Non-negligent mistake vs negligence vs strict liability vs Benghazi

Tort law was one of my favorite classes in law school, gruesome injury cases being more interesting than contractual disputes over international chicken shipments.

The usual rule of non-negligent mistake is that you lump it. I drive over a virtually-invisible oil patch and go into a skid and injure you. No one would've seen it, so the injuries are your problem.

Negligence is when I failed to see an otherwise-visible oil patch because I was adjusting the car radio instead of carefully watching the road, and this time I owe you. The classic Reasonable Person wouldn't have adjusted the radio except in absolutely safe conditions. The RP isn't superhuman, supersmart, or superskilled, but he or she doesn't make easily foreseeable mistakes.

Strict liability reverses the rule of non-negligence:  if the harm was from something that even RP would not have avoided, the victim gets compensated. Same as the first case, I drive over a virtually-invisible oil patch and injure you, only that now, your injury results from the fact that I was transporting explosives that then exploded. Strict liability is considered a mostly-modern legal invention but there were earlier forms. Collapsing dams for watermill ponds were examples, and my favorite case was a pioneering, late 19th-Century balloonist who landed on a woman's vegetable patch. She hauled him into court for her veggies. He rightly pointed out that ballooning is brand new and no one knows how to land them - the judge said tough luck, if you do something abnormally risky like ballooning then you're strictly liable for any harm.

Negligence and strict liability seemed like separate concepts until Professor Grey pointed out that the Reasonable Person acts reasonably every time, but no actual human being does. It is unreasonable to expect someone to be reasonably prudent every time, but the law expects that, so a corner of strict liability is embedded in the law of negligence, presumably for the same societal reasons that we apply strict liability in other situations.

So this brings us to Benghazi - it's hard to figure out what the right wingers are screaming about, especially when their bizarre claims about coverups seem tangential to the real issue of inadequate security in the lead-up to the tragedy. I don't know if the inadequate security was a non-negligent mistake or negligence on someone's part, although I'd lean towards the latter. As far as the response  once the attacks started and the hurt feelings of the people who believe they didn't get accurate information in the near-term aftermath, the first of those two things is hard to judge and the second isn't all that important.

But that still leaves the screw-up in the security preparations. Even if it's negligence that resulted in four deaths, I don't hold that as a major screw-up of the Obama Administration. They make thousands of security decision, and they will screw some of them up. Someone should pay for it somewhere in the chain of command (assuming it is negligence), but this is small potatoes - it would be unreasonable to go from this to concluding that the administration as a whole is negligent.

I wish the worst thing we could say about the Bush Administration was that they screwed up and four people died.


UPDATE:  I need to do some additional research but I think Paul Ryan lied to the public on national television about a national security issue in the vice-presidential debate when he said there was virtually no US security in Libya compared to what we have at the Paris embassy, while knowing that CIA was nearby. He should get hit with this when he runs in 2016.

California Democratic state convention and Grover Norquist

My two activities this weekend were to listen to the podcast of Grover Norquist speaking to the Commonwealth Club and attending the annual California Democratic Party convention in Sacramento. Norquist played up the libertarian angle, probably a smart move when a conservative addresses a liberal crowd. He definitely threw the Bushies under the bus on Iraq and claimed to oppose occupying nations (something contrary to his position back when it counted). He also claimed the Democrats drive up the size of government to increase the number of people dependent on government and therefore supportive of Democratic positions, making opposition to government spending a partisan issue on purely partisan grounds. A lot of it was either disingenuous or vague, like supporting tort action as a substitute for environmental regulation, when torts are incredibly inefficient and often limited by the Republican Party.

The best part of the Democratic state convention was a panel on strengthening partnerships to communities of color. The really interesting thing these independent organizations are doing is targeting intermittent, low-frequency voters and get them to turn out on issues (not for specific candidates). I can attest from my own campaign that those voters are not campaign primary targets - when you have limited money, you put your effort into reaching someone who votes 80-100% of the time, not 20%. While California is majority-minority, the stats they showed had a majority of voters being white and disproportionately wealthy, and until the electorate reflects the population, they argued that governmental priorities won't reflect popular needs - quite the opposite of the problem Norquist sees of a too-big government.

For myself, I'm not sure whether growing inequality is caused by unfair governmental processes biased against the poor, or by the nature of our current economy, but either reason to me justifies countervailing action. I'm not buying Norquist's argument that we just need government to leave us alone. That doesn't mean he's always wrong though - finding the areas where government doesn't work well or should be less intrusive could be an area of agreement. A cap-and-trade or carbon tax is a good example, as opposed to typical regulation. Just waiting for the Republicans to pick that one up.

