Brendan Nyhan

Who needs night vision goggles and smart bombs? The Swiss used carrier pigeons and bikes (!) until very recently:

Switzerland has been neutral for 500 years, and these days it’s hard to imagine who might attack us or what enemy the army should prepare to fight. Thus over the course of the past several decades the army has acquired an increasingly quaint character. Carrier pigeons were used until 1994, and the bicycle units were disbanded only four years ago. And it wasn’t until the 1990s that the high command realized that two-thirds of the more than 20,000 fortifications scattered throughout the country were unnecessary and could be closed.

Via Bob Somerby, the Washington Post has a nice takedown of President Bush’s claims to have doubled economic aid to Latin America (which are similar to his bogus claims about cutting the deficit in half):

As President Bush arrived in Brazil on Thursday, he brought with him a message that he believes has been lost on the region: U.S. concerns about persistent poverty have prompted a doubling of economic aid to Latin America since 2001.

…To make the claim, however, Bush is relying on what some analysts called an accounting gimmick. In fact, they said, U.S. aid to Latin America has remained relatively stable since 2000. And the budget Bush sent to Congress last month proposed cutting aid from $1.6 billion to $1.47 billion, an 8 percent reduction.

…Administration officials acknowledge that they are cutting foreign direct assistance this year but said it still remains much higher than during the Clinton administration. “On a trend line, it’s a little bit lower than where it’s been over the past several years,” Assistant Secretary of State Thomas A. Shannon Jr. told reporters in Washington on Wednesday. “But it’s still considerably higher than it was previously.”

…[The foreign aid offered by Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez] may explain why Bush is so intent on calling attention to U.S. aid, telling interviewers and audiences that he has increased it from $860 million to $1.6 billion. “And yet we don’t get much credit for it,” Bush told CNN’s Spanish-language network. “And I want the taxpayers, I want the American people to get credit for their generosity in Central and South America.”

Analysts note that Bush is using a misleading base line, comparing this year’s figure with 2001, a year when Latin American aid was essentially cut in half temporarily to make up for a large military aid package for Colombia and five neighbors. Moreover, Bush never mentions in his comments that he just proposed cutting the figure he cites in next year’s budget.

“The total aid for 2000 was actually higher than the 2008 budget request because of the Plan Colombia supplemental, and in 2002 the amount of aid was about the same as it is now,” said Adam Isacson of the Center for International Policy in Washington. “So unfortunately, this change in rhetoric isn’t reflected in the budget.”

PBS was apparently ahead of its time. Following up its offer of the official McCain fleece with a $200 donation, the McCain campaign is now pushing (PDF) the official McCain 2008 hat for a $100 donation:

How long until they offer a tote bag?

Today’s newspapers seem to be relatively quiet on the bogus Obama stock story, but it’s worth noting a Chicago Tribune article that supports the explanation that Obama’s broker bought the same stocks for both clients:

The arrangement with his UBS broker began not long after Obama signed a $1.9 million three-book deal in December 2004. He said the bulk of his advance went toward purchase of a new home in Hyde Park. Obama said in an interview that he turned to a personal friend and political supporter, George Haywood, for help in deciding how to invest the remainder.

“This was very casual,” Obama said, recalling that he said, “`George, I’ve got $100,000 that I’m interested in doing more [with] than the standard mutual fund. What recommendations or suggestions do you have?’ He said, `Why don’t you go with this stockbroker who has worked well with me in the past?’”

Obama said he met with the stockbroker, whom he declined to identify.

“What I said was, `George told me that you could invest in slightly higher-risk stock choices,’ and that I didn’t want to know anything about it,” Obama said. “He provided us with the standard form where they ask you, `What’s your risk tolerance?’ and `How long do you expect to hold these stocks?’ etc. That was the extent of the conversations.”

Obama said he did not give the broker specific directions about where to put the money.

…Obama said it is not surprising that the broker bought the same stocks for him and Haywood, also one of his clients. Haywood referred him to the broker in the first place, Obama said, and so it makes sense that he might choose the same stocks for one client that he recommended for another.

