The Economist has a great breakdown of the campaign season (via Political Wire):

Most presidential campaigns are three-act dramas. Act I is a referendum on the incumbent. Voters look at the president and ask ?Does he deserve four more years?? If the answer is a clear yes?as in 1984 or 1996?it barely matters who the challenger is; he may as well go home. This stage lasts until the party conventions. Assuming voters have not definitively decided on re-election?and, manifestly, they have not this time?Act II starts with the conventions and runs until about September. Voters then turn their attention to the challenger: is he ready for prime time? If he is, Act III, the real horse race, begins in September with the presidential debates. Then, and only then, do the head-to-head comparisons matter.

All that means Mr Bush has time to recover from his current woes. Voters have barely begun to look at Mr Kerry, let alone make direct comparisons with Mr Bush. And events may yet play a big role in determining the outcome of the vote. The publication of the September 11th commission’s report on the eve of the senate convention may help Mr Kerry. Better news from Iraq, or (God forbid) an attack by al-Qaeda would almost certainly help Mr Bush.

But it is clear that Mr Bush has done worse in Act I than an incumbent should. His crown sits all the more uneasily because the polls suggest that the vast majority of voters have already made up their minds (only one in ten say they are undecided). If he is to triumph in Act III, Mr Bush has a lot of crowd-pleasing to do. Mid-June might mark his electoral nadir; but it might also be seen as the beginning of the end of the Bush presidency.

With Act I winding down, I’d say Bush is already on the ropes. He’s had a string of failures that have driven his poll numbers down. Worse than that, however, is that he’s still trying to strengthen his base with crap like his “gay people are gross” amendment to the constitution at a time when both candidates would normally be racing to the middle.

Sure, Kerry’s got similar problems from the far-left, but he’s largely a question mark in the eyes of most voters. Americans, who have been getting to know Bush for the last four years, already know how they feel about the man from Connecticut Crawford. At this point, perceptions of Bush’s presidency are set in stone compared to those of Kerry. This explains why Bush’s website has more negative things about John Kerry than positive things to say about George Bush. Now who’s the “pessimist” again?

Matt Yglesias poses an interesting question :

Daniel Drezner uses rhetorical devices when writing his columns, just like the rest of us. “Unless the entire country–particularly the political class–is required to take an introductory economics course, the mercantilist mindset will be hard to shake.” Which brings to mind a good question — why not require the entire country to take an introductory economics course? If everyone had to learn a little basic, non-calculus economics it seems to me that that would be a very worthwhile investment.

While I think this idea has some merit, this email sent to me by Hal Millard makes me think we should set our sights a little lower.

I’m a former newspaper reporter, now a pro freelancer. I’m not sure if you have worked in the trade or not, but here’s the dirty little secret behind the media’s seeming ineptitude in all things financial — J-schools, by and large — never teach the stuff. And that lack of a foundation is only compounded as reporters advance and become editors.

In fact, I went to a large, well-respected J-school and never once had to take any math class, much less a class on how to report and write about financial and economic issues. (I did have to take Econ 101, but that shit is no more advanced than the stuff you learned in high school).

The sad part is, I now derive most of my income from writing about business and finance. I’ve had to learn everything on the fly, and still I feel like a sham sometimes even though I somehow manage to be right most of the time and have never had a major fuckup (yet).

I can count on one hand the number of journalists (financial writers or generalists) I know of that can intelligently write about these things.

That’s just sad, because government officials and biased experts can consistently fool the vast majority of reporters every time.

There are even websites that explain “math for journalists!” And we’re talking things such as how to figure percentages!

In my opinion, no reporter (rookie cub or pro) should step foot in a newsroom until they can show they know how to construct and manipulate a spreadsheet program in order to analyze information, and completely understand a P&L statement and basic SEC filings.

But I’m not holding my breath. Until J-schools change or newsrooms provide much-needed remedial or continuing education for reporters, American media consumers will remain ignorant about what’s really going on behind all those numbers.

What are we to make of a situation in which the people who are supposed to be dumbing down complex subjects for the rest of us are making it up as they go along? Of course, this whole “blind leading the blind” situation would explain a lot of the positive coverage Bush’s economic proposals have received over the last few years…

For those of you who do your websurfing on your PDA’s or celphones, I’ve created a slimmed down version of the site for you. You can see it by clicking here. The mobile version of the site has the most recent five entries and the comment thread. I don’t know much about WAP or anything like that, so if it doesn’t work on your celphone, there’s probably not much I can do about it.

