An Obama Admin Reality Check:

If one of their people gets caught saying "those bloggers need to take off the pajamas, get dressed and realize that governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult”, what do you expect them to do, exactly?

Do you expect them to say "hell yeah, that's absolutely where we stand, SCREW the bloggers and the swivel chairs they rode in on"? Hell no.

You're going to expect them to say "that doesn't reflect White House thinking." Which they did say. Because they aren't idiots. That's why they're going anonymous in the first place!

So if you do expect to say that, don't assume that that somehow excuses everything. It doesn't signify that they didn't mean it. It doesn't signify that they've seen the error of their ways. It just signifies that they know enough to deny it on the record. But if you look at their history, like Aravosis does, the attitude becomes perfectly clear:

this isn't the first time the White House has "reportedly" criticized bloggers, or progressives. In August, they dismissed anyone who had concerns about how health care reform as "the left of the left" - which is awfully similar to the current accusation that we're "the Internet left fringe." Then a few weeks later, the president said that blogs don't fact check, and are all "people shouting at each other."

And the fact that the White House holds conference calls with bloggers is nice. But let's not exaggerate here. Those calls are as much, if not more, for the White House's benefit than for ours.

Bloggers are the only key members of the Democratic noise machine who have been shunned by the president. He met with liberal talk radio, with the partisan pundits on TV (Rachel and Keith), and even invited a conservative blogger (Andrew Sullivan) and conservative writer/activists Bill Kristol and David Brooks. But no such meeting has ever been scheduled with the liberal political blogs.

There is a pattern of disdain for, and distrust of, the blogs that started with the Obama campaign two years ago, and now has extended into the Obama White House. Privately, both the campaign and the White House have been happy to ask the Netroots for help when the going gets tough (Joe and I alone, via this blog, raised $50,000 for Barack Obama - and I suspect Jane and Markos and Duncan and others have raised a lot more than that). And in spite of our differences with Barack Obama, the Netroots have been happy to help the President when called upon. But publicly, Team Obama keeps us, like much of the core Democratic constituencies, at arm's length.

He doesn't pay enough attention to his base because he takes them for granted. Fine. We knew that.

But the bigger story here is that they really, really don't like blogs, or bloggers, or independent, not-for-profit online journalism and commentary in general. They're fine with the Washington Press, since they love their empty little stories about horse racing, parrot the conventional wisdom, and are people that you can intimidate or reward with access to the administration and its officials. They don't even mind the hard right, I suspect, since they're a known quantity and are expected to be the opposition. But loud, unpredictable, passionate, dissatisfied liberals and progressives with a megaphone and an attitude are just dangerous. They write inconvenient things. They either don't know or don't care about what is or isn't "out of bounds" to believe. They don't care about access, and they despise lobbyists as much as the Admin once pretended to.

They aren't playing the game. They aren't to be trusted. So anonymous "pyjamas" it is.

Why is it, to Canadian Columnists, "Bold" Means "Right-Wing"?

So I opined earlier about Canadian opinion journalism. I said it was almost uniformly terrible. (So is the American version, but you've got more Glenn Greenwalds and the like out there.) That isn't quite true: Gwynn Dyer is excellent, as is Antonia Zerbisias, whose old blog on Canadian media was a savage indictment that anybody would be proud of.

What it is more appropriate to say, I think, is that it's bizarrely conservative, to the point where it gives just plain bad advice. Case in point, Jeffrey Simpson:

Their new pitch would be: Elect us and we will eliminate the federal deficit fast and pay down the debt that Canada incurred to fight the recession. Not for us the Conservative approach of stringing out deficits and building up debt, thereby leaving Canada more vulnerable than it would otherwise be to external shocks such as inflation. We Liberals balanced the budget and kept it in surplus when last in government, and we'll do it again.
How? By raising the goods and services tax by two points, thereby bringing in about $70-billion over five years. With that money and reasonable growth, Canada would almost balance the books in 2012-13, and run a surplus the next year.
With budgetary surpluses, Canada would better prepare itself for the aging population. It could invest more money in health care or higher education. It could have some left over for reducing taxes on individuals and businesses....
...Politics aside, the risk of a tax hike is slower growth. But if the Bank of Canada knew fiscal policy would be tightened, because a government had been elected on that platform, it could ease monetary policy in a few years. Or the government could phase in the GST increase if a tax hike would unduly threaten growth. Or it could offset some of the GST hike with lower taxes on incomes – something almost every economist would applaud.

