Kevin Drum - 2012

HSR Opponents Working Hard to Turn Me Into a Supporter

| Thu Mar. 8, 2012 12:07 PM EST

Regular readers know that I'm not a fan of the proposed LA-San Francisco high-speed rail project, and as the projected costs have ballooned I've become even less of a fan. But lord almighty, stuff like this could change my mind:

The fast trains connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco would create new communities of high-density apartments and small homes around stations, reducing the suburbanization of California, rail advocates say. That new lifestyle would mean fewer cars and less gasoline consumption, lowering California's contribution to global warming.

....Opponents, most of whom are political conservatives, regard the ambitious project as a classic government overreach that will require taxpayer subsidies. But they also see something more sinister: an agenda to push people into European or Asian models of dense cities, tight apartments and reliance on state-provided transportation.

...."It is a real movement in California of controlling the masses, controlling land use, deciding where people should live," said Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Tulare). "I oppose that absolutely, because it is a form of left-wing social engineering."

...."It has nothing to do with transportation. This is entirely social policy," said Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Granite Bay). "It is all about the far left's fever dream to get mother Earth back to a pristine condition by elbowing us into these dense urban cores."

So who spilled the beans, anyway? Now the whole world knows that we lefties are drooling over the prospect of taking away everyone's homes and engineering a forced march into modern-day high-rise concentration camps where the cable companies don't offer Fox News. All the better to control you with, my sweeties.

Yeesh. But that's the mindset we're up against. Not we're giving people more lifestyle choices but your lifestyle choice is inherently insulting to the one I prefer. And sweet reason will do little to change this. As Matt Yglesias, one of our most vocal proponents of denser lifestyles, says, "A lot of the time there's genuinely no substitute for changing people's minds."

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Looking Ahead to 2016

| Thu Mar. 8, 2012 10:43 AM EST

Can this possibly be for real?

A true-sounding aside from Alex Pareene: "Rick Santorum is the 2016 GOP nomination frontrunner." It's true because the runner-up of the last Republican primary always starts off with an advantage. McCain 2008. Dole 1996. Bush 1988. Reagan 1976. Romney looked like the candidate most likely to break the trend, but no longer.

Maybe! This is why I sort-of-but-not-really-but-then-again-maybe-seriously want Rick Santorum to win the nomination this year. The only hope for the future of the Republican Party is to finally nominate the conservative of their dreams and then go down to an epic, ego-shattering defeat. It would, perhaps, pound some sense into them and finally give the party's moderates the backbone they need to wrest control away from the Limbaugh/Fox/Dobson/Norquist brigade. But if they nominate Romney and lose? Then, once again, it will be because they denied the one true faith. And that could, I suppose, make Santorum the frontrunner for 2016. Buckle up.

Targeted Ads Are the Least of Our Online Worries

| Thu Mar. 8, 2012 10:19 AM EST

Katherine Mangu-Ward thinks people are freaking out way too much over Google's plan to aggregate personal information about its users across all its platforms:

As it happens, we know how much people value their privacy: They'll sell information about every prescription they fill at CVS — or every pint of Haagen Dazs at Safeway — in exchange for a steady infusion of $1 coupons. They'll hand off information about the timing of their daily commute in exchange for a couple of minutes saved at a toll booth every day. They'll let Amazon track their diaper and book purchases because they would rather not re-enter their credit card number every time they want to buy something.

This is totally true. I happen to think that most people don't take this seriously enough, but who cares what I think? If you're willing to sell information about your buying habits to the highest bidder, there's no reason I should be able to stop you. She's also right about this:

But if you're more skeeved than pleased, consider letting your brain overpower your gut here. This is a fact you cannot change: All the free stuff on the Internet is possible because you slap your eyeballs on some ads from time to time. If Google and other retailers can't scrape and sort your data to offer a few well targeted ads, there are two other viable choices: 1) Less of the free stuff you like. Like this blog. It might stop being free. For instance. 2) More ads in the throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks school. Think: those annoying dancing silhouette gals selling cheap mortgages.

In fact, because of the fundamental failure of the online advertising model, more and more of the web is inaccessible all the time. Archives are unavailable, news sites are behind paywalls, etc. That's a pain in the ass for someone like me.

