If I were in a Broadway musical, I would break out singing:

Isn’t it bliss?
Could it be true?
Anti-smoking ads are gone
I can safely view.
Send in the Post,
I can read the Post![1]

For many weeks, you could not visit the Washington Post website (or a lot of others as well) without seeing a horrifying anti-smoking ad that involved a woman (Terrie Hall) who was missing at least half her jaw and had a hole in her windpipe. Now it is gone. And I am so glad.

Look: it isn’t like I’m against these ads. I have smokers in my life and I worry about them constantly. And these ads make me far more likely to talk to them, even though I find it hard to talk with them without ragging on them. But that’s why these ads are so disturbing. I don’t worry that my sister is greatly reducing her life expectancy. Life isn’t as great as we believe; death is not the worst thing. But going through these surgeries and having parts of your body removed? Suffering through radiation treatments? Living in pain or at least at diminished capacity? That’s terrible. And I hate to think of her like that.

So I understand the ads and I think they are a good thing. But I still hate seeing them. They creep me out and make me sad. I’m very grateful for the respite. And I’m enjoying it, even though I know how temporary it is. Meanwhile, my efforts to move my sister continue.

[1] That’s a not good at all parody of one of my favorite songs, “Send in the Clowns”:

Alec MacGillis has written a great article over at the magazine Andrew Sullivan almost destroyed. All right, The New Republic! Called The Real Scandal Behind the IRS Controversy, it simultaneously puts the IRS “scandal” into perspective and presents what is a real scandal.

Why did the IRS group in the Cincinnati office go after the poor Tea Party groups? Very simply: because they were suspicious. The 501(c)(4) clause is supposed to be used by groups that are committed to the social good. For example, a group that wants to raise money to increase awareness of the plight of the Wandering Salamander. It isn’t for groups that want to encourage Obama to “stop killing babies” in the middle of the 2012 campaign. There is a bit of tax code for that: 501(c)(3). The problem is that such groups have to reveal who their donors are. As of 2009, there was a huge increase in new groups that claimed to be 501(c)(4) compliant. It rightly seemed fishy to the Cincinnati group and it made sense to target right wing groups because the vast majority of these new groups were right wing.

MacGillis notes one aspect of this that I wrote about this morning:

But MacGillis isn’t an apologist for the IRS. He notes that there were two aspects of this right wing deluge of questionable 501(c)(4) use. One part was the smaller Tea Party groups. But the more important was the huge groups like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS. In fact, he notes that Crossroads GPS alone was responsible for 28% of the $254 million spent by all 501(c)(4) groups. Yet Crossroads GPS didn’t hear a peep from the IRS. That’s a scandal!

But it is hardly surprising. Here in the United States the law is applied equally to all people and institutions. Unless the person or institution gets big enough. Then they are above the law. That’s what was going on at the IRS regarding their investigation of the 501(c)(4) groups. In their defense, I suspect that the Cincinnati group was afraid to go after Karl Rove. And it is certainly the case that Rove would have sent his high paid lawyers after them. But cowardice is no excuse. And all it does is lead to our current situation with a two-tracked justice system.

Afterword

I have little doubt that this will get little coverage in the coming hysteria over the IRS actions. The Republicans and Democrats are about equally committed to comforting the rich and powerful. Time will tell.

On this day back in 1842, composer Arthur Sullivan—one half of Gilbert & Sullivan—was born. One of the fathers of cubism, Georges Braque was born in 1882. Composer Ken Darby was born in 1909. Boxer Joe Louis was born in 1914. Bea Arthur was born in 1922. Director Herbert Ross was born in 1927. Peoples Temple founder Jim Jones was born in 1931. Science fiction writer Roger Zelazny was born in 1937. Ritchie Valens was born in 1941. And Motown great Mary Wells was born in 1943.

Harvey Keitel is 74 today. Stevie Wonder is 63. Screenwriter Alan Ball is 56. Unofficial ambassador to North Korea, Dennis Rodman is 52. And Stephen Colbert is 49.

But how could I not give the day to a man you have probably never heard of? He’s a man who is really important—especially to women, which is to say to everyone. On this day back in 1883, Georgios Papanikolaou was born. He was a Greek scientist who did really important work on the early detection of cancer. In particular, he invented the Pap smear. So if you are a woman and you are still alive, or a man who was born by a woman who had not died of cervical cancer, then you can likely thank Dr. Papanikolaou. He’s one of the many great people we never hear about who have had profound positive effects on our lives.

Happy birthday Georgios Papanikolaou!

