Shrill Watch

 Ben Stein drives Felix Salmon to shrillville:

Ben Stein Watch: October 30, 2007, by Felix Salmon: I'm a uniter, not a divider. I'm a lover, not a fighter. I don't like to engage in the politics of personal destruction. But as Jonathan Landman might say, we have to stop Ben Stein from writing for the Times. Right now. And so, by popular demand, the first weekly Ben Stein Watch.

Stein uses his column this week to ask a question: "Is It Responsible to Shun Military Contractors?". Stein is a believer that investing isn't just about money:

I certainly believe in socially responsible investing for myself. I sold my tobacco shares long ago. (They have done fantastically well since then, but I don't regret my decision.)

Unfortunately, Stein doesn't tell us why he sold his tobacco shares. So we're going to just have to take a wild guess: maybe it's because cigarettes kill people?

Yet somehow Stein just can't comprehend why some socially responsible investors don't want to invest in arms manufacturers. "I don't understand this whole attitude," he writes. "Maybe someone can explain it to me."

Here, Ben, let me try, in words of one syllable:

Guns and bombs kill people.

Oh, damn, "people" is two syllables.

But let me rewind, to the very first sentence of Stein's column:

Henry Blodget should have started out as a writer.

I might point Stein to the second sentence of Blodget's wikipedia page:

Blodget received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University and began his career as a freelance journalist and was a proofreader for Harper's Magazine.

Sigh....

Stein finishes up his column seemingly asking the SEC to regulate everything that absolutely anybody might conceivably invest in. He doesn't claim that this massive expansion of regulatory responsibilities would do any good, mind you; he just ends his column, cryptically enough, by saying that "the ladder of law should have no top and no bottom." It's a Bob Dylan lyric which Stein obviously loves, since this is the second time this year he's trundled it out.

So here's my idea. Since Stein clearly isn't being featured in the business section on the grounds of his economic expertise, he's obviously got this gig on the grounds of his celebrity status. Maybe the Times has no desire to replace Stein with someone (like DeLong, say) who actually knows what he's talking about - what they want is a writer who's vaguely familiar with economic concepts but who's also something of a household name. My suggestion: Bob Dylan.

Tom Friedman and the New York Times Drive Duncan Black Shrill!

When I look at it, I understand why. My brain, too, cannot grasp the concept that Tom Friedman still has a job:

Eschaton: Now He Tells Us: Little Tommy Friedman, age 9:

What does that mean? This: 9/11 has made us stupid. I honor, and weep for, all those murdered on that day. But our reaction to 9/11 — mine included — has knocked America completely out of balance, and it is time to get things right again.

What reaction was that? Oh, maybe this one.

I think it [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie.

...

We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big state right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, and there was only one way to do it.

...

What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?"

You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna to let it grow?

Well Suck. On. This.

Okay.

That Charlie was what this war was about. We could've hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.

Hundreds of thousands of people sucked on it, and little Tommy Friedman still has a job.

I thought that the smart money was that a million Iraqis are now dead because Tom Friedman and company let themselves be "knocked... completely out of balance."

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

George W. Bush Has Driven General Casey Shrill!

Welcome, general!

Casey tells Congress Army is stretched too thin - The Boston Globe: By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff  |  September 27, 2007: WASHINGTON - The Army's top officer, General George Casey, told Congress yesterday that his branch of the military has been stretched so thin by the war in Iraq that it can not adequately respond to another conflict - one of the strongest warnings yet from a military leader that repeated deployments to war zones in the Middle East have hamstrung the military's ability to deter future aggression.

In his first appearance as Army chief of staff, Casey told the House Armed Services Committee that the Army is "out of balance" and "the current demand for our forces exceeds the sustainable supply. We are consumed with meeting the demands of the current fight and are unable to provide ready forces as rapidly as necessary for other potential contingencies."

Officials said Casey, who appeared along with Army Secretary Pete Geren, personally requested the public hearing - a highly unusual move that military analysts said underscores his growing concern about the health of the Army, America's primary fighting force.

Casey, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wanted a public forum even though he has ample opportunity to speak to lawmakers in closed-door meetings.

Representative John M. McHugh, a New York Republican, said Casey's blunt testimony was "just downright frightening."...