We should admire and learn from them

That is all.*




*Except that I'm breaking my own rule of not posting a hotlink without also giving people some idea of what it's about.  I'm annoyed when bloggers do that.

Maybe Reid screwed the pooch on climate legislation in 2017, too

Talking Points Memo refers, on Reid's barely-anything changes to the Senate filibuster and how nothing is now happening on Obama's appointments.  To be fair, some of the problem is self-inflicted by Obama putting the task of nominating candidates to all positions somewhere below watching ESPN and filling out his college basketball tournament predictions.

The climate legislation hook is that 60 vote filibuster blockage to pass climate reform in the Senate.  Nothing is going to pass soon anyway, but we do have a shot in 2017.  Chances of success depend in part on how much the filibuster can still trip it up.  Even the strongest filibuster "reform" that was presented this year was weak tea.  I figured we have four years of trying something, finding it's not enough, and then trying something stronger.  By starting us out with barely-anything, we will end up fewer steps down the road to quasi-democratic procedures when climate legislation has a chance.

Adding to the war on science: gun research, pregnancy-rape connection....

Keith Kloor is tired of people talking about the war on science. I'd think that he would have a point if other people stopped committing a war on science. It took the news events from the last year to let me know about several fronts in the war on science that I hadn't known:  limits on health research funding that might show gun control as reducing violence (something Obama is trying to get around but is still in the law) and the claim that women couldn't or rarely became pregnant from rape.

Another recent attack, although more of a war on math, is the claim that dividing up the electoral vote from states with a slight Democratic lean by congressional district instead of awarding all the votes to the victor will result in more attention to rural conservative districts. The reality is that attention only goes to electoral votes that are truly in play - you ignore the areas that are certain wins or certain losses. Conservative districts in battleground states have a at least a shot at attention - their votes now make a difference, but not when their effect could be taken for granted.  As has been noted, this issue is just an attempt to skew the national election at the expense of the local interest.

To be fair, the question remains of when a stupid claim by some people on one side, like the pregnancy-rape thing, can be considered a joint responsibility for that side of the spectrum.  I think when it rises to the level of being made repeatedly by the political elite, Congressmen and senatorial candidates, then I'd say they at least have a problem.

Shutting down funding as in gun research takes the attacks on science to another level, from denial to an active refusal to let other people understand the issue (UPDATE:  corrected from "shutting down funding entirely", per a comment request below). Climate denialists must be jealous, although I do recall Republican attempts to shut down earth-monitoring satellites.

Threats to science providers such as bogus referrals for criminal prosecution by powerful senators are the near-worst, though.

Stop making war on science, and I'll stop talking about it.  Calling them out on it is the small good thing that can be done in response.  I think it shows in the general intellectual dissatisfaction with the Republican Party elite, and someday the Republicans will have to come around.


UPDATE:  one missing aspect of the gun research discussion is the political signalling that goes beyond the letter of the prohibition on certain results from research.  The original prohibition is/was a signal of political strength by gun nuts and a warning to government-funded researchers to stay away.  If you fund studying of drunk driving and effect on public health safety, then you get a pat on the head no matter how good or bad the work is.  Fund a study on whether more guns result in more accidental shootings/suicides/illegal guns, and expect to see your work analyzed with great bias, and expect the agency to face funding cuts in the next cycle.  Obama's action is a bit of contrary signalling.

Four out of five dentists say it's the scientific consensus, stupid

I'm late to the game of the Cox/Ince editorial on science and policy, but two points:

1. It's not "science" that matters most at the intersection of science and policy but scientific consensus that does.  If there's a well-established consensus with very few expert dissenters, then you've got factual conclusions as far as policymakers are concerned.  The consensus could be wrong of course, but that's not really relevant to policymakers - they don't have a choice of waiting for a perfect consensus because that won't happen.  What's missing from the commentary I've seen is that policymakers also don't have the choice of second-guessing the consensus by becoming their own Galileos.

Let's forget climate change for a while and take my constrained policymaking field instead.  Should I direct my water district to add fluoride to our water supply?  The vast majority of dentists say it helps teeth, but some disagree.  Does adding fluoride create non-dental health risks for the general population?  The vast majority of oncologists, endocrinologists, and neurologists reflected in the scientific consensus say somewhere between "no" and "not proven," but some disagree.  It's ridiculous to think I could get sufficient expertise in those three fields as well as dentistry to let me judge between experts.

