Inside politics - why McCain "wrote" that banking was a good guide for health care reform

Emphases mine. Poignant, and funny. Worth remembering the next time your industry rag features the wisdom of a major political figure ...

James Fallows (September 22, 2008) - Edging back into politics: "My First Kill" (Life)

Many people have noted that this past week was a bad time for John McCain to have published an article promising to deregulate the health insurance industry, "as we have done over the last decade in banking," given the collapse of the banking industry due in part to that deregulation.

... my immediate reaction to the flap was to sympathize with whatever poor schlub had actually cranked out the article in question, which appeared in Contingencies, the closely-followed journal of the American Academy of Actuaries. The article just before it in Contingencies's newest issue was "An Actuary Weighs the Proposals." I love the magazine business.

Two things are 100% certain about this article:

1) John McCain did not write it;
2) Whoever did write it was just trying to get through the to-do deadline list for that day in the campaign office, and knew that the simplest way to do so was to cut-and-paste from existing statements on health policy.

I sympathized because on my very first day as a cub speechwriter in the Jimmy Carter campaign office, 26 years old and ready to inspire the nation, I was told that I had two hours to turn out an article "by" Carter for an important interest group...

Sniff. And we thought they really cared.

BTW, if you remember Carter's hunting rep, it came in part from Fallows cub assignment for a gun club rag ...

(Fallows, btw, is very much in the magazine business.)

Turning Japanese: Krugman on the humbling of the Fed

Paul Krugman's fairly accessible (non-mathematical) explanation of why Bernanke and the Fed are fighting for traction:

The humbling of the Fed (wonkish) - Paul Krugman - Op-Ed Columnist - New York Times Blog

... in March, and again this week, interest rates on T-bills fell close to zero — liquidity trap territory. What does that do to the Fed’s role?

You still see people saying, in effect, “never mind the zero interest rate, why not just print more money?” Actually, the Bank of Japan tried that, under the name “quantitative easing;” basically, the money just piled up in bank vaults. To see why, think of it this way: once T-bills have a near-zero interest rate, cash becomes a competitive store of value, even if it doesn’t have any other advantages...

... Ben Bernanke came into his current position believing that central banks have the power, all on their own, to fight Japan-type problems. It seems that he was wrong

So when you're turning Japanese (apologies to those in Japan who suffered this road in the 80s and 90s), you need more than the Fed. You need policy. That means you need a President.

That means that there's no real hope until next January, then we either flame out with McCain/Palin or hope with Obama/Biden.

Oh well, we knew that the last election was one of the most important in American history. We blew it anyway. So now we the next one is one of the most important in American history ...

PS. Krugman's blog is being overwhelmed by comments, most of them are denial-of-service insults from the enemies of the enlightenment. We need to tell him that others have solved this problem by outsourcing the moderation task to trusted third parties. Of course he doesn't control his blog, the NYT does ...

Tom Tomorrow's 1998 Wall Street expose

Topical in 1998, topical in 2008, topical in 2018 ...

Will the NYT break the "balance" rule? Kristof's late awakening.

Another sign that that mainstream journalists are, very, very slowly, beginning to realize that the GOP has played them for 12 years (emphases mine) ...

Op-Ed Columnist - The Push to ‘Otherize’ Obama - Kristof - NYTimes.com

... a McCain commercial last month mimicked the words and imagery of the best-selling Christian “Left Behind” book series in ways that would have set off alarm bells among evangelicals nervous about the Antichrist.

Mr. McCain himself is not popular with evangelicals. But they will vote for him if they think the other guy may be on Satan’s side.

In fact, of course, Mr. Obama took his oath on the Bible, not — as the rumors have it — on the Koran. He is far more active in church than John McCain is.

(Just imagine for a moment if it were the black candidate in this election, rather than the white candidate, who was born in Central America, was an indifferent churchgoer, had graduated near the bottom of his university class, had dumped his first wife, had regularly displayed an explosive and profane temper, and had referred to the Pakistani-Iraqi border ...)

What is happening, I think, is this: religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian.

The result is this campaign to “otherize” Mr. Obama. Nobody needs to point out that he is black, but there’s a persistent effort to exaggerate other differences, to de-Americanize him...

... I’m writing in part out of a sense of personal responsibility. Those who suggest that Mr. Obama is a Muslim — as if that in itself were wrong — regularly cite my own columns, especially an interview last year in which I asked him about Islam and his boyhood in Indonesia. In that interview, Mr. Obama praised the Arabic call to prayer as “one of the prettiest sounds on earth at sunset,” and he repeated the opening of it.

