I'm happy to concede that having a conversation like that on the merits requires a level of research no one on this blog is going to do. However to the extent we're arguing about what was in the platform and legislation actually accepted by the administration I'd say the evidence is clear.
I am not one to defend the constant calling up of the famous Austrian in American politics but that's just changing the subject.
What killed Romney was the proposal for wholesale restructuring (read massively cutting) of entitlements. Some changes there may well need to be on the table at some point but I know that you know that isn't the same as auditing fraud waste and abuse in discretionary spending or ferreting out millions spent on teaching the women of Kandahar about Gloria Steinem or whatever.
No real disagreement on the principle. This is where I interject that there was a 'smarter government' component to the Obama administration. That inclination seems to have been lost in the Biden admin and the unusual circumstances of slow growth and essentially 0% interest on government borrowing that preceded it. I am all for bringing those concepts back.
I am against domestic boondoggles. But all domestic boondoggles at least put money in the pockets of Americans, and even the worst of the worst are to some degree defensible on those terms.
The boondoggles Russel is defending caused untold damage (Chris understates it only because it takes books to describe how bad both wars and related activities were). The money would have been better spent by flying around in a helicopter dumping it out over American cities.
This is down right hysterical, given we spent at least $5 trillion dollars for the Pentagon to fight 'islamofascist' terrorism abroad when at the end of the day all we needed was reinforced cockpit doors and maybe a narrowly defined special forces operation in Afghanistan.
I watched it with 2 of my buddies (also old millennials) and my 7 year old. None are hip hop fans, but also no one had any particularly strong reaction to it in real time, pro or con. It is possible I am being knee jerk because my Facebook feed is currently full of smug reprimands (including by one of those friends!) aimed at people who did not like the half time show. A lot of 'white people am I right?' kind of stuff. There is also a really conspicuous lack of people complaining about the half time show, not that I doubt the existence of people complaining about the half time show. Feels very twitter circa 2020 and I hate it.
Ha I didn't really think about it on that level and maybe I misread you. I am but a humble metal head. No act I like will ever, nor should they, play the super bowl for no reason other than the fact that everyone watching would absolutely hate it. Maybe one day when the members of Metallica reach their 80s they'll go embarrass themselves in a similar way that a lot of rock acts from earlier eras have over the years.
Knowing I will not like the music means I watch for spectacle, not really anything else.
Agreed. That's where your green card at the border suggestion comes in, and where the total unwillingness to accept that sort of arrangement from the wider electorate follows.
I think having the discussion on those kinds of terms would be more productive. Yglesias has his One Billion Americans book that I have not read but as I understand it makes some arguments in that direction.
What it inevitably runs into though is that in the age of jet travel hundreds of millions of people could be here in a relative blink of an eye. Even our own, relatively open door past of mass immigration is not a parallel for what that might look like.
Nevertheless I'd take the honesty of that kind of conversation over what we have today.
Probably my fault for not explaining my thoughts well. They go something like this:
-Hayes et al are not moved by any of the economic arguments in play re: immigration.
-For them it isn't about GDP or growth or full employment or prices of goods and services (or jobs "Americans won't do").
-What they do believe in is a universal rights ideal that anyone can immigrate anywhere and it is the host country's obligation to accommodate.
-This is probably bolstered by attitudes about what the developed world, Westerners, white people, whoever, owe to the denizens of poorer countries.
-To the extent any exploitation or other moral issues arise from how immigration plays out in practice, their answer is to make every entrant a citizen and/or provide legal status allowing them to benefit from all protections.
-However, they also know that this position is a total non-starter politically.
-Instead they argue for immigration from a perspective of neoliberal economics as a means of winning the argument without actually owning or making the case for their true position.
-This is what causes the weird tension that Freddie is picking up on, and that renders their arguments nonsensical to anyone paying even a little bit of attention to the larger political context and partisan divides.
-Freddie's mistake is taking the argument Hayes et al are making at face value.
-To me it's obvious that they really care about all the mushy stuff, not about having people to work at illegally low wages rebuilding LA.
I think Philly's d-line is just that good. They can get pressure and sacks without help.
But really all the more reason for KC to try to do something that might draw some of those calls. Or anything at all to catch a break or change the momentum.
Instead they looked like they were playing an out of conference game at 1 PM in early October.
