Balance of Opinion

ON HIATUS

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Kruh) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:18:00 +0000

Digesting: the AIG fallout

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Kruh) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:29:00 +0000

The AIG bonuses have evoked one of the biggest punditry gang tackles I've seen in a long time. So far, I've collected 36 commentaries about some aspect of the mes. Michelle Malkin (Creators), Maureen Dowd (NYT), Steve Chapman (Chicago Tribune) have written two columns each; Eugene Robinson (WaPo) has written a column and a PostPartisan entry, as well.

All generally fall in three genres: 1.) rage at AIG, 2.) rage at Obama and a hypocritical (or opportunistic) Congress for its populist rage, and 3.) a call for calm and a little perspective.

Here's just a sampling ...

Michael Kinsley (WaPo):

"If you buy the theory that 'retention payments' are needed, then they need to be big enough to work. If $100,000 is the right amount to keep an AIG employee from leaving for one of the many job opportunities no doubt available in the middle of a depression at companies that wish to duplicate AIG's success in marketing securities too complicated for anyone but an AIG employee to understand, then paying $50,000 is a waste. AIG will lose the employee and $50,000."

Maureen Dowd:

"On St. Patrick’s Day, the president spoke a bit of Gaelic, dyed the White House fountains green and talked about his distant relatives in the tiny Irish town of Moneygall, aptly named since money and gall are the two topics now consuming him.
"But Mr. Obama is still having trouble summoning a suitable flash of Irish temper at the gall of the corrupt money magicians who continue to make our greenbacks disappear into their bottomless well. He’s got to lop off some heads."

Margaret Carlson (Bloomberg):

"No Drama Obama doesn’t know when to give up the cool that worked so well during the presidential campaign for a little righteous fury. He knew AIG had no shame when, after the first bailout, company officials flew off for a week of mani-pedis at a California spa and a partridge hunt in England. Would you trust them after that not to grab whatever they could get their hands on?"

Linda Chavez (Creators):

"Spare me the populist outrage. Members of the House Financial Services Committee sounded more like an out-of-control mob than leaders who could help solve one of the worst financial crises in U.S. history when they confronted AIG CEO Edward Liddy this week. And the president wasn't much better. They are whipping the American people into a nasty and destructive frenzy that won't do anything to help fix the economy and will likely make it worse."

Mona Charen (Creators):

"[Rep. Barney Frank, chair of a subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee] demanded that [AIG CEO Edward] Liddy reveal the names of the 73 executives who had received retention bonuses. Liddy said he would do so if he could receive a promise of confidentiality. Frank refused and threatened to subpoena the names. Liddy said if subpoenaed he would obey the law, but he then read to the committee some of the death threats his company had been getting over the past few days ...
"That is the sort of ugliness and criminality that Frank is willing tacitly to encourage by demanding the names."

Charles Krauthammer (WaPo):

"A $14 trillion economy hangs by a thread composed of (a) a comically cynical, pitchfork-wielding Congress, (b) a hopelessly understaffed, stumbling Obama administration, and (c) $165 million [in bonuses to AIG]. ...
"For this we are going to poison the well for any further financial rescues, face the prospect of letting AIG go under (which would make the Lehman Brothers collapse look trivial) and risk a run on the entire world financial system?"

Trudy Rubin (Philadelphia Inquirer):

"Many Americans feel they have been cheated by Wall Street and corrupt politicians. Indeed, Obama was swept into office as a result of such feelings ...
"Yet AIG rage can become a dangerous phenomenon if it is misdirected or misused ...
"The din virtually blots out the bigger picture: how the rescue of AIG relates to the urgent need to save the banking system and reinvigorate bank lending. Meantime, AIG rage has inspired demagoguery among scared politicians trying to deflect blame. This in turn has produced quick fixes that may undercut long-term economic reforms."

(Rubin's column, BTW, is a rare detour from foreign affairs. I do hope the Inquirer's bankruptcy proceedings haven't had an effect on her travel budget ... but perhaps that's too much to ask.)

All of this has seemed to cause a backdraft of renewed anxiety over the Obama administration in general -- and its reaction to the economic crisis, specifically. This sort of response from the right is predictable, of course, but a remarkable amount is coming from the left. Paul Krugman (NYT) panned the leaked details of the bank rescue plan; I anticipate he'll have much more to say about the actual announcement in his next column on Friday. Thomas Friedman (NYT) is nearing the point of apoplectic:

"We’re in a once-a-century financial crisis, and yet we’ve actually descended into politics worse than usual. There don’t seem to be any adults at the top — nobody acting larger than the moment, nobody being impelled by anything deeper than the last news cycle. Instead, Congress is slapping together punitive tax laws overnight like some Banana Republic, our president is getting in trouble cracking jokes on Jay Leno comparing his bowling skills to a Special Olympian, and the opposition party is behaving as if its only priority is to deflate President Obama’s popularity."

Frank Rich's patience has been worn down to a nub, also in NYT:

"Six weeks ago I wrote in this space that the country’s surge of populist rage could devour the president’s best-laid plans, including the essential Act II of the bank rescue, if he didn’t get in front of it. The occasion then was the Tom Daschle firestorm. The White House seemed utterly blindsided by the public’s revulsion at the moneyed insiders’ culture illuminated by Daschle’s post-Senate career. Yet last week’s events suggest that the administration learned nothing from that brush with disaster."

