Conservative journalist says he infiltrated, escalated D.C. museum protest
A conservative journalist has admitted to infiltrating the group of protesters who clashed with security at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum on Saturday — and he openly claims to have instigated the events that prompted the museum to close.
Patrick Howley, an assistant editor at the American Spectator, says that he joined the group under the pretense that he was a demonstrator. “As far as anyone knew I was part of this cause — a cause that I had infiltrated the day before in order to mock and undermine in the pages of The American Spectator,” Howley wrote. (The language in the story has since been changed without explanation.)
Could this time have been different?
(KEVIN LAMARQUE - REUTERS)
Christina Romer had traveled to Chicago to perform an unpleasant task: she needed to scare her new boss. David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s top political adviser, had been very clear about that. He thought the president-elect needed to know exactly what he would be walking into when he took the oath of office in January. But it fell to Romer to deliver the bad news.
So Romer, a preternaturally cheerful economist whose expertise on the Great Depression made her an obvious choice to head the Council of Economic Advisers, gathered her tables and her charts and, on a snowy day in mid-December, sat down to explain to the next President of the United States of America exactly what sort of mess he was inheriting.
Axelrod had warned her against pulling her punches, and so she didn’t. It was not a pleasant presentation to sit through. Afterward, Austan Goolsbee, Obama’s friend from Chicago and Romer’s successor, remarked that “that must be the worst briefing any president-elect has ever had.”
But Romer wasn’t trying to be alarmist. Her numbers were based, at least in part, on everybody else’s numbers: There were models from forecasting firms such as Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody’s Analytics. There were preliminary data pouring in from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Federal Reserve. Romer’s predictions were more pessimistic than the consensus, but not by much.
By that point, the shape of the crisis was clear: The housing bubble had burst, and it was taking the banks that held the loans, and the households that did the borrowing, down with it. Romer estimated that the damage would be about $2 trillion over the next two years and recommended a $1.2 trillion stimulus plan. The political team balked at that price tag, but with the support of Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary who would soon lead the National Economic Council, she persuaded the administration to support an $800 billion plan.
The next challenge was to persuade Congress. There had never been a stimulus that big, and there hadn’t been many financial crises this severe. So how to estimate precisely what a dollar of infrastructure spending or small-business relief would do when let loose into the economy under these unusual conditions? Romer was asked to calculate how many jobs a stimulus might create. Jared Bernstein, a labor economist who would be working out of Vice President Biden’s office, was assigned to join the effort.
Romer and Bernstein gathered data from the Federal Reserve, from Mark Zandi at Moody’s, from anywhere they could think of. The incoming administration loved their report and wanted to release it publicly. Romer took it home over Christmas to double-check, rewrite and pick over. At 6 a.m. Jan. 10, just days before Obama would be sworn in as president, his transition team lifted the embargo on “The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.” It was a smash hit.
“It will be a joy to argue policy with an administration that provides comprehensible, honest reports,” enthused columnist Paul Krugman in the New York Times.
There was only one problem: It was wrong.
Congestion and the real value of public transit
One common argument against boosting public transportation is that buses, trains and subway systems “don’t pay for themselves.” Roads, we’re told, are bankrolled by drivers, via gas taxes. Subway systems, by contrast, aren’t self-sufficient and usually need additional funds on top of whatever they collect through fares. (Boston’s subway system, for instance, collects just 25 percent of its revenues through fares; the rest comes from a state sales tax and other local funds.)
But there are two counterarguments here. The first is that roads don’t always pay for themselves (see this report, or ask the Texas DOT). And the second is that public transit doesn’t just benefit the people who ride the buses or subways. It also benefits drivers, by reducing overall congestion. Aaron Renn wades through the Texas Transportation Institute’s recent report on urban mobility and finds data on how much congestion is actually reduced by transit systems in 10 different U.S. cities (figures are in millions of dollars):
LongForm.org’s weekend reading list
Every weekend, Longform.org picks the week’s best in-depth stories on politics and policy for Wonkblog. For daily selections of new and classic nonfiction, check out Longform.org or follow @longformorg on Twitter. This week’s stories include a look at 19 months in a hospital, the failures of the Home Affordable Modification Program and deforestation.