The Republican Party Drives Matthew Yglesias Shrill!

It's Lee Atwater who done it:

Matthew Yglesias: Atwater's Strategy: I have, in the past, been known to argue that the role of race per se in the GOP "southern strategy" has often been overstated by liberals. Bob Herbert disagrees and would seem to have the proverbial telling quote:

In 1981, during the first year of Mr. Reagan’s presidency, the late Lee Atwater gave an interview to a political science professor at Case Western Reserve University, explaining the evolution of the Southern strategy: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’ ” said Atwater. “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

Now that said, Herbert's more recent examples of "sustained mistreatment by the Republican Party" of black people mostly involve efforts to prevent black people from voting, which I'm fairly sure they do for purely partisan reasons than out of racism as such.

General Ricardo Sanchez Is SHRILL!

It's the "national political leadership":

Talking Points Memo | Kickin' the Can: By Josh Marshall: I haven't seen much published reference to this speech but it seems we can add retired Gen. Ricardo Sanchez to the list of former Bush appointees and Generals serving under the president who turn out to be thoroughly disillusioned with the president's conduct of the war. This weekend, at a speech in Corpus Christi, Texas, Sanchez said ...

My assessment is that we have a crisis in national political leadership. When will America recognize the danger we face? When will the corrosive partisanship of American politics end and allow for a bipartisan solution to arguably the most dangerous threat our nation has faced in over 60 years?

When asked who he meant by "national political leadership", Sanchez said “the most senior political leadership,” which leaves little doubt he's referring at least to the president and his chief subordinates.

Taken on its own, the statement certainly contains at least some ambiguity. Is this an indictment of the White House or a more general 'pox on all your houses' dig at our collective politics and the failure of those of us at home to unify around a strategy while we've got soldiers in the field fighting and dying.

I found the link to the report of the speech at Scott Horton's site. And just after the quote I just excerpted Horton provides this gloss ...

For three months now, Sanchez has been making off-the-record statements. He eventually came to the conclusion, he says, that Republican politics had trumped the national security interests of the United States in the execution of plans in Iraq. The Bush Administration had not planned to win in Iraq, but simply to keep a war running so Bush could run around and play “war president.” That is as devastating a criticism as any general has made of a president since the days of Douglas MacArthur. Unlike MacArthur’s criticisms, however, it has the advantage of being accurate.

Horton's right. If anything he understates it how devastating a charge that is. Does anyone know more about what Sanchez has been telling people off the record?

Tom Brokaw and Hank Paulson Drive Matthew Yglesias Shrill

Boy, is he shrill:

Matthew Yglesias: Behind the Scenes: Tom Brokaw leading in to a question to Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, started by talking about how he knows that Hank and his wife are ardent conservationists: "I've been on bird-watching expeditions with them that are also marathons; it's a death-march from 4AM to midnight."

Now, obviously, there's be no way to enforce a rule like "important media people aren't allowed to be bird-watching buddies with high government officials" but it is striking that you tend not to hear about this sort of coziness between the media and political elites when said media elites are busy posturing as a vast brigade of Woodward and Bernsteins eagerly digging to the truth. Meanwhile, Paulson, representing an administration that's worked tirelessly to block action on climate change at a climate change event, just sat around and said a bunch of misleading stuff designed to make you think that the Bush administration has been contributing constructively to this matter. Brokaw, who's probably not an idiot, doesn't want to give his friend the bird watcher a hard time, and just smiles before moving on.

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Washington Post Edition)

Is there any reason that the Washington Post should print another paper edition, ever? Anybody? Anybody? Bueller?

For the past several years Dan Froomkin has been maintaining to me that the Washington Post's Peter Baker is an honorable, intelligent reporter trying as hard as he can to get it right.

Today Matthew Yglesias reads Peter Baker, and wretches. The paragraph he quotes is Peter's lead:

Legacywashing With the Post: The Washington Post's Peter Baker falls for administration spin in a jaw-dropping manner. Here's the lead:

As he addresses a conference on climate change this morning, President Bush will face not only a crowd of skeptics but the press of time. For nearly seven years, he invested little personal energy in the challenge of global warming. Now, with the end in sight, he has called the biggest nations of the world together to press for a plan by the end of next year.

