quotable – Page 5

Category: quotable (page 5 of 6)

Matt Taibbi on accountability

First of all, we should get one thing out of the way — it’s not any citizen’s job to give a politician credit for his political calculations. In fact, that should rightly be part of the calculus of any political calculation; a politician should have to weigh the benefits of making, say, an unsavory insider alliance against the negative of public criticism for that move. If a leader doesn’t have to earn the admiration you give him, then a) that admiration doesn’t mean anything, and b) he will surely spend all his political capital on the people who do make him earn it.

Matt Taibbi on Obamania.

Nate Silver on the politics of recovery

December 12, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

At the end of the day, however, the piling-on in liberal circles does not match the objective evidence about the economy. And if it sets any precedent, you may have a robust recovery by the middle of next year, but with neither the White House’s conservative nor liberal critics willing to give them much credit for it. Voters may stay away from Democrats as a result, pushing the country toward more conservative economic policy and ensuring that liberal critics of the economy aren’t lacking for greivances any time soon.

FiveThirtyEight: If An Economy Recovers and No One Cheers It, Does It Make a Sound?

Climbing out of the unemployment hole

December 11, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

But let’s set a more modest goal: return to more or less full employment in 5 years –which means seven lean years of depressed employment. To keep up with population growth over those 7 years, the United States would have had to add 84 times 127,000 or 10.668 million jobs. (If that sounds high, bear in mind that we added more than 20 million jobs over the 8 Clinton years). Add in the need to make up lost ground, and we’re at around 18 million jobs over the next five years — or 300,000 a month.

Paul Krugman in The jobs deficit.

Baby Boomers

December 11, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

There’s no stopping the “me” generation. In the ’60s they got all the good drugs, in the ’70s all the sex, in the ’80s all the money, and now, in the waning days of the aughts, they won’t let go of all the jobs. It goes without saying that during the next decade they’ll gobble up all the good healthcare.

Andrew Leonard in Curse of the boomer hegemony.

The urgency of health care reform

December 10, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Why is health care reform important? I haven’t seen it put better than in this St. Petersburg Times op-ed.

The GOP and identity politics

December 8, 2009 / Rafe / 2 Comments

This assertion by Tom Schaller at fivethirtyeight.com strikes me as completely true:

In other words, although the end-of-life use of Medicare is a government problem that violates almost every philosophy they espouse about the proper role of government—public sector over private; easily exploited by, rather than protected from, trial lawyers; a moral hazard, consequence-free billing system as opposed to rational, need-based spending; a program with rising outlays as opposed to slow or zero growth outlays—Medicare is instead the very program they are rallying behind.

And why? For votes—specifically the votes of those angry, mostly-white seniors upon whom they are betting their electoral fortunes in 2010 and beyond. In short, the GOP has now become so wedded to its dying, white majority that it is willing to sacrifice not only good public policy and smart long-term budgeting, but its very own core principles. Their politically-motivated, 180-degree defense of Medicare and their inflammatory rhetoric about death panels proves that the GOP is now the party paralyzed by identity politics.

Commodifying Moneyball

December 7, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

The challenge for Bloomberg is to create software that is better, faster and more visually useful than what rivals offer to help develop players and predict their performances. A demonstration of Bloomberg’s software showed dazzlingly colorful graphics and an easy way to plot statistics and compare players in complex combinations.

The developers say that after studying rival software makers, they can do more and do it better.

From an article in the New York Times, Bloomberg Technology Embraces Baseball. Moneyball was really a book about identifying and exploiting undervalued assets. The main thing that has changed since the book was published is that players are valued much more accurately than they were when the A’s were beating teams with higher payrolls.

Infographic of the climate change argument

December 7, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Information is Beautiful: Climate Change Deniers vs The Consensus.

I researched this subject in a very particular way. I deliberately chose not speak directly to any climate experts or leading scientists in the field. I used only publicly available web sources.

Why? Because I wanted to simulate what it’s like for people trying to learn about climate change online.

What’s next for Android?

December 3, 2009 / Rafe / 2 Comments

Mark Sigal has a really nice piece for O’Reilly Radar looking at the challenges that lie ahead for Android:

Now, as a developer, do you develop different versions of your software to take advantage of the cool features of each of these different devices (and the lifecycle of supporting same)? Do you focus on just the device that pushes the highest volume (and release more apps specific to that device)? Or, do you pursue a lowest common denominator that strives for uniformity across all form factors?

Nearly all political journalism is worthless

December 1, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Ezra Klein’s list of reasons why most political journalism has very little value:

Campaigns don’t really matter. Elections are largely decided by the fundamentals of the economy. The graphs in this article would’ve done more to predict the 2008 election than reading Politico every day.

Presidential speeches don’t matter much, either.

Nor does the executive’s legislative strategy, come to think of it. Politics is much more interesting when it’s told as the story of the executive, but in fact, the rules and composition of the Congress decide 80 percent of everything — including the president’s legislative priorities and strategy.

Polls are useful for measuring impressions but very bad for measuring beliefs.

The media is a political actor, not an observer.

Pretty much no one watches cable news.

What you emphasize is a lot more important than what you report. People don’t read you closely.

I’d say that coverage that explains the implications of policy choices is important, but that coverage of why it’s happening is almost always wrong, and nearly worthless even when it’s right. People in general prefer a dramatic, personal narrative that describes day to day events, but most of the time events are dictated by broad trends and path dependence. Those stories aren’t very interesting to write or read, so the market dictates that journalists make up a narrative to describe events instead.

rc3.org

Strong opinions, weakly held