Henry

Sounds as though Bill Frist isn’t the only prominent Republican in trouble over stock-market shenanigans. P O'Neill links to an interesting story in the Irish Times (behind their paywall) that deserves more attention. Richard Egan, former US ambassador to Ireland and major Republican fundraiser is in very hot water with the IRS for tax avoidance.

bq. Following an investigation, the IRS claims that Mr Egan set up an “economic sham” whose principal use was to reduce his tax payments. The IRS said that Mr Egan, the billionaire co-founder of Massachusetts’ most valuable technology company, EMC Corp, used two companies to set up the scheme using a European-style options scheme as soon as he resigned as the head of EMC to become ambassador. Mr Egan and his family were the most successful fundraisers for President Bush’s re-election campaign and have long been major contributors to the Republican Party.

Like Mr. Frist, Egan seems to have set up this scheme in order to repackage the proceeds from selling shares in his family company. The Irish Times has been following Mr. Egan’s progress for a while; it ran a story last year on his and his family’s selfless contributions to the campaign of their ideological opponent, Ralph Nader. From that story:

bq. The Egans, now known in the Republican Party as the “First Family of Fundraising”, are reportedly the only US family that has three members who have raised more than $200,000 (€161,767) each for Bush’s re-election campaign.

PZ Myers announces that it’s Lurker Day, that day of the blogospheric calendar where readers who usually never make comments tell us what they like about our blog, what they don’t like, who they are etc etc. Sounds like a good idea – we have no idea who y’all are, but would like to find out.

Matt Cheney voices a common complaint about the MacArthur foundation awards.

bq. I’m glad Lethem was chosen, and certainly am excited for him, but this choice continues the unfortunate trend of the MacArthur award often going to writers who have already found a lot of success. Imagine, for instance, how much it would have changed Lethem’s life to get this award not right now, when his books sell well, but ten (or even five) years ago, when the $500,000 would have done exactly what it is supposed to do: free the recipient from financial considerations that limit their ability to experiment.

And indeed, a cursory glance at the list of awardees tells us that well over half of them are over 40, and/or well established in their career paths. Of course, the MacArthur foundation has excellent institutional reasons for choosing people who already seem to have established themselves – to do otherwise would be to take much bigger risks that MacArthur awardees are going to flake out later or have mediocre careers. But then, would you do better? If you think so, your nominations (more or less serious please) invited in comments for people who _should_ get awards in the future. Less serious speculations as to the most plausible blogger to receive a MacArthur are also invited (my money would be on Cory Doctorow).

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has some interesting things to say about his experiment in allowing comments on his blog.

1. Visitor stats rise considerably. But this happens so quickly, I believe it is people hitting “reload” to read additional comments, rather than more readers.

2. The more that comments are regularly available, the more rapidly the quality of comments falls. The quality of comments stays high when it is periodic, not automatic, and when we request comments specifically.

3. The quality of comments is highest when the matter under consideration involves particular facts and decentralized knowledge. Posts which mention evolution, free will, or Paul Krugman do not generate the highest quality of comments.

So my current sense (Alex chooses his own course, though I believe he agrees) is to ask for comments periodically rather than always having comments open. The goal is to maximize the real value of comments, rather than the number of comments (or measured visits) per se.

Which of these specific claims can be universalized? Speaking, like Tyler, from personal experience, it seems to me that his observations on visitor stats are probably generally true. The relationship between the general availability of comments, and the quality of the comments falling in particular varies considerably from blog to blog. _Making Light_ has been extraordinarily successful in building up a community of commenters with interesting things to say (it has a homier feel than most comment sections; everyone mostly knows each other). The argument that more commenters=less interesting discussions has a lot of truth to it – there is very clearly a Gresham’s law effect, where bad commenters drive out good ones. Which suggests (and again _Making Light_ illustrates this well) that a vigorous moderation policy can help counteract the negative effects of growth. Finally, Tyler may be on to something when he talks about specific facts and decentralized knowledge – but there’s another factor there which I think is even more important. That’s the extent to which there is minimal agreement on a shared set of facts in the first place. Where there isn’t – and where there’s strongly opposed viewpoints – blog comments sections tend to break down rapidly. For Tyler, it’s Paul Krugman; for us, it’s the Israel-Palestine question (where I don’t allow comments any more on the rare occasions that I post ). But even here, Jonathan Edelstein’s Head Heeb seems to succeed in hosting generally civil discussions – I suspect that this is another example of the community effect – the commenters are a group of people who seem to have come to know each other over time, and have a good sense of the ground rules of debate. But enough rabbitting on; over to you.