This turnaround just didn't happen. The UN had a meeting on Monday aimed at building political momentum for a meeting to happen later in Bali aimed at kicking off negotiations toward an international treaty that will commit the world's countries to binding reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. Bush didn't attend that meeting. Instead, he called this other meeting in an effort to subvert action on climate change. He hasn't in the past "invested little personal energy in the challenge of global warming." Rather, he's invested plenty of energy in undermining efforts to respond to the challenge of global warming and continues to do so by continuing to oppose mandatory emissions reductions.

This isn't brain science (it's climate science -- ha!) to move to address the challenge of global warming you need to move to address the challenge not just say you're addressing it while not doing anything. You need to, that is, unless all you really want is for Peter Baker to publish a misleading article about what you're doing in The Washington Post.

It is not that Peter Baker is ignorant, Matt. "Falling for administration spin" is not what is going on here. Not at all.

Liars for Jesus Drive P.Z. Myers Shrill:

Boy! Is he shrill:

Pharyngula: Evil Catholic propaganda: hat a charming representative for Christianity! A Catholic archbishop is claiming that condoms and retroviral drugs have been intentionally spiked with HIV. That's getting down and dirty with best evangelical strategy: lie, smear, and promote evil ignorance.

Archbishop Chimoio told our reporter that abstention, not condoms, was the best way to fight HIV/Aids. "Condoms are not sure because I know that there are two countries in Europe, they are making condoms with the virus on purpose," he alleged, refusing to name the countries. "They want to finish with the African people. This is the programme. They want to colonise until up to now. If we are not careful we will finish in one century's time."

Please, Archbishop Chimoio, tell me of these amazing human societies where abstinence actually works.

I wonder if those mysterious unnamed countries are also where Ruloff's mysterious unnamed researchers live.

He said he knew researchers, whom he would not name, who had studied cellular mechanisms and made findings "riddled with metaphysical implications" and suggestive of an intelligent designer. But they are afraid to report them, he said.

Liars for Jesus all begin to sound alike after a while, don't they?

Oh, well. Ruloff is only trying to keep people stupid. Chimoio is trying to kill them.

Bill Clinton on the Republicans and Moveon

YouTube - Bill Clinton On MoveOn:

GO BIG DOG GO!

Mark Bauerlein Drives Smurov Shrill!

Smurov writes:

The Valve - A Literary Organ | What Constitutes Academic Labor: This short essay by Mark Bauerlein requires a comment box, if only to highlight this aside:

Do not believe academics when they talk about summer research work. Outside the scientists, most of them are idle or labor on books and articles that they don’t have to write and that less than 50 people will read.

Let me break that down for you:

1. Most academics don’t work during the summer. 
2. Professors can be divided into two groups: 1) the idle and 2) those who work.  The latter, however, labor on books and articles related to their specialization, so only specialists will read them.  Therefore, the effort expended on them doesn’t count as work. 
3. Most academics don’t work during the summer.

Sounds fine to me. 

The Neoconentariat Drives Justin Logan Shrill!

Justin Logan writes:

Cato-at-liberty » You Call That Rethinking?: You Call That Rethinking? In a maddening discussion with Robert Wright, AEI scholar David Frum promises a “rethinking” of his views on Iraq but, unsurprisingly, I suppose, provides no such thing. I’ll leave it to C@L readers to stomach as much of it as they can.

But at times like this, I am reminded of Anatol Lieven’s takedown of Eliot Cohen in The National Interest:

by contributing in this way to a hasty, poorly-planned military operation, it must be repeated that Dr. Cohen took on himself a measure of the moral, intellectual and political responsibility for precisely those U.S. administration mistakes in Iraq which he now denounces, and which have cost so many American lives. It is disappointing—though not surprising—that Dr. Cohen himself does not realize that this record demands from him, as an honorable man, a lengthy period of quiet, private reflection on his mistakes and the reasons for them.

Lieven is absolutely right, but if his advice were followed, housing prices in Northern Virginia could well plummet as the neocon commentariat flees for the hills to contemplate the err of their ways. We probably shouldn’t hold our breath.

Michael Berube Gets Canonical on Ross Douthat

I say this is shrill!

Crooked Timber » » Everybody wang chung tonight: Perhaps the sorry state of contemporary canon-commentary is best exemplified by Ross Douthat, who picks up the NAS study and writes, “obviously, having Morrison and to a lesser extent Woolf in that group is somewhat depressing.” Obviously, you just gotta love the “obviously.” In a stroke, five of the most accomplished novels from the high-modernist era—-Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves—have now been so pwned by Ross Douthat!

No way they deserve to be sitting in the chair reserved for the author of “Mac Flecknoe.”

Douthat’s judgment is then seconded by a couple of rapid-fire commenters, one of whom writes that “intelligent professors should acknowledge that Toni Morrison’s work is low-brow junk” only to be corrected, one comment down, by someone who writes, “Excuse me. Toni Morrison’s work is not ‘low-brow junk.’ It’s middle-brow junk.” I can’t explain these comments myself, any more than I can explain why a once-respected literary magazine like the Atlantic would want to offer gigs to people who find it “obviously” depressing that writers like Woolf and Morrison are widely read and studied, but I can suggest three options: (1) the commenters have actually never read Paradise or Beloved, novels that make substantial demands on ordinary readers; (2) people are unaware that the properly highbrow way to sneer at Morrison is to compare her unfavorably with Faulkner or Garcia Márquez, neither of whom is usually associated with the lower brows; (3) these remarks are actually a subtle form of praise, insofar as they link Morrison to Charles Dickens, long considered by Surly Curmudgeons everywhere as the king of middlebrow junk.

And why are people still hating on Toni Morrison? Because in Canon-Debating World, it’s always 1987, and . . . oh, you know the tune. Everybody have fun tonight.

---

In Canon-Debating World, it’s always 1987, and we always have to be on the lookout for the possibility that some black writer, somewhere, is getting too much attention at some dead white guy’s expense. (Odd, isn’t it, that the allegedly overrated contemporary writer is always black? And if people don’t want to make an issue of this, then they shouldn’t complain about the attention being paid to writers like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison and Chinua Achebe. They should try complaining instead that everyone has read Don DeLillo’s Underworld but few people have read Book VI of the Aeneid, or something along those lines.)

We Would All Be Better Off If the Washington Post Just Stopped Printing Tomorrow

Atrios is shriller than ever! He reads the Washington Post--which nobody should have to do--and finds Chris Cillizza And Shailagh Murray. The lead:

In Swing Districts, Democratic Enthusiasm Is Harder to Come By: Conventional wisdom dictates that Democratic voters are thrilled with their choices for president, bursting at the seams to rally behind Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) or whoever gets the party's nod next year. A recent survey by Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, however, showed Clinton and Obama trailing former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani (R) in the 31 Democratic-held House districts regarded as most imperiled in 2008, and even potentially serving as a drag on those lawmakers' reelection chances. The poll was conducted in August but has not been previously reported. It paints a "sobering picture" for Democrats, according to a memo by Lake and Daniel Gotoff that accompanies the poll report...

Atrios writes:

Blogger Ethics Panel: So why is "Democratic pollster" Celinda Lake running push polls about Obama and Clinton? Why are Cillizza and the Devil running them as news? More importantly, why isn't Cillizza telling us that Celinda Lake works for the rival Biden campaign? I know he knows this, because he told me himself...

Indeed, Cillizza did:

Celinda Lake Joins Biden's 2008 Team: If Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (Ill.) and Barack Obama (Ill.) are the hares of the 2008 Democratic nomination race, Sen. Joe Biden (Del.) is aiming to be the tortoise. While the announcements of Clinton and Obama have dominated the news over the past week, Biden continues to soldier on -- slowly building a national political team. The latest addition to the team is Celinda Lake, who will handle polling for Biden's presidential effort. Lake, a well-known pollster among the chattering class, had a very good 2006 as the lead pollster for Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) as well as Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-Calif.) and Tim Walz (D-Minn.). All three beat Republican incumbents...

And it's true: the name of Celinda Lake's employer, Joe Biden, doesn't appear in the Cillizza-Murray article. And the wording of Lake's question?

"Some people say [your Democratic incumbent] is a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton and will support her liberal agenda of big government and higher taxes if she becomes president," the poll stated, before asking respondents whether they would still vote for their incumbent or choose a Republican candidate...