Also, since I’ve been doing most of my blog reading through a newreader, I’ve updated my RSS 1.0 and 2.0 templates to include full entries. If you’ve got a blog, I reccommend doing the same. For those of you with Movable Type, all you have to do is replace this line in your RSS templates :

<description><$MTEntryExcerpt encode_xml=”1″$></description>

With this :

<description><$MTEntryBody encode_xml=”1″ remove_html=”0″ $><$MTEntryMore encode_xml=”1″ remove_html=”0″ $></description>

That’s it.

Since I’m moving tomorrow, I’ve spent the last two weeks going through everything I own. One of the things that I found at the bottom of a box was this letter that I think you’ll all get a kick out of. First a little background…

The first internet company I ever worked for was your classic “start-up” situation. These guys didn’t care about what they had to do as long as they got that golden IPO that would make us all millionaires. When I joined the company, their business plan was to be a virtual real estate company that would take pictures of various houses for sale and post them on the site. When that started to fall apart, they decided to go with an online yellow pages sort of thing and try to sell advertising space in the listings. The day after Time magazine had a cover story on ecommerce, the company reinvented itself yet again as one that sold random crap.

While the company was always a step or two behind internet trends, they made sure to be a step or two ahead of their creditors. In my time there, we’d moved the company’s offices twice (the rumor was so we could avoid paying rent). I’d also survived two rounds of layoffs and had paychecks bounce. When I decided to move and gave my two weeks notice, I was fired the next day out of fear that I would develop “short-timers syndrome” and hurt the company (they were doing that well enough on their own). Needless to say, this is the main reason I’m so comfortable working for a big, “evil”, and stable corporation.

At some point during my employment with this company, I intercepted the following letter at the fax machine which was so juicy, I had to photocopy it and hold on to it for the last 6-7 years. (Names have been omitted to protect the innocent…and my ass)

Dear ______,

I want to renegotiate the note with you and I want to come to some amicable terms.

Monday morning I plan to write a form letter regarding your failure to disclose certain payments to your underwriter and to ________ and fax it to all 50 state regulatory agencies plus the SEC (I have all their fax numbers programmed). That should keep your company busy and in front of the right people.

I have relatives in _____ and have asked them for a good law firm to represent me. ______ lied to me regarding your company, _______ lied, ____ lied and you are all going to jail. If I can help put you all in the same cell I will do my best.

I will go through your document word by word tonight on the train. I will rip you an asshole big enough for your entire computer system to fit through without feeling any pain.

I have been in the brokerage business my entire life (25 yrs) and I know how to make a NIGHTMARE out of your dream.

You like lawyer bills and writing to the 50 regulators, be my guest.

Tomorrow you will return my call and settle this matter one way or the other.

I dunno about you, but I’m still shocked the internet bubble ended up popping. With such honest and business savvy people at the helm, I just assumed all of our wildest dreams would come true…

I’ve got five free Gmail invites for anyone who wants one. The first five people to email me get them. Just don’t forget to check your bulk mail folder.

UPDATE : Sorry folks, I’m all out. If any of you have some Gmail invites to share, please donate some of them to Gmail4Troops.com (which I didn’t find out about until this morning).

A reader sent in this hilarious link to the latest conservative culinary fad, W Ketchup :

You don?t support Democrats. Why should your ketchup?

W Ketchup? is made in America, from ingredients grown in the USA.

The leading competitor not only has 57 varieties, but has 57 foreign factories as well. W Ketchup comes in one flavor: American.

Does buying ketchup help the Democrats? Is John Kerry responsible for outsourcing? TruthOrFiction.com has the answers :

First, the Heinz company has issued a statement clarifying that neither Teresa Heinz Kerry nor Senator Kerry has any involvement in the management or the board of the business.

It also says that neither Teresa Kerry nor any of the Heinz endowments or trusts holds any significant percentage of of shares of the company and that their holdings are less than four percent.

In other words, no controlling interest.

The statement also says that sixty percent of the sales of the company are overseas and that the foreign plants allow them to serve local customers with fresher ingredients.

In other words, their foreign operations are for the purpose of doing business on foreign land, which is not the same, for example, as an American factory firing its workers and having the same work done in another country by cheaper labor.

Teresa Heinz Kerry was married to the late Senator John Heinz III, a Republican from Pennsylvania.

