The subprime mortgage mess

A scandalous detail about the failings of the ratings agency in the mortgage mess as revealed in a column by Tom Friedman in the NYTimes: Standard & Poor's was not equiped to estimate what would happen to default rates if home prices went down. Their system was built on the assumption that home prices could only go up.

Apparently, they had never heard the term housing bubble.

Appropriate Tasks

For these 3 months we're living with the slightly absurd situation of a discredited government remaining in power during a crisis. The absurdity is on full display here in a screenshot from MSNBC (from Matthew Yglesias):



Each man has a task appropriate to their abilities: Obama's is to deal with our mess, and Bush's is to pardon a turkey. It must be said, pardoning a turkey requires some skill, since Sarah Palin was unable to pull it off without a major disaster. But Bush can probably handle this.

But Obama has to try to calm markets and do whatever he can do behind the scenes to lead Paulson away from any major fiasco. This is just nuts. This is the kind of situation where a vote of no confidence needs to lead to a change of government, NOW!

Maybe it would be a good thing if the Constitution were more easily amended.

Update: The Onion! What a national treasure.


In Thanksgiving Tradition, Bush Pardons Scooter Libby In Giant Turkey Costume

Barnes is Domestic Policy

Here’s a January 2007 Melody Barnes op-ed on what a progressive president might say in a Sate of the Union address:

House Dems did Better than Obama

Yglesias points out a strange deflation of praise for how well House Dems did.

All told, 56 percent of Americans voted for a House Democrat whereas only 52 percent voted for a Republican in 1994. That’s a larger majority than Obama got and, indeed, would have been considered a pretty crushing landslide on the presidential label.

Before I read this, I definitely thought house Dems did well, picking up seats for second straight cycle which is rare, but not as bone crushingly well as I would have hoped given the overall political contex.

What is even weirder about house races going well is that public approval ratings for congress are very low.

Proposed by-law change

Here's the wording which, I anticipate, will be voted on in late December. It would require 2/3rds support from the voting members in order to pass:


Proposed new wording:

4.2) Membership is valid for one year, expiring on December 31st.

(TO REPLACE: Membership is valid for one year, from annual meeting to the next annual meeting.)

RATIONALE: Having memberships expire at the annual meeting (in March) leads to confusion. Having memberships expire on December 31st would simplify the situation and reduce confusion. Under this change, a 2009 membership would run for the calendar year 2009. Since CSCC has not held votes in January and February, the change will not deprive any current (2008) member of a voting privilege: it will simply allow more time to join for 2009. (The steering committee vote occurs sometime after the annual meeting in March.)


The steering committee discussed the by-laws at some length and decided that this was the only substantive change needed. We also decided not to take up valuable energy with this issue in the midst of the political season, which is why we are now tackling it at the end of the year.

I hope the change will prove uncontroversial since its only practical effect is to make it easier for everyone to remember whether or not they are currently a member. However, if you do have objections, feel free to voice them in the comments (anonymously if you prefer).

Brought tears to my eyes...

At the end of this long WaPo article on an 89 year old, Black member of the White House staff, and his wife who also worked there, came this absolute gut wrencher.

They talked about praying to help Barack Obama get to the White House. They'd go vote together. She'd lean on her cane with one hand, and on him with the other, while walking down to the precinct. And she'd get supper going afterward. They'd gone over their Election Day plans more than once.

"Imagine," she said.

"That's right," he said.

On Monday Helene had a doctor's appointment. Gene woke and nudged her once, then again. He shuffled around to her side of the bed. He nudged Helene again. He was all alone.

"I woke up and my wife didn't," he said later.

Some friends and family members rushed over. He wanted to make coffee. They had to shoo the butler out of the kitchen.

The lady whom he married 65 years ago will be buried today.

The butler cast his vote for Obama on Tuesday. He so missed telling his Helene about the black man bound for the Oval Office.

538 and polling recap

I've been expecting an election post-mortem from Nate Silver comparing the 538 predictions to (1) the polls themselves, and (2) the other polling compilations (pollster and real clear politics). I'm surprised that it hasn't yet appeared, because it's an interesting question that deserves some sophisticated analysis, namely, when you try hard to learn as much as possible from aggregated polling data fit against demographics, how close does it get you?

