Krugman’s blog, 5/17/13

There were four posts yesterday.  The first was “Too Much Talk About Liquidity:”

Antonio Fatas is annoyed at Gillian Tett, who talks to the I-see-bubbles crowd and assumes that they have The Truth — namely, that those crazy central banks are flooding the world with liquidity, driving asset prices to crazy levels, and it will all end in terrible grief. Pretty much the same discussion we’ve been having about the armageddon hedgies.

As Fatas says, it’s hard to see what exactly in the data supports this view. Short-term interest rates are near zero because the economy is so depressed, and will stay that way for a long time. Long-term rates are low because people, rightly, expect short-term rates to stay low for a long time. What about stocks? Here’s profits versus the S&P 500:

Does this shout “bubble” to you?

Now, there are some real puzzles here. Why have profits been so strong in a weak economy? Why, with profits so high, don’t businesses find reason to invest more (equipment investment is actually fairly strong, but construction remains weak). (For the seriously wonkish, why do average and marginal q seem to be so different?)

But these seem to be real-side puzzles, not monetary/financial puzzles. I don’t see anything in the data that has the “signature” of what you’d expect if the big problem was that Ben Bernanke is flooding the market with artificial liquidity that has nowhere to go.

The second post of the day was “That Hideous Strength:”

The FT has an interesting article on problems with Irish GNP (not GDP) accounting; essentially, measured Irish income is being inflated by foreign companies with no real activity there that nonetheless find ways to make profits materialize in a low-tax jurisdiction. We sort of knew this was happening — that, for example, a lot of the apparent rise in productivity was just a shift to pharma companies that produce a lot of reported value-added but add little to the Irish economy. But the new ESRI report suggests that the problem is bigger than realized.

However, this passage got me:

The ESRI research raises question marks over the strength of Ireland’s recovery, which has surprised many foreign observers in light of the severe economic crisis the country experienced in 2008.

Who are these surprised foreign observers? My impression is that Ireland has been proclaimed a success story again, and again, and again, only to have the narrative slink away in the face of disappointing experience. And if we look at jobs, which is not subject to these accounting issues, here’s what the “strength of Ireland’s recovery” looks like:

A few more such strong recoveries and there will be no jobs left at all.

The third post of the day was “That 90s Show:”

I picked a good week to be away — and I am still away, mostly, although playing a bit of hooky on the notebook right now. For it has been the week of OBAMA SCANDALS, nonstop.

Except it seems that there weren’t actually any scandals, just the usual confusion and low-level mistakes that happen all the time, in any administration.

Does the evaporation of the scandals matter? I don’t know. Unfortunately, I remember the early Clinton years, when ridiculous stuff — restructuring at the White House travel office, for God’s sake, and a money-losing land deal — led to years of front-page headlines, endless investigations,and nothing at all in the form of proven Clinton wrongdoing. If the press decide that scandals are going to be the topic, the absence of actual scandals may not matter.

Oh, and the ongoing disaster of economic policy? Boooring.

He ended the day with “Friday Night Music:  Suzanne Vega, Gypsy:”

Something beautiful for a lovely weekend:

Suzanne Vega, “Gypsy,” Live on Soundcheck

 

Blow, Nocera and Collins

In “Resonance Resistant” Mr. Blow says that Republicans miss another chance to honestly engage the public as they race off the cliff in the supercharged outrage machine.  Joe Nocera shrieks that “Energy Exports Are Good!”  But he has a question:  Why is the Dow Chemical Company lobbying to keep a lid on them?  Apparently he’s as big a fan of fracking as he is of the Keystone pipeline.  (Well, as long as the shit doesn’t end up on his block, I guess…)  Ms. Collins, in “Hard of Hearings,” says don’t worry, people. If you missed the heated hearing on the I.R.S. held by the House Ways and Means Committee on Friday, she has a complete rundown.  Here’s Mr. Blow:

Whether one thinks the demiscandals being howled about in Washington should or should not resonate more widely, they don’t.

According to a Gallup report released Thursday, “The amount of attention Americans are paying to the I.R.S. and the Benghazi situations is well below the average for news stories Gallup has tracked over the years.” (The Associated Press phone records case wasn’t mentioned.) Why might this be? I have a few theories:

CREDIBILITY People know that the Internal Revenue Service is the conservatives’ bogeyman. It’s the agency that collects the taxes that Republicans hate so much. Some Americans see taxes as, at worst, a necessary nuisance; Republicans see them as an absolute evil. The I.R.S. is the agency that collects the wealth from “us” for the government to redistribute to “them.” As National Journal pointed out Friday, “The agency also implements much of the country’s social policy through the tax code.” We all know that anything with “social” in its name activates the conservative gag reflex.

And on the Associated Press front, it just doesn’t ring true to have Republicans standing up as defenders of the “lame-stream media.” It’s like the person with the club feigning common cause with the baby seal. People just don’t buy it.

Furthermore, Republicans have exhibited a near-pathological need to say anything, no matter how outlandish, that would invalidate the Obama presidency. This has left them with little credibility now that there may be legitimate problems. This is the story of the political party that cried “Kenyan.”

COMPLEXITY Where is Benghazi? Seriously, folks, quickly point it out on a map. Thought so. Now, to the controversy: the talking points — what they said, and the machination of how that was altered, and whether Al Qaeda should have been immediately blamed, and whether the word “terror” should have had an “-ist” or an “-ism.” Seeking to find the killers of four dead Americans is honorable; endless testimony about a fussed-over script used to explain the tragedy is mind-numbing.

UNPOPULARITY It is clear that the Justice Department overreached on the Associated Press scandal and that its strong-arm tactics are likely to have a chilling effect. But Americans are not big fans of mass media. A November Gallup poll found that only a fourth of Americans rate the honesty and ethical standards of journalists highly. Even bankers ranked higher.

As for Tea Party groups that received extra scrutiny from the I.R.S., an Associated Press-GfK poll released last month found that fewer than a fourth of Americans say they support the group. The Tea Party may well be passé.

The policy issue is a different story, as The Washington Post pointed out this week: “In 2010, the Supreme Court’s landmark ‘Citizens United’ decision cleared the way for corporations and labor unions to raise and spend unlimited sums of money, and register for tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(4).”

That decision was extremely unpopular. An ABC News/Washington Post poll released nearly a month after the decision was handed down found that 80 percent of Americans opposed it.

So an unpopular movement applied for tax-exempt status under conditions made possible by an unpopular court decision, in order to influence politics with unfathomable amounts money from unnamed donors? Good luck gaining sympathy for that.

ZEALOTRY The Congressional Tea Party Caucus founder, Michele Bachmann, who never misses a chance to say something asinine, suggested to the conservative site wnd.com that it was “reasonable” to worry that the I.R.S. might use Obamacare to kill conservatives.

