He basically calls her a willing puppet

ok but she at least tries to explain her sources and all of that and expresses that the people she talked she felt it was credible that they believed what they were telling her.

She relied largely on one now discredited source. We've seen how relying on one source works out.

CalvinBall wrote:destroys is a bit much

Sorry, Calvin. I'll be more careful in the future.

Clavin destroyed traderdave

Destroys is fair. She comes off very poorly IMO.

CalvinBall wrote:destroys is a bit much

No, he ripped into her about as hard as you're going to see on a show without going the absurd cable news route. And she came across poorly, and not just in my opinion either.

Honestly, I'm not sure why you'd choose that post to delve into semantics..

CalvinBall wrote:ok but she at least tries to explain her sources and all of that and expresses that the people she talked she felt it was credible that they believed what they were telling her.

Yet at the same time, even people with no inside sources knew that the Bush administration was going to bend over backwards to find a reason to invade Iraq. Personally, the only reason I wasn't skeptical of their WMD evidence was that I figured that if anyone know about the existence and location of Hussein's WMD, it'd be the people who sold it to him.

Go Bernie: http://i.imgur.com/BWPRr4x.png

This made me laugh: http://www.theonion.com/articles/who-is ... :2:Default

Dangerously Radical Fringe Views: Reform Wall Street, avoid costly and ineffective conflicts in Middle East, help working families prosper

Soren wrote:Destroys is fair. She comes off very poorly IMO.

Yeah.

Judith Miller was a White House stenographer for the Bush administration that worked for The New York Times

never forget

Neat little paper that I think docsmooth, Werthless and others might enjoy - http://home.uchicago.edu/~/davetannenba ... 20bias.pdf

jerseyhoya wrote:Neat little paper that I think docsmooth, Werthless and others might enjoy - http://home.uchicago.edu/~/davetannenba ... 20bias.pdf

Does my enjoying, and agreeing with much of, the portion I've read so far subvert the authors' main theses?



Good stuff, Jerz, thank you.

One thing that occurs to me - and that the authors probably wouldn't disagree with too much - is that, like David Blaine, policy "magicians" could basically be very transparent about the behaviors and responses their policy tactics tap into, and they would still work pretty much the same way. Behavior is hard to change, particularly inertial behaviors. People ARE "essentially conservative", and thank heaven for that. Most public policy that attempts broad scale behavior change is fighting the tide, however gentle and ambiguous the tide may be.

Basically, my feeling is all public policymakers must be required to play baseball, or at the very least pass some sort of exam that discerns whether they "get" what it embodies about the "right" balance of individual and society.

Jerz, given that an important implication of the authors' work is that if you could strip away philosophical/ideological preferences, policymakers would be in general agreement about the efficacy of nudge tactics, you should write a rebuttal addressing the challenge of devising measures that could objectively determine how well nudge tactics accomplish their (presumably resolved, at some level) policy objectives, and even harder, establish defensible 'control groups' for such measures.

My feeling is that how you do it pretty readily gets bound up in why you do it, and it's hard to successfully disentangle the 2. You could do some interesting papers on the ideological/tactical tangles of initiatives like Medicare Advantage plans, Health Savings Accounts, Medicare Part D (Rx) benefits, the ACA, etc, using this paper as the opening wedge.

Ok, one last brainfart and then 1) I'll finish reading the paper and 2) let somebody else chime in.


The work underscores why , despite the "striking" finding on p.7, highly divisive them/us politics is both depressing and self-defeating in the most predictable and frustrating prisoners-dilemma-type way

jerseyhoya wrote:Neat little paper that I think docsmooth, Werthless and others might enjoy - http://home.uchicago.edu/~/davetannenba ... 20bias.pdf

Oh man, a link to a pdf. Your endorsement might prompt me to read it this weekend.

So the Bridgegate indictments came for all three central figures. Wildstein pled guilty. Baroni and Kelly are saying they're innocent.

Wildstein says it was for revenge at the mayor of Fort Lee, and that he has evidence that Christie knew that the lanes were closed as it was happening. Baroni and Kelly are calling Wildstein a liar, and seem to be suggesting they were duped into it by him.

http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/20 ... dicte.html - the indictment is at the bottom of the article. It seems like the Feds believe Wildstein, but he is the central figure in almost all of the prep, and there isn't much involvement between Baroni and Kelly. Can see an explanation where Wildstein hatched the plan to punish the mayor because he is the sort that thinks it's a big game, sold Kelly and Baroni on the idea to hurt the mayor based off of a legitimate traffic study, and just half assed the traffic study part of it, unless I'm missing something in reading the indictment. Not that being involved in a plot where you're doing a traffic study driven largely by animus to a mayor intending to screw up peoples' commute is good governance, but I'm not sure it's illegal. There were complaints about the fairness of the local access points, and there was a real traffic study going on at the time that this plan actually screwed up, so the legitimacy of what Wildstein proposed was plausible (if that's what happened). This seems to be the defense Baroni and Kelly are planning. US Attorney seems to think otherwise.

The US Attorney said these are the only people who will be indicted for the bridge stuff, and declined any comment on the claim from Wildstein about evidence Christie knew about the closures. That evidence would seem to matter a good bit on whether it shows he was told the roads were closed (not a big deal), whether he acknowledged being told they were closed (in which case he lied or misremembered about when he first found out), and obviously whether he was told why they were actually closed (this would be very not good). At any given time many lanes are closed on many roads in the state.

Another hole in the Christie 2016 ship, though it also seems like everything he said after the allegations were confirmed in January 2014 has held up, or at least there's nothing suggesting otherwise. But even if he's in the clear legally, politically he needs to end this chapter, and the legal drama is going to drag out. He's got enough other things he has to overcome, and this lingering as a story plus the strength of the field really makes things tough.