Afterword

And this one goes out to Dr. Papanikolaou:

Gallup released a poll where they asked Americans which entities have too much power. There is good news and bad news. The list includes some notable bad guys: lobbyists (71%), major corporations (67%), and the finance industry (67%). But it also listed the federal government (58%) and unions (43%).

It is wrong to say that lobbyists have too much power. Lobbyists are just employees. The problem with lobbyists are the companies who hire them. Focusing on them is missing the larger picture. So people are more concerned about lobbyists than the major corporations who hire them. When it comes to the next two entities, they are more or less the same thing. But the numbers are telling: roughly 33% of the people think that major corporations have the right amount of power or too little. This is the crazy Republican base. Anyone who doesn’t think corporations don’t have too much power in this country is living in an alternate universe.

I’m torn by the statistic on the federal government. I really don’t know how I would have answered that question because the federal government is multifaceted. There are areas where it has way too much power: surveillance, targeted killing, war powers. And there are other areas were it does not have enough power: economic control, welfare, the environment. The 58% figure is typical of the American disgruntlement regarding government: we love what the government does for us but always with a vague feeling that it is up to no good. The best example of this is foreign aid. We spend less than 1% of our budget on foreign aid, but Americans think we spend about 25%. So in a general sense, the fact that most Americans think the federal government is too powerful is meaningless. Note also that Americans are equally against cutting funding of the military—the one place the government clearly has too much power.

And then we get to unions. This is a similar thing to the federal government. Despite the fact that unions have been gutted and have almost no real power anymore, 43% of Americans are still afraid of the boogeyman that is unionization. Oh my God! Workers are organizing like the companies they work for! The horror! Even Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks piles on in the video below. He admits that unions don’t have much power anymore, but that is apparently too much for him. He seems to be confused. The idea of a democracy is not that groups don’t have power; it is that groups will have representative power. As it now stands, unions have far less power than is reasonable for the workers they represent.

The poll doesn’t really matter though. One thing that polls have shown is that Americans are pretty clueless about what is going on in America. They are, for example, against Obamacare while being for every individual idea in it. Most everything in this poll is just the conventional wisdom of political reporters. It does not indicate that Americans know what’s going on.

Apparently, it doesn’t pay to be a clever farmer. Vernon Hugh Bowman had a brilliant idea. He bought a bunch of soybean seeds from a grain elevator. He figured that some subset of those seeds would contained the Roundup Ready gene, a patent of Monsanto. He planted the seeds, sprayed them to Roundup, and kept the seeds from the plant that survived. Then he had the Roundup resistant seeds that he wanted to sell as such. Monsanto pushed back, of course. And now the Supreme court, in a unanimous decision, found that Bowman had indeed infringed on Monsanto’s patent.

My thinking on this case is complicated. On the one hand, if we are going to have a patent system, we have to enforce patents. On the other hand, Monsanto is polluting the world. Farmers generally only buy seeds from grain elevators for animal feed and other low quality purposes. But one can’t do that if he wants to avoid GMO products. So our government protects the products of corporations but does not hold those corporations responsible for the effects of those products.

I am not saying that GMO seeds are necessarily bad. Pollution isn’t necessarily bad. Pollution is just something that you don’t want. And when it comes to GMO products, there are a lot of people who don’t want them. (I’m not one of those people, by the way.) But when it comes to wealthy people and corporations, we have a different approach to the law. If something makes Monsanto money, that it must be protected. If something cost Monsanto money, then it was me overlooked. This is, of course, exactly the situation with investment banking: privatized profits, socialized losses.

So I’m all for allowing Monsanto their non-free-market profits from their patented genes. But I’m against Monsanto getting to pollute our food supply with products that a good part of the country does not want. More and more, we are becoming a country where the laws are tilted excessively toward corporate profits. The government does everything it can to assure those profits. And we call this the “free market.” Meanwhile, the government does nothing to limit the harm that these corporations do. That would be “socialism.” I assure you, if the situation were reversed and Monsanto were trying to steal Bowman’s seeds, the Supreme Court would have come to the opposite conclusion. I even know the argument they would have made: stopping Monsanto from taking Bowman’s seeds would have been too big a burden on the free market.

“A government of the corporation, by the corporation, for the corporation, shall not perish from the earth.” Just ask the “liberals” on the Supreme Court.

This whole IRS controversy seems much ado about nothing. The IRS is generally interested in looking at political nonprofit organizations because regardless of their political stripes, they ought to be paying taxes. Most of these groups aren’t working for the public good; they are pushing their own agenda. And as Matt Yglesias is fond of saying: that’s great! But it isn’t something that we should be subsidizing with tax exempt status. Inside this effort, a small group looked at organizations with names that included “tea party” or similar. And then the head of the division found out about it and put a stop to it. One would think that would be the end of it.