This is all babble. This over-focus on deficits in Canada is absolutely ludicrous: the Great Recession is not over and shows signs of double-dipping, unemployment is sagging (at best) and horrifying in certain regions, inflation is as unlikely there as it is in America and Canada doesn't have that bad a debt-to-GDP ratio to begin with!

He even acknowledges that the debt-to-GDP ratio will be declining in the piece itself!

Canada is now headed for a less-than-optimal postrecession landing. We'll get deficits stretching until almost the end of the next decade, with an accumulation of debt (although a declining debt-to-GDP ratio).

So why the hell are you babbling about debt, Jeffrey?
But more importantly, why on earth would the "bold idea" be to run to the right of the Conservatives on the issue of deficits? Yes, voters worry about such things, mostly because they are pushed to think of state budgets in terms of their own budgets, and aren't told that the situation is completely different. But the ones who may theoretically vote on such things are conservatives. Progressives don't vote based on deficits, because they know there are better things to worry about most of the time.
(Oh, and I didn't miss the veiled attempt to shift the tax burden downward by reducing progressive income taxes and increasing regressive consumption taxation, either. Shameless, isn't he?)
So does Simpson honestly think that conservatives are going to vote for a tax hike? During a recession? Against all historical evidence and common sense? And he thinks that that is how the Liberals should distinguish themselves? Sure, it'd be different. It'd certainly differentiate the Liberals from the Tories or the NDP, since neither of them are blithering idiots.
It just shows how out-of-touch people like Simpson are. They spend their time in that circle of (useless) Canadian elites that actually thinks that people are going to care more about deficits than their taxes or the programs that help them and their families. Regular Canadians (and Americans, and Britons, and Indians, for that matter) are not going to lose their minds over deficits crowding out spending or minor inflationary pressures. They aren't corpulent bondholders and creditors, for whom the prospect of deflation is a glorious windfall—another round at the trough.
I suspect that Simpson's circle are. He has no idea what people think, no more than Iggy does. So he should probably stop trying to give advice. He's got neither the aptitude nor the insight.

Robert Novak Dies at 78

Story on MSNBC.

Find Your Own Damned Pony

Canadian opinion journalism is almost universally terrible.

No, sorry, it is. There are exceptions, but by and large they're buried under a feculant mound of blowhards, faux-populists, "political strategists" who do little more than copy ancient American talking points, and Christie Blatchfords.

There's a reason I rarely bother quoting them. For all that I castigate whatzisname—and justifiably so, considering his apparent adoration of British libel law of all things—at least he's vaguely engaging, and counts himself among their bloggers, who are actually a fair bit more interesting. (James Curran's brand of somewhat disillusioned Liberalism come to mind. As does Jen Smith. Or Calgrit, but that's obvious.)

But man, sometimes you read something from an opinion journalist that just blows your head off:

[I]n certain quarters of the progressive media, commentators are bruiting over the possibility of Fascism in America. One thing about the Yankee left — no matter how hard they dig there is never a pony hiding under their particular pile of shit. Eight months after electing the most progressive candidate to even think about the White House since George McGovern, suddenly Fascism is on the march. And the Republicans are just discombobulated enough to provide fuel for the phony fire.

You be a bit confused. See, nobody who had actually read Sara Robinson's magisterial article on fascism would say this. They'd know that she was drawing on impeccable sources, made logical analogies, and had been published on a site that is absolutely authoritative on the subject among American liberals and progressives. If it's on Orcinus, you can take it seriously.

