More Conservative Sting Operations Go Wrong

Hillary Clinton - Conservative Sting OperationsA Clinton campaign official alleges that the women engaged in several efforts to entrap supporters. In one scheme, described by Clinton staff, a woman attempted to pass a cash donation to Clinton volunteers and interns. In another, a woman approached the campaign on Aug 19 and said both her parents had donated to Clinton the legal maximum of $2700 each and wanted to funnel an additional donation through their daughter, a violation of federal law. On Aug 13, a woman claiming to be Canadian approached another Clinton fellow to ask how to falsify an address for a campaign donation.

In another instance, a woman volunteering with the Clinton campaign on voter registration efforts in Iowa City returned to the campaign’s office in Des Moines and asked whether it was okay that she refuse to register people who don’t support Clinton, the campaign official said. The Clinton campaign maintains that its policy is to register all voters, regardless of their preference in candidates.

The women presented themselves as Allison Holmes, Jess Koski, and Jess Jones, according to the Clinton campaign, which collected names, email addresses, and phone numbers for the women. All gave the same phone number, which is listed on the website for the University of Minnesota-based Students for a Conservative Voice. Messages left at the number by TIME requesting comment were not returned.

—Zeke Miller
Clinton Campaign On Alert For Undercover Conservative Sting

“I Would Prefer Not To”

Herman Melville - I Would Prefer Not ToThe next morning came.

“Bartleby,” said I, gently calling to him behind his screen.

No reply.

“Bartleby,” said I, in a still gentler tone, “come here; I am not going to ask you to do any thing you would prefer not to do — I simply wish to speak to you.”

Upon this he noiselessly slid into view.

“Will you tell me, Bartleby, where you were born?”

“I would prefer not to.”

“Will you tell me any thing about yourself?”

“I would prefer not to.”

“But what reasonable objection can you have to speak to me? I feel friendly towards you.”

He did not look at me while I spoke, but kept his glance fixed upon my bust of Cicero, which as I then sat, was directly behind me, some six inches above my head.

“What is your answer, Bartleby?” said I, after waiting a considerable time for a reply, during which his countenance remained immovable, only there was the faintest conceivable tremor of the white attenuated mouth.

“At present I prefer to give no answer,” he said, and retired into his hermitage.

It was rather weak in me I confess, but his manner on this occasion nettled me. Not only did there seem to lurk in it a certain calm disdain, but his perverseness seemed ungrateful, considering the undeniable good usage and indulgence he had received from me.

Again I sat ruminating what I should do. Mortified as I was at his behavior, and resolved as I had been to dismiss him when I entered my offices, nevertheless I strangely felt something superstitious knocking at my heart, and forbidding me to carry out my purpose, and denouncing me for a villain if I dared to breathe one bitter word against this forlornest of mankind. At last, familiarly drawing my chair behind his screen, I sat down and said: “Bartleby, never mind then about revealing your history; but let me entreat you, as a friend, to comply as far as may be with the usages of this office. Say now you will help to examine papers tomorrow or next day: in short, say now that in a day or two you will begin to be a little reasonable; say so, Bartleby.”

“At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable,” was his mildly cadaverous reply.

—Herman Melville
Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street

PZ Myers on the Great Nothing of New Atheism

PZ MyersReason is not enough. Reason can show you the best way to achieve a goal, but if your goal is mass murder, or denigration of women, or the perpetuation of an oppressive hierarchy, it’ll help you do that, too. We need purpose and value and meaning as well, and if a prominent Leader of atheism is saying that atheism doesn’t do that, that’s a declaration that atheism is bankrupt, and has failed totally. It has become a Great Nothing.

That’s not my atheism, though. I argue that the absence of gods gives greater prominence to the interdependence of the human community, and adds greater weight and urgency to the importance of empathy and equality and all those human values — but if atheism is now a label that allows us to nonchalantly disavow responsibility for the actions of those within our own group, perhaps it’s time to disband the whole idea of an atheist community.

