The Washington Press Corps and the "Watergate debt"

I don't want to exaggerate the magnitude of this, but I have come around to the notion that one of the factors, albeit perhaps a small one, that helps explain the bizarre behavior of mainstream journalists toward Republican scandal over the past quarter century is the sense that the press corps owes one to the GOP after Watergate.

The scandal was the one instance in American history where a president was forced to resign and investigative journalism was arguably the main driver. The press aggressively pursued the story and the coverage was, at the very least, sometimes colored by the personal dislike that many journalists felt toward Nixon.

As the years passed and the former president (deservedly or not) manage to rehabilitate some of his reputation, the idea seemed to take root in the press corps that they needed to balance the scales. The idea was nurtured by the Republicans and conservative media but I don't believe it was planted by them. Like its sister belief, the biased liberal media theory, it was an idea born of and trapped in the 70s.

The Iran Contra scandal was both symptom and aggravating factor.  There were hesitation marks all over the reporting, and while some of these can be attributed to the extraordinary popularity and charisma of Ronald Reagan, the timidity of the press is still notable. Nonetheless, despite the relatively gentle handling, it was still another case of journalists pursuing a Republican scandal.

By comparison, the election of Bill Clinton seemed to represented almost a perfect opportunity to balance things out. Not only was Clinton a Democrat, he also was an outsider (which threatened the livelihood of veteran reporters whose status rested on their DC Rolodexes) and a Southern boy from the wrong side of the tracks (which played on deep-seated regional and, more importantly, class prejudices).

I was in or around Arkansas through the 90s and I remember a constant sense of amazement. Perhaps it was just my naivety, but I was completely unprepared for how low supposedly respectable journalists were willing to go once they'd committed to a narrative, even if it meant crawling in bed with the remnants of the state's  segregationist movement (I still remember my revulsion seeing the Washington press corps elevate Jim Johnson to elder statesman).

I've argued before that the bad journalism that took root during Whitewater was a contributing factor and possibly necessary condition for the Bush presidency, the build-up to Iraq, and a general undermining of democracy that culminated with the election of Donald Trump. It would be ironicc if misplaced guilt over great journalism helped contribute to the decline of the profession.

For related oints, check out thee following from Charles Pierce and Frontline.

Take a deep breath, relax

For the sake of mental health, it would probably behoove all of us to take occasional breaks from the political scene. Here is some wonderful Americana up from the great Jerry Goldsmith.

Both films are excellent, but I especially want to praise the second, not because it is necessarily better, but because it is un-deservedly obscure. A true gem of a movie.

The War on Data -- Trump-Care edition

This mostly speaks for itself but here are a few quick points:

After the election, a lot of people started asking how this could happen. A big part of the answer is that, if you neglect and/or undermine fundamental institutions, bad things happen;

This thread is closely intertwined with our discussion of Straussianism and the noble lie. If you believe that the masses can't process the truth and often need to be misled, your first order of business is discrediting and dismantling respected institutions that provide the public with trustworthy data;

We've been on this beat a long time.




Alice Ollstein writing for TPM:

On Wednesday morning, two powerful House committees began marking up the bills to repeal the Affordable Care Act despite the fact that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has not yet crunched the numbers on what the plan would cost or how many people would lose their health insurance if it passes.

The Republican authors of the bills refused to say this week if the number of uninsured Americans would grow or shrink under their proposals. Independent estimates of how many people would lose insurance range between two to four million and tens of millions of people. As for how much the plan would cost the federal government, Republican leaders offered no numbers—only vague assurances that it will be "fiscally responsible."

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) told reporters Wednesday that he was not sure when the CBO would release its analysis of the bills, but said he hoped it would be next week, before the bill came to the House floor for a vote. But ahead of that vague release date, rank-and-file Republicans are casting doubt on the agency's judgement.

"The CBO is consistently inconsistent," Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) told TPM. "They can't predict the actual results of a 10-year window, because life changes so quickly. So I don't put that much weight on a CBO score."

Over on the House side, Rep. David Brat (R-VA) laughed when TPM asked about the rush to mark up the bill without knowing its cost or impact. "The CBO, they've scored everything wrong for decades," he said.

Emerging from a closed-door meeting of the Republican caucus, Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA) agreed. "To tell you the truth, the CBO, I don't see where they get it right," he told TPM. "I don't know what variables or parameters they use to score things. I don't have a lot of confidence in the CBO process."

