On this day in 1915, probably the greatest American economist ever Paul Samuelson was born. He is the man most responsible for establishing Keynesian economics to its place as the fundamental basis of the science. But today, there are real debates as to whether economics is a science. There is no doubt that Samuelson was as scientist, and he did brilliant work in a number of areas, in the end publishing almost 400 papers. But what about the profession?

I think what liberal economists do is science. This is something that Paul Krugman talks about a lot. When new data come along, they alter their theories of the science. But look what happened to the conservative economists in the 1970s. When stagflation (high inflation coupled with high unemployment) happened, they found that economic shocks could throw the economy on tilt. In that case, it was an oil price shock. But instead of building on the Keynesian base that had worked so well to explain the economy up to that point, they threw it out. And what’s worse, they clearly threw it out because they didn’t like the political implications of Keynesian theory. The Keynesians, on the other hand, did use the shocks to build on the existing theory. (Although even they didn’t seem to do that great a job, but at least it was still science.)

Consider Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity. It didn’t cast away Newtonian mechanics. Newtonian mechanics was a special case of relativistic mechanics. That was one of the reasons we could have confidence in the theory. The same goes for quantum mechanics: if you pull out and look at macro-scale phenomena, you see that it becomes good old fashioned classical mechanics. That’s how science works. If you are bopping around from one incompatible theory to another, you aren’t doing science.

To this day, many conservative economists think that people like Samuelson and Keynes were wrong, or worse: a joke. This is despite the fact that Samuelson was hugely important in showing that the neoclassical approach to microeconomics leads to Keynesian macroeconomics. Of course to people who do economics as a science and not mathematical doodling, Paul Samuelson is a towering figure. He also built the MIT economics department, bringing in three really important economists who I’ve actually heard of: Franco Modigliani, Joseph Stiglitz, and Paul Krugman.

Also, he was born in Gary, Indiana:

Happy birthday Paul Samuelson!

Many people have noted that voter-ID laws are a solution is search of a problem. But as Scott Lemieux has noted, that’s really not the case, The Vote Fraud Fraud: Still Fraudulent. Republicans saw a very big problem: the percentage of white people (especially the old and male ones) in the country was dropping, and pretty much no one else was interested in voting from them. So looking at that problem, they came up with the simplest solution imaginable: stop people who aren’t white from voting.

That was a simple solution because it has a long history of working. Two words: Jim Crow. Pretty much everything that whites did to stop blacks from voting into the 1960s is being done now. As I’ve noted before: if a citizen doesn’t have an ID necessary to vote, what is the requirement that they get such documentation? It’s a poll tax. When the government stopped high school teachers from registering students, what is that? It’s intimidation of voter registration drives. And there is a long list of other ways that the white elites worked to keep others from voting, all on display today, albeit without the same open campaign of terror.

It’s also really interesting that the Republicans have not pursued ways of stopping voter fraud through absentee ballot. That’s the kind of voter fraud that could be done on a large scale that might actually affect the outcome of an election. But absentee voting is something that is done by older white voters. You know: Republicans. So there is no concern about that kind of voter fraud. Again: this is because voter-ID laws are not about voter fraud. They are about stopping Democrats from voting.

A great example of this comes to us from Iowa where Secretary of State Matt Schultz released a report last week on voter fraud. After two years and a quarter million dollars, he found a total of 117 cases of “voter misconduct” with 17 more cases that are pending. That’s roughly 0.008% of all the votes cast in 2012—assuming those 17 pending cases come through. So is it a big deal? No. But even if it had been 99% of the ballots were cast illegally, it wouldn’t matter.

You see, these cases of voter fraud mostly involved non-citizens and felons registering to vote. And some of them involved people voting in two states, by absentee ballot in one of the states, we assume. Of course, none of this necessarily means these people actually voted. A non-citizen may have registered and then not voted. Someone who recently moved to Iowa might still have been registered in his previous state without voting there. So the number—small as it is—is likely overstated. But the most important thing is this: none of this kind of voter fraud would be addressed by requiring voters to show identification at the polls.

