No, That's Not the Right Answer

From the piece on Ezra Klein's Wonkblog about the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation's decision to cease giving money to Planned Parenthood:

Komen said it could not continue to fund Planned Parenthood because it has adopted new guidelines that bar it from funding organizations under congressional investigation.

This is a lie. It's not even a creative lie, although with today's media culture it might be good enough to just get parroted around the world. It's a lie because it presents the new anti-funding-organizations-under-congressional-investigation guideline as the cause. It's not the cause, it's the event. It's one of their own policies! Whose choice was it to impose this policy on the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation? It was their own damn choice! A choice made, moreover, at a time when it would have been obvious to all and sundry that the main upshot of that "guideline" would be defunding Planned Parenthood. They defunded Planned Parenthood because of these guidelines, but they adopted these guidelines because they wanted to defund Planned Parenthood. They have not given an answer to the question of why they wanted to do this, although it's not hard to guess given that the founder and CEO of the Foundation is a long-time Republican donor, about $100,000 to Republicans and right-wing causes since 1987 by my rough summation of the various donations, and apparently a known hard-core "pro-lifer." It's a solid guess that the reason they wanted to defund Planned Parenthood is that the person whose organization this is is enough of a rabid right-winger to just want to crush them for the sin of providing abortions. (With money other than that from Komen, I gather.) That's it. The guidelines are entirely a smokescreen.

Why Do We Like Manufacturing Jobs, Again?

Prompted by President Obama's emphasis on manufacturing in his State of the Union address, Matt Yglesias has been questioning the apparent embrace of manufacturing by left-wingers. If we want generous universal health care, a vastly improved educational system featuring early childhood education, smaller classes in elementary and high schools, and widespread higher education, a better physical infrastructure, and more sustainable/non-factory/organic/local agriculture, then we presumably want people to be working in those fields, none of which are manufacturing, and therefore we clearly don't really want the manufacturing sector to gobble up too many workers. Apparently various other internet liberals are taking some issue with his presentation of these issues; I have not honestly looked at their responses, because what I'm about to write does not really concern any of the specifics of this debate. Rather, it just strikes me that there's no good reason to like manufacturing jobs at all.

Why It's a Good Bet that Reality's Really Real

I just returned from the inaugural meeting of my Perception and the Mind class. Our professor spent a while discussing the concept of perception, including the more-or-less philosophical puzzle about how or whether we can know whether our perceptions tell us anything objective about the real world. Is there any way, she wondered, to be sure we're not in a Matrix-style virtual reality, where our brain is being fed information to simulate an apparent reality that doesn't exist? Well, no, we can't be certain. But I do think that we have good reasons for thinking that it's exceedingly likely reality is real, and not a virtual computer simulation*, for the very simple reason that making such a simulation would be extremely difficult.

The world around me is tremendously detailed. Just sitting on my bed in my dorm room, using only my (admittedly very strong) glasses as a sensory aide, there's already enough to take in. If I chose to acquire the right apparatus, I could see, in addition to everything that's apparent on inspection, the tiny molecular structures of everything around me, their electromagnetic images outside the narrow visual band, etc. The amount of sheer information about this world that appears to surround me is staggering, in other words. A simulated virtual reality would have to pour that information into me, and would have to generate it, all at once, all using the strength of some computing system. That's hard.

On the other hand, all that needs to happen for this information to be there, and for me to perceive it, on the hypothesis that it is the actual world is just for a world to exist, one that's got lots of detail to it, and for beings within it to develop the ability to detect information about that world. That's not very hard. Or, to be more precise, it is very hard, probably a great deal more unlikely from a properly a priori vantage-point than the task facing the designer of a virtual reality that I described above, but these things are also necessary for the virtual reality. This is something like Carl Sagan's observation that if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. In order to have a simulated virtual reality, there must be some real world in which that virtual reality is being simulated, and there must be beings within that world who can detect information about it, and therefore be tricked into thinking they've received information about a world that doesn't exist. All of the complexity, the difficulty, the improbability, and the weirdness of the sheer existence of reality and sentient beings within that reality necessary for me to sit here observing such a wonderfully detailed world are also necessary for that world to be a fake. It's just that, if it is a fake, there's a whole extra layer of complexity, difficulty, improbability, and weirdness, entirely added on top of the original layer.