The article reads, in part:

“Since the I.R.S. also is the chief enforcer of Obamacare requirements, she asked whether the I.R.S.’s admission means it ‘will deny or delay access to health care’ for conservatives. At this point, she said, that ‘is a reasonable question to ask.’ ”

“Reasonable” and “Bachmann” don’t even belong in the same conversation, let alone the same sentence, and yet she remains one of the most visible spokeswomen for the movement.

Even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich warned Republicans against overreaching. In an NPR interview that aired Friday, Gingrich, referring to the impeachment of President Clinton, said, “I think we overreached in ’98 — how’s that for a quote you can use?”

He continued, advising his party to be “calm and factual.” Ha! That’s too rich, and too late. Republicans are already invoking the I-word.

Republicans are their own worst enemies at times like these, unable to leave well-enough alone, and missing chances to honestly engage the public as they race off the cliff in the supercharged outrage machine.

Well, if you have nothing to offer that the country wants, just howl louder…  Here’s Mr. Nocera’s love song to the energy industry:

What first caught my eye was the op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal. Published in late February, it was written by Andrew N. Liveris, the chairman and chief executive of the Dow Chemical Company. Liveris, an Australian, has become quite the Washington player in recent years. Among other things, he heads President Obama’s efforts to revive manufacturing.

The op-ed was about one of my favorite subjects: the abundance of natural gas reserves discovered in the United States since the “fracking” revolution began. This newly found gas, Liveris wrote, offered “a historic opportunity to strengthen the economy, increase national competitiveness and create jobs.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Within a few paragraphs, however, the Liveris article took on a Pravda-like quality: a political insider sending a coded message to other insiders. He wrote, for instance, that the new jobs the natural gas boom was expected to create would depend on an “affordable” and “plentiful” supply. Given that that’s exactly what we currently have, what was the real subtext?

Then it became clear: Liveris’s plan for ensuring cheap domestic gas was — are you ready for this? — limiting exports. An export market driven by, you know, supply and demand was described as “unchecked.” What was left unsaid was that if natural gas could not be exported, the resulting oversupply would depress prices — and boost Dow’s profits.

Finally, Liveris acknowledged that Dow owned 15 percent of a proposed facility in Texas, which was causing “advocates of unchecked exports” to “attack” the company for being in a position to profit from exports while publicly opposing them. But, he insisted, Dow would not make a profit. Hmmm.

I bring all this up because on Friday, the Department of Energy, after a two-year hiatus, granted a permit to a facility called Freeport LNG, which will allow it to export liquefied natural gas to countries with which we do not have free-trade agreements.

Originally built to import natural gas, the plant will cost as much as $11 billion to retrofit and take years to complete. It will export only a tiny fraction of the natural gas that is consumed by Americans. And wouldn’t you know it? This is the facility in which a Dow Chemical limited partnership holds a 15 percent stake.

Exporting natural gas has enormous benefits for the United States. Exports create jobs that are every bit as good as manufacturing jobs. They help our trade deficit. They tie us closer to important allies like Japan, which desperately need the gas. According to Michael Levi, the author of an authoritative new book, “The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America’s Future,” the prospect that America could export natural gas has even helped our European allies gain leverage with its primary supplier of fossil fuels, Russia.

“Most studies suggest that the main impact of exports will be to increase U.S. production rather than take away other uses,” Levi says. Thus, it will not likely have a major effect on the price of gas. Levi told me that one legitimate fear is that the additional drilling could increase the potential environmental risks posed by fracking. But the answer is to ensure that wells are drilled in an environmentally safe manner. That is true whether we export gas or not.

And what does Dow Chemical say now that “its” facility has been approved? I spent much of Friday afternoon peppering the company with questions, most of them revolving around Dow’s seeming hypocrisy in opposing “unfettered” exports while owning a big chunk of a facility that would someday be shipping natural gas to Japan.

Finally, more or less in exasperation, a Dow spokesman put Liveris on the phone. The Dow chairman pointed out that when the company originally invested in Freeport LNG, the facility was meant to import gas rather than export it. He said that the company won’t make money because its stake will be so diluted once capital is raised for the retrofitting. He insisted that he is a believer in market forces, but that the natural gas market is so different from other commodities that it must be treated differently.

He also said, though, that the company was not opposed to natural gas exports — just so long as it was limited.

Earlier, a Dow spokesman had sent out a press release claiming that the permit approval by the Department of Energy was actually a victory for Dow’s position. To put it in words that the press representative would never use, so long as the Department of Energy permitting process is so absurdly slow — thus creating a government bottleneck that restrains “unfettered” exports — Dow and Liveris have gotten exactly what they’ve been seeking: limited exports and plenty of cheap domestic gas to help fuel their profits.

There is a technical term for this. It’s called “having your cake and eating it, too.”

Now here’s Ms. Collins:

Before Congress is finished with the Internal Revenue Service, there’s a serious danger some of us are going to wind up feeling sorry for the auditors.

And, honestly, that is not the way we were planning on spending the spring. Especially since it appears that there are people making decisions at the I.R.S. who have the intelligence of a wet Frisbee.

But, so far, the Congressional hearings of outrage have been even less sympathetic. Perhaps you didn’t have time to spend much of your Friday watching the House Ways and Means Committee grill Steven Miller, the newly axed I.R.S. head, about the agency’s targeting of groups with names like “Tea Party” for unwelcome in-depth attention.

Let me summarize:

Committee Chairman Dave Camp: Thank you all for coming here today. Our topic is abuses in the Internal Revenue Service, an entity that I believe is about the size of China, with long, spiky tentacles that reach out and squash all the hopes and dreams of the American people. My first question, Mr. Miller, is whether your agency is so enormous and evil that it will one day destroy the nation as we know it, or whether it already has, and this committee is actually just sitting on the scattered shards and rubble of what once was a great republic.

Steven Miller: Thank you for inviting me here today. I would like to begin by apologizing for mistakes that have been made. Now I am prepared to begin answering your questions, and then gradually fade into sullen exhaustion.

Sander Levin, Ranking Democrat: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for organizing this bipartisan outpouring of rage. I would like to begin by welcoming Inspector General J. Russell George, and asking him to repeat his conclusion that none of the bad things we’re discussing were the result of partisan pressure. Possibly he could say that twice. Then I would like to ask him to confirm that he was appointed by George W. Bush. And then to point out that the guy who was in charge of the I.R.S. when all this happened was also appointed by George W. Bush.

Representative Devin Nunes, Republican of California: Mr. Miller, how would you like it if we were to subpoena your e-mails and phone calls and records of anyone you’ve met with over the last four years? Also, have you ever had any contact with the Obama re-election campaign?

Mr. Miller: I would just like to say in my defense that the I.R.S. provided horrible customer service.

Representative Dave Reichert, Republican of Washington: What the I.R.S. did was inexcusable. Also, I want to register my strong protests about the way Mr. Miller keeps interrupting me while I am demanding that he answer my questions.