What Schultz is doing is what Republicans always do in these cases: show that there is some voter fraud and then argue that this fraud justifies laws that would have no effect on that kind of fraud. The truth is that any complex system will have errors in it. For example, reducing food stamp fraud means that a lot more people who ought to get food stamps won’t. The only way to eliminate fraud is to eliminate the program. In order to eliminate voter fraud, we would have to eliminate voting. The question is, which is better: a slightly imperfect democratic system or a non-democratic system?

But in this case, the Republican push for voter-ID is not about doing anything about voter fraud. It is about voter suppression. This is why states have reduced early voting: there is not even a pretense of fighting voter fraud there. It is all about stopping the Wrong Kind of Voter. This dates back to the earliest days of our republic. But at least men like John Adams were honest enough to admit to their own elitism. Now the elitist party has half the country convinced it is looking out for their interests. Meanwhile, white people vote to keep Those People in their place, while their tax dollars continue to go to Exxon and other “deserving” causes.

H/T: Jonathan Bernstein

Emily Dickinson famously wrote, “The Heart wants what it wants—or else it does not care.” I’ve been thinking about that a lot as it relates to two of my favorite conservative writers: Josh Barro and Dave Weigel. Both are smart young men who see the conservative movement for all its silly ridiculousness. But each has a soft spot for a Republican politician that simply can’t be explained by who they are. In fact, in the only thing that really distinguishes the objects of their affection are idiosyncrasies that make them less generally appealing, not more. So Barro loves an loudmouthed bully and Weigel loves a neo-confederate subgenius. The heart wants what it wants.

Josh Barro’s infatuation with Chris Christie is the harder one to understand. I know that among the pundit class, Christie is seen as a practical politician who is willing to work across the isle. But that really isn’t true, and Barro is far too smart to believe that. Christie is an absolutely pure conservative. There is no major issue on which he disagrees with his crazy party. Sure, he gives himself a little ideological wiggle room to not froth at the mouth about Muslims, but he is governor of a blue state after all. And he’s governed in an extremely conservative way. This is the man who has killed important public works projects and has done all he can to destroy the public pension system. (You know: contracts only matter when they apply to rich people!)

But Barro just loves him. In fact, he loves him so much that I simply won’t read him anymore when he’s talking about Christie. It’s always the same apologetics. Christie could be caught poisoning squirrels in the park and Barro would argue that it means nothing because squirrel lovers don’t vote in presidential primaries. Last November, Barro wrote a classic, Let’s Stop The Hand-Wringing About Chris Christie Being A “Bully.” In that article he’s pushing against this idea (that I share) that Christie’s obnoxious act is going to alienate just about everyone outside of New Jersey. Reading Barro on Christie always reminds me of the Far Side cartoon where the dog is trying to lure a cat into a clothes drier, thinking, “Oh please, oh please…” Barro is hoping against hope that the object of his affection will be the next president.

But my all time favorite was the article I wrote, Josh Barro Phenomenon. Barro liked the article so much that he tweeted to me, “your post is the dumbest thing I’ve read today, and I read several other dumb things today.” But based upon another tweet, it was clear that he didn’t understand what I was talking about. Christie had just killed the Hudson River tunnel. Christie did it for his usual conservative reasons like, you know, that he hates regular people and that he wants to save money to give to his cronies. But Barro was right there to make the reasonable sounding argument, “The project is filled with waste!” Well, sure; that can be said about every project ever done. But the truth is that he will always find some reasonable excuse for why Chris Christie is right.

I don’t mind that Josh Barro is in love with Chris Christie, but does he have to flaunt it in public. I mean, there are children watching!