So, yeah, maybe some targeted ads are a small price to pay for all this stuff being collected. And if targeted ads were the only thing to be worried about, I wouldn't be worried. But I don't think you need to have a very active imagination to figure out that both the public and private sectors can eventually do a whole lot more with this stuff than learn what brand of ice cream you like. Just as they can use it to offer you services, they can also use it to deny you services. They can use it to discriminate in subtle ways that are putatively based on data mining, not race/sex/ethnicity. They can use it to make decisions about who should and shouldn't be allowed to fly on airplanes. They can sell it to marketers somewhat less scrupulous than Procter & Gamble. They can subpoena it in divorce cases. They can make it a part of massive NSA-run surveillance programs.

It's not the targeted ads I mind. It's everything that comes after targeted ads that I mind. I'd suggest that the rest of us ought to mind it a little more too.

Bachmann: Obama Could Mandate One-Child Policy

| Thu Mar. 8, 2012 12:32 AM EST

Before you read this, I want to remind you that only a few months ago Michele Bachmann was considered a serious contender for the Republican nomination for president. Hard to believe, I know, but it's true. With that thought firmly in mind, here is Bachmann last night:


This was in an interview over at The Blaze, Glenn Beck's website, and even the Blaze folks were sort of aghast that Bachmann could suggest something like this. But it's comforting in a way. This is old school Bachmann.

But as long as we're on the subject, here's a wee bit of factmongering for you. Did you know that lots of women have no health insurance, and the only reason they have any maternity coverage at all is because of federal programs like Medicaid and CHIP? It's true! It turns out that about 40% of all births in the United States are paid for by these programs.

And even women who are insured don't always have maternity coverage. Lots of them do, thanks to the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) of 1978, which conservatives and the business community hated at the time. But there are still gaps: small businesses are exempt, and most individual insurance plans don't cover maternity expenses. Obamacare will take care of that shortly, but of course, conservatives and the business community consider that an act of unprecedented tyranny.

Your garden variety hospital delivery — not counting prenatal and postnatal care — will set you back about ten grand or so these days. Most people would have a hard time affording that, but thanks to Medicaid, CHIP, the PDA, and Obamacare, most women are either covered or soon will be. In other words, the only reason most women can afford modern childbirth in modern hospitals at all is because of various federal laws that either mandate it in the private sector or pay for it out of public funds. If it weren't for that, most families couldn't even have one baby born in the hospital, let alone two. That's some pretty pro-family policy from us liberals, no?

(Via an equally dumbfounded Ed Kilgore.)

More Twaddle From the Twit

| Wed Mar. 7, 2012 8:00 PM EST

Did the Iranians release their American hostages on the day of Ronald Reagan's inaugural because they were scared shitless of what the Gipper would do to them if they held out? In a word, no. Probably just the opposite. They weren't especially afraid of Reagan, but they were pissed off at Jimmy Carter and wanted to deny him the satisfaction of being able to announce the hostages' release. What's more, by 1981 Iran was in a war with Iraq and really, really needed the money that had been frozen while the hostages were being held.

But not everyone is aware of all this, and James Joyner argues that this includes people running for president:

It’s rather unreasonable to expect our presidential candidates to consult with teams of historians to get their post hoc, studied reactions to events. Those who have studied the negotiations since — and presumably had the ability to talk to some on the Iranian side — have since concluded that there’s little to no evidence that the incoming president’s foreign policy was a significant factor. But there’s no reason on earth Romney should know that.

Well, sure, I'll go along with that. We can't expect presidential candidates to know everything.

But here's the thing: if you don't know about this history, you probably shouldn't write op-eds in the Washington Post about it. Or if you do, you should spend a minute or two on the internet checking things out. That would keep you from writing nonsense like this:


What twaddle. If Romney is clueless about this episode in American history, fine. He's had other things on his mind for the past 30 years. But if he doesn't know anything, he shouldn't be mouthing off about it either. Deal?

99 Cents and the Future of Journalism

| Wed Mar. 7, 2012 3:42 PM EST

There's a new journalism startup in town called Matter. Their pitch: once a week they're going to publish a stunningly good piece of long-form journalism about issues in technology and science. "That means no cheap reviews, no snarky opinion pieces, no top ten lists. Just one unmissable story." Each one of these unmissable stories will cost an iTunes-like 99 cents.