He was killed in an aircraft accident in 1991, leaving his portion of the family fortune to his wife, estimated to be $500 million.

Probably just as deceptive as the “America?s Ketchup?” crap is the label itself. By placing a picture of George Washington on the bottle, they’re trying to create the impression that the “W” stands for “Washington” (as opposed to a reference to this dumbass). If that’s the case, would the father of our country appreciate being made the mascot of a partisan condiment? looking at his 1796 farewell address, I doubt it.

Washington, like many of his contemporaries, did not understand or believe in political parties, and saw them as fractious agencies subversive of domestic tranquility. When political parties began forming during his administration, and in direct response to some of his policies, he failed to comprehend that parties would be the chief device through which the American people would debate and resolve major public issues. It was his fear of what parties would do to the nation that led Washington to draft his Farewell Address.

The two parties that developed in the early 1790s were the Federalists, who supported the economic and foreign policies of the Washington administration, and the Jeffersonian Republicans, who in large measure opposed them. The Federalists backed Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton’s plan for a central bank and a tariff and tax policy that would promote domestic manufacturing; the Jeffersonians opposed the strong government inherent in the Hamiltonian plan, and favored farmers as opposed to manufacturers. In foreign affairs, both sides wanted the United States to remain neutral in the growing controversies between Great Britain and France, but the Federalists favored the English and the Jeffersonians the French. The Address derived at least in part from Washington’s fear that party factionalism would drag the United States into this fray.

And speaking of conservative food, remember Star Spangled Ice Cream? They’re the right-wing answer to Ben and Jerry’s who had their fifteen minutes of fame last year when they introduced flavors like “Choc & Awe” and “I Hate The French Vanilla”. Well, they’re about to release a new flavor : GuantanaMocha. Don’t get me wrong, mocha is probably my favorite ice cream flavor, but do conservatives really like being reminded of rape and torture while they eat their dessert?

Thanks to my girlfriend for pointing me in the direction of last night’s interview between Larry King and Ron Reagan Jr. :

KING: Your mother came out — I was the master of ceremonies that night at that dinner where they honored her at the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation. Wasn’t too long, maybe two months ago, less maybe. She came out that night and strongly supported stem cell research, embryonic stem cell research. Everyone supports adult stem cell research. Where do you stand? What do you make of it?

REAGAN: I stand shoulder to shoulder with my mother on that. It’s astonishing to me that we are even having the conversation about this. We’re not talking about fetuses, human beings being killed, we’re talking about collections of cells in a petri dish that are never, ever going to be a human being. This could be the biggest revolution in medicine ever, well, ever really. Bigger than antibiotics. Bigger than anything.

And you know what strikes me, too, is that you cannot be against embryonic stem cell research and be intellectually and therefore morally consistent, if you’re not also against in vitro fertilization. Because the same thing results in in vitro fertilization. Thousands of blastocysts collections are discarded. Now you’ll notice that most of the politicians who are against embryonic stem cell research don’t say anything about in vitro fertilization. You might wonder why. Well, it’s because what are they going to do, come out against people who want to get pregnant? That’s a political non-starter so they’re going not going to — they are just going to shut up about that and go after stem cell research instead. They’re playing politics with it and it is shameful. It is shameful.
. . .
CALLER: I was just wondering if, Ron, are you going to take a more public stand now with stem cell research if your mother doesn’t come out so much in public, will you?

REAGAN: I may well. I may well. It’s a very important issue. Some people may not realize how important it is, but this is a huge, huge medical breakthrough.

KING: What do doctors and researchers tell you?

REAGAN: Doctors and researchers, as I said, can’t believe we’re still having this discussion. This is like not believing Darwinian evolution, or something, which many people in this administration also don’t believe in. You know, just by the by. It is so profoundly anti-intellectual and inhumane. I mean, we are talking about cells, undifferentiated cells, in petri dish. No fingers, no toes, no brain, no spinal cord, no feelings, no pain, no nothing. These are just cells. And we’re talking about the potential to save real, living human beings. Children with diabetes, for instance.

KING: The feeling is it will lead to this kind of research using the embryonic stem cells, will quickly bring about, will speed up…

REAGAN: Here’s the potential for this. Imagine 10 years from now, you have — something goes wrong with you. You can extract cells from your own body, create embryonic stem cells with those cells, and then reinject those stem cells that are now genetic match to you, so there’s no, you know, fussing around with rejection or tissue rejection or anything nothing like that, and repair an internal organ. Repair your heart from the inside out using your own cells. You know, stem cells generated from your own body.