Asked whose report he would rely on if not that of the non-partisan office, Thompson replied, "Trust me, this bill will be subject to all kinds of alternative analysis."

Jason Chaffetz and the sewage metaphor

This illustrates the point we made earlier, namely most of the leadership of the Republican Party and the conservative movement are now drinking out of the wrong pipe.

From Chaffetz to low-income Americans: Buy health care, not iPhones by Christopher Wilson

“Americans have choices, and they’ve got to make a choice,” said Chaffetz in a Tuesday interview with CNN, “so maybe rather than getting that new iPhone they just love and spending hundreds of dollars on that they should invest in their own health care. They’ve got to make those decisions themselves.”
…

“Well, what we’re trying to say — and maybe I didn’t say it as smoothly as I possibly could — but people need to make a conscious choice, and I believe in self-reliance. And they’re going to have to make those decisions.”
…

Chaffetz has been under fire for the last two months in his role as chairman of the House Oversight Committee, as constituents chanted, “Do your job!” at a February town hall meeting. Chaffetz said the majority of those in attendance were paid outsiders.

Regular viewers of FOXNews (and this goes triple for consumers of more extreme conservative media) have been told constantly that the world is rife with anti-Republican conspiracies propped up by liberal media, that conservative protests are grassroots expressions of the silent majority rather than Astroturf, and that the poor routinely dine on steak and lobster then rush out to buy the most expensive consumer electronics, all on the taxpayers' dime.

Having that retiree in Florida or Arizona believe these things has been of great benefit to the GOP over the past decade or two, but it is potentially quite dangerous when the leaders and spokespeople of the party believe it too.

Ayn Rand on native American rights

This is Joseph.

Ayn Rand on the settling of North America:

The citizens in it have individual rights, but the country has no rights and so anyone has the right to invade it, because rights are not recognized in that country; and no individual or country can have its cake and eat it too--that is, you can't claim one should respect the "rights" of Indians, when they had no concept of rights and no respect for rights. But let's suppose they were all beautifully innocent savages--which they certainly were not. What were they fighting for, in opposing the white man on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existnece (sic); for their "right" to keep part of the earth untouched--to keep everybody out so they could live like animals or cavemen. Any European who brought with him an element of civilization had the right to take over this continent, and it's great that some of them did.

 This quote is so brutal that I wondered if it might have been fabricated.  But, it seems to be sourced correctly to a speech at West Point Military Academy.

If we presuppose that this quote is an accurate view of Ayn Rand's views, then it has some really big implications.  It rejects group rights, which really isn't a big surprise to anyone who has read Atlas Shrugged.  What is more concerning is the individual rights of the American Indians.  It's not at all clear that these people lived in savagery, and there is good evidence that Europeans mostly come into contact with the survivors of a plague, aka smallpox.  Some degree of social degradation could be expected in these circumstances.

What is the most challenging element here is the notion that the "civilized" European was justified in expropriating land (i.e., property) based on cultural superiority.  And this expropriation had a great deal of force involved.

It creates a notion that force is justified to claim property if one is more culturally advanced.  That would totally change the thrust of her philosophy, given that there is no entity that can decide who can arbitrate this distinction, meaning that the winners are likely to declare themselves socially superior.  This is a collapse into force-based conquest when different groups come into contact.

To me this is a critical point of weakness in the Randian viewpoint, if this is how it looks at inter-cultural conflict.  It's only moral justification is the ideal that property rights have a key element in the ability of complex societies to function.  But if the conflict between groups is to be arbitrated by force, then you really don't have much distinction from feudalism, which had strong property rights and an ideal of enforcing/expanding them by force.

I wonder to what extent this was a "one off" line of thinking?

Wow, it's like almost all of the Trump Threads decided to converge at 3:49 on a Saturday morning -- UPDATED

Rachel Roberts writing for The Independent:

White House officials have reportedly said they have no idea where President Donald Trump got his information that his phones were wire-tapped by Barack Obama.

Mr Trump made his latest explosive claims on Twitter without offering supporting evidence, saying he was the target of a Watergate-style plot and his New York office was wiretapped during the election campaign against Hillary Clinton.

Two former senior US officials dismissed Mr Trump's accusations out of hand as “just nonsense” and “just wrong”, with one telling CNN categorically: “This did not happen”.

