Ryan Cooper

I ain't got no Nobel Prize, but I'm going down guns blazing Paul Krugman and Mike Konczal  team up again me and Jonathan Chait to argue that, despite mine and Chait's assertion of a conservative reform movement, there isn't much meat on their policy bones. There's something to that as far as the specific policies they mention (climate change, the danger of inflation), but I think they're rather missing the point. You see, whether some policy is labeled "liberal" or "conservative" is a rather fluid thing. As people have pointed out a gazillion times, Obamacare is basically indistinguishable from Bob Dole's 90s healthcare plan, developed by the Heritage Foundation and first passed by Mitt Romney. Yet the minute people associated that set of ideas with Obama, average Republicans instantly created an iron-hard belief that Obamacare represents the death knell of American freedom, and rearranged their policy views accordingly. T...

Jonah Goldberg, noted right-wing intellectual , has a new book out about cliches. He doesn't like them, and today he highlights one he especially doesn't like: “Einstein defined insanity as ‘doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”  First of all does anyone know if he really said that?  Second, this is absurd. You know a better word for “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”?  “Practice.” I can't find definitive proof of the veracity of the Einstein quote one way or the other, though I think Goldberg is right to be skeptical of it; that sort of thing is common. But this is a tendentious misreading of the cliche. When practicing, you expect the same thing every time, namely to get better at whatever you're practicing. Einstein (or whoever) obviously meant that if you're trying to accomplish some goal, and you do something and it doesn't work , then it's foolish to keep doing tha...

Chris Mooney pulls out the following figure: The figure basically says it all. The upgraded picture is swiped from Kevin Drum. UPDATE: A reader asks me to explain the word "Lysenkoism." Lysenko was a Soviet pseudo-biologist who rejected the ideas of Mendelian genetics in favor of some cockamamie baloney about acquired characteristics. Lysenko's doctrine, supported by Stalin, became enforced party doctrine, and Soviet biology was set back a generation. The Wikipedia summary is remarkably apt: Lysenkoism is used colloquially to describe the manipulation or distortion of the scientific process as a way to reach a predetermined conclusion as dictated by an ideological bias, often related to social or political objectives. Conservative beliefs on evolution and climate change (among others) quite obviously fit this description.

The fact that Herman Cain is now close to the lead, and his risible 9-9-9 plan is getting a lot of attention is really amazing, and speaks to the depth of the contempt that conservatives have for Mitt Romney, but on another level it has finally breathed life into the graveyard that is conservative economic policy. Just think of the history.  For the past 30 years conservatives have had tax cuts as their be-all and end-all remedy for every economic problem.  Stuck in a recession?  Cut taxes. Budget deficits? Well, tax cuts really raise revenue, so just cut them some more.  Got a bit of a surplus?  You guessed it, tax cuts. Alan Greenspan was even arguing back in 2000 that the primary policy problem we faced was the national debt being paid off too quickly . But while Reagan's and Bush's tax cuts did give most of the benefits to the rich, they at least threw some scraps down the income ladder.  Nowadays, though, we've got new ideas.  We're going to ...

This is why I added him to the blogroll. He writes for the American Conservative: Americanists believe that any statement from the President that fails to build up and anoint Mousavi as the preferred candidate is discouraging to Mousavi and his supporters, because they apparently cannot grasp that being our preferred candidate is to be tainted with suspicion of disloyalty to the nation. It is strange how nationalists often have the least awareness of the importance of the nationalism of another people. Many of the same silly people who couldn’t say enough about Hamas’ so-called “endorsement” of Obama as somehow indicative of his Israel policy views, as well as those who could not shut up about his warm reception in Europe, do not see how an American endorsement of a candidate in another country’s election might be viewed with similiar and perhaps even greater distaste by the people in that country. Good old fashioned hard-headed realism.

...is a fucking dipshit. Seriously? I used to joke that way to make fun of conservatives. It's cold here so global warming is clearly a myth. What a complete tool.

Some would call me a leftist, I imagine, so I feel somewhat obligated to respond to this . Here's his argument. Something like this? Correct me if I'm being dishonest. 1) Liberals look at history and the ideologies of man, the forms of government, religion, and so forth have not stopped war, poverty, crime, injustice, etc. 2) Liberals think that since all these ideas of man have proved to be wrong, the source of all war, etc., must be found in the attempt to be right, because if nobody tried to be right we wouldn't disagree we wouldn't fight, we wouldn't go to war, which means no crime, etc. 3) Therefore, liberals conclude, we must reject all fact, reason, truth, logic, morality, and decency, just like in the song "Imagine." 4) To achieve this devious goal, liberals thus elevate everything that is wrong and tear down everything that is right. Evidence: Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. NYT breaking the Abu Ghraib scandal. Newsweek's Koran story. The...