Kathleen Parker is doing her best not to have a complete right-leaning conniption:

"Despite civic rage and political blame -- even death threats aimed at business executives -- there is a carnival air of unseriousness and grotesquery loose upon the land. Life has become one grand, comic burlesque, a vaudevillian game show where plumbers are journalists, war heroes twitter, and the president hits the late-night circuit in the midst of crisis."

What they're reading

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Kruh) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:24:00 +0000

Eleanor Clift (Newsweek): Dispatches from the War Room by Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg

What to call it

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Kruh) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:18:00 +0000

So much of the punditry has been trying to put a name to this economic downturn since it seems to be worse than your run-of-the-mill recession, but not quite a depression. Newsweek's Anna Quindlen has split the difference and come up with a novel idea: "repression."

Ick.

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Kruh) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 16:30:00 +0000

Did Joel Stein (LA Times, married man) just say what I think he said?

"It turns out the easiest way to seem like a really good guy is to show up alone at a birthing class. If the other women weren't with their husbands and carrying their babies, I think I could have gotten some."

Welcome innovation

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Kruh) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:46:00 +0000

One of the smartest additions to the punditsphere in recent days in John Dickerson's Debate-o-Matic, which takes the hot topics of the week and offers concise arguments on either side. Sure, it's a little simplistic, but Dickerson is deft enough to get at the heart of an issue. For example, on Obama's ill-advised Special Olympics quip on The Tonight Show:

"It was a big gaffe by Obama: It's never good when the president casually insults a whole class of people on national television. It's a little window into his soul, and it turns out that he's not that nice a guy. He makes jokes at other people's expense, as he did about Nancy Reagan after he was elected. Plus, when he's already being criticized for being too distracted with an overloaded schedule and his NCAA bracket picks, does he really need another video clip of himself being jokey and distracted?
"Oh, please, it was not: It was a mildly dumb thing to say, and he cleaned it up immediately, calling Tim Shriver to apologize. The world is in turmoil, let's move on."

I don't know about anyone else, but for me, placing such well-reasoned, and opposing, arguments side by side -- from the same source -- seems to have a calming effect. ("See? Life is complicated. Just keep breathing.")

Debate-o-Matic debuted the week of the presidential inauguration, and Dickerson has been filing weekly ever since.

Smart addition

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Kruh) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:34:00 +0000

Posted at the end of Jim Hoagland's latest in WaPo is an update on previous column topics:

"Since my column last week, American International Group (AIG) has disclosed that it sent $3 billion of U.S. taxpayers' money to UBS, which is refusing Justice Department demands to identify the thousands of Americans whom the Swiss bank helped evade U.S. taxes. Oy. And vey. On a more positive note, national security adviser Jim Jones flew secretly to Switzerland this month to meet with vacationing Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen and then threw U.S. support behind Rasmussen to become the next NATO secretary general. Mazeltov, Denmark."

This assumes readers have seen the previous column (though a handy link is provided, of course, for online readers), but it's still a helpful tool for a public trying to keep up with quickly changing news events. Too often pundits -- and journalists, for that matter -- tackle a subject, then move on, never to look back. While they rightly think they may have said all that they want to say about a particular topic, that hardly means the news has stood still. The punditry is usually loath to devote entire columns to a subject recently tackled even when conditions have changed -- but this addendum offers an intriguing middle-ground solution to this gap.

Is Nicholas Kristof ...

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Kruh) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:57:00 +0000

... the last pundit in America to have discovered Washington D.C.'s school superintendent, Michelle Rhee?

She was Time magazine's cover subject on Dec. 8. Linda Chavez (Creators) and Fred Hiatt (WaPo) wrote full columns about her last November, and various other pundits have been touting her reforms for months now.

I'm not saying the NYT columnist shouldn't have written about Rhee. But he could have written what journalists call a "second-day" story -- one that acknowledges previous coverage. Instead, Kristof writes a lead that suggest he's just discovered a hidden treasure:

"The most unlikely figure in the struggle to reform America’s education system right now is Michelle Rhee.
"She’s a Korean-American chancellor of schools in a city that is mostly African-American. She’s an insurgent from the school-reform movement who spent her career on the outside of the system, her nose pressed against the glass — and now she’s in charge of some of America’s most blighted schools. Less than two years into the job, she has transformed Washington into ground zero of America’s education reform movement."

A little sunshine

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Kruh) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:36:00 +0000

David Ignatius (WaPo) takes a break "from gloom and doom" to report that Australia's prime minister, Kevin Rudd, now sees three encouraging signs in the global economy:

"The first positive development Rudd sees is a change in global governance. The world's executive committee is shifting from the small, Euro-American-centered Group of Eight nations to the wider Group of 20, ... an inclusive group that numbers five participants from Europe, five from the Americas, five from Asia and five others (not least, Australia).
"Rudd's second encouraging sign ... is the growing role of China in maintaining global economic stability. ... The details are still being discussed, but China is expected to contribute more of the [International Monetary Fund's] capital and to have a bigger say in the fund's management.
"The third upbeat observation ... is that the United States is back as a leader of the network of global institutions. Where George Bush was a reluctant participant in last October's G-20 meeting, the Obama administration has been an enthusiastic player -- supporting plans for new global financial regulation and backing a doubling of IMF resources to $500 billion."