And fluoride is just one issue.  What about water supply decontamination - should we use chlorine or chloramine?  What is the maximum horizontal acceleration that a worst-case earthquake will exert on each of our eleven dams?  Is the stream gauge appropriately sited to be provide accurate data on stream flow during storm events?  How much chromium 6 is tolerable in our stored groundwater?  Can migrating steelhead trout make it up the proposed fish ladder? I'm not second-guessing these things if they have an expert consensus behind it, regardless of a few dissenters.

Incidentally, I don't distinguish between scientific consensus and other expert consensus.  Seismologists tell us the maximum acceleration during an earthquake, and engineers tell us what dams can handle.  I don't see a difference.

The intersection with policy gets complicated if the consensus has an important dissenting faction or if there's no consensus at all, but that's not what we're facing on some issues, like global climate change.

2.  Contrary to what scientists often say, the science can all-but-decide policy because some policy questions are easy.  Scientific predictions of climate change in the next century under business as usual emission scenarios run from "bad" to "potentially disastrous".  That's pretty much all we need to know from a policy perspective to conclude that we have to deal with it.  The question of how we deal with it isn't easy or exclusively a science question, but whether to deal with it was answered by science.

Time to show fingerprints on Syria issues

From NYTimes:

The Obama administration secretly gave its blessing to arms shipments to Libyan rebels from Qatar last year, but American officials later grew alarmed as evidence grew that Qatar was turning some of the weapons over to Islamic militants, according to United States officials and foreign diplomats.... 

The experience in Libya has taken on new urgency as the administration considers whether to play a direct role in arming rebels in Syria, where weapons are flowing in from Qatar and other countries.

The Obama administration did not initially raise objections when Qatar began shipping arms to opposition groups in Syria, even if it did not offer encouragement, according to current and former administration officials. But they said the United States has growing concerns that, just as in Libya, the Qataris are equipping some of the wrong militants....  

Relying on surrogates allows the United States to keep its fingerprints off operations, but also means they may play out in ways that conflict with American interests....

“....When you have an intermediary, you are going to lose control.”

The obvious reaction is either stop getting involved or stop worrying about showing your fingerprints. I'll go for Door #2.  I supported making the threat of limited military involvement in February and more actual support for the opposition in July, and I think either case would have shortened the time frame of the civil war and improved a future transition.  I remain concerned about ethnic massacres and religious instability in the post-Assad future.  Supporting groups that are less likely to do this, and especially getting Alawite opposition groups into a prominent position in the opposition military forces, could be crucial for the country's future.  Unfortunately, I think the war might still grind for months more, giving time for this option to work out.

For my less interventionist friends, I'll just mention that until recently I hadn't been too opposed to the drone war in Pakistan overall as a legitimate function of self-defense against Al Qaeda, but I'm reconsidering.  Al Qaeda in Pakistan isn't that big of a threat, while Pakistan itself desperately needs stability.  Pakistan is simply more important, and the drone strikes aren't helping.  Not sure if I'd completely eliminate them, but the go/no go decisionmaking needs to change.

Good Yglesias, Bad Yglesias

In the Good Yglesias category, we have "the spice must flow" problem in that stopping the Keystone XL pipeline and other pipeline-fighting as led to a boom in shipping oil by rail.  This correctly points the problem with a regulatory approach to carbon reduction - someone looks for a way around the regulation.   OTOH, oil is not the same as Herbert's spice - it's a lot more price elastic in the long run, and anything running up the price will reduce the quantity purchased.

Regulation is an imperfect substitute for a carbon cap or carbon tax, but it's better than nothing.

For Bad Yglesisas, we have a cursory rejection of the idea that people making over $400,000 could have their entire income taxed at the highest rate instead of just the amount falling in the highest bracket.  The flaw is a simplistic approach Yglesias takes - identify a problem and then pronounce the whole thing dead.  Yes, as he describes, a ten-dollar increase in income could result in tens of thousands of dollars in additional taxes.  He fails to take the next step to see if the problem has a solution.  In this case, just alter the proposal so that the more a person's income exceeds $350,000, the larger the share of that person's income under $200,000 that gets taxed at the top rate.  It satisfies the Republicans' inane criteria of not raising the top rate while getting more tax money out of the top earners.  The solution isn't too difficult.