The situation is somewhat different with Dave Weigel. It has to be. Barro is an idealist and Weigel is a cynical curmudgeon. (And he’s only 32; imagine him in his 70s!) Almost everything that he writes oozes with playful disdain. If Bokonon had been a journalist, he would have been Dave Weigel. Yes, it’s a funny old world. When all the world follows his advice and kills themselves, he will wryly note that people are strange as he goes off in search canned foods and shelter for the night

But as a bleeding heart libertarian, Weigel has a strange fondness for Rand Paul. I understand: they are both at least nominally libertarians. But Paul is no kind of bleeding hearter. He’s very much like his father Ron Paul who I did not vote for when he ran for president as the Libertarian Party candidate when I was a registered libertarian. Because the Paul family isn’t even libertarian; they are neo-confederates. They are anti-federalists, as Steven Taylor describes in The Anti-Federalist Impulse. So why is a “social justice” kind of libertarian like Dave Weigel so infatuated with Rand Paul? I guess we just have to depend upon Ms Dickinson: Weigel’s heart wants what it wants, and apparently that is the pre-epiphany Grinch sized heart that resides in the mostly empty chest cavity of Rand Paul.

When Rand Paul announced that voter-ID laws were not a good thing for the Republican Party, I didn’t mention it. What was there to say? All he meant was that it was bad public relations. But many liberals were annoyed when he walked back even that tepid statement to proclaim to the world that he was shocked that people would think he was against voter-ID. And just to prove that Paul really is just a neo-confederate, his PAC director Doug Stafford said, “Senator Paul believes it’s up to each state to decide that type of issue.” Just like in the good old days of Jim Crow!

But Weigel, always eager to prove his fealty to his guy, was having none of it, Rand Paul’s Voter ID Walkback. You see, Rand Paul didn’t actually walk back his comments. He still means them: voter-ID is bad for the Republican Party, but move it along. It’s fine. He just wants to link them to his noble efforts to give felons back their voting rights. I’m all for that, as I wrote last month, Stop Assuming All Felons Are Murderers. But it’s only 11 states where voting rights are not automatically restored after felons complete their punishment. And most of those 11 states are red states. So I suspect Rand’s interest in the issue is more about being viable in the Republican primary in Mississippi than in any thoughts about what is right.

Still, who else turns Rand Paul’s cretinous position on voting rights as a laudatory article about Rand Paul, the ex-con’s best friend? Only someone in love with the man for reasons the rest of us cannot see. The same goes for Josh Barro. I really don’t understand how two really smart, knowledgeable, and clear-eyed political commentators can be so blind about these objectively awful men.

If Emily Dickinson were around today, I think she would say, “The Heart wants what it wants—because it’s blind and stupid.”

A lot of politics is just about differences of opinion. You know: reasonable people can disagree. I’ll give you an example. I believe in a guaranteed minimum income. Providing this would allow people to go out and be creative: they could build innovative businesses without worrying that failure would ruin them. It would also raise the wages of difficult and boring jobs because people could get by without doing anything. And it would improve the level of human dignity. But there are those who say the opposite. They claim that it is only when people are staring into the face of total destruction that they come up with great ideas. I think they are totally wrong and history proves it, but these people really do believe what they argue.

What if, however, the state of California started a project to provide a guaranteed income and it worked really well. Suddenly, California’s economy was booming with highly innovative new products and the happiness index went through the roof. Imagine that the people that didn’t believe in a guaranteed minimum income tried to hide the success of the program. Or even worse: imagine they tried to keep the people in California from knowing about the program so they didn’t take part in it. That would be evil.

Well, that’s what we have with Obamacare. Jonathan Cohn reported yesterday, A Shameful Victory for Obamacare’s Opponents. McKinsey and Company did a study of Obamacare and found that about half the people who shopped on the exchanges ended up not purchasing insurance. But here’s the key, “[T]wo-thirds of these people said they didn’t know they could get financial assistance.” How proud the conservative movement must be that their disinformation campaign worked so well!

You may remember back last year when Sean Hannity had on four couples who were hurt by Obamacare. It turned out that all the people were mistaken. But I was especially interested in Robbie and Tina Robison:

Or there was Julie Boonstra who just knew that Obamacare was going to cost her money even though it was going to save her well over a thousand dollars per year. These and many millions more have been lied to very effectively by the right wing disinformation system. It’s disgraceful.