KING: So you can take the Alzheimer’s.

REAGAN: Hopefully. Hopefully.

KING: And replace it.

REAGAN: That’s possible. Alzheimer’s, ironically, may not be the best test case for this sort thing. Heart disease, diabetes, may be better. The brain is such a complex thing. The mechanism of Alzheimer’s may not lend itself to embryonic stem cell research. It may, we don’t know that.

KING: Muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis.

REAGAN: Parkinson’s. The list of things that could be helped by this just goes on and on. And that we are playing politics with this, I’ll say it again, is shameful.

The title of this post points to the only reason I can think of to explain the conservative position that a bunch of cells in a petri dish are equivalent to a human life. Now I know right-wingers have been blurring the lines between life and potential life for a while now, but it’s starting to get pretty goddamned ridiculous. What’s next? Accusing guys who practice the “pull out method” of being murderers? Holding funerals for all the eggs killed during a menstrual cycle?

I’m willing to accept that there are people who are really militantly anti-abortion. That’s fine. We can argue until the end of time about just when Jesus uses his magic wand to give the sperm and egg a “soul” (I vote for never), but until a fertilized egg is implanted in a woman’s uterus, there isn’t gonna be a fucking baby. That’s not a political opinion, it’s the birds and bees.

Here’s a typical story you’ll see on the campaign trail :

President Bush’s re-election campaign, seizing on good economic news, unveiled a television commercial Friday that emphasizes job growth and criticizes senate rival John Kerry as a pessimist.

“After recession, 9-11 and war, now our economy has been growing for 10 straight months,” the ad says. “John Kerry’s response? He’s talking about the Great Depression. One thing’s sure: Pessimism never created a job.”
. . .
Bush’s new ad highlights the president’s own economic record, as the campaign works to promote an improving economy and shift the focus from Iraq.

Seizing on the fact that the economy is one of voters’ top issues, the ad claims that Bush enacted the “largest tax relief in history” and boasts that under his leadership there has been record homeownership, low inflation and low interest rates, and 1.4 million jobs created since August.

The 1.4 million figure was calculated based on Friday’s Labor Department announcement that U.S. employers added almost a quarter million workers in May. The department released the numbers at 8:30 a.m. The new ad was posted on the campaign’s Web site at 11 a.m.

But as Thomas Schaller explains over at the Gadflyer, those 1.4 million jobs aren’t exactly something to brag about :

That sounds nice, but here?s the catch: Because population growth requires the economy to produce about 150,000 jobs per month ? a point Kerry adviser Tad Devine tried to explain to Judy Woodruff on CNN today ? that means that the Administration must create more than 150,000 jobs each month outpace the expanding size of the employable national workforce, thereby creating net new jobs and lowering the unemployment rates.

Those rates are holding steady, which should raise flags in the media. For the innumerate scribes out there, the math is so simple you can do it without removing your shoes:

Because 9 x 150,000 is 1.35 million, and because subtracting this figure from 1.4 million yields the miniscule total of 50,000 jobs, the president?s policies during the past three quarters have created an average of fewer than 6,000 net new jobs per month during the past nine months above and beyond the jobs needed to meet an expanding employable population.

Let me touch on that second to last paragraph there. When you hear people praise Bush’s work on the economy, notice that they keep coming back to “jobs created”. There’s a good reason for that since the past few months have been really good for Bush on that front :

That’s a pretty dramatic spike up, especially if you consider that the number of jobs has been going down for almost all of Bush’s presidency. But one thing you don’t hear them talk about as much is the unemployment rate. The reason for this is that all this magical job creation hasn’t really done much to change the number of people out there looking for work :



As an aside, I included two different lines on the chart above to point out something that doesn’t get a lot of attention. While the unemployment rate is “officially” 5.6%, the method for calculating this number leaves out quite a few people. Here’s the explanation from the BLS :

U-3 Total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force (official unemployment rate)

U-6 Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers

NOTE: Marginally attached workers are persons who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for a job. Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule.

And if you think under-counting the number of unemployed and a stagnant unemployment rate relative to job growth are Bush’s only worries, let me point you to some posts by my fellow bloggers that shed even more light on how the economy is really doing.