I see it as a red herring because it is a way to defend mass unskilled immigration without arguing their implicit but unstated actual position, which is about human rights trumping parochial and/or nationalistic concerns, not really about economics at all. I think their position on the subject would be what it is no matter what the economists (or the Economist) says.
Edit to add, I'm sure Larry Summers actually does hold the 'neoliberal' position on the merits, but I do not think thats the case for name your progressive pundit.
Yea the whole thing went the way the Eagles season has gone. Really good defense and 'good enough' offense to play keep away. You can sell out against Barkley but Hurts is still solid in the pass game, especially if he's going to benefit from field position and turnovers.
Washington played them better in all 3 meetings than the Chiefs did last night because they approached all of those games with an underdog mentality (i.e. go for it on 4th from the beginning) and still only went 1-2.
Who knows what happened behind the scenes but KC played the whole thing way too risk averse. Like, why not try a fake punt? Why not try a designed QB run? It's the freaking Super Bowl!
Not sure if a scouting failure or if they were just overrated all season long like many suspected.
I don't think Freddie is wrong in the abstract but I do think he's wrong about the actual beliefs that lead to what I think is fairly called total intellectual dishonesty.
My take is that progressives like Hayes and Blitzer on some level believe that immigration is a human right exercised by immigrants themselves, whatever the particulars of the legal regime they are (or more pertinent, are not) following. From this perspective answering no to anyone who wants entry is itself a violation of those human rights. They're just also smart enough to understand that this framing is incredibly radical and would never be acceptable to the wider electorate, and so they pivot to neoliberal economic arguments as a sort of red herring.
Oh yea, Eagles defense won that game, have to give them 80-85% of the credit. They pressured Mahomes without blitzing. He looked off all night and no one was ever open. All the Eagles offense had to do was not screw it up and they didn't.
At that point the Eagles had moved into more of a prevent, keep the ball in front of you defense. As soon as KC failed to do anything on the opening possession of the second half the clock became a factor. Objectively KC was shut out and as crazy as it is to say, in context of the game every single KC point was scored in garbage time.
I am pretty bored with the Chiefs but for whatever reason they do not annoy me to anywhere close to the degree the Belichick/Brady Pats dynasty did. I also despise the Eagles. This one is easy for me from a rooting perspective.
I let my oldest pick what we're doing for dinner and he (somewhat unexpectedly) said 5 Guys. So I'll be off to spend like $70 on burgers and fries that are better than McDonalds but probably not the 3 to 4 times better the price would imply.
I'm not telling you to be shaking in your boots over a lawsuit. I'm telling you there is a high probability that the courts aren't going to go along with a lot of this because it isn't how the law or constitution works. In the last 48 hours alone we've had freezes on the birth right citizenship EO, the order to put the USAID employees on leave, and on Musk and team's access to Treasury Dept data, including an order to destroy anything they've taken.
What even conservatives should be worried about, not that I imagine they will be, is an approach to governance that amounts to yelling 'Somebody stop me!' like Jim Carey in the Mask. Our system is only capable of containing so much defection and aggressive probing of boundaries before sparking a constitutional crisis. No one knows what's on the other side of that and no one with any sense should want to find out.
Alternatively, while I have my doubts about the GOP's ability to govern itself in Congress, if they are able to do so and pass laws rolling up USAID into the State Department or eliminating its functions entirely, well that's just life in a democracy. Elections have consequences and whatever I or anyone else thinks about the policy decisions Congress has the authority to do things like that. Same if they want to mandate some sort of audit, eliminate the Department of Education, liquidate the federal workforce, or whatever else.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Deficits, Debt, and DOGE”
Do you think you know? Or that Elon Musk knows?
I'm happy to concede that having a conversation like that on the merits requires a level of research no one on this blog is going to do. However to the extent we're arguing about what was in the platform and legislation actually accepted by the administration I'd say the evidence is clear.
"
I am not one to defend the constant calling up of the famous Austrian in American politics but that's just changing the subject.
What killed Romney was the proposal for wholesale restructuring (read massively cutting) of entitlements. Some changes there may well need to be on the table at some point but I know that you know that isn't the same as auditing fraud waste and abuse in discretionary spending or ferreting out millions spent on teaching the women of Kandahar about Gloria Steinem or whatever.
