Josh Marshall argues that bad picks by Democratic governors in filling vacant seats make it harder than necessary to retain those seats.

I was just looking at this run-down of recent polls by Tom Jensen at Public Policy Polling. The upshot is that while it seems extremely unlikely Republicans could regain control of the senate next year, it’s not impossible and they look well positioned to make a big dent in the Dems’ majority in the upper chamber.

Most of this has to do with the factors we know about — a bad economy, a charged up right-wing, President Obama’s decline in popularity. But looking more closely at the races something else stood out to me: just how many of the vulnerable seats are ones where bad or questionable picks by Democratic governors have put Democrats in an unnecessarily weak position.

To be clear, not all of these are bad candidates/incumbent senators. But politically they’re all very weak — probably unnecessarily so given the states they come from.

The ones that stand out are Beau Biden in Delaware, yet to be determined in Illinois, Kirsten Gillibrand in New York, and Michael Bennet in Colorado.

[...]

Some of these picks stemmed from personal idiosyncrasies, others unique personal situations. But all were made in the post-2008 political climate when the Democratic ascendancy seemed to flow into an endless future. And the Dems could pay a real price.

Josh admits that there may not have been better candidates to fill the seats in question but he’s frustrated that considerations other than selecting the candidate best able to defend the seat in 2010 were a factor.  And that’s a reasonable enough argument.  Especially since the seats in question would be quite safe had Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Ken Salazar not vacated them prematurely to take seats in the Obama administration.

At the same time, however, I’d note that the Republican candidates to fill these vacancies don’t have the advantage of incumbency.  And they’re presumably running uphill fights, given that Democrats so recently won these seats.

Nick Schultz points us to this interesting graphic on the private sector experience of presidential cabinets:

The chart “”includes secretaries of State, Commerce, Treasury, Agriculture, Interior, Labor, Transportation, Energy, and Housing & Urban Development, and excludes Postmaster General, Navy, War, Health, Education & Welfare, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security—432 cabinet members in all.”

If this is accurate, it is indeed truly “remarkable.” Schultz notes that “public sector employment has ranged since the 1950s at between 15 percent and 19 percent of the population,” so this isn’t the explanation. Yes, Democratic presidents have tended toward people with public sector backgrounds — for reasons perfectly understandable given their ideology — but only by a somewhat higher margin than Republicans.

But it’s almost incomprehensible that 90 percent of Obama’s administration would have no private sector experience. What in the world have they been doing the last eight years, when they presumably weren’t in appointed positions?

Katherine Mangu-Ward offers a plausible explanation: “Part of the reason for the dramatic dip could be Obama’s “no revolving door” policy. The new rules aim to keep lobbyists out of his government but may wind up functioning as a screen for all manner of folks with private sector experience on the CVs.”

Story link via memeorandum.

Full disclosure: I published, and was paid for, a goodly number of pieces at Tech Central Station/TCS Daily when Nick was editor.

Google looked like a monkey after its algorithms had an unfortunate result for searches for photos of the First Lady.

For most of the past week, when someone typed “Michelle Obama” in the popular search engine Google, one of the first images that came up was a picture of the American first lady altered to resemble a monkey.

On Wednesday morning, the racially offensive image appeared to have been removed from any Google Image searches for “Michelle Obama.”

Google officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

Google faced a firestorm of criticism over the episode. First, it banned the Web site that posted the photo, saying it could spread a malware virus. Then, when the image appeared on another Web site, Google let the photo stand. When a Google image search brought up the photo, an apologetic Google ad occasionally appeared above it.

The ad redirected users to a statement from Google which read, “Sometimes Google search results from the Internet can include disturbing content, even from innocuous queries. We assure you that the views expressed by such sites are not in any way endorsed by Google.”

Guardian’s Mark Sweeney has a more detailed explanation:

The image, which has been appearing at the top of search results when the words “Michelle Obama” are put into Google Images, was posted on a blog called Hot Girls, which is hosted by the Google-owned blog service, Blogger.

Hot Girls’ owner has today removed the image, which appears to have originally been put up with a blog post on 21 October, and displayed an apology in Chinese with a very loose English translation.

