Brendan Nyhan

I’ve written before about how the alternative minimum tax needs to be fixed before it explodes into the middle class at the end of the decade — a nasty problem that the Bush administration has used to keep deficit projections down. Surprisingly enough, the administration has insisted that any fixes be “revenue-neutral”; ie lost revenue from AMT modifications has to be made up with other tax increases. So why are Ron Wyden and Max Baucus to the administration’s right on this issue? Yesterday’s New York Times reports that they are endorsing Chuck Grassley’s bill proposing AMT repeal with no effort to seek the revenue elsewhere — a short-sighted decision that could lead to even more red ink by the end of the decade:

A top Senate Republican challenged a crucial element of President Bush’s budget and tax strategy on Monday, calling for a repeal of the alternative minimum tax at a cost of at least $611 billion over 10 years.

…Robert J. Carroll, the Treasury Department’s deputy assistant secretary for tax policy, told the subcommittee that any reductions on the alternative tax should be “revenue neutral.”

…Mr. Grassley said he would introduce a bill this week to repeal the tax. The bill’s co-sponsors are Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona; Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana; and Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon.

The New York Times reports that Google Print for Libraries is being challenged by the American Association of University Presses:

How long is a snippet? That is one
of more than a dozen questions directed
at Google Inc. this week by the
executive director of the Association
of American University Presses, the
trade group representing university
presses. At issue is whether Google
Print for Libraries, the company’s
plan to digitize the collections of
some of the country’s major university
libraries, infringes the copyrights
of the authors of many books
in those collections. The program
will allow users to search the contents
of books, displaying context-specific
“snippets” of the texts of
copyrighted works.

In a letter to Google
dated Friday, the details of which
were first reported by BusinessWeek
on Monday, Peter Givler, executive
director of the press association, said
that Google Print for Libraries “appears
to involve systematic infringement
of copyright on a massive
scale.” Mr. Givler said the service
has “the potential for serious financial
damage” to the members of the
press association, a collection of
largely not-for-profit businesses that
typically produce and sell scholarly
works of nonfiction that have relatively
little commercial potential. In
a statement, Google said that it has
an “active dialogue with all of our
publishing partners,” adding that it
protects the copyright holders by allowing
users of Google Print to view
only a few short sentences of protected
text.

Both sides seem to be screwing up here. Google owes the university publishers the same respect it has shown to commercial houses; trying to do this without their cooperation is crazy. At the same time, though, university presses put out thousands of volumes that no one reads. The sales numbers I’ve heard for good academic books are tiny; I can’t imagine what happens to the bad ones. That’s why I think making volumes accessible to search is a fantastic way to increase sales — if it’s done right.

More McCain fetish nonsense from David Broder, dean of the “can’t we all get along” wing of the press:

The Monday night agreement to avert a showdown vote over judicial filibusters not only spared the Senate from a potentially ruinous clash, but also certified John McCain as the real leader of that body.

In contrast to Majority Leader Bill Frist, who was unable to negotiate a compromise with Minority Leader Harry Reid or hold his Republicans in line to clear the way for all of President Bush’s nominees to be confirmed, McCain looks like the man who achieved his objectives.

If — as many expect — McCain and Frist find themselves rivals for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, the gap in their performance will be remembered.

Atrios gets this one right:

Um, no. No one gives a shit. While I certainly won’t deny that the filibuster fight and the judges it’s about are important, the people in this country don’t give a shit and won’t remember the fact the John “The Press Swoons at My Every Move” McCain was one of 14 senators who brokered a deal on this issue because most people in the country don’t give a shit about this issue and more importantly most people in this country don’t think bipartisanship and dealmaking for their own sakes are important.

It just isn’t the case that there are two sides two every issue, there are courageous people who can forge a compromise if they want, and that compromise is intrinsically better than the original two positions.

Also, it’s absurd to call McCain the “real leader” of the Senate. He’s a backbencher who helped broker a paper agreement that has yet to be tested.

(Previous installments in the goo-goo series.)

Via Atrios, here’s Editor & Publisher on the latest nonsense from the White House podium:

At a White House press briefing Monday, Press Secretary Scott McClellan, pressed by reporters and with Afghan President Karzai in disagreement, retreated on claims that Newsweek’s retracted story on Koran abuse cost lives in Afghanistan.

He also claimed that he had never said it did, even though a check of transcripts disputes that. On May 16, for example, he said, “people have lost their lives.” On May 17, he said, “People did lose their lives,” and, “People lost their lives” due to the Newsweek report.

And let’s not forget Larry DiRita, the Pentagon spokesman who told Newsweek, “People are dead because of what this son of a bitch [the Newsweek source] said. How could he be credible now?”

I don’t have much to add on last night’s agreement to avert the nuclear option, except to say that the fate of specific nominees is a minor concern compared with the larger issue — preventing the GOP from breaking the rules of the Senate on a party-line majority vote. Can the agreement hold back the forces of partisanship for long? I’m skeptical.

