Even Sullivan Can See What's Happening Clearly

Every now and then, Andrew Sullivan nails the situation eloquently and clearly. I believe this is exactly right and why none of us should buy that shiny-object crap about "the past doesn't matter":

Clive Crook writes:

What does it matter who caused the problem? Obama's job is to solve it.

This with respect to the crippling fiscal legacy bequeathed by the Bush administration and the appalling recession that subsequently wiped out revenues. Yes, he actually wrote the words:
What does it matter who caused the problem?
Let me try to explain: it matters who caused the problem and why because if we do not understand the causes we cannot fix the problem and it matters because any adult judgment of a politician's first year that does not take into account the inheritance he was bequeathed is impossible.
It matters because the most important fact in American politics is the worst presidency in modern times that preceded Obama.

Two failed, unwinnable wars that continue to destroy lives and cripple our finances, a massive splurge in entitlement and discretionary spending, a huge increase in defense spending and massive tax cuts: this we now have to forget? This context should be removed from the picture?
It matters too because the very people who gave us this mess are now adamantly refusing to do anything to get us out of it, and pledge to return to exactly the same policies that got us there in the first place: more tax cuts, more war, more entitlement spending, more debt, no health insurance reform, no action on climate change. Clive acts as if there were some viable alternative out there. There isn't.
I'm not saying that Obama should not be held responsible for actions he has taken; I am saying he should not be held responsible for actions he did not take and an appalling inheritance he was forced to grapple with. Removing that context, as the GOP has largely done, and Crook now endorses, is to rig the entire debate so that Obama cannot win. It is a function of the kind of punditry that is, in fact, far more of a problem for the country than anything Obama has done - because it bases political judgment on unreality, and distorts the body politic's capacity for reasoned argument. It treats all of this as a game.

Absolute Proof the Military-Industrial Complex Rules

Matt Yglesias spotted the following chart and draws the obvious conclusion. Combat aircraft? We are nuts...all of us for either asking for it or for going along with it. More proof that the fear card always works. You can't even go after this stuff without being called soft on security. Per Attackerman:

I got this chart from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment’s Todd Harrison’s brand-new paper on the imminent Fiscal 2011 defense budget. (Conveniently released today!) As you can see, all this chart details is spending on aircraft. In last year’s budget, that spending represented 5 percent of the budget, or between $38.6 billion and $40.1 billion, depending on whether you want to include funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in your calculation or not.
You see that bright green line? The one at the top? The one that’s way higher than all its colorful competitors? That represents procurement funding for combat aircraft.
Has it sunk in yet?
It’s only a slight exaggeration to say we don’t use combat aircraft in the wars we’re fighting. You have to come up with a baroque set of Michael Bey-esque geopolitical calculations by which we would use combat aircraft in any conceivable war. The U.S.’s area of combat-aircraft dominance is called Planet Earth. No Air Force is going to challenge ours. No actual U.S. adversary has an air force, and the list of real-potential U.S. adversaries that do starts with Iran and ends with North Korea, neither of which are remotely stupid enough to test us in the air. The most likely scenario for using combat aircraft in a U.S. war is an alien invasion.
What is relevant to the wars we fight are (a) remotely-piloted aircraft like drones, (b) surveillance aircraft like drones, (c) helicopters, and (d) especially airlift, to get our ground troops from Point A to Point B. And as you can see from the chart, we don’t spend nearly on that stuff what we spend on combat aircraft.
But by all means, freeze spending on school lunch programs and Head Start and shit like that.

Yikes! Watch What You Eat

This could be very important. It's not some chain email -- it's the Scientific American, no less, saying so. The plastics and POPs all around us are getting into our bodies and even causing low level disease, such as obesity. Use only glass and metal containers and cooking gear whenever possible. Also, avoid farm-raised seafood. This will change how I cook and eat. It may also explain why cancer is so much more common now than it was 50 years ago.

Researchers have for the first time found a connection between exposure to certain chemicals and insulin resistance, according to a study published in the online edition of Environmental Health Perspectives.
A group of European scientists examined whether exposure to persistent organic pollutants (POPs) contributed to insulin resistance, which has been increasing around the world. More than 25 percent of U.S. adults suffer from metabolic conditions stemming from insulin resistance that include fatigue, obesity and difficulty regulating blood levels of fat and sugar.
Researchers fed rats a high-fat diet of either crude or refined fish oil from farmed Atlantic salmon over 28 days. The crude fish oil contained average levels of POPs that people are exposed to through fish consumption, while the refined oil contained none. Both had equal fat levels.
They found that rats exposed to the crude fish oil developed belly fat and could not regulate fat properly. They had higher levels of cholesterol and several fatty acids in their livers. Those exposed to the refined fish oil experienced none of those symptoms.
Researchers said the findings provide "compelling evidence" of a causal relationship between POP exposure common in the food chain and insulin resistance, and highlight the need to understand the interactions of POPs and fat-containing foods such as fish, dairy products and meat.
How to deal with POPs is particularly challenging because they persist in the environment for long periods and can build up in animals' tissues.
The 2001 Stockholm Convention, which the United States has ratified but not signed, lists and bans numerous POPs from manufacture and use. The researchers say their evidence reinforces the need to have international agreements aimed at limiting the release of POPs into the environment in an effort to protect public health.