Mr Trump, who has frequently railed against “fake news”, apparently relied on conservative media sources rather than intelligence briefings to support his allegations – to the exasperation of members of his own team.

One White House official is reported to have “grimaced” when he woke up and saw the President’s fluffy of tweets, according to Politico.

“It could have come from anywhere”, the official reportedly said, adding it was unlikely to have been an official source.

“Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” the President tweeted, in a reference to Cold-war era allegations of espionage without evidence.

Breitbart, the right-wing media outlet previously run by Mr Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon, published a story accusing the Obama administration of having monitored Trump Towers during the election campaign.

The Breitbart story, which claimed the tactics were designed to undermine Mr Trump’s bid for the White House in a similar way to the “Plumbers” plot against the Democrats by President Nixon, referenced commentary by radio host Mark Levin.

But neither Breitbart nor Mr Levin offered any independent reporting or cited any intelligence sources to support their allegations.

As far back as 2015, we've been making the point that "the Donald Trump candidacy is providing the kind of stress that highlights flaws in our journalistic system." Various practices and conventions that have always been bad are now undeniably bad. Some journalists continue to hold to these discredited notions and are left looking like fools, but many, perhaps more, have responded by taking a long hard look in the mirror and upping their game.

For example, we did a post last week on Jay Rosen's smart analysis of accusation-driven reporting:

1.     Person A makes an accusation against Person B.
2.     Person B denies the accusation.
3.     A news outlet reports that the accusation has been made and denied, but doesn’t offer any information to support or disprove the accusation.
4.    The accusation itself, not the accuracy of the claim, is treated as the newsworthy story.

This was the default mode during Whitewater and it remained disturbingly common. Recently, though, things have started to shift. As President Trump's early morning tweets have accumulated, more journalists and pundits have started pointing out the implausibility in the lede and sometimes even the headline.

We've also been writing about how the immersive bubble that the conservative movement created has resulted in a base with a sense of the plausible and appropriate can no longer be reconciled with that of the general public like some massive psych experiment. A major aspect of this experiment was a Straussian approach to misinformation.  The operating assumption was that party's cannon fodder would be fed whatever it took to keep them angry and afraid while the leaders would know what was really going on.

With the rise of the Tea Party and culminating with the election, the leaders believe what the base believes. The conspiracy theories, rumors and outright fabrications that were supposed to keep the retiree in Florida worked up are now having the same effect on the president.

THIS JUST IN...

From a characteristically sharp piece by Josh Marshall [emphasis added]:

My best guess is that is a typically Trumpian development in that it involves both abject lying and a big splat of ignorance, laziness and ridiculousness of simply having no idea of how the different branches connect with each other. He hasn't realized that demanding a congressional investigation is different when you're President rather than some old guy getting angry watching Fox News in the living room. The President is in essence demanding Congress investigate him. Yes, he thinks it's Obama. But he inherited Obama's house. Whatever Obama did, Trump owns it.

Bialystock's Paradox: Obamacare edition

I'm sure others have noted this, but reading Jonathan's Chait's account of the GOP's struggles to craft a health care plan that is satisfactory to the party and not wildly unpopular with the general electorate, I was struck by a familiar dynamic.

Eleven days before Donald Trump took office, I wrote a column with the slightly hedged but still hyperbolic headline “Obamacare Repeal Might Have Just Died Tonight.” While the “might” was doing a lot of work, my argument was that the GOP’s clearest and easiest path for repealing Obamacare had fallen short, which would force Republicans to attempt to forge a vastly more difficult path. That is what has happened since, and that is why the cause of repeal has been dying a slow and painful death. John Boehner — who repeatedly led his party to election victories on the promise that they would repeal Obamacare! — has now admitted repeal is “not going to happen” and “most of the framework of the Affordable Care Act” would remain in place.

As long as they lost the presidency, the Republican leadership was able to squeeze a lot of votes and dollars out of opposition to Obamacare, but the election changed the dynamic.

Republicans were able to paper over this yawning chasm between what their base demands and what their elites are offering for the last eight years only because they have been able to avoid a specific alternative. Republicans attacked Obamacare for its high deductibles, and Trump promised a replacement that would give everybody better coverage for less money. But their proposals would do the opposite. Multiple sources report that the House Republican replacement plan was supposed to come out this week, but was delayed after an initial analysis by the Congressional Budget Office yielded a horrific score. Their plan would cut the average subsidy level for a person buying insurance on the exchanges from $6,314 to $3,643, according to a preliminary calculation by the liberal Center for American Progress.

