How can any educated person not think of Dred Scott and Plessy as Supreme Court decisions with which one disagrees? (I suppose it's possible that one doesn't think of them since neither has any precedent value now; and I suppose it's possible that one would implicitly think of only 20th century and beyond.)
Kelo is an obvious 21st century choice, plus I imagine most people disagree with either Bowers v. Hardwick or Lawrence v. Texas.
But... tell me how this is wrong:
A hedge-fund reader emails: "Reid, Schumer, and Pelosi are widely assumed to be stoking a financial Reichstag fire that would be a win-win for the permanent government. Conventional wisdom holds that economic chaos benefits the "out" presidential party, of course. Destruction of private wealth increases dependency on the central government. And a humbled private sector makes spinning the regulatory ratchet that much easier. Cynical, shameless, and in plain sight."
--Instapundit
A bunch of politicians want to implement a draconian/idiotic bailout -- that incidentally helps them quite a bit both in affixing blame to the other party AND in giving them a breathtaking amount of power come January 2009. Ostensibly they're "fixing" the economy, but nearly everything they say [by inciting panic*] or do [by intertwining Uncle Sam with the market] should identifiably have the opposite effect.
*- Charles Schumer only killed one bank. Did Harry Reid decide he had to up the ante and kill off an entire industry?
Look, I know full well that the dominant memes are that Republicans Are Evil, and in particular that it was somehow the GOP that caused people to sign up for mortgages that, if they had one lick of sense, they'd realize they couldn't afford unless the housing market kept going up forever.
But for all the economic wrongs the GOP supposedly committed over these past few years, none of them involved spending my money against my will, and certainly none of them rose to the level of wishcasting economic ruin for political gain.
(This still doesn't mean that an out-of-nowhere $700B taxpayer outlay with no oversight is anywhere near the right solution, but at least the problem is easier to understand.)
The State of California asks the Treasury Dept. for a loan, because the amount of credit they need just isn't available on the open market.
As mentioned in the parenthetical above, I'm still deeply skeptical that the best (or even most direct) solution to a liquidity crunch is for taxpayers to put up some arbitrary chosen value on hard-to-value assets.
This probably wouldn't look as good as it could have with any real effort, but anyway, Radley Balko has pointed out that every David Brooks column can be summarized by the sentence "What we need in this situation is authority."
Never mind. The point is to compare this to this.
A partial list of bail-out opponents:
Rush Limbaugh
Dennis Kucinich
Jeff Flake
International A.N.S.W.E.R.
Richard Mason (who was even more eloquent on Facebook than on Blogspot; he was vocal about this back when I just assumed it was bad-but-unstoppable)
A partial list of bail-out supporters:
George W. Bush
Warren Buffett (incidentally, DO NOT EVER TRUST THIS MAN except on his stock tips: every other time he opens his mouth it's ultimately to boost the values of his holdings, or worse yet to torpedo the value of things he wants to buy at distressed rate - that Warren Buffett is evil is one of the most under-reported stories in American finance)
Nancy Pelosi
Barney Frank
Megan McArdle
and David Brooks (as noted here). at least Megan knows what she's talking about - if you were still undecided then knowing where Brooks stands should help you rapidly choose the opposite position
Two political dynamics that I find similar:
1. September-October 2008: Congress needs to pass a bailout
2. Most of this decade: various European voters need to approve this EU treaty
Two long-term socioeconomic trends that also have instructive similarities:
1. About a generation ago it was decided that everyone should get a college education, and that government loans/grants would help foot the bill. Can you guess what effect both the increased demand and the subsidy had on tuition rates? Harvard's mammoth endowment rests (to a surprising extent) on the backs of taxpayers.
2. Somewhere around that time it was decided that everyone should own a home, and that government...
...anyway, one obvious difference between these two is that when a student loan borrower defaults, you can't repossess his education. The other is that the "tuition bubble" has yet to burst.
A social ritual that "everyone should go to college" or "everyone should own a home" has obvious effects on demand; that's fine, that's what markets are about. But when government subsidy gets involved, the unintended consequences spiral. Many people bought more home than they could afford, when a smaller house would have been much more prudent and still a comfortable living. I wonder how many of the people who go to small, uber-expensive (but not Ivy-caliber) liberal arts schools have really made the best decision.
Two factoids, of which the scarier sounding one is by far the less useful:
1. Worst one-day drop (by raw number) in stock market history.
2. 17th-worst percentage drop in stock market history.
Two factoids that are even less scary than the previous two:
1. +254 so far today
2. We're still in five digits, and have been since 2004
"[T]he fact that someone of Biden's experience and intellect can make as many gaffes as he has since joining the ticket shows how treacherous the presidential trail is."
--Kristen Powers (NY Post columnist), quoted by Mickey Kaus
Now if you'll excuse me, time to re-watch the SNL skit making fun of the Palin-Couric interview.
(And your money [since most of you are taxpayers from the U.S.], and your family, friends, neighbors...)
Bailout bill goes down (again), but yet another vote planned? Good luck...
"If you need proof that this is the most important election in a generation, get this: Jewish grandkids are flying to Florida to visit their grandparents -- without being guilted into it -- to talk their elders out of voting for John McCain."