Greenwalds's Analysis of What's Wrong with the Press

Glen strikes again and his points, and evidence, are all to the mark. There is no doubt the press has failed in the last decade. This describes why and how, especially when coupled with the fact that big corporations run the news operations and those working in those operations want to please their bosses by playing the access game this way.

Aside from falsity -- and the fact that they become irreversibly lodged in our political culture as fact -- what do all of these deceitful reports have in common?  They're all the by-product of granting anonymity to people and then repeating what they claim as fact, with the falsehood-disseminators protected by "journalists" from any and all accountability for their falsehoods.  It's exactly the same process that caused our leading media outlets to tell Americans about Iraq's massive WMD program and Al Qaeda connections; Jessica Lynch's heroic firefight with inhumane Iraqi devils and her "rescue" by our Marines; Pat Tillman's death at the hands of Al Qaeda monsters; and government tests that "confirmed" the presence of bentonite in the anthrax used to attack the U.S., which meant it was likely that Saddam was behind the attacks.
Unjustified anonymity -- especially when mindlessly repeating what shielded government sources claim in secret -- is the single greatest enabler of false and deceitful "reporting."  Despite (or, really, because of) its unparalelled record of producing lies, it will never stop, because agreeing to it is how "journalists" end up being selected as favored message-carrying servants for the powerful.  This falsehood-producing method isn't ancillary to American journalism but central to it; the book which is occupying the attention of America's political and media class is based exclusively on unattributed, shielded sources, and that seems to bother none of them.

Becoming an Aristocracy

The data doesn't look good for Americans as far as having the economic success of each generation be independent of their parents. I was surprised at how much worse on this the US is than most other developed countries. I expect this will get even worse as the expense of a college education continues to rise faster than than national income.

Bhashkar Mazumder, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, has a paper which says that “Using administrative data containing the earnings histories of parents and children,the IGE is estimated to be around 0.6. This suggests that the United States is substantially less mobile than previous research indicated.” And, “estimates of intergenerational mobility are significantly lower for families with little or no wealth.”

He also points to CAP’s research on the subject:

By international standards, the United States has an unusually low level of intergenerational mobility: our parents’ income is highly predictive of our incomes as adults. Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Among high-income countries for which comparable estimates are available, only the United Kingdom had a lower rate of mobility than the United States.

And you don’t need to take my word for it either, the Economist—an outfit with right-wing views on economic matters, but that’s also international in its outlook and thus not blinded by the solipsism of the American right—has covered this in detail.
This one stat isn’t the be-all and end-all of mobility. One nice thing about the United States and social mobility is that compared to most European countries (but not Canada or Australia, or for that matter Sweden in Europe) it’s easier for foreigners to move here and make their way. Still, the facts are the facts. The ex ante level of inequality in the United States makes social mobility hard, and we’re not doing anything like the kinds of investments in child nutrition, early education, etc. that could make up for it ex post.

Taxes and Growth

Another conservative belief proven wrong with the facts. Are they ever right? I would hope so, but with this era's conservatives, it never seems to happen.

For the record, however, the most-taxed countries on Earth (i.e., the countries where revenue is the highest percent of GDP) are in order:

1. Denmark
2. Sweden
3. Belgium
4. France
5. Norway

In terms of per capita GDP these are, respectively, the 4th, 9th, 14th, 15th, and 3rd richest countries on earth while the United States is 17th. Of course in part that’s an exchange rate phenomenon and if you use PPP adjustments rather than market exchange rates, the U.S. looks better. On the other hand, if you peer into the future it seems to me that exchange rate comparisons are likely to make us look even worse in years to come. The high-tax five also do very well on things like the U.N. Human Development index.

MoDo Fails Badly

Nice evisceration of a particularly awful MoDo column. Note my comment (20. from Down Goes Pecksniff):

When I saw MoDo this morning, I fumed. She is occasionally clever, and certainly better than the neo-con crowd over at WaPo, but this was pathetic.
Matt has nailed what gnawed at me — that, according to her, Obama should treat the electorate as children. None of that wimpy, analytical, fact-finding stuff for her. AUTHORITY is what’s needed from our leaders. We had that for eight years and look where it got us. She has gone to the dark side, or maybe just the dumb side, and I’m done.