Even if it weren't on Orcinus, you could also look at how it was posted on the website of the Campaign for America's Future. Which makes sense, as she's a Fellow there. Yet here's Mr. Bell, citing "certain quarters" and linking to Truthout, in a brazen and obvious attempt to paint Ms. Robinson as a nutter.

Perhaps he might be justified if he could point to anything in the substance of the post. But he didn't. He didn't quote Robinson, as I did him. He didn't summarize Robinson. He didn't rebut Robinson, because rebuttal requires that you demonstrate the vaguest familiarity with the subject.

In fact, Douglas Bell has given us absolutely no reason to believe he read word ONE of what Robinson wrote.

You may ask "why on earth wouldn't he?" You may ask "why on earth would he pull such a dishonest ploy"? You may ask "why on earth would he spend the rest of the article taking shots at Americans that care about their politics, instead of babbling about 'silly seasons'"?

You may ask "why on earth would he possibly think he could get away with this?"

Why?

Canadian opinion journalism is almost universally terrible.

"Jane Galt" Truly Revealed!

HAH! Oh boy is this too good.

Mark Ames just penned an expose on Megan McArdle, my old "friend" "Jane Galt". Far from the Libertarian hero she's portrayed herself as, it turns out that Ames has revealed a person who has benefited, from beginning to end, from public largess. Why? Well, meet her dad:

Megan McArdle is the daughter of one Francis X. McArdle, who built his career as a public servant in the New York City administration, then moved over to the private side, where he could leverage his contacts with the government -- and finally moved back onto the public payroll in 2006, when Mr. McArdle was appointed by then-Sen. Hillary Clinton to advise the federal government how public funds should be spent, and on whom. Earlier this year, Mr. McArdle was reportedly in Albany lobbying the New York state government for a job as the "stimulus czar," appropriating President Obama's federal spending money.

Megan was born in 1973, a few years after Francis got his big fat job on the public payroll in the New York City administration, where he stayed for 11 years. Among the first big jobs Megan's daddy took while climbing up the public payroll career ladder were jobs as Inspector General for the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, and Director of Program Budget for the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation.

So Megan McArdle's entry into this world was literally greased by taxpayer funds. But of course, it wouldn't stop there.

Francis McArdle, rose up the Big Government ranks in the New York city. His public-funded career reached its peak in 1978 when then-Mayor Ed Koch named him as Commissioner of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, where he served until 1981. That job put McArdle in control of all sorts of public works: water supply, waste water, sewage infrastructure. It's kind of fitting that McArdle's privileged childhood was funded by taxpayer's shit and urine -- a Freudian might say that this is the source of her inexplicable hatred of the same Big Government that pissed dollars and shat gold on the McArdle household.

Megan's dad moved from the public sector overseeing public works to a job with real estate developer Olympia & York -- just in time to take advantage of the huge Battery Park City project that Olympia & York was developing under contract. The success of the project relied on huge taxpayer subsidies -- at least $65 million in 1981 dollars -- as well as major public works projects to make the development attractive, including the disastrous Westway road project, which drained at least $85 million of federal subsidies until it was finally mothballed in the mid-80s, due to environmental concerns and public protests -- the kinds of protesters whom grown-up Megan McArdle would later attack. No matter, though, because by the time the Westway was canceled and all that public money was wasted, Olympia & York, Megan's daddy's company, had catapulted into one of the top real estate moguls in the world, and Megan's daddy was ready to move on to even bigger things.

In 1985, F. X. McArdle had moved from the private sector to a position that Megan understands better than any other: a lobbyist who manipulates Big Government on behalf of private companies. Francis X. McArdle was named to head the General Contractor's Association of New York. He stayed in that lucrative position for the next 20 years.

So. Her dad was a public servant who cashed in on the private side, and then made even bigger bucks as a lobbyist. Our heroic libertarian individualist is the daughter of a wealthy lobbyist.