A footnote to the story — Obama, a longtime smoker, apparently did not want to invest in tobacco stocks:

Obama said he didn’t invest in a qualified blind trust because it wouldn’t enable him to limit which companies he invested in, such as those in the tobacco industry and other areas that he did not want to support.

It’s great that Obama didn’t want to invest in tobacco companies, but obviously every time he lit up he was supporting them.

Only in America? From the official Obama store:

I love this country.
(Via Garance Franke-Ruta at Tapped.)

Via Eric Alterman, Todd Gitlin had the same reaction as me (and Alterman) to the front page New York Times story on Barack Obama yesterday:

The story? Well, here’s the lede:

Less than two months after ascending to the United States Senate, Barack Obama bought more than $50,000 worth of stock in two speculative companies whose major investors included some of his biggest political donors.

Sounds like they nailed him dead to rights. But hold on for the fourth graf:

A spokesman for Mr. Obama, who is seeking his party’s presidential nomination in 2008, said yesterday that the senator did not know that he had invested in either company until fall 2005, when he learned of it and decided to sell the stocks. He sold them at a net loss of $13,000.

The spokesman, Bill Burton, said Mr. Obama’s broker bought the stocks without consulting the senator, under the terms of a blind trust that was being set up for the senator at that time but was not finalized until several months after the investments were made.

So let’s see if we’ve got this straight. First graf: “Barack Obama bought….” Fourth graf: “the senator did not know that he had invested….”

If you’re feeling nostalgic for the ’90s, or if you’re of a numerological bent, please note that today’s peculiar choice of a front-page story comes fifteen years minus one day after the legendary March 8, 1992, front-pager by Jeff Gerth on Gov. Bill Clinton’s Whitewater deal.

So how do the Times reporters justify the story after having conceded that the purchases were made by a (mostly) blind trust? They write:

There is no evidence that any of his actions ended up benefiting either company during the roughly eight months that he owned the stocks.

Even so, the stock purchases raise questions about how he could unwittingly come to invest in two relatively obscure companies, whose backers happen to include generous contributors to his political committees.

Note the weasel words “raise questions.” The mundane explanation for Obama’s purchase is buried in the article:

But he put $50,000 to $100,000 into an account at UBS, which his aides say was recommended to him by a wealthy friend, George W. Haywood, who was also a major investor in both Skyterra and AVI BioPharma, public securities filings show.

Translation: It appears Obama’s broker at UBS bought the stocks on his behalf after having done so for Obama’s friend, who recommended UBS to Obama. A followup in today’s Times (by a different reporter) makes this more explicit:

Mr. Obama said he retained a broker upon the recommendation of a wealthy friend and top contributor, George W. Haywood. The senator said he did not specifically instruct the broker to follow the investment patterns of Mr. Haywood, who along with his wife, Cheryl, has contributed nearly $50,000 to his campaigns and political action committee.

“What I wanted to make sure was that I didn’t want to invest in companies that would potentially bring conflicts with my work here or not abide by some public statements I’ve said in terms of how things work,” Mr. Obama said. “Obviously, the thing didn’t work the way that I wanted it to, which is why we ended up discontinuing it.”

But, he added: “It wouldn’t be surprising to me that he was recommending stocks similar to me that he would be recommending to others.”

Hotline on Call notes how weak the original Times report is on substance:

The Times suggests that Haywood recommended that Obama use UBS’s broker in part because he knew that UBS would invest some of Obama’s assets in the two companies partly owned by Haywood.

The ultimate consequences of the purchase provide no help, here. Obama lost money overall and divested himself as soon as the purchases were disclosed to him. The facts are on his side.

If you think Obama is lying and somehow directed his broker to purchase these stocks on Haywood’s advice (and knew that Haywood was an investor in those companies), and if Obama planned to use his office to appropriate avian flu funds to the pharma company, then… say that. The circumstantial evidence does not begin to prove it.

