I thought cats were supposed to get gradually calmer and more mature as they aged. Not these two. They’re now 11 months old, and apparently they went nuts during my stay in the hospital. Now that I’m back, they’re still going nuts. Every scrap of paper in the house has to be kept at least six feet off the ground or else it gets shredded. When does the calming down part start?

At the moment, I’d settle for training Hilbert not to leap on my stomach unexpectedly. This is not good for people with bad backs. It. Needs. To. Stop.

A few days ago, anti-street-harassment organization Hollaback posted a YouTube video of a woman walking through Manhattan for ten hours and being subjected to repeated and demeaning cat-calls. So what did conservatives think of this? Here’s Christine Sisto at National Review:

Most of the criticisms of this video are basically, “Since when is saying ‘good morning’ harassment?”…. The “harassment” comes from the intent. A woman doesn’t believe that a man genuinely wants to know how how her day is going when he shouts it at her as she walks by him on the street….Anyone with a modicum of common sense who watches the video can see that these men weren’t interested in wishing a random person a pleasant day.

….Whatever the cause of cat-calling may be, it should stop….A societal change is needed, one that can start with a guy not clapping his buddy on the back for telling some girl how much he enjoys her assets. Maybe, someday, we ladies can walk to work in peace.

Here’s Jay Nordlinger:

Christine Sisto has written about “cat-calling.” I’m so glad she has tackled this subject — it’s important. I have witnessed cat-calling my entire life, as we all do. In the main, I have not found it innocent, sweet, and breezy, as in a Warner Bros. cartoon. (“Hey, toots! Nice gams!”) I have found it menacing, disgusting, and semi-assaultive.

And here’s Jonah Goldberg:

I’d note that this practice pre-dates the rise of rap music by decades if not centuries or millennia. The issue isn’t race, it’s manners. Good manners are taught for the most part by good parents, good schools and good peers. I agree with Christine that Hollaback is spitting into the wind here. I also agree that catcalling should stop and that the only thing that can stop it is a societal change. But such a change would require a lot more than a few videos, no matter how viral. And it would also require the progressive Left to take on challenges much stiffer than bullying already well-mannered people to police their micro-aggressive grammar on elite college campuses or in obscure chatrooms. And that’s why I don’t think it will stop anytime soon.

Goldberg, unfortunately, simply can’t pass up the opportunity to somehow shift the blame for continued cat-calling onto the PC left. That’s shopworn and witless. But at least he’s against it. On the whole, then, good for National Review for not pretending that cat-calling is yet another innocent bit of fun that humorless liberals are trying to deny the rest of us. It’s disgusting and it should stop. At least we all agree about that.

Getting deep into the weeds of local congressional races isn’t my thing, but it’s certainly been intriguing this year watching Republicans attack Democrats for being willing to accept Republican positions on various issues. Until now, the most egregious example of this came from Karl Rove’s Super PAC, which has attacked several Democratic senators for supporting a plan to raise the retirement age of Social Security—an idea that Republicans have been promoting for years. Chutzpah!

But now we have a new contender in the sweepstakes for sheer partisan hypocrisy. Dylan Matthews tells us today that in Arizona a Republican contender is attacking Democrat Ron Barber for…. supporting a budget compromise engineered by tea party darling Paul Ryan.

The flyer, which apparently comes from the Arizona Republican Party, is on the right. Note the Arizona GOP’s thundering denunciation of Ryan’s “bone-chilling” budget, which “cut vital assistance programs.” That’s all true, of course, and many Democrats held their noses and voted for the deal. But there’s no question that all the bone-chilling stuff came straight from the fever swamps of the Republican Party. They’re the ones who refused to extend unemployment benefits and demanded cuts in food assistance.

We’ve heard a lot this election cycle about Democrats running away from President Obama. Are we now going to see stories about Republicans running away from Paul Ryan and his fellow budget ideologues? Probably not. But we should.

Justin Wolfers shows us an intriguing example of confirmation bias today. It turns out that Leo, the New York Times election forecasting model, bases its forecasts on running hundreds of simulations and then taking an average. But readers who want to play around can go ahead and toss the dice themselves, generating their own random simulations. So what do readers do?

This is where confirmation bias comes in. If you’re convinced that the Republicans are going to win but your first two spins suggest a Democratic victory, you may feel deflated; perhaps you’ll spin again, in the hopes that you’ll finally get to see what a Republican victory looks like….85 percent of the time that your first two spins show a Democratic victory, you’ll keep spinning, perhaps hoping to see a Republican victory.

The same logic says that those who see the Democrats as likely to win are more likely to spin again after seeing the Republicans win in their first two spins, and once again, 85 percent of you do so.