But before I go on with the story, let’s think for a moment about the idea that a group with “tea party” in its title is conservative. As I’ve argued, the Tea Party doesn’t really exist; it is just the base of the Republican Party. But the people who consider themselves members of the Tea Party have long argued that this isn’t the case. Why, they’re not even conservative. They have Democrats and Republicans. So how can an IRS investigation of groups with “tea party” in their names be an attack on conservatives? I welcome this controversy if it means we can finally all admit that the Tea Party is nothing but the conservative base of the Republican Party.

Now that Benghazi seems at last to be fading to the “fake moon landing” status it so richly deserves, the conservatives are grabbing hold of an actual controversy: IRS targeting of conservative groups. Marco Rubio wants blood. He wants the head of the IRS Commissioner. But as Jonathan Chait noted this morning, there is no commissioner. When this program was going on, the IRS was being run by Donald Shulman, a Bush appointee. But his term ended last November, and since then, the acting head has been Steven Miller. (Obama has yet to nominate a new commissioner; this is typical of him and it is almost as big a problem as the Republicans filibustering every nominee.)

So what exactly is Rubio doing? He wants to register his outrage. But this whole thing ended almost two years ago. As I said: much ado about nothing. But one of the few things that Republican politicians do is appear on conservative media to shout about how horrible things are. Calling for the resignation of nonexistent bureaucrats is an important part of their job descriptions. And even when they do happen to latch on to a real controversy, it doesn’t mean their reaction will stay inside the reality based world. I’m sure that we will hear some conservatives calling for the abolition of the IRS because of this. Of course, there are always conservatives calling for the abolition of the IRS. If Rubio thinks he can be at the head of the pack with calling for a resignation of a nonexistent person, he’s seriously underestimated the craziness of his party.

John Sides is a very smart political science professor at George Washington University. But sometimes, he’s kind of boring. Like today, when he was over at Wonk Blog and explained, Four Reasons It’s Hard to Campaign Your Way to the Presidency. I have to assume that he was trying to counter the idea that the well-run campaign is the one that finishes first. No one I read makes that argument. In anything, I personally go too far the other direction: the only thing that matters are the fundamentals. I’ll admit that there are people who who hold clearly incorrect opinions on how a president gets elected. But are we really going to spend all of our time trying to correct fools who will never learn anyway? Does Dr. Sides think the likes of Cokie Roberts reads Wonk Blog?

There is one argument that I have heard from time to time over the last six months. It goes like this: Obama won the election because he spent money early to define Romney as an out of touch plutocrat and Romney was never able to get past that label. Sides counters this by noting that Obama only really pushed that narrative for two weeks in July. I would go further: people already thought that Romney was an out of touch plutocrat. If the ads worked, it was only because they reminded people why they hated Romney. There is a tendency among political pundits to assume that the people are empty vessels just waiting to be filled up with politician talking points. It doesn’t take much time listening to Romney himself to decide that he is an out of touch plutocrat:

Sides’ four reasons are not that interesting. They all come down to the same basic thing: commercials are just not that useful in presidential campaigns. It is one thing for corporate money to flood into California and confuse the population about GMO labeling. In that case, there is either going to be labeling or there isn’t. With a presidential campaign, one of the guys is going to become president. And for most people, it isn’t going to matter all that much which—or at least, that’s what they think until they look back on two years with the Republican president. And that gets to Sides’ best observation: there are ads on both sides pushing against each other. It is hard to get much advantage in such a situation.

The only thing that happened in the 2012 presidential campaign that had a notable effect outside the economic fundamentals was the Obama get out the vote (GOTV) operation. Sides didn’t discuss this, because it wasn’t inside the context of his article. But it is part of the campaign. And I care about it, because it goes along with my guiding philosophy of elections: people almost always vote the same and the only difference is who decides to vote. The fact that Obama had an highly effective GOTV effort probably did earn him an few million extra votes. Was that enough to swing the election? No. But under the right circumstances, it could have been. What’s more, it is something that will continue to help liberals. Even if the Republicans get very good at GOTV, most of their backers already vote. They don’t have the potential to greatly improve their numbers.

As to Sides’ general argument: I agree. Advertising doesn’t mean that much in most elections. But pundits will continue to cover elections as though they do. It is fun to cover and it is fun to read (or watch).