This is a classic example of the weaknesses of “objective” news reporting on ethical issues. The Times reporters don’t make an explicit argument or concede the limitations of their claim. Instead, they string together a series of facts around a loose hypothesis (that Obama’s actions “raise questions”) and leave it to the reader to infer what they cannot prove. It’s dirty pool.

With the conviction of Scooter Libby on four counts yesterday, the media focus on the trial is quickly shifting to a partisan debate over the merits of a pardon.

Democrats are already calling on President Bush to promise not to pardon Libby, as in this statement from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid:

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, issued a statement calling on Mr. Bush to promise that he would not “pardon Libby for his criminal conduct.”

The White House is stalling, with spokeswoman Dana Perino saying that “I’m aware of no such request for a pardon. And as is afforded to all Americans, there is a process that is followed in which to apply for a pardon… I don’t think that speculating on a wildly hypothetical situation at this time is appropriate.”

But the conservative movement is making a strong push for a pardon. National Review issued an editorial just a few hours after the verdict calling for a pardon, and today’s Wall Street Journal includes not one but two pieces calling for a pardon — an editorial and an op-ed by Ronald D. Rotunda.

Will Libby be the next Casper Weinberger, the Iran-Contra figure who President George H.W. Bush pardoned in December 1992? Washington Post columnist Al Kamen has announced a contest to guess Libby’s pardon date — send in your entries today!

Update 3/8 6:35 AM: A New York Times story on the pardon debate includes an interesting tidbit – the prediction markets are already putting the odds of a pardon at 63 percent:

Meanwhile, the online futures exchange Intrade.com has offered Libby pardon futures.

“There’s good interest in the market already,” John Delaney, the Intrade chief executive, said by telephone from Dublin. He said traders so far had collectively predicted a 23 percent chance of a pardon by the end of 2007 and 63 percent by the end of President Bush’s term.

Andrew Sullivan has written an elegant response to Ann Coulter’s description of John Edwards as a “faggot” during her speech at CPAC:

Coulter’s defense of the slur is that it was directed at an obviously straight man and so could not be a real slur. The premise of this argument is that the word faggot is only used to describe gay men and is only effective and derogatory when used against a gay man. But it isn’t. In fact, in the schoolyard she cites, the primary targets of the f-word are straight boys or teens or men. The word “faggot” is used for two reasons: to identify and demonize a gay man; and to threaten a straight man with being reduced to the social pariah status of a gay man. Coulter chose the latter use of the slur, its most potent and common form. She knew why Edwards qualified. He’s pretty, he has flowing locks, he’s young-looking. He is exactly the kind of straight guy who is targeted as a “faggot” by his straight peers. This, Ms Coulter, is real social policing by speech. And that’s what she was doing: trying to delegitimize and feminize a man by calling him a faggot. It happens every day. It’s how insecure or bigoted straight men police their world to keep the homos out.

And for the slur to work, it must logically accept the premise that gay men are weak, effeminate, wusses, sissies, and the rest. A sane gay man has two responses to this, I think. The first is that there is nothing wrong with effeminacy or effeminate gay men – and certainly nothing weak about many of them. In the plague years, I saw countless nelly sissies face HIV and AIDS with as much courage and steel as any warrior on earth. You want to meet someone with balls? Find a drag queen. The courage of many gay men every day in facing down hatred and scorn and derision to live lives of dignity and integrity is not a sign of being a wuss or somehow weak. We have as much and maybe more courage than many – because we have had to acquire it to survive. And that is especially true of gay men whose effeminacy may not make them able to pass as straight – the very people Coulter seeks to demonize. The conflation of effeminacy with weakness, and of gayness with weakness, is what Coulter calculatedly asserted. This was not a joke. It was an attack.

Secondly, gay men are not all effeminate. In the last couple of weeks, we have seen a leading NBA player and a Marine come out to tell their stories. I’d like to hear Coulter tell Amaechi and Alva that they are sissies and wusses. A man in uniform who just lost a leg for his country is a sissy? The first American serviceman to be wounded in Iraq is a wuss? What Coulter did, in her callow, empty way, was to accuse John Edwards of not being a real man. To do so, she asserted that gay men are not real men either. The emasculation of men in minority groups is an ancient trope of the vilest bigotry. Why was it wrong, after all, for white men to call African-American men “boys”? Because it robbed them of the dignity of their masculinity. And that’s what Coulter did last Friday to gays. She said – and conservatives applauded – that I and so many others are not men. We are men, Ann.