Ignatius adds, of course, the he hopes Rudd is right.

How Krugman saved my bacon

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Kruh) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 21:36:00 +0000

A version of the following appeared in the March 22 edition of The Dallas Morning News:

I don’t watch Jim Cramer or Suze Orman or any of the other star-powered financial advisers who make their living telling people how and where to invest their money. Until Jon Stewart took him down, I hardly even knew who Jim Cramer was. I don’t read The Financial Times or Barrons, and I glance only fleetingly at the glossy magazines chock full of advice that Fidelity Investments sends me, because that’s where I keep my IRA.

The only economic expert I follow religiously is New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, and he is the sole reason I did something back in March 2008 that millions of people now wish they had done. I yanked every last penny I had invested out of the stock market.

For severals months afterward, the market kept perking along, and I fretted that I’d made a huge mistake – the Fidelity adviser I discussed it with certainly thought so. These days, though, I’m careful to contain my glee around all of my friends and family members whose investments have tanked.

As the writer of Balance of Opinion, a digest of political commentary that appears weekly in The Dallas Morning News, I read every Krugman column because it’s my job. And I confess: Given my lack of interest in all things financial, if I’m not the very picture of concentration, I can easily feel like Ginger, the Far Side cartoon dog that only nominally understands her master: “Blah blah blah target interest rate blah blah blah margin call blah blah blah mortgage-backed securities … ”

But early last year – around the time Jim Cramer was extolling the stability of Bear Stearns – Krugman had definitely grabbed my attention. While the rest of the political punditry was acting like the whole world revolved around Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Krugman was filing column after column foretelling imminent economic meltdown. When I heard Cramer on The Daily Show insisting “we all should have seen it more,” I just rolled my eyes and wondered, didn’t anyone else read Krugman?

On Jan. 18, 2008, the columnist’s most cheerful news was that the looming economic crisis wouldn’t be as bad as Argentina’s “death spiral," but he still predicted "the next year or two could be quite unpleasant."

"Some critics say that the Fed helped inflate the housing bubble with low interest rates. But those rates were low for a good reason: although the last recession officially ended in November 2001, it was another two years before the U.S. economy began delivering convincing job growth, and the Fed was rightly concerned about the possibility of Japanese-style prolonged economic stagnation.
"The real sin, both of the Fed and of the Bush administration, was the failure to exercise adult supervision over markets running wild."

On Jan. 25, he declared the economic stimulus plan – the one that gave us our $300 checks – “a lemon":

"The goal of a stimulus plan should be to support overall spending, so as to avert or limit the depth of a recession. If the money the government lays out doesn’t get spent — if it just gets added to people’s bank accounts or used to pay off debts — the plan will have failed ...
"We don’t know for sure how deep the coming slump will be, or even whether it will meet the technical definition of a recession. But there’s a real chance not just that it will be a major downturn, but that the usual response to recession — interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve — won’t be sufficient to turn the economy around."

On Feb. 8, he predicted:

"Since the current problems of the U.S. economy look like a combination of 1990 and 2001, the shape of this episode of economic distress will probably be similar to that of the earlier episodes: even if the official recession is short, the bad times will linger well into the next administration.
"How severe will the distress be? The double-bubble nature of the underlying problem — a housing bubble and a credit bubble combined — suggests that it may well be worse than either 1990 or 2001."

A week later, he compared what was happening in the economy to “a sort of minor-key reprise of the banking crisis that swept America in 1930 and 1931.”

"A decade ago, during the last global financial crisis, the word on everyone’s lips was 'contagion.' Troubles that began in a far-away country of which most people knew nothing (Thailand) eventually spread to much bigger countries with no obvious connection to Southeast Asia, like Russia and Brazil.
"Today, we’re witnessing another kind of contagion, not so much across countries as across markets. Troubles that began a little over a year ago in an obscure corner of the financial system, BBB-minus subprime-mortgage-backed securities, have spread to corporate bonds, auto loans, credit cards and now — the latest casualty — student loans ...
"Why has a crisis that began with loans to a limited group of home buyers ended up disrupting so much of the financial system? Because, ultimately, it’s more than a subprime crisis; indeed, it’s more than a housing crisis. It’s a crisis of faith."

The week after that, he foresaw “an extended period of economic weakness,” that could possibly last beyond 2010.

"Many economists have pointed out the parallels between the current situation and the early 1990s: another real estate bubble, subprime playing more or less the same role formerly played by bad loans by savings and loan institutions, financial trouble all around.
"The difference is that the problems look a lot worse this time: a much bigger bubble, more financial distress, deeper consumer indebtedness — and sky-high oil prices added to the mix. So if history is any guide, we should be looking at an extended period of economic weakness, probably extending well into 2010, and quite possibly even longer."

On March 7, he declared: “The full economic effects of the implosion of the housing market and the freezing of the credit markets have yet to be felt. As more things fall apart, perceptions will only get worse.”

