I’m sure by now most of you have seen this video of Mittens calling to abolish FEMA, but here it is again —

The plan is for the federal government to shift responsibility and cost for disaster relief to the states, who will then turn it over to the private sector. Has anyone worked out the business plan for making a profit at disaster relief?

This is not to say that private business can’t respond to disasters, when it wants to. After 9/11, power and phone service was restored quickly to the financial district without Rudy Giuliani even having to ask. You might remember there was less interest in rebuilding New Orleans after Katrina.

Not everything that’s worth doing will make money, especially short term. There are some things that are just cost. Recovery from disaster is a prime example. I suppose the hard-core libertarians will argue that if rebuilding thir or that can’t be done at a profit, then let’s not do it. This is an argument for letting the nation fall into rot, sooner or later.

Effective disaster relief, especially on a large multi-state scale, requires management by people with experience at disaster relief. It makes sense to have a federal agency dedicated to responding to disasters, because such an agency can be staffed by people who are experts at disaster relief and who can coordinate work and resources across state lines.

Ideally, such an agency would not be subject to political machinations. The biggest reason FEMA failed to respond to Katrina is that so many of the pros had quit during the Bush Administration and been replaced by political cronies, and the massive loss of institutional memory and experience rendered FEMA into a bumbling mess.

But that’s why states can’t be expected to do disaster relief on their own, because so many disasters are once-in-a-lifetime phenomena. A state that hasn’t had a really massive flood, fire or storm in the past 20 years can’t be expected to put together an effective disaster management team on the fly.

This seems to obvious to me that I have to wonder about the basic intelligence of anyone who would suggest turning disaster relief entirely over to states, never mind trusting the tender mercies of private business. Of course, today Romney is saying he wouldn’t abolish FEMA. He might as well be wearing a T-shirt that says “total bullshit.” He has no convictions; he just makes stuff up as he goes along.

See also Matt Yglesias.

No apparent storm damage here in lower Westchester County, just north of the Bronx. I have not lost power, and the only damage I can see from my windows is to the shrubbery. There’s no traffic on the Cross County Parkway, which makes me wonder if it has been closed. I am too far from either the Hudson River or Long Island Sound to know how much flooding damage there has been.

Update: Well, I spoke too soon — the heat and hot water are out. I hadn’t noticed there was no heat because the apartment is comfortable, but the no hot water thing is a more immediate concern. Well, could be worse.

They’re saying the storm is reaching land about now. So far I’m not seeing much. It’s damp out and very windy. However, moving to a beachfront apartment is losing its appeal.

Meanwhile, the name “Nate Silver” seems to be driving the Right into a hysterical rage. The most recent rant by Dylan Byers sneers that Silver is merely using arithmetic.

Silver’s no stranger to doubt and criticism. He even doubts his own model sometimes. But he dismisses this criticism.

“We can debate how much of a favorite Obama is; Romney, clearly, could still win. But this is not wizardry or rocket science,” Silver told POLITICO. “All you have to do is take an average, and count to 270. It’s a pretty simple set of facts. I’m sorry that Joe is math-challenged.”

Of course, it hardly matters what Brooks, Scarborough or any of Silver’s critics or supporters think. What matters for Silver is that the president wins and that he ends up with a total number of electoral votes somewhere in the ballpark of whatever Silver predicts on the afternoon of Nov. 6. And even then, you won’t know if he actually had a 50.1 percent chance or a 74.6 percent chance of getting there.

In other words, Byers cannot even imagine that somebody might draw conclusions from the data and not the other way around. See also Steve M.

Professor Krugman:

Like others doing similar exercises — Drew Linzer, Sam Wang, and Pollster — Nate’s model continued to show an Obama edge even after Denver, and has shown that edge widening over the past couple of weeks.

This could be wrong, obviously. And we’ll find out on Election Day. But the methodology has been very clear, and all the election modelers have been faithful to their models, letting the numbers fall where they may.