So: will it work? Matter is raising money on the internet, and they've already blown past their $50,000 goal to get started. But will enough people buy their pieces at 99 cents a pop to keep them going? Felix Salmon and Stephen Morse debate the issue over at Felix's site, but really, I think Felix says all that needs to be said in this short paragraph:

Matter’s Kickstarter campaign proves that people want to give them their money. The task facing Matter is to create material that’s so unique, so great, that readers around the country and the world will be eager to buy subscriptions, or individual issues, in the knowledge that their money is going straight to the creators of that content. It’s an exercise in doing something which has historically been extremely rare, in the world of journalism: selling stories to readers, as opposed to selling readers to advertisers.

Yep. But here's the thing: getting great material is the challenge faced by every single magazine and newspaper in the world. And how do you get great material? Answer: make sure your stories are written by great writers. But there are really only two ways to do this:

  • Hire the best writers and reporters in the business. You do this the old-fashioned way: by paying higher rates than anyone in the business.
  • Find fresh, young writers and reporters who produce great stuff but are relatively unknown. 

But again: these are the options open to every single magazine and newspaper in the world. Option #1 is really expensive, because the top writers are either already on staff somewhere and probably unavailable at all, or else they charge punitively high word rates. Option #2 is great, but everyone in the world is hunting for people like this. If you've figured out a way to find them better than anyone else, then you have a bright future. But it's a future based on your talent scouting ability, not your delivery mechanism.

So we'll see. I don't have much of an opinion about Matter because I suspect their delivery mechanism is beside the point. It does have the benefit of keeping overhead costs low, but that's probably a wash since they also have no advertising revenue. Basically, if they're able to consistently produce spectacular pieces of journalism that generate a lot of online buzz, they'll succeed. If they can't, they won't. But that would probably be true regardless of what kind of delivery model they choose.

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Will Retiring Baby Boomers Overwhelm the Housing Market?

| Wed Mar. 7, 2012 1:58 PM EST

Paging Karl Smith! Suzy Khimm writes today about something that I remember getting a bit of attention a few years ago: namely that as we baby boomers age, we're all going to sell our houses. This is going to put an unusually large number of old houses on the market, which could keep the construction market depressed for a long time. It's our final parting gift to the younger generation.

But is it true? Suzy is writing about a new study from the Bipartisan Policy Center, so I went off to read it. In the executive summary, it says this:

Depending on assumptions about the economic recovery, seniors will release a net of 10.6–11.3 million housing units between 2010 and 2020....Between 2000 and 2010, the net release of homes totaled some 10.5 million units.

So, um, pretty much the same. The next decade will see a release of maybe a few hundred thousand more old homes than the last decade. That's a rounding error. Here's the detail, which accounts for different forecasts of economic growth:

Under the low scenario, total absorption of owner-occupied housing amounts to only 13.3 million units; after subtracting the units released by older adults, this would mean an increase of only 3.8 million in owner-occupied units for the decade, compared with an increase of slightly more than six million for the decade from 2000 to 2010. The high scenario, by contrast, would bring a projected 18.6 million new households into homeownership and yield a net growth of 10 million new homeowners.

In the medium scenario, there would be an increase of about 7 million units, compared to 6 million for the past decade. That doesn't sound especially Armageddon-like. I'm having a hard time getting too panicked about this.

In any case, this is a chicken-and-egg problem. If the economy is bad, then fewer people will buy homes. If the economy is good, more people will buy homes. No surprise there. But of course, if more people buy homes, that will help drive the recovery. Would you care to weigh in on this, Karl?

UPDATE: In fairness, I should note that the study also suggests that this release of housing will be quite different in different states, so there could be substantial issues in some regions but not in others. Also, we're going to need a lot of new retirement and assisted-living homes as the baby boom generation ages. But I think we already knew that.

The Left Strikes Back

| Wed Mar. 7, 2012 12:41 PM EST
Rush Limbaugh

Bob Somerby points out today that Rush Limbaugh has been spewing bile for years. And yet, he says, "We liberals have been too lazy, too feckless, too ditto-headed to insist that big news orgs challenge Limbaugh." So Limbaugh has mostly gotten away with it.

I don't really buy Bob's examples of supposed liberal fecklessness. They involve things like claiming that lower taxes will bring in more revenue, which has been conservative dogma for years. It's also been the subject of relentless fights. Still, it's true that Limbaugh has said terrible stuff in the past, but it's only SlutGate that's come close to generating a serious level of blowback against him. How come?