Brad DeLong points out that the fruits of the economic recovery aren’t making a dent in the compensation gap. (via Kevin Drum)

As a share of the economy labor compensation has not been this low in almost 40 years (since 1966), and after-tax corporate profits are at the highest levels ever recorded by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Since its peak in 2001, as a share of gross domestic product (GDP), labor compensation has decreased by about 4 percent (from 67 to 63 percent) and corporate profits have increased by about 4 percent (from 8 to 12 percent) ? see chart below. After taxes, corporate profits reached 9.6 percent of GDP ? the highest level recorded dating back to 1947.

Billmon reminds us that wage growth is still lagging behind inflation, so even if you have a job, your dollars aren’t buying as much as they used to.

Nathan Newmann strengthens DeLong’s point by comparing the current recovery to previous ones. Unlike the last eight times we’ve had to pull ourselves out of an economic slump, this time we don’t have any major compensation or wage increases to look forward to.

The Center for American Progress pointed out in March that even with jobs being created, the quality of those jobs leave a lot to be desired :

According to government statistics “of 290,000 private-sector jobs created since April 2003, most - 215,000 - have been temporary positions.” Last month, employment in the private sector would have fallen “without the creation of 32,000 temporary jobs in the professional and business services sector.” Some economists think “that Mr. Bush’s tax incentives for business investment, which allow for 50% depreciation in the first year on most business equipment, may have temporarily helped tilt the balance in favor of spending on equipment instead of new permanent workers.”

Bush is fond of telling people that “pessimism never created a job”, but from where I’m sitting, optimism isn’t faring much better.

As I’ve mentioned before, I grew up attending Unitarian-Universalist churches. One of the questions I’m often asked is “What kind of a church would an atheist go to?” Despite the fact that I haven’t regularly attended services in the last ten years, I usually feel the need to defend the church. Unfortunately, my explanations usually fall apart after “It’s possible to feel enlightened without being subservient to a diety…” I guess part of the reason is that while I understand the reason atheists would go to church, I’m not at all compelled to go myself.

As a way of helping explain things a bit better, I suggest reading this sermon by the former youth director of my church. Since the sermon is about how he went from atheist to believer, it only addresses the question posed above in a roundabout way. Nevertheless, it makes for a very interesting read, especially in comparison to the millions of stories out there about guys who “found salvation at the bottom of a bottle”. This bit in particular does a great job of describing my problems with the Christian God (for lack of a better term) :

Perhaps the reason I couldn’t abide the notion of God all those years was because it was someone else’s notion of God - and a dangerous, idolatrous notion at that.

The perverted picture of God that I so naturally recoiled against for much of my life goes way, way back. It began, so to speak, “in the beginning.” To my mind, it can be traced to one crucial verse in the Old Testament . . . and to the thinking that inspired that verse . . . as well as to the thinking that has since been engendered by that verse. My copy of Genesis, Chapter 1, verse 26, reads: “And God said, let us make humanity in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over the earth.”

As debatable as the common translation of that passage is, I think most of us could agree that its two central ideas - the idea that God and human beings somehow uniquely resemble each other, and the idea that human beings should dominate the earth - these two ideas have shaped our culture for thousands of years, and continue to have enormous power over it, even today. This particular world-view can be implicated in most of the great tragedies of human history - wars and genocide, nationalism and racism, and the nuclear proliferation and environmental degradation that today threaten our very existence.

Such thinking, I believe, is precisely what we need salvation from; such thinking, in fact, is what made me an atheist for much of my life.

As this post winds down, lemme just share a sample exchange that I’ve had numerous times during conversations on this topic :

Christian : So if you’re not worshiping anything, why do you have to go to church?

Unitarian-Universalist : We’ll there’s a lot to be said for congregating with others who share your beliefs.

X-ian : So isn’t it just a club then?

UU : Well, no more than your church. After all, you can’t tell me you’re wearing your “Sunday best” to impress Jesus. He knows what you look like naked.

In the end, the idea of a church that doesn’t revolve around prayer is too hard a concept for most people to grasp.

This post at LeanLeft has me thinking. Once the right-wingers have finished parsing the hell out of the words “contacts” and “relationship” so they can prove a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda that doesn’t exist, can we go ahead and apply the standard they come up with to the connection between George W. Bush and Ahmad Chalabi? Just curious, because it seems to me that the President and/or his staff feeding information to an Iranian spy is a pretty big deal.