Reconciliation
— Five iconic science images, and why they’re wrong.
— Noah Schactman reports that a virus is infecting the U.S. drone fleet.
— A visual history of depictions of Wall Street as a scary octopus.
— Does Bob Dylan deserve the Nobel Prize in literature?
— Nate Silver finds that Occupy Wall Street is now getting just as much media coverage as the first tea party rallies.
— Meanwhile, Occupy Sesame Street gets violent.
— Expressions of sheer terror, as captured by a haunted house camera.
Did Harry Reid just make the Senate less dysfunctional — or more partisan?
Did Harry Reid’s maneuver in the Senate last night crack open the door to partisan abuse of Senate procedure — or to bipartisan filibuster reform? Last night, the majority leader (D-Nev.) imposed an unprecedented limit on the ability of the minority to offer up amendments after cloture has been invoked — the motion to bring debate to a close — as Ezra explains. Reid’s opposition to the GOP’s dilatory tactics reflects the growing frustration that the Senate’s rules make it too easy for the minority to obstruct legislation. The move has led to some hope that Congress will finally be pressured to reform the procedures of a dysfunctional Senate, as well as fear that future majorities could use (and potentially abuse) the precedent that Reid has set. But there are also obstacles that could keep big changes from being implemented.
Was Wall Street to blame for high oil prices?
Back in 2008, when the price of oil was zooming up to $140 per barrel, there was a lot of chatter about whether Wall Street deserved the blame. And that debate hasn’t vanished. Last month, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) cited a report from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as proof that “Wall Street speculators dominated the oil futures market.” Economists like Paul Krugman, meanwhile, have argued that supply and demand were the chief culprits. Oil was getting pricier because China, India and Brazil kept using more and more of it, and production couldn’t keep up. So who was right?
(Associated Press)
A new paper from the St. Louis Fed finds that both camps were, in a way. The authors, Luciana Juvenal and Ivan Petrella, combed through a wealth of economic and oil data to tease out various factors affecting the price of crude. Their conclusion? The sharp rise in price from 2004 to 2008 was primarily driven by supply and demand. Asia’s thirst for oil was growing, and the ability of countries like Saudi Arabia to keep up was declining. But a decent portion of the price increase, about 15 percent, could be chalked up to “financial speculative demand shocks.”
Why drunk driving is dropping dramatically
A sliver of good news in the wake of dismal employment numbers and congressional meltdowns: Drunk driving is dropping sharply. New numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the number of drunk-driving incidents has dropping by one-third from 2006 to 2010:
This isn’t all good news: There are still 112 million self-reported drunk-driving incidents each year — “unacceptable” to public health officials. At the same time, that’s 40 million fewer people driving drunk than there were four years ago.
Which defense cuts would Romney reverse?
In his much-hyped national security speech this afternoon, Mitt Romney promised that on “day one,” he would “reverse President Obama’s massive defense cuts.”
But, uh, which massive defense cuts? In 2008, the Department of Defense received $594 billion for military programs. In 2009, the first year of Obama’s presidency, it got $636 billion. In 2010, the Pentagon got a bit devilish and saw its budget increased to $666 billion. In 2011, the Obama administration requested $739 billion from Congress. And that doesn’t count the hundreds of billions in war funding the military has received.
Has innovation stagnated?