The dire pronouncements – not to mention the fact that Krugman had just been awarded the Nobel Prize in economics – had an unshakable cumulative effect on me, and one night I couldn’t sleep for worry about my little nest egg. Around 2 a.m. I decided I didn’t need to lose any more sleep. The next morning I cashed out everything.

I’m sure there are times when Krugman has been wrong, but this was not one of them. Now, looking back at his divinations, I can’t help but be reminded of an Old Testament prophet, like Amos, who toddles out of the sheep pastures to proclaim impending doom if the people don’t change their ways. The high priest resists the warnings, misinterprets the prediction, tries to shoo the prophet away. And now look at us – all in economic exile.

I’m certain Krugman wasn’t the only economist sounding the alarm. But his was the one that I heard, and lucky me – sorry for gloating – I also wasn’t listening to the priesthood of the financial advice-givers who were soliciting optimism and assurances from the ones in the process of wrecking the economy.

Wherever there’s a disconnect between these two forces in the financial media, it does not serve this country well. One side is macro: the experts who can absorb and interpret the complex interrelationship of global economic forces. The other side is micro: the experts who tend to get a piecemeal view of the economy through market research and analysis.

The latter, of course, make their living recommending how we should invest, and many provide measured judgments in the context of greater forces. But the ones who indulge in the language of certitude (“Bear Stears is fine! Do NOT take your money out!”) play directly into our human nature that likes a gamble, that believes in a “sure thing” and thinks the system can be beat. Besides that, the Jim Cramers of the world are a lot more entertaining than the Paul Krugmans, and all things considered, we’d rather be entertained.

So now many of the advice-givers are suffering a crisis in their own confidence, and I say bully. Their chastening, and humbling, should make them better at what they do, as well as remind the rest of us to sober ourselves up.

Unfortunately, our financial prophets are fallible, too, and the proof of their brilliance comes only in hindsight. I don’t kid myself that I also took a gamble when I pulled my money out. And these days, though I pay attention to Krugman, almost every pundit is focused on the economy, so his is but one voice in the clatter.

The only sure thing? Nobody really knows what’s going to happen. But there are prophets and priests in our midst, and it behooves us to recognize the difference.

*POSTSCRIPT* I will tell my blog readers that I have already stuck a toe back into the stock market.

Back in late January, I invested about 15 percent of my corpus in one mutual fund and another blended fund (stocks and bonds). The Dow Jones Industrial Average was around 8,000 and holding at that time, and a gut feeling told me that no way could it go any lower.

So much for my gut feelings.

However, I did just check my total ( as of Friday), and because most of my IRA is now in bonds, CDs and a money market account, I've calculated that I've lost about 0.3 percent of my corpus since March 2008.

Nobody in my investment class is making any money right now (at least as far as I can tell), so I continue to count myself as lucky for holding basically even.

All that said, I will confess I've made several extremely poor investment decisions in the past -- which is one of the main reasons, I think, that the Krugman columns scared the bejeebers out of me.

P/CP: Obama foreign policy

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Kruh) — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 03:25:00 +0000

Charles Krauthammer (WaPo, Feb. 20):

"President Bush's response to the Kaliningrad deployment -- the threat was issued the day after Obama's election -- was firm. He refused to back down because giving in to Russian threats would leave Poles and Czechs exposed and show the world that, contrary to post-Cold War assumptions, the United States could not be trusted to protect Eastern Europe from Russian bullying.
"The Obama response? 'Biden Signals U.S. Is Open to Russia Missile Deal,' as the New York Times headlined Biden's Feb. 7 Munich speech to a major international gathering ...
"A week after the new president went about sending sweet peace signals via al-Arabiya, Iran launched its first homemade Earth satellite. The message is clear. If you can put a satellite into orbit, you can hit any continent with a missile, North America included ...
"With a grinning Goliath staggering about sporting a 'kick me' sign on his back, even reputed allies joined the fun. ... Islamabad capitulated to the Taliban, turning over to its tender mercies the Swat Valley, 100 miles from the capital. Not only will sharia law now reign there, but members of the democratically elected secular party will be hunted as the Pakistani army stands down."

Fareed Zakaria (Newsweek, March 16):

"The Washington establishment is mostly fretting, dismayed in one way or another by most of these [foreign-policy] moves [by the Obama administration]. The conservative backlash has been almost comical in its fury. Two weeks into Obama's term, Charles Krauthammer lumped together a bunch of Russian declarations and actions — many of them long in the making — and decided that they were all 'brazen provocations' that Obama had failed to counter. Obama's 'supine diplomacy,' Krauthammer thundered, was setting off a chain of catastrophes across the globe. The Pakistani government, for example, had obviously sensed weakness in Washington and 'capitulated to the Taliban' in the Swat Valley. Somehow Krauthammer missed the many deals that Pakistan struck over the last three years —during Bush's reign — with the Taliban, deals that were more hastily put together, on worse terms, with poorer results."

Unusual stance

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Kruh) — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 02:31:00 +0000

Steve Chapman (Chicago Tribune) can invariably be relied upon to toe the libertarian line -- one of the few self-avowed of his ilk among the mainstream punditry. But Chapman's latest column seems to advocate something decidedly un-libertarian -- more video cameras on police cars.

