Brendan Nyhan

Upholding this site’s reputation for substantive commentary and insightful analysis, I’m quoted in the Columbus Dispatch discussing Tim Kaine’s crazy eyebrow:

Blogger
notes
overarching
concern
about
Kaine’s
brow

Just to support the theory that there’s a blog for almost anything these days, check out www.brendan-nyhan.com/ blog/2006/02/tim_kaines_ craz.html. That’s the site for chatter about “Tim Kaine’s crazy eyebrow,” referring to the new Virginia governor who offered the Democratic rebuttal to President Bush’s State of the Union address. “That eyebrow is too distracting for the party to ever put him on national television again,” wrote Brendan Nyhan, a graduate political-science student at Duke University. “Call me shallow if you want, but it’s true. . . . Yikes.” The blog noted 880 hits already on Google for “tim kaine eyebrow.”

PS We’re up to 21,400 hits for “tim kaine eyebrow” on Google, though I’m only ranked #3 in the search at the moment.

During an appearance on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” Senator Joe Biden, a possible Democratic presidential contender, claimed that the Senate committee hearings he chaired dramatically changed public opinion about war with Iraq (go to 31:17 in the Real Player clip):

[T]here’s a reason why Democrats are so frustrated. We have no organ of government we control, therefore there’s nothing that you in the press cover about what we have to say. I can make all the speeches in the world I want. It’s not going to get the kind of coverage that would get if in fact they were able to hold three days of serious hearings like I did when I was chairman before the war in Iraq, where close to 70 percent of the American people supported going to war before the hearings began and after the hearings were over it was down below 50 percent.

I assume Biden is referring to the high-profile hearings he held on July 31 and August 1, 2002 (PDF). But I don’t see any evidence of a resulting change in public opinion on support for military action:

USA Today/Gallup poll: 61 percent support in June 2002, 58 percent in September.

Fox News poll: 72 percent support in July, 69 percent support in August.

ABC News poll: 72 percent support in March, 69 percent support in August.

In fact, I don’t see evidence of a swing from “close to 70 percent” support for military action to “below 50 percent” at any point during the period when he was chairman of Senate Foreign Relations (July 2002-January 2003). Given Biden’s reputation as a blowhard and a plagiarizer, you’d think he would be more careful about this kind of self-aggrandizing rhetoric, especially given that he voted in support of the war after the hearings.

Christopher Caldwell’s thoughtful article on the status of Muslim immigrants in Sweden includes a staggering statistic:

In 2004, there were only 329 people serving sentences of more than five years in all of Sweden.

By contrast, the United States has approximately 132,000 prisoners serving life sentences and sentenced 430,000 individuals to state prisons for a mean sentence length of four years in 2002 alone, which means that at any given time there are hundreds of thousands of people serving more than a five year sentence in state or federal prison in this country.

Even accounting for the much smaller population of Sweden (approximately 9 million), these disparities are unbelievable. Obviously, there is a complex debate about the causes of the difference in the prison populations, but its sheer magnitude is shocking to me.

Last week I discussed the useless children’s websites from the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA. Today Wonkette brings news of another useless government website for kids – NRO Junior, the children’s website of the National Reconnaissance Office, which features useful content such as this:

And the article in The Nation that inspired the Wonkette post brings news that there are even more of these things as a result of a 1997 order from President Clinton mandating “that all government agencies set aside virtual space on their websites for child-friendly material.”

Yet another example is the Crypto Kids website of the National Security Agency, which features wacky such as “Crypto Cat, versed in Navajo, the language of the storied code talkers of World War II; Decipher Dog, a cryptanalyst who learned the fine points of broadband networking from his stepmother, an NSA network engineer; T. Top, a turtle who knows how to design and build computers; and a language analyst named Rosetta Stone.” Here’s the whole codebreaking team:

Unlike Simon Apter, the author of the Nation article, I have no ideological objection to intelligence agencies seeking to appeal to children, but I do have an objection to government waste. Creating endless websites probably seemed high tech in 1997, but we should all be able to agree now that these things are a waste of time and money. How many children could possibly be visiting them?

Commenter Rick points me to an item on Republican presidential front-runner George Allen from Al Kamen’s Washington Post column:

Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer yesterday asked Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) about the “visible anger we saw on the face of Zawahiri ” — al Qaeda number two Ayman — on the latest videotape. “And I was thinking about 20 years ago when he was on trial in Egypt, in that jail cell chanting and yelling inside that courtroom. What does that anger suggest to you, that we saw on that tape?”

Allen: “Well, I think the anger shows that he’s angry.”

Already in top form for ’08.

Sounds like a winner!