Paul Krugman: What I Hate About Political Coverage

Yea, our grand heresiarch is shrill:

What I Hate About Political Coverage - Paul Krugman - Op-Ed Columnist - New York Times Blog: What I Hate About Political Coverage Warning: this is a bit (actually, more than a bit) of a rant.

One of my pet peeves about political reporting is the fact that some of my journalistic colleagues seem to want to be in another business – namely, theater criticism. Instead of telling us what candidates are actually saying – and whether it’s true or false, sensible or silly – they tell us how it went over, and how they think it affects the horse race. During the 2004 campaign I went through two months’ worth of TV news from the major broadcast and cable networks to see what voters had been told about the Bush and Kerry health care plans; what I found, and wrote about, were several stories on how the plans were playing, but not one story about what was actually in the plans.

There are two big problems with this kind of reporting. The important problem is that it fails to inform the public about what matters. In 2004, very few people had any idea about the very real differences between the candidates on domestic policy. It remains to be seen whether 2008 is any better.

The other problem, which has become very apparent lately, is that this sort of coverage often fails even on its own terms, because the way things look to inside-the-Beltway pundits can be very different from the way they look to real people.

Which brings me to the Petraeus hearing.

To a remarkable extent, punditry has taken a pass on whether Gen. Petraeus’s picture of the situation in Iraq is accurate. Instead, it was all about the theatrics – about how impressive he looked, how well or poorly his Congressional inquisitors performed. And the judgment you got if you were watching most of the talking heads was that it was a big win for the administration – especially because the famous MoveOn ad was supposed to have created a scandal, and a problem for the Democrats.

Even if all this had been true, it wouldn’t have mattered much: if the truth is that Iraq is a mess, the public would find out soon enough, and the backlash would be all the greater because of the sense that we had been deceived yet again.

But here’s the thing: new polls by CBS and Gallup show that the Petraeus testimony had basically no effect on public opinion: Americans continue to hate the war, and want out. The whole story about how the hearing had changed everything was a pure figment of the inside-the-Beltway imagination.

What I found striking about the whole thing was the contempt the pundit consensus showed for the public – it was, more or less, “Oh, people just can’t resist a man in uniform.” But it turns out that they can; it’s the punditocracy that can’t.

There is No Non-Shrill Lunch

PGL is, well, shrill:

Bush Rebuts Greenspan's Critique of Fiscal Policy, by PGL: My title is the title of a WSJ op-ed from Henry Pulizzi:

Saying he "respectfully" disagrees with former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's recent criticism, President Bush defended his administration's fiscal record and said his tax cuts helped the U.S. fend off recession and reduce massive deficits. "Our fiscal record is admirable and good. After all, the deficit as a percentage of GDP is low relative to the 30-year average," Mr. Bush said in an interview with the Fox News Channel. I would also argue that cutting taxes ... made a significant difference in dealing with the deficit because the growing economy yielded more tax revenues, which allowed us to shrink the deficit.

My apologies to AB readers for repeating Mr. Pulizzi’s title as it is complete and utter BS. Bush did not rebut anything. Hat tip to Mark Thoma for reminding us that real economists – which excludes Lawrence Kudlow but does include Bush’s “own economists” - do not believe in the free lunch supply-side crap that certain GOP politicians routinely utter. Henry Pullizi should be ashamed of himself for suggesting that George W. Bush rebutted in any way what Alan Greenspan has recently said.

I have a question for the either incredibly stupid or dishonest Henry Pullizi – shouldn’t the fact that Bush went on Faux News been a big clue that his statements were just stupid partisan garbage? Seriously – how dumb is this Mr. Pullizi?

Gene Healy: Learning to Love the Imperial Presidency

Gene Healy is shrill:

Reason Magazine - Rant: Learning to Love the Imperial Presidency: “I took an oath, and I take that oath to the president very seriously,” former White House aide Sara Taylor told the Senate Judiciary Committee during the summer hearings on the U.S. attorneys purge. Taylor’s statement prompted an indignant clarification from Sen. Patrick Leahy (D–Vt.): “No, the oath says that you take an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution of the United States!”

