Hump-Day Song of the Week: I Got a Man by Positive K

I’m not trying to hear that, see.

What if Gore won?

Yglesias notes that most Americans don’t think things would be different if Gore had been elected, then plays a fun mental game wondering what would have happened if there had been a Gore presidency. I think he does a pretty good job, but since we’re playing alternative history, I’d like to play along.

January, 2001: President Gore is sworn into office. His priority for the first 100 days is a climate bill, and, seeing that the Senate is Republican-controlled (thanks to Vice President Lieberman foolishly staying on the senate ballot), he sees that the only way of moving forward is a cap-and-trade bill, which the Republicans write and President Gore signs it in June 0f 2001.*

* As a guide, I just looked at the legislative history of No Child Left Behind, and it’s strange that while it passed congress in June, President Bush didn’t sign it into law until January 2002. Anyways.

The rest of the summer is quiet as the administration tries to work with Republicans to put together a finance bill that would protect Social Security funding while maintaining a balanced budget (the lock box). Republicans begin to demand tax cuts in exchange for such an agreement.

However, the negotiations come to a (necessary) halt the morning of September 11, 2001. In the days following the attacks, conservatives demand a military action against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. However, Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Wesley Clark both oppose such an extreme measure, both aware of how inhospitable such a place would be for American military. Instead, targeted air strikes are launched at known training camps throughout Afghanistan, and intelligence personnel begin working closely with Pakistan to covertly find a way to bin Laden.

Gore’s hesitation to start a full-scale war in southern Asia cut short the rally-around-the-flag effect of the attacks as Republicans brand him a coward, but the Pakistani capture of bin Laden outside a camp in Tora Tora in Spring of 2002 stops the free-fall.

Unfortunately for President Gore, the economy, weighed down by the attacks and higher energy prices as a result of the climate bill, enters a weak recession in early 2002. As a result, Republicans make further gains in the House and Senate. Republicans in congress propose a stimulus bill with massive tax cuts, while Democrats counter with a massive spending bill. In the end, the 2002 Economic Recovery Act is $200 billion, 60/40 tax cuts (and tax rebates) and state relief spending. It’s not nearly enough, but it makes the recession short-lived.

As 2003 begins, the economy begins picking up as investment in alternative energy picks up. Extremely higher CAFE standards force Ford and GM to reorganize their companies to produce smaller vehicles, while Secretary of Labor Andy Stern works with UAW and the auto companies to agree on a new, more competitive labor contract.

Let me be clear here: 2003 brings no war in Iraq, because nobody in this administration would have thought to even bring it up.

With the economy picking up, Gore easily beats Sen. McCain in 2004, and picks up control of the Senate besides. At the beginning of his second term, the president proposes to congress a massive overhaul of the healthcare system: Free healthcare for all children, massive subsidies for those under a certain income threshold, a patient’s bill of rights, and the ability to buy into insurance plan offered to members of congress. A provision to establish the ability to buy into Medicare is scuttled in the negotiations.

Shored up with a massive win on the domestic front, Gore, with Sec. Kerry and special envoy George Mitchell, go to Istanbul for an Israeli/Palestinian peace summit.

It ends there, because that’s where all administrations end. Oh, and in case you’re wondering: Yes, Gov. Mitt Romney wins the 2008 election against the Lieberman/Edwards ticket. And Willard’s running mate is none other than Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.*

* I’m only kind of kidding.

In case Utah wasn’t strange enough

I’ve never been to Utah, probably to my detriment (I think). So, if you have, the strange booze laws may not be as, well, strange, to you. I was aware, thanks to the Winter Olympics some years back that Willard helped rescue, that you couldn’t get normal beer there, but I was unaware of this stuff:

So-called Zion curtains separating diners from bartenders are not only back, the opaque partitions unique to Utah are now closing on eateries whose only alcoholic beverage is beer.

Restrictions placed on new beer-only restaurants are driving at least one Utah chain, Wing Nutz, to expand out of state. Another, Wingers Bar & Grill, is questioning whether it should open more restaurants in the state.

The change means servers at new eateries that serve only beer may not pop off a cap on a beer bottle or pull the tab on a can in view of customers. They must install partitions or build backrooms to store or pour beer with a 3.2 percent alcohol content by weight. Heavier beer is not allowed.

Morning Constitutional – Tuesday, 30 August 2011

Good morning, folks. Matthew Fox has been arrested for assaulting a bus driver. Now, your morning constitutional:

Libyan rebel leaders have given pro-Gaddafi forces until Saturday to surrender, as Gaddafi’s family arrives in Algeria.