There’s been a lot of back-and-forth in Italy recently about the role of the governor of the Bank of Italy in blocking a foreign takeover of a domestic bank, and possibly showing favouritism to one of his mates in the process. This is creating a rift in the main government party, Forza Italia, between those (led by economy minister Domenico Siniscalco) who want to try to force him to resign, and those (including Berlusconi) who are trying to duck the issue. But there’s an accompanying story which, as far as I know, has received zero attention in the American press. A prominent member of Forza Italia has come out with his theory of why foreign bankers want to come to Italy – a conspiracy among the Elders of Zion. According to this editorial (English version here ) in _Corriere della Sera_, Guido Crosetto, a member of the Italian parliament’s finance committee, has announced that the Italian banking sector is (my translation) “proving tempting to many, above all to the hordes of Jewish and American freemasons who are already at the doors.” When asked to clarify, he “limited himself to pointing out that Merrill Lynch was ‘a particular institution in which the shareholders were specifically Jews.'”

I don’t need to stress how disgusting this is. But it’s also a little strange that it hasn’t been picked up in the US press and blogosphere (the Italian media didn’t do a great job either until the last day or two). There’s a minor cottage industry that tries (sometimes on the basis of quite remarkably dubious evidence) to identify instances of West European anti-Semitism, usually in order to insinuate that it’s the motivation behind European policies on the Middle East. But as a result, it focuses its attentions either on the European left, or on right-wingers (such as the French government) who opposed the Iraq war. The patently anti-Semitic outbursts of a politician in a party that’s one of the Bush administration’s few allies in Western Europe apparently don’t merit the same level of attention, just as Berlusconi’s own comments about Mussolini's prison camps and his notorious cracks about concentration camp kapos were greeted with silence from the right.

Update: translation slightly modified and English version of editorial added thanks to comments.

Ralph Luker has a round-up post of reactions to the second “Ivan Tribble” missive on blogging and academia. This is something that I’ll be speaking to substantively in the near future in a longer piece; for the moment, I just want to observe that blogging has been helpful in a very practical but unexpected way to my academic career. I moved last year from the University of Toronto to George Washington University (I loved Toronto and the university, but had good personal reasons, unconnected to the Department, to move). I know for a fact that my blogging at Crooked Timber played a minor (but real) role in helping me land my current job – one of the people involved in the job search for a new position was a CT reader, clicked through to my homepage, and saw that my research interests seemed a plausible fit with the Department’s needs. I suspect that the blog only played a marginal role in helping bring me to the attention of my current Department, but when you are one of many people applying for a job, every bit of name recognition helps. I can easily imagine how some kinds of blogging wouldn’t be helpful – but the vast majority of academic blogs that I read don’t fit into the rather peculiar stereotype that Tribble seems keen to perpetuate.

Turns out that some of those Godfearing, family values penguins may be playing for the other team.

(via Max).

Kevin Drum says:

bq. The fact is, conservatives haven’t won much of anything in the last 10 years except a PR triumph. Their biggest successes have been on taxes — a Pyrrhic victory at best without corresponding spending cuts — and in the court system, which hasn’t actually delivered much real world benefit. Plus they have a war in Iraq, for whatever that’s worth. Public opinion simply hasn’t allowed them anything more.

I think that this misunderstands what has been happening these last few years. I’m reading Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s _Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy_ (Powells, Amazon) at the moment, and it’s very good on this topic.

bq. As is often noted, usually with a “gotcha” thrown in, the size of public spending under President Bush has _not_ fallen, even as tax revenues have plummeted. … And while Republicans are reducing the beast’s daily rations, they are asking it to do more things – from new subsidies for corporations and rich investors to new drug benefits for the aged to trillions in potential borrowing to establish private accounts for the Social Security system. Some say this means the Republican revolution never happened. The truth is more complex. Although Republicans have not starved the beast in the short run, they are putting it on a very specific diet that is transforming the role of government in American life. This special diet is not principally aimed at making government larger or smaller, at least in the short term. It is aimed at tilting the balance of benefits and protections – usually away from ordinary Americans and toward the well off, the well connected and the Republican base … Plus, the day of budgetary reckoning _will_ come. The Republican innovation has been to separate the pleasant business of cutting taxes from the unpleasant business of slashing popular social programs. But if the Republicans continue to cut taxes, or even simply maintain existing tax reductions, the unpleasantness is coming. And it will be especially painful for those who value the popular government programs likely to come under the knife.

Update: See also Brad Plumer.

Any DC-area CT-readers who want to go to the Sigur Ros concert at the Strathmore today? I have a spare ticket which I’m giving to the first person to ask for it in comments (I’ll be around the show at 6.45pm or so to do the handover).

110 Stories.

The NYT Magazine has a long story on The Believer and n+1 magazine as apostles of the new seriousness in literary culture.

bq. In the end, this may be the common ground n+1 and The Believer occupy: a demand for seriousness that cuts against ingrained generational habits of flippancy and prankishness. Their differences are differences of emphasis and style – and the failings that each may find in the other (or that even a sympathetic reader may find in both) come from their deep investments in voice, stance and attitude rather than in a particular set of ideas or positions. For The Believer, the way to take things seriously is to care about them – “to endow something with importance,” in Julavits’s words, “by treating it as an emotional experience.” And this can lead, at times, to the credulous, seemingly disingenuous naïveté that Greif finds infantile. For n+1, the index of seriousness is thought for its own sake, which can sanction an especially highhanded form of intellectual arrogance. But, of course, this distinction, between a party of ardor and a party of rigor, is itself too schematic, since The Believer, at its best, is nothing if not thoughtful, and n+1 frequently wears its passions on its sleeve.