This doesn't mean, of course, that I do have any way of knowing for sure that this dorm room around me isn't a fake. It just means that, if I don't have any direct evidence on the question one way or another, it's staggeringly unlikely to be a fake. It's a reasonable presumption for me to make, in other words, that reality is really real. I might be wrong, and it might even matter a great deal that I'm wrong (though it might not). But until some Morpheus comes along to give me a reason not to do so, I might as well bet on reality, the less-unlikely possibility.

You've Got It Backwards, Gov. Christie

Of the marriage-equality bill working its way through the New Jersey state legislature, my odious Governor Chris Christie, Republican, said the following:

"I don’t think there’s anything necessarily so special about this particular issue that it must be handled by a Legislature."

This was in the context of arguing for a referendum on gay marriage, rather than just passing the bill outright. But note that this is precisely backwards. Legislatures are not councils of experts upon whose intervention we depend when the issue is too complex or misunderstood or, you know, important to let the people decide it for themselves. Legislatures are the solution to the problems posed by the overwhelming desire of most people not to spend all their time thinking about public policy concerns. They pick a group of people whom they trust (in theory, at least) to study the issues and render informed decisions which reflect the interests of the people themselves, so that most of us can just lead our normal lives. Some people then think that on certain issues of particular importance or centrality, particularly though not exclusively things of constitutional stature, it's not enough just to let the delegated powers of the legislature decide, and that we should ask the people directly. Some people might think it a shame that we allow legislatures to decide these things in the first place, as Rousseau did. But there's no world in which the more important, or "special" in Christie's terminology, an issue is, the more we ought to have it decided by a legislature. The way it works is that issues to be decided by the people are more important than issues to be decided by the legislature, which are in turn more important than issues to be decided by unelected government officials and bureaucracies.

There are a lot of reasons not to like Governor Christie, and not to like this recent statement of his, of which this is a fairly minor one. Still, it reflects a profound lack of understanding of very basic political theory, and that just kind of pisses me off.

Get It Together, President Obama

No, that's not about the economy, jobs, the deficit, gay marriage, dealing with Congressional Republicans, or really anything else for that matter. It's about sloganeering, specifically the apparent frame for his upcoming State of the Union address: "an America built to last." This is, to my mind, another pathetic failure to use "A New Foundation" as the President's catch-phrase. As regular readers know, assuming there are any, I've been advocating for this as the President's catch-phrase for two years come tomorrow. Obama's "Win the Future" line was similarly trying to get at the same idea as "A New Foundation," but did so by sounding incredibly silly and being extremely easy to mock on Twitter. "Built to last" is a car commercial-level slogan. "A New Foundation" is the exact same slogan, except that it doesn't suck! It's the same image of a new, robust version of our country, except instead of sounding like a sleazy auto salesman it's cut from the very same cloth as such progressive agendas as the New Deal, Fair Deal, Square Deal, New Frontier, and Great Society. It's not even really a slogan: while it is a catch-phrase, it's more of a title than a description.

And yet, he continues not to see it. This is a sad day for American rhetorical framing devices.

Gingrich-Obama Debates: Bring 'Em On!

Apparently Republicans, in South Carolina at least, think Newt Gingrich would be a more formidable general-election candidate than Mitt Romney. Their justification for believing so, all objective polling evidence to the contrary, is their belief that Gingrich is such an amazing debater that he'll just destroy Obama in that forum. Partly this is also due to their belief that Obama is just a dimwit who's only ever gotten anywhere through affirmative action. Newt plays to this a whole frickin' lot, with his whole "I'll challenge Obama to a series of Lincoln-Douglas debates" schtick. But here's the thing: this whole idea is massively wrong. Newt can get massive applause lines playing to the insane Republican audience, but he's not actually that brilliant a debater. Obama, on the other hand, is extremely intelligent, and I imagine is currently barely containing his glee at the prospect of getting to debate Newt Gingrich. He'll run rings around him. Newt's just said so many things where the public, including non-crazy non-Republicans, is just so against him, that Obama will have an almost-too-damn-easy time pinning him to them in the fall.

But please, nobody tell the Republicans. Let them keep deluding themselves into thinking that Obama's a pathetic wimp, and that all he needs is a good standing-up-to from Newt to expose him for the fraud he is. Let them believe that just long enough to nominate him.