I’m sure that as the years go on, everyone will see that they are better off with Obamacare than they were before Obamacare. Eventually, Republicans will stop talking about it and Fox News will find that it doesn’t boost their outrage ratings. Within ten years at the most, we will be at that glorious moment of, “Keep your government hands off my Obamacare!” But the cynic in me will still be sad. Because all the same “journalists” will be lying about something else and all the same viewers will have learned nothing and will believe whatever lies come next.

Last year on this day, I wrote about the great British painter Thomas Gainsborough who was born in 1727. But it was a very short article and I can think of no one more deserving to talk about in a bit more depth. He was mostly a portrait painter by trade and his best known work is The Blue Boy. It is a remarkable painting, especially for the way it renders the light on the rumpled clothing.

But Gainsborough wasn’t fond of his portrait paintings. I’m guessing, but I suspect that he didn’t especially like having to deal with the rich patrons he was forced to work so closely with. What he wanted to do, and did do at the end of his life was work on landscapes. In this way, I suspect that he anticipated Romanticism, although without all its annoying baggage. If you look at his early portraits, you will often see quite impressive backgrounds. He wasn’t inclined to paint people sitting in a chair in a drawing room.

Because I am very sentimental, my favorite piece by Gainsborough is Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher. It was painted during the last years of his life. It is a narrative painting although without any symbolic content as in William Bouguereau The Broken Pitcher. Sometimes, a broken pitcher is just a broken picture:

Happy birthday Thomas Gainsborough!

Glenn Hubbard is the ultimate example of a conservative economist who has given up all pretense of being a scientist and works just as an apologist for conservative policy. See my article, Conservative Apologia Economics. I really can’t see him talk without having a strong desire to slap him. He’s got the smug demeanor of a man who knows he was once smart and knowledgeable, but now thinks the smartest thing he ever did was to sell his soul for thirty pieces of silver. Unlike Judas, however, I doubt that Hubbard will give his blood money back and hang himself. But it’s pretty to think so.

Any time that Hubbard publicly embarrasses himself, I am very interested. If there were a new cable network “Glenn Hubbard Speaks” (which is the same as embarrassing himself), I would get cable. In fact, that would be a good way to kill me. I don’t think I could tear myself away from the station to eat. It would be like the best drug ever. Or better: Infinite Jest!

So I was all excited this weekend when Hubbard and Tim Geithner got into a bit of a fight. Now I’m no fan of Geithner. But he isn’t Seventh Sign evil like Hubbard is. So there was little doubt where my sympathies would lie. And it turned out like that. In Geithner’s new book, he says that he had a conversation with Hubbard. Hubbard criticized the White House for not jumping all over the Simpson-Bowles budget plan. Geithner said they would when the Republicans said they would be willing to raise taxes as the Simpson-Bowles plan required. Hubbard replied, “[W]ell of course we have to raise taxes, we just can’t say that now.” At least, that’s what Geithner claims.

This exchange makes Hubbard look like a jerk. For one thing, it has been a big Republican talking point that Obama didn’t embrace Simpson-Bowles, even though they are even more against it than the Democrats. But it’s worse than that. Is Hubbard an economist or a Republican political hack? Well, we know the answer to that, but Hubbard would claim that he’s an economist. And just like John Roberts, he would tell you that he just calls economics as he sees it. He has no ax to grind!

Hubbard shot back. “Geithner is making it up. It’s pretty simple. It’s not true.” Oh! My! God! Tim Geithner is lying about Glenn Hubbard! Or so says Glenn Hubbard who has all the credibility of that scorpion who kills the turtle in the famous Aesop’s Fable. Still, it’s he said, he said. Who can know the truth?