That's not to say it's a good idea when compared to simply raising the rate as Obama proposes, along with restoring estate tax rates to the 2009 level.  John Sides notes this proposal protects the ultra-rich by going after the rich.  That seems to be a common theme in Republican Party policy.


UPDATE:  Pat Robertson finds a nut.



Climate change would also fall under a "revealed science" category to the extent that category equals "about as proven as you're going to get in science."

Lessons or lack thereof from bipartisan movements

As Obama heads off to Burma, I think back to when I knew something about that country.  I spent two winters there doing volunteer work in the early 90s and then several years in the mid-90s in Oregon focusing on Burma human rights work, comparing the situation to South Africa.  I'm cautiously optimistic at this point, although the ethnic conflict is far from over and even democracy will be no guarantee of good treatment for ethnic minorities.

Relative to most other western nations, the US did pretty well in Burma, backing up Suu Kyi and others in the elected/overthrown leadership.  When we activists went Congress to ratchet up sanctions, the senators we counted on were Patrick Leahy, Mitch McConnell, and Jesse Helms (Ted Kennedy was also good, I think).  Our little Oregon group got every member of the Oregon congressional delegation to support sanctions, with liberal Republican Mark Hatfield being the hardest one to convince.  Burma never became polarized in American politics, as far as I can tell.

In another field that has long been polarized, things are changing.  Washington Monthly has a good piece titled The Conservative War on Prison, with conservatives starting to hop onto the alternatives-to-prison bandwagon.  The article is good on the what and when aspects of conservative change, but less so on the why and why at this particular time aspects.  There was this, though:

At the start of the 2007 legislative session, legislative analysts predicted that Texas was on track to be short 17,700 prison beds by 2012 because of its growing inmate population. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s response was to ask legislators to build three new prisons, but Madden and Whitmire had other ideas. Not only did they bring back a revamped version of their probation proposal—they also took aim at the revolving-door problem by cranking up funding for programs such as in-prison addiction treatment and halfway houses. This time, Perry relented (persuaded at least in part, the duo contends, by a high-stakes meeting they held with him shortly before the opening of the legislative session). Since then, the prison population has not increased, and last year, the TDCJ closed a prison for the first time in decades.

Budget shortfalls do not explain this shift. In 2007 Texas was basking in a huge projected surplus, and the Great Recession was still a year away. Instead, Madden and Whitmire had different winds at their backs. For one thing, the policy context favored reform. One legacy of the state’s prison litigation trauma is that Texas has strict restrictions on overcrowding (unlike, say, California). Under Texas law, when the system approaches capacity, corrections staff must seek certification from the attorney general and the governor to incarcerate more prisoners. The approval process forces state leaders to confront the choice between more prisons and more diversion programming. The political environment had also changed since the GOP completed its takeover of state politics in 2003. As a longtime observer of the state’s criminal justice notes, “Now … all the tough guys are Republicans. They don’t want to be outdoing each other on this stuff.”

I'm not entirely happy with this explanation.  I have my own, which is that ideological movements get bored.  After saying the same thing for a long time, there's a desire to say something else.  I think conservative ideology takes longer to get restless than others, but it still happens.  It's also not always successful:

Of course, there are limits to how far ideological reinvention can go. As political scientist David Karol has argued, it is unlikely to work when it requires crossing a major, organized member of a party coalition. That’s something environmentalists learned when they tried to encourage evangelicals to break ranks on global warming through the idea of “creation care.” They got their heads handed to them by the main conservative evangelical leaders, who saw the split this would create with energy-producing businesses upon whom Republican depend for support.

That's a rather simplified description of what happened among evangelicals, including who started it, how far it got, and whether the movement's truly ended.  It also downplays the difficulty in crossing the ideological and economic barriers of the tough-on-crime mindset and the prison-industrial complex.

I'm not sure what lessons to draw from all this for climate policy purposes.  Sometimes all you can do is wait for people to change - or push change through without their help.  I've also thought for a while that Al Gore has been careful to avoid some of the limelight.  Conservatives are showing some real ferment over immigration, modest change on gay marriage, and tiny little cracks in climate denial.  Maybe we'll get lucky.

The path to citizenship will be crooked for Republicans

A few more thoughts on the election and then I'll let it go:

Immigration.  The Republicans are in trouble on immigration and citizenship no matter what they do.  No change and they imitate the California Republican Party in relevance.  Much of their elite seems to realize this and want to compromise, but the Democrats should put them through a wringer and demand everything the Ds think should happen:  a reasonable pathway to citizenship for immigrants who have been here for a reasonable amount of time.  The 1987 amnesty applied to people who had been in the country for over five years, setting them on a path to citizenship seven years after being legalized.  Personally I'd lengthen the first period and shorten the second one, but it's a reasonable model for the future.