This should surprise no one: the call to prayer blasts from mosque loudspeakers five times a day, and Mr. Obama would have had to have been deaf not to learn the words as a child. But critics, like Jerome Corsi, whose book denouncing Mr. Obama, “The Obama Nation,” is No. 2 on the New York Times best-seller list, quote from that column to argue that Mr. Obama has mysterious ties to Islam. I feel a particular obligation not to let my own writing be twisted so as to inflame bigotry and xenophobia.

Journalists need to do more than call the play-by-play this election cycle. We also need to blow the whistle on such egregious fouls calculated to undermine the political process and magnify the ugliest prejudices that our nation has done so much to overcome.

Well, at least Obama isn't being accused of atheism. That would be really serious. Being the anti-Christ ain't so bad.

There are only two interesting aspects to the late-to-the-game Kristof column. One is that he's right that the religious ploy is a great proxy for racial prejudice. My opinion of the religious right can't really get any lower though; their enthusiasm for torture in the name of the Savior Bush pretty much dropped 'em into my eternal pit of fire.

The more important point is his belated call that journalists need to stop the play-by-play and start calling foul. Too little, probably too late, but it's progress of a sort. It moves Kristof a good step above the Friedman/Dowd basement.

Incidentally, I was amazed to discover that there's a segment of the "right" that thinks Jerome Corsi is "embarrassing for the Right, embarrassing for Republicans, embarrassing for conservatives and libertarians, embarrassing for all of us". Not bad from someone belonging to a social movement striving to destroy civilization. Of course if they were really serious they'd be campaigning for Obama, so that upon losing power the GOP would start to rebuild and reform.

Update 9/22/08: The McCain campaign freaks out. They don't like journalists who point out that their pants are on fire.

Sen. John McCain’s top campaign aides convened a conference call today to complain of being called “liars.” They pressed the media to scrutinize specific elements of Sen. Barack Obama’s record.

But the call was so rife with simple, often inexplicable misstatements of fact that it may have had the opposite effect: to deepen the perception, dangerous to McCain, that he and his aides have little regard for factual accuracy...

Heh, heh, heh. They're worried. This is good.

Cheney's alternate succession plan

Nobody would believe that Al Gore had an "alternate succession plan" when he was VP.

It's very easy to believe that Cheney did (does):

All the best details from Barton Gellman's new book on Vice President Dick Cheney. - By Juliet Lapidos - Slate Magazine

.... Page 158: Addington didn't like the idea that the speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate are included in the order of succession. An unnamed Cheney admirer told Gellman that the vice president and his staff had 'plans' for an alternate succession, 'and their plans were going to be by fiat.'

Sure. I believe it.

New Orleans: plus ca change

The media kind of missed this ...

Editorial - ‘Never Again,’ Again - Editorial - NYTimes.com

... All those without a car or a ride were taken on state buses to four state-run warehouses. It was in these shelters, including two abandoned stores, a Wal-Mart and a Sam’s Club, that thousands of working-poor New Orleanians got a sickening reminder of Katrina.

Evacuees said they had had no idea where they were going; bus drivers would not tell them. When they arrived, there were not enough portable toilets, and no showers. For five days there was no way to bathe, except with bottled water in filthy outdoor toilets. Privacy in the vast open space — 1,000 people to a warehouse, shoulder-to-shoulder on cots — was nonexistent. The mood among evacuees was grim, surrounded as they were by police officers and the National Guard, with no visitors or reporters allowed...

It's almost as though someone was taking revenge for past complaints ...

The Bushies draw the torture line ...

They felt burial alive was too extreme ...

All the best details from Barton Gellman's new book on Vice President Dick Cheney. - By Juliet Lapidos - Slate Magazine: "Page 177: John Yoo, who worked in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 until 2003, rejected only one proposed investigation technique on legal grounds. He said that 'the CIA could not bury a subject alive, even if it planned to dig him back up in time.'"

So the CIA was keen to try? What else do you think they did?

Of course I didn't vote for these monsters. It's a crime against humanity that the GOP is able to contend for the presidency.

OJ Simpson and John McCain: Great competitors, great liars

We're familiar now with the admired athlete who lies with absolute conviction about their use of performance enhancing drugs.

It's part of the competitive nature. OJ Simpson was an astoundingly effective liar -- he turned his competitive streak to concealing murder. It worked.

Humans are vulnerable to lies. Alpha competitors can often lie very effectively. I think they come to believe their own lies.