Google had refused to remove the offensive image from its picture search listings, despite complaints that it is racist, instead opting to run an ad next to it explaining its policy on how search engine results work.

A spokesman for Google said that the Hot Girls blog and image may still temporarily appear when some users make Google Images searches but that it was coming out of the search engine’s indexing system.

The company has been unusually responsive in this case, and understandably so.  But the fact of the matter is that its Image Search, while simply amazing in many respects (I use it all the time for photos to illustrate posts at OTB), is subject to the same manipulation as its text search results.   Indeed, it’s hard to search for anything at all — but especially people’s names — and not find plenty of dubious results.

Photo credit:  Island Crisis

I’ve canceled tonight’s installment of of OTB Radio, our weekly BlogTalkRadio program.

My co-host Dave Schuler is understandably unable to participate after the recent loss of his mother, who will be laid to rest Saturday, and I’m in no mood to go on without him.

The next episode will air on Wednesday, December 2nd.

Our colleague Dave Schuler lost his mother Sunday.   My  sincere condolences.

Dave eulogizes her in brief, moving fashion:

I have lost my oldest friend, my first teacher, and my most inspirational life model. My mother has died at 88.

One of my core beliefs is that the best way to preserve someone you love who has died in your heart is to do the things that person would have wanted to do. From this day forward I hope that, in addition to seeing, hearing, loving, and acting for myself, I will see with my mother’s eyes, hear with her ears, love with her heart, and act with her courage and joy.

It’s a tall order. She was and for me will always remain a great human being, one of the very best I have ever known.

May she rest in peace.

Photo from Mrs. Schuler’s appearance on NPR’s wonderful StoryCorps program, talking with her eldest daughter (and Dave’s sister).  Dave has the audio archived here.

Phil Carter, well known to longtime denizens of the blogosphere as the former proprietor of Intel Dump, has suddenly resigned as deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee policy. The NYT buries this news on A20:

The Defense Department official in charge of closing the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has resigned after only seven months in the job, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

Phillip Carter, who was named deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee policy in April, resigned last Friday because of “personal issues,” a Pentagon official said. Mr. Carter could not be reached for comment and no other reasons were given for his departure.

Mr. Carter, 34, a lawyer and an Army adviser to the Iraqi police in Baquba in 2005 and 2006, was in charge of veterans outreach in President Obama’s 2008 campaign.

Mr. Carter’s departure comes as the administration has acknowledged that it will not be able to close the prison by Jan. 22, the self-imposed deadline Mr. Obama announced immediately after taking office.

Mr. Carter has also left in the middle of the administration’s efforts to prosecute some of the Guantánamo detainees and find a location in the United States to house perhaps 50 to 100 terrorism suspects indefinitely. The Cuba prison now has 215 detainees.

Phil’s extraordinarily talented, having reached such an exalted position at a very young age through hard work rather than connections.  He is an autodidact expert on terrorism and related matters, having established himself as not only a leading blog authority on the subject but one who was regularly published in Slate, the Washington Post (which later enticed Phil to move his blog to their space) and elsewhere.   One of the best thoughtful critics of the Iraq War, he was called to active duty from the Army Reserves and served there ably and honorably as a captain.

While the timing of Phil’s departure suggests a principled political opposition to Obama policy, the “personal issues” could be real rather than a polite dodge.  Glenn Greenwald has some not unreasonable speculation on the former front.

I have no idea what actually motivated Carter’s abrupt resignation, but here’s what I do know:  so many of the detention and other “War on Terror” policies Obama has explicitly adopted were the very same ones which Carter (as well as Obama) repeatedly railed against during the Bush years, in Carter’s case primarily in blogs he maintained both at The Washington Post and at Slate.  Whatever else is true, the policies Obama has adopted in the last six months in the very areas of Carter’s responsibilities were ones Carter vehemently condemned when implemented by Bush.

Greenwald spends the next several paragraphs laying out that case in a very convincing manner.

Ironically, given that Phil was a relatively senior appointee in the administration, my position on these issues is closer to the president’s than his.  But this is perhaps the most substantive issue area in which President Obama most sharply differs from Candidate Obama.  From my perspective, this is a classic case of a naive candidate being hit with reality when confronted with the reality of being responsible for America’s national security and I applaud the president for alienating his base rather than doing the wrong thing.  But for a true believer, I could see how the dashing of Hope and lack of Change could be too much to bear.