If the Rs refuse to pass something like this through Congress, then beat them up over it in 2014 while also getting the best compromise possible.  If the Rs do pass something substantial, then they still lose, because those legalized citizens will be Democratic voters for a generation and a fraction.  The Rs painted themselves into this corner, it'll be a long time to get out.  The white vote share of the presidential electorate is declining 2 points every four years, probably translating into a one-percent gain each cycle for the Democratic candidate.

Denialists lost seats.  In under-reported news, four out of five Congressional Representatives dubbed the "Flat Earth Five" by the League of Conservation Voters for denying climate reality lost their seats, and eleven of twelve generally anti-environment candidates also got beat.  These people were specially targeted and I've been looking for more specifics; the League needs to update their website (a little update here).  This is a nice bit of karmic payback for 2010, when most of the eight Republicans who voted to do something about climate lost their seats to primary challengers.

Citizens United redistributed income.  Some billionaires redistributed a few percent of this year's income to the somewhat-less wealthy without causing too much harm at the federal level in this election.  I'm not quite as sure they were harmless at the state and local level this cycle, and even the dumbest of rich people may learn to spend their unlimited campaign money more effectively in the future, again most likely by targeting it at the state and local level.  Watch out for next time.

Overturning Citizens United.  Obama will probably nominate 2-3 justices over the next four years.  Ginsburg, age 79 and with previous cancer bouts, should have retired a year or two ago but took a huge risk hanging on.   Hopefully she'll do the right thing, and Breyer, age 74, might do the same.  The conservatives' ages are 76 (Scalia), 76 (Kennedy), 64 (Thomas), 62 (Alito) and 57 (Roberts).  They'll do their best to last out four years, but might not have a choice.

Bahrain Silence = Climate Silence.  Juan Cole had an interesting post about continuing repression in Bahrain against the Shiite majority.  Too bad that Romney wasn't asked to compare his relative activism over Syria, which I liked, to the situation in Bahrain.  Maybe the Republican talking heads on the Sunday shows could still get asked - this is the worst situation of the US looking the other way, for somewhat obvious military reasons.

Hanging up my local politics crystal ball.  My water district had three elections, and I called all three wrong.  It doesn't make the results bad - I'm actually thrilled that our funding measure that needed two-thirds' support under California law received 72.65% support, and it includes $24 million that helps prepare for sea level rise along San Francisco Bay.  Staff's first draft had $5 million for this; I can (and will) take credit for much of the increased funding.

UPDATE:  forgot to add my plea to reduce the Senate filibuster bottleneck, along with the actually-still-alive hope that Harry Reid might do it.

UPDATE 2:  with actuarial tables and my trusty calculator, I get a 79% chance of four-year survival for each of Scalia and Kennedy, 93% for Thomas, 94% for Alito, and 96% for Roberts, leaving a 52% chance that all five will survive four years.  Their health probably makes this an underestimate, but severe disability might also get one or two of them to leave if they really couldn't serve.

Taking on our toughest challenges

The Christie cameo is probably no accident - enviros would love to split him off from the denialists.


P.S.  For my wonderful Santa Clara County voters, please vote Yes on Measure B!

If campaigns are zero-sum games, why will neither side talk about climate?

I've seen the justified lamentations about the lack of climate discussion in the campaign, and occasional discussion of why Obama hasn't talked that much about it.  (I provided my own explanation - Ohio.)  There's less discussion of why Romney doesn't talk about it, and little about why the interaction between candidates doesn't produce discussion.

In zero-sum politics, a disadvantage for one candidate should be an advantage for the other candidate, so why doesn't at least one of them push his opinion?

Unlike Karl Rove, I don't have THE answer, but I do have possibilities:

1.  This NYTimes article says their positions aren't that different.  Both acknowledge people are changing climate, so there's no reason to talk about that as opposed to their actual differences over energy policy.

I'm not buying it, first because it far overstates Romney's acceptance of climate change: "there remains a lack of scientific consensus on the issue."  That leaves plenty of room for a fight between reality and denial.  Also the strong difference in energy policy - support a growing sector versus abandoning it to China in favor of a declining and polluting sector - should easily reference back to climate.

The article does provide a service in saying Obama hasn't been completely silent.  And Romney's oblique references have been mocking Obama's intention to do something about it.  Let's refine the question to why both sides say so little instead of being silent.