If I found myself in charge of a new country after a coup d’etat, and was limited to a single economist to help me build the new country, I wouldn’t want some Nobel Prize winner—not even someone like Paul Krugman. The reason is that those who win such a prize are brilliant in certain ways, but that doesn’t necessarily mean much when it comes to practical economics. After all, one only needs a single great idea (and often not even that) to get a Nobel. As we’ve seen with any number of brilliant Chicago School economists: when it comes to the actual economy that all of us struggle with each day, they are usually driven much more by their ideological preferences rather than what the profession generally has to teach about the economy.

Take for example the idea of Ricardian equivalence. This is an idea from David Ricardo, an economist who followed closely on the heels of Adam Smith. The idea is that there is a limit to government stimulus.[1] If the government decides to spend beyond its income, the taxpayers will assume that this means that future taxes will have to be raised to pay off the spending. As a result of this, the taxpayers will reduce their spending to provide for the taxes that they know are coming. There is one obvious problem with this theory: people aren’t nearly as rational as economists always assume. And there are other problems. But if we assume that the model is completely accurate, it still doesn’t prove that stimulus doesn’t work.

An example will help. Let’s assume the government provides stimulus over 2 years that they will pay off by issuing 30 year bonds. The taxpayers will not set aside all the money to pay their taxes in that 2 years. They put aside a much smaller amount for the 30 years over which the bonds will mature. Thus, a big government stimulus will not be offset by a huge reduction in spending by the private sector. And this is the case even if Ricardian equivalence is right, which is far from certain.

I bring this up, because lots of distinguished economists argued that the 2009 stimulus bill (ARRA) couldn’t help the economy because of Ricardian equivalence. They weren’t talking long term, here. Instead, they just didn’t understand a basic economic fact. They were lost in the mythical fairy land were theory is reality. Economics as a whole is prone to this mistake, but conservatives are especially prone to it. I’ve been thinking about this since Dean Baker wrote yesterday, “As a general rule economists are not very good at economics.”

A lot of people wonder why Baker has never been given a Nobel Prize. After all, he is consistently right about pretty much everything. Check out this Birthday Boasts article last year about a lot (but certainly not all) of the things he’s been right about that most of his fellow economists have been wrong about. But really: they don’t give out Nobel Prizes for that kind of thing. Instead, they give out such prizes to focused work on something (usually) very small. Although I may find people like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz very useful in understanding economic policy, it isn’t because of their Nobel Prize winning work.[2]

Baker’s article is about how the world should never have taken Reinhart-Rogoff 90% debit cliff seriously in the first place. As I noted last month:

When put this way, economics starts to sound like a very simple science that requires little more than common sense. Indeed, that’s how Baker noticed the housing bubble years before it exploded: house prices had always stayed pretty much flat when adjusted for inflation. Then, in 1995, they started going way up. There was no reason to believe that there was a real reason for houses to be worth more. So Baker’s conclusion: it was a bubble.

When I have my Augusto Pinochet moment of being able to rebuild a country after a coup, I will not reach out to a brilliant, but ideologically blinded Nobel Prize winning economist like Milton Friedman. Nor will I consult with much more clear-sighted Nobel laureates like Krugman and Stiglitz (although they would both make excellent seconds). Instead, I would pick Dean Baker because I think he sees the world as it is rather than as it ought to be. Of course, it matters that he is a liberal and thus cares about the effects policies have on people. But in an economic adviser, the first thing you want is someone who can see the world clearly. And on the right especially, we get ideology before reality or people. Now all I have to do is find a good coup d’etat opportunity.

[1] Actually, this is more how it seems to be used today by conservatives, especially following Robert J. Barro’s work. The original idea is more general: taxes and debt are the same because the people know they will have to pay for it one way or another. Apparently, Ricardo himself didn’t believe that such an equivalence existed. This gets to the heart of something that is wrong with science generally: ideas are often celebrated more because they are interesting than that they are right.

[2] I am not, however, saying that their research is irrelevant. Krugman’s work on liquidity traps and Japan have been really helpful in analyzing what we are currently going through. But that isn’t the work he got the Nobel for. Stiglitz’s work was on asymmetric information in economic models. That does not have a direct relationship to our economy. It does, however, show how screwed up economics as a science has been. The idea that information asymmetries would not be fundamental to the science demonstrates how lost in theory land it has always been.

This is an amazing bit of video from Friday’s Real Time with Glenn Greenwald really taking Bill Maher to task on his anti-Islam rhetoric. Greenwald is making a kind of Some People Push Back argument. He is saying that it is outrageous for Americans to be shocked at the violence in the Middle East when we have been by far the most violent player in the region. But as is often the case, Maher pushes the argument in a religious direction and really shows off his ignorance. For one thing, he notes that Islam has been around long before America became a country. I guess the implication is that Islam was very violent then, but that isn’t the case. Then he states that for the last 200 years, Christianity has been violent. That’s almost too ignorant to be believed.