UPDATE:  Noah Schachtman, a mutual acquaintance and good friend of Phil’s, talked to him on the phone and was told, “I made this tough decision for personal reasons, even though I loved the job and the work we were doing. Hopefully I’ll have the chance to serve again.”   Phil says the same in an email to me.   I see no reason to doubt his word.

Laura Rozen thinks it’s odd that Phil hasn’t been more specific.  Maybe he’s operating under the presumption that the details are none of our business.

Remember the bizarre case of Bill Sparkman, the census worker found hanging from a tree in Kentucky with the letters FED scrawled on his chest?  Remember the media frenzy about crazy Southerners and their hatred of the federal government?  At the time, I cautioned against jumping to conclusions, saying there could be any number of explanations.  I also agreed with Andrew Sullivan that suicide was unlikely given what we then knew about Sparkman.

Well, it turns out, the unlikely explanation was the right one.

A Kentucky census worker found naked, bound with duct tape and hanging from a tree with “fed” scrawled on his chest killed himself but staged his death to make it look like a homicide, authorities said Tuesday.

Bill Sparkman, 51, was found strangled Sept. 12 with a rope around his neck near a cemetery in a heavily wooded area of the Daniel Boone National Forest in southeastern Kentucky. Authorities said his wrists were loosely bound, his glasses were taped to his head and he was gagged.

Kentucky State Police Capt. Lisa Rudzinski said an analysis found that “fed” was written “from the bottom up.” He was touching the ground, and to survive “all Mr. Sparkman had to do at any time was stand up,” she said. Authorities said Sparkman was not under the influence of any drugs or alcohol at the time of his death. His clothes were found in the bed of his nearby pickup. “Our investigation, based on evidence and witness testimony, has concluded that Mr. Sparkman died during an intentional, self-inflicted act that was staged to appear as a homicide,” Rudzinski said.

[...]

Authorities said Sparkman alone manipulated the suicide scene, which was so elaborate that a man who discovered the body was convinced Sparkman was murdered.

Rudzinski said Sparkman “told a credible witness that he planned to commit suicide and provided details on how and when.” Authorities wouldn’t say who Sparkman told of his plan, but said Sparkman talked about it a week before his suicide and the person did not take him seriously. He told the person he believed his lymphoma, which he had previously been treated for, had recurred, police said.

Sparkman also had recently taken out two accidental life insurance policies totaling $600,000 that would not pay out for suicide, authorities said. One policy was taken out in late 2008; the other in May. If Sparkman had been killed on the job, his family also would have been be eligible for up to $10,000 in death gratuity payments from the government.

Michelle Malkin wonders, “When will the Left retract the Kentucky census worker case smear against conservatives?”  Stacy McCain piles on:

Bill Sparkman committed suicide. So much for “Southern populist terrorism” — and the credibility of Andrew Sullivan. So much for “Send the body to Glenn Beck” — and the credibility of Rick Ungar.

But at least some on the Left are quickly getting the word out.  Zachary Roth at TPM writes, “Sparkman deliberately played on rural Kentucky’s reputation as a hotbed of anti-government sentiment to create the impression that he had been murdered because of his job.”  TLOOG’s Mark Thompson adds,

After all the speculation that the death of a census worker was fueled by anti-government extremismand how the Tea Party movement (whatever its faults) was a vanguard for a violent anti-government uprising, it now appears that the killing was a suicide made to look like a homicide so the man’s family could collect a substantial life insurance payout.  This is a saddening portrait of a deeply troubled man in deeply troubled times. It is not, however, evidence that anti-government activists are uniquely violent.

When information is scant, we tend to fill in the gaps based on our prejudices about how the world works.  On the whole, it’s a completely reasonable thing to do.  Indeed, the nature of wisdom is the ability to extrapolate from what we’ve learned.   But sometimes jumping to conclusions bites you in the ass.