"
Google is your friend:
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2010/07/22/improper-payments-elimination-and-recovery-act-cutting-waste-and-fraud-government
"
No real disagreement on the principle. This is where I interject that there was a 'smarter government' component to the Obama administration. That inclination seems to have been lost in the Biden admin and the unusual circumstances of slow growth and essentially 0% interest on government borrowing that preceded it. I am all for bringing those concepts back.
"
I am against domestic boondoggles. But all domestic boondoggles at least put money in the pockets of Americans, and even the worst of the worst are to some degree defensible on those terms.
The boondoggles Russel is defending caused untold damage (Chris understates it only because it takes books to describe how bad both wars and related activities were). The money would have been better spent by flying around in a helicopter dumping it out over American cities.
"
This is down right hysterical, given we spent at least $5 trillion dollars for the Pentagon to fight 'islamofascist' terrorism abroad when at the end of the day all we needed was reinforced cockpit doors and maybe a narrowly defined special forces operation in Afghanistan.
On “The USAID Fight Is About Power, Not Spending”
No but in light of the house bill you shared above it's a much closer call than I would have thought.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/10/2025”
Is there any timeline on when/if something substantive will be released?
I'm dying to yell 'we're through the looking glass here,people..' at everyone I know.
"
Someone needs to keep Skinner distracted so we can bust into his office and sneak a peak at those documents.
On “Kansas City wants to Score the first Threepeat against the Philadelphia Eagles in New Orleans”
Fair enough.
I watched it with 2 of my buddies (also old millennials) and my 7 year old. None are hip hop fans, but also no one had any particularly strong reaction to it in real time, pro or con. It is possible I am being knee jerk because my Facebook feed is currently full of smug reprimands (including by one of those friends!) aimed at people who did not like the half time show. A lot of 'white people am I right?' kind of stuff. There is also a really conspicuous lack of people complaining about the half time show, not that I doubt the existence of people complaining about the half time show. Feels very twitter circa 2020 and I hate it.
"
Ha I didn't really think about it on that level and maybe I misread you. I am but a humble metal head. No act I like will ever, nor should they, play the super bowl for no reason other than the fact that everyone watching would absolutely hate it. Maybe one day when the members of Metallica reach their 80s they'll go embarrass themselves in a similar way that a lot of rock acts from earlier eras have over the years.
Knowing I will not like the music means I watch for spectacle, not really anything else.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/10/2025”
Agreed. That's where your green card at the border suggestion comes in, and where the total unwillingness to accept that sort of arrangement from the wider electorate follows.
"
I think having the discussion on those kinds of terms would be more productive. Yglesias has his One Billion Americans book that I have not read but as I understand it makes some arguments in that direction.
What it inevitably runs into though is that in the age of jet travel hundreds of millions of people could be here in a relative blink of an eye. Even our own, relatively open door past of mass immigration is not a parallel for what that might look like.
Nevertheless I'd take the honesty of that kind of conversation over what we have today.
On “Kansas City wants to Score the first Threepeat against the Philadelphia Eagles in New Orleans”
But isn't it more fun if the music you like says something profound about you and your various failings as a human being? Be better!
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/10/2025”
Probably my fault for not explaining my thoughts well. They go something like this:
-Hayes et al are not moved by any of the economic arguments in play re: immigration.
-For them it isn't about GDP or growth or full employment or prices of goods and services (or jobs "Americans won't do").
-What they do believe in is a universal rights ideal that anyone can immigrate anywhere and it is the host country's obligation to accommodate.
-This is probably bolstered by attitudes about what the developed world, Westerners, white people, whoever, owe to the denizens of poorer countries.
-To the extent any exploitation or other moral issues arise from how immigration plays out in practice, their answer is to make every entrant a citizen and/or provide legal status allowing them to benefit from all protections.
-However, they also know that this position is a total non-starter politically.
-Instead they argue for immigration from a perspective of neoliberal economics as a means of winning the argument without actually owning or making the case for their true position.
-This is what causes the weird tension that Freddie is picking up on, and that renders their arguments nonsensical to anyone paying even a little bit of attention to the larger political context and partisan divides.
-Freddie's mistake is taking the argument Hayes et al are making at face value.
-To me it's obvious that they really care about all the mushy stuff, not about having people to work at illegally low wages rebuilding LA.
On “Kansas City wants to Score the first Threepeat against the Philadelphia Eagles in New Orleans”
I think Philly's d-line is just that good. They can get pressure and sacks without help.