Presumably readers are smart enough to know that these really are just random rolls of the dice that don’t mean anything. Only an average of hundreds of simulations is meaningful. And yet, many of us play the dice-rolling game anyway. Why?

Properly speaking, I’m not sure this is actually confirmation bias. I suspect that partisans just want to avoid a feeling of hopelessness. Sure, the official results will tell them that, say, Democrats have a 34 percent chance of holding the Senate, and that should be enough. But it’s not. Democratic partisans want to see the concrete possibility of a Democratic win. Rather than confirmation bias, this shows a human preference for examples vs. statistical forecasts.

Now, I’d expect that Democrats would do this more than Republicans. After all, if Leo says Republicans have a 66 percent chance of winning, that should make Republicans pretty happy. Why bother running even a single simulation that might spoil the good news? Unfortunately, Leo’s data doesn’t tell us if this happens, because it doesn’t know who’s a Democrat and who’s a Republican. But I’ll bet I’m right.

The PATRIOT Act gave federal agents expanded powers to issue search warrants without informing the targets of the warrant beforehand. Why? Because terrorism investigations were special: they’d fall apart if terrorists received warning that they were being investigated. So with terrorism suddenly a far bigger priority after 9/11, national security required that authority for these “sneak-and-peek” warrants be broadened.

A few days ago, the Electronic Frontier Foundation tallied up the known figures for sneak-and-peek warrants:

• 2001-03: 47
• 2010: 3,970
• 2011: 6,775
• 2012: 10,183
• 2013: 11,129

That’s quite an increase. So did terrorism investigations skyrocket over the past decade? Not so much. It turns out that hardly any of these warrants were used in terrorism cases. Instead, they were virtually all used in narcotics cases—as the chart on the right shows. Radley Balko draws the right lessons from this:

• Assume that any power you grant to the federal government to fight terrorism will inevitably be used in other contexts.
• Assume that the primary “other context” will be to fight the war on drugs.
• When critics point out the ways a new law might be abused, supporters of the law often accuse those critics of being cynical — they say we should have more faith in the judgment and propriety of public officials. Always assume that when a law grants new powers to the government, that law will be interpreted in the vaguest, most expansive, most pro-government manner imaginable. If that doesn’t happen, good. But why take the risk? Why leave open the possibility? Better to write laws narrowly, restrictively and with explicit safeguards against abuse.

There’s no reason laws like this can’t be drawn properly in the first place. Sure, some terrorism cases involve narcotics, but that’s a poor excuse. If terrorism is genuinely involved, law enforcement officers have plenty of opportunity to convince a judge of that. A properly-constructed statute won’t get in their way.

This goes for the NSA as well as the FBI, by the way. If they need broadened surveillance powers to fight terrorism—and perhaps they do—a narrowly-drawn statute won’t hurt them. If they object to this, every one of us should wonder why.

Earlier today I was idly flipping channels on the TV and came upon a CNN chyron informing me breathlessly that Chuck Hagel had just “blasted” President Obama’s Syria policy. Unfortunately, I came in at the end of the segment, so I didn’t get to find out just what kind of blasting Hagel had done. But it certainly sounded ominous.

I just now remembered this, and figured I should take a look at the news to see what had happened. But that wasn’t so easy. Every front page I checked had bupkis about Hagel. Finally I went to the source: CNN. Here’s what they say:

Earlier this month, while on an trip to Latin America to discuss climate change, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel sat down and wrote a highly private, and very blunt memo to National Security Advisor Susan Rice about U.S. policy toward Syria.

It was a detailed analysis, crafted directly by Hagel “expressing concern about overall Syria strategy,” a senior U.S. official tells CNN. The official directly familiar with the contents declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.

….The focus of the memo was “we need to have a sharper view of what to do about the Assad regime,” the official said. The official refused to provide additional details, but did not disagree with the notion that Hagel feels the U.S. is risking its gains in the war against ISIS if adjustments are not made.

That’s it? Hagel wrote an internal memo suggesting that we should have a “sharper view” of what to do about Assad? And some sympathetic White House official kinda sorta agreed that Hagel felt we might be in trouble if “adjustments” aren’t made?

I swear, watching cable news is like reading the National Enquirer these days: big, blasting headlines that turn out, when you read the story, to mean absolutely nothing. That’s ten minutes of my life that I’ll never get back. Thanks, CNN.

Today’s economic news is fairly good. GDP in the third quarter grew at a 3.5 percent annual rate, which means that the slowdown at the beginning of the year really does look like it was just a blip. Aside from that one quarter, economic growth has been pretty robust for over a year now.

At the same time, inflation continues to be very low, which you can take as either good news (if you’re an inflation hawk) or bad news (if you think the economy could use a couple of years of higher inflation).

