Quoth Rep. Peter King (R-NY), who fails to observe that, indeed, 100 percent of Catholic terrorists are practitioners of Christianity too.

I’ve yet to meet someone whose Social Security check comes late, and “it’s lost in the mail” rivals “the dog ate my homework” in believability. On a larger scale, the 13 largest oil companies in the world, all of which are state-owned and -operated, seem quite good at participating in capitalism.

It’s handy, then, to be able to point out a story that surfaced this week. Giant, profit-driven corporation AT&T has such bad service in New York that it appears to be doing everything imaginable to not sell stuff that people want to buy.

What kind of capitalism is that called? Reducing the supply of something for sale for marketing purposes — the so-called scarcity principal — doesn’t work with bandwidth and other commodities.

It’s a certainty that AT&T will resume online iPhone sales soon, but it’ll be because people are talking, not because its network is even remotely tolerable.

(image via)

(via Council on Foreign Relations)

It’s a good thing I didn’t speak up.

But as bad as the healthcare debate became, brewing climate-change policy reform will draw an even-more-foot-stompy reaction from conservatives.

Here are five reasons why:

Healthcare is one of the most boring areas of public policy imaginable, while environmentalism has consistently drawn a high level of attention for the past four decades. Whereas healthcare reform actually created the current ideological divide among the huddled masses about how, exactly, public policy should treat healthcare, with climate change, that divide has long been established despite decades of policy inaction.

There have been clumsy attempts at climate-policy reform elsewhere in the world. There are plenty of conservatives who think any government intervention into private industry at all, no matter how reasonable the policy, is inherently bad and riddled with ulterior motives. These people don’t need any additional encouragement, but they’ll get it from the same astroturfing lobbyists who organized anti-healthcare rallies and protests. See also: Climategate.

Progressives can effectively argue for healthcare reform by using moral appeals. Because pretty much everyone can agree that helping sick people, whether or not they’re insured, is the moral thing to do, there wasn’t a whole lot of noise from conservatives about poor people not deserving to live. But hard science, not moral fundamentals, will drive climate-change policy, and there’s a lot of overlap between those who have unwavering support for both upping morality and deriding science. Related:

It’s easy for conservatives to call climate-change science mind control. Talking to a climate-change denier about the science behind environmental trends is a bit like dividing by zero: There’s simply no way to make it work. Indeed, it was cold outside someplace today, and citizens of an industrialized country like the States will be among the last to experience climate-change ramifications first-hand. But plenty of Americans, with their grumbles about their HMOs, do have first-hand experience with the the plight of receiving healthcare. And on that note:

Climate change is a problem “designed to be ignored,” The Washington Post recently noted. “It is a global problem, with no obvious villains and no one-step solutions, whose worst effects seem as if they’ll befall somebody else at some other time.” H.R. 3247 (overview, full text) actually seeks to identify the psychology behind consumer reactions to climate change. Though there are certainly worse ways to spend $50 million, detractors have a habit of reacting to politics instead of policy.

Fortunately, “most Republicans,” said Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.), post-Copenhagen, “don’t feel comfortable with the idea that our party stands for unlimited carbon pollution perpetually.” So the brewing problems involve conservatives – those wishing to conserve policy rather than change it – and not the Republican party or its supporters.

There are even odds, though, on whether Graham and his supporters will hold onto that position when confronted with angry voters hellbent on conserving nonexistent climate-change policy that no one bothered to create in the first place.

(image via)

The San Francisco Chronicle today reports:

Just 31,382 borrowers nationwide had received permanent loan mods as of Nov. 30 under the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), the Treasury Department reported. Meanwhile, First American CoreLogic says that 1.7 million homes are likely to be lost to foreclosure next year.

For a lot of underwater mortgages, the wisest financial decision for the homeowners is to leave and default on the mortgage contract. (The finance industry calls this behavior a “strategic default.”) Strategically defaulting on a loan is irresponsible, un-American, and wrong — and corporations do it all of the time. Slate‘s Daniel Gross writes:

Morgan Stanley, for example, is a gigantic corporation. As of the second quarter, it boasted total capital of $213.2 billion. It certainly has the ability to make good on obligations incurred by its many operating units. But earlier this month Morgan Stanley said it would turn over five San Francisco office buildings to lenders rather than pay the debt on them. Why? Morgan Stanley foolishly paid top dollar for the buildings in 2007, when prices were really high. The values have plummeted, and tenants are hard to come by.

Et cetera, et cetera.

Meanwhile, a University of Arizona law professor recently published a useful paper (.pdf) on why, precisely, homeowners continue to throw money at remarkably overvalued mortgages when doing so clearly harms their long-term financial health. From the paper:

[M]ost homeowners do not strategically default as a result of two emotional forces: 1) the
desire to avoid the shame and guilt of foreclosure; and 2) exaggerated anxiety over foreclosure’s perceived consequences.

And a bit about those loan modification programs:

Moreover, these emotional constraints are actively cultivated by the government and other social control agents in order to induce homeowners to ignore market and legal norms under which strategic default might not only be a viable option, but also the wisest financial decision.

So:

Unlike lenders, individual homeowners have thus generally not acted to minimize their losses and have born a disproportionate share of the burden from the housing collapse.

And then:

Implicit in this [loan modification] approach is the assumption that home owners are unlikely to default on their mortgage if they can “afford” the monthly payment. In other words, federal policy assumes that homeowners are – for the most part – not “ruthless” and won’t walk away from their mortgages simply because they have negative equity. Most homeowners walk only when they can no longer afford to stay.

Homeowners need to become “ruthless” with their too-costly mortgages to balance out the corporations who are so clearly taking advantage of their good intentions. Perhaps when the government-sponsored modification programs go away completely, consumer behavior will change.

The foundation is so-named for those Knights: John S. and James L. Knight, who established media enterprise Knight-Ridder, which was sold to newspaper publisher McClatchy in 2006. (Disclosure: Knight-Ridder was a client of mine.)

Politico reports:

Knight now joins joins the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, Atlantic Philanthropies, the Markle Foundation and The Huffington Post as the principal backers of the project. 


Headed by Executive Director Nick Penniman and Executive Editor Larry Roberts, the Investigative Fund now has 11 full-time staffers and a $2 million budget. Arianna Huffington chairs the board or directors, which also includes journalist and New America Foundation head Steve Coll and philanthropist David Bohnett.

I’m among the minority who firmly believe that having many more nonprofit news sources would be a good thing for everyone involved, and that nonprofit news outlets are the ideal place for the most-skilled journalists in the industry to work. This is why today’s funding announcement is such welcome news: Two-hundred large can come pretty close to funding two staff reporters, including travel, for a year.

Go here and here for incomplete but mostly accurate lists of other nonprofit journalism projects, both in print (e.g., Mother Jones) and online (e.g., ProPublica).

So first, Jack Bauer sells out to do a freaking Bank of America commercial, and now, he’s unable to successfully interrogate Santa Claus? How’s he going to even deal with New York cabbies next season?

(Video created by the fine folks at Rebel Christmas Cards, via)