OJ Simpson, meet John McCain ...

Richard Cohen - The Ugly New McCain - washingtonpost.com

The precise moment of McCain's abasement came, would you believe, not at some news conference or on one of the Sunday shows but on "The View," the daytime TV show created by Barbara Walters. Last week, one of the co-hosts, Joy Behar, took McCain to task for some of the ads his campaign has been running. One deliberately mischaracterized what Barack Obama had said about putting lipstick on a pig -- an Americanism that McCain himself has used. The other asserted that Obama supported teaching sex education to kindergarteners.
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"We know that those two ads are untrue," Behar said. "They are lies."

Freeze. Close in on McCain. This was the moment. He has largely been avoiding the press. The Straight Talk Express is now just a brand, an ad slogan like "Home Cooking" or "We Will Not Be Undersold." Until then, it was possible for McCain to say that he had not really known about the ads, that the formulation "I approve this message" was just boilerplate. But he didn't.

"Actually, they are not lies," he said.

Actually, they are.

McCain has turned ugly. His dishonesty would be unacceptable in any politician, but McCain has always set his own bar higher than most...

I am one of the journalists accused over the years of being in the tank for McCain. Guilty. ...

... What impressed me most about McCain was the effect he had on his audiences, particularly young people. When he talked about service to a cause greater than oneself, he struck a chord. He expressed his message in words, but he packaged it in the McCain story -- that man, beaten to a pulp, who chose honor over freedom. This had nothing to do with access. It had to do with integrity.

McCain has soiled all that. His opportunistic and irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin as his political heir -- the person in whose hands he would leave the country -- is a form of personal treason, a betrayal of all he once stood for. Palin, no matter what her other attributes, is shockingly unprepared to become president. McCain knows that. He means to win, which is all right; he means to win at all costs, which is not.

At a forum last week at Columbia University, McCain said, "But right now we have to restore trust and confidence in government." This was always the promise of John McCain, the single best reason to vote for him. America has been cheated on too many times -- the lies of Vietnam and Watergate and Iraq. So many lies. Who believes that in Afghanistan last month, only five civilians were killed by the American military in an airstrike, instead of the approximately 90 claimed by the Afghan government? Not me. I first gave up on the military during Vietnam and then again when it covered up the death of Pat Tillman, the Army Ranger and former NFL player who was killed in 2004 by friendly fire.

McCain was going to fix all that. He was going to look the American people in the eyes and say, not me. I will not lie to you. I am John McCain, son and grandson of admirals. I tell the truth.

But Joy Behar knew better. And so McCain lied about his lying ...

Minnesota 5th most bike friendly state

Pretty darned good for a state that has a serious amount of winter:

Bicycle & Transportation News & Nonsense || Ride Boldly! || Ride Boldly!

The League of American Bicyclists ranks Minnesota 5th out of 50 states in the Bicycle-Friendly State Program. Woo. West Virginia? Totally last....

Here's the community list, I really am amazed Chicago does so well.

It's not easy to find the top 8, the map kind of hides that. I couldn't identify #6 ...

1. Washington
2. Wisconsin (ouch)
3. Arizona (wow)
4. Oregon
5. Minnesota
6. ??
7. California
8. Illinois

The list of top states is somewhat Democrat leaning, but Wisconsin and Minnesota both can have Republican governors and I think Arizona is largely GOP. On the other hand, the list of bicycle friendly communities is almost entirely Democrat.

I winced to find Wisconsin in the #2 slot, but I can't deny they've done a fantastic job with their bicycle network. It is really commendable. As a Minnesotan I shouldn't like Wisconsin as much as I do.

If you're looking for places to live in the US, you could do far worse than use the community index.

Leahy on anthrax: the FBI is wrong

Leahy is one of the smartest and most respected senators in the business.

Now I really don't believe the FBI.

Senator, Target of Anthrax Letter, Challenges F.B.I. Finding - NYTimes.com:

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a target of the anthrax letters of 2001, said Wednesday that he did not believe the F.B.I.’s contention that an Army scientist conducted the attacks alone.

At a hearing of his committee, Mr. Leahy told the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, that even if the bureau was right about the involvement of the scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, who killed himself in July before ever being charged, he thought there were accomplices.

“If he is the one who sent the letter, I do not believe in any way, shape or manner that he is the only person involved in this attack on Congress and the American people,” said Mr. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont...

The FBI's credibility is almost as bad as Bush/Cheney's.

