J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 361
May 24, 2018
Some Fairly Recent Must- and Should-Reads About Our Public Sphere, Now in as Bad Shape as It Has Ever Been (Hi Gerry Baker! Hi Dean Baquet!)
Public Sphere:
Carlos (2007): Internet race and IQ debate: Andrew Sullivan Edition:): "Doug, the guy is also a perfect vector for promoting nitwit ideas through a credulous population...
WTF happened to Brendan Nyhan? The braineater has eaten his brain: Josh Marshall: "There are several problems with this logic.: The first is that you are applying jury trial standards to what are political questions. You are also applying statutory standards where they do not exist. As a factual matter the obstruction question is not in doubt...
Paul Krugman says that the public sphere���even the good part of the public sphere���has gone wrong because of the threat and the menace that is twitter: Paul Krugman: Monopsony, Rigidity, and the Wage Puzzle: "This discussion is taking place marks a kind of new frontier in the mechanics of scientific communication���and, I think, an unfortunate one...
Note to Self: I am pretty good at making sure Twitter does not seize my attention and hack my brain. But many other people are not. Platforms so that you can control aggregators. How was it that Tim Berners-Lee's Open Web crushed the Walled Gardeners in the 1990s? And how have the Walled Gardeners made their comeback? And what can be done?: Manton Reece (2014): Microblog Links: "Brent Simmons points to my post on microblogs and asks...
Nick Bunker provides an excellent tweetstorm on the issues involved in thinking about slack, wage growth, unemployment, and employment. He also mourns for the pre-twitter bite web: "remember blogposts? Those were cool!" It is certainly the case that Twitter has devoted zero���nay, less than zero���effort to building tools for curating tweet call-and-response episodes into anything that Plato would recognize as a dialogue...
From the University of Oregon, Mark Thoma's Economists' View continues to be the single best link aggregator in economic policy and theoretical economics: read him...
If you do not make the Economic Policy Institute one of your trusted information intermediaries, you are doing it wrong. Badly wrong.
The Sisyphean work of getting to people to recognize that the Reagan "morning in America" boom was a standard Keynesian reaction to a larger federal deficit in a time of high unemployment���it continues: Menzie Chinn: The Reagan Tax Cuts and Defense Buildup: Supply-Side Miracle or Keynesian Stimulus?: "This set of outcomes does not deny the existence of some supply side effect���the dots in Figure 2 don���t line up exactly on a straight line���but the overall pattern seems to be more consistent with an AD shift from the tax cuts and spending increases (combined with monetary policy relaxation) as opposed to a supply-side scenario as laid out by Wanniski and Laffer.... Bruce Bartlett, who was there at the inception, reminds me of Barry Ritholtz���s review of Reaganomics. See also Bartlett���s piece on the subject..."
The New York Times tried to suck up to the eminent and intelligent Alice Dreger the wrong way. Boy! Is she pissed! And she only gets pissed when getting pissed helps fix a significant problem: that the New York Times today is a central part of a "postapocalyptic, postmodern media landscape where thoughtfulness and nonpartisan inquiry go to die": Alice Dreger: Why I Escaped the ���Intellectual Dark Web���: "I asked what this group supposedly had in common...
Time to go read The Federalist Papers, written when it was not a slam-dunk belief anywhere that a republic could be sustained, again: Barry Eichengreen: China and the Future of Democracy: "Growing geostrategic influence, rising soft power, and, above all, continued economic success suggest that other countries will see China as a model to emulate...
I agree with Noah Smith that a lot of interesting work is being done in academic economics���even in macro. I agree with the Economist that academic economists are more-or-less neutralized at best in the public sphere, with bad actors, bad methodology, and bad ideologues drowning out information. I agree that economics should do a much better job of policing its own internal community and standing within it via what my colleague Alan Auerbach calls "obloquy". I agree that economics should do a much better job of managing its discursive modes, in both empirical and theoretical work. But I do wish the Economist would turn its microscope on what purports to be economic journalism more: Noah Smith: OK, so The Economist has an ongoing series of articles about the shortcomings of the economics profession: "https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21740403-first-series-columns-professions-shortcomings-economists...
Geoffrey Hodgson: 200 Years of Karl Marx: "At least two major aspects of Marx���s thought removed protections of human rights and paved the way for brutal totalitarianism...
Noah Smith: Remember Karl Marx for the many things he got wrong: "Marx didn���t make it to 200, but the ideas he injected into the global conversation and the ideologies that bear his name far outlasted the German economist and philosopher...
The White House press corps: working for their sources first, their bosses second, and themselves third. Do they view themselves as working for their readers at all?: Katha Pollitt: A Press Corps Full of Aunt Lydias: "The real reason... would call into question the underlying presumption of the dinner, which is that there is no price for 'access'...
Ashley Feinberg: Leak: The Atlantic Had A Meeting About Kevin Williamson. It Was A Liberal Self-Reckoning: "In a staff meeting, Jeffrey Goldberg and Ta-Nehisi Coates discussed the hiring and firing of a conservative writer. But it wound up being about a lot more than that...
Yes, this is as bad a violation of academic standards as it looks: Henry Farrell: The public choice of public choice: "Now this... 'financial ties to the Charles Koch Foundation... [but] George Mason University has cited its academic independence...
Never forget how pig-ignorant stupid the High Priests of Liquidationist Chicago were in 2009: Paul Krugman (2009): The lost generation: "Matthew Yglesias catches Eugene Fama making a strange assertion...
This phenomenon is truly deplorable, on many levels: Gillian Tett: True believers: why US evangelicals support Trump: "80 per cent of white evangelicals voted for him in the 2016 election...
Mark Thoma: On the 2009-2015 Dark Age of Macroeconomics: Weekend Reading
Paul Krugman (2012): Economics in the Crisis: Weekend Reading
Credulous business-friendly reporters willing to publish cries of "labor shortage" without evidence are annoying: Neel Kashkari: "The extreme emotions around the labor market 'historic, severe worker shortages'. Sounds like a real crisis. Is it?...f
Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fire: Government as the Problem in the 1970s and 1980s: Martin Feldstein (1979): Introduction to The American Economy in Transition: "The post-[World] War [II] period began in an atmosphere of doubt and fear...
Isn't AdBlock a bigger piece of the answer?: Zeynep Tufekci: We Already Know How to Protect Ourselves From Facebook: "Personalized data collection would be allowed only through opt-in mechanisms that were clear, concise and transparent...
Justin Fox: Paul Ryan's Roadmap Was an Epic Fiscal Failure: "Paul Ryan did not cause the financial crisis.��He has nonetheless failed pretty spectacularly...��his actions have made the situation much worse than it had to be...
Jag Bhalla: The Epistemic Vigilance We Evolved To Do Well: "Confirmation Bias Isn���t a Bug, It���s Operator Error...
Robert Skidelsky: The Advanced Economies��� Lost Decade: "Policy interventions immediately following the 2008 crash did make a difference.... The 2008 collapse was as steep as that of 1929, but it lasted for a much shorter time...
Ezra Klein (2012): A not-very-truthful speech in a not-very-truthful campaign: "Honestly? I didn't want us to write this piece...
Dan Drezner (2014): What Nick Kristof Doesn't Get About the Ivory Tower: "Three tribes that dominate the discussion of foreign affairs���academics, Beltway types and money folks...
Brent Simmons: Blogging System Rewrite: "I realized that I want my blog to be me on the web. This used to be true, but then along came Twitter, and then my presence got split up between two places...
Paul Krugman: Unicorns of the Intellectual Right: "Economics... a field with a relatively strong conservative presence.... [But] trying to find influential conservative economic intellectuals is basically a hopeless task...
Heidi Moore: "What is going on at the Atlantic?](https://twitter.com/moorehn/status/98... 'Too far'?" It���s the genteel form of white ethnicism...
Zeynep Tufekci: Why Mark Zuckerberg���s 14-Year Apology Tour Hasn���t Fixed Facebook: "By now, it ought to be plain... that Facebook���s 2 billion-plus users are surveilled and profiled, that their attention is then sold to... practically anyone... who will pay... including unsavory dictators like the Philippines��� Rodrigo Duterte...
Justin Fox: Beware Economists Who Warn of an Entitlement Explosion: "A��quintet of��notable Republican economists... Michael J. Boskin, John H. Cochrane, John F. Cogan, George P. Shultz and John B. Taylor...
Josh Marshall: Is Facebook In More Trouble Than People Think?: "People aren���t fully internalizing that the current crisis poses a potentially dire threat to Facebook���s... core advertising business.
Henry Farrell: Who has any use for conservative intellectuals?: "The firing of Kevin Williamson has led, predictably, to outrage from other conservatives, and in particular from anti-Trumpers like Bill Kristol and Erick Erickson...
Larry Summers: No, ���Obamasclerosis��� wasnt a real problem: "The Wall Street Journal���s Greg Ip... finds credible... claims that President Barack Obama���s policies... materially slowed economic growth...
Kevin Drum: In Defense of Smartphones: "Sherry Turkle is an MIT professor who thinks social media is decimating face-to-face contact...
Thomas Piketty: Brahmin Left vs. Merchant Right: Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict (Evidence from France, Britain and the US, 1948-2017): "Using post-electoral surveys from France, Britain and the US...
Kevin Drum: National Review Still Has a Race Problem: "The Atlantic recently hired... Kevin Williamson... [who] believes abortion is murder and... any woman who gets an abortion should be executed...
Nicholas Gruen: The middleware of democracy. Or from knowledge to wisdom: or at least knowledge 2.0: "Simon Heffer���s High Minds presents us with a portrait of the mid-Victorians in which they consciously set about building... ours... liberal democratic world...
Robert Feenstra, Hong Ma, Akira Sasahara, and Yuan Xu: Reconsidering the ���China shock��� in trade: "While previous studies focus on the job-reducing effect of the surging imports from China or other low-wage countries on US employment...
Hannah Kuchler: The anti-social network: Facebook bids to rebuild trust after toughest week: "Mark Zuckerberg began 2018 vowing to 'fix Facebook'.... That job is more urgent than ever...
Can someone with a larger tolerance for reading b---s--- than I tell me how Robert J. Barro trimmed his estimate of the effects of the Trumpublican tax cut bill from "smaller than 8.4%.... not by much... I made a rough downward adjustment of the long-run level effect from 8.4% to 7%..." to 0.4%?: Robert Barro and Jason Furman: The macroeconomic effects of the 2017 tax reform: "The result is that GDP would rise by 0.4 percent in the law-as-written case...
Just when you think the mainstream media could not sink any lower into misogyny and stupidity, it's the Atlantic Monthly!: Scott Lemieux: Are you provoked yet?: "Both James Bennet and Fred Hiatt have been asked to hold David Bradley���s beer...
Simon Wren-Lewis: Beliefs about Brexit: "I want to... ask why public opinion seems oblivious to the failures of all those claims before the negotiations that ���we hold all the cards��� compared to the reality that the UK has largely agreed to the terms set out by the EU...
John Scalzi: No, In Fact, You Should Not Write For Free: "I can see where Douglas has gone wrong... some of it boils down to a matter of definition of what constitutes 'free' writing...
David Brady: We... would be delighted by... lift[ing] all single mothers out of poverty.... Making a substantial fraction of people not poor would reduce poverty. Duh: "In @washingtonpost, Robert Samuelson has written a 'critique' of our NY Times piece...
Gillian Tett(January 2017): Donald Trump���s campaign shifted odds by making big data personal: "CA has built a franchise by promoting a proprietary technique known as ���psychographs���...
Those beats won't sweeten themselves!: Zack Kanter: "Absolutely bizarre, fawning NYT piece [by Zach MacFarquhar]. I���m not sure I���ve read anything quite like it in recent memory..."
Jonathan Chait: Nancy Pelosi Is Good at Her Job and She Should Keep It.: "There is zero sign Pelosi���s age has impeded her work...
FT: Thoughts for the weekend: "'To wit, Phil Gramm was right: We are in a mental recession, not an actual recession.' - 2008 comments from President Trump's new economic advisor [Larry Kudlow]..."
Ted Ruger (Dean): Lawyers, Guns & Money: "Dear members of the Penn Law community...
Paul Bedard: Larry Kudlow predicts 4%-5% growth, 'investment boom': "Larry Kudlow, picked to be President Trump���s new economic adviser...
Jonathan Chait: New Trump Economist Kudlow Has Been Wrong About Everything: "The Republican Party... supply-side economics... not merely a generalized preference for small government with low taxes...
Ed Kilgore: What the Christian Right Sowed, Trump Reaped: "Gerson is especially insightful [in saying]: Conservative Evangelicals didn���t back Trump despite his unsavory personality...
Josh Barro and Isaac Chotiner: Policy without politics, immigration, and Trump���s self-awareness: Isaac Chotiner: "Are you enjoying this moment? By 'this moment', I mean the last 14 to 15 months of being a political commentator?...
Carlos (2007): Internet race and IQ debate: Andrew Sulliv...
Carlos (2007): Internet race and IQ debate: Andrew Sullivan Edition:): "Doug, the guy is also a perfect vector for promoting nitwit ideas through a credulous population...
...which, to use a Bujoldism, has demonstrably happened. Again.
The tension between his wingnut id and his somewhat more principled superego is interesting to watch. (At least for me, but I have notoriously tacky tastes.) I don't know why this makes him more believable. Something to do with the conversion narrative, I suppose: he STRUGGLES with his IDEAS! People, it's because he's not the brightest bulb on the tree. I see people STRUGGLING with MATH all the time, but I don't ask them to do my taxes.
Doug M.: "Oh, for goodness' sake, Andrew Sullivan...
...Yes, he's predictable. Yes, he's not too bright. Yes, despite his constant attempts to portray himself as a principled seeker after truth, he'll never change his mind about race and genetics, or Hillary, or half a dozen other idees tres tres fixees. At this point, when I see "race" or "genes" in a Sullivan post, my eye now bounces automatically.
...He's still worth skimming for (1) a window into a particular sort of conservative mind, and (2) the occasional interesting link.
#shouldread
WTF happened to Brendan Nyhan? The braineater has eaten h...
WTF happened to Brendan Nyhan? The braineater has eaten his brain: Josh Marshall: "There are several problems with this logic.: The first is that you are applying jury trial standards to what are political questions. You are also applying statutory standards where they do not exist. As a factual matter the obstruction question is not in doubt...
...As a citizen I���m entitled and obligated to render judgments when actions are required. Again, you are suggesting that we somehow must remain in a cloud of unknowing under a jury renders a criminal verdict. That is absurd.
Finally you���re suggesting that if I state that he has clearly obstructed justice and infer that he has done so to conceal underlying crimes that others will be less likely to uphold norms in the future. How can this possibly make logical or ethical sense? Are you suggesting that because I���m drawing these inferences that other Presidents will be more likely to obstruct justice in the future or take control of investigations into their own actions? How can that possibly make sense?
Citizens are obligated to make judgements about public officials who represent them. You are suggesting that there is a presumption of no wrongdoing that should constrain political action until a jury verdict of guilt. That makes no sense...
#shouldread
Not quite true. It is what the Left New Dealers' consensu...
Not quite true. It is what the Left New Dealers' consensus was. They had lost power in the U.S. But enough of them made it across the Atlantic to do a lot of good: Daniel Davies: "If you like the German social, political and economic model, it's worth remembering that what it really represents is the consensus of American opinion on how to build a stable non-Communist polity if you were starting from scratch, circa 1945..."
#shouldread
David Frum: 15 Criminal-Law Questions Surrounding the Pre...
David Frum: 15 Criminal-Law Questions Surrounding the President: "Open questions...
Trump campaign aides and associates met with Russian agents in advance of the Russian hacks and releases of Democratic internal communications. Did these meetings lead to any form of coordination between the Trump campaign, the Trump family, or Trump supporters on the one hand and Russian intelligence and its proxy, WikiLeaks, on the other?
Russia engaged in large-scale and illegal expenditures on social media to help elect Trump. Did the Trump campaign, the Trump family, or Trump supporters coordinate or assist in any way with these violations of U.S. law?
Trump campaign aides reportedly met with representatives of Persian Gulf governments who offered to violate U.S. law to help elect Trump. What came of those meetings?
How much Russian money has flowed into the Trump family and the Trump Organization since Trump suddenly and mysteriously became cash-rich in 2006?
Did all the foreign funds flowing into the Trump family and Trump Organization comply with applicable U.S. laws on taxation and money laundering?
Did the Trump family and Trump Organization themselves comply with all U.S. laws on taxation and money laundering?
To what extent was Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort beholden to foreign entities? What services, if any, did he provide them?
To what extent was Trump���s first national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, beholden to foreign entities? What services did he provide them?
The same question applies to Sam Clovis, George Papadopoulos, and other figures on Trump���s campaign and foreign-policy teams.
The family business then run by Trump���s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, was in desperate need of funds in late 2016. The record shows he approached entities in China, Russia, and Qatar for aid. What is the exact list of foreign entities solicited by Kushner? What pitch did he offer them in exchange for their prospective investments? Did his pursuit of these investments ever tilt the administration���s foreign policy?
After the election, Trump���s personal lawyer Michael Cohen obtained millions of dollars from foreign and domestic businesses in return for his promise to consult with them. Did Cohen share any of those payments in any way with the president, his family, or his businesses?
Since the election, Trump���s companies have received millions of dollars in licensing fees from entities in Turkey, the Philippines, India, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, and other foreign countries. How much have the president���s businesses been paid by foreign persons and what portion of his total income originates in foreign payments?
Is it true that Stormy Daniels���s daughter was threatened in order to coerce her Daniels signing a nondisclosure agreement with Trump? If so, who ordered and delivered that threat? Did any other women sign such agreements? Were any of them threatened?
Was Trump in any way connected to the payment of $1.6 million to former Playboy model Shera Bechard, an agreement facilitated by Cohen���Trump���s personal lawyer���and using the same aliases and structure as the agreement Cohen struck with Stormy Daniels on Trump���s behalf?
Elliott Broidy, the former deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee, told The Wall Street Journal that he had an affair with Bechard, and that she subsequently decided to terminate her pregnancy. He made the first installment of that payment on November 30; he had a private meeting with Trump on December 2, at which he pushed for a crackdown on Qatar, lobbying for which he expected to be rewarded by the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. How did Broidy land that meeting���and why did Trump prove willing to follow his advice?..."
#shouldread
May 23, 2018
Note to Self: J. Bradford DeLong Fall 2018 Schedule: http...
Note to Self: J. Bradford DeLong Fall 2018 Schedule: https://www.icloud.com/numbers/0G9LA14Y90ziASotpvoQPx4Qw
For an appointment outside or to reserve a slot during office hours, send email to: delong@econ.berkeley.edu
Note to Self: Working on Today...:
Computer Literacy: A...
Note to Self: Working on Today...:
Computer Literacy: An Educational Experiment http://delong.typepad.com/teaching_economics/an-educational-experiment.html
Last semester's grading
Oxford Proposal: Macroeconomics: A Very Short Introduction
Equitable Growth
Books- Martha Wells- The Murderbot Diaries https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0OCCvTnS2wOyEF3hrNUALf0dQ
Martha Wells's "Artificial Condition" Is Strongly Recommended
Very strongly recommended: Martha Wells: Artificial Condition: The Murderbot Diaries.
This is one scene: perhaps the best "tell, not show" scene I have read in a long time: Martha Wells: The Last Stand of the Four ComfortUnits of Ganaka Mining Pit: "In the corridor near the living quarters, I found the other ready room, the one for the ComfortUnits...
...Inside were four shapes that were clearly cubicles, but smaller. Their doors stood open, the plastic beds inside empty. In the corner there was space for a recycler, but no weapons lockers, and the storage cabinets were all different. I stood in the center of the room. The cubicles for the murderbots had been closed, not in use. Which meant none of the SecUnits had been damaged and all had been either out on patrol, on guard, or in the ready room, probably standing around pretending not to stare at each other.
But the cubicles for the sexbots were open, which meant they had been inside when the emergency occurred and the power shut off. If the power is off, you can manually open a cubicle from the inside, but it won���t shut again. It meant they had deployed during the ���incident.���
I used the energy weapon in my arm again to power the first cubicle���s emergency data storage. I didn���t have anywhere near the energy needed to get the whole thing powered up, but the data storage box is for holding error and shutdown information if something goes wrong during a repair. (There are a lot of other things you can do with it if you���ve hacked your governor module, like use it to temporarily store your media so the human techs won���t find it.) SecSystem might have used it before its catastrophic failure. It had been used. But by the ComfortUnits, to download their data during the incident. It was patchy and hard to put together, until I realized the ComfortUnits had been communicating with each other.
I stood there for five hours and twenty-three minutes, putting the data fragments together.
There had been a code download from another mining installation for the ComfortUnits, supposedly a patch purchased from a third party ComfortUnit supplier. The ComfortUnits had all flagged it as non-standard and needing review by SecSystem and the human systems analyst, but the techs who had downloaded it ordered them to apply it. It turned out to be well-disguised malware. It hadn���t affected the ComfortUnits, but had used their feeds to jump to SecSystem and infect it.
SecSystem had infected the SecUnits, bots, and drones, and everything capable of independent motion in the installation had lost its mind.
In between the running and shooting and the humans screaming in the background, the ComfortUnits had managed to analyze the malware and discover it was supposed to jump from them to the hauler bots and shut them down. This would disrupt operations so the other mining installation could get their shipment to the cargo transport first. This had been a sabotage attempt, not a mass murder. But a mass murder was what was happening.
The humans had managed to get an alert out to the port, but it was clear help would not arrive in time. The ComfortUnits noted that the SecUnits were not acting in concert, and were also attacking each other, while the bots randomly smashed into anything that moved. The ComfortUnits had decided that taking SecSystem back to factory default via its manual interface was their best option.
ComfortUnits are more physically powerful than a human, but not a SecUnit or bot. They had no inbuilt weapons, and while they could pick up a projectile or energy weapon and use it, they had no education modules on how the weapons worked. They could pick one up, try to aim it, pull the trigger, and hope the safety wasn���t engaged.
One by one the file downloads had stopped.
One had signaled that it would try to decoy SecUnit attention away from the others, and three acknowledged.
One had heard screams from the control center and diverted there to try to save the humans trapped inside, and two acknowledged.
One had stayed at the entrance to a corridor to try to buy time to reach SecSystem, and one acknowledged.
One reported reaching SecSystem, then nothing...
#books
May 22, 2018
Ten Years Ago at Grasping Reality: May 22, 2008
CFP Panel on the Transparent Society: David Brin's Book Ten Years Later: There are all the���call them Little Brothers���the people who want to sell you things that you may need to be persuaded against your better judgment to buy. And then there are the people who want to figure out whether you will be a more expensive customer to serve... so that they can decide not to let you be a customer.... David Brin wrote, I think, a wonderful book. And complaining that his solution���turn the cameras around���doesn't solve all problems is like complaining that the portions of the free ice cream aren't large enough. Nevertheless, I do complain...
DeLong on the Dollar���and Other Things���on Bloomberg Radio
Engagement in Foreign Affairs: Matthew Yglesias on our two examples of following wingnut-McCain policies of not negotiating: "The United States really only has two experiences with a sustained effort at the Bush/McCain approach.... One would be our effort to deny recognition to Communist China during the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations... a strategic fiasco... of such enormous proportions that Richard Nixon's role in undoing it actually manages to stack up in a non-trivial way against his otherwise terrible record in office. The other is our fifty year effort to starve the people of Cuba into rebelling against Fidel Castro. McCain actually defends continuing this policy, but everyone with a functioning brain understands that it's been a ludicrous failure..."
Ten Years Ago at Grasping Reality: May 28, 2008
CFP Panel on the Transparent Society: David Brin's Book Ten Years Later: There are all the���call them Little Brothers���the people who want to sell you things that you may need to be persuaded against your better judgment to buy. And then there are the people who want to figure out whether you will be a more expensive customer to serve... so that they can decide not to let you be a customer.... David Brin wrote, I think, a wonderful book. And complaining that his solution���turn the cameras around���doesn't solve all problems is like complaining that the portions of the free ice cream aren't large enough. Nevertheless, I do complain...
DeLong on the Dollar���and Other Things���on Bloomberg Radio
Engagement in Foreign Affairs: Matthew Yglesias on our two examples of following wingnut-McCain policies of not negotiating: "The United States really only has two experiences with a sustained effort at the Bush/McCain approach.... One would be our effort to deny recognition to Communist China during the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations... a strategic fiasco... of such enormous proportions that Richard Nixon's role in undoing it actually manages to stack up in a non-trivial way against his otherwise terrible record in office. The other is our fifty year effort to starve the people of Cuba into rebelling against Fidel Castro. McCain actually defends continuing this policy, but everyone with a functioning brain understands that it's been a ludicrous failure..."
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