Yet the right — and we’re not talking about the fringe here, we’re talking about mainstream commentators and publications — has been screaming “bias”! They know, just know, that Nate must be cooking the books. How do they know this? Well, his results look good for Obama, so it must be a cheat. Never mind the fact that Nate tells us all exactly how he does it, and that he hasn’t changed the formula at all.

This is, of course, reminiscent of the attack on the Bureau of Labor Statistics — not to mention the attacks on climate science and much more. On the right, apparently, there is no such thing as an objective calculation. Everything must have a political motive.

They don’t know how to be objective. They don’t know what objectivity is. It is unthinkable to them that the truth isn’t exactly what they think it is.

For an antidote to the craziness, see Nate Silver: Artist of Uncertainty.

Update: See also “People Who Can’t Do Math Are So Mad At Nate Silver“

Update: Researchers have decided that the Mayan calendar doesn’t end this year after all, but has another 7,000 years to go. But does that mean that for the next 7,000 years earth will be populated with humans — or zombies?

Apparently having been dropped on his head from a large height sometime after 2007 or so, Matt Stoller is arguing that electing Mitt Romney would be good for progressivism. Apparently, the income inequality that has been building since the early 1970s is entirely by President Obama’s design — seriously — and there is no significant difference between Obama and Romney on women’s health issues such as abortion. Who knew?

Scott Lemieux argues that Stoller has turned into the new Camille Paglia, except “1)with fewer references to Madonna and uses of the word “Dionysian,” and 2)less coherent.” That’s good, but not on the mark, I think. I have always thought of Paglia as the Thomas Kinkade of philosophy, and I don’t think Stoller rises to that level. He’s possibly attempting to be the Glenn Beck of firebaggers, but he’s not flamboyant enough to pull that off.

Also, too:

Excerpt from the new book Assholes: A Theory

Frank Rich on how the Right will get worse after Obama wins.

More on Stoller — the Booman.

Dean Chambers, the rightie poll-denier genius behind unskewedpolls.com, explains the basic difference between the American Right and the American Left:

While many conservatives look to former Clinton political consultant Dick Morris to understand the polls and political surveys on the elections, or even a site like UnSkewedPolls.com, those on the left look to New York Times blogger Nate Silver.

Behold some of Morris’s predictions from 2010:

Morris talked about Christine O’Donnell having a 50-50 shot to win the Delaware U.S. Senate seat (she lost by 13 percent), how Republican Joe DioGuardi had a good shot against incumbent Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand in the New York U.S. Senate race (she won with 62 percent), and how Carl Palladino had a “superb chance” of upsetting Andrew Cuomo in the New York State gubernatorial race (he lost by 29 percent).

Steven Taylor:

The bottom line here is that Chambers is claiming that the “right” like to get their numbers and analysis from a blatant partisan commentator and/or from a source that re-calculates the polling results while the “left” likes to go to a fellow who analyzes copious amounts of data via sophisticated modeling. This strikes me as damning the “right” quite frankly. It certainly puts Chambers’ POV into perspective (not that this is a surprise).

In other words, Chambers lives deep in the weeds of rightie la-la-land and wouldn’t know reality if it smacked his face and introduced itself. Further, Chambers’s opinion piece is unconsciously and hysterically funny, especially if you are amused by psychosexual obsessions:

Nate Silver is a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice that sounds almost exactly like the “Mr. New Castrati” voice used by Rush Limbaugh on his program. In fact, Silver could easily be the poster child for the New Castrati in both image and sound.

See also Tbogg, “Unskewed Studmuffin Dean Chambers Does Not Care For Nate Silver’s Dickless Polling.”

And here’s the punch line: Yesterday even Chambers had Obama two points ahead of Romney. See “Now Even the “Unskewed” Polling Has Obama out in Front.”

Sam Wang on David Brooks —

It was fun to learn of David Brooks’s addiction to polling data. He spends countless hours on them, looking at aggregators, examining individual polls, and sniffing poll internals. From all of this, what has he learned?