If Obama wins, the agency needs to be rebuilt.

Apocalypse now: my why

Why are we making history today?

Gordon's Notes: Apocalypse now? Putnam investors

... SEC bans short selling.... 300 trillion is kind of a lot of money ... US Treasury has guaranteed money market funds...

This is what I think is going on.

Yeah, sure, greed, self-deception, information technology enabling levels of complexity humans cannot fathom, Bush trashing US fiscal policy -- they all contribute. They're not new though -- well, maybe the complexity part is.

Here's what I think is new.

Sometime in the 90s we went through a set of major technological and social transformation. Information technology, especially the net, radically changed human productivity in ways we didn't fully measure. Secondly billions of people emerged from years of education in China and India to remake the world economy. Thirdly the end of cold war, and the lost days of Pax Clintonia, unleashed the full power of comparative advantage across the global economy.

Humanity generated vast amounts of wealth -- but it came too fast to be redistributed. It pooled in the hands of a very small number of people, in part because the increasing cognitive demands of workplace were effectively disabling 70% of the population. We began to enter the neo-feudal era.

Trillions of dollars are sloshing around now. Money that the bottom 70% of the population would spend on health care, on cars, on homes, on clothes and on education -- either directly or through taxes. The owners of the money can't possibly consume it, so they try to find ways to grow it. It must grow because that much money is about power, power is relative, and the competition never ends.

The money sloshes into stocks, then real estate, then financial instruments. It never really gets destroyed, just redistributed among the very powerful and very wealthy.

Until we find a way to recycle that money into the hands of people who will use it as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself, the cycle won't stop.

That's my why.

Palin email hacked through password reset - educating America

We are truly in the twilight of the password.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Palin e-mail hack details emerge: "It is thought the attackers exploited the password resetting system of Yahoo s e-mail service."

Password reset mechanisms, like Google's brain-dead system, are one sign of the end time. Another is the insane security questions we're asked now. (Vanguard is particularly stupid in their use of a security question, but Fidelity wins the prize for the world's stupidest password policy.)

Geeks have known for at least 8 years that passwords were finished, and security analysts have known this for perhaps forty years. It takes a while for these things to trickle out though; we suffer from the tyranny of the mean in this as in so many other domains.

Palin now joins Paris Hilton in helping educate the American people how truly screwed we are.

The only good news is that two factor identification is starting to get out (though myOpenIDs current implementation is aggravatingly wrong). Biometrics integrated with our cell phone has to be one piece of the puzzle, we can't get it fast enough.

Update 9/24/08: Schneier, under pressure, finally comments. Sort of. What can he say that he hasn't said well for many years? The sheer, unrelenting, stark stupidity of the "security question" makes any commentary pointless. It's persistence is a sign that we're reaching the end of the human run.

Apocalypse now? Putnam investors

I've been betting that Vanguard and Fidelity, for example, will whether the storm.

That's still my bet. The institutional investors mentioned below may have had to pull money to meet obligations, rather than to find a safer haven. Also, 12.3 billion is pretty small money-market fund.

Still, this won't improve Emily's mood ...

Talking Points Memo | Wow [1]

... Putnam Investments has closed a $12.3 billion money-market fund to limit losses to its investors the large mutual fund company said today. The highly unusual announcement is the latest sign that tremendous financial pressures are now threatening even some of the safest kinds of investments. The Prime Money Market Fund was open only to institutional investors. Putnam said in a statement that its board decided to close the fund last night after receiving a large number of redemption requests. The company said it could honor those requests only by selling assets at a loss reducing the value of the remaining shares. Putnam said it decided instead to liquidate the fund and spread any losses evenly among all the investors. 'We wanted to treat all shareholders equally ' said spokeswoman Laura McNamara. She said it was 'premature' to discuss how much of a loss if any shareholders will incur...

We need a game theorist to tell us if this lessons the incentive to cut and run (since you don't come out ahead), or increases the incentive to move fast. I'm hoping the former.

My theory has been that if this thing hits Vanguard and Fidelity then the "safe havens" are remote underground caverns well stocked with things like long-lived antibiotics, high quality seeds, and a good supply of materials for building log shelters.

I don't have time to set up the caverns, so we'll just have to wing it. I'm leaving my dollar-cost-average stock purchase programs in place.

We sure do live in interesting times. It's increasingly hard to remember what life was like in the Clinton era; it seems like a lost golden age.

All we need right now is for Al Qaeda to rise up from its grave. That would really top things off. Hmm. You don't suppose Cheney is playing for a third term? Nahhhhh.

