Kevin Drum

A War Against Harman?

| Thu Apr. 23, 2009 8:29 AM GMT

When the Jane Harman story first broke, I thought the most interesting question might very well be, Who leaked it?  The more I read about it, the more I'm beginning to think I was right.  Here's the latest from CQ:

Intelligence officials, angry that former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had blocked an FBI investigation into Democratic Rep. Jane Harman's interactions with a suspected Israeli agent, tipped off Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, that Harman had been picked up on a court-ordered National Security Agency wiretap targeting the agent.

In doing so, the officials flouted an order by Gonzales not to inform Pelosi, three former national security officials said.

....A well-placed source said an official from the CIA had gone around Gonzales to inform Pelosi about Harman being picked up on the wiretap...."She knew. We made sure she knew," said one of the former officials, chuckling.

It's not at all clear that Harman did anything wrong here.  (Though it's not clear that she didn't either.)  What is clear is that the CIA is engaged in some pretty serious message sending against people they don't like.  My guess: I don't know how Harman is going to weather all this, but I don't think it's going to turn out well for the CIA.  They may have gone a couple of steps too far this time.

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Down the Rabbit Hole

| Thu Apr. 23, 2009 8:15 AM GMT

From Matt Yglesias:

Dave Weigel notes that Senator Jon Cornyn (R-TX), in charge of helping GOP Senate candidates, is being surprisingly friendly with former Rep. Pat Toomey who’s mounting a challenge-from-the-right to Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA). Dave notes that “it becomes much, much harder to hold the seat if Specter loses.”

Matt goes on to say that this is pretty similar to what happened in the Virginia senate race last year and wonders why the GOP is essentially committing suicide.  It's a good question, and despite the general wankery involved it makes it almost irresistable to try to psychoanalyze the current Republican soul.  It's all just too weird otherwise.  Having gone crackers during the Bush years, and getting convincingly drubbed at the polls for it in 2006 and 2008, the almost unanimous reaction among conservatives has been to double down: focus even more on tax cuts to the exclusion of everything else; focus more on pure obstructionism; focus more on defending torture and insisting that it works great; focus more on gun nuttery even though Obama plainly has no intention of doing anything dramatic about guns; focus more on the absolute craziest pundits.  It's as if they're convinced, so deep in their souls, that America couldn't have really turned against them, that they can't even conceive of any strategy other than amping up the lunacy even further.

I dunno.  It's all crazy.  I can't even begin to understand it.

Negotiating With Pirates

| Wed Apr. 22, 2009 10:27 PM GMT

Treasury's last offer to Chrysler's bondholders was 15% of the total value of their debt.  The bondholders sneered.  They wanted 65%.  Today, Treasury upped their offer:

The Treasury now proposes that the banks and other lenders accept as payment 22% of the $6.9 billion they are owed plus a 5% equity stake in Chrysler, said several people familiar with the matter.

....The new government offer leaves the U.S. and Chrysler lenders at least $3 billion apart with one week left before an April 30 Treasury deadline to determine the auto maker's fate. The two sides are also far apart in how big an ownership stake the lenders would get in a restructured Chrysler.

Who will blink?  I'll predict that they end up at, oh, 30% and a 20% equity stake.  Put your guess in comments.  Whoever comes closest get an autographed 8x10 of Lee Iacocca.

First Movers

| Wed Apr. 22, 2009 10:46 AM GMT

Some recent research apparently shows that the first brand of some particular good to hit the shelves in some particular area (Miller beer in Chicago, Heinz ketchup in Pittsburgh, etc.) manages to retain outsize market share for a very long time.  This prompts Matt Yglesias to look at maps showing the density of Starbucks stores and Walmarts:

You see some of the stereotype “latte liberal” stuff going on here, but it’s also clear that pure proximity to Seattle or to Bentonville is a big factor. And in the CPG market, these kind of impacts seem to last a long time. And somehow Tim Horton’s can be very popular in Canada but not make it big in the states. Why doesn’t In-and-Out Burger spread to the east coast?

I don't know about Starbucks, but a big part of the reason the Walmart map looks this way is simply that Walmart management chose to expand first and most densely close to its home territory.  In the case of In-N-Out, my understanding is that the family that owns them has declined to sell franchises, which limits their geographical reach based on how fast they can finance growth through internal cash flow.

So there's more going on than just first mover advantage.  Though there's certainly plenty of that too, especially for food items, I think, where people get accustomed to a particular taste and stick with it for a long time.  Taste in candy, for example, is famously set in childhood, which is why Americans scarf down megatons of Hershey's chocolate every year, while the rest of the world considers it barely fit for pig swill.  Lots of interesting stuff going on here.

Moral Relativism

| Wed Apr. 22, 2009 9:47 AM GMT

When the subject has anything to do with sex, the right in America is the party of moral absolutes.  We know what's right, we know what's wrong, and even if there's a price to pay we can't shirk our responsibility to set a proper example and do the right thing.

But when the subject is torture, suddenly it's all about carefully weighing the costs and benefits.  Having an honest debate about how far we should go to protect ourselves.  Understanding the context of what happened.  It's just not possible to flatly say that waterboarding and sleep deprivation and stress positions are barbarisms unfit for use by a civilized country.  It's much more complex than that.

Funny how that works, isn't it?

Oil Shocks

| Wed Apr. 22, 2009 9:27 AM GMT

Ryan Avent points today to a paper by Jim Hamilton suggesting that the real cause of our current recession is the spike in oil prices between 2007-2008.  Here's Hamilton on the implications of a model he originally constructed in 2003:

I used [] historically estimated parameters to find the answer to the following conditional forecasting equation. Suppose you knew in 2007:Q3 what GDP had been doing up through that date and could know in advance what was about to happen to the price of oil. What path would you have then predicted the economy to follow for 2007:Q4 through 2008:Q4?

....Somewhat astonishingly, that model would have predicted the course of GDP over 2008 pretty accurately and would attribute a substantial fraction of the significant drop in 2008:Q4 real GDP to the oil price increases.  The implication that almost all of the downturn of 2008 could be attributed to the oil shock is a stronger conclusion than emerged from any of the other models surveyed in my Brookings paper, and is a conclusion that I don't fully believe myself.

Well, I don't fully believe it either.  But do I believe that the oil spike played a significant role?  You bet.  I don't have any kind of background in econometrics, but I can create simple-minded charts showing how the economy responds to sharp rises in oil prices, and four years ago I did just that.  My chart is on the right, and it shows that every time since 1973 that oil prices have risen by 50% or more in a short period, the American economy has tanked — and the bigger the spike, the bigger the tank.  The far end of my chart is labeled with question marks, but of course we can now fill in that data: the rise in oil prices that began in 2003, retreated a bit in 2006, and then spiked sharply starting in 2007 did indeed touch off a recession.  And as in previous episodes, the fact that it was a big rise meant that the result was a big recession.

Plus there was the whole subprime thing, a huge credit expansion, the rise of financial wizardry, the end of the housing bubble, and so forth.  A perfect storm.  But if you want to persuade me that oil prices played a role too, I'm all ears.  I'd be pretty surprised if it were otherwise.

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Paying to Play

| Wed Apr. 22, 2009 8:43 AM GMT

Jonathan Turley tells me something I didn't know:



A speech can be copyrighted, but I didn't realize that the image of a dead person — and an extremely public one at that — could be protected the same way.  Live and learn.

False Confessions

| Wed Apr. 22, 2009 8:17 AM GMT






A Wee Proposal

| Tue Apr. 21, 2009 10:07 PM GMT


They're Nuts

| Tue Apr. 21, 2009 8:48 PM GMT