And then everybody went home for the weekend.

What are we going to do about the I.R.S.? Some of its workers made wildly inappropriate judgments and some of its top brass appears to have the spunk of a pillow. Congress is demanding that heads roll, but the inspector general says that, so far, there’s no evidence of political pressure, just ineptitude. There is literally only one person in the entire operation who’s not covered by civil service, so I wouldn’t expect a purge. Miller, in his testimony, said that, so far, one employee has been relocated in punishment for his or her role in the case. The American people cry out for blood and they get a transfer.

But here’s where the sympathy comes in. The I.R.S. employees were stuck with a pile of 70,000 applications for the tax-exempt status that’s awarded to organizations engaged in social welfare issues. Recently, political groups have been gaming the system, announcing they’re just do-gooders with a minor political sideline in order to qualify. When they succeed, they get to keep their donors secret. The rules for who qualifies are murky, and, according to Miller, only about 150 to 200 people were making the decisions about who got further scrutiny.

Also, they were working at the Determinations Unit of the Rulings and Agreements Office of the Exempt Organizations Division of the Internal Revenue Service. Spending their lives trying to clarify the 501(c)(4) status. You try that for a while and see how you like it.

If Congress wanted to help, the members could simplify the law so I.R.S. minions aren’t trying to figure out which groups spend only 49 percent of their resources on politics as opposed to 51 percent.

Or, they could give the I.R.S. more money to do the job it’s stuck with now. The budget has been cut almost $1 billion over the last few years, while its duties have expanded. Next Friday, I.R.S. workers will enjoy the first of a series of unpaid furloughs thanks to that sequester.

Or Congress could just keep holding committee hearings in hopes that investigators will finally discover that the I.R.S. offices in Cincinnati are actually controlled by a pack of left-wing operatives who are not only Obamaphiles but also vampires. Vampires who had no respect for the laws regarding 501(c)(4) status.

Krugman’s blog, 5/16/13

There were three posts yesterday.  The first was “Who You Gonna Bet On?”:

OK, this is different: Jesse Eisinger of Propublica — Propublica! — defending those poor maligned hedge fund managers against the ridicule of macroeconomists.

And it’s true: we’ve been having a lot of fun over those dire pronouncements that quantitative easing will drain our vitalpreecious bodily fluids, doom western civilization, and all that.What’s odd, however, is that although Eisinger’s piece is titled “Why fund managers may be right about the Fed”, it offers absolutely no analysis to that effect — no channel through which Bernanke’s policies might in fact be a disaster, as opposed to pointing out that the economy hasn’t been doing all that well even though stocks are up.

Eisinger’s main ace in the hole seems to be that economists failed to see the crisis coming:

But what these investors are expressing should trouble all of us: they have almost no confidence in the Federal Reserve or the economics profession. And for good reason.

It’s impressive that the Fed and many economists have successfully predicted the path of interest rates and inflation in the wake of the worst financial crisis in a generation. But neither the central bank nor academicians managed to predict or prevent the crisis in the first place. The failure dwarfs the accomplishment.

I would disagree about the respective importance of failure and accomplishment; I’ve recently argued that it’s just the other way around:

I would argue, however—self-serving as it may sound (I warned about the housing bubble, but had no inkling of how widespread a collapse would follow when it burst)—that the failure to anticipate the crisis was a relatively minor sin. Economies are complicated, ever-changing entities; it was understandable that few economists realized the extent to which short-term lending and securitization of assets such as subprime mortgages had recreated the old risks that deposit insurance and bank regulation were created to control.

I’d argue that what happened next—the way policymakers turned their back on practically everything economists had learned about how to deal with depressions, the way elite opinion seized on anything that could be used to justify austerity—was a much greater sin. The financial crisis of 2008 was a surprise, and happened very fast; but we’ve been stuck in a regime of slow growth and desperately high unemployment for years now. And during all that time policymakers have been ignoring the lessons of theory and history.

Still, in fairness, the fund managers complaining the loudest about Bernanke do seem to be guys who saw the housing bubble and made money by shorting subprime. So they have some right to feel that they have a track record.

But is it the kind of track record that suits them for analyzing monetary policy and macroeconomics? The most famous of the housing shorters, thanks to Michael Lewis, is John Paulson; and, well, Krugman or Paulson: Who you gonna bet on?

The point, I think, is that you can simultaneously fault the Fed and economists in general for failing to see this crisis coming, and ridicule the hedge fund guys for giving advice right now that is both ludicrous and dangerous. And you should.

The second post of the day was “The Smith/Klein/Kalecki Theory of Austerity:”

Noah Smith recently offered an interesting take on the real reasons austerity garners so much support from elites, no matter hw badly it fails in practice. Elites, he argues, see economic distress as an opportunity to push through “reforms” — which basically means changes they want, which may or may not actually serve the interest of promoting economic growth — and oppose any policies that might mitigate crisis without the need for these changes:

I conjecture that “austerians” are concerned that anti-recessionary macro policy will allow a country to “muddle through” a crisis without improving its institutions. In other words, they fear that a successful stimulus would be wasting a good crisis.

…

If people really do think that the danger of stimulus is not that it might fail, but that it might succeed, they need to say so. Only then, I believe, can we have an optimal public discussion about costs and benefits.

As he notes, the day after he wrote that post, Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post made exactly that argument for austerity.

What Smith didn’t note, somewhat surprisingly, is that his argument is very close to Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, with its argument that elites systematically exploit disasters to push through neoliberal policies even if these policies are essentially irrelevant to the sources of disaster. I have to admit that I was predisposed to dislike Klein’s book when it came out, probably out of professional turf-defending and whatever — but her thesis really helps explain a lot about what’s going on in Europe in particular.

And the lineage goes back even further. Two and a half years ago Mike Konczal reminded us of a classic 1943 (!) essay by Michal Kalecki, who suggested that business interests hate Keynesian economics because they fear that it might work — and in so doing mean that politicians would no longer have to abase themselves before businessmen in the name of preserving confidence. This is pretty close to the argument that we must have austerity, because stimulus might remove the incentive for structural reform that, you guessed it, gives businesses the confidence they need before deigning to produce recovery.

And sure enough, in my inbox this morning I see a piece more or less deploring the early signs of success for Abenomics: Abenomics is working — but it had better not work too well. Because if it works, how will we get structural reform?

So one way to see the drive for austerity is as an application of a sort of reverse Hippocratic oath: “First, do nothing to mitigate harm”. For the people must suffer if neoliberal reforms are to prosper.