Maybe this is what comes from living in corruption-prone Chicago. The column leads with a man charged with DUI who appeared stone-cold sober in the video. Charges were dropped against the suspect -- and charges are now being considered against the cop.

Tracking the public mood

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Kruh) — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 01:20:00 +0000

Jim Hoagland's zeroed in on a topic in his Sunday column that seems uncannily prescient, considering how the AIG bonuses have blown up in the news on Monday:

"[White House economic adviser Larry] Summers, appearing at the Brookings Institution on Friday, was asked who was actually getting the tons of taxpayer dollars being shoveled into the husk of AIG, the now-shriveled insurance giant. Summers swatted the question away with a rare refusal to explain, spin or even answer."

You've got to wonder how Summers might answer that question today.

Hoagland joins his WaPo colleague David Ignatius in worry over the mood of the body politic:

"Choose your image: a ticking time bomb, a pile of kerosene-drenched kindling, an entire people balancing on a precipice. This is how the American public is being portrayed in some private discussions at the top of this understaffed administration. But those cliches may not do justice to the gathering forces of social explosion as unemployment leaps, the stock market buckles and the greed of investment bankers dominates family dinner discussions."
"The good news is that the Obama camp thinks it still has time to head off the threat of a significant radicalization of the American body politic."

Here's Ignatius ... I quoted him in a previous posting, but it's worth juxtaposing it with Hoagland:

"What will happen if Obama's efforts fail? That's the question that really worries me when I think about history. During the 1930s, European politicians failed to solve the economic crisis through normal democratic means. So the public turned elsewhere. People became so angry with bankers and business tycoons, and with the bickering parliamentarians, that they turned to authoritarian leaders who promised national action -- in the form of fascism. That nightmare scenario may seem far off today. But there's an ugly mood developing, as people start looking for villains to blame for the economic mess."

Honestly, is it really time to raise the specter of anarchy and insurrection?

By the way, in the column Hoagland perpetuates one of the great myths of Watergate -- that Deep Throat source Mark Felt actually told Woodward, "Follow the money."

Back in 1997, as reported here by William Safire, NPR commentator Daniel Schorr tracked down the origins of the famous quote, and the trail led directly to All the President's Men screenwriter William Goldman. Perhaps Hoagland should have walked down the hall and double-checked his facts with Watergate reporter Bob Woodward.

Even Broder has gotten impatient

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Kruh) — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 01:02:00 +0000

David Broder (WaPo) -- the man who has covered presidential administration back to Truman or Hoover or Buchanan ... well, almost as many as Helen Thomas -- has decided the Obama honeymoon is officially over.

"Among those who follow government closely, there has been an unmistakable change in tone in the past few weeks. These are not little Rush Limbaughs hoping that Obama fails. They are politicians and journalists measuring him with the same skeptical eye they apply to everyone else. "I think the shift began when Obama moved beyond the stimulus bill to his speech to the joint session of Congress and his budget message. For the first time, the full extent of his ambitions for 2009 became clear -- not just stopping and reversing the steep slide in the economy but also launching highly controversial efforts in health care, energy and education."

I find it intriguing how well that speech went over with a least the left-leaning punditry in the days immediately afterward. Since then, pundits such as Broder are taking a second look and saying, gulp.

Now he tells us

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Kruh) — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Paul Krugman (NYT), in Madrid, reports on Europe's economic perils and he drops this little bombshell at the end:

"Does all this mean that Europe was wrong to let itself become so tightly integrated? Does it mean, in particular, that the creation of the euro was a mistake? Maybe."

A really big 'if'

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Kruh) — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:45:00 +0000

Thomas Friedman (NYT) is hot on his favorite trail these days -- looking for the next big breakthroughs in clean, renewable energy.

This time he's out near San Francisco at the National Ignition Facility, where researchers are aiming 192 lasers into frozen hydrogen pellets.

"Once one of those pellets is heated and compressed by the lasers, it reaches temperatures over 800 million degrees Fahrenheit, 'far greater than exists at the center of our sun,' said [NIF director Edward] Moses.
"More importantly, each crushed pellet gives off a burst of energy that can then be harnessed to heat up liquid salt and produce massive amounts of steam to drive a turbine and create electricity for your home — just like coal does today. Only this energy would be carbon-free, globally available, safe and secure and could be integrated seamlessly into our current electric grid."

So what's the catch? The lab has yet to produce more energy from the pellets than is expended by the laser beams. In other words, it's an energy drain. (Friedman prefers to depict it as not having an "energy gain.") This has been the sticking point for so many other alternative modes of energy (think hydrogen cars) that seemed so ready to put us into the Jetson Age.

Friedman doesn't conceal the obstacle, but the column also has the sort of gee-whiz quality (the headline is, after all, "The Next Really Cool Thing") that can get readers a bit more excited than perhaps reality should warrant.

Courageous admission

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Kruh) — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 00:35:00 +0000

I've been reading Leonard Pitts for years, and this is the first time I've seen him write about his father physically abusing his mother (both now deceased) when Pitts was a child. Strong stuff -- and gutsy of Miami Herald columnist to share it.