It doesn't stop there, though:

Megan showed how much she owes to her dad's way of doing business when she admitted in a blog post that she owes her success to personal contacts "I sent out about 1400 resumes blind after my firm failed. I got not one response. All the jobs I interviewed for came from personal contacts."

We learn just how useful these personal contacts are for Megan McArdle thanks to a gushing profile on her published in early 2007 in a rightwing magazine called "Doublethink" -- put out by a corporate-funded advocacy group with ties to Tom Delay and Cato, whose mission is to "identify and develop future conservative and libertarian leaders." In the profile, we learn that Megan's first job in 2001, after graduating from the University of Chicago's graduate business program as a committed Ayn Rand libertarian, was canceled due to the market drop in 2001. So instead of flipping burgers to make ends meet, the libertarian moved back home into her parents' Upper West Side digs -- a home that taxpayer money helped to fund. There, in the hard knocks of the Upper West Side, the 28-year-old MBA seethed in libertarian anger at all the welfare queens and wasteful government spending programs she saw all around her. But it wasn't until bin Laden created an opportunity that Megan finally got a job -- as an "executive copy girl" for a post-9/11 cleanup crew near the site of the WTC. It was exactly the sort of job that those "personal contacts" can help you get in the "byzantine" world of construction in NYC.

It was at this time, living in her parent's swank Manhattan pad and working a job in her daddy's line of business, that Megan McArdle's blogging career as a right-wing libertarian crusader was born.

Instead of admitting that she got her first job thanks to daddy's shady connections with the corrupt construction trades, Megan pretended that she took the WTC-cleanup job as a sort of personal penance, a gift to the people of her stricken city: "[I}t was easier to bear it all than it would be working somewhere else, and worrying, and unable to do anything about it." Really Megan, you shouldn't have born that cross for us.

There's a lot more there about the Atlantic Monthly, which I'll leave aside, since it is the former employer of Matthew Yglesias, a blogger I still respect.

And, honestly, the quality of an argument is not dependent on the identity and nature of the author. This whole enterprise of mine here would be somewhat silly if I didn't believe that. I could have just gone eponymous like the aforementioned Yglesias. I didn't, and that was for a reason.

So, instead, I'll say that this is more instructive than anything else. it's about a key problem with modern opinion journalism, which is that far, far too many people in that business are in it because of being born to the right people and belonging to the right class, instead of due to skill, talent, and insight. They are wealthy and secure enough that they don't have to worry about the economic repercussions of what they have to say; yet somehow almost inevitably spout conclusions that support the wealthy and powerful, because that's who they identify with.

And, yes, the "libertarians" tend to be the worst, because they don't understand and don't recognize the structures that placed them where they are. They want to think the best of themselves, they want to think that they're responsible for their success, so they adopt an ideology that lets them do that. It's understandable, sure, but that doesn't mean the rest of us should fall sway to that same ideology. Yet precisely because it's so convenient, they're the ones with the bullhorns, at least on "economic" issues.

I see this in a number of the defences out there, too. John Carney's rant about how "ugly" the Ames piece is ignores the privilege that he enjoyed as the son of a successful antitrust lawyer. (I have little sympathy for it anyway, considering how "ugly" the results of the policies both Carney and McArdle advocate, but regardless.) Ezra Klein posted a more thoughtful response, but again misses the point that it's McArdle's privilege that is the point here, and the incoherence of her ideological advocacy in light of that privilege.

And that's all assuming that she makes utterly impersonal, completely logical and rational arguments. But she doesn't. Her blogs have always been peppered with autobiographical details that are supposed to support her claims, and I remember "Jane Galt" constantly appealing to her authority as some kind of economic expert. She isn't, and has been roundly castigated for that already- but if you want to appeal to your personal authority, you're fair game, because it's your credibility that's at question here.

(That's also not getting into the hypocrisy of the right complaining about personal attacks. Seen her birth certificate lately?)

For all that his column may be uncomfortably personal, Ames has delivered an explosive broadside to McArdle's credibility. And considering how much he's written on privilege in America, it makes a lot of sense. "Ugly" or no.