Wonkblog: Master Archives
A game changer for campaign reporting
“Game Change 2” has just been published, and horse-race junkies currently feeling the aches and fevers of election withdrawal (Virginia and New Jersey’s gubernatorial races -- much less New York’s puny mayoral race -- hardly provided a fix) are rejoicing. As well they should. “Game Change 2” -- the actual title is “Double Down: Game Change 2012” -- is a joyous romp through the seedy underbelly of presidential campaigning. It’s a cure for the off-year shakes.
No-till farming is on the rise. That’s actually a big deal.
Here's a fascinating trend in U.S. agriculture that's been going on for the past few decades. It's the dramatic rise ... of no-till farming:
"No-till farming" sounds pretty dull at first. The term basically describes ways to grow crops each year without disturbing the soil through tillage or plowing.
The best sentences we read today
-- "In Germany there are two types of immigrants: model immigrants and problem immigrants. You have to decide early, because switching later is difficult."
-- "Similarly, I question whether Martin Luther’s experiences are all that relevant to our understanding of modern viral content."
-- "Hours after the Kennedy assassination, my parents and I experienced the shared horror of realizing that the Lee Oswald we knew, the one who had been in our house and sat at our dinner table, was the same man who had just been accused of killing the president."
-- "You kind of have to wonder if the the revolving door’s antisocial roots just might be what keeps us from using them."
-- "If we're going back to the oral culture, does the shift have to happen all at once? Can we transition through handwritten scrolls or cuneiform tablets first?"
Bernanke: Why the 2008 crisis was a lot like the Panic of 1907
In the final panel of an all-star economic conference in Washington on Friday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke took the stage to discuss the global financial crisis--and in particular to apply a historical lens to it. While his insights aren't new, they put the near-collapse of the global financial system in 2008--and the Fed's efforts to stop it--in a useful light.
Q&A;: The FDA is banning trans fats. We just figured out how to measure them.
On Thursday, the Food and Drug Administration announced that it intends to ban artificial trans fatty acids from the nation's food supply because the substances increase the risk of heart disease. According to the Institute of Medicine, "there is no safe level of consumption of artificial trans fat." But how will we be sure that our food doesn't contain any of the stuff whatsoever? We called up the AOCS, which used to be called the American Oil Chemists Society and now just goes by "Your Global Oil and Fats Connection" and also maintains a blog. Chief executive Patrick Donnelly was in China at a soaps and detergents association conference, but he referred us to Richard Cantrill, the organization's chief science officer and technical director. A lightly edited transcript of our interview follows.
Congress says five D.C. residents enrolled in Obamacare. There’s more to the story.
The District of Columbia's insurance marketplace has enrolled exactly five people in health plans, according to documents released by the Senate Finance Committee on Friday.
That sounds like bad news for our hometown exchange. But, when you dig into the numbers a bit further it turns out -- as is true with most health policy issues -- the issue is a bit more complicated.
Science: U.S. presidents are becoming more narcissistic over time
Presidents of the United States are gradually becoming more narcissistic, and that might not necessarily be a bad thing.
That isn't meant as an endorsement of the unethical behavior associated with some kinds of narcissism in a new analysis of data on presidential personalities. Unethical behavior should never be condoned. Ever!
Disney tales: TV and movies are terrible businesses. Theme parks are awesome.
The Walt Disney Co. is an iconic media and entertainment brand. It owns some of the world's best-known and beloved characters, film franchises, television channels and theme parks. And it reported earnings Thursday that give a surprising (or perhaps not-so-surprising) window into the forces buffeting all media industries.
Everything you need to know about “super typhoons”
One of the strongest tropical storms on record — Super Typhoon Haiyan — slammed into the Philippines Friday morning, killing as many as 10,000 people so far and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee their homes. The storm is expected to hit Vietnam next.
Our colleagues over at Capital Weather Gang have been doing a fantastic job covering this incredibly large storm in all its destructiveness. So go there for detailed updates.
Americans already think a third of the budget goes to foreign aid. What if it did?
The poll result that seems to most frustrate budget analysts is the apparent belief among Americans that foreign aid is a huge cost to the federal government. The latest poll that my colleague Ezra Klein cites finds that the average American thinks the United States spends 28 percent of the federal budget on aid to foreign governments -- more than the country spends on Social Security or Medicare or defense.
The U.S. labor force is still shrinking. Here’s why.