But then it’s also clear that my vision of what atheism ought to be is a minority view. The majority are doing their damnedest to confirm the poor opinion the believers have of us.

—PZ Myers
Is Atheism Bankrupt?

Paul Ryan’s Reputation Was Never Deserved

Brian Beutler - Paul Ryan's ReputationIt’s easy to forget, after the horrifying Republican National Convention we just witnessed, and after Clint Eastwood lectured a chair at the RNC four years ago, that [Paul] Ryan’s VP-acceptance speech in 2012 was censured by the often-adoring press for being unusually misleading. He blamed President Barack Obama for the closure of a General Motors plant in his hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin, that had been shuttered before Obama became president; for doing “exactly nothing” to implement the findings of a debt commission Ryan himself had driven to gridlock; and for several other tendentious or false things. When confronted with skepticism from the press, he hid behind bad spin and technicality and deception.

Back in 2011, when House Republicans were trying to extort fiscal policy concessions from Obama, Ryan used his intellectual cachet to claim that briefly defaulting on the national debt — for “a day or two or three or four” — would be harmless if it ultimately forced Obama to accede to GOP demands.

Ryan and his colleagues precipitated a sharp drop in consumer confidence. Their antics alone threatened to send the economy into recession, and if they had actually defaulted on the debt, per Ryan’s guidance, the economic carnage could have been far graver.

Today, the stewards of Ryan’s reputation are aghast when Trump says he might refuse to meet the country’s obligations to creditors, but they mostly overlooked Ryan’s comments five years ago, and he’s never really walked them back. It took his ascension to the House speakership, when the onus to raise the debt limit was falling on him, for his office to admit he now believes the debt limit deadline set by the Treasury Department “is the date.” But if Hillary Clinton becomes president, it’s easy to imagine him reverting to his prior, more reckless view.

—Brian Beutler
Nobody Should Be Surprised That Paul Ryan Is Supporting Donald Trump

Free Trade: From Promise to Scam

Matt Taibbi - Free TradeClinton promised that free-trade agreements would emphasize new environmental standards, would expand the rights of workers in signatory countries, that we would not trade with countries that employed subsidies or tariffs against us, and that displaced domestic workers would eventually see gains after being retrained and redeployed for new jobs that would eventually appear to replace the lost ones.

“To the men and women of our country who were afraid of these changes,” Clinton said, “the gains from this agreement will be your gains, too.”
It was never articulated this way, exactly, but the basic promise of free trade was that the American middle class would experience temporary losses that over time would be balanced out by increased growth worldwide.

It was trickle-down economics, only repackaged with an international spin: After a long trip around the world, the wealth eventually gets back to you.

Twenty-three years later, we see how all of this has turned out. There have been some improvements in the economic condition of foreign workers.
But we never excluded politically oppressive regimes from free-trade deals, never made sure that trade partners weren’t also massive human rights violators, never seriously worried about environmental enforcement. Mostly, we just made cheap, un-free foreign labor available to Western manufacturers.

Even a onetime die-hard NAFTA cheerleader like staunch Clinton supporter Paul Krugman, who once compared free trade’s critics to the anti-evolutionist followers of William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Monkey Trial, now admits that the case for “ever-freer” trade is a “scam”…

—Matt Taibbi
A Republican Workers’ Party?

Peter Thiel: Totalitarian Collectives Bad; Authoritarian Leaders Good

Peter ThielI remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself “libertarian.”

But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. By tracing out the development of my thinking, I hope to frame some of the challenges faced by all classical liberals today.

—Peter Thiel
The Education of a Libertarian

Joseph Stiglitz on the Neoliberal Management of Globalization

Joseph Stiglitz - neoliberal globalizationHow can something that our political leaders — and many an economist — said would make everyone better off be so reviled?

One answer occasionally heard from the neoliberal economists who advocated for these policies is that people are better off. They just don’t know it. Their discontent is a matter for psychiatrists, not economists.