Story links: memeorandum

Tyler Cowen dubs the paradox of choice — the idea that people become unhappy when given too many choices — “one of the most overrated and incorrectly cited results in the social sciences.”  He cites Tim Harford’s recent piece in FT describing research on the subject:

Is more choice better? Ten years ago the answer seemed obvious: Yes. Now the conventional wisdom is the opposite: lots of choice makes people less likely to choose anything, and less happy when they do choose.

The most famous supporting evidence is an experiment conducted by two psychologists, Mark Lepper and Sheena Iyengar. They set up a jam-tasting stall in a posh supermarket in California. Sometimes they offered six varieties of jam, at other times 24; jam tasters were then offered a voucher to buy jam at a discount.

The bigger display attracted more customers but very few of them actually bought jam. The display that offered less choice made many more sales – in fact, only 3 per cent of jam tasters at the 24-flavour stand used their discount voucher, versus 30 per cent at the six-flavour stand. This is an astonishingly strong effect – and utterly counter to mainstream economic theory.

[...]

But a more fundamental objection to the “choice is bad” thesis is that the psychological effect may not actually exist at all. It is hard to find much evidence that retailers are ferociously simplifying their offerings in an effort to boost sales. Starbucks boasts about its “87,000 drink combinations”; supermarkets are packed with options. This suggests that “choice demotivates” is not a universal human truth, but an effect that emerges under special circumstances.

Benjamin Scheibehenne, a psychologist at the University of Basel, was thinking along these lines when he decided (with Peter Todd and, later, Rainer Greifeneder) to design a range of experiments to figure out when choice demotivates, and when it does not.

But a curious thing happened almost immediately. They began by trying to replicate some classic experiments – such as the jam study, and a similar one with luxury chocolates. They couldn’t find any sign of the “choice is bad” effect. Neither the original Lepper-Iyengar experiments nor the new study appears to be at fault: the results are just different and we don’t know why.

When I saw that question at Kevin Drum’s place, the likely answer struck me as rather obvious.  Apparently, Kevin though so, too, since he came up with the same answer:

Perhaps the paradox of choice used to be true in simpler times, but the internet and the rest of modern life have taught us to revel in choice, rather than being intimidated by it.  In a related vein, maybe it’s a generational thing.  Maybe choice dazzles me more than it does a 20-something who grew up with 87 cell phone plans, 300 cable channels, and 1,000 Facebook friends.

Even aside from technology, we’re used to more choices.  Yes, we’ve gone from 3 TV channels to hundreds but also from 3 or 4 car manufacturers to a dozen, an almost infinite variety of coffees, ethnic restaurants, and many other things over the course of the past few years.

Kevin’s also right, I think, that our familiarity with the product in question matters.  It’s a bit of a chore to chose between seventeen brands of strawberry jam, for instance, but not all that complicated.  On the other hand, choosing a cell phone and accompanying plan — and being obligated for two years to live with that choice or pay heavy penalties — can be rather intimidating.

It also occurs to me that the original experiment may just demonstrate that people aren’t interested enough in jam to spend a lot of time comparison shopping.  So, unless they’ve run out and really need some more, they may bypass a giant display whereas choosing between, say, strawberry, grape, and cherry and then between Smuckers, Polander, and store brand makes impulse purchases more inviting.

Photo: Country Living

Last night, shortly after getting our 10 month old to sleep, I laughed at the opener to Esquire’s “How to Entertain Kids of Any Age This Holiday Season” featurette.

The premise:

Suddenly, children are all over the house. Somehow, for a couple hours, you’re in charge of keeping them occupied. But, with the right activities, turns out it’s not all that hard.

The advice:

Ages 0-1: You will not be responsible.

Indeed.

The remainder of the piece is useful, if less amusing. Except this one:

Ages 5-7: Stand in front of the garage and let them try to hit you with tennis balls.

I’m not sure that’s a good idea.  But funny all the same.

Steve Green:  “If there really was a Party Of No, I would so join.”

Indeed.

via Glenn Reynolds

Jonathan Last calls this NYT obit for Dennis Cole “the saddest thing you’ll read today.”

To think that you can be one minute marrying one of Charlie’s Angels and then a few years later dying alone in Ft. Lauderdale while doing cruise ship acts.

People have taken faster, deeper dives, of course.  But, yes, not the life he’d have imagined in 1978.

Naturally,  I’m reminded of the lyrics of “Every Mother’s Son,” one of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s lesser classics.