When you win, people expect you to start fulfilling obligations, and when you've been making promises you can't keep...

There will be safe seats. There are no safe seats.

In 2017, we have a perfect example of when not to use static thinking and naïve extrapolation.

Not only are things changing rapidly, but, more importantly, there are a large number of entirely plausible scenarios that would radically reshape the political landscape and would undoubtedly interact in unpredictable ways. This is not "what if the ax falls?" speculation; if anything, have gotten to the point where the probability of at least one of these cataclysmic shifts happening is greater than the probability of none. And while we can't productively speculate on exactly how things will play out, we can say that the risks fall disproportionately on the Republicans.

Somewhat paradoxically, chaos and uncertainty can make certain strategic decisions easier. Under more normal (i.e. stable) circumstances it makes sense to expend little or no resources on unwinnable fights (or, conversely,  to spend considerable time and effort deciding what's winnable). The very concept of "unwinnable," however, is based on a whole string of assumptions, many of which we cannot make under the present conditions.

The optimal strategy under the circumstances for the Democrats is to field viable candidates for, if possible, every major 2018 race. This is based on the assumption not that every seat is winnable, but that no one can, at this point, say with a high level of confidence what the winnable seats are.

More on Straussian communication matrices -- in retrospect, it's surprising it took us this long to get to the NYT

A few weeks ago we ran a post (followed up here) on the implications of Strauss on bullshit propagation.The prime example in both was the coverage of Paul Ryan.

Unless they are to stupid to breathe, reporters covering Paul Ryan have to know that he lies routinely, that he's not a world-class marathoner, that his tastes run less to domestic beer and more to $350 bottles of wine, that he was neither surprised nor disappointed when the camera crews show up to find him washing dishes at a soup kitchen. Journalists could still consider Ryan an honest man because they felt he was only lying to those below them on the hierarchy.

Even among the lied-to journalists, there were strata. There were those who didn't believe the humble everyman bit but swallow the rest. Then there were those who (having a rudimentary understanding of the numbers) knew that Ryan's budgets were profoundly dishonest, but they put those deceptions down as the compromises necessary to make the sausage. They too believed that he was only lying to those below them on the hierarchy, colleagues who lacked the sophistication to follow detailed budgetary discussions. Ryan was, after all, a serious policy wonk who cared deeply about issues like fiscal responsibility.

Of course, every bit of evidence we have indicates this is also a lie, that Ryan is a committed Randian who is willing to inflate the deficit like a birthday balloon if that's what's required to redistribute wealth from the takers to the makers.

Cognitive dissonance is a cruel mistress and hubris is a bitch. The New York Times has recently stepped up its game on the investigative side and has started turning in some truly extraordinary work. The analysis and editorial side, however, remains a disaster.  One of the flaws that has haunted the paper pretty since its inception is arrogance. No other American journalistic institution has more deeply internalized a belief in its own superiority.

Check out how Jennifer Steinhauer continues to cling to the myth of Rep. Ryan. [emphasis added]

Mr. Trump’s budget blueprint — which is expected to be central to his address to Congress on Tuesday night — sets up a striking clash with the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, who has made a career out of pressing difficult truths on federal spending. For years, Mr. Ryan has maintained that to tame the budget deficit without tax increases and prevent draconian cuts to federal programs, Congress must be willing to change, and cut, the programs that spend the most money — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Arrogant and wrong is a dangerous combination even in the best of times, and these are not the best. The paper is trying to deal responsibly with Trump, but to do so without admitting that they had been wrong about so much of the political landscape or owning up to the part their pox-on-both-their-houses reporting played in the election.

Pre-reading for tomorrow's post

I've got one in the queue on a recent example of the New York Times' ongoing effort to face the reality of Trump while clinging to the myth of Ryan. Over at New York Magazine, Jonathan Chait takes an ax to the NYT's battle for the party's soul narrative.

GOP Game Theory -- things are still different

"It's probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in."

    LBJ on FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover,

[UPDATE: The conversation continues with The nuclear moose option and The Republicans' 3 x 3 existential threat.]


Let's start with a prediction:

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) predicted on Tuesday that Republicans will split with President Trump within months unless the administration changes course.0

"My prediction is he keeps up on this path...within three, four months you're going to see a whole lot of Republicans breaking with him," Schumer said during an interview with ABC's "The View."

