Have you been keeping up with the latest on Benghazi! Yeah, me neither. But I guess it's time to correct that. It turns out there are two new developments that the wingers are pretty sure will finally blow the lid off the whole thing.

First up is a dramatically anonymous "military special ops member" who told Fox News that there was a team based in Croatia that could have been scrambled to Benghazi in time to do....something:

“I know for a fact that C-110, the EUCOM CIF, was doing a training exercise in ... not in the region of North Africa, but in Europe,” the operator told Fox News' Adam Housley. “And they had the ability to act and to respond.”

....“We had the ability to load out, get on birds and fly there, at a minimum stage,” the operator told Fox News. “C-110 had the ability to be there, in my opinion, in a matter of about four hours...four to six hours.” Being so close, C-110s would have been able to respond had there been a second attack, the source added.

And why are we only hearing about this now? Because everyone who knew about it was afraid to come forward, natch. You know how ruthless Obama can be. Today, though, Billy Birdzell, a former special ops team leader, pretty much torched the whole conspiracy theory. He makes three points. First, Obama ordered the C-110 group to launch at 2:39 am. Four hours later the attacks were over, so the team couldn't possibly have gotten there in time to stop anything. Second, even if they'd been launched earlier, it's fantasy to think they could have gotten to the compound within four to six hours. Third, even if, miraculously, they could have gotten there in time, they couldn't have done anything to stop mortar fire, which is what killed the two consulate guards in the annex.

"The person in the interview is a clown," says Birdzell. Click the link for his extremely persuasive full analysis.

So that's one down, but next up are four, count 'em, four anonymous whistleblowers who are said to be "career-level officials at the State Department and the CIA." One of the State Department whistleblowers is represented by Victoria Toensing, a longtime Republican operative whose name you might recall from both the Monica Lewinsky and Valerie Plame affairs. Ed Henry of Fox News asked Obama about all this at his press conference on Tuesday, but apparently even the vast apparatus of the West Wing can't keep up with the latest Republican conspiracy theories on Benghazi. Obama had no idea what he was talking about. In any case, supposedly the four whistleblowers will be testifying in front of Darrell Issa's oversight committee next week:

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell E. Issa, California Republican, has promised bombshells at the hearing, which he says will “expose new facts and details that the Obama administration has tried to suppress.”

....Lawyers Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing, who say they are trying to represent Benghazi witnesses who want to testify publicly about what they know, on Thursday repeated claims that access to their clients was being inhibited by pressure from unidentified administration officials. Mr. diGenova said on Fox News that the hurdles he faced amounted to a “cover-up” and that the Accountability Review Board failed to interview key witnesses for its report, starting with Mrs. Clinton.

And not only did Obama try to "suppress" this bombshell testimony, but now that he's (apparently) failed, the four officials from State and CIA are in considerable danger thanks to their decision to come forward. Issa has so far declined to provide the names of next week's witnesses because, he claims, he's concerned about "possible retaliation whistleblowers could face at the hands of administration officials."

What's it all about? Beats me, but among other things I gather the witnesses are going to rehash old charges about Hillary Clinton turning down requests for more security at the Benghazi consulate and dropping the ball on the night of the attacks. There's also a bunch of background sniping involved in the whole thing, including Toensing's claim that the State Department refused to give her a security clearance and Issa's pique over the rules under which his committee has been allowed to view documents. Beyond that, who knows? I guess we'll find out next week.

• Print
• Email
• Tweet

Via Brenda Cronin, here's a fascinating study suggesting that faster adoption of broadband internet leads to higher marriage rates. The author, Andriana Bellou of the University of Montreal, presents the basic regression chart on the right, and then runs through a variety of tests to find out whether this is really a causal relationship. After all, maybe tech-friendly places have always produced higher marriage rates. Or maybe sociable people like the internet and also like getting married. Or it could be that causality runs in the other direction: maybe people who are more likely to get married are also more likely to move to tech-friendly places. Etc.

Bellou takes a variety of strategies to test causality. For example, it turns out that broadband penetration in 2000-05 doesn't predict marriage rates in the pre-internet era (1990-95). This suggests that her results aren't due to something special about the geographic areas that eventually adopted broadband at high rates.

Long story short, her conclusion is that this association is probably causal. Other things equal, better access to the internet really does produce a greater number of marriages. eHarmony really does work.

In a way, this isn't too surprising, but there's obviously a lot of noise in the data. I'll be interested to see if her result holds up once the rest of the world starts banging away on it.

• Print
• Email
• Tweet

Obviously I haven't been keeping up with Republican shenanigans at the state level. I knew about all the abortion restrictions, and I knew about all the voting restrictions. But somehow I missed this:

Friction over tax policy within the GOP has flared in states such as Louisiana, Nebraska, Kansas and Ohio, as Republican lawmakers raise concerns over projected revenue losses from income-tax cuts. Three of those states shelved big income-tax cuts that would be paid for by broadening the sales tax, and in Kansas, legislators will return next week to a continuing debate over the size and speed of proposed cuts.

Last week, the Indiana legislature passed a plan giving Gov. Mike Pence an income-tax cut that was smaller and phased in over a longer period than his original proposal. Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin agreed to an income-tax-cut deal with Republican lawmakers, but they postponed it until 2015 over revenue concerns. North Carolina lawmakers have been discussing a tax overhaul for months but haven't come up with a plan.

Really? I knew about Bobby Jindal in Louisiana, and his plan to scrap the (progressive) state income tax and make up the revenue by raising the (regressive) state sales tax. But Nebraska, Kansas, Ohio, Indiana, Oklahoma, and North Carolina have all been contemplating the same thing?

WTF? Is this now a conservative thing? Did ALEC or the Heritage Foundation release a white paper about this last year? What possible excuse can they be offering for such a direct tradeoff between lower taxes on the well-off and higher taxes on the middle class? Why risk their reputations on such a transparent sop to the rich? Have they now officially given up even pretending?

• Print
• Email
• Tweet

Will 30-year fixed-rate mortgages disappear if the federal government doesn't guarantee them via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Dean Baker cries foul:

This can easily be shown not to be true by the market in jumbo mortgages. These are mortgages that are too large in value to be insured by the GSAs. A large share of these mortgages are 30-year fixed rate mortgages. Also, while it is less common today, prior to the housing bubble banks did hold a substantial share of their mortgages, typically around 10-20 percent. Since the government was not guaranteeing these mortgages, the banks must have felt the guarantee was unnecessary to get them to issue 30-year fixed rate mortgages.

I'd add that most other countries don't have agencies like Fannie and Freddie, but manage to have robust mortgage markets anyway. (Sometimes a bit too robust.) It's true, I think, that the traditional 30-year fixed is a bit of a historical artifact in the U.S. that isn't common elsewhere, but so what? There's no reason to stay hooked on the 30-year fixed just because it's been around for a long time. We should be concerned with proper regulation of the mortgage market—down payment requirements, income requirements, interest rate limitations, etc.—not with saving a particular kind of mortgage. Variable-rate mortgages work fine throughout the world with proper regulation but without GSAs like Fannie and Freddie, and they can work fine here.

Fannie and Freddie need to be wound down gradually. There's no need for a big bang. But they're relics of an earlier age and we should be willing to get rid of them.

• Print
• Email
• Tweet