But income data suggest that it is the neoliberals who may benefit from therapy. Large segments of the population in advanced countries have not been doing well: in the US, the bottom 90% has endured income stagnation for a third of a century. Median income for full-time male workers is actually lower in real (inflation-adjusted) terms than it was 42 years ago. At the bottom, real wages are comparable to their level 60 years ago.

—Joseph Stiglitz
Globalization and Its New Discontents

Dean Baker’s Summary of the 2016 July Jobs Report

Dean Baker on 2016 July Jobs ReportThe Labor Department reported the economy added 255,000 jobs in July. With the June number revised up to 292,000, the average for the last three months now stands at 190,000. The household survey also showed a positive picture, with employment rising by 420,000. With new people entering the labor force, the employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) edged up by 0.1 percentage point to 59.7 percent, while the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 4.9 percent…

Other news in the establishment survey was also positive. The length of the average workweek edged up by 0.1 hours leading to an increase in the index of aggregate weekly hours of 0.5 percent. There also is some evidence of more rapid wage growth. The year-over-year increase in the average hourly wage was 2.6 percent. The annual rate comparing the average for the last three months with the prior three months was 2.8 percent. If this continues, workers will be able to get back some of the share lost to profits in the downturn.

While the household survey is mostly positive, there are some aspects that continue to suggest labor market weakness. The duration measures of unemployment all increased in July, with the average duration of unemployment spells rising from 27.7 weeks to 28.1 weeks and the median from 10.3 weeks to 11.6 weeks. These durations are more consistent with a recession than a strong labor market.

Similarly, the number of people involuntarily working part-time rose slightly to 5.94 million. This followed a sharp drop in June, but it is nonetheless quite high for a labor market with an unemployment rate of 4.9 percent. Also, the percentage of unemployment due to voluntary job leavers remained at 10.7 percent. This compares with peaks of more than 12.0 percent before the recession and over 15.0 percent back in 2000.

One interesting note is that the least educated workers appear to be the biggest beneficiaries of recent job growth. The EPOP ratio for workers without high school degrees rose by 2.1 percentage points for the month and is 1.6 percentage points above its year ago level. The unemployment rate for this group is 1.9 percentage points below the year ago level. By contrast, the EPOP ratio for college grads is down by 0.5 percentage points from its year ago level while the unemployment rate is unchanged. The unemployment rate for workers with just a high school degree fell by 0.5 percentage points over the last year.

One positive item in this report is a sharp drop in black teen unemployment from 31.2 percent to 25.7 percent. These data are highly erratic, but the June level was a sharp reported rise from a low of 23.3 percent in February.

This is mostly a very positive report. In addition to the strong growth in jobs in the establishment survey, the household survey also showed a large jump in employment. The increase in hours, coupled with some evidence of more rapid wage growth, add to the positive picture. The labor market still has some way to go to fully recover, but it is making progress.

—Dean Baker
Employment Again Rises Sharply in July

Stephen Breyer’s Bizarre Reversal of the Use of “Courtesy”

Ian Millhiser - Supreme Court CourtesyTo explain, the “GG” in [Gloucester County School Board v GG] is Gavin Grimm, a trans high school senior who challenged his school’s discriminatory bathroom policy. Grimm won in a federal appeals court, and the school district sought a stay of that decision from the Supreme Court. Although Breyer opposed granting the stay, he nonetheless voted with his four conservative colleagues to grant it, explaining that he did so “as a courtesy” that “will preserve the status quo (as of the time the Court of Appeals made its decision) until the Court considers the forthcoming petition” asking the justices to hear this case on the merits.

Such “courtesy” votes are fairly common in death penalty cases due to a quirk of the Supreme Court’s rules. It takes four justices to agree to hear a case, but five to grant a stay. To prevent a situation where the Court announces that it will hear a capital case, only to have that case become moot after the inmate at issue in that case is executed, a fifth justice often grants a courtesy vote to stay that execution while the case is pending.