Giving Rick Santorum a Modicum of Credit Where It's Due

Today's Midday Open Thread on Daily Kos, one of their several daily round-ups of interesting news links, includes this piece about Rick Santorum's comments about how he would counsel against an abortion if one of his daughters were raped. Their headline: "Rick Santorum: a firm believer in a rapist's right to reproduce, even if he's the grandfather." Now, Rick Santorum and I agree on approximately zero political issues, at least within the frame of controversy in modern American politics (I'm pretty sure he's avowedly anti-slavery), but I have to admit that Daily Kos' spin on this statement is a little unfair. There is absolutely zero obligation on a rape victim to abort a pregnancy which results from that rape. People make too damn much of a deal about genetic heritage, in my opinion, and were I in the situation Santorum describes I think an important part of my counsel would be, look, half the DNA comes from a pretty despicable source, but that doesn't actually mean anything about the child.

Now, I'm pretty sure Rick Santorum also believes that abortion should be illegal, including in the case of rape. That's the problem here, not whether he would personally advise his own daughter not to have an abortion in that situation. Politics is about public policy, so let's criticize politicians who want to make bad public policy, not people who might choose as a private course of action something which might be required by bad public policy.

No, Infidelity Doesn't Mean Newt Would Be A Good President

Keith Ablow, a so-called psychiatrist who appears on Fox "News" saying silly things, is at it again. This time his claim is that Newt Gingrich's history of infidelity and wife-leaving ought to improve our estimate of how good a President he'd be. Essentially his argument is that hey, three whole women have been way attracted to this guy, so he must be pretty awesome. Now, let's set aside some of the basic logical problems here: I'm pretty sure a lot of people we just would not want as President have been pretty popular with the ladies. Ablow is using "number of wives" as a proxy for "number of women who've been deeply attracted." This is a mistake. I'd bet you anything that far more women have been attracted to Barack Obama throughout his life than were in Newt Gingrich's first fifty years of life, and probably in Gingrich's entire sixty-eight year life. The difference is, Obama decided he was interested in one of those women, and has stuck with that decision for the past nineteen years, while Newt's changed his mind twice (at the marriage level; who knows how many mistresses he's had). Why should deciding to take advantage of a higher proportion of the female opportunities offered him make us think Newt would be a good President?

(Not that it necessarily ought to make us think he'd be a bad President, although the specifics of the way he's left his wives does make it seem that he's kind of a jerk.)

On Newt's "Open Marriage" Request

Apparently the second Mrs. Gingrich (of three) gave an interview, to be aired later tonight as a palate-cleanser from the Republican debate (yes, another one), from which the so-called "bombshell" headline is that Newt asked her whether she'd be okay with an open marriage. This would be around the time when he was cheating on her with the third and current Mrs. Gingrich, an indiscretion he says he's sought forgiveness for from god, etc. etc. But I can't see why this would be that much of a bombshell: don't we already know he was, you know, cheating on her? That's old news, right, and fully priced into everyone's opinions of Newt already? Isn't it kind of de minimis at worst, and arguably not even a negative, if he also, you know, asked permission to cheat? I mean, for me anyway it's an emphatic positive (although the part where, on being told "no," he goes ahead and cheats anyway is not so hot): having clandestine affairs without telling your spouse/partner is a genuine wrong that you've done them, whereas asking if they're okay with your having an affair and then, with permission, having said affair is not a wrong at all. Perhaps it'll sound all San Francisco-y to South Carolina Republicans, but I still think that it's just not categorically different than the existing body of Gingrich sex scandalousness.

Maybe they'll prove me wrong, but I'd be a bit surprised.

Why Keystone XL's Blockage is Good

Matt Yglesias points out, regarding the Republican-grandstanding-inspired decision by the Obama State Department to deny a permit to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, that simply blocking infrastructure for the existing fossil fuel-based economic structure is not a very effective way to fight global climate change. He may very well be right about this, although as he admits that doesn't mean by itself that the pipeline should've been built, just that it's not a major win for environmentalists. But even granting that there's not a huge connection between blocking Keystone and blocking global warming, I'm exceedingly happy that the pipeline will be blocked, on environmental grounds. Global climate change is, quite importantly in my opinion, not a standard environmental issue. It concerns pollution truly global in origin (i.e., it doesn't matter where the pollution comes from), global in action, global in consequence, long-term. Most environmental issues are much more localized in both time and space. Keystone, in addition to whatever relationship it may have to the global greenhouse gas thing, would involve seriously contaminating one particular aquifer in the Nebraska region. A rather important aquifer, I hear. That's enough for me, as an environmentalist, to oppose the pipeline, and to celebrate the fact that the idiot Republicans maneuvered the Obama people into blocking it.