[1] No link because Firefox NoScript warned me of a cross-scripting XSS attempt. Could be a false alarm, or they could have been hacked. I sent 'em an email.

Update: SEC bans short selling. Yep. Apocalypse now. Which reminds me of the kind of bleak sorts of things we realists like to dwell on. When the great depression hit we lived in a physical world. So things got dingy, dusty, and kind of worn, but they didn't vanish. Now we live in a virtual world. If we experienced GD II, where companies like Google go under, a good chunk of our world doesn't get dingy -- it vanishes. Presumably the government would need to nationalize those industries rather than let them vanish.

This meme shows up in modern science fiction btw. As I've mentioned before, people who don't read science fiction must find our world particularly surprising.

I'm still betting against GD II of course. Sure is interesting times though.

Update: $300 trillion is kind of a lot of money, isn't it? That's 0.3 quadrillion dollars. There, I wanted to be the first to start measuring things in quadrillions of dollars. Trillions are so 20th century. BTW, people who are both lucky and insightful, and who can play the game and win, are going to get insanely rich from this.

Update 11:30 CT: US Treasury has guaranteed money market funds. Note that the tag on this post includes the string "history".

Update 2:20pm CT: BBC most read posts in the middle of the biggest financial transformation since the 1930s...


It's not on the radar in Asia at all, but it did make #3 in North America.

I think I live in a parallel reality.

Task management: a feature request

Given the insane way our patent laws work, this is probably patentable. Hopefully publishing it here would prevent that. I sent this feature request to Appigo in the hope they'll add it to their excellent iPhone ToDo.app, but I'd look at a competitor if they got to it first. I really do find the 'assign task to overloaded day' thing to be troublesome.

Appigo Todo | Google Groups

I've been a heavy duty task user for years.

The biggest problem I run into is the task/capacity ratio. On average I have about 1.5 hours a day to work on non-trivial personal tasks...

I need some kind of capacity indicator so that when I move a task I don't move it into an overloaded day.

Obviously it has to be something lightweight, and it may be that very few of your users are going to need this. So it has be something VERY lightweight.

Here's a strawman suggestion. Fancier versions involve looking at calendar, etc.

1. In settings (advanced) users can specify default daily capacity for each day of the week (hours) and default time-to-complete value for new tasks.
2. In task add an optional attribute of time to complete (5, 20, 60, 90, 120 mins for example).
3. In the view we see when scheduling a task, include a capacity icon (vertical bar, green, yellow, red, etc)

If user clicks on the capacity icon they get screen that shows scheduled events (from calendar if possible) and tasks for that day. From here user can override the default capacity value for the day, they can click on tasks for the day to edit them (move them, change time, etc) or they can click to go to the calender app.

Obviously this isn't likely to be the right way to do these things. Customers like me are almost never right in terms of how we think a task should be accomplished. I just put it out as a way to express what I'm hoping to see one day. I know my life isn't going to get any less crowded until the nursing home ...

tags: jfaughnan, jgfaughnan, task management, suggestion, proposal, question, lightweight project management, Appigo, time management, productivity

Update 9/19/08: A better design would be to read the calendar, and look for a something called (say): "Appigo task time". If it existed that would be used as the capacity for the day. If not, use the default.

Money market funds don't guarantee a $1 a share

This is perhaps a good time to remind everyone that when you buy a money market fund, you buy a share and earn returns.

The share is priced at $1 a share and that never seems to change. That's an industry convention however, not a law. Even if you have money parked in an ultra-low interest US Treasuries money market fund, there's no law that the share price has to stay at $1. In theory, you can lose money ...

Worse than ever - Paul Krugman - Op-Ed Columnist - New York Times Blog

... Here’s the one-month T-bill rate, from the WSJ; when it goes way down, that’s showing a flight to safety. As of this morning, it’s about 0.2% — a panic level. This probably reflects the emergence of trouble in money market funds, which strikes me as very scary — yet another type of postmodern bank run...

If a money market fund invests in US treasuries, and the fund is earning an insignificant interest rate, then the fund's expenses will mean that, if the share price doesn't fall, the fund is operating at a loss.

If you're losing 0.3% a month on a hundred billion dollars those losses can hurt.

At least one small company money market fund lost value recently. I think we're a good way from Vanguard or Fidelity money market funds dropping share prices below $1/share, that's pretty far down on my personal worry list.

It would be wrong, however, to say that a money market fund is as safe against loss as an FDIC bank account.