Courtesy votes in death penalty cases, in other words, acknowledge the fact that death is irreversible. If an individual is executed, and the Court later decides that this execution is illegal, not even the Supreme Court of the United States has the power to bring this individual back to life.
Nothing about Gavin Grimm’s case is analogous to the irreversible machinery of death. When Grimm returns to school this fall, he will either be afforded his full measure of civil rights, or he won’t be. If the school district allows him to use the men’s room, and then a Supreme Court decision holds that the district is free to lock Grimm out of that bathroom, then there is nothing preventing the school district from doing so in the future.

Indeed, the irony of Breyer’s courtesy vote is that it may bring about the very circumstance that these votes are supposed to prevent. Again, courtesy votes are cast in death penalty cases to prevent an irreversible event from frustrating the Court’s jurisdiction over a case. The stay that Breyer voted to grant will remain in effect until “the issuance of the judgment of this Court,” if the Supreme Court agrees to hear this case. But the Court may not issue its judgment until late June, weeks after Grimm will have graduated from high school.

In extending “courtesy” to his conservative colleagues, in other words, Breyer may have taken away Grimm’s one shot to have his rights vindicated.

—Ian Millhiser
The Inexplicable “Courtesy” That Could Elect Donald Trump

Gold Is Not a Good Hedge Against a Bad Economy

Royal Economic SocietyGold has not served very well as a hedge against bad macroeconomic and stock market outcomes. That is the central conclusion of research by Professors Robert Barro and Sanjay Misra, published in the August 2016 issue of the Economic Journal. Their study draws on evidence from long-term US data on gold returns, as well as gold returns during some of the worst macroeconomic disasters experienced across the world.

Gold has historically played a prominent role in transactions among financial institutions even in modern systems that rely on paper money. What’s more, many observers think that gold provides a hedge against major macroeconomic declines. But after assessing long-term US data on gold returns, the new research finds that gold has not served consistently as a hedge against large declines in real GDP or real stock prices.

From 1836 to 2011, gold delivered low average real price appreciation and experienced high average volatility. The mean real rate of price change was 1.1% per year, close to the 1% average real rate of return on three-month US Treasury Bills and comparable assets.

—Royal Economic Society
Gold Has Never Been a Great Hedge Against Bad Economic Times: Evidence From Decades of Us and Global Data

Matt Taibbi on the Donald Trump Convention

Matt TaibbiIt wasn’t what we expected. We thought Donald Trump’s version of the Republican National Convention would be a brilliantly bawdy exercise in Nazistic excess.

We expected thousand-foot light columns, a 400-piece horn section where the delegates usually sit (they would be in cages out back with guns to their heads). Onstage, a chorus line of pageant girls in gold bikinis would be twerking furiously to a techno version of “New York, New York” while an army of Broadway dancers spent all four days building a Big Beautiful Wall that read winning, the ceremonial last brick timed to the start of Donald’s acceptance speech…

But nah. What happened instead was just sad and weird, very weird. The lineup for the 2016 Republican National Convention to nominate Trump felt like a fallback list of speakers for some ancient UHF telethon, on behalf of a cause like plantar-wart research.

—Matt Taibbi
Trump’s Appetite for Destruction: How Disastrous Convention Doomed GOP

Why H P Lovecraft Couldn’t Write Dialog

Stephen King - Writing Is SeductionLovecraft was, by all acccounts, both snobbish and painfully shy (a galloping racist as well, his stories full of sinister Africans and the sort of scheming Jews my Uncle Oren always worried about after four or five beers), the kind of writer who maintains a voluminous correspondence but gets along poorly with others in person — were he alive today, he’d likely exist most vibrantly in various internet chatrooms. Dialogue is a skill best learned by people who enjoy talking and listening to others — particularly listening, picking up the accents, rhythms, dialect, and slang of various groups. Loners such as Lovecraft often write it badly, or with the care of someone who is composing in a language other than his or her native tongue.

—Stephen King
On Writing