The U.S. labor force keeps shrinking rapidly. Back in 2007, 66 percent of Americans had a job or were actively seeking work. Today, that number is at 62.8 percent — the lowest level since 1978:
U.S. Labor Force Participation Rate:
Now, a big caveat here: That big October drop in participation could have been skewed slightly by the government shutdown. The official household survey counted 720,000 people as leaving the labor force last month, but that might have included some furloughed federal employees or contractors who have since returned to the job. If so, expect a small rebound next month.
Job growth was pretty solid last month, despite the shutdown
We’ll put the jobs day caveats first because they’re bigger than usual this time: One month’s survey doesn’t tell us a whole lot about how the economy is doing, offers only a partial picture subject to major revisions, and so on and so forth. That’s even more true than usual this month because the report was influenced by the government shutdown, both in predictable ways (federal employees who were furloughed were to count as unemployed, on a temporary layoff) and unpredictable (the survey was taken a week late, so peoples’ memories of whether they were working might be hazy).
Wall Street figured out how to securitize your rent. Should you worry?
The housing crash created a lot of problems. Millions of families lost their assets. Neighborhoods emptied out as homes went into foreclosure. The rest of the economy went into a tailspin.
Investment funds had a problem too: They largely lost the market for residential mortgage-backed securities that had provided such excellent yields in the early 2000s, and with the Federal Reserve keeping interest rates low, there aren't a whole lot of obvious sources of income. For the past three or four years, they've been hunting for new places to park their money that could generate substantial returns. Lucky for them, the crash brought about by those very securities had also created an opportunity: Not mortgage payments on homes that a buyer would eventually own outright, but rent checks that a tenant would keep sending forever.
Wonkbook: Obama shouldn’t apologize for blowing up the terrible individual market
Welcome to Wonkbook, Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas's morning policy news primer. To subscribe by e-mail, click here. Send comments, criticism, or ideas to Wonkbook at Gmail dot com. To read more by Ezra and his team, go to Wonkblog.
Last night, NBC's Chuck Todd asked President Obama about the people losing their health insurance despite his promise that "anyone who likes their plan can keep it." (See the video and read the transcript here.)
The best sentences we read today
- “Avoid the terms ‘thighs’ and ‘rubbing,’ or any combination thereof. ‘Ebitda’ and ‘namaste’ are fine.”
- "On the brink of extinction, the chamber's final few moderates cower in the basement, sporting fingerless gloves and burning historical documents for warmth as they listen to Jay Rockefeller and Lamar Alexander tell tales of glory days gone by."
- "I asked him about the experience and got a more press-release-esque response than one typically expects from a family member."
- "But the senator has contracted a dangerous condition that can cause people to have impaired judgment. It’s called governing by anecdote — and it’s spreading."
VIDEO: Watch Obama (kinda, sorta) apologize to Americans’ losing their health plans
President Obama is offering an apology to Americans who have received insurance cancellation notices--sort of.
In an interview with NBC News, the president says "I'm sorry" to Americans who are losing their health plans.
"I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me," he told NBC News in an exclusive interview at the White House.
Why investors love Twitter’s low sales numbers
Investors love Twitter. Really, really love it.
Just a week ago the company had expected to issue shares for $17 to $20 each. Earlier this week, it upped that to a $26 initial public offering. And in trading Thursday, Twitter saw its stock hit as high as $50 a share before settling at $46 to $47 in mid-afternoon. At that price, the value of the company stands at around $26 billion -- for a money-losing company that had only $317 million in revenue last year and $422 million in the first nine months of 2013.
Unemployment benefits for 2.1 million workers are set to expire early next year
More than 2 million out-of-work Americans will lose their unemployment benefits early next year unless Congress extends a jobless-aid program that's set to expire, a new report warns.
Here's the back story: The United States currently has about 4.1 million workers who have been out of a job for at least six months. About one-third of them are still scraping by with help from an unemployment-benefit program that Congress temporarily expanded in 2008 in response to the financial crisis and severe recession.
Why did we go to war in Iraq? An interview with Peter Baker.
Peter Baker is a White House correspondent for the New York Times and author of the excellent "Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House". We spoke on Wednesday, and a lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Ezra Klein: When the George W. Bush administration ended, a lot of people were really eager to move on. There was even this whole presidential campaign about “change.” So why did you decide to dive deep back into those years?
Uh-oh: Techies are finding new problems with HealthCare.gov
Every day, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services hosts a phone call with reporters. This is the "Operational Update on the Health Insurance Marketplace" and usually happens around 1:30 or 2 p.m.
Today's "Operational Update on the Health Insurance Marketplace" was not especially good news: As capacity problems at the start of HealthCare.gov get fixed, tech workers are finding new capacity problems later in the application process -- ones that, up until now, they didn't know about.
2012