It's in the context, of course, of a plea to Rihanna, the singer who was beaten up by her boyfriend, hip-hop star Chris Brown. (I'd put "allegedly" but it seems they have him dead to rights.)

"Ms. Fenty, I know you've got a lot of people in your business right now, all with an opinion about how you should run your life. "I would not be surprised if you are fed up with it. I would only beg you to put that emotion aside and try to hear what you are being told: If this guy did what you say he did, you need to drop him like a hot rock."

The other kind of pork

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Kruh) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:19:00 +0000

I just noticed Nicholas Kristof's column today is the most emailed NYT article at the moment. Much more than most, he has a history of being able to change the course of human events with a single column. (Case in point: Mukhtar Mai, the gang-rape victim in Pakistan whom he helped become a worldwide symbol of human rights.)

Today's Kristof topic: MRSA, an antibiotic-resistant staph infection carried by swine. The columnist reports on an Indiana doctor who treated an outbreak in his community, which has hog farms on its outskirts.

"By last fall, Dr. Anderson was ready to be a whistle-blower, and he agreed to welcome me on a reporting visit and go on the record with his suspicions. ... So I made plans to ... visit Dr. Anderson in his practice. And then, very abruptly, Dr. Anderson died at the age of 54.
"There was no autopsy, but a blood test suggested a heart attack or aneurysm. Dr. Anderson had himself suffered at least three bouts of MRSA, and a Dutch journal has linked swine-carried MRSA to dangerous human heart inflammation."

It gets even more ominous: A new University of Iowa study has found that 45 percent of swine farmers and 49 percent of hogs sampled carried MRSA.

"The study was small, and much more investigation is necessary," Kristof couches, but I'm thinking this has the potential of starting a national pork scare. I'm also figuring Kristof thinks it's necessary -- or he wouldn't have written about it. *UPDATE* Twenty-four hours later, and it's still the No. 1 emailed ... Seems to be making the rounds at Facebook, as well.

Nary a peep

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Kruh) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 18:16:00 +0000

It's been four days since Obama announced he'll allow stem-cell research to be funded with federal dollars, and the punditry has barely mustered a response.

So far, two right-leaners, Kathleen Parker and Michael Gerson (both WaPo), and one libertarian, Steve Chapman (Chicago Tribune), have filed comments on the decision -- none complimentary.

Gerson's criticism is in the context of the nomination of Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius to head HHS. Chapman reiterates the standard argument:

"Research on embryonic stem cells is controversial because it requires the destruction of live human embryos. Supporters find it easy to minimize the significance of this fact because the embryos are only a few days old -- nothing more than "blastocysts."
"But if it's OK to destroy 5-day-old embryos to further scientific inquiry, is it OK to destroy embryos that are five weeks old? Five months? Eight months? Science can't answer that question."

Parker, as is her wont, finds a compelling new argument:

"Since Obama began running for president, researchers have made some rather amazing strides in alternative stem cell research. Science and ethics finally fell in love, in other words, and Obama seems to have fallen asleep during the kiss. Either that, or he decided that keeping an old political promise was more important than acknowledging new developments."

Considering how vociferously the left-leaning punditry decried President Bush's withdrawal of federal funding, you'd figure at least one of them might stand up and say hooray ... But they all seem too preoccupied these days worrying about Obama's response to the economy. *UPDATE* Charles Krauthammer's clamor over the stem-cell decision packs the punch of several columns. It's Mr. K (WaPo) in classic high dudgeon:

"While I favor moving that moral line to additionally permit the use of spare fertility clinic embryos, Obama replaced it with no line at all. He pointedly left open the creation of cloned -- and noncloned sperm-and-egg-derived -- human embryos solely for the purpose of dismemberment and use for parts. "I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix. Moreover, given the protean power of embryonic manipulation, the temptation it presents to science, and the well-recorded human propensity for evil even in the pursuit of good, lines must be drawn."

And finally a left-leaner weighs in -- Ellen Goodman (Boston Globe) at her sauciest, and most trenchant, too:

"There is a reason for all of us to be grateful to octomom. She has created a consensus where none existed. We now know exactly what should not be done with the leftover embryos languishing in fertility clinic freezers. They should not be given to Nadya."

'Tis a bewilderment

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Kruh) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:06:00 +0000

I consider Roger Cohen to be among the most competent and consistent pundits among the pontificate, but his Thursday column on British Prime Minister Gordon Brown (I think) has to be among the most disjointed I've read in some time.

It goes from extolling Brown's appearance on The Daily Show, to Stewart extolling Brown's speech before Congress, to a Stewart joke about war, to a Cohen joke about war (and a guest appearance of a Gail Collinsian "but I digress"), to this summation of what he's trying to say:

"This is supposed to be a galvanizing column, not another of those bleeding-heart jeremiads about some insoluble problem like man’s cruelty to man or the ghastly financial consequences of the herd instinct."

Ho-kay.

Cohen forges on, or rather backward, again extolling Brown's appearance on the Stewart show, before he heads into another digression about the Brown-Obama gift exchange, then meanders back to Brown's congressional address, "perhaps the best political speech of his life."

Is this what the column's about?