Well, Matt Yglesias took a dive into the facts, The Geithner-Hubbard Spat Shows How Conservative Wonks Try to Have it Both Ways on Taxes. He found that Hubbard had actually written an OpEd in The New York Times where he admitted that taxes would need to go up. What does this mean:

There’s a bigger issue here that goes beyond what a repugnant little prig Hubbard is. The conservative movement is based upon this idea that they are just telling the prols what they want to hear but that once they are in power, they’ll do what has to be done. But that never happens. Ever since Bush the Elder, Republicans have decided that raising taxes is toxic. So Hubbard may write the occasional OpEd that says what he knows to be true. But if he were high up in a Romney administration today, he’d be selling the idea that we really need to lower the top tax bracket to 25%. It’s like that line from Mother Night, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” The conservative elites pretend to be as ignorant as the loony base, and in the end, they are as ignorant as the loony base.

Stephen Colbert is fifty years old today, but like a lot of entertainers, his life is really boring so I skipped him. Instead, I went with a really great director who you’ve probably never heard of. He got his start as a choreographer on stage and then eventually on the screen. This isn’t so strange. Bob Fosse was one of the greatest choreographers ever and then went on to be one of the great directors. I don’t think that’s too surprising. Dance is all about telling a story, but without words. And regardless of how you dress it up, films are about story telling. Oh, I forgot to tell you who I’m talking about!

On this day in 1927, the film director and much more, Herbert Ross was born. Most people haven’t heard of him, but they’ve seen and enjoyed his films: The Owl and the Pussycat, Play It Again, Sam, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, The Goodbye Girl, Footloose, Steel Magnolias, and Boys on the Side. I’ve left out a lot of films, most of which you’ve probably seen and enjoyed. He wasn’t an ostentatious director, but he was artful.

My favorite of his films is Funny Girl. He didn’t direct the film. (William Wyler, also a great director, did so.) Ross choreographed it. But my understand is that he directed the musical numbers. And they are the high points of the film. So here is what might as well be a short film, the “I’m the Greatest Star” number. I just love it:

I think we over-value what film directors do. From D W Griffith to Martin Scorsese, they are just trying to tell stories. And when they do it artfully with style, they are at the top of their profession. Herbert Ross was such a director who made the raw materials of his films into something even better. The next time you are looking for a good, funny, and entertaining movie to watch, find one by Herbert Ross. You won’t be disappointed.

Happy birthday Herbert Ross!

Afterword

Another of Ross’ films was Pennies from Heaven. I wrote a fairly harsh review of the film recently. But as I note, the film is great; it is just brought to its knees by Steve Martin’s performance. Despite everything else, it is worth watching.

For a long time, I’ve puzzled over something. Why has the conservative treatment of Obama been almost exactly the same as the treatment of Bill Clinton. Yes, there have been little differences. For example, no one ever claimed that Clinton wasn’t qualified to be president because he wasn’t born in America. And that is a bit of overt racism that should have embarrassed the conservative movement far more than it did. I think the reason that it didn’t cause more of a stir was that the media are loath to admit anything quite so disturbing as the fact that one of the major political parties in the United States owes most of its appeal to racism. And the white majority mostly wants to compartmentalize racism as nothing more than people who use the n-word. But other than this bit of clearly racist behavior, Obama and Clinton were treated the same.

What I mean by this is that both men were treated as though they were treated as though they were invalid. And conservatives seem to believe that either men are capable of anything. There are stories about how Obama is secretly gay married and of course who can forget that Bill Clinton murdered Vince Foster. What’s more, during both presidencies, the conservatives have kept going with supposed scandals that not only don’t come to anything, but don’t even seem to be about anything. What was Whitewater about? What is Benghazi! about? It isn’t just that I don’t know. The people pushing these scandals don’t seem to know either.

But leave it to Ta-Nehisi Coates to straighten out my thinking on this issue, Bill Clinton Was Racialized, Too. He pointed out that the issue isn’t so much who is leading the Democratic Party. The issue is that to the racists, the Democratic Party itself is the black party. It’s the part that looks after the interests of “those people.” He explained it:

Then he linked this to the very long history of white Americans seeing black Americans as invalid—not “real” Americans. I was especially amazed to read that people argued that Frederick Douglass didn’t actually write Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass because he was just an ignorant black man. This goes right along with claims that Obama didn’t write Dreams from My Father. How far we’ve come! But the point is that anyone but white Europeans are not just The Other, but are beings who just can’t be anything but unworthy outsiders.