In absence of the sophisticated analysis, we can do something simple minded: we can compare the predicted spread in the national popular vote to the actual spread (which is by now settled, regardless of what comes out of Missouri). Kos has some work on this here and here. For aggregators, 538 missed the popular vote difference by 0.4%, while Real Clear Politics and Pollster both came in over 2%. Score one for Nate.

Now for individual polls, Kos lists 14 pollsters (CNN, Rasmussen, Gallup, CBS, etc) and their deviation from the final popular vote ranged from 0.5 to 5.7, with median error around 2.5%. Conclusions to draw from this: Evidently quality aggregation adds significant value to the projection capability of pollsters. Given 14 different pollsters making predictions, the odds are that at least one of them would be nearly spot on by chance (so, not especially useful knowledge because you can't predict WHICH one will be spot on). So that Nate beat the whole field is remarkable.

Another conclusion is that low quality aggregation adds little value: it's not enough to simply average results. Pollster and Real Clear Politics came in about like typical single pollsters.

So, Nate evidently owns the quality aggregation. It will be interesting (to me at least) to see how this stands up to more sophisticated analysis.

Meeting without preconditions: We were warned!

John McCain warned us that Obama would meet with dastardly leaders without preconditions, and today we see that he was right. Obama is meeting with perhaps the least popular leader in the world, one who has been accused of significant human rights violations, and who has carelessly led his country to economic ruin. And the word is that Obama's not just meeting, he's planning to be concillatory, to forge a partnership. We should have known!

(borrowed from TPM reader DG)

Friday Humor: The Aftermath

From The Onion. I wish this didn't ring so true, but it really, really does.

The Exhale - Supreme Court Edition

So, Obama has won, and we're all starting to absorb the prospect of having a sane, functioning national government in the near future. One of the relatively important areas where this matters received surprisingly little attention during the campaign, namely, the Supreme Court. Let me outsource this to Brad DeLong, who writes

At the moment the Supreme Court consists of one very smart centrist-liberal Democrat, Ruth Bader Ginsburg; one very smart centrist-centrist Democrat, Stephen Breyer; one very old good-hearted Republican, John Paul Stevens; one very tired center-right Republican, David Souter; one right-establishment Republican, Anthony Kennedy; and four raving Republican wingnuts with varying degrees of cleverness. Seven Republicans, only three of them attached to reality, and two Democrats.

This degree of Republican partisan entrenchment in the court is--in a word--bizarre. It is not a good thing.

I think Brad's assessment of the justices is spot on. I would add that the three most likely retirements - likely to come in the next four years - are Ginsburg, Stevens, and Souter. That's three of the four justices usually considered the "liberal" side of the court (even though two of them are in fact Republicans). Losing more ground to the wacko side of the court would have been beyond bad. We already have bad, even very bad. Losing more ground would have been disasterous.

DeLong continues:

Moreover. this Supreme Court forfeited any claim to be due deference from the other branches of the government when it prostituted its office to install George W. Bush as president eight years ago. It then established a new constitutional principle: that if an election is close and if one party has appointed an overwhelming majority of justices of the Supreme Court, that majority gets to decide the election.

Republican hack Alex Castellanos said last night, on CNN: "There is no way for us Republicans to win this election unless we had a 9-0 majority on the Supreme Court." That was a joke. But it really wasn't a joke at all, was it?

Think about that.

Is this a constitutional principle that we want established? No. But it will be established unless we declare that this is not, in fact, a constitutional moment we want to embrace.

He goes on to propose a punitive solution for Congress to enact. His proposal is not the least bit likely to happen (he likes to expound these ideas as a matter of principle, and more power to him), and probably shouldn't happen. But in my opinion, we should take the time to reflect and be clearheaded about how truly awful our Supreme Court is, and how truly unacceptable their behavior was in the 2000 election.

One of the many steps of our long, slow national exhale.

Yes We Can? (The Answer)

HOORAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dubya's legacy

This Historian takes apart Dubya's legacy. I am mostly looking to the future, but this line is a doozy (Gibbon wrote the definitive rise and fall of Roman Empire).

Not even Gibbon could supply a story as fatefully bizarre as the ultimate consummation of Reagan-Bush conservatism, its last act: the most massive shift of financial power from the private to the public sector since the New Deal. Rather like the Pope deciding that all along he really wanted a barmitzvah.

LOL