But really all the more reason for KC to try to do something that might draw some of those calls. Or anything at all to catch a break or change the momentum.
Instead they looked like they were playing an out of conference game at 1 PM in early October.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/10/2025”
I see it as a red herring because it is a way to defend mass unskilled immigration without arguing their implicit but unstated actual position, which is about human rights trumping parochial and/or nationalistic concerns, not really about economics at all. I think their position on the subject would be what it is no matter what the economists (or the Economist) says.
Edit to add, I'm sure Larry Summers actually does hold the 'neoliberal' position on the merits, but I do not think thats the case for name your progressive pundit.
On “Kansas City wants to Score the first Threepeat against the Philadelphia Eagles in New Orleans”
Yea the whole thing went the way the Eagles season has gone. Really good defense and 'good enough' offense to play keep away. You can sell out against Barkley but Hurts is still solid in the pass game, especially if he's going to benefit from field position and turnovers.
Washington played them better in all 3 meetings than the Chiefs did last night because they approached all of those games with an underdog mentality (i.e. go for it on 4th from the beginning) and still only went 1-2.
Who knows what happened behind the scenes but KC played the whole thing way too risk averse. Like, why not try a fake punt? Why not try a designed QB run? It's the freaking Super Bowl!
Not sure if a scouting failure or if they were just overrated all season long like many suspected.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/10/2025”
I don't think Freddie is wrong in the abstract but I do think he's wrong about the actual beliefs that lead to what I think is fairly called total intellectual dishonesty.
My take is that progressives like Hayes and Blitzer on some level believe that immigration is a human right exercised by immigrants themselves, whatever the particulars of the legal regime they are (or more pertinent, are not) following. From this perspective answering no to anyone who wants entry is itself a violation of those human rights. They're just also smart enough to understand that this framing is incredibly radical and would never be acceptable to the wider electorate, and so they pivot to neoliberal economic arguments as a sort of red herring.
On “Kansas City wants to Score the first Threepeat against the Philadelphia Eagles in New Orleans”
Oh yea, Eagles defense won that game, have to give them 80-85% of the credit. They pressured Mahomes without blitzing. He looked off all night and no one was ever open. All the Eagles offense had to do was not screw it up and they didn't.
"
At that point the Eagles had moved into more of a prevent, keep the ball in front of you defense. As soon as KC failed to do anything on the opening possession of the second half the clock became a factor. Objectively KC was shut out and as crazy as it is to say, in context of the game every single KC point was scored in garbage time.
"
I thought it was pretty meh.
But I also think hip hop sucks generally.
"
Yea Reid is much more likeable.
I still hated him when he coached the Eagles but that seems so long ago now.
"
I am pretty bored with the Chiefs but for whatever reason they do not annoy me to anywhere close to the degree the Belichick/Brady Pats dynasty did. I also despise the Eagles. This one is easy for me from a rooting perspective.
I let my oldest pick what we're doing for dinner and he (somewhat unexpectedly) said 5 Guys. So I'll be off to spend like $70 on burgers and fries that are better than McDonalds but probably not the 3 to 4 times better the price would imply.
On “Keynesian Beauty Contests, Schelling Points, and the Omnicause”
I'm not telling you to be shaking in your boots over a lawsuit. I'm telling you there is a high probability that the courts aren't going to go along with a lot of this because it isn't how the law or constitution works. In the last 48 hours alone we've had freezes on the birth right citizenship EO, the order to put the USAID employees on leave, and on Musk and team's access to Treasury Dept data, including an order to destroy anything they've taken.
What even conservatives should be worried about, not that I imagine they will be, is an approach to governance that amounts to yelling 'Somebody stop me!' like Jim Carey in the Mask. Our system is only capable of containing so much defection and aggressive probing of boundaries before sparking a constitutional crisis. No one knows what's on the other side of that and no one with any sense should want to find out.
Alternatively, while I have my doubts about the GOP's ability to govern itself in Congress, if they are able to do so and pass laws rolling up USAID into the State Department or eliminating its functions entirely, well that's just life in a democracy. Elections have consequences and whatever I or anyone else thinks about the policy decisions Congress has the authority to do things like that. Same if they want to mandate some sort of audit, eliminate the Department of Education, liquidate the federal workforce, or whatever else.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.