On to more promising ideas.

2.  One or both sides overestimate the risk to their position.  If each side thinks the issue can backfire and hurt their side relative to the other, then neither will bring it up.  Both campaigns might think the issue has a 55% chance of helping the other side - that's not possible in zero sums, but would mean someone has bad political judgment.

I think this plays a role.

3.  It's not climate as an issue but their own ability to hurt themselves.  Maybe the candidates figure anything they say is more likely to motivate the other side than it is to motivate their own side, so again they keep quiet.  The analogy would be to Romney's relative silence over his abortion position, and the Democrats' relative silence about their somewhat-tepid opposition to torture and civil rights violations.

Problem with this one is that surrogates and Superpacs would likely go on the attack over climate, but everyone has little to say.

4.  It's like space policy - not enough people cared to force it on the agenda.  If Hurricane Sandy had happened in September then things might have been different.  If last summer's heat wave had more time to get into the public mindset, it also might have changed things.  The idea here though is that while the policy elites may be thinking of these things, most of the public isn't.

Sadly, I'm giving this last option the most credit, with an assist from overestimating risk.  It doesn't excuse a lack of leadership, but again helps explain it.  And it means those of us who care about climate have to do more.


For a little respite from climate silence, here's a debate between campaign surrogates with the last part discussing climate.  Romney's surrogate flat-out lies in the debate about current coal technology not producing pollutants, but admits that Romney would eliminate greenhouse gas controls that the EPA is currently phasing in under the Clean Air Act.  He also says the government should provide some money for energy research, but nothing to reduce carbon emissions.  So much for the NY Times article.

How dare Nate Silver suggest that someone put his money where his mouth is

The public editor at the NY Times is aghast that Nate Silver proposed a $1000 bet for charity against Joe Scarborough over the election outcome.  Silver thinks the math and data shows a high likelihood of Obama victory, while Scarborough doesn't like math and think people that use it should be told to shut up.  Perhaps sensing that her pearl-clutching isn't too convincing, the editor suggests people think he's a journalist when he's clearly a columnist discussing his own view of things, and gets a news editor to suggest discomfort with a journalistic slippery slope.

I honestly don't get why people have problems with other people proposing bets.  My guess is they don't like betting themselves and therefore think nobody else should be allowed to bet, so they make statements like it's "classless" to bet with money going to charity.  I kind of like incentives, myself, but maybe I'm classless.

As for that scary slippery slope, I would gladly give a push and would love to see other columnists put their money where their mouths are, because it might rein them in a little bit, or their critics.  Kind of harder to do that on the straight news side where it's an institution that's reporting out, not just the names on the byline, but if the institution can figure out a way to do that, then more power to them.  What a wonderful world it would be.

A better critique, also noted by people in Silver's Twitter feed, is that if Scarborough believes the odds are 50-50, and all Silver is offering is an even odds bet, then there's no advantage to Scarborough in taking the bet.  No disadvantage either, but there's no incentive from Scarborough's perspective.  Silver should put up $1250 against $1000 to fix that.  Also the money shouldn't go to the same charity but ideally to different ones that the two sides rank differently in preference.  Part of betting is to make people think carefully about their claims, and if the same charity gets the money then you lose some of that incentive.

And while I'm on the subject - there are many many reasons why Mitt Romney would be terrible for the country, especially on climate change, but I don't think his $10,000 bet offer was one of them.  As a gotcha line in the debate it might have been kind of lame, the outcome might have been deceptive, and the cavalier attitude towards that kind of money is unfortunate, but the simple concept of betting someone over a false statement isn't wrong.  Bloomberg has much better reasons for voting for Obama instead of Romney.

Romney in Ohio

Romney's team is replaying the tricks that Karl Rove wore out several times, a false sense of guaranteed victory.  From saying in 2006 that Republicans would control the Senate and the House right before they lost both, to the current claim of momentum, it's smoke and burnt toast.

In Ohio, polls show Obama ahead, and way ahead in the locked in, early vote:

On one hand, the two candidates are locked in a dead heat among Ohioans who have not yet voted but who say they intend to, with 45% of respondents supporting the President and 45% preferring his Republican challenger. 

But Obama has clearly received a boost from Ohio’s early voting period, which began on Oct. 2 and runs through November 5. Among respondents who say they have already voted, Obama holds a two-to-one lead over Romney, 60% to 30%. 

When those two groups are combined, the TIME poll reveals, Obama leads by five points overall in Ohio. 