Well I’ve been ridin’ a winning horse for a long, long time
Sometimes I wonder is this the end of the line
No one should take advantage of who they are
No man has got it made
If he thinks he does, he’s wrong

(chorus)
Every mother’s son better hear what I say
Every mother’s son will rise and fall someday

I’ve seen it happen so many times, so many times before
Some man got so much money he doesn’t worry no more
Or he’s got such a pretty woman that’ll treat him fine
Well my friend has been a fool
It happens every time

(chorus)

I’m not tryin’ to preach to no one, to no one at all
I’ve seen so many of my good friends just rise to fall
‘Cause they got so much money or a woman so fine
Well my friends have all been fools, it happens every time

Laura Sjoberg informs us that she is working to form a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, Queer, and Allies  Caucus of the International Studies Association (the premier organization of academic IR scholars) in order to:

A. To promote fair and equal treatment of members of the Lesbian, Gay, Transgendered, Bisexual, and Queer and Allies (hereafter LGBTQA) community in the International Studies Association (hereafter ISA) and in the profession of international studies, in areas including but not limited to graduate school admission, financial assistance in schools, employment, tenure, and promotion.
B. To combat discrimination against and provide support for LGBTQA faculty, student, and professional members of the International Studies Association.
C. To encourage the application of the skills of scholars and students of international studies to combat discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
D. To promote the recruitment of new members to the Caucus specifically and ISA generally.

Leaving aside that the last of the four goals amounts to a self-licking ice cream cone (not that there’s anything wrong with that) how needed are these? Is there really rampant discrimination on the basis of sex in the academy these days? Homosexuality is mainstream in our broader society at this point, much less the relatively liberal halls of academe.

Do LGTBQ types face discrimination in financial aid or grad school admissions?  If so, how?  That is, how would the bureaucratic offices who make these decisions even know that the people were LGTBQ?  (One presumes, irrespective of the answer, that Allies are safe in this regard.)

I suppose that a man showing up for a job interview wearing lipstick and a dress might still be poorly received in many departments across the land.  But so might a man showing up with a mustache or blue jeans or a too-nice suit.

Beyond this, what has any of this to do with ISA?  It was “was founded in 1959 to promote research and education in international affairs.”  Its current purpose is still along those lines:

I.    Provide opportunities for communications among educators, researchers, and practitioners in order to continually share intellectual interests and meet the challenges of a changing global environment

II.    Develop contacts among specialists from all parts of the world in order to facilitate scientific and cultural change

III.    Provide channels of communication between academics and policy makers to promote a successful link between the production of knowledge and its utilization

IV.    Improve the teaching and dissemination of ideas, concepts, methods, and information in the field of International Studies

Rather than hijacking a purely scholarly organization with grievance issues, why not form a caucus within, say, the American Association of University Professors?

One possible explanation:  Sjobert is also chair of ISA’s Feminist Theory and Gender Studies section.  In April, she expressed concern that some LGTBQ members of ISA might chose not to attend the 2010 annual meeting in New Orleans on the grounds that “there is a substantial risk of a lack of equal protection of the laws in the most dire possible situations, including but not limited to critical medical emergencies.”  Apparently, this concern was not heeded and the meeting’s still on.

But, if LGTBQ activism can already take place (albeit, not successfully in this case) within the context of an existing organized section, why the need for a caucus?

Dan Drezner and Megan McArdle are among those recommending Saturday Night Live’s opening sketch parodying a joint press conference with President Obama and Chinese President Hu.

Drezner quips that the sketch manages to convey the nature of the relationship much more succinctly than his own 40-page academic treatise.

Note that, although it appears that President Hu has the power because he is repeatedly berating Obama, the content of the skit suggests otherwise.  Hu’s repeated complaints that the United States is, er, “doing sex” to him demonstrates the very limited leverage China has over U.S. policy.

While $800 billion is indeed a lot of money, it’s not as large a chunk of U.S. public debt as widely imagined.  But it’s enough to virtually assure that China will keep lending us more money.

As an aside, I’m bemused that SNL has managed to get away with having a white guy playing Obama for this long, much less having a white guy playing Hu and a white woman affecting the broken English of a Chinese translator.