Super PACs Actually Are Worse Than Nothing

Super PACs, the major players in the post-Citizens United world of campaign finance, only have one rule of any significance: they cannot coordinate with a candidate's campaign. That's it, really: no limitations on contributions from humans or corporations, no disclosure requirements, etc. But as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are ably demonstrating, that rule is a sham. Colbert, the "candidate," and Stewart, the Super PAC manager, spent a few minutes the other day sitting on the set of The Daily Show exchanging plans for the Super PAC's activities, but with the extremely-thin-veneer of talking to the audience instead of each other. Then they demonstrated that Jon could tell Stephen his plans for future advertising and Stephen could speak the sentence "I cannot coordinate with you in any way" with either a giant grin on his face or a worried look, with Jon taking the obvious inference, while staying within the bounds of the law, and that, even if they were fined for any violations, they could pay those fines with Super PAC money. In other words, the non-coordinate rule scarcely has any bark, let alone bite. This means, as best I can tell, that Super PAC-world is just like totally-unregulated-campaign-finance world except that, instead of ads being run by campaigns in their own name, they get run by group with names of a comparable silliness to Stephen's "American for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow." In other words, compared to zero campaign finance restrictions whatsoever, Super PACs serve only to reduce transparency and accountability. Great.

The Insanity of an Economically-Determined Electoral World

In his morning "Wonkbook" post rounding up interesting political happenings from recent times today, Ezra Klein spends the first paragraph talking about Andrew Sullivan's recent article praising and defending the Obama Administration. Then he says this:

But Obama's reelection won't be decided in the pages of newsweeklies. It will be largely decided by the state of the economy. And the state of the economy will largely be decided by events in Europe. And Europe's not looking so good.

Now, I'm not here to quibble with the factual accuracy of that statement. If we interpret the word "largely" loosely, then it's basically true: Nate Silver's analysis at FiveThirtyEight suggests that macroeconomic performance may account for about half of the variance in Presidential election results, and Europe will certainly be quite important to American economic performance in 2012. No, my point is different. This idea, that Presidential elections are determined largely or almost entirely or, at the extreme, entirely by crude macroeconomic results, may be true, but if it is true it tells us some very bad things about our voters.

Ignoring Radicalism

At the main Times Square New Year's festivities this past year, the last few minutes before the stroke of midnight were spent having Cee Lo Green, a hip-hop-ish singer of some repute, singing the song "Imagine," by John Lennon. All very well and good, although it was a mediocre-at-best performance and felt kind of random. But in singing Imagine, Mr. Green changed the line "Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion, too" to "Nothing to kill or die for, and all religions true." Now, the new version is in the first place deeply offensive to anyone who even remotely shares the convictions on this issue of John Lennon; Imagine is one of the most famous anti-religious songs, and changing that particular lyric in that particular way feels simply violative. Moreover, the new line is gibberish, even from a pro-religion perspective: different religions make differing factual claims about the world, which cannot all be true.

I Just Don't Get It

A certain New Hampshire primary voter, on why she chose Gov. Jon Huntsman:

"He seems to be straightforward and he wants to rebuild the trust, and that's lacking all over," she said. She had briefly considered Rick Santorum because she liked his emphasis on family values, but decided that the trust issue was bigger.

"No one trusts Washington anymore," she said.

....
Seriously? Okay, before I launch into my tirade I should mention that there's a non-zero chance that this woman was talking in code about electability, that she was debating whether the "trust" message or the "family values" message would play better in the general election. But let's assume that this is not the case, and instead she was trying to decide which of these people she herself would most like to be President. If that's the question, then everything she just mentioned is meaningless. What on earth does "rebuild the trust" mean, as a campaign platform? Well, it kind of suggests something reform-y, but there are lots of reforms that various people have favored. And she doesn't exactly seem to be talking about reform. Rather, she just notices that no one trusts Washington anymore, and hears Huntsman echoing this concern, and therefore likes him. As for Santorum, well, we don't know from this article whether this woman is actually a rabid bigot like Santorum, but there's no reason to think so. More likely she just knows that she likes families, and Santorum talks a lot about how important families are.