“At least for the early vote, the Obama ground game seems to be working,” says Mark Schulman, president of Abt SRBI, which conducted the poll. 

Nearly one third of all Ohioans voted early in 2008.

(Emphasis added.)  Romney's losing ground with every day.  If he doesn't pick up three or four points or even more starting now, not just on Election Day, then he loses Ohio (assuming the poll's right, of course).  Nate Silver says the candidate who wins Ohio wins the election in 95% of his simulations.  If Romney loses Ohio, he then needs to win Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Colorado, and Virginia.

Keep talking up that momentum Mitt, but you're losing the race as long as the Democrats do a good ground game on turnout, or someone springs an October surprise.


UPDATE:  I forgot to add the obvious that Ohio is car-manufacturing oriented, and the less-obvious that it's 82% dependent on coal.  This might help explain, although not excuse, Obama's climate silence.

Republicans care more about diplomats than soldiers

It's not something I would have predicted, but it's hard to make logical sense over the Republican scrutiny of every detail of the four tragic American deaths in Benghazi while having little interest in the events immediately preceding the deaths of thousands of US soldiers under hundreds of scenarios in wars under both Bush and Obama.  I guess diplomats matter more to Republicans?

It's a dangerous world and people make mistakes.  There's no evidence tying security mistakes to Obama and Biden, at less so than the Paul Ryan and the Republican's vote to decrease security funding for diplomats, not to mention Ryan's deception in the last debate by saying no Marines were in Benghazi even though the Republicans had incompetently leaked that the CIA security was present.

Hope some of that comes out tonight, if we are forced to put a microscope on a that small part of the Libyan revolution that otherwise has had enormous positive consequences for Libya and the rest of the world (other than Mali).

Romney refuses to disclose whether he paid a significant amount of income taxes before 2010

The headline above is the takeaway I get from the "disclosures" by the Romney campaign that just went up an hour or so ago.  All they're saying is percentage of adjusted income spent on taxes, not whether the income is virtually eliminated by tax strategies like write-offs from capital losses.  If the vast majority of his $250 million is in investments that lost money, and he made some money on speaking fees that paid normal income taxes, his overall tax bill would be not that much larger than someone in the upper middle class.

What they need to do is show the tax returns, which would give some way to examine if they've been playing games.  Failing that, they should at least provide brief details with actual amounts paid in each of the years they've summarized, just like they did for 2011.  If we believe the summaries released today, Romney did pay taxes every year, but we don't yet know if the taxes amounted to a hill of beans.

That stagflation they predicted in 2009 doesn't seem to be happening

Here's me bloviating in February 2009:

Conservatives choose inflation as a test of whether the stimulus will be a failure

I've seen conservatives railing against the stimulus package as something that will bring inflation without economic growth, or a return to stagflation. Sounds like we've got a good, Republican-chosen, measurable parameter of whether the stimulus fails.

If inflation in the next year or two spikes dangerously far above last year's 3.85%without being caused by something external like an oil shock, then the Republicans turned out to be right. I don't think the absence of inflation by itself proves the stimulus worked, but it will show the downside risk was very low.

Of course, I expect conservatives will attempt to have people forget everything they said about stagflation when the time comes around, but this is one way to make it slightly harder.

For related fun, here are the Republican prophecies of doom at the time of the Clinton 1993 stimulus plan.

Now with the latest action by the Fed, we hear more of the same inflation nonsense from the same people, such as this genius given a February 2009 Op-Ed space in the NY Times:

Thirty Years Later, a Return to Stagflation  

CONGRESS has made a terrible mistake. Amid a rhetorical debate centered on words like “crisis,” “emergency” and “catastrophe,” it acted too fast. While arguments were made about the stimulus bill’s specific components — taxpayer money for condoms, new green cars and golf carts for federal bureaucrats, another round of rebate checks — its more dangerous consequences were overlooked. And now the package threatens a return to the kind of stagflation last seen in the 1970s.

 Be sure to check out the entire entertaining read from the future Vice-Presidential nominee of the GOP.

Getting Romney's culture quote just right

There may have been some confusion about what Romney actually said about culture and economic success, so I thought I would document it:

I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things....As you come here and you see the G.D.P. per capita, for instance, in Massachussetts, which is about $53,000, and compare that with the G.D.P. per capita just across the state of Mississippi managed by Governor Haley Barbour, which is more like $31,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality....If you could learn anything from the economic history of the world it’s this: culture makes all the difference.... I recognize the hand of providence in selecting this place.