Maher is demonstrating the biggest problem I have with the New Atheists. They all have a strong tendency to be apologists for Christianity and Judaism. This isn’t so much because they defend these faiths. It is just that they lose all perspective when it comes to Islam. It is the usual mechanism by which racism justifies itself. When a Christian bombs an abortion clinic, they don’t tar all Christians with the act: Christianity is most clearly not the reason for the attack. But when a Muslim blows something up, it most clearly is because of the religion. It is madness. And it is very often explained by quoting evil things in the Koran and nice things in the Bible. But it could just as easily be the other way around. It isn’t, because Bill Maher and other neocons know a priori their conclusions.

What I find most amazing is how parochial people like Bill Maher and Sam Harris are. They think themselves anything but. However, they attack what is foreign and forgive what is close by. Sure, Christians may be silly, but they aren’t violent. So everything is seen from a western or American point of view. The Christians can’t be terrorists because they are part of us, attacking another part of us. But when young Muslims attack the Boston Marathon, it is an attack of them against us. All of this thinking leads to neoconservative policy. And as much as Maher and Harris might claim otherwise, it is really nothing more than racism.

Greenwald is right and Maher is wrong:

On this day in 1918, Julius Rosenberg was born. He was very clearly spying for the USSR, and our government put him and his wife Ethel to death to 1953. I hate this whole episode. First, it is far from clear that Ethel had anything to do with this case. Also, all the other conspirators were given prison sentences, rather than death. So why were these two killed? I really think they became a symbol of the evil Soviet Union infiltrating our country and our culture. What’s more, there was the whole idea that the Soviets weren’t smart enough to make an atomic bomb, they must have stolen it from us. So basically, the Rosenbergs paid the ultimate price to make Americans feel better about the Soviets getting the bomb. I’m sure if we could have, we would have made another Jewish couple pay for Sputnik 1. I used to think, “We are better than this.” Now I just think, “This is who we are.”

The great French composer Gabriel Faure was born on this day in 1845. It is hard to encapsulate his style. At his best, I think of him as pre-Debussy. And I mean that as a compliment; Debussy is often too impressionistic. Faure never loses focus on the music as you can see in this piano version of Sicilienne opus 78:

The great philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti was born on or about this day in 1895. I used to read him when I was a kid. I think I learned a bit from him, especially about the difference between affectation and a genuine response to the external world. I still struggle with that. But there is nothing affected about my crush on Katharine Hepburn who was born in 1907. Talk show host Tom Snyder was born in 1936. And comedian George Carlin was born in 1937.

The quotable Yogi Berra is 88 today. Burt Bacharach is 85. Steve Winwood is 65, so I guess we won’t be hearing anything from him in the future. Miller’s Crossing star Gabriel Byrne is 63. Ving Rhames is 54. And Emilio Estevez is 51.

The day, however, belongs to Florence Nightingale who was born on this day back in 1820. In general, her exploits during the Crimean War are believed to be newspaper hype. But she did go on to found a nursing school that effectively started professional nursing. She was also very important in the move to display statistical information in graphical form. Today we take this stuff for granted, but it was a huge leap forward in making information intelligible. Today, we see this kind of presentation of data in People.

Happy Birthday, Florence Nightingale!

On this day back in 1824, French academic painter Jean-Leon Gerome was born. English illustrator Walter Goodman was born in 1838. The great American songwriter Irving Berlin was born in 1888. Choreographer Martha Graham was born in 1894. The great Salvador Dali was born in 1904. Comedians Phil Silvers and Foster Brooks was born in 1911 and 1912.

The brilliant political comedian Mort Sahl is 86 today. And so is the bumbling Colonel Crittendon from Hogan’s Heroes, Bernard Fox. And Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan is 80.

It was hard to pass up Irving Berlin and Salvador Dali, but the day belongs to physicist and curious character Richard Feynman who was born on this day in 1918. He was one of the founders of quantum electrodynamics, which is basically quantum mechanics and relativity all rolled into one. Most people know him from his book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! It is a fun book to read, although I was never sure if I believed him. I suppose now I do. When I was younger, I thought he had a good too many wonderful adventures. But now I know it is all in the telling; there isn’t anything especially exotic about the stories. He’s just a good and funny writer.

Happy birthday Richard Feynman!