Do I really need to explain in detail how irrelevant all of this stuff is to what actually happens once someone gets elected? The simple fact that this woman is on the fence between Rick Santorum and Jon Huntsman, for god's sake, is enough to make that perfectly clear. Santorum is probably the craziest, most viciously right-wing person in the Republican field, with a special emphasis on the bigotry and hate, whereas Huntsman, while conservative, is a more-or-less reasonable, sane type, with a particular lack of emphasis on social conservativism. Huntsman supports civil unions, for crying out loud, while Santorum thinks gay parents are worse than no parents! If people were thinking about actual substantive issue positions, the Santorum/Huntsman swing voter would not exist. This woman is casting her vote on an utterly meaningless basis.

The Sense in Which Republicans Do Favor Equality of Opportunity

Paul Krugman has a great column out today about how there's zero evidence that Mitt Romney actually does favor "equality of opportunity," and less than zero evidence that Congressional Republicans do. The main thrust of his case is that we have extravagantly unequal opportunity in this country, as seen in things like malnutrition among poor children (not to mention the hideously inegalitarian educational system). But there is a Republican response to make, along the lines of my post on this subject a little over a year ago. (Note that I don't think it's a good response, just a response.) The government programs Krugman is advocating, they might say, aren't about equality of opportunity, but rather about ensuring equal outcomes. WIC and other food-stamp programs aim at ensuring that poor people, equally with rich people, have enough to eat. That's an outcome, right? If we really want to focus exclusively on opportunity, then we should provide everyone with the opportunity to achieve the outcome "has enough to eat."

Now as I said, this is not a good response. The first enormous problem with it is that making sure everyone has enough to eat ought to have priority, purely on its own terms, over any kind of esoteric concern with "opportunity" versus "outcomes." Failing to accord it such demonstrates that right-wingers who would make the above statement are, to put it mildly, callous bastards. But as I mention in my previous post, there's another problem, at the esoteric philosophy level. Even if we concede that the right-wing vision provides "equality of opportunity" at the level of "do I have enough material goods to sustain myself?", it entirely annihilates anything resembling such equality when it comes to the higher reaches of human aspiration. No one will, for instance, become President if they have to spend their whole life working multiple minimum-wage jobs just to feed themselves and find shelter. If we actually cared about the democratic egalitarian notion that "anyone can grow up to be President," we should need to guarantee a sizable amount of outcome-equality at the "lower," more formative levels of life and society. Otherwise our society would become, in a sense, a series of competitions, arranged from "basic necessities" to "highest aspirations," where at every step along the way only the winners of one game would get to even play the next one. That might suit Mitt Romney just fine, since he's one of the people who has won at every stage of the game, but it doesn't really sound very much like equality of opportunity, in the truest sense, to me.

Rick Santorum, Theocrat

Okay, I know that the Republican Party is basically committed to a more-or-less theocratic ideology in many ways, but at least some of them have the sense to be subtle about it most of the time. Not Rick Santorum:

 “One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country. ... Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception is okay. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

Also he apparently said something about how great the Crusades were, and how American wars in the Middle East were a continuation of the great work of those Crusades, and "onward American soldiers." Seriously. The man's a theocrat, plain and simple. At least he's honest about it, if that's a good thing.

The Question is not, "Can they do moral philosophy?"

So apparently some woman in New York is trying to get punitive damages for pain suffered by her dog because of deficient care by the store that sold it to her. Basically the case rests upon convincing the Law to recognize the dog as a Being rather than as Property, although her lawyer has been throwing around the word "soul" in a way that does no one any good. Out of curiosity I checked out the Huffington Post comment thread, and while most of the commenters said things like, "well I'm sympathetic, but c'mon, you can't even prove that humans have souls," one person said something like, "well perhaps animals have souls, but they don't have rights. They have no ability to understand complex moral issues." He then went on to insult animal rights advocates, blah blah blah. Can I just say, this is entirely the wrong way to look at things? Yes, John Rawls' framework makes a lot of use of the fact that the citizens of his desired just society are rational, moral, autonomous beings, which is how he manages to exclude non-human animals. As a matter of political theory the fact that animals cannot communicate is deeply relevant, and probably does mean that we shouldn't even try to give animals political participation rights.