UPDATE:  Adam Serwer points me to this Jezebel post to let me know that “getting away is relative.”

Ed Driscoll, Jonathan Adler and Glenn Reynolds take the New York Times and other mainstream outlets to task for their decision to not republish the stolen emails from climate scientists on the grounds that they were illegally obtained and written with the expectation of being kept private.  After all, these outlets famously publish illegally obtained classified national security information at the drop of a hat.

While that’s a pretty persuasive critique on its face, the comparison is ultimately false.

In the case of the East Anglia listservs, the victims are private individuals.  By contrast, the Pentagon Papers and various intelligence leaks published during the Bush era were owned by the United States Government and arguably kept secret partly to shield elected leaders from political fallout.  Nor were the latter “stolen” in the same sense as the former.  Rather, people authorized to receive the information shared it with reporters who are under no obligation to protect classified secrets.

What would be interesting is to see how the NYT and others handle illegally obtained documents from people with whom they don’t politically agree.  Have they republished similarly stolen emails that were harmful to, say, tobacco companies or investment bankers?

If so, then were have a much better case for hypocrisy.

In a front piece story in today’s NYT, Edmund Andrews warns that the bill is about to come due on the massive borrowing the federal government has engaged in.

Treasury officials now face a trifecta of headaches: a mountain of new debt, a balloon of short-term borrowings that come due in the months ahead, and interest rates that are sure to climb back to normal as soon as the Federal Reserve decides that the emergency has passed.

[...]

With the national debt now topping $12 trillion, the White House estimates that the government’s tab for servicing the debt will exceed $700 billion a year in 2019, up from $202 billion this year, even if annual budget deficits shrink drastically. Other forecasters say the figure could be much higher.

In concrete terms, an additional $500 billion a year in interest expense would total more than the combined federal budgets this year for education, energy, homeland security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[...]

Americans now have to climb out of two deep holes: as debt-loaded consumers, whose personal wealth sank along with housing and stock prices; and as taxpayers, whose government debt has almost doubled in the last two years alone, just as costs tied to benefits for retiring baby boomers are set to explode.  The competing demands could deepen political battles over the size and role of the government, the trade-offs between taxes and spending, the choices between helping older generations versus younger ones, and the bottom-line questions about who should ultimately shoulder the burden.

[...]

The problem, many analysts say, is that record government deficits have arrived just as the long-feared explosion begins in spending on benefits under Medicare and Social Security. The nation’s oldest baby boomers are approaching 65, setting off what experts have warned for years will be a fiscal nightmare for the government.  “What a good country or a good squirrel should be doing is stashing away nuts for the winter,” said William H. Gross, managing director of the Pimco Group, the giant bond-management firm. “The United States is not only not saving nuts, it’s eating the ones left over from the last winter.”

Emphases mine.

This sounds ominous and unsustainable.  But Paul Krugman, recent winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, say these fears are overblown.

As Dean says, the numbers don’t fit the scare story — a decade from now interest payments will reach a level not seen since … 1992. And the market seems unworried, since long-term rates remain low.

The “Dean” is question is Dean Baker of The American Prospect.  He sarcastically titles his post, “In Just a Decade the U.S. Interest Burden Could Be as High as It Was in 1992!!!!!!!”

There is no evidence presented in this article that the rise in interest rates will place the U.S. government in a situation where it will be unable to pay its bills and no one cited in this article makes such a claim.

The article is also completely unbalanced in not presenting the views of any economist who could put the deficit/debt issue in perspective for readers.

Krugman makes the same charge but, oddly, neither of them bother to actually present a counterargument.

Andrews argues that most of the debt is in short-term loans whose price will go up as there becomes more competition for money.  He makes what strikes me as a plausible case that higher interest rates, growth in entitlement spending, and a smaller tax base will make servicing the debt very, very difficult.   Countervailing factors could offset this but neither Krugman nor Baker tell us what they might be.

It’s true that we had gloom and doom forecasts during the 1992 recession.  But we only solved those through the dual magic of the dotcom bubble and the post-Cold War defense drawdown.  It’s not likely that those events will repeat themselves.

Photo by Flickr user kandyjaxx under Creative Commons license.