The New York Times points out that President Bush is once again peddling the supply side myth that cutting taxes increases revenue:

One of the interesting things that I hope you realize when it comes to
cutting taxes is this tax relief not only has helped our economy, but it’s
helped the federal budget. In 2004, tax revenues to the Treasury grew
about 5.5 percent. That’s kind of counter-intuitive, isn’t it? At least
it is for some in Washington. You cut taxes and the tax revenues increase.
See, some people are going to say, well, you cut taxes, you’re going to
have less revenue. No, that’s not what happened. What happened was we cut
taxes and in 2004, revenues increased 5.5 percent. And last year those
revenues increased 14.5 percent, or $274 billion. And the reason why is
cutting taxes caused the economy to grow, and as the economy grows there is
more revenue generated in the private sector, which yields more tax
revenues.

No, no, a thousand times no! As I’ve explained ad nauseum, the fact that revenues increased somewhat in 2004 after declining massively does not mean the tax cuts boosted revenue overall. Here’s the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

[R]evenues declined in nominal terms for three straight years in 2001, 2002, and 2003 (the first time this happened in the U.S. since the 1920s) and in 2004 reached their lowest level as a share of the Gross Domestic Product since 1959… Even with the unexpected gains, projected revenues remain low by historical standards. CBO’s estimates show that, if the tax cuts and AMT relief are extended, revenues as a share of the economy over the next decade (2007-2016) will be lower than they were in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s.

Bush’s claim is equivalent to saying a car that slowed from 55 to 25 and then sped back up to 35 is going faster than when it started. Indeed, CBPP reports that the tax cuts played a major role in the deterioration in the nation’s fiscal position:

Despite claims that the main culprit in this fiscal deterioration is “runaway domestic spending” or growth in entitlement spending, the primary reason for the change from surplus in 2000 to the deficit in 2005 is lagging revenues. In 2000, the surplus equaled 2.4 percent of GDP. In 2005, the deficit equaled 2.6 percent of GDP. This is a negative swing in the nation’s fiscal position of 5.0 percent of GDP. During this period, revenues declined from 20.9 percent of GDP in 2000 to 17.5 percent of GDP in 2005, a drop of 3.3 percent of GDP. Thus, 66 percent of the downturn in the fiscal situation since 2000 (some 3.3 percent of GDP out of the total deterioration of 5.0 percent of GDP) is attributable to the drop in revenues.

Moreover, revenues in 2005 were lower as a share of GDP than the average for the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, or the 1990s. By contrast, total spending was 20.1 percent of GDP in 2005, up 1.7 percent of GDP from 2000 but lower than in any year from 1980 through 1996.

Similarly, data that the Office of Management and Budget released in conjunction with the budget shows that increases in domestic discretionary, international, and entitlement spending (including the prescription drug benefit) account for only 28 percent of the cost in 2006 of legislation enacted since January 2001. Tax cuts account for 36 percent of the cost of that legislation, with the remaining 35 percent attributable to increased funding for defense and homeland security.

Although increased spending for domestic programs has played a relatively modest role in the return of deficits since President Bush took office, the President’s budget puts virtually the entire burden of budget-tightening on those programs.

Nonetheless, the White House has made this claim over and over again. I posted about a similar claim by Bush in August. Back in 2003, I also noted here and here that the administration continued to make the claim that tax cuts increased revenue even though Bush’s own Council for Economic Advisers cast doubt on it in the 2003 Economic Report of the President [PDF], writing, “The modest effect of government debt on interest rates does not mean that tax cuts pay for themselves with higher output. Although the economy grows in response to tax reductions (because of higher consumption in the short run and improved incentives in the long run), it is unlikely to grow so much that lost tax revenue is completely recovered by the higher level of economic activity.”

Meanwhile, the administration is also pushing the latest version of its absurd plan to allegedly cut the deficit in half. We covered the 2003 version of this plan in All the President’s Spin (pp. 138-139) and repeatedly debunked the 2004 version (which shifted the goalposts by using inflated 2004 deficit projections as a benchmark) on Spinsanity. The latest version is just more of the same — a misleading claim that ignores likely costs before 2009 as well as the massive cost of renewing President Bush’s tax cuts after 2009. As CBPP notes, “The budget conceals or omits information essential to assessing its impacts on deficits and on programs and services that affect millions of Americans,” including funding for US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan after 2007 and Alternative Minimum Tax relief after 2006.

Some members of the press are finally starting to scrutinize the supposed budget-cutting plan now that it’s in at least its fourth version. In particular, Jonathan Weisman did a good job at the Washington Post. But many others are not — only a handful of articles on Bush’s budget mention its omission of alternative minimum tax relief in the context of the plan to cut the deficit in half.

Time to do better.