Long recovery from Irene ahead for the East Coast.

In an unprecedented move, Republicans in congress are demanding budget cuts in return for funding for Irene relief.

Budget cutting could have a serious impact on how the government responds to natural disasters.

The Obama administration is planning to eliminate dozens of deadlines that would require states to replace traffic signs to comply with new Bush-initiated safety standards—instead allowing states to replace signs as they wear out.

Meanwhile, the administration is still working on the jobs plan it intends to announce next week.

U.S. Judge Sharon Lovelace Blackburn has temporarily blocked Alabama’s new tough immigration law, which, among other measures, requires schools to check the citizenship status of students.

The Affordable Care Act is already leading to lower premiums for consumers. Also, a provision going into effect Thursday will give the administration and states the authority to scrutinize any raise in rates over 10%.

Nineteen cities posted home price gains, but home prices fell nationwide 4.6% from June 2010 to June 2011, the largest one-year drop since November 2009.

Yeah, President Obama’s uncle was arrested for a DUI.

This woman is terrible.

Finally, Connecticut man reports own parking violation to police, gets tased.

Why national polls are pointless at this juncture (or any, really)

Texas Governor Rick Perry’s now shot ahead in the national polls. Way ahead. But, how good are national polls at this point in the season? Well. Gallup, September 24, 2003:

The new poll, conducted Sept. 19-21, shows [Gen. Wesley] Clark leading the field of 10 Democratic candidates for that party’s presidential nomination. Twenty-two percent of Democrats who are registered to vote say they are most likely to support Clark for the nomination, giving him nearly a double-digit lead over former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean (13%). Clark has a slightly larger advantage among Democratic registered voters over Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry (11%), Missouri Congressman Dick Gephardt (11%), and Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman (10%). None of the other candidates receive more than 4% support.

But, Gallup warned, even then:

Earlier Gallup analysis also shows that polls taken in the fall before the primary election season have not been good predictors of who the eventual Democratic nominee would be.

Reading that sentence now makes it’s almost hilarious that pollsters get away with this.

Morning Constitutional – Monday, 29 August 2011

Good morning, everybody. Beyoncé revealed that she’s pregnant. Now, your morning constitutional:

At least 21 are dead, millions are without power, and much of New England is encountering major flooding after Irene made its way up the East Coast this weekend.

With less than $1 billion now available for disaster assistance, FEMA will have issues paying for Hurricane Irene among its other priorities, such as the tornadoes that destroyed Joplin, Mo.

As Tripoli fell into rebel control, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi still at-large. Rebels consider him still a threat. On the other hand, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, has been found and is in a coma and near death.

Japan’s ruling Democratic Party chose Finance Minister Yoshihiko Noda to be their next prime minister yesterday following the resignation of Naoto Kan. Kan was widely hoped to end the current revolving door of Japanese prime ministers (he was the fifth in seven years), but perhaps Japanese politics has been revealed to be too broken.

President Obama will nominate Princeton economics professor Alan Kruger to head his Council of Economic Advisers, succeeding Austan Goolsbee. Kruger recently returned to Princeton after serving as assistant Treasury secretary for the first two years of the Obama administration.

Consumer confidence is sapping the already weak economy: Most Americans do not believe they will make more money next year than this year.

Richard Thaler: “If we want to balance the budget over time we are going to have to elect adults to Congress who are prepared to invest now in our country’s future and then, when the economy picks up, take the necessary steps to get spending in line with revenue. The question is whether politicians who act like adults can win elections.”

You should read this: Does American Need Manufacturing?

Thanks to a provision in the Texas school financing bill, Rick Perry’s travel and security costs to the state of Texas will remain secret at least until the 2012 election.

Finally, 16-year-old tells story of fist-fight with polar bear.

Seriously?

Dick move:

Elementary special education teacher Anthony Prowell is running for the seat as a Democrat in Arizona’s 8th congressional district, a surprising move against a popular incumbent who’s recovering from a gunshot wound to the head in January.

Yeah, that’s Rep. Gabrielle Gifford’s seat. You know, the lady who was shot in the goddamn head earlier this year and is still recovering? Perhaps less surprising:

Prowell said he got the cold shoulder when contacting leaders of the local and state Democratic parties about a potential run.

Pipeline

In honor of Irene surfing her way up the eastern seaboard, here are two somehow very different versions of Pipeline:

Which do you think is more awesome? I think it’s just about tied up.