The last post of the day was “The Sadomonetarists of Basel:”

The WSJ highlights a speech by Jaime Caruana, general manager of the Bank for International Settlements, warning of the dangers of easy money and the need to raise rates now to avert … something or other. And his views matter, says the Journal:

Mr. Caruana is no disgruntled outvoted hawk on a policy-setting council, trying desperately to set the record straight after being outvoted. Rather, he’s the mouthpiece for a global college of central bankers, almost all of whom find themselves under intense pressure from their national governments to keep things ticking over while they try to repair the economy.

His views also matter for another reason: the BIS is one of the few international financial institutions (some say the only one) to see the financial crisis coming and to issue clear warnings ahead of time.

I guess we can check the record here and see just how prescient the BIS was. What I do recall, however — which the Journal apparently doesn’t — is that the BIS has spent years warning about the dangers of low interest rates. Except that a couple of years back it was telling a completely different story about why we needed to raise rates; you see, the big danger was of imminent inflation:

“Global inflation pressures are rising rapidly as commodity prices soar and as the global recovery runs into capacity constraints,” said the BIS, which acts as a central bank for the world’s central banks. “These increased upside risks to inflation call for higher policy rates.”

In fact, inflation is running below target just about everywhere. You might therefore think that the BIS would step back a bit and reconsider both its policy recommendations and the framework it uses to derive those recommendations.

But no. Higher interest rates are always the solution; it’s only the problem they’re supposed to solve that changes.

 

Brooks, solo

Prof. Krugman is off today, so Bobo is flying solo.  In “When Governments Go Bad” he says the I.R.S. and Justice Department scandals disrobe a culture festering in unrestraint and overreach.  Not in the least surprisingly, the word “Republican” appears only in comments.  Bobo saw no reason whatsoever to include it in his piece…  Here he is:

Government, Clinton Rossiter once wrote, is something like fire: “Under control, it is the most useful of servants; out of control, it is a ravaging tyrant.”

So you want government workers to be acutely aware of the ambiguous and perilous nature of their position. You want them to have a heart full of affection for the people they serve. They should regard the people as a mentor, respecting their wisdom, grateful for their trust and longing to serve them with deference and respect.

As they love and respect the voters, you also want government workers to fear themselves. You want officials who are aware that they probably went into government in part because they have a desire to shape and help other people, and that this desire comes with its own form of immoderation.

You want government workers who are alert to their own tendency toward bossiness; who ladle out their power carefully, gram by gram; who are aware that they are not really as benevolent and disinterested as they seem to themselves. Most of all, you want people with a strong sense of self-restraint.

As a surgeon abhors sloppiness, the best government workers instinctively abhor any hint of domination. Knowing how power is liable to corrupt them, they tend to shrink back at any hint of their own overreach and desire for control.

But we don’t exactly see this attitude in the big stories about government today, do we? Most government workers are amazingly dedicated and talented, and they put in a level of commitment that is far out of proportion to their salaries. But we’re also seeing government workers, who, far from checking their own desire for control, have taken it out for a romp.

The I.R.S. scandal and Justice Department’s invasion of The Associated Press are just the most recent examples of overreach. They rest on top of the daily intrusions of the post-9/11 security apparatus and much else.

It’s hard to tell now if the I.R.S. scandal is political thuggery or obliviousness. It would be one thing if the scandal is just a group of tax people targeting the most antitax groups in the country. That’s just normal, run-of-the-mill partisan antipathy.

It would be far worse if the senior workers of the I.R.S. have become so isolated by their technocratic task that they didn’t even recognize that using the search term “Tea Party” was going to be a moral and political problem. If that’s the case, then the members of the I.R.S. leadership are suffering from a tunnel vision that turns outside reality into abstractions. When government workers lose touch with the normal human context of their job, that’s when the real horror show commences.

Everyone is treating the I.R.S. issue as a bigger deal, but the Justice Department scandal is worse. This was a sweeping intrusion that makes it hard for the press to do its job. Who is going to call a journalist to report wrongdoing knowing that at some future date, the government might feel perfectly free to track the phone records and hunt you down?

I would have thought a dozen Justice Department officials would have risen up and splashily resigned when they learned of the scope of this invasion. Aren’t there some lawyers in the Justice Department, and, if so, did they go to law schools where the Constitution is left unassigned?

This scandal arises from a larger cultural virus: leakaphobia. Every administration centralizes power more tightly than the one before and is more paranoid about leaks than the one before. Every administration successively narrows the circle of debate, forsaking wide deliberation for the sake of reducing leaks (except the politically useful ones). Why do they do this? Because people who go into government not only have a tendency to want to control other people but also to control information.

We clearly have a values problem in the federal government. We clearly have a few or many agencies where the leaders don’t emphasize that workers need to check themselves, or risk losing what remains of the people’s trust.

The rest of us just have to be more wary. For example, I generally support the little behavioral nudges that Cass Sunstein describes in his outstanding book “Simpler” — the subtle policy shifts that induce people to save more, or eat healthier. I’d trust somebody with a minimalist disposition like Sunstein to implement these policies. But I wouldn’t necessarily trust the people at the I.R.S. or Justice Department to implement them. They’d take a nudge and expand it into a shove.

And what are we to make of financial regulatory reform and the new health care law? In a culture of unrestraint, will federal regulators use these rule-writing opportunities to expand their reach beyond anything now imagined?

People can only have faith in a government that self-restrains, and there’s little evidence of that now.

Bobo had no problem at all with the previous administration…

Krugman’s blog, 5/15/13

Just one post yesterday, “About That Debt Crisis? Never Mind:”

Link fixed

OK, another toe dipped in reality. The new CBO numbers are out, and they scream “debt crisis? What debt crisis?” Here’s the actual and projected ratio of federal debt to GDP:

Yes, debt rose substantially in the face of economic crisis — which is what is supposed to happen. But runaway deficits? Not a hint.

Yes, there are longer-term issues of health costs and demographics. As always, however, these have no relevance to what we should be doing now — and it’s far from clear why they should even be a priority for discussion. As I’ve written before, the VSP consensus seems to be that to avoid the possibility of future benefit cuts, we must commit ourselves now now now to … future cuts in benefits.

Why, it’s almost as if the real goal was to make sure that benefits get cut even if the fiscal outlook improves.

Meanwhile, our policy discourse has been dominated for years by what turns out to be a false alarm. To the millions of Americans who are out of work and may never get another job thanks to premature fiscal austerity, the VSPs would like to say, “oopsies!”

Or maybe not even that. I’m happy to report that the Times does place this fiscal news on page 1. But correspondents tell me that at VSP Central, aka The Washington Post — where deficit panic has pervaded the news pages as well as the opinion section — the stunning new deficit report is buried as a small item deep inside the paper.

And Bowles and Simpson, who are now 26 months into their prediction of fiscal crisis within two years, will continue to be treated as revered gurus.

I love it that he always puts Bowles first, so they can be shortened to “BS.”