Like creationists searching for evidence that the Earth is 6000 years old, Republicans are still trying to try to find some basis for their belief that Saddam hid WMDs before the invasion:

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee has turned over to intelligence agencies 12 hours of audio recordings of Saddam Hussein meeting with top advisers, an aide to the chairman, Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan, said Tuesday.

Mr. Hoekstra believes the recordings may shed light on whether Mr. Hussein hid unconventional weapons before he was toppled in 2003, said the aide, Jamal D. Ware.

The voice on the recordings has been confirmed by intelligence analysts as Mr. Hussein’s, Mr. Ware said. He could not say when the recordings were made. But a statement from John Loftus, a former federal prosecutor who provided the recordings to Mr. Hoekstra, said on his Web site that the recordings continued “well into the year 2000.”

Mr. Loftus said he had received the tapes from a former American military intelligence analyst, but it was unclear where the analyst had obtained them. The examination of the recordings was first reported Tuesday in The New York Sun.

With leaders like these, is it any wonder that so many Americans still think Saddam had WMDs? How are tapes from 2000 going to prove that Saddam hid WMDs before the 2003 invasion?

Andrew Gelman, a statistics and political science professor at Columbia, presented his co-authored paper “Rich state, poor state, red state, blue state:
What’s the matter with Connecticut?” (PDF) on Friday, and it’s well worth a read. The key point is that the pattern of poorer Republicans “red states” and richer Democratic “blue states” is a misleading guide to the relationship between income and party preference. David Brooks and the other pop sociologists are not giving us the whole picture.

Here’s the key part of the abstract:

We find that income matters more in “red America” than in “blue America.” In poor states,
rich people are much more likely than poor people to vote for the Republican presidential
candidate, but in rich states (such as Connecticut), income has a very low correlation with
vote preference. In addition to finding this pattern and studying its changes over time, we
use the concepts of typicality and availability from cognitive psychology to explain how these
patterns can be commonly misunderstood. Our results can be viewed either as a debunking of
the journalistic image of rich “latte” Democrats and poor “Nascar ” Republicans, or as support
for the journalistic images of political and cultural differences between red and blue states—
differences which are not explained by differences in individuals’ incomes.

For decades, the Democrats have been viewed as the party of the poor, with the Republi-
cans representing the rich. Recent presidential elections, however, have shown a reverse pat-
tern, with Democrats performing well in the richer “blue” states in the northeast and west
coast, and Republicans dominating in the “red” states in the middle of the country. Through
multilevel modeling of individual-level survey data and county- and state-level demographic
and electoral data, we reconcile these patterns.

To see how dramatically the influence of income varies by state, see figure 12 on page 18, which contrasts Mississippi (the state where income has the strongest influence) with Connecticut (the state where it has the least). Pretty remarkable. As Gelman said, rich white people in the South are to the Republicans what African Americans are to the Democrats.

Print headline: “Bush to Propose Vast Cost Savings in Medicare Plan.”

From the fourth paragraph of the article:

Administration officials, Congressional aides and lobbyists said the president was contemplating a package of proposals that would cut the projected growth in Medicare spending by $30 billion to $35 billion in the next five years. That represents less than 1.5 percent of total Medicare spending in those years.

Questions: Do Times editors read the articles before writing headlines? And can we enroll them in Brad DeLong’s economics journalism class? Luckily, someone must have noticed the contradiction because the online headline now reads “Bush to Propose Curbing Growth in Medicare Cost.”

After criticism of President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program during a Senate intelligence committee hearing yesterday, Pat Roberts trotted out some nasty post-9/11 rhetoric:

[I]n a statement issued later, Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who is chairman of the committee, accused Mr. Rockefeller and other Democrats of derailing the discussion about security threats with their concerns about the eavesdropping program.

“I am concerned that some of my Democrat colleagues used this unique public forum to make clear that they believe the gravest threat we face is not Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, but rather the president of the United States,” Mr. Roberts said. “There is no doubt in my mind there are marching orders to the minority members of this committee to question and attack, at every opportunity, the president, the vice president, the secretary of state, attorney general and now members of our intelligence agencies.”

Of course, the members did not say that “they believe the gravest threat we face is not Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, but rather the president of the United States.” This is a smear that suggests that anyone who criticizes the President is somehow disloyal or insufficiently concerned about the terrorist threat.

Roberts seemed to draw his inspiration from Trent Lott, who said virtually the same thing in May 2002 when Democrats were asking what warnings President Bush received before 9/11: “For us to be talking like our enemy is George W. Bush and not Osama bin Laden, that’s not right,” he said.

Luckily, however, this kind of rhetoric is much less effective today, when Bush is polling in the low 40s, than it was in 2002, when his approval ratings were still in the high 60s/low 70s due to the 9/11 boost. What will the bully brigade do?