Oh, no wait. What Cohen really wants to talk about is Obama and how he has "not yet found his presidential voice." No, wait ... Back to Brown (and a blessed respite from the madness with generous quotations from the speech). Then it's back to the president and an exhortation that "it’s time for some unvarnished Obama," which is "the real story Stewart intuited."

So the column is really about Obama? Or what Stewart thinks about Obama? Or what Cohen thinks Stewart thinks about Obama?

The whole thing crashes down on a questionable question mark: "As [Stewart] noted, how desperate must things be 'when Britain is trying to cheer us up?'" (Who can easily construe this as a question?) What a mess.

Digesting: Obama's first 50 days

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Kruh) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 20:24:00 +0000

Pundits are notoriously an impatient bunch, which is probably why so many are now filing columns that reek of "serious assessment" of the first 50 days of the Obama administration rather than waiting for the traditional first 100 days -- even though that number is just as arbitrary as 50. (Besides that, Obama has by now shown himself to be a man who keeps his eye on the long-term rather than someone who gets caught up in the latest transitory crisis the media is convulsing over.)

Reading these column in big batches, I'm struck by how many exude a certain panic with the way things are going in the Land of Economic Meltdown.

Thomas Friedman (NYT): "Friends, this is not a test. Economically, this is the big one. This is August 1914. This is the morning after Pearl Harbor. This is 9/12. Yet, in too many ways, we seem to be playing politics as usual."

Rich Lowry (National Review): "Perhaps Obama's muddle-through approach to the banks will suffice until the natural resilience of the economy brings a recovery. Or perhaps, as Obama temporizes, the problem gets bigger and worse, discrediting his leadership and exposing the vision of his budget as, in the words of a headline in The Economist, 'wishful, and dangerous, thinking.'"

Robert Samuelson (Newsweek): Confidence (too little) and uncertainty (too much) define this crisis. Obama's double talk reduces the first and raises the second. He says he's focused on reviving the economy, but he's also using the crisis to advance an ambitious long-term agenda. The two sometimes collide. ... When Congress debates Obama's sweeping health care and energy proposals, industries, regions and governmental philosophies will clash. Will this improve confidence? Reduce uncertainty?"

Paul Krugman (NYT): "So here’s the picture that scares me: It’s September 2009, the unemployment rate has passed 9 percent, and despite the early round of stimulus spending it’s still headed up. Mr. Obama finally concedes that a bigger stimulus is needed. But he can’t get his new plan through Congress because approval for his economic policies has plummeted, partly because his policies are seen to have failed, partly because job-creation policies are conflated in the public mind with deeply unpopular bank bailouts. And as a result, the recession rages on, unchecked."

Fred Barnes (Weekly Standard): "Obama hasn't failed. He's been in office less than two months. But he is sowing the seeds of failure, both economically and politically. He doesn't quite own the economy yet, but he does own the stock market. It's a bet on the future. And so far the stock market has registered a resounding vote of no confidence in Obama's economic policies."

I could go on, but why scare myself any more than necessary?

I have no doubt we've gotten ourselves into quite an economic pickle, but in my web meanderings, I ran across this in an article in Time that suddenly explained a lot to me:

"Evolutionary psychologists ... [argue] that human beings feel more stress during times of insecurity because they sense an immediate but hard-to-discern threat — the modern-day equivalent of an unseen predator growling in the trees. Patients have been known to experience higher levels of anxiety, for example, while waiting for biopsy results than knowing the diagnosis — even if the result is cancer. It's better to get the bad news and start doing something about it rather than languish in limbo."

And good grief ... Isn't that where we all are these days? It's just one big anxiety-inducing echo chamber out there -- our own anxiety resonating off the media, which resonates more anxiety, which only makes us more anxious. The fact is, we just don't know what's going to happen, and it's driving everyone more than a little bonkers.

In this midst of this anxiety, there are a few voices of calm, such as Kathleen Parker (WaPo), who takes her own jitters over Obama's trillion-dollar spending plans to former Clinton budget aide Matt Miller, author of The Tyranny of Dead Ideas:

"Miller says we have no choice but to run even higher deficits for a few years to get the economy out of the ditch.
"Feeding the beast, in other words, is unavoidable. But will it work -- or will we all be speaking French and eating moldy cheese in two years?
"To the 'nobody knows' chorus, add at least one strong dissenting voice. Miller says that though stimulus efforts may or may not work, Obama is doing the right thing with the budget."

Parker confesses she's not entirely persuaded -- nor sedated -- but Miller's "less-scary scenarios, based on facts rather than rhetoric, help tamp down the impulse to build a bigger bunker."

Bob Herbert (NYT) expends an entire column to call for calm:

"Barack Obama has only been president for six weeks, but there is a surprising amount of ire, anger, even outrage that he hasn’t yet solved the problems of the U.S. economy, that he hasn’t saved us from the increasingly tragic devastation wrought by the clownish ideas of right-wing conservatives and the many long years of radical Republican misrule.
"This intense, impatient, often self-righteous, frequently wrongheaded and at times willfully destructive criticism has come in waves, and not just from the right. Mr. Obama is as legitimate a target for criticism as any president. But there is a weird hysterical quality to some of the recent attacks that suggests an underlying fear or barely suppressed rage. It’s a quality that seems not just unhelpful but unhealthy."