Blow and Collins

Both Mr. Blow and Ms. Collins have been pondering scandals.  In “Scandalous vs. Scandal Lust” he says Outrage! Disgrace! But, really, there’s not enough there there.  Ms. Collins has a suggestion in “On The Plus Side …,” and says it’s been quite a week of scandals! Maybe, as part of crisis-management, our fearless leaders could come together and do something worthwhile like name a national rock.  Here’s Mr. Blow:

I have watched in recent days as a parade of conservatives have used specific and real governmental missteps to justify their wide-ranging paranoia and irrational hostilities. “Aha!”

You have to take their glee in sorrow with a grain of salt. For them this is more about their scandal lust than what’s scandalous. These people have been searching for a scandal — Kenyan birth certificates and a Michelle Obama “whitey” tape — for years. The fact that they now have something solid and not made of sand is going to make sad souls happy. That’s to be expected.

What’s not to be expected — but has become depressingly predictable — is to watch liberals rending their garments and gnashing their teeth in woe-is-us doom chanting. The overreaction is exhausting and embarrassing.

Let’s say what this confluence of missteps is and what it is not — at least as the evidence now suggests.

First, the three issues — Benghazi, the targeting of conservative groups by the I.R.S. and the Department of Justice’s monitoring of Associated Press journalists — appear to be completely unrelated, try as politicians and pundits may to connect them. Second, the president does not appear to have had any direct involvement in any of the episodes. Third, their weight and resonances differ greatly, although all could be diminished by their emerging concurrently.

At this point, this is about flaws of procedures — some possibly illegal, all very disturbing — and problems of perception. But they are neither fatal nor unfixable.

Now, let’s separate the well-worn Benghazi witch hunt from the other two. From all appearances that is just a callous use of a tragic event to take a political slap at President Obama and a stab at the likely Democratic presidential heavyweight Hillary Clinton. It is being conducted by hyperpartisan politicians and aggravated by Fox News, both with a stake in justifying their unjustifiable contempt for this Democratic administration, and foiling the next one.

But Americans appear to be tiring of all that chasing of smoke and little finding of fire.

According to a Pew Research Center poll issued this week, the percentage of Americans closely following the Benghazi news has continued to fall. Less than half of the respondents believe that the Obama administration has been dishonest, while almost as many say that the Republicans have gone too far in the hearings. At least one in five don’t know either way.

According to the Pew Poll:

“About half (56 percent) of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say they regularly watch the Fox News channel, and this group is particularly frustrated over the Benghazi situation. Fully 79 percent of Republicans who regularly watch Fox News say the Obama administration has been dishonest, compared with 60 percent of Republicans who don’t watch Fox regularly. Nearly half (46 percent) of Republicans who regularly watch Fox News say they are following the story very closely — compared with 23 percent among other Republicans. Those who regularly watch Fox News are also far more critical of the news media: 59 percent say the hearings have not received sufficient coverage by the news media.”

On the I.R.S. scandal, however, it certainly appears that the agency behaved stupidly. Not because they sought to scrutinize the mockery that is these 501(c)4 “social welfare” groups, but because they did so unevenly. But what will be left after all the hue and cry? As the Notre Dame law professor Lloyd Mayer told the Christian Science Monitor this week:

“What has been missed in the outrage is the recognition that this problem arose from much deeper sources than the poor judgment or possible partisan bias of a handful of I.R.S. employees.”

He continued:

“Congress has given the I.R.S. the difficult task of applying an incredibly vague definition of political activity and an uncertain standard for how much political activity tax-exempt social welfare organizations may engage in.”

That, in the end, is the real scandal.

And now to the Associated Press scandal. The Justice Department was just wrong in the employ of its dragnet, and the administration — as represented by a spokesman, Jay Carney — was disingenuous in its insistence that the administration supports “unfettered” journalism. It just doesn’t. But we’ve always known that, at least we in the media have. The scandal here is that an atmosphere of intolerance for leaks — which Republicans ironically accused the Obama administration of encouraging — seems to have overtaken the Justice Department.

On Wednesday the White House took steps to mitigate the damage, releasing more than 100 pages of Benghazi talking point e-mails, seeking to revive a shield law for reporters who refused to disclose confidential sources, and having the president himself deliver a statement on the I.R.S. In it he announced the resignation of the acting commissioner of the agency, the implementation of new safeguards and a pledge to work with Congress in investigating the matter. As the president said, “The good news is that it’s fixable.”  And, it is.

That’s it — the gist of all three as far as we know at this point. These are not administration-enders. People can be punished, or fired or even jailed, if Speaker John Boehner has his way, but at this early stage signs are not pointing to any of those people being in the White House.

Even if I had hair, I wouldn’t be setting it on fire, not yet anyway.

And now here’s Ms. Collins:

Let’s try to come up with some positive thoughts about the recent political fortunes of the Obama White House:

• Economy’s getting a little better. Deficit’s dropping.

• Bill Clinton had a really terrible second term and look how well things turned out for him.

• Nobody in the administration has been caught driving to Canada with Bo the dog strapped to the car roof.

It’s been quite a week, what with the I.R.S. scandal, the Benghazi controversy and revelations about the Justice Department’s sweep of The Associated Press’s phone records. Plus, the Russians came up with an alleged American spy in a bad wig who they said was caught carrying a compass, an atlas of Moscow and a ridiculous traitor-recruitment letter. That one could be a set-up, but if it’s real, then we are just going to have to cancel the summer.

Republicans were leaping joyfully through the capital like overcaffeinated gazelles. There is not a committee chairman in the House of Representatives who isn’t planning hearings of outrage about something — except maybe the poor woman John Boehner appointed to run the committee in charge of housekeeping.

Heads must roll! Senator James Inhofe announced that “people may be starting to use the i-word before too long,” having apparently missed all the prior calls for the president’s impeachment for everything from failure to balance the budget to gun control.

Senator Marco Rubio demanded “the I.R.S. commissioner’s resignation,” possibly unaware that the nation had not had an I.R.S. commissioner since last November. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid expressed doubt that the nation would be satisfied just with the head of “some temporary guy” and called for a permanent appointment. This was presumably due to Reid’s desire for stability, not just a more rewarding target.

The acting commissioner did, indeed, get the ax on Wednesday, but the chances that the Senate is going to approve a new Internal Revenue Service commissioner are approximately as good as the odds it will include zombies under Social Security. Reid is still struggling with the nominations for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Environmental Protection Agency, which have been held up by the Republicans on the grounds that they don’t really like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Environmental Protection Agency. The Labor Department appears likely to get a new leader the very second hell freezes over. Also, Republican Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri has vowed to put a hold on E.P.A. nominee Gina McCarthy until he gets a new flood-way project.

Serious problem for Washington: How do you get heads to roll when there aren’t any heads? Except for Attorney General Eric Holder, who’s been running the Justice Department for what seems like 100 years, and appears linked to just about every disaster in the history of the Obama administration. I believe we may soon discover that he was the one who provided the would-be spy in Russia with a brown wig that looks like an obese cat.