UNC political scientist Jim Stimson is the most distinguished analyst of public opinion in the country, and he’s written a wonderful new book for a general audience called Tides of Consent. The stereotype is that public opinion is transient and easily manipulated, but Stimson shows that its movements over time are systematic responses to the actions of government. For instance, public opinion trends against the administration in office; thus, during the Reagan/Bush era the public became more liberal, but after Bill Clinton took office, it turned in a conservative direction. These trends in “policy mood” are, as he puts it, “the drive wheel” of American politics, powerfully shaping election and policy outcomes. In short, everything you think you know about public opinion is (probably) wrong. Make sure to check it out.

Steve Lovelady at CJR Daily reports on an Annenberg Public Policy Center poll showing the public is much more sympathetic to partisan journalism than the press is:

The Annenberg poll found that the public is far more sympathetic to the idea of a partisan press than journalists are. Whereas only 16 percent of the journalists polled said it was “a good thing if some news organizations have a decidedly political point of view in their coverage of the news,” 43 percent of the public thought it sounded like a swell idea.

Among the journalists, 80 percent thought a partisan press was a “bad thing,” but only 53 percent of the public thought so. Four percent of each group had no opinion.

This is the same point that we made in the conclusion to All the President’s Spin. As we wrote, “we need a press corps that is willing to clarify complex issues for readers, weigh in on the merits of factual claims, and hold politicians accountable” — and the “objective” media generally refuses to do so. In some cases, non-“objective” publications do a better job. The problem is that most ideological writing is untrustworthy. We need more reporters who fill what we call the “middle ground of reporters who uphold professional standards of accuracy but call politicians to account for misleading statements.” Hopefully that’s where the press is headed.

Dana Milbank joins me in mocking the nuclear option clown show:

Senators love to talk about their chamber as the “world’s greatest deliberative body.”

Yesterday morning, Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) used the phrase. Yesterday afternoon, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) used it. But it took Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) to show why the Senate is the world’s greatest deliberative body.

The octogenarian legislator, rising in defense of the filibuster, displayed a larger-than-life poster of Ian McDiarmid playing the evil Supreme Chancellor Palpatine in the just-released film “Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith.”

“In a far-off universe, in this film, the leader of the Senate breaks the rules to give himself and his supporters more power,” Lautenberg inveighed. “I sincerely hope that it doesn’t mirror actions being contemplated in the Senate of the United States.”

Lautenberg juxtaposed the evil chancellor with another poster, of Jimmy Stewart playing Sen. Jefferson Smith in Frank Capra’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” That film, Lautenberg said, “is a celebration of this Senate, the world’s greatest deliberative body. But if the majority leader is successful in ending the filibuster . . . we will move from the world’s greatest deliberative body to a rubber-stamp factory.”

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, people might have considered such a display on the Senate floor to be cheap. But in the debate over President Bush’s judicial nominees, which won’t end until Tuesday at the earliest, anything worth saying on either side has long ago been said — repeatedly.

…[I]t was hard to top Lautenberg, whose staff announced, in a media advisory, that the senator “will have visual aids to make his point — great for television!” After Lautenberg, echoing a new MoveOn.org advertising campaign, likened Republican leader Bill Frist (Tenn.) to Palpatine, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), on a visit to the Senate press gallery, was asked what character Democrats represent. “We are the Jedi knights,” he replied instantly. “We have the light source.”

Frist spokesman Bob Stevenson scoffed at these claims, suggesting the Democrats are in fact led by a floppy-eared outcast from Naboo. If Frist is Palpatine and Democrats are Jedi, Stevenson wondered, “would that make Howard Dean Jar Jar Binks?”

It is a question worthy of the world’s greatest deliberative body.

The New York Times interactive class graphic dumps political scientists into the category “Miscellaneous social scientists,” while economists and sociologists have their own categories. Where’s the love?

Courtesy of my fellow Duke grad student Gerry DiGiusto, perhaps the greatest angry paragraph in the history of movie reviewing:

No, the one who gets me is Yoda. May I take the opportunity to enter a brief plea in favor of his extermination? Any educated moviegoer would know what to do, having watched that helpful sequence in Gremlins when a small, sage-colored beastie is fed into an electric blender. A fittingly frantic end, I feel, for the faux-pensive stillness on which the Yoda legend has hung. At one point in the new film, he assumes the role of cosmic shrink — squatting opposite Anakin in a noirish room, where the light bleeds sideways through slatted blinds. Anakin keeps having problems with his dark side, in the way that you or I might suffer from tennis elbow, but Yoda, whose reptilian smugness we have been encouraged to mistake for wisdom, has the answer. “Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose,” he says. Hold on, Kermit, run that past me one more time. If you ever got laid (admittedly a long shot, unless we can dig you up some undiscerning alien hottie with a name like Jar Jar Gabor), and spawned a brood of Yodettes, are you saying that you’d leave them behind at the first sniff of danger? Also, while we’re here, what’s with the screwy syntax? Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. “I hope right you are.” Break me a fucking give.

By the way, the movie isn’t very good. Once you’ve seen it, I highly recommend the whole Lane review. This paragraph sums things up pretty well:

The general opinion of Revenge of the Sith seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion.