You, too, can now learn what ex-Trot James Burnham has to teach us about the true nature of anti-McCarthyism:

The McCarthy issue was used by the American Communists as their channel back into the stream of Popular Frontism. The Communists, in fact, invented the term "McCarthyism," and devised most of the ideology that went with it.... The liberals, on a roaring civil rights jag... lowered their guard and the Communists closed.... "[A]nti-McCarthyism" as a movement... was a united front, the broadest and most successful the Communists have ever catalyzed in this country....

What Wilmoore Kendell has to teach us about the true nature of liberalism--you know, that doctrine of Harry Truman:

As this columnist never misses a chance to say, it isn't that the Liberals aren't anti-Communist; they are merely anti-Communist in a peculiar sort of way... [that] automatically exclude[s] effective anti-Communist action. And they cannot go along when the community sets out to do something about its Communists.

The magazine on Eisenhower's 1957 sending the 82nd Airborne Division to Little Rock to protect civil rights:

By what right, according to what law, do these heavily armed combat teams of the first nuclear age "pentomic" division remain and act in Arkansas? Where is the statute... that entitles these soldiers... to quarter themselves on the municipal property of the Little Rock school system? to obstruct traffic...?... to forbid citizens to assemble together?... to club and stab citizens slow to respond to shouted orders? What law authorized the rude braggadocio of General Walker?... The truth is... [t]here is no law, the bayonets have displaced the law in Little Rock.... General Walker is in Little Rock as the commander of an army of occupation... enforcing unconditional surrender. No sensible person will excluce the possibility of a domestic crisis so extreme.... [W]ould it not be prudent to reflect that when guns are released from control by law, we can never be sure what direction they will point in?

The magazine's doubts about the Fifteenth Amendment:

Although the states qualify voters, Art. I, Sec. 4 of the Constitution grants to Congress the power to make or alter... regulations concerning elections for senators and representatives. The Fifteenth Amendment prohibits the denial or abridgement of the right to vote "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."... [H]onest men may differ as to the wisdom and expediency of these grants [of power to the federal government.]...

And Frank S. Meyer on the virtues of McCarthyism:

The peculiar horror of this presidentiad of Eisenhower... [is that] everything merges into one dull blur.... It cannot grasp as real the looming threat of dehumanization that proceeds from the iron tyranny of Soviet Communism or from the soft blandishments of the Welfare States and World Government.... [T]he Era of Moderation could be fairly launched only after the censure and destruction of McCarthy. So long as there was a voice so powerful... insisting that the contemporary world presented an absolute choice between good and evil... the anesthesia could be only imperfectly administered.... What Joe McCarthy was... can[not]... be judged by weighing in the balance the niceness of his discriminations or that tactical acuity of his actions.... His was not a common role. It comes to few men to play it--sometimes to a poet, sometimes to a politician sometimes to someone of no particular position.... Joe McCarthy, who bore witness against the denial of truth that is called moderation, and died for it: "He was a prophet."...

The Washington Monthly : BLACK IS WHITE, UP IS DOWN....Via the Carpetbagger, Treasury Secretary John Snow explains why a president who has vastly increased the federal deficit is more fiscally responsible than a president who vastly reduced it:

Sipping a latte at a Starbucks coffee shop with reporters in Washington two days ago, he said that "the president's legacy will be one of having significantly reduced the deficit in his time," and said Clinton's budget was a "mirage" and "wasn't a real surplus."

Snow said the Clinton surplus was inflated by a stock-price bubble and that Bush will be remembered for cutting the gap from a record $412 billion in the 2004 fiscal year.

You can't make this stuff up. Consensus reality just doesn't exist for these guys anymore.

OK now: Bob Kimmitt, Mark Warshawsky, anybody else in the Bush Treasury who wants to retain ties to the reality-based community, or to avoid losing their own reputations to the Clown Show--now is time to start thinking about whether you want to bail out. ]]> 2005-12-22T01:21:07Z 2005-12-22T01:20:19Z tag:www.j-bradford-delong.net,2005:/movable_type//1.1810 2005-12-22T01:20:19Z

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Richard Cheney. Do it now.

Bush Addresses Uproar Over Spying: Nor did [Bush] explain why the current system is not quick enough to meet the needs of the fight against terrorism. Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the NSA in urgent situations can already eavesdrop on international telephone calls for 72 hours without a warrant, as long as it goes to a secret intelligence court by the end of that period for retroactive permission. Since the law was passed in 1978 after intelligence scandals, the court has rejected just five of 18,748 requests for wiretaps and search warrants, according to the government.

Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who was NSA director when the surveillance began and now serves as Bush's deputy director of national intelligence, said the secret-court process was intended for long-term surveillance of agents of an enemy power, not the current hunt for elusive terrorist cells.

"The whole key here is agility," he said at a White House briefing before Bush's news conference. According to Hayden, most warrantless surveillance conducted under Bush's authorization lasts just days or weeks, and requires only the approval of a shift supervisor. Hayden said getting retroactive court approval is inefficient because it "involves marshaling arguments" and "looping paperwork around."

In asserting the legality of the program, Bush cited his power under Article II of the Constitution as well as the resolution authorizing force passed by Congress after the Sept. 11 attacks. The resolution never mentions such surveillance, but Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said it is implicit and cited last year's Supreme Court decision in Hamdi vs. Rumsfeld , which found that the force resolution effectively authorized Bush to detain U.S. citizens indefinitely as enemy combatants. But the same ruling held that detainees are entitled to challenge their imprisonment in court.

"This is not a backdoor approach," Gonzales said at the White House. "We believe Congress has authorized this kind of surveillance." He acknowledged that the administration discussed introducing legislation explicitly permitting such domestic spying but decided against it because it "would be difficult, if not impossible" to pass.

The elevator from the parking garage up to the main floor of Barnes and Noble has broken down under the weight of Christmas shoppers.

I walked past Wolf Camera three times without noticing its existence. (Of course, the fact that the only sign saying "Wolf Camera" was not visible from the footpath provides some sort of excuse.)

"What are all these people doing here?"

"They're Christians. They're buying Christmas presents."

"If they are Christians, shouldn't they be processing, wearing robes, holding candles and singing advent carols? Should they be driving SUVs at excessive speed through parking lots?"

"Don't ask vain questions!"

"O come, o come Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
Who mourns in lonely exile here
Until the son of God appear..."

"Hush! You're making a spectacle of yourself!"

"Rejoice! Rejoice!"

"People are looking!"

"Emmanuel shall come to thee..."

"Shut up and shop!"

Dan Gross writes:

Daniel Gross: December 18, 2005 - December 24, 2005 Archives: [There's good stuff but] there's also a fair amount of junk in there.... [I]n the last couple of years, a huge differential has opened in the taxation between short-term gains and long-term capital gains. If investors were wealth-seeking machines that were highly influenced by differential taxation rates -- as Prescott argues -- then you would think that the opening of this differential would have a huge impact on investing and trading behavior. People would avoid taking short-term capital gains at all costs, and seek only to take long-term capital gains. Of course, precisely the opposite has happened in the two years since the tax regime on capital gains changed.... Prescott also slips into the intellectual dishonesty so common to this page, writing:

And this isn't about giving tax breaks to the rich. The Wall Street Journal recently published a piece by former Secretary of Commerce Don Evans, who noted that "nearly 60% of those paying capital gains taxes earn less than $50,000 a year, and 85% of capital gains taxpayers earn less than $100,000." In addition, he wrote that lower tax rates on savings and investment benefited 24 million families to the tune of about $950 on their 2004 taxes."

That's a nice way of playing with numbers. It may well be that 85 percent of the households that pay a capital gains tax of some sort earn less than $100,000. But that doesn't mean the benefits of capital gains tax cuts don't flow disproportionately to the ultra-rich. The real question to ask is: what percentage of capital gains taxes paid are paid by those earning less than $100,000. The answer: a heck of a lot less than 85 percent.... [P]eople making more than $100,000 probably pay 90 percent or more of the capital gains taxes.... Next, he's on to the deficits.

But shouldn't we worry about federal deficits? Isn't it true that we need to raise the capital gains and dividends rate to capture more revenue and thus help close the widening deficit maw? The plain fact is that last fiscal year the debt-to-GDP ratio (broadly defined) went up only 0.2%. If the forecasted deficits over the next five years are correct, it will begin declining. Tax revenues will rise as economic activity continues to grow -- indeed, this has been the case in 2005. Besides, to raise tax rates and thereby dampen economic activity seems a perverse way to improve our economic situation, including our level of tax receipts -- 15% of something is better than 20% of nothing.

Now we're into serious doublespeak. We don't have to worry about extending tax cuts due to expire, Prescott argues, because if the current forecasts on deficits for the next five years are correct, the deficits will begin declining. Of course, the reason the current forecasts call for deficits to start declining in the out years is precisely because they presume the temporary tax cuts will disappear....

Sigh.

Not good. Not good at all. An economist's job is to teach people what is going on--not to make misleading assertions about the incidence of tax law changes by regurgitating Don Evans's talking points. Don Evans can speak his own talking points perfectly well.

Larry Kudlow on Federal Reserve on NRO Financial : I still can't forgive the [Federal Reserve] for decimating and deflating the bullish stock market economy five years ago, a move that temporarily ended the great productivity surge of the Internet revolution.

Productivity growth in the American economy, nonfarm business sector:

I can't stand it. I really just cannot stand it.

Price Earnings Ratios as Forecasters of Returns: The theory that the stock market is approximately a random walk does not look right at all: Figure 1... show[s]... the ratio of the real Standard and Poor Index ten years later to the real index today (on the y axis) versus... the ratio of the real Standard and Poor Composite Index for the first year of the ten year interval, divided by a lagged thirty year moving average of real earnings.... If real stock prices were a random walk, they should be unforecastable, and there should really be no relation here between y and x. There certainly appears to be a distinct negative relation here. The January 1996 value for the ratio shown on the horizontal axis is 29.72, shown on the figure with a vertical line. Looking at the diagram, it is hard to come away without a feeling that the market is quite likely to decline substantially in value over the succeeding ten years; it appears that long run investors should stay out of the market for the next decade...

In 1996 Yale economist Robert Shiller looked around, considered the historical record on the performance of the stock market, and concluded that the American stock market was overvalued. Prices on the broad index of the S&P 500 stood at 29 times the average of the past three decades' earnings. In the past, whenever price-earnings ratios had been high future long-run stock returns had turned out to be low. On the basis of econometric regression studies carried out by him and by Harvard's John Campbell, Shiller predicted in 1996 that the S&P 500 would be a bad investment over the next decade. In the decade up to January 2006, he predicted, the real value of the S&P 500 would fall, and even including dividends his estimate of the likely real inflation-adjusted returns to be earned by investors holding the S&P 500 was zero--a far cry below the 6% per year or so real return that we have come to think typical of the American stock market.

Robert Shiller's arguments were convincing. They convinced Alan Greenspan enough so that in December of 1996 he gave his "irrational exuberance" speech to the American Enterprise Institute. They certainly convinced me.

But Robert Shiller's arguments were wrong--at least, wrong ex post. Unless the American stock market collapses before the end of January, the past decade has seen the stock market offer returns a little bit higher than the historical averages--much, much greater than zero. Those who invested and reinvested their money in America's stock market over the past decade have nearly doubled it, even after taking account of inflation.

Why was Shiller wrong? In an arithmetic sense, we can point to three factors, each of which can take roughly one-third the credit for real American stock returns of 6% per year over the past decade rather than zero:

• 2% per year because the acceleration of productivity growth produced by the high-tech revolutions behind the very real "new economy" has made American companies much more productive.
• 2% per year because of shifts in the distribution of income away from labor and toward capital that have boosted corporate profits as a share of production.
• 2% per year because the argument of Glasman and Hassett in Dow 36000 turned out to be only nineteen-twentieths wrong: they argued that increasing risk tolerance on the part of stock market investors would raise long-run price-earnings ratios by 400%; it actually appears that increasing risk tolerance has raised long-run price-earnings ratios by 20% or so.

None of these three factors were obvious as of 1996 (although there were signs of the first and inklings of the third for those smart or lucky enough to read them). As of 1996, betting on Shiller's regression studies was a reasonable thing to do, perhaps an intelligent thing to do--but it was also an overhelmingly risky thing to do, as anybody who followed the portfolio strategy implicit in Shiller's analysis now painfully feels in his wallet or her purse.

Economists muse about just why it is that stock markets around the world are subject to fits of "irrational exuberance" and "excessive pessimism." Why don't rational and informed investors take more steps to bet heavily on fundamentals and against the enthusiasms of the uninformed crowd? The past decade gives us two reasons. First--if we grant that Shiller's regression analyses had correctly identified long-run fundamentals a decade ago--betting on fundamentals for the long term is overwhelmingly risky: lots of good news can happen over a decade, enough to bankrupt an even slightly leveraged bear when stocks look high; and lots of bad news can happen over a decade enough to bankrupt an even slightly leveraged bull when stocks look low. Thus even in extreme situations--like the peak of the dot-com bubble in late 1999 and early 2000--it is very difficult for even those who believe they know what fundamentals are to make large long-run bets on them. And it is even more difficult for those who claim they know what long-run fundamental values are and want to make large long-run contrarian bets to convince others to trust them with their money. As J.P. Morgan said when asked to predict what stocks would do: "They will fluctuate."

Perhaps this is how it should be: if it were easy to pierce the veils of time and ignorance and to assess long-run fundamental values with a high degree of confidence, it would be easy and safe to make large contrarian long-run bets on fundamentals. In this case the smart money would smooth out the enthusiasms--positive and negative--of the overenthusiastic crowd. And stocks would fluctuate less. And there wouldn't be teasing evidence at the edge of statistical significance of large-scale deviations of stock market prices from fundamental values.

Here Fafnir interviews Condi Rice:

RICE: First of all, we don't send prisoners off to be tortured, Fafnir. We just transport prisoners to countries where torture happens to be legal and where they happen to end up getting tortured.

FB: Well that explains everything then! It's all just a wacky misunderstanding, like that episode a Three's Company where Jack sends Janet off to Uzbekistan to get boiled alive by the secret police.

RICE: I'd also like to point out that whenever we send a prisoner to a country that routinely tortures prisoners, that country promises us NOT to torture them.

FB: And then they get tortured anyway!

RICE: Yes, they do! It's very strange.

FB: Over and over again, every time! That's gotta be so frustrating.

RICE: Oh it is, it is.

FB: So the first time you kidnap a prisoner an send him to Saudi Arabia you're like "don't torture this guy" an they're all "we totally won't" an then they go an torture him an you're all "ooh Saudi Arabia I told you not to torture him!" an they're all "oh we're sorry, we promise next time" an then you go "well you better" an you send em the next guy an they torture him too an you go "oh man Saudi Arabia you did it AGAIN!"

RICE: The president believes in the value of patience, Fafnir. He's not going to let a few dozen innocent torture victims come between him and his favorite third-world dictators.

FB: See after the first coupla hundred times that happened I woulda registered a complaint with customer service.

Bush's Snoopgate: WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY By Jonathan Alter WPNI Updated: 6:17 p.m. ET Dec. 19, 2005: Bush came out swinging on Snoopgate—-he made it seem as if those who didn’t agree with him wanted to leave us vulnerable to Al Qaeda-—but it will not work. We’re seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator.... No wonder Bush was so desperate that The New York Times not publish its story on the National Security Agency eavesdropping on American citizens without a warrant, in what lawyers outside the administration say is a clear violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.... [O]n December 6, Bush summoned Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office in a futile attempt to talk them out of running the story. The Times will not comment on the meeting, but one can only imagine the president’s desperation.

The problem was not that the disclosures would compromise national security, as Bush claimed... that “the fact that we are discussing this program is helping the enemy.” But there is simply no evidence, or even reasonable presumption, that this is so. And rather than the leaking being a “shameful act,” it was the work of a patriot inside the government who was trying to stop a presidential power grab.

No, Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story—-which the paper had already inexplicably held for a year—-because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker. He insists he had “legal authority derived from the Constitution and congressional resolution authorizing force.” But the Constitution explicitly requires the president to obey the law. And the post 9/11 congressional resolution authorizing “all necessary force” in fighting terrorism was made in clear reference to military intervention. It did not scrap the Constitution and allow the president to do whatever he pleased in any area in the name of fighting terrorism.

What is especially perplexing about this story is that the 1978 law set up a special court to approve eavesdropping in hours, even minutes, if necessary. In fact, the law allows the government to eavesdrop on its own, then retroactively justify it to the court, essentially obtaining a warrant after the fact. Since 1979, the FISA court has approved tens of thousands of eavesdropping requests and rejected only four. There was no indication the existing system was slow—-as the president seemed to claim in his press conference-—or in any way required extra-constitutional action....

[T]he president knew publication would cause him great embarrassment and trouble for the rest of his presidency. It was for that reason—and less out of genuine concern about national security—that George W. Bush tried so hard to kill the New York Times story.

PressThink: Two Washington Posts May Be Better Than One : Jay asked me yesterday -- back when it was a little more relevant -- to weigh in on whether or not I am an ideologue. I apologize for not responding with blogger speed.

But as it happens, Jay has already expressed my position on this issue more skillfully than I could. For instance, there was his post on http://washingtonpost.com's Achenblog, in which he wrote:

First, Froomkin has an argument. His (in my paraphrase) is: You actually don't think I'm liberal; what you mean is that I am anti-Bush. But you're wrong. I am not anti-Bush, but I do have a kind of agenda as a writer and observer, and it often places me in conflict with this White House. I am for "discourse accountability" in presidents. I try to insist that the president engage in real dialogue, and refrain from demagoguery. I think speeches should be fact-checked, and statements intensely scrutinized. When presidents refuse to answer their critics they do democracy a disservice. When they refuse even to be questioned they pretend they're kings and this we cannot allow.

Froomkin further says: I have an agenda, but not an ideology in the conventional sense. I stand up for these things but I do not take political stands the way a Richard Cohen or George Will might. You can argue with my agenda, but why are you calling me a liberal when I would apply the same standards to a president named Kerry, Clinton, Biden or Obama? (I believe he would, too.)

Amen, Jay (and the many, many readers who said similar things.) (And re: the whole imperial presidency meme, see today's column.)

So I'll just add a few thoughts.

I think one reason some people see the column as having a political bias may be a misreading of my enthusiasm. The fact is that, like most good reporters, I am delighted when I get wind of what I consider a great story -- and I am outraged when I see the public's right to know being stymied. Reporters have traditionally been encouraged to suppress that sort of passion or outrage in their work product. But I have long felt that the Internet audience demands voice. Nobody wants to read a bored blogger. So I wear my passion on my sleeve.

But it's journalistic passion, not partisan passion. And what disturbs me is the suggestion that enthusiastically scrutinizing a Republican president is somehow de facto biased and liberal -- and therefore inadvisable for a reporter in a mainstream newsroom. I think that's toxic for the industry, and for democracy.

Incidentally, I think this also speaks to a larger issue going forward. As more reporters start blogging (and they should) they'll either write boring blogs that fail -- or they'll write with a bit of attitude and succeed by connecting with readers. What will happen then? Here's one scenario: Newsroom leaders will become less fixated on detachment and balance -- two attributes that I think are hurting us more than helping us these days -- and will instead focus on the values at the core of our industry, such as fairness and accuracy.

Finally: There's been much speculation over whether my column would take the same approach with a Democrat in the White House. My answer is that the same passion for answers and accountability would inform the column no matter who is president. But a better question, really, is would the column take the same approach with another president -- either Democratic or Republican -- who was more forthcoming? And the answer is: I don't know. It's possible that in some ways the current incarnation of White House Briefing is a uniquely appropriate response to a unique presidency with a unique lack of transparency.

Meanwhile, in email the lurkers--highly, highly respected journalist lurkers, both inside and outside the Washington Post newsroom--tend to agree with Dan, and also are irate because they typically believe that this passion for accountability and answers has been by and large absent from the print Washington Post's coverage of George W. Bush. Here are some not-atypical excerpts:

I think the [core] problem here is... [national political editor John] Harris doesn't care for heat from the White House.... [T]he White House has been treated so gently by the Post, for the most part, that anyone there complaining about Froomkin should blush. Of course they never blush...

The Post has many more columnists with full blown conservative than liberal biases...

The tension between the Post newsroom and the website is hardly new.... Post management has refused... to meld the two... operations because... the web folks would be covered by the Newspaper Guild contract.... Don't expect any melding... soon. It would cost the Washington Post Company too much money...

Froomkin is a columnist, not a reporter.... The folks at the White House obviously know this and Harris should remind them of it whenever they complain...

The print Post has always blurred the line in allowing reporters to be columnists. Howard Kurtz writes news stories for the Post, writes a weekly column, and writes still more columns for the website...

Post reporters [write news stories]... opinion pieces that appear in... Outlook... "News Analysis" stories which often have lots of opinions, [and] when an analysis piece get too obviously into opinions, it carries a "Commentary" label.

I will keep the main weblog at http://delong.typepad.com/, with assorted site feeds http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/atom.xml and http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/index.rdf.

I will mirror the main weblog at http://braddelong.blogspot.com/, with associated site feed http://braddelong.blogspot.com/atom.xml.

In addition, I will mirror another copy on my office machine. The address http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/--the original weblog--is now an empty frame enclosing http://delong.typepad.com/, but I will still copy posts over to the machine http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/ with associated feed http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/index.rdf

War and Piece: I think Noah Shachtman is onto something. Wonder if some new data mining or other technology meant that the way they got "probable cause" was through what the courts would deem illegal search and seizure? Is this about some technological application that has an implicit policy change the administration never declared? So you start by mining every single communication to and from Afghanistan and you mine some significant patterns and work backwards? But why even at that point -- when let's say they had a list of targeted phone numbers or specific individuals in the US they then wanted to surveil -- would they not then go to the FISA court, which surely would be sympathetic to their security argument, and one would then have, with a court-approved wiretap, potentially legally admissable evidence? Why stick with a program that could never be used in court?

I don't think we can understand this warrantless NSA spying on Americans story without its connection to the whole secret extra legal other decisions the Bush administration has made mostly in secret - the torture, the extraordinary renditions, Gitmo, secret prisons, declaring unilaterally US citizens like Padilla and Hamdi enemy combatants, instantly denied the rights of US citizens, because clearly, the Bush administration never meant to try any of the people picked up by this program in a court of law.

And for such vast, extra legal search and seizure of captured communications, why do they seem to have so very little to show for it? And why did they not consider creating some oversight mechanism, that would give the program some pretense to legitimacy? Why was this policy change all done in secret, with those authorizing the program the same ones who allegedly "oversaw" it, answerable to nobody, a perfect circle absolutely ripe for abuse?

And I think there's a whole new set of hurdles to Alito's nomination that just appeared, that may make even Republican Senators resist putting someone on the Supreme Court who would deem such secret executive powers at the cost of those of Congress.

Let me sharpen that: after this, I cannot see how Alito can be confirmed. If the Bushies are smart, they will withdraw Alito's nomination now.

As to why they didn't create some oversight checks-and-balances--why they weren't worried about handing such powers to a future left-wing president--there are two possible answers: (a) They are really stupid. (b) They are really evil--they do not intend for there to be a left-wing president ever again. I vote for (a) myself. I wish I could suppress the still small voices in my head that are whispering (b).

I hate the way this administration has turned me into a nutbar conspiracy theorist.

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Richard Cheney. Do it now.

Pharyngula : Easterbrook... is outraged at the arrogance of the damned atheist.

Don't take this personally, but if you are an American adult there is a one in two chance that Richard Dawkins, a renowned professor of science at Oxford, thinks you are "ignorant, stupid or insane," unless you are "wicked." These are the adjectives Dawkins chooses to describe the roughly 100 million Americans adults who, if public opinion polls are right, believe Homo sapiens was created directly by God, rather than gradually by evolution. Ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked. Not much to choose from there!

...The important point, of course, is that contrary to Easterbrook's claim that there isn't much to choose from, that list actually covers the whole wide range of possibilities. Dawkins himself goes on to explain that the stupid, insane or wicked are the minority possibilities, but let's be honest and face the facts: if you are a creationist, you are almost certainly deeply ignorant of biology. Easterbrook seems to have actually gotten the quote from Dawkins' defense of the statement, but doesn't seem to have comprehended any of the surrounding words.

The gist of Easterbrook's complaint is that Dawkins is "arrogant", which seems to mean that he forcefully and plainly states the facts and evidence and logic of his case, and that those facts don't leave much wiggle room for the evolution deniers....

Pharyngula goes on to write:

While Easterbrook is doing his rabble-rousing best to rile up his readers into hating that arrogant bastard Dawkins, he also doesn't bother to consider this revealing passage from the article he cites.

Not only is ignorance no crime, it is also, fortunately, remediable. In the same Times review, I went on to recount my experiences of going on radio phone-in talk shows around the United States. Opinion polls had led me to expect hostile cross-examination from creationist zealots. I encountered little of that kind. I got creationist opinions in plenty, but these were founded on honest ignorance, as was freely confessed. When I politely and patiently explained what Darwinism actually is, they listened not only with equal politeness, but with interest and even enthusiasm. "Gee, that's real neat, I never heard that before! Wow!" These people were not stupid (or insane, or wicked). They didn't believe in evolution, but this was because nobody had ever told them what evolution is. And because plenty of people had told them (wrongly, according to educated theologians) that evolution is against their cherished religion.

This is exactly right. We're all ignorant to different degrees about different things. Dawkins tends to be more right than wrong on the subject of evolution, but is probably more wrong than right on the subject of automobile repair. It's a strange attitude that some people have that pointing out their ignorance of certain subjects is a terrible insult, as if everyone is expected to be omniscient and infallible polymaths...

Senate Finance and House Ways and Means Reconciliation Tax-Cut Packages Flawed, Rev 11/29/05: Who Benefits from the House and Senate Tax-Cut Packages?... Both the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate tax-cut packages would primarily benefit upper-income taxpayers. Under both bills, more than three-quarters of the gains from the major provisions in the bill would go to people with incomes over $100,000 a year.... [T]he House package is substantially more skewed to the very highest-income taxpayers than the Senate measure. Some... 40 percent of the benefits of the Ways and Means Committee package would go to people with incomes [of a million dollars a year or more].... The primary reason for the House measure’s far more skewed distribution is that it extends capital gains and dividend tax cuts but not AMT relief....

The House bill’s concentration of tax-cut benefits among households with incomes over $1 million undercuts the claims of many supporters of capital gains and dividend tax cuts who have misleadingly sought to characterize these tax cuts as providing benefits that are widely distributed. Those making these claims point to the number of taxpayers who receive a benefit of any amount from the capital gains and dividend tax cuts. These claims ignore the fact that many of the middle-income taxpayers who are affected receive very small tax-cut benefits while a highly disproportionate share of the benefits go to households at extremely high income levels.... [A]bout 26 million households will receive some benefit from the extension of capital gains and dividend tax cuts in 2009, or about 17 percent of all households.... [But] households with income of less than $50,000 would receive an average tax cut in 2009 of less than $11 from the capital gains and dividend measures, according to the Tax Policy Center. Households with incomes of less than $100,000 would receive an average tax cut of $29. In contrast, the average tax cut for households with income of more than $1 million would be $32,000 in 2009...