Sequester fail

Going back a few days here, and maybe this is not exactly new, but, this Ezra Klein post nicely captures how the FAA vote in congress marks the Democrats officially failing on the sequester politics.

Economist on climate

Turns out an Economist article on climate change not necessarily being all that bad doesn't really hold up.

WaPo Facebook

Oh hey there's Facebook on the front page of the Post again. It appears to be a legitimate story, though. [[Facebook flexes political muscle with provision in immigration bill]]

Wes in the news

NYT goes A1 today with quite a critical story on prominent Wesleyan alum Majora Carter ("Hero of the Bronx Is Now Accused of Betraying It.")

The Sunstein tell-all

Lisa Heinzerling critiques Simpler by Cass Sunstein.

TAL on disability

Haven't listened to it myself. But the left is pushing back hard on This American Life's piece on disability insurance.

Update: much more here.

NYC paid sick leave

This is a big deal. The NYT front-pager today explains the compromise deal, and recounts some of the history of Christine Quinn blocking the legislation, but eventually suffering under the costs of huge pressure and a tremendous campaign for it, and deciding to bargain.

I don't have a sense as to how good or not this compromise is on the scale of things. It sounds like there may be lessons to be learned here about sticking with a campaign and the possibilities for pressuring someone who is seeking office.

What politicians say matters, drones edition

Glenn Greenwald has written previously about how President Obama has taken extreme civil liberties violations, ones that received widespread criticism by liberals under Bush's presidency, and effectively mainstreamed them. What so much of the public once claimed to abhor the public now largely embraces, and this was largely the work of the Obama Administration. There are nuances, yes, but I think Greenwald is basically right about this.

Now David Weigel points out new polling on drones. It turns out that public opinion on has soured somewhat on them, and this coincided, Weigel argues, with Rand Paul bringing negative attention to the subject. (On this one, it seems harder to know exactly what part of it Paul caused, but I do think it's at least a significant part).

The point is this: what politicians say matters. Yes, it can be overstated, and the effects vary from issues to issue. On some things, like perhaps abortion, most people are fairly entrenched, so a President or member of congress isn't going to move things that much, presumably. With many other issues, such as drones, the public has less of an entrenched position.

And so maybe this is all an argument in favor of political grandstanding (which there is already lots of, obviously, but hardly in all of the ways I would like). And when a President or member of congress says "I can't move public opinion just by what I say!" remember that sometimes they can.

NYT moves Iran-Contra into muddy territory

Peter Hart catches the NYT saying:

In the 1980s, Democrats harshly criticized President Ronald Reagan's attempts to arm Nicaraguan rebels.

The key word being "attempts" -- because back in reality, Reagan actually did arm the Contras.

Boston Phoenix

The Boston Phoenix announced today that it is ceasing publication.

While the alt weeklies in the bigger cities around the country are not what they once were, I think to this day many of them break a ton of stories and do news and commentary in a way that no one else does. And The Phoenix has certainly been part of that.

Call me skeptical that anyone is going to fill that gap in anywhere near the same way.

Mary Jo White

I said the other week that I was surprised Gretchen Morgenson seemed so optimistic about Mary Jo White, the SEC nominee. Looking back at it, maybe I was over-reading (misreading, I guess) her column, though.

And now in Sunday's paper, in looking at White's past, Morgenson is kind of unimpressed.

Organizing for Action backs down

Kind of a big deal. After getting tons of criticism, the Obama Administration's advocacy group for Whatever The President Is For announces they won't be taking corporate donations.

Doesn't make the group great all of a sudden, and there's still room for influence by people with a lot of money. But, progress. And progress that wouldn't have happened without the backlash.

New WaPo ombud

The Washington Post is ending their ombudsman position. The Washington City Paper says: alright, then we are the new ombudsman.

Kellerism

Bill Keller continues his downhill trend, now claiming that Obama campaigned "on poll-tested tax hikes alone." Republican message, yes. What actually happened, no.

Thinking about lines

In regards to sequester furloughs, such as at Customs and Border Protection, the White House says:  "At the nation’s busiest airports, like Newark, JFK, LAX, and Chicago O’Hare, peak wait times could grow to over 4 hours or more."

Indeed: if you furlough some people, so you have fewer agents working, the line is going to build up during the day and get longer and longer.

But remember that this first step doesn't guarantee that the government actually saves money. If you still have the same planes coming in, and they're still as full as they were the week before, then the line builds up and gets longer over the course of the day, as the throughput is lower than it used to be, while the input is the same. So, late in the day, the line is still there, unusually long and unusually late into the evening, and doesn't go away altogether until later at night.

The government is still processing the same number of people entering the country; you still need the same total agent-hours. Whether you pay 20 agents to work 10 hours or only pay 10 agents -- but then they have to work 20 hours -- would make no difference spending wise. (I'm simplifying here).

The government starts saving money only if and when you reach the second step: the lines are so long that people find out about it, and cancel their trips to the United States. Then the agent-hours the government has to pay for actually start to decrease.

Lines are weird. We usually don't think about them very well. With "short" lines, the situation is determined mostly by the input, the output, and how much line had already built up. With longer lines, the input starts to get affected (if people have information about the length of the line), making a very different dynamic.

How long the lines will be, and how much money the government will actually save, will depend on how good information people get about those lines and what they decide to do with it.

USAToday/Pew: If You Don't Count Jobs/Economy, Deficit is Totally Public's Top Priority!

USAToday and Pew are out with a poll this morning, and there are two main angles they and others are pushing. First, that on several big issues, the public trusts Obama more than Republicans leaders. Ok, good to know. Second, they asked which of those issues is people's top priority. Well, deficit comes in at #1, beating guns, immigration, and climate change! Thus ABC headlines: "Deficit Tops Public’s Priorities."

This would be notable indeed, since for years the public's top priorities, in poll after poll, have been "jobs" or "the economy." It's true that "deficit" has been going up and up in the polls, quickly, which is troubling, and not surprising given the huge campaign and unbelievable amounts of money and power behind it. But despite that push, the public still cares more about jobs and the state of the economy generally, thankfully.

So why has deficit now suddenly topped jobs/economy in this poll? Only because USAToday/Pew simply didn't offer respondents jobs/economy as one of the four choices (question 7).

If you look at Pew's own most recent poll that lets people give a variety of answers for top priority, from just last month, you'll see that "strengthening economy" and "improving job situation" outrank "reducing budget deficit."

(And now the most giant hat tip to Dan Froomkin, whose twitter feed this morning was the source of basically everything in this post.)

Keystone pipeline strategy

There's been a lot of "hey protester people, you shouldn't be trying to stop the keystone pipeline, because it's not actually the single biggest climate change issue, and yadda yadda." David Roberts writes the best big picture response.

Joe Nocera is a doofus, part 526

Column today about the Keystone pipeline gets a key point rather wrong.

Update: more on Nocera's column here.