Month: March 2013

Yglesisas Answers it All

Matt Yglesias asks:

There’s no mystery as to why the National Republican Campaign Committee hates Nancy Pelosi, but their dislike for San Francisco is a bit puzzling.

Almost directly, and seemingly without realizing it, Matt Yglesias also provides the answer:

[San Francisco is] an enormous economic success story. The San Francisco metropolitan area has the fourth-highest median household income in the country, with its Bay Area partner San Jose coming in at number three. Metro San Francisco is in a tie for having the third-highest-pay for low-wage workers, its fourth in median wages, and third in 90th percentile wages.

GOP orthodoxy requires “government” of any kind to be an abject and self-evident failure. Few citizens of the US would dispute the sense that San Francisco is the liberal bastion of the United States. Therefore it must be an urban hellhole and not be visited by any kind of success. Where success exists, it must be ignored. Similarly, old Taxachusetts must be forever suffering under the yoke of ludicrously high taxes (and one must never acknowledge the reality: that MA’s effective tax rates and collective tax burden generally trend lower than those of old Live Free or Die itself, that glibertarian heaven called New Hampshire).

Much like the Post Office and many other examples, any functioning example of government, large or small, must be (at a minimum) denigrated. If possible, it must also be actively undermined such that it may then be pointed to as an example of the impossibility of government intervention, large or small. All evidence to the contrary must be marginalized. And that is why the GOP “hates” San Francisco and largely assumes it to be barely survivable smoking ruin.

I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.

Flannery O’Conner, as clear on her theoretical 88th birthday as on any other.

I was disappointed when Speaker Gingrich ultimately decided against [forming a Santorum/Gingrich Unity ticket in the GOP primary], because it could have changed the outcome of the primary, and more importantly, it could have changed the outcome of the general election.

Rick Santorum wistfully recalls what might have been.
He’s right, though, a Gingrich/Santorum ticket would have changed the general election outcome into much more of a 50-state stomping than the merely-wide-margin Obama win that we got. Something for Turtledove to look into, to be sure.

Gee, mail?

Ezra Klein:

I’m starting to worry a bit about Gmail, which is at the core of pretty much my entire life. I know, I know — Gmail is safe. The data it feeds into the Google mainframe is extremely valuable to the search giant. They won’t let anything happen to it.

You should be worried and they will, inevitably, let “anything” happen to it. While Reader had far fewer aggregate users than GMail has, think of what the underlying dataset was. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of savvy users collecting the the feeds they were interested in and then ladle on top what they actually read out of that list. Back in the old days, it was also what they starred and shared with friends. But that’s not allowed anymore, hasn’t been for a long time now…so, uh, there went that little nugget of highly actionable advertising information right down the toilet.
Many of the biggest sites around still garner huge fractions of their incoming hits from Reader feeds, and this is a product that has (at best) been ignored and (at worst) progressively disabled by a parent company ever sure that Reader’s just not “social” enough and therefore not anything people would ever be interested in. This, of course, after they killed the social functions in Reader. Nothing at all worth seeing in there for a massive advertising company, what with all the hits and all. Outgoing hits, don’t you know. One should expect to stay at Google. Kinda like AOL. You know, the early 90’s and the high excitement of “portal” sites. Which were pretty great, I think we’ll all agree. “You’ve got GMail!” is really something they should look into with the doodle. Get somebody’s 10% time assigned to that, Grace.

But the fact is, Google saw nothing worthwhile in that Reader data, or they wouldn’t be killing Reader. Yes, I understand that they think all that hot, linking action will automagically move into Google+, where no one is, and that the same massive group of nobodies will laboriously (and mostly manually) create the equivalent feed(s), one entry at a time, and just go back to enjoying all that great Google+ product when they’re not doing so. But, you know, manually. And in front their pals who also aren’t using the service.

So it should be pretty plain that the moment some corporate bozo decides that GMail is the problem with Google+ (or whatever the idiotic corporate bozo windmill Google is tilting at come the day), GMail will end. And no amount of “but I paid for more space!” will save your email, Ezra. This too shall pass.

So enjoy the grand convenience of being advertised to based on your emails while it lasts. Quite frankly: I love it too. Were it legal, I might marry it. Again, for the first time. And but also buy the biggest hard drive you can afford every couple of years and back up all your Google data to it. Because all of it will go away. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon. And for a long time.

Up words

Chris Hayes moves to msnbc weekday prime time. Nice. But I can’t help but notice this:

“Up” doesn’t have a huge audience […] but it consistently beats CNN on Saturday and Sunday mornings, and it has been praised by media critics for allowing long, thoughtful conversations about politics and public policy, the kind rarely seen elsewhere on television.

These conversations usually project a liberal worldview, in line with MSNBC as a whole. But Mr. Hayes and his producers also try to book guests who don’t often get on television, including conservatives; a recent discussion with Mr. Hayes and four conservatives lit up the blogosphere. “Add this segment to the list of reasons Chris Hayes’ Up has become the most interesting weekend political show in America”

Emphasis added to help me ask exactly which feature of Up do you assume is the least likely to survive the massive transition to a “prime time audience”? Right this very second in some boardroom somewhere, somebody is saying “all that thoughtfulness may work on a Saturday morning, but…”

Up words

Breaking: GOP Won Big in 2012

At least they won it in every way possible that doesn’t involve, you know, actually winning:

[The GOP thinks] they lost because their get-out-the-vote technology failed on Election Day. They think they lag the Democrats in data mining and use of social media. They think media bias defeated them. They think they kinda-sorta won because they won the white vote and the elderly vote. They think a tiny number of anomalous, atypical Republicans spoiled everything for the rest of the party by scaring women with off-putting abortion rhetoric. They think they just haven’t found the right messenger who can explain to Hispanic voters that they’re “natural Republicans.” They think Obama and Democrats win among low-information voters who are too dumb to realize what’s really happening to them and what the two parties really stand for. Or those same voters are being bribed with “Obamaphones.” And, yes, Republicans are still claiming voter fraud.

Oh, and besides, they won the House (even if they lost the total House vote and won only because of gerrymandering, and even if Democrats retained the Senate), so 2012 was a split decision right? Heck, Paul Ryan won – he won reelection to his House seat.

So it’s all good for the GOP! Their ideas are what America wants! It’s obvious!

Exactly.

Breaking: GOP Won Big in 2012

Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, “This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!” This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise.
I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for. We all know that at some point in the future the Universe will come to an end and at some other point, considerably in advance from that but still not immediately pressing, the sun will explode. We feel there’s plenty of time to worry about that, but on the other hand that’s a very dangerous thing to say.

Douglas Adams, who would be 61 today, speaking at Digital Biota 2 in 1998.
Source: douglasadams.se

Republicans have very decidedly not agreed to any kind of tax reform that raises federal revenues. This is the whole crux of the debate. They have never agreed to anything other than revenue-neutral tax reform.

Kevin Drum, saying what should be printed in the maximum size possible, laminated in armor-strength plastic, and posted on the wall of every news agency large and small. Every single news outlet gets this simple, straightforward fact utterly and completely wrong every single time they venture here. Wishing hard and clapping louder will not make the GOP sensible. Neither will acting as though they want a “sensible” deal when they have made no such overtures, large or small.

Reporting this as though both parties are equally at fault is doing The Republic no favors.