Schumer argued while most GOP lawmakers aren't yet willing to break publicly from the White House, they are privately having "real problems" with Trump's policies in his first month.

"A lot of the Republicans, they're mainstream people. ... They will feel they have no choice but to break with him," he said.

GOP leadership are largely dismissing any early signs of discord between Congress and the White House as they slowly try to make progress on an ambitious agenda.

Ed Kilgore, however, points out that Trump may not be as toxic as many people think:

So while it is hard to deny that Trump is amazingly unpopular for a new president, unless his approval ratings trend farther down the way even those of popular presidents typically do, his party may not suffer the kind of humiliation Democrats experienced in 2010. For all the shock Trump has consistently inspired with his behavior as president, there’s not much objective reason for Republican politicians to panic and begin abandoning him based on his current public standing. But in this as in so many other respects, we are talking about an unprecedented chief executive, so the collapse some in the media and the Democratic Party perceive as already underway could yet arrive.

The relationship between the Trump/Bannon White House and the GOP legislature is perhaps uniquely suited for a textbook game theory analysis. In pretty much all previous cases,  relationships between presidents and Congress have been complicated by numerous factors other than naked self-interest--ideological, partisan, personal, cultural--but this time it's different. With a few isolated exceptions, there is no deeply held common ground between the White House and Capitol Hill. The current arrangement is strictly based on people getting things they care about in exchange for things they don't.

However, while the relationship is simple in those terms, it is dauntingly complex in terms of the pros and cons of staying versus going. If the Republicans stand with Trump, he will probably sign any piece of legislation that comes across his desk (with this White House, "probably" is always a necessary qualifier). This comes at the cost of losing their ability to distance themselves from and increasingly unpopular and scandal-ridden administration.

Some of that distance might be clawed back by public criticism of the president and by high-profile hearings, but those steps bring even greater risks. Trump has no interest in the GOP's legislative agenda, no loyalty to the party, and no particular affection for its leaders. Worse still, as Josh Marshall has frequently noted, Trump has the bully's instinctive tendency to go after the vulnerable. There is a limit to the damage he can inflict on the Democrats, but he is in a position to literally destroy the Republican Party.

We often hear this framed in terms of Trump supporters making trouble in the primaries, but that's pre-2016 thinking. This goes far deeper. In addition to a seemingly total lack of interpersonal, temperamental, and rhetorical constraints, Trump is highly popular with a large segment of the base. In the event of an intra-party war, some of this support would undoubtedly peel away, but a substantial portion would stay.

Keep in mind, all of this takes place in the context of a troubling demographic tide for the Republicans. Their strategic response to this has been to maximize turnout within the party while suppressing the vote on the other side. It has been a shrewd strategy but it leaves little margin for error.  Trump has the ability to drive a wedge between a significant chunk of the base and the GOP for at least the next few cycles, possibly enough to threaten the viability of the party.

The closest analogy that comes to mind is the Democrats and Vietnam, but that was a rift in a big-tent loosely organized party. The 21st Century GOP is a small tent party that depends on discipline and entrenchment strategies. It's not clear that it would survive a civil war.

Given that, I suspect the next year or two will prove Schumer wrong. There is some evidence that the president's polling has stabilized, perhaps even rebounded a bit, but even if the numbers go back into free fall, Republicans in the House and the Senate will be extremely reluctant to break from Trump with anything more than isolated or cosmetic challenges.

This isn't just a question of not wanting Trump outside the tent pissing in; this is a question of not wanting Trump outside the tent tossing grenades. 

Sometimes problems are complicated

This is Joseph

Kevin Drum points us to data suggesting that, contrary to the experience in the United States, immigrants in Sweden are more likely to commit crimes than natives.  Now this data has the same issues that any crime data has -- reported crime and committed crime are slightly different constructs and there may be some important social norms. 

The source of immigration might matter a lot if you believe in the "lead-crime hypothesis", or in strong cultural factors underlying criminal acts. 

That said, this sort of evidence actually makes me more confident in the "immigrants commit less crime findings" in the United States, as it tends to rule out an underlying confounding factor that generates these results despite the true rates being equal.  It doesn't mean that the comparison is unbiased, but it suggests we don't have a uniform, large bias in effect everywhere. 

This suggests an approach to immigration filled with nuance, and likely a suggestion that US immigration policy has probably been a bit if an under-reported success story for the past couple of decades. 