E.J. Dionne (WaPo) takes a similar tone, noting "it's hard for the fair-minded not to have some sympathy for Obama. After all, he has been in office for less than two months, and no president since Franklin D. Roosevelt has inherited such an 'unholy mess,' as one of his top advisers put it."

Dionne goes on to do a little cheerleading:

"Obama's calm and deliberative style is one of his greatest strengths. He doesn't want precipitous action in the midst of a bewildering economic collapse to come back to haunt us all. But there are times when excessive caution can be as dangerous as impetuousness. The president has no choice but to be bold. If there is one thing he should fear, it is fear itself."

BTW, Howard Fineman (Newsweek) offers an exhaustive encapsulation of everything Obama is being criticized for these days. Definitely worth a click for those feeling a need for their free-floating anxiety to be more specific.

Links run amok

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Kruh) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 15:29:00 +0000

Thomas Friedman's NYT column on Wednesday includes this comment, complete with the link:

"First, to get out of a crisis like this you need to let markets clear. You need to let failed companies, or homeowners, go bankrupt, unlock their dead capital and reapply it to thriving entities. That is how the dot-com bust ended, and out of that carnage emerged a whole new set of companies. The problem with this crisis is that A.I.G., Citigroup and General Motors — and your neighbor’s subprime mortgage — are not Dogfood.com."

Click on the link, and what do you get? The still alive-and-kicking PetSmart. What gives?

In all my roaming around news sites, I'm often baffled by the plethora of links embedded in stories and columns. Frank Rich's is among the worst (here's his Sunday column -- a prime example), but the one that wins the prize is Time magazine, which relentlessly tries to send you off to internal sites that often have only the most tenuous connection to what you're reading. Definitely a fad that needs to be reined in.

On the way out

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Kruh) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 15:02:00 +0000

Chas Freeman, Obama's nominee to chair the National Intelligence Council, has withdrawn his name from consideration, writing in a statement: “The libels on me and their easily traceable email trails show conclusively that there is a powerful [Israel] lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own from being aired."

Of the pontificate, so far Rich Lowry (National Review and NY Post) appears to be the only one who has jumped on Freeman's case:

"Never let it be said that America isn’t a country of remarkable openness. You can go directly from effectively working for the Saudis and Chinese to being the country’s top intelligence analyst. Only in the land of opportunity.
"This is the career trajectory of Chas Freeman, the former diplomat whom the Obama administration intends to make chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Freeman was ambassador to Saudi Arabia, the most lucrative diplomatic posting in the world because the ambassadors usually end up in the employ of the Saudis after leaving public service.
"Sure enough, Freeman is now president of the anti-Israel Middle East Policy Council, which might not exist without Saudi largesse."

Freeman has been defended against these insinuations by the man who picked him, Dennis Blair, director of National Intelligence. So far, the only member of the pontificate who gave him a thumbs-up is foreign-affairs expert Georgie Anne Geyer, who wrote in a column on the Middle East:

"President Obama himself has made gestures to the Arab world that might presage some changes. He personally telephoned the moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, gave his first White House television interview to the Saudi-funded al-Arabiya television network and appointed Chas Freeman Jr., former ambassador to Saudi Arabia and a rare free-thinker on the region, as chairman of the important National Intelligence Council (thus causing the outbreak of still another of the eternal rages of the Israeli lobby here)."

*UPDATE* Slate's Fred Kaplan and David Broder (WaPo) come to Freeman's defense -- of course when it's too late to help.

Kaplan:

"Freeman's friends and former colleagues ... decried the whole scummy process. During the struggle for his nomination, which was carried out almost entirely in the blogosphere, they mustered evidence showing that Freeman's critics were distorting his statements, taking them out of context, in some cases wildly so ...
"But a debate on the merits is beside the point. Once Freeman became a lightning rod ... President Obama had no choice but to abort the appointment. Otherwise, he would have faced not only a struggle over personnel but a never-ending series of struggles over policy."

Kaplan thinks Freeman's opponents "misplayed their hand." If Freeman had taken the post, Kaplan reasons, he could have been used as a "whipping boy for all foreign-policy measures they don't like ... and it might have been easier for them to rally opposition." But now they've been left with the popular president as their main target.

Broder was able to report the suddenness of Freeman's decision, since the columnist actually had breakfast with him the day he withdrew his name and during the meal he said "he thought he could ride out the storm." Broder laments the loss of the career foreign-service officer, whom the columnist describes as "low-key, thoughtful and obviously smart as hell."

Quotable

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Kruh) — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:39:00 +0000

Jim Hoagland (WaPo): "President Obama's confidence in [Joe] Biden's versatility and talents is outranked only by that of, well, Biden's in himself."

Anna Quindlen (Newsweek): "Texas leads the nation in spending for abstinence-only programs. It also has one of the highest teen birthrates in the country. Those two sentences together sound like the basis for a logic question on the SAT, but a really easy one."

What they're reading

noreply@blogger.com (Nancy Kruh) — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:20:00 +0000

Kathleen Parker (WaPo): The Tyranny of Dead Ideas by Matt Miller

George Will (WaPo): The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

Clarence Page (Chicago Tribune): The True Believer by Eric Hoffer