Leahy was right, of course. But it’s not surprising that the 32-year-old Taylor, born the month after Nixon’s resignation, had some trouble locating the object of her sworn fealty. For as long as she’s been alive, the conservative movement has prioritized the expansion of presidential power, often at the expense of the Constitution.

It wasn’t always that way. Almost to a man, the conservatives who coalesced around William F. Buckley’s National Review in 1955 associated executive power with liberal activism and viewed Congress as the conservative branch. In 1967 the right-wing intellectuals Russell Kirk and James McClellan praised the late Ohio Sen. Robert Taft, “Mr. Conservative,” for warning that an overly aggressive foreign policy threatened to “make the American President a virtual dictator.” During his 1964 presidential bid, Barry Goldwater called the celebration of presidential power “a philosophy of government totally at war with that of the Founding Fathers.”

Yet Goldwater’s distrust of presidential power fit uneasily with his embrace of a hyper-aggressive posture in the struggle against the Soviet Union. When conservatives did support the expansion of presidential power, it was almost always in the context of foreign policy. Even so, postwar, pre-Watergate conservatives in Congress voted against the expansion of presidential power more consistently than did liberals.

That began to change with Nixon. Prominent conservatives began to see the executive as the conservative branch and set to work developing a conservative case for the imperial presidency. Right-wing ressentiment over Nixon’s downfall helped drive the shift. As the right-wing writer M. Stanton Evans quipped, “I didn’t like Nixon until Watergate.”

Conservatives started to consistently vote for major expansions of presidential strength, even when those expansions contradicted traditionally conservative positions. By the Reagan era, prominent Republicans were calling for a repeal of the 22nd Amendment, which limits presidents to two terms. In the ’90s, then-Speaker Newt Gingrich led an unsuccessful effort to repeal the War Powers Act, even though that would have increased the powers of President Clinton. “I want to strengthen the current Democratic president,” Gingrich explained, “because he’s the president of the United States.”

Trying to strengthen the powers of the presidency when the office is occupied by a political enemy shows principle of a sort. But it’s not a recognizably conservative principle. Conservatism as its best has recognized man’s weakness for power. As Kirk put it in 1993, “The conservative endeavors to so limit and balance political power that anarchy or tyranny may not arise. In every age, nevertheless, men and women are tempted to overthrow the limitations upon power, for the sake of some fancied temporary advantage.”

Modern conservatives, by contrast, spent much of the ’90s trying to convince the nation that its highest office had been seized by an unscrupulous, venal man who would stop at nothing to retain power. They’ve spent much of this decade trying to tear down checks on that office’s power, all the while with another Clinton warming up in the on-deck circle.

The Heritage Foundation, the leading conservative think tank in D.C., still offers a Russell Kirk lecture series. The speaker at the Kirk Lecture of February 2006 was John C. Yoo—an architect of the PATRIOT Act, coauthor of White House legal memos asserting that the president could unilaterally suspend the Geneva Conventions, and the legal academy’s most prominent advocate of unbridled executive power.

You’ve come a long way, baby.

Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism Looks to Be Really Shrill

Yves Smith learns something about the strategies of Goldman Sachs's Global Alpha fund, and is genuinely shocked:

Global Alpha, Carry Trade Victim: Bloomberg reports that Goldman's big hedge fund, Global Alpha, which took a beating along with other quantitatively oriented traders, was down 22.5% in August. Even among quant funds, this was lackluster performance. James Simons' Renaissance Technologies recouped the 8.7% loss it suffered at the beginning of the month.

But here comes the juicy bit: of that 22.5% loss, the biggest contributor was an 8.9% fall in currencies due to being hit by an unwinding of the carry trade. The fund had sold yen and bought Aussie dollars, and the Australian dollar fell 6% while the yen rose.

Let's get this picture straight. Goldman is charging hedge fund fees and claiming to deserve them by virtue of having highly sophisticated models, and one of its biggest positions in a yen/Aussie dollar bet? You don't need Goldman for that. Japanese housewives are doing far more complicated currency trades on their own. They can try to hide behind their models, but this is plain simple point of view punting on currencies.

But Goldman would have you believe otherwise:

"Longer term, successful quant managers will have to rely more on unique factors," the firm's fund-management division said in a report to clients. "While we have developed a number of these factors over the last several years, in hindsight we did not put sufficient weight on these relative to more popular quant factors."