I think I got that right.  If not perfectly correct, then I'm certain it fits the spirit of what he was trying to say.

News report of quote is here, and economic info here.

The real process problem that Republican leaders have with Obama's immigration order

UPDATE:  per the comments, the change was a policy change and not a new Executive Order as it was originally reported.  Not sure that changes the analysis.)


Republican leaders have complained at great length about the alleged process problem with Obama's DREAM executive order, deferring for two years any action to remove illegal immigrants who were brought here as children.  They say it's not up to Obama to choose which laws to enforce, and the correct process is to change the law via Congress.

So this is silly- prosecutorial discretion is a standard executive function.  The Rs do have a process concern, just not the one they mentioned.  See the recently-passed transportation bill instead:

Thanks to the stubbornness of the Senate’s political odd couple — the liberal Barbara Boxer of California and the conservative James Inhofe of Oklahoma — Congress approved on Friday afternoon a serviceable transportation bill.... it does not include two anti-environmental riders pressed by the House — one approving the risky Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada, the other preventing regulation of toxic coal ash waste from power plants....There are flaws, some serious. Financing for “transportation alternatives” — bike paths, pedestrian walkways and the like — suffered modest cuts. The bill also directs the transportation secretary to suspend environmental reviews of highway and transit projects costing less than $5 million, in violation of environmental law.

What's the relation?  Must-pass, popular legislation is a great place to push one's priorities onto one's opposition, especially unpopular things like stopping regulation of toxic coal ash.  The Rs didn't get all they wanted, but they did get some of it.

They wanted the same process for popular, must-pass legislation barely tolerating illegal immigrants brought here as children - they wanted to see what other, unrelated and toxic provisions they could get passed at the same time within Democratic legislation.  Now, it's no longer must-pass - the Ds can help their constituencies via Executive Order, so Rs have to actually offer something better than the EO to get them on board.

Expect the same thing, by the way, for whatever your favorite flavor of climate legislation.  It won't stay pure.  Sorry about that.  To whatever (limited) extent we can get similar climate results via EPA regulation under the Clean Air Act, that reduces Republican leverage, just as Obama did on the immigration issue.

Obamacare part deux - credit where due

Brian Beutler on March 26:

In a little-noticed exchange Monday, conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts may have tipped his hand that he’s entertaining the possibility that the health care law’s individual mandate can be upheld on a constitutional basis that’s different from the one supporters and opponents have made central to their arguments....Roberts suggested he’s skeptical that the mandate and its penalties can be treated separately and may have opened the door to finding that Congress’ power to impose the mandate springs from its broad taxing power.

And Mark Kleiman on Wednesday:

....the ill-tempered and intemperate) outbursts from Alito about juvenile LWOP and (especially) Scalia about immigration make me wonder. If their side had won a huge victory – if they were about to overturn Obamacare – wouldn’t you expect them to be on their best behavior, and disinclined to reveal the full extent of their partisan hackery?
On the other hand, if Kennedy or maybe even Roberts decided that killing ACA was a bridge too far, it would be perfectly understandable if that put the extreme reactionaries in a pissy mood. 

I offer no prediction. But I’m not in total despair. I’ll leave that for tomorrow.

I've heard others say they had the same suspicion, but didn't hear them say it before the decision came out.

Another effect includes Vermont single payer plan getting a boost:

Vermont's push for universal, publicly funded, single-payer health care is going ahead no matter what, Gov. Peter Shumlinsaid Thursday, but he hailed the U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the federal Affordable Care Act as a big boost for the state's efforts.
Shumlin called Thursday "a great day for Vermonters and a great day for Americans." But, he added, "I would say that of all the states of the Union, the least to be impacted by the Affordable Care Act is probably the state of Vermont."
That's because Vermont's health care overhaul, which legislation passed last year says will be implemented by 2017, goes well beyond the federal law, in the direction of a Canadian-style public system.
The biggest impact from the federal law will be money: an estimated $400 million a year in tax credits to help people with low and moderate incomes buy health insurance. That's expected to provide a partial answer to a big and still unanswered question: how Vermont will pay for its new health care system.

I'll add more on that Commerce Clause dicta thing:  if Obama's re-elected and gets to replace one of the five justices who made up the nonsense, it's far easier for a lower court to make up its own mind rather than glumly affirm a bad precedent and wait for the Supremes to overrule it.

Finally, Anthony Kennedy as a radical with some liberal social views, not a moderate.  I guess I can see it.