So any Democratic president is going to be treated as an interloper. It doesn’t matter if they get 90% of the vote. And as we saw after the 2008 election, a certain segment of the conservative movement doesn’t accept voting. This is why ACORN was such a prime target for them. These people will never believe that the nation is changing. Instead, we get “black presidents” because ACORN and other nefarious groups are stealing elections. This is also why conservatives have embraced voter-identification laws. It isn’t about winning future elections (for the base). It is about making sure that elections are honest because they just know that real America (white America) could never have a president who cared about those non-white aliens.

Update (12 May 2014 7:42 pm)

As if on cue, The Blaze published, Texas Gun Shop’s “Funny” Sign Is Sure to Rile Up the Left: “I Like My Guns Like Obama Likes…”

I don’t see the need for the scare quotes. It is funny if you accept the premise. I bring it up because it works perfectly with what I just wrote about: conservatives’ belief that Obama is an interloper because he wasn’t really elected. It was all those non-citizens who illegally voted for him. So it’s a racist sign, but I don’t think that’s going to rile up a lot of liberals. It’s just SOP from conservatives. It wouldn’t even cause much of a stir if it had been displayed on a church’s sign.

Emily Letts is a young abortion counselor who decided to made a video of her own abortion to show that it wasn’t some scary thing. I don’t know exactly what she was thinking, but it seems to me that a lot of people in the anti-choice movement think that abortion involves doctors going inside the vagina with scalpels to cut full growth babies to pieces like something out of a slasher horror film. Given the size of fetuses during early term abortions, the procedures is more like hair electrolysis.

Amanda Marcotte over at RH Reality Check summed up the typical anti-choice reaction, Anti-Choicers Desperately Insist You See Things That Are Clearly Not There. Mostly, it is like Breitbart‘s William Bigelow who noted, “Of course, it wasn’t so pain-free and safe for the baby, but there is no mention of the baby in the entire article—or, for that matter, his or her father.” That one’s delicious! Not only does he (It’s always a he!) focus on it being a “baby” but he’s also concerned that the father’s rights are somehow being denied. That’s the first thing that I think about when a woman decides to have an abortion, “Is this okay with the father?!”

I don’t know how far along Letts’ pregnancy is. But I do know it is well within the first trimester. I also know that it is only in the fifth week that the brain starts to develop. It is not until well into the third trimester that what we think of as an actual human brain begins to develop. Pain is something that we experiment because of our brains. The nerve impulses are not themselves pain.

I have to admit, though: abortion does bother me. I don’t like it when things are killed. I try to get house flies to leave my room rather than kill them. Just the same, if they don’t, I have no problem killing them. I place my comfort above the life of a house fly. I am not a Jain. (Although I greatly respect them!) Of course, I’m not suggesting that a house fly is a fetus. Just the same, the annoyance of a fly buzzing me is not the same as a fetus growing inside me that might kill me. And note: women die during childbirth at a much greater rate in the United States than they do in other advanced countries. But I don’t hear anyone in the Breitbart empire upset about that.

Don’t misunderstand, I know that the real reason that people are against abortion is because they claim that the fetus has a soul. How do they know that? No one knows. It’s just a commonly held opinion in the religious community. But it’s funny how when these people, who supposedly only care about the souls of fetuses, start talking about killing “babies” when they are trying to make a political argument. And that’s especially interesting because, as I noted above, they don’t seem to care about mothers dying as a result of childbirth. And they don’t much seem to care about the babies dying after they’re born. Get ’em born; get ’em baptized; and let ’em die!

But Emily Letts shows in her short, not at all graphic video, first trimester abortions are simple, painless, and quick medical procedures. There are no babies involved. And if you ask Thomas Aquinas, there are no souls involved either.