It’s an interesting article, which has a lot to say about the role of the little magazine in American culture. Still, its underlying argument misses the mark in its attempt to bundle two dissimilar publications into the same category. There’s a very big difference between sincerity, which is what The Believer is looking for, and the kind of seriousness that _n+1_ advocates. The one is more or less entirely apolitical, and (in my personal opinion) quite annoying – its underlying claim is that we should abandon our critical faculties and only speak when we have something nice to say. The other is a claim that both literature and politics _matter_ and should be subjected to harsh and ferocious criticism where they go wrong. Randall Jarrell, moved to sarcasm at an editor’s wrath on behalf of an aggrieved reviewee, wrote:

bq. I had thought a good motto for critics might be what the Persians taught their children: _to shoot the bow and speak the truth_; but perhaps a better one would be Cordelia’s _love and be silent_.

As best as I can tell, _n+1_ is of the Persians’ party, and _The Believer_ of Cordelia’s. Not the same thing at all.

(Full disclosure: a piece of mine will probably be published on N+1‘s website in the next month or two).

Update: John Holbo reacts to the same article on the _Valve_.

Stephen Bainbridge heads for the exit:

bq. let’s review some basic facts. The head of the National Guard has acknowledged that the deployment of his personnel to Iraq delayed the response to Katrina by at least a day. Senior Bush administration personnel told the NYT that politics delayed their response. Bush’s choice to head FEMA has been relieved. Conservative pundit/NRO Corner blogger Rod Dreher observes that “a raft of FEMA’s top leaders have little or no emergency management experience, but are instead politically well connected to the GOP and the White House. This is a scandal, a real scandal. How is it possible that four years after 9/11, the president treats a federal agency vital to homeland security as a patronage prize?” There’s a big difference between incontinence and telling the truth about an administration that is, if I may resort to being crude, screwing the pooch. Only fanatical Bush defenders like Snow can’t see the difference. It’s time for real conservatives and RINOs to unite in holding this administration’s feet to the fire.

A few days ago, Tyler Cowen gave a quite unfavourable review to Barbara Ehrenreich’s _Bait and Switch_. Tyler observed, not unreasonably, that a job candidate like Ehrenreich’s _alter ego_, who didn’t appear to have much in the way of social networks, was unlikely to secure many offers. But as Paul Campos observes today this logic cuts both ways – manifestly unqualified candidates can land plum positions which are far, far above their level of incompetence, as long as they have the right college room-mates.

bq. It’s clear that hiring Brown to run FEMA was an act of gross recklessness, given his utter lack of qualifications for the job. What’s less clear is the answer to the question of exactly what, given Brown’s real biography, he is qualified to do. … Brown’s biography on FEMA’s website reports that he’s a graduate of the Oklahoma City University School of Law. … Of more relevance is the fact that, until 2003, the school was not even a member of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) … it’s fair to say that Brown embarked on his prospective legal career from the bottom of the profession’s hierarchy. … When Brown left the IAHA four years ago, he was, among other things, a failed former lawyer–a man with a 20-year-old degree from a semi-accredited law school who hadn’t attempted to practice law in a serious way in nearly 15 years and who had just been forced out of his job in the wake of charges of impropriety. At this point in his life, returning to his long-abandoned legal career would have been very difficult in the competitive Colorado legal market. Yet, within months of leaving the IAHA, he was handed one of the top legal positions in the entire federal government: general counsel for a major federal agency. A year later, he was made its number-two official, and, a year after that, Bush appointed him director of FEMA. It’s bad enough when attorneys are named to government jobs for which their careers, no matter how distinguished, don’t qualify them. But Brown wasn’t a distinguished lawyer: He was hardly a lawyer at all. When he left the IAHA, he was a 47-year-old with a very thin resumé and no job. Yet he was also what’s known in the Mafia as a “connected guy.” That such a person could end up in one of the federal government’s most important positions tells you all you need to know about how the Bush administration works–or, rather, doesn’t.

Ehrenreich’s experiences as a middle-aged woman with a thin resume and no networks worth speaking of stacks up, shall we say, in an interesting fashion against Michael Brown’s experiences as a (slightly less) middle-aged man with an equally thin resume (if not a worse one) and high-level connections to the Republican kleptocratic classes. Tyler is right that personal networks count for a lot. But Ehrenreich’s riposte, I imagine, would be that the networks you have access to are a product of both your social position and your 'ability to be a suck-up'. A point which Brown’s skyrocketing career in the current administration drives home trenchantly (even now they’re hesitating to fire him).

The Jared Diamond wars have begun to flare up again. Of particular interest is this recent exchange between Timothy Burke and Fred Errington and Deborah Gewertz at _Savage Minds_. Tim objects that Errington and Gewertz’s critique of Diamond is itself guilty of that which it condemns.

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