The claim that too many other quants were making the same trade is utter baloney. Huge numbers of Japanese speculators were into that trade. Everyone knew that. Every time the yen stated to appreciate, retail traders in Japan would sell it down, until even they lost their nerve...

Washington Post Hack Michael Gerson Drives Publius Shrill!

Yes, Publius is shrill:

Obsidian Wings: Gerson's Pants-on-Fire Problem: Anyone care to take a stab at what Gerson means by this:

The resentment of Sunni tribal leaders against al-Qaeda's highhanded brutality predated the surge -- but the surge gave those leaders the confidence and ability to oppose al-Qaeda.

The surge was proposed in December, 2006, following the elections. The Anbar tribes made a decision about AQI in September, four months earlier. Maybe the Anbar sheiks read the Charlie Cook Report and just extrapolated from there. This macaca thing is going to kill Allen in Fairfax. Death to America.

Of course, I recognize he's using patented Gerson weasel language (e.g., the "resentment" -- not the action -- predated the surge). But it's still intended to mislead -- which is unfortunately a regular feature of his op-eds, not to mention his speeches and his life more generally.

"The President’s Description ... of the Stakes in Iraq was Delusional"

The Commander in Chief is a pretty lame duck:

Somebody Else’s Mess, By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, September 16, 2007: George W. Bush delivered his farewell address on Thursday evening — handing the baton, and probably the next election, to the Democrats. Why do I say that? Because in his speech to the nation the president … said that … a substantial number of U.S. troops would remain in Iraq “beyond my presidency.” Therefore, it will be up to his successor to end the war he started. …

The sad thing for the American people is that we have no commander in chief anymore, framing our real situation and options. The president’s description on Thursday of the stakes in Iraq was delusional. … We … do not have a commander in chief weighing the costs of staying in Iraq indefinitely against America’s other interests at home and abroad. 

The Texas Execution System Drives Radley Balko into Shrill Unholy Madness!

Radley Balko: Did Texas Execute an Innocent Man? Who Cares!

TheAgitator.com: Did Texas Execute an Innocent Man? Who Cares!: Comments: A judge has blocked prosecutors from destroying a hair found at scene of the murder for which Claude Jones was convicted, and executed in 2000. DNA testing will now be done to determine if it matches Jones. It's not just any hair. It's the hair that prosecutors matched to the defendant at trial by way of a hair fiber analyst.

Hair fiber analysis is, to say the least, an imperfect science. It has led to wrongful convictions before, and professional prosecution hair fiber witnesses have a history of exaggerating the certitude of their findings.

I haven't read enough about this particular case to have an opinion on it. I note it mostly because of the following passage, which I find absolutely inexplicable:

The groups, represented by attorneys at Mayer Brown LLP, filed the court motions Friday after the San Jacinto District Attorney refused to agree to DNA testing – and also refused to agree not to destroy the evidence while courts consider whether DNA testing can be conducted.

Now, I can think of some reasons why a prosecutor would want to destroy a piece of physical evidence that could prove that the state executed an innocent man. But none of them are compatible with...um...being a human being.

Perhaps, for example, the prosecutor was one of the prosecutors who worked on the case, and doesn't want the stain on his career that might come with a wrongful execution. Perhaps he wants to avoid the inevitable stain on Texas' already execution-happy reputation that would come with proof that the state executed an innocent man. Perhaps he knows that proof of a wrongful execution will make it much more difficult for him to win death penalty cases in the future.

But here's the thing: While I can perhaps see a prosecutor harboring such sentiment deep down inside, I can't possibly conceive of anyone actually making these sorts of arguments publicly. Or with a straight face.

Because, you see, if Texas did execute an innocent man, all of those things should happen. Because...well...because Texas...would have executed an innocent man.

And if Texas did execute an innocent man, that Texans might find out about it--and subsequently raise understandable questions about the morality and efficacy of the death penalty--isn't something to be avoided, it's something that damned-well ought to happen. Because--at risk of repeating myself--Texas would have executed an innocent man.

Seriously. What possible not-devoid-of-all-morality argument could a prosecutor possibly make for being permitted to destroy evidence that might prove an innocent man was executed?

I really can't think of one.