But the entire point of a so-called human right is that you have it not by virtue of any particular characteristic or, you know, virtue, like the ability to understand complex moral concepts, but because you are a human being and you exist. My right not to be murdered does not stem from my ability to participate in a long-term cooperative scheme among rational moral beings treated as free and equal citizens. Rather it stems from the fact that being murdered is pretty much the ultimate evil that can befall me (in both the etymological and modern sense of the word!), and so if we care about my welfare at all then we'll care pretty strongly that I not get murdered. We can see that this is what's going on because we don't withdraw basic rights against violence from people who demonstrate, say, an utter lack of ability to understand complex moral issues. There are many members of the species Homo sapiens who cannot understand such concepts; I think the commenter to whose "arguments" I am responding may be one of them. As Peter Singer has been known to point out, some human beings have neurological impairments that prevent such understanding. We don't say that these people are not beings, do not have rights. They retain a full complement of human rights, because they are still humans.

So what is it, exactly, about humans that makes us so damn special? It clearly is not our ability to do moral philosophy, although that's a useful skill. Perhaps there's some sort of religious philosophy that describes violence against human beings as a "sin," just because, and thereby dodges the question of why it's a bad thing. But I think in general our sense that violence against humans is wrong derives from our understanding that such violence inflicts tremendous suffering on the victim (among others), and that it is therefore almost always a bad thing. And we do tend to express the wicked nature of violence in rights terminology: I do have a right against your shooting me through the heart. I have this right simply because I am a human being who would suffer rather tremendously (infinitely, one might say) if you did so. It comes with a corresponding obligation on you not to shoot me through the heart, again just because it would cause lots of suffering. If you concede that non-human animals can suffer, can feel pain, can feel pleasure, can just plain feel, then what's left of the case against basic animal rights?

Ron Paul is not Progressive, not even about wars or drugs

Ron Paul is a nasty, old, bigoted, angry white man. This much, I think, the majority of left-wingers will readily grant, at this point in history anyway. Between the newsletters and the opposition to anything the federal government ever wants to do that's, you know, good, and the failing to be pro-choice and the monetary crankery and the opposition to anything resembling civil rights laws, it's a pretty clear picture. But some of them, even while admitting that in general he's not a very nice guy, will nonetheless insist on spending a fairly large amount of time and effort talking up his supposedly progressive views on foreign and drug policy. The basic argument is that we should like Ron Paul's foreign and drug policies because he is opposed to the Wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and on Drugs. He deserves some amount of credit, these people say, for having the right position on some issues, even if he's very very wrong on most issues.

And I suppose he does, in a way. After all, his fellow-competitors in the Republican primary are as wrong as he is on most issues, give or take, and much more wrong on these two. But I think it's worth emphasizing that Ron Paul does not have a progressive foreign policy. Nor is his anti-War on Drugs stance the result of some latent liberaltarianist streak. In both cases what we see is the result of his universal opposition to anything the federal government ever does. I've always thought he's not so much a libertarian as he is an antifederalist. As best I can tell, his own personal preferences for proper public policy would criminalize abortion (and embryonic stem cell research on embryos that would be discarded anyway), have government schools teaching children religious doctrines, and would subsidize private religious schools. He may or may not be in favor of criminalizing most common currently-illegal drugs and establishing a system of ID cards. His big point is that he doesn't want the federal government doing any of these things. He's basically an anti-federalist, plus some lack-of-understanding on economics and some bigotry.

Obama's Recess Appointment and Media Interpretation

Today, President Barack Obama decided to make a recess appointment of Richard Cordray to run the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Republicans have been blocking this nomination for months, not because they mind Cordray as CFPB chief but because they mind the CFPB itself. This would all be the normal course of things, were it not for the fact that the Senate is not technically in recess. They've remained in pro forma session, though of course all 100 Senators are out of town and no work is getting done. The Associated Press story covering the appointment described things thusly:

He [Obama] is essentially declaring the Senate's short off-and-on legislative sessions a sham intended to block his appointments.

See, this is just false. Obama is not declaring that; he's declaring that, because those "sessions" are, as everyone knows, a sham intended to block his appointments, they are invalid and the Senate counts as being in recess anyway. (Incidentally, I think that's a perfectly reasonable interpretation: if every Senator has gone home for an extended period of time, and no Senate work is being done, it counts as a constitutional recess no matter what they decide to call it.) It's just true, and to the best of my knowledge undisputed, that these "sessions" are a sham intended to deprive Obama of his constitutional recess-appointment power. Instead of saying so, though, the AP presents this factually true statement as something Obama is "claiming." As in, implicitly, "and Republicans claim this to be false, and we can't/won't tell you who's right." C'mon, people.