Weekly Digest – December 30, 2012

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Politics

  • Blues Cruise, Joe Hagan:  GOP faithful take to the high seas to figure out what went wrong for their candidates last Nov.
  • Tea Party, Its Clout Diminished, Turns to Narrower Issues, Trip Gabriel: “People in positions of responsibility within the Republican Party tolerated too much of this [“tinfoil hat” behavior],” said Fergus Cullen, a former chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party… Republican leaders “looked the other way too often,” he said. “They sort of smiled, winked and nodded too often, when they should have been calling ‘crazy, crazy.’ ”.  Thank you, Fergus Cullen.
  • As Swing Districts Dwindle, Can a Divided House Stand? Nate Silver:  Nate Silver, uncharacteristically, blows an analysis.  He examines ‘polarization’ without analyzing the underlying reason for it, i.e., he studies the symptoms by fails to address the cause.  (For baseball fans out there, exclusive focus on symptoms over underlying cause is what I believe to be the shortcoming of PECOTA and other Sabermetric analyses.)
  • Silencing the Science on Gun Research, A.L. Kellermann and F.P. Rivara: “The nation might be in a better position to act [to reduce gun violence] if medical and public health researchers had continued to study these issues as diligently as some of us did between 1985 and 1997. But in 1996, pro-gun members of Congress mounted an all-out effort to eliminate the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Although they failed to defund the center, the House of Representatives removed $2.6 million from the CDC’s budget—precisely the amount the agency had spent on firearm injury research the previous year. Funding was restored in joint conference committee, but the money was earmarked for traumatic brain injury. The effect was sharply reduced support for firearm injury research.”
  • The Right’s Second Amendment Lies, Robert Parry:  “Right-wing resistance to meaningful gun control is driven, in part, by a false notion that America’s Founders adopted the Second Amendment because they wanted an armed population that could battle the U.S. government. The opposite is the truth, but many Americans seem to have embraced this absurd, anti-historical narrative.”
  • Kerry’s Nomination and the Return of Swift Boats, Charlie Pierce:  Pierce reminds me why Kerry is an excellent choice for Secretary of State:  “[Kerry] has made an entire Senate career out of taking on foreign-policy issues that nobody else – except Gary Hart – ever wanted to touch. He led the way in normalizing diplomatic relations with Vietnam at a time in which H. Ross Perot was still running around the country talking about thousands of American POW’s in camps in Laos… He took on the rat’s nest at the Bank Of Commerce And Credit International, when BCCI was laundering money for whoever came through the door, and when BCCI also had bought enough politicians in Washington that Kerry and his investigators were pretty much out there alone.”

Economics

  • More on Why the Fed is Agressively Targetting Unemployment, Jared Bernstein:  “It’s … not at all weird that the Fed is aggressively targeting unemployment; what’s weird is that Congress is not.”
  • The Deficit:  Not as Bad as They Want You to Think, Evan Soltas:  “If those so-called deficit hawks would stop moralizing long enough to look at the data, they might find something surprising: That data almost entirely undermine their argument.”
  • There’s Only One Way to Fix the Deficit- And Actually It’s Totally Painless, Joe Weisenthal: “People who insist that the US has a gigantic “spending problem” are ignorant of what really drives the deficit and the national debt… When unemployment drops, the deficit as a percentage of GDP drops. When unemployment rises, the deficit rises… The deficit has been driven by unemployment, which means … Closing the deficit is painless. It’s not about belt-tightening, it’s about putting more people to work, which is something that everyone loves.”
  • Sorry, Folks, We Don’t Just Have a Spending Problem, Henry Blodget:  “We DO have a spending problem.  If we are ever to get our budget deficit under control, we need to trim long-term spending growth.  But blaming the whole deficit problem on “spending” ignores the other half of the problem: Taxes.  Our federal tax revenue right now is historically low.  To begin to address our deficit problem, therefore, we need to trim spending growth and increase taxes.”

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