More evidence the stimulus “worked”

Dylan Matthews pours through nine studies on the efficacy of the ARRA and concludes:

As the descriptions above make clear, none of the studies are flawless. But while the optimistic studies do, in fact, support the conclusion that the stimulus worked, there is some reason to doubt that the pessimistic studies support the conclusion that it failed. Conley and Dupor found a negative effect on employment and output but, as they concede and critics of the study have emphasized, their results are not statistically significant. Taylor found that the stimulus did not increase government purchases significantly but, as Noah Smith argued, this result could be consistent with the stimulus increasing employment and output. Oh and Reis found a small multiplier for tax transfers of the kind found in the stimulus package, but as they concede, their model produces estimates for key figures that are empirically implausible. Using more plausible figures produces a significantly larger multiplier, meaning the package was more effective than the model initially suggested. Due to these issues, I’m inclined to believe that the preponderance of evidence indicates the stimulus worked.

It’s a good run-down of the studies and their findings; I recommend looking at it.

Texas gives up on capitalism

That’s a headline I never thought I’d type, but there it is. What do I mean? Well, Texas conservatives have won out and changed the state’s schools curriculum and rewrote the textbooks. It’s pretty awful; for example, they managed to redact Jefferson from a list of people who write things that inspired the revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries and replaced him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone.

But, oddly enough, they seem to have given up on capitalism:

They also replaced the word “capitalism” throughout their texts with the “free-enterprise system.”

“Let’s face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation,” said one conservative member, Terri Leo. “You know, ‘capitalist pig!’ ”

I bet these folks are really good at yelling at rocks.

Damn dams

CC photo by Flickr user andwhatsnext

Damn. Dams:

In 2009 the American Society of Civil Engineers released a survey of the state of infrastructure in the U.S. The group found that dams are, on average, in terrible disrepair. Of the more than 85,000 dams, more than 4,000 are unsafe or deficient, and nearly 1,800 of those are located where a breach would cause severe damage to life or property. With so many dams, it is hard to know where the gravest danger lies. The average budget for dam inspectors is distressingly low. For instance, Texas employs just seven inspectors to keep an eye on 7,400 dams, and in many states inspectors lack the authority to inspect private dams, including those built to hold back the chemical by-products of mining operations. A report by Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute estimates that dams are the most potentially hazardous source of energy. A catastrophe at an average dam has the potential to kill 11,000 people.

If only there was a massive shortage of work for people to do to make people extraordinarily inexpensive to employ, record low interest rates to borrow capital, we could actually maybe fix these things.

Oh, wait, we could. It’s just that we have all these jerks who took over the House who think that low taxes on rich people, higher taxes on the poor and middle class, and absolutely no new spending whatsoever are more important than putting people to work fixing our nation’s infrastructure.

Hump-Day Song of the Week: Uh Oh by Talib Kweli feat. Jean Grae

Makes you wonder how there are not more women in hip-hop. Jean Grae just kills it.

Morning Constitutional – Wednesday, 24 August 2011

Good morning, folks. Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith are not separating. Now, your morning constitutional:

Fighting continues in Tripoli, as rebels seize Gaddafi’s compound, Gaddafi issues a defiant rant over the radio, and the National Transitional Council prepare to take over and appeal to world powers to help it begin the process of rebuilding the country. Meanwhile, the journalists stuck inside the Rixos hotel wait.

Yup, there was a minor earthquake yesterday.

North Korea has agreed to consider a moratorium on nuclear weapons testing and production and return to six-party talks.

Good economic news: Orders for U.S. durable goods rose 4% in July, way higher than expected. The number was buoyed by a 11.5% increase in orders for automobiles and parts, the highest since 2003.

Vice President Biden didn’t go to China to “explain a damn thing” about the economy, and notes that China’s economy is growing because the U.S. military presence in Asia.

Despite what Speaker Boehner says, business economists do favor some tax hikes.

Ezra Klein: “When the financial markets collapsed, household debt was nearly 100 percent of GDP. It’s now down to 90 percent. In 1982, which was the last time we had a big recession, the household-debt-to-GDP ratio was about 45 percent.”

Sixteen of France’s mega-rich have signed a petition calling on the government to raise their taxes.

Megatrends that weren’t.

Finally, man robs bank, returns money because girlfriend yelled at him.

Earthquake Tweets

Yup, there was an earthquake in the mid-Atlantic region this afternoon, registering a 5.9 magnitude and generally just forcing people to go outside and enjoy the beautiful day.

There were lots of Twitter jokes (we made a few), and you should look at them, because, well, they’re entertaining, and it’s not like anybody got hurt. Sure, some people’s days were made terrible because they have to do a lot more work (inspections, traffic control, inspections, dealing with idiots, inspections, etc.), so that sucks.

Meanwhile, above is what the Bachmann campaign tweeted. Weird.

Modern human’s wisdom teeth problem

I used to wonder how wisdom teeth could be such a problem (so many people have to get them removed!), and, yet, before dentistry happened, it couldn’t have been. Surely all those people back then weren’t suffering from impacted wisdom teeth? Well, Dr. Lieberman, an evolutionary biology professor at Harvard, points out in an interview with Claudia Dreifus at the New York Times:

[I]mpacted wisdom teeth and malocclusions are very recent problems. They arise because we now process our food so much that we chew with little force. These interactions affect how our faces grow, which causes previously unknown dental problems. Hunter-gatherers — who live in ways similar to our ancestors — don’t have impacted wisdom teeth or cavities. There are many other conditions rooted in the mismatch — fallen arches, osteoporosis, cancer, myopia, diabetes and back trouble.

Huh. The more you know.

Good news is bad news for craft beer drinkers

Good beer is getting too damned popular. Poor Rhode Island:

Earlier this year, three major craft brewers – Avery, Dogfish Head, and Great Divide – announced that they were pulling out of some markets because the demand is outstripping brewing capacity. In other words, craft beer has become so popular so quickly that brewers can’t produce enough of it to satisfy everyone.

In each case, Rhode Island has been among the states where, for now, those brewers have stopped distributing. Massachusetts, thankfully, has been unaffected, though it is easy to imagine that beer aficionados in the Ocean State will hop across the border and grab their Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA, Great Divide Yeti, and Avery Maharaja in Bay State liquor stores. So don’t be surprised if it suddenly becomes more difficult to find your favorite beers in places like Attleboro and Seekonk.

So, good news: People like good beer. A lot. Bad news: The makers of good beer can’t keep up. However, it is interesting that this is forcing them to leave markets and not hike prices, a la Econ 101. But, luckily, New England states are so small that you can pop over to another one with relative ease.

Also:

Burton Baton Burton Baton is an interesting beer. It often gets classified as an imperial India pale ale, but it’s not purely an IPA. Burton Baton is actually two beers in one. Delaware-based Dogfish Head makes Burton Baton by fermenting two types of beer – its renowned 90 Minute IPA and an English old ale – and then blending them together in a large oak tank, where the new beer sits for a month. The result is a wonderfully complex beer. Dark amber in color, the beer pours with a head pocked with fat bubbles. A lot of hops and a smidge of vanilla comes through in the aroma. Grapefruit, oak, and a lot of alcohol emerge in the taste. Because of the balance in this beer, the hops are subdued compared to other imperial IPAs, and it’s not at all bitter. Burton Baton is a robust beer boasting a panoply of flavors.

I’ve never had this beer, but I Need. One. Now.

Friday Funny: Four Yorkshiremen

The original Four Yorkshiremen from Redifusion TV “At Last The 1948 Show.”  Tim Brooke-Taylor, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, and Marty Feldman perform the classic Four Yorkshiremen Sketch years before Monty Python.

Why don’t poor people want to help poorer people?

Turns out we’re all just assholes. Those near the bottom just don’t like helping out anybody who is worse off than themselves. The Economist explains:

Instead of opposing redistribution because people expect to make it to the top of the economic ladder, the authors of the new paper argue that people don’t like to be at the bottom. One paradoxical consequence of this “last-place aversion” is that some poor people may be vociferously opposed to the kinds of policies that would actually raise their own income a bit but that might also push those who are poorer than them into comparable or higher positions. The authors ran a series of experiments where students were randomly allotted sums of money, separated by $1, and informed about the “income distribution” that resulted. They were then given another $2, which they could give either to the person directly above or below them in the distribution.

In keeping with the notion of “last-place aversion”, the people who were a spot away from the bottom were the most likely to give the money to the person above them: rewarding the “rich” but ensuring that someone remained poorer than themselves. Those not at risk of becoming the poorest did not seem to mind falling a notch in the distribution of income nearly as much. This idea is backed up by survey data from America collected by Pew, a polling company: those who earned just a bit more than the minimum wage were the most resistant to increasing it.

Poverty may be miserable. But being able to feel a bit better-off than someone else makes it a bit more bearable.

Michele Bachmann clearly doesn’t understand oil markets

Candidate for the Republican nomination for president and winner of the Iowa Ames Straw Poll Michele Bachman made a very strange promise:

“Under President Bachmann you will see gasoline come down below $2 a gallon again,” Bachmann told a crowd Tuesday in South Carolina. “That will happen.”

Poem of the Week: Ex Machina