“Just keep in mind three things when you read about innovation droughts. First: The key to innovation is the exploitation of really big inventions. Computerization is as big as it gets, and it has a much longer tail than electrification. We’re not even close to mining its full potential yet. Second: Above a certain level, the goal of productivity gains is to provide us with more fun. It doesn’t matter whether that fun comes in physical or virtual form, or how it shows up in national accounts. Third: Don’t exaggerate past innovations just because they were exciting or dramatic, and don’t discount current innovations just because they’ve happened behind the scenes or seem sort of prosaic. Hip replacements may not be as big a mobility improvement as the automobile, but they’re a bigger deal than you think — as you’ll realize someday if you have to get one because you can’t walk more than a hundred feet at a stretch with your original equipment.” — Kevin Drum has a provocative post pushing back against the idea that we’re in a period of stagnating innovation. It’s definitely worth reading the whole thing.
State Republicans’ health reform playbook: not ‘repeal and replace,’ but ‘oppose and implement’
Up on the Hill, health reform repeal is having a small renaissance. Congressional Republicans held a repeal press conference earlier this week; on Thursday, Rep. Denny Rehberg urged the Supercommittee to strip away key parts of the law’s funding. "Every day I get up, I do at least something to fight Obamacare," Rep. Steve King boldly declared at a Wednesday press event.
But at an insurance industry conference, just nine blocks down the street, opponents of the health reform law were having a completely different discussion: how to move forward on implementation.
(J. Scott Applewhite - AP)
Lunch break: Robot fetches a sandwich from Subway
University of Tokyo researchers have taught a robot called PR2 to find the closest sandwich. If there isn’t one in the refrigerator, it will head to the nearest Subway:
This robot can also bake you cookies.
(h/t The Daily What)
Republicans think the supercommittee will succeed. Democrats don't.
In a new poll of “congressional insiders,” the National Journal finds that an overwhelming number of Beltway Republicans think the deficit-reduction supercommittee will succeed, while most Democrats think it will fail:
(SOURCE: NATIONAL JOURNAL)
Why the difference? Certainly Republicans aren’t inclined to compromise on taxes to raise revenue. Although a small number of Republicans have rebelled against the party’s hard line, they’re still on the fringes of the debate. The National Journal asked its pool of Beltway insiders whether they’d accept a range of major tax reforms to raise revenue, and 46 percent of Republicans replied “none of the above”:
A breakdown of trust
To most Americans, it looks as if there’s never been a better time to be rich. The top 1 percent takes in 24 percent of the national income and holds 40 percent of the national wealth. Neither jobs nor housing prices have rebounded in the aftermath of the financial crisis, but corporate profits have generally been strong. The S&P 500, though volatile, has weathered the crisis relatively well, today standing roughly where it was at the beginning of October 2008.
Talk with some of those in the top 1 percent, though, and they make it sound as if there’s never been a worse time to be rich. At a medical-innovation conference in Cleveland this week, I heard chief executive officers complain about being treated like “criminals,” about profit being regarded as intrinsically suspicious, about the president saying unkind things about oil companies, about exemplars of hard work and success being viewed as greedy rather than productive. Like Rodney Dangerfield, the rich may be making money, but what they really want is respect.
It’s not a recession. But the jobs report is still awful.
The fact that the U.S. economy added 103,000 jobs in September can only be counted as “good” news when compared against expectations. Markets were expecting to hear that we were in the throes of a double-dip recession, and when it turned out we actually had piddling job growth, stocks rallied joyfully. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that this is still piddling job growth — just barely enough to keep up with increases in the population. (The unemployment rate remained unchanged at 9.1 percent.)
One big thing to note here is that government layoffs continue to act as a drag on the recovery. Governments at all level lost 34,000 jobs on net, including 5,000 at the U.S. Postal Service. Local governments laid off 35,000 workers. The public sector keeps getting smaller and smaller — the U.S. economy has now lost 535,000 government jobs since September 2008 — which has done a lot to offset gains in the private sector.
The Senate’s new rules
The Democrats changed the Senate last night. Not a lot. Not in a way you’re likely to notice, or that is even likely to affect anything. But they changed it. They showed it could be done, that the rules of the place weren’t written on stone tablets and handed down from a fiery mountain.