We could still use some higher growth after five years of weakness, but at least we’re providing a bit of a counterbalance to Europe, which appears to be going off a cliff at the moment. Count your blessings.

Paul Waldman comments on Chris Christie’s latest outburst against a heckler:

My favorite part is how Christie keeps calling him “buddy” (reminded me of this). Now try to imagine what would happen if Barack Obama shouted “Sit down and shut up!” at a citizen. Or almost any other prominent politician, for that matter; commentators would immediately start questioning his mental health. But even though it’s been a while, shouting at people was how Chris Christie became a national figure talked about as a potential presidential candidate in the first place….If you standup at a town meeting and ask him an impertinent question about something like the state budget, he’ll shout you down (to the cheers of his supporters).

Here are a few ways to explain this pattern of behavior:

1. This is a calculated way of showing that he’s a Tough Guy, which Christie knows Republicans love
2. This is just who Christie is, and if nobody was around he’d still be picking fights with people
3. Both 1 and 2

I lean toward number 3. It isn’t just play-acting, because Christie obviously gets sincerely pissed off when he’s challenged by people he thinks are beneath him. At the same time, he’s a smart enough politician to know that the cameras are on, and there’s some benefit to reinforcing the persona he has created.

I admit that this is mostly just curiosity on my part, since Christie’s act long ago got nearly as stale as Sarah Palin’s. But take a look at the video. Unlike Waldman, I vote for No. 1. To me, Christie appears entirely under control. I don’t doubt that there’s some real annoyance there (even a Vulcan would get annoyed at your average heckler), but overall, Christie’s response gives the impression of being practically scripted. There are even a couple of instances where Christie seems like he forgot his lines and hurriedly tosses them in before heckler guy goes away and ruins his chance to get off his best zingers.

So vote in comments. Is it real anger, or has it just become a well-rehearsed schtick by now? In this case, at least, I vote for schtick.

Wonkblog regales us this morning with the chart on the right, which summarizes a recent Chapman University survey about what we’re afraid of. Basically, it suggests that Democrats are more afraid of things than Republicans. This goes against the conventional wisdom a bit, and it especially goes against the conventional wisdom in the “strangers” category. Supposedly, liberals are more open to strangers and outsiders than conservatives, but this survey suggests the opposite.

So that’s interesting. But what’s probably more interesting is the cause of all this fear. Here’s what the researchers say are the prime causes of fear:

• Low education
• Talk TV
• True Crime TV

These all make sense. People with low levels of education tend to be poor and to live in poor areas. I don’t know why they’re so afraid of clowns, but it makes perfect sense that they’d have relatively high levels of economic anxiety as well as fears for their personal safety. As for talk TV, that makes sense too. “It is a simple, straight-line effect,” the researchers says. “The more one watches talk TV, the more fearful one tends to be.”

So turn off the doofus TV, OK? And tell your friends and family to turn it off too. It’s making our lives worse.

And for the record, the rest of the survey suggests that Democrats tend to be afraid of crime, pollution, and man-made disasters. Republicans tend to be afraid of today’s youth, the government, and immigrants.

This is just raw data, and I suppose you can take it two ways, but here’s what a new Pew poll says about supposed Latino outrage over President Obama’s decision to delay executive action on immigration until after the election. Basically, the whole thing was overblown. It turns out that only about 9 percent of Latinos are angry about the delay. David Lauter summarizes the rest of the survey:

The Pew survey showed that Latino support for Democrats has receded on a couple of key measures, including party identification and a question about which party better represents their interests. But the decline was modest, noticeable mostly by contrast with very high levels of support achieved in 2012, when Obama won reelection.

….Asked which party “has more concern for Latinos,” half named the Democrats and 10% said Republicans, with just over one-third saying they saw no difference. On that question, too, the Democrats’ standing has dropped from a high point reached during Obama’s reelection, but only to the level that prevailed during most of his first term. The Republican standing has not changed significantly.

Roughly speaking, Latino support for Democrats has dropped a bit from the sky-high levels of the 2012 campaign, when Republicans featured a presidential candidate who pandered to his tea-party base by refusing to support immigration reform and chattering instead about “self-deportation.” But Latino support has only dropped to about the same levels it had before then. In other words, not much has changed.

Obama made a mistake when he hinted that he might take immigration action before the election. That was politically inept, and sure enough, it sparked a revolt among Democratic Senate candidates running in red states. When Obama was forced to backtrack, it was a temporary embarrassment—but that’s all it was. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that most Latinos understand politics just as well as everyone else, and don’t really hold Obama’s actions against him. They know perfectly well why Obama did what he did, and they know perfectly well that Obama will probably keep his promise after the election.