1. Today, President Obama would be a bit more likely to win.
2. There seems to be a whiff of momentum toward Mitt Romney.

(Emphasis mine.)

I am having a sad. All of that effort, and his two conclusions still have two major errors. Evidently he does not read the Princeton Election Consortium. Let us dissect this.

First — in truth, says Professor Wang, President Obama is a lot more likely to win. He calculates the probability of an Obama electoral college win at about 90 percent.

Second — the Professor says the Romney surge ended about October 11 and began to reverse on October 16. Nate Silver is a bit more cautious about the probability of an Obama win (73 percent as of this morning), but he agrees Ro-mentum is over. Nate says Romney peaked on October 12 and has been losing ground since.

See also the RAND tracking poll and the most recent Pew state results.

I know the Irish famine was long ago and far away, but it’s still especially galling to me when someone with an Irish surname believes that the poor need the “incentive” of hunger and homelessness to make them go to work. But Paul Ryan’s “poverty” speech in Ohio yesterday amounted to that. He echoed what the English said when they continued to export food out of Ireland while a million Irish starved to death.

What, then, were the ideologies that held the British political élite and the middle classes in their grip, and largely determined the decisions not to adopt the possible relief measures outlined above? There were three in particular-the economic doctrines of laissez-faire, the Protestant evangelical belief in divine Providence, and the deep-dyed ethnic prejudice against the Catholic Irish to which historians have recently given the name of ‘moralism’.

Laissez-faire, the reigning economic orthodoxy of the day, held that there should be as little government interference with the economy as possible. Under this doctrine, stopping the export of Irish grain was an unacceptable policy alternative, and it was therefore firmly rejected in London, though there were some British relief officials in Ireland who gave contrary advice.

The influence of the doctrine of laissez-faire may also be seen in two other decisions. The first was the decision to terminate the soup-kitchen scheme in September 1847 after only six months of operation. The idea of feeding directly a large proportion of the Irish population violated all of the Whigs’ cherished notions of how government and society should function. The other decision was the refusal of the government to undertake any large scheme of assisted emigration. …

… There was a very widespread belief among members of the British upper and middle classes that the famine was a divine judgment-an act of Providence-against the kind of Irish agrarian regime that was believed to have given rise to the famine. The Irish system of agriculture was perceived in Britain to be riddled with inefficiency and abuse. According to British policy-makers at the time, the workings of divine Providence were disclosed in the unfettered operations of the market economy, and therefore it was positively evil to interfere with its proper functioning. …

… Finally, we come to ‘moralism’-the notion that the fundamental defects from which the Irish suffered were moral rather than financial. Educated Britons of this era saw serious defects in the Irish ‘national character’-disorder or violence, filth, laziness, and worst of all, a lack of self-reliance. This amounted to a kind of racial or cultural stereotyping. The Irish had to be taught to stand on their own feet and to unlearn their dependence on government.

Of course, the biggest reason so many Irish had been reduced to living on little else but potatoes — and on nothing when the potato crops failed — was that the upper classes had rigged the system to keep the Irish Catholic peasants from ever being upwardly mobile.

Back to Paul Ryan — Ed Kilgore wrote,

In other words, Medicaid and food stamps will be block-granted, which in the former case will (along with the repeal of ObamaCare) eliminate health insurance for 31 to 37 million poor people, and in the latter eliminate food assistance for a mere 10 million. And since Medicaid, food stamps and the earned-income-tax-credit (extremely unlikely to survive a Romney administration attack on “tax loopholes”) were key working-poor supports underlying welfare reform, it’s unlikely welfare reform will exactly thrive, either.

And so, the entire Romney/Ryan “poverty” strategy is basically to consign poor people to the bracing independence of relying on an unimaginable boom in jobs that will supposedly be produced by tax and spending cuts.

See also Eight Things To Know Before Paul Ryan’s Speech On Poverty.