Here’s what happened: Mitch McConnell wanted to bring up the president’s jobs bill, which Harry Reid is still modifying in an effort to win more Democratic votes. He wanted to do so for a simple reason: Sans modifications, the bill would fail and the Democrats would be embarrassed.
McConnell tried a legal but arcane maneuver to suspend the rules after cloture and force a vote. If you didn’t understand that, don’t worry, nobody understands that. It hasn’t been done since 1941. What matters, though, is what happened next.
Reid objected. The Republicans, he said, were being “dilatory,” forcing votes just to waste the chamber’s time. The parliamentarian — the Senate’s umpire — overruled him. But rather than backing off, Reid forced a majority vote on the parliamentarian’s ruling. The vote succeeded, and the rules were changed to outlaw McConnell’s maneuver.
Expert panel to White House: Keep the Affordable Care Act’s benefits affordable
Every health interest group in D.C. is eagerly awaiting an official definition of “essential health benefits,” the set of procedures and medical treatments that the Affordable Care Act will require all insurers to cover. That’s makes last night’s Institute of Medicine report, which tells the White House to make the benefit package’s affordability the chief concern, the hot read for health policy wonks around town.
Wonkbook: A rules change in the Senate?
Dylan Matthews is writing Wonkbook while Ezra is traveling.
Top stories
1) The Senate moved fast to overhaul the body's rules, report Manu Raju and Scott Wong: "The Senate descended into procedural chaos Thursday night as Democrats forced a change in Senate rules and shut down a GOP effort to bog down a Chinese currency bill with a series of unrelated amendments. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s move to suddenly overhaul a key Senate rule without warning infuriated Republicans and put an already bitterly divided chamber on edge as senators from both sides of the aisle traded angry accusations over whether the fight would fundamentally limit the rights of the minority party...Democrats said the move was needed to limit dilatory tactics that essentially amounted to a 'filibuster by amendment' even after the chamber votes to end debate on a bill...'We are fundamentally turning the Senate into the House,' said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky)."
Reconciliation
— Ezra is hosting “The Rachel Maddow Show” tonight on MSNBC. Tune in!
— RealClearPolitics goes literary.
— Slate turns the 2012 Republican primary into a literal, animated horse race.
— A mayor who crushed a luxury car with a tank wins the “Ig Nobel” Peace Prize.
— “While we’ve begun to care where our food comes from, we show little concern for how our electronics are made.”
— In South Korea, a backlash against too much studying.
Occupy Wall Street keeps a wary distance from the Democratic Party
The emergence of Occupy Wall Street has come just as Democratic leaders and President Obama himself are pivoting toward a more populist agenda. In recent days, a growing number of prominent Democrats have expressed solidarity with the movement’s anti-corporate message. But even in the heart of the nation’s capital, activists say that politicians shouldn’t be expecting their support — no matter how sympathetic they may be to a message about the widening income gap.
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Blog Contributors
Ezra Klein
Ezra Klein is the editor of Wonkblog and a columnist at the Washington Post, as well as a contributor to MSNBC and Bloomberg. His work focuses on domestic and economic policymaking, as well as the political system that’s constantly screwing it up. He really likes graphs, and is on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. E-mail him here.
Sarah Kliff
Sarah Kliff covers health policy, focusing on Medicare, Medicaid and the health reform law. She tries to fit in some reproductive health and education policy coverage, too, alongside an occasional hockey reference. Her work has appeared in Newsweek, Politico, and the BBC. She is on Twitter and Facebook.
Suzy Khimm
Suzy Khimm covers the budget, economic policy, and financial regulatory reform. Before coming to Washington, she was based in Brazil and Southeast Asia, where she wrote for the Economist, Slate, and the Wall Street Journal Asia. Follow her on Twitter here, and email her here.
Brad Plumer
Brad Plumer is a reporter focusing on energy and environmental issues. He was previously an associate editor at The New Republic. Follow him on Twitter. Email him here.
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