People, this too shall pass. We’re in a moment, not a map for the entire Obama second term. It is, of course, possible that things will get worse, and we’ll discover the president’s health care plan is, as Michele Bachmann claims, part of a plot to deny medical treatment to conservatives. Or things could get better. The White House seems to be getting some traction on the I.R.S. Maybe the economy will really improve, the scandals will run their course, and people will turn their attention to worthy causes like early childhood education or stopping climate change.

Admittedly, the last scenario is a long shot. And even if Barack Obama ascended into heaven, the Republicans would point out that before he went, the I.R.S. picked on the Tea Party.

Maybe, while he’s crisis-managing, the president could also figure out a way to show people government working at something other than reorganizing troubled agencies. Maybe he could start off with passing a bill that’s supereasy. I notice that in state legislatures, when times are tough, parties are sometimes able to get together in order to pick a new state thing. You know, state bird, state animal. Some states find this so relaxing they never stop. (New Mexico has an official state guitar, state tie and state aircraft, which, unfortunately, is the hot-air balloon.)

The United States has a few of these items, like a bird and an anthem, but there’s plenty of territory to cover. The president could demand that Congress pick an official national rock. Committees could hold hearings about the relative merits of slate and granite. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell would threaten to filibuster unless his colleagues considered coal. But, in the end, I believe everybody would rally around a grand compromise for marble. And the country would feel much, much better.

Baby steps. Then we can get to the debt ceiling.

Krugman’s blog, 5/14/13

Just one short post yesterday, “Austerity in the New York Review of Books:”

I have been spending my time doing my best to take a break from the alleged real world, and will continue doing so for a bit. I should, however, let readers know that my longish-form essay on the great austerity debacle is now up at The New York Review of Books.

 

Dowd and Friedman

In “Cascading Confessions” MoDo says the revelations of two famous women help bring their diseases out of the shadows.  The Moustache of Wisdom is still in Sana, Yemen.  In “A Visit to Yemen’s Zoo” he says the state of the endangered Arabian leopard may be a bellwether for Yemen and its people.  Here’s MoDo:

Two of the hot topics trending on Twitter Tuesday were Angelina Jolie and the I.R.S.

Beauty and the Beast.

Jolie stunned the world with a New York Times Op-Ed article explaining why she decided to have a preventive double mastectomy once she learned that she has the BRCA1 gene, which spikes the risk for breast and ovarian cancers.

The actress was close to her mother, who died at 56 after battling ovarian cancer for nearly a decade, and she wrote that she “will do anything” to be with her own children as long as she can.

“I started with the breasts, as my risk of breast cancer is higher than my risk of ovarian cancer, and the surgery is more complex,” she wrote, adding that “I do not feel any less of a woman. I feel empowered that I made a strong choice that in no way diminishes my femininity.”

I had to keep checking the byline to make sure the piece was really by Angelina Jolie. She has been the embodiment of physical perfection for so long — a fierce, tattooed warrior and seductress with a genuine wildness who made female action roles from Lara Croft to Mrs. Smith to Evelyn Salt absolutely believable.

So it was hard to read about the pain caused by the genetic imperfections lurking beneath that lush perfection, a curveball from a woman celebrated for her curves.

Jolie, 37, is a famous crusader for refugees. She has also had other, more noirish shades to her image, from wearing Billy Bob Thornton’s blood in a vial around her neck to drugs, cutting, knife-collecting and depression to shoplifting Brad Pitt from America’s sweetheart to the “Saturday Night Live” parody that presents the serial adopter and mother of six as a stalker of babies.

She knows that she will face criticism for elitism, given that she has the money to get the more than $3,000 BRCA testing and the best surgeons, while other women don’t. Yet her courage in going public with the graphic details of her mutilation and reconstruction, even though she’s part of an industry that considers a 10-pound weight gain a career catastrophe, makes her a real-life action heroine.

Ever since Rock Hudson gave a face to AIDS and softened the position of Ronald Reagan, we have known it is possible for Hollywood stars to ameliorate the stigma of disease and spark recognition, conversation and inspiration.

Jolie’s health revelation overshadowed another one in the same newspaper by the woman who would be the first female mayor of New York City. Christine Quinn, the Council speaker and early leader to succeed Michael Bloomberg, told The Times’s Kate Taylor about her descent — as a teenager trying to manage her mother’s fatal breast cancer — into bulimia and alcoholism.

In a classic Irish Catholic quid pro quo with the heavens, Quinn said she believed that if she could be the perfect daughter, thin and pretty, somehow her mother might be saved.

“For a brief moment,” she said of the early sensation of throwing up, “you’ve kind of expelled from your being the things that are making you feel bad.”

The shame was harder to expel. “Asking for help, going to the rehab, dealing with bulimia, cutting back on drinking, getting drinking out of my life altogether — all of that helped me put the pieces back together,” she said, adding that the final piece was her marriage to her wife, Kim Catullo, a corporate lawyer from New Jersey.

Unlike Jolie, Quinn faced a lot of skepticism about her motives for spilling her secrets, which will be chronicled in an upcoming campaign-season memoir.

Clearly, she wanted to control the way the news got out, rather than having it spread by her opponents in the mayor’s race — one of whom may be Anthony Weiner, who has been on a revelatory and redemption odyssey of his own in The Times. And then there’s her other rival, Bill de Blasio, whose wife has frankly shared her former life as a lesbian.

Quinn also wanted to sprinkle some humanity on an image that took hits when she looked like “Mayor Dracula” on a February cover of New York magazine and when she was skewered in an article in The Times in March about her screaming fits and volatile bursts of wrath and retaliation. Mayor Dracula has a bloody penchant for threatening to cut off the privates of those who get on her bad side.

Perhaps realizing her confession seemed more self-serving than public service, Quinn had a Q. & A. on Tuesday at Barnard with the college’s president, Debora Spar, that ruled out any political questions.

“I hope that what I share in this book is helpful, particularly to young women and girls who feel stuck,” Quinn said.

And she certainly hopes the book is helpful to one 46-year-old woman who feels stuck, castigated as an arrogant bully who moves this way and that, going as far to the left as she can without losing Mike Bloomberg, and fundamentally not believing in anything.

With Chris Christie, his admission that he had lap-band surgery under an assumed name to curb his obesity is a second-tier story. The first-tier story is that he’s a Jersey guy who takes no guff.

Christine Quinn needs a first-tier story.