As members of other minorities have been forced to say in the past: I am not a faggot. I am a man.

My friend Ben Fritz shares an excellent graphic from Dateline Hollywood, the satirical entertainment news website he co-edits:

You have to admit that the resemblance is uncanny…

It’s increasingly clear that Hillary Clinton is going to be covered like Al Gore. Meaningless anecdotes will be framed as revealing deep aspects of her character; everything she says is going to be portrayed as the result of political calculation; and every shift in tone or emphasis will be covered as an attempted reinvention of her persona.

Just considers Mark Leibovich’s New York Times profile, which opens with a supposedly revealing discussion of this:

Apparently, Leibovich believes it holds key insights into her character:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton signs autographs meticulously, drawing out each line and curve of “H-i-l-l-a-r-y,” “R-o-d-h-a-m” and “C-l-i-n-t-o-n.” She leaves no stray lines or wayward marks.

“Hillary, over here, over here,” called out a young woman from the mob that formed outside the Berlin Town Hall when Mrs. Clinton, Democrat of New York, arrived for a “conversation,” in the parlance of the made-to-order intimacy of her presidential campaign. “Can you sign my Hillary sign, please?” the woman asked.

Mrs. Clinton autographed the poster, carefully. It took a full seven or eight seconds, none of the two-second scribbles of other politicians. She is the diligent student who gets an A in penmanship, the woman in a hurry who still takes care to dot her i’s.

Let me speak for all Americans: who the f— cares?

Leibovich then moves on to a Dowd-esque attempt to attach a number of archetypal personas to Hillary, even calling her current campaign “Version 08, Nurturing Warrior, Presidential Candidate Model”:

She is, in this latest unveiling, the Nurturing Warrior. She displays a cozy acquaintance (“Let’s chat”) and leaderly confidence (“I’m in it to win it”). She is a tea-sipping girlfriend who vows to “deck” anyone who attacks her; a giggly mom who invokes old Girl Scout songs and refuses to apologize for voting for the Iraq War Resolution in 2002. Her aim, of course, is to show that she is tough enough to lead Americans in wartime but tender enough to understand their burdens.

Over the years, Mrs. Clinton has evolved through a series of female personas. Her outspoken feminism and perceived putdown of cookie-baking mothers provoked fierce criticism. She became the classic “woman wronged” after the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

As a Senate candidate in 2000, Mrs. Clinton embraced the role of an attentive “listener” as opposed to the power-hungry climber many had suspected. In the Senate, Mrs. Clinton has applied herself to winning over colleagues and becoming one of the boys…

It is not easy, though, to humanize a juggernaut, which Mrs. Clinton’s well-financed and hyperdisciplined campaign most certainly is. And it is difficult to appear authentic in tightly controlled settings, or conduct intimate conversations amid mobs of people, many wearing press credentials.

But the senator is trying hard. In appearances in Washington and around the country, Mrs. Clinton — Version 08, Nurturing Warrior, Presidential Candidate Model — is speaking more freely of her gender than she has in years. Her campaign knows that Democratic women are her most loyal supporters. Ann Lewis, a senior campaign aide, points out that women made up 54 percent of the electorate in 2004; Mrs. Clinton garnered 73 percent of female voters in her re-election campaign last year, compared with 61 percent of male voters, according to exit polls.

The rest of the article includes sections on “The Listener,” “The Sister Act,” and “Tough Hostess,” which are again intended as descriptions of Clinton’s various personas.

The problem with this kind of coverage is that every politician is in some sense calculated. Their public persona always evolves over time and varies by context. But as a result of the conventional wisdom about authenticity, some politicians have their every move framed as calculated (Hillary, Gore) and some don’t (McCain). It’s completely arbitrary.