I don't know. But I was reminded of a Suzy Khimm piece from a couple of weeks ago that asked a similar question about the proposed ultrasound law in Virginia, which also generated a tremendous amount of liberal protest:

What makes this all slightly surprising is that the Virginia law is not new. Twenty states have ultrasound-related abortion restrictions...So why is an old abortion restriction suddenly coming under fierce protest this time around? Analysts say that a new political landscape, coupled with a shift in abortion rights rhetoric, have allowed opponents to successfully push back against an abortion restriction that has passed with much less protest in a half-dozen other states.

...."In any of these contests, you need to get people passionate," says Anna Esacove, a sociologist at Muhlenberg College who studies abortion politics. "Framing this as rape creates a passionate response for people who are against the laws. Even if people don't think it's rape, it gets people talking about it."

....The messaging reminds some who have followed reproductive health politics of the antiabortion movement's successful rhetoric in pursuing a ban on "Partial-Birth Abortion."..."Partial-birth abortion was really a watershed in terms of rhetoric," says Deana Rohlinger, a sociologist at Florida State University whose research focuses on social movements. "When the National Right to Life tested it, it just tested through the roof, and now it's history."

If this is right, it's bad news for Bob, who's consistently argued against the Foxification of the left and for a tough but fundamentally factual approach to fighting the modern right. But Suzy is suggesting that although the key to success in Virginia was partly better organization, it was mostly about using more incendiary language. Likewise, in the case of Rush, the key to success had nothing to do with his odious point of view. It was all because we could highlight a single word—"slut"—that enraged people.

I don't know if this is correct. I'm just tossing it out for comment. But politics has always been about emotion, not cool logic, and maybe these two recent examples suggest that liberals are rediscovering that lesson. We'll see.

It's Mitt, Mitt, Mitt for the Home Team

| Wed Mar. 7, 2012 12:01 PM EST

Apologies for the lack of Super Tuesday posting. Five minutes of Newt's victory speech sucked all the wind out of me. So here's my wrapup: Mitt Romney used to be the inevitable nominee. After last night, he's still the inevitable nominee. As David Corn notes, Gingrich is obviously the walking dead at this point, but is too egotistical and just plain mean to realize it. Ditto for Santorum, though I suppose you could argue that he still has a tiny chance of winning.

At this point, I can just barely conceive of a scenario where everyone doubles down and refuses to exit the race, preventing Romney from winning a clear majority on the first ballot. But by "barely," I mean "like the odds of an asteroid landing on one of Mitt's cars." It's unlikely in the first place, and the pressure on both Santorum and Gingrich to stop the bloodletting would be intense if they tried to hold out. I don't think they could do it.

Like it or not — and no one does — it's Mitt. Might as well get used to it.

UPDATE: Nerd alert of the day comes from Dave Weigel: "[Romney's] strategy from state to state looks a bit like Galactus's strategy for planet-devouring: Move in, absorb everything. Restore Our Future is his Silver Surfer, softening up the terrain and warning of doom." Okey dokey. Dave also points out something that struck me as well last night: when the talking heads talked about Ohio, it was almost as if Romney was a Democratic candidate. All night, he racked up big wins in the big urban counties while Santorum colored the state purple with wins in all the rural counties. That sure sounds like a mirror image of November to me.

Maybe I'll Get an iPad 3 After All

| Wed Mar. 7, 2012 10:56 AM EST

The iPad 3 — or the iPad HD or whatever Apple decides to call it — is coming out today, and I have no plans to get one. At least, I didn't have any plans to get one until yesterday. Now I'm thinking about it.

Why? Because something suddenly occurred to me that I hadn't thought about before. I regularly use a remote access program called TeamViewer to do tech support on my mother's computer. I also have it installed on my laptop so that I can access my desktop PC. I've always known that an iPad client was also available, but for some reason it never clicked with me that I could actually use it. But of course, I can. And that would mean that I'd have a lovely iPad with all the usual lovely iPad functionality, but I'd also be able to pop up my desktop Windows screen anytime I want and use the stuff that's unique to it. And if all the rumors are right and the iPad 3 has a new super high-res display, I assume that my desktop screen would scale down to iPad size fairly cleanly.

I still don't know if I'll get an iPad, but I'm suddenly thinking that I might. The combination of high-res viewing, Kindle app, and remote desktop make it a pretty appealing idea. I just hadn't ever thought about that combination before.

I guess there's no reason for any of you to be interested in this. But you might be! So I'm sharing. Any of you ever tried this with an iPad 2?