Now here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

Arriving in Yemen last week, I had an experience I’d never had before. I drove from the airport into Sana, the capital, on the main thoroughfare, through a raging torrent of water. I was staying in the old city, a United Nations World Heritage site, which is accessed primarily by an ancient, moat-like road, known as the Sailah. It used to be made of dirt, shrub and pepper trees, which for generations absorbed water in the rainy season, although in downpours it would still flood. But, in 1995, at Yemen’s request, the United States paid to have it paved. Because Yemenis have largely deforested all the mountains around Sana, the lack of trees, vegetation and topsoil means the rainwater now rushes off the mountains, enters the paved city and finds its way to the paved Sailah, turning the road into a rushing aqueduct. Our S.U.V. eventually made it upstream to our hotel, giving a whole new meaning to the expression “we sailed into town.”

The other day, it hailed in Sana, piling up in some spots like a winter snow to a degree no one could remember. Meanwhile, up north, the most violent rainstorms in 25 years in Saudi Arabia just killed 13 Saudis in flooding and had Saudi television airing “footage of people clinging to trees and cars trapped by water,” the BBC reported.

It is impossible to say if these more powerful storms are the result of global warming, which is expected to make the hots hotter, the dries drier and the wets wetter in certain areas. What is not in doubt is that something is changing. Yemeni farmers traditionally divided their growing season into 13-day increments for each aspect of planting and harvesting. “That is how dependable the summer rains were — but not anymore,” said Abdul Rahman al-Eryani, Yemen’s former minister of water and environment. They have become both more erratic and more violent.

What also is not in doubt is that these weather changes are adding to the stress on frail infrastructure across the Arab world. This, combined with continued high population growth, is helping to fuel the Arab uprisings against the old Arab regimes and adding to the challenges for the new ones. For instance, the water table here in Sana has fallen so low from overdrilling, and has dried out the bedrock sandstone so much that it appears to be triggering geological faults, said Eryani. Sana just built a new airport terminal, but, while it was under construction, a fault opened underneath it, extending for miles and requiring an injection of concrete to keep it stable.

Most of the old generation of Arab leaders never gave much thought to natural capital: the forests, shrubs and ecosystems that naturally store water, prevent runoff, flooding and silting. The new generation will have to be environmentalists, otherwise their new politics will be overwhelmed by environmental stresses.

Yemen is the leading edge of this trend. In 2009, Eryani encouraged then-President Ali Abdullah Saleh to name the endangered Arabian leopard as Yemen’s “national animal,” in hopes of preventing its extinction and promoting more environmental awareness. (Where the wildlife thrives, the people usually thrive.)

“The Arabian leopard is at the top of the food chain here,” explained Eryani, “so if we can keep it alive in the wild, it is a strong indicator that the ecosystem is still intact.” As the biggest predator, the Arabian leopard can survive only if the antelope, the rabbits, the partridges, gazelles, ibex and hyrax that it feeds on also survive. Those animals, in turn, need a healthy ecosystem of springs, shrub lands, topsoil and forests. Not surprisingly, since all of those are disappearing, so, too, are the leopards.

In 2009, an American teacher in Yemen, David Stanton, set up a foundation here to protect endangered wildlife, focusing on the leopards. We met the other day outside the leopard zone at the Sana Zoo to discuss their future, while one of these sleek animals lounged on a shelf in his cage — waiting for his daily diet of donkey meat.

“Generally speaking, the Arabian Peninsula is drying,” said Stanton, and while the Arabian leopard can roam wide areas for a long time without water, their prey cannot. “So when you destroy the habitat of the prey, you destroy the habitat of the predators.”

 Stanton started his work before the democracy revolution here in 2011, and back then, he recalled, “people would come to me and say: ‘Why are you protecting leopards when we have leopards in the government?’ ”

Of course, they were right. Arab dictators were at the top of the food chain in their countries — the ultimate predators. Eventually, though, they and their cronies and families ate so much themselves — while also despoiling their natural capital — that there was too little left for the rest of their burgeoning populations, and their people revolted.

The governments experiencing Arab awakenings, though, will never sustainably rebuild their countries’ human capital if they don’t also rebuild their natural capital. If you visit Yemen in five years and hear that the Arabian leopards are extinct, you’ll know the revolution here failed. But if you hear that the leopard population is on the rise again, there is a high likelihood that its people will be as well. Watch the leopards.

Krugman’s blog, 5/13/13

One post yesterday, “Which Textbook Is That, Exactly?”:

OK, on the road, and a quick post over coffee.

Ryan Avent, like me, was favorably impressed by the Nick Crafts piece on British policy in the 1930s. I was, however, slightly puzzled, in a tooting-my-own-horn fashion, by the reference — which I missed in Crafts, but was repeated and emphasized by Avent — to the “textbook approach” of raising inflation expectations to escape a liquidity trap.

Um, which textbook is that, exactly? As far as I know, among basic textbooks only Krugman/Wells even talks about the liquidity trap; certainly we were the only one talking about it before 2008. And the whole discussion of inflation expectations and monetary policy in a liquidity trap as a sort of inverted version of the usual credibility problem — in fact, the whole revival of the liquidity trap as a modern concern — dates from this paper (pdf).

This isn’t purely self-promotion (although obviously that’s part of it). I do think that one reason I’ve done pretty well in tracking this ongoing slump is that I’ve been thinking about liquidity trap issues for a very long time, years before almost anyone else.

OK, while I’m wrenching my arm patting myself on the back, here’s Ryan Grim explaining how one critic, in his desperate attempts to create false equivalence, is forced to invent a character named “Paul Krugman” bearing little resemblance to the person of the same name.

 

Brooks and Bruni

Mr. Nocera is off today.  Bobo, in “The Next Scapegoat,” says political one-upmanship has just hit a new low with the recent charges leveled against Victoria Nuland, the spokeswoman for the State Department.  Well, well, well…  Bobo’s knickers are in a knot because he knows Ms. Nuland, not for any other reason.  Mr. Bruni, in “Our Ceaseless Circus,” says from Benghazi to gun control, we pivot too quickly from the substance to the sideshow of who’s winning and losing.  Here’s Bobo:

Twenty years ago, when she was a young Foreign Service officer in Moscow, Victoria Nuland gave me a dazzling briefing on the diverse factions inside the Russian parliament. Now she is a friend I typically see a couple times a year, at various functions, and I have watched her rise, working with everybody from Dick Cheney to Hillary Clinton, serving as ambassador to NATO, and now as a spokeswoman at the State Department.

Over the past few weeks, the spotlight has turned on Nuland. The charge is that intelligence officers prepared accurate talking points after the attack in Benghazi, Libya, and that Nuland, serving her political masters, watered them down.

The charges come from two quarters, from Republicans critical of the Obama administration’s handling of Benghazi and intelligence officials shifting blame for Benghazi onto the State Department.

It’s always odd watching someone you know get turned into a political cartoon on the cable talk shows. But this case is particularly disturbing because Nuland did nothing wrong.

Let’s review the actual events. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was killed on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2012. For this there is plenty of blame to go around. We now know, thanks to reporting by Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper and Michael Schmidt in The Times, that Benghazi was primarily a C.I.A. operation. Furthermore, intelligence officers underestimated how dangerous the situation was. They erred in vetting the Libyan militia that was supposed to provide security.