Postscript: Mark points out that the absolute rates are different.  Wikipedia suggests ~2 murders per 100,000 persons in Sweden and ~5 murders per 100,000 persons in the United States of America.  So you could see this type of effect modification, even if the crime rate among immigrants was identical between the two countries. 

What the relative rate discussion is doing is pointing out the policy implications of immigration and public safety.  If immigrants have a lower crime rate then natives then criminality among immigrants is a very odd reason to be against immigration.  Note that this is the general policy case: one can be pro-immigrant, see immigrants as being a net positive for crime rates, and still see specific immigrants (say one who commits a violent crime) as being problematic. 

Nor are these points decisive on a policy front.  It's merely one data point among many when making complex policy decisions.  Immigration has implications for economic growth, wages, and human rights, all of which are also important considerations. 

Of course, watching video on tiny screens has made a comeback...

One of the topics I want to take a serious run at one of these days is how the way we think about scientific and technological progress was shaped by two huge spikes, the larger occurring in the late 19th and early 20th century and the other hitting during the postwar era. A big part of that story is the break represented by the Great Depression and the second World War. Though you could argue that the war was actually a period of heightened progress, from a man-in-the-street standpoint, the 30s and the first half of the 40s generally seemed somewhat stagnant.

Television is a useful example. Almost as soon as people were able to transmit voices via wires or over the airwaves, the developers started thinking about ways to add video. This goes all the way back to Alexander Graham Bell. In the early part of the last century, the progress toward television appeared rapid and inevitable.

It is true that the system shown below looks awfully crude, but it represented a stunning advance at the time. Within the space of something like three years the technology went from first public demonstration to actual broadcast received by commercially available sets. In another five years the resolution would top 300 lines, not much by our standards but enough for a reasonable viewing experience.

It is also true that the mechanical approach to prove something of a dead end, but electronic television systems were not far behind. As early as 1929, Philo Farnsworth was publicly demonstrating television systems with no moving parts.

I suspect that most of the people who saw the various demonstrations or who eagerly leafed through each month's edition of magazines like Popular Science back in the late 20s assumed that most modern, upper-class houses of the late 30s would come equipped with a television.

Recommended by the good people at Gizmodo:

Canceling then showing up anyway is probably my favorite

I'm no fan of Andrew Romano. He's one of those journalists who likes to use his instincts and understanding of politics to delve beyond the mere facts. Unfortunately, he's not very good at that part. He does seem, however, to be a reasonably reliable reporter. I wouldn't post his analysis and predictions (at least, non-ironically), but I do trust his to get his quotes right and this summary of Republican "evasive maneuvers" in the face of angry constituents is a nice complement to our previous discussion of how important lines of communication are breaking down between GOP officials and the voters.

    Publicly canceling a scheduled town-hall event because you “didn’t want to meet until all the president’s nominees were confirmed,” then showing up anyway, to talk solely to your conservative supporters, who somehow still seemed to know you would be there (Mo Brooks, R-Ala.)

    Posting a photo from your “great town hall this morning with concerned citizens about the need for tax reform” on Facebook, despite never actually putting said event on your calendar or otherwise telling your constituents that it was happening (Jim Renacci, R-Ohio)

    Removing all mention of your upcoming “town hall” from the host city’s municipal website and refusing to call it a town hall when questioned, insisting instead that it is a “low-key” “community meeting” with other elected officials (Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.) [Not to be confused with the previously mentioned town hall avoidance of Rep. Jimmy Duncan Jr. (R-TN) -- MP]

    Refusing to denounce your “friend” when he announces that he needs “all patriots in attendance” at your next town hall “to protect” you “from any potential disruption of [your] speech,” adding that “concealed carry permit holders [are] most welcome” and shouldn’t “forget [their] ammo” (Matt Gaetz, R-Fla.)

    Insisting that you are too “busy, busy, busy” to meet with your own constituents during the “first 100 days,” while at the same time scheduling a “special guest” appearance at another congressman’s town hall meeting 2,130 miles away (David Brat, R-Va.)

Speaking of older posts

This is Joseph.

LGM points to this older Paul Krugman piece on why market forces don't work in health.  It discussed the work of Kenneth Arrow, who recently passed away.  But it is worth considering that health care is not a traditional market, like the ones that Adam Smith so nicely described, but has features (high and variable cost, complexity) that make it different.