The next day, Nuland held a background press briefing, a transcript of which is available on the State Department’s Web site. She had two main points. There’s a lot we don’t know. The attack was conducted by Libyan extremists. She made no claim that it was set off by an anti-Muslim video or arose spontaneously from demonstrations.

On Friday, Sept. 14, David Petraeus, then the director of the C.I.A., gave a classified briefing to lawmakers in Congress. The lawmakers asked him to provide talking points so they could discuss the event in the news media.

C.I.A. analysts began work on the talking points. Early drafts, available on Jonathan Karl’s ABC News Web site, reflect the confused and fragmented state of knowledge. The first draft, like every subsequent one, said the Benghazi attacks were spontaneously inspired by protests in Cairo. It also said that extremists with ties to Al Qaeda participated.

The C.I.A. analysts quickly scrubbed references to Al Qaeda from the key part of the draft, investigators on Capitol Hill now tell me.

On Friday evening of Sept. 14, the updated talking points were e-mailed to the relevant officials in various departments, including Nuland. She wondered why the C.I.A. was giving members of Congress talking points that were far more assertive than anything she could say or defend herself. She also noted that the talking points left the impression that the C.I.A. had issued all sorts of warnings before the attack.

Remember, this was at a moment when the State Department was taking heat for what was mostly a C.I.A. operation, while doing verbal gymnastics to hide the C.I.A.’s role. Intentionally or not, the C.I.A. seemed to be repaying the favor by trying to shift blame to the State Department for ignoring intelligence.

Nuland didn’t seek to rewrite the talking points. In fact, if you look at the drafts that were written while she was sending e-mails, the drafts don’t change much from one to the next. She was just kicking the process up to the policy-maker level.

At this point, Nuland’s participation in the whole affair ends.

On Saturday morning, what’s called a deputies committee meeting was held at the White House. I’m told the talking points barely came up at that meeting. Instead, the C.I.A. representative said he would take proactive measures to streamline them. That day, the agency reduced the talking points to the bare nub Susan Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations, was given before going on the Sunday talk shows.

Several things were apparently happening. Each of the different players had their hands on a different piece of the elephant. If there was any piece of the talking points that everybody couldn’t agree upon, it got cut. Second, the administration proceeded with extreme caution about drawing conclusions, possibly overlearning the lessons from the Bush years. Third, as the memos moved up the C.I.A. management chain, the higher officials made them more tepid (this is apparently typical). Finally, in the absence of a clear narrative, the talking points gravitated toward the least politically problematic story, blaming the anti-Muslim video and the Cairo demonstrations.

Is this a tale of hard intelligence being distorted for political advantage? Maybe. Did Victoria Nuland scrub the talking points to serve Clinton or President Obama? That charge is completely unsupported by the evidence. She was caught in a brutal interagency turf war, and she defended her department. The accusations against her are bogus.

Gee.  Maybe we should encourage Bobo to make a few more friends…  Here’s Mr. Bruni:

Four Americans died in Benghazi, Libya: people with unrealized hopes, unfinished plans, relatives who loved them and friends who will miss them.

But let’s focus on what really matters about the attack and its aftermath. Did Hillary Clinton’s presumed 2016 presidential campaign take a hit?

We live in a country lousy with guns and bloody with gun-related violence, manifest two weeks ago in a Kentucky 5-year-old’s fatal shooting of his 2-year-old sister, evident over the weekend in a hail of bullets at a Mother’s Day parade in New Orleans.

But let’s cut to the chase. Did Kelly Ayotte, the New Hampshire senator, safeguard or endanger her political future by casting one of the votes that doomed gun-control legislation in the Senate? An d does the law’s failure mean that it’s time to write the obituary for Barack Obama’s presidency, which has more than 1,300 days to go, or can we wait — I don’t know — a week or maybe even two to do that?

Now we have a scandal at the Internal Revenue Service to factor in. And a scandal it is, in urgent need of a thorough investigation, which President Obama pledged at his news conference on Monday and which we’re very much owed.

But before we get a full account, let’s by all means pivot to the possible political fallout, politics being all that seems to matter these days. Will Republicans ever trust and be able to work with the administration again? (This is being asked as if there were all that much trust and cooperation in the first place.) Have they finally been handed the cudgel that can whack Obama and his crew into oblivion? Assess, discuss and please don’t forget to make predictions about the 2014 midterms.

It never gets better and may in fact be getting worse: the translation of all of the news and of all of Washington’s responses into a ledger of electoral pluses and minuses, a graph of rising and falling political fortunes, a narrative of competition between not just the parties but the would-be potentates within a party. On issue after issue, the sideshow swallows the substance, as politicians and the seemingly infinite ranks of political handlers join us journalists in gaming everything out, ad infinitum.

To follow the debate over immigration reform is to lose sight at times of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in limbo and the challenge of finding the most economically fruitful and morally sound way to deal with them and their successors. No, the real stakes are United States Senator Marco Rubio’s presidential aspirations. Will he pay a high price with the Republican base for pushing a path to citizenship? Or will he earn necessary centrist credentials?

And where does it leave him vis-à-vis Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, who are fellow Republican senators itching for prominence and are also hypothetical primary rivals? The next presidential election is three and a half years away — an eternity, really — but instead of putting a damper on speculation, that time span has encouraged it, letting a thousand theories and nearly as many contenders bloom.

We can wonder: if Clinton decided not to run, would a door open for another woman, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of the New York? Just how well has Gillibrand positioned herself for such a turn? That story is already out there, and in it her record is framed largely in terms of her prospects for national office, as if one exists in the service of the other, as if the point of a Congressional seat is leveraging it into an even better, more regal throne.

What about the actual business of governing? Between all the preening, partisan cross-fire and of course fund-raising that consumes members of Congress, is there any space and energy for that?

Not much, to judge from either the sclerosis that now defines the institution or the obsessions of those of us in the media. Our quickness to publicize skirmishes and divine political jockeying abet both. Actors tend to do whatever keeps the audience rapt.

At Obama’s news conference, he breezed past the I.R.S. debacle too quickly, and I’m not sure why he’d stayed mum until then. He flashed too much self-righteous anger about the scrutiny of the Benghazi talking points, which strike to important matters of accountability and credibility.

But however self-servingly, Obama got one thing about Benghazi exactly right: what’s most vital, and what’s being obscured, is how we improve diplomatic security.

After all, the fates altered most profoundly by the attack weren’t his or Clinton’s or any other pol’s, but rather those of the four lost Americans: Christopher Stevens, Glen Doherty, Tyrone Woods and Sean Smith.

“We dishonor them,” Obama said, “when we turn things like this into a political circus.” Indeed. But it’s what we turn almost everything into.