--Joel Stein
It's a cute idea, but how does "grandkids are flying to Florida" demonstrate "most important election in a generation"?
Call me a math geek, but I do not think the word "proof" means what most op-ed writers think it means.
Dear Nancy Pelosi,
Is this bailout thing critical to our nation's financial security or not? If it were, then your only move would be to get it passed and stop trying to pad the vote with cross-party CYA. That you'd rather blow it up than pass it along party lines tells me one of two things: one is deeply unflattering to the bailout, the other is even more deeply unflattering to you.
Dear John Boehner (et al),
THANK YOU for standing up for fiscal sanity. The New York Times editorial board will of course judge you for "partisanship," even though the only two relevant questions are:
Does the country need a bank bailout?
Does the country need this bank bailout?
This is not McCain's finest hour, but if I had the time I'd barnstorm district by district to get more of you and less of Frank/Pelosi. (And yes, they showed me why my vote is best spent on McCain after all.)
Remainders:
A healthy bank's perspective on the rescue plan. (I wonder what this bank thinks.)
Only 48 hits, most of them from whacked-out message board threads. I wonder what the number will be in a week.
UPDATE: You'll no doubt read (here for example) about how Newt Gingrich did the same "at least 100 other-party votes" thing for NAFTA. But that was an unambiguously good thing (that was politically unpopular despite being unambiguously good), where we would either make the world a much better place soon or have to wait awhile for that to happen.
By contrast, I assume everyone agrees that this $700B bailout would be terrible, where the only question is (and only plausible reason for passing it) whether the entire system would collapse tomorrow without it. The only circumstances under which this bailout should come to pass are circumstances so dire that nobody should give a damn about party affiliation.
John McCain lost my support today*: This post explains it best, among other things that "McCain’s intervention makes passage of the [bailout] more likely"
My support isn't worth much, as a California voter who doesn't contribute time or money to political campaigns, but it's still a sad day for me.
*- That doesn't mean I'll vote for Obama, just that if the election were tomorrow I would decline to vote.
Ah, this gave me glee.
A partial list of former presidential candidates who will not win this November, despite having nontrivial chances a few months ago:
Hillary Clinton
John Edwards
Mike Huckabee
Mitt Romney
Rudy Giuliani
(Eh, as you know I wouldn't have minded Rudy so much. But your mileage may vary considerably.)
All five of the above would have certain weaknesses compared to either Obama or McCain. This isn't necessarily to say that McCain and Obama were the two best options (though I think they were), but at the very least you can focus on one or two of the five and think "there but for the grace..."
While we're here, I predict that you (any given reader) know at least one person who will insist that this point-counterpoint was the Funniest Thing Evar. You'll learn a lot about what makes someone tick, and how different people judge humor, when that happens.
"I must tell you, there are those in the public debate who have said that we must act now. The last time I heard that, I was on a used-car lot," said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Indiana. "The truth is, every time somebody tells you that you've got to do the deal right now, it usually means they're going to get the better part of the deal."
--quoted by Ilya Somin at Volokh Conspiracy
Well gosh, do you think there's any chance that this was partly a consequence of this?
(Of course, the picayune environmental requirements don't help - it's not that they're stricter than surrounding gas regulations so much as that they're incompatible. Heaven forbid different states' environmental lobbies get their act together and settle on one standard.)
A Crimson columnist wants Harvard to deny admission to private school students. (Via Joanne Jacobs.)
It's not entirely clear what Harvard would stand to gain from this. (...says the guy who wants Harvard to stop charging tuition -- but here at least my conceit is that Harvard would suddenly have the best students by a mile, rather than a barely perceptible edge over whichever school is second-best.)
This rather reminds me of Slashdotters who, just as Google was about to make its IPO, not only wanted Google to become non-profit but also assumed that Google itself would share that vision.
(And one point of preface: I'm willing to believe that we escaped unspeakable catastrophe, and that the Fed making credit available was a Good Thing. But that's a far cry from spending $700 billion outside the purview of Congress, or even outside judicial review. Getting to the point...)
1. More seriously: What can ordinary Americans do to stop the most egregiously illegal aspects of this bailout?
2. Less seriously: I can't wait to see the South Park episode based on this crisis. (Would you believe that I never did see Gnomes until about the night before last? Now that the entire series is free on-line, we're working our way through; just finished Season 2.)
What is your opinion of the electoral college?
To what extent does the fact that Al Gore won the 2000 popular vote affect your opinion of the outcome of the 2000 election?
More than one post at FiveThirtyEight.com indirectly suggests the possibility that John McCain might win the 2008 popular vote but lose the election.
Does that change your opinion any?
(Cards on the table: I'm outspokenly in favor of the electoral college, i.e. in favor of keeping the system we have now. This is true regardless of whose ox is gored. If McCain won the popular vote but lost the election, I think a lot of "Gore won the popular vote" people would be suspiciously silent. Their counter-argument would be, "well, we settled this in 2000," to which the counter-counter-argument would be "we settled this in 1787.")
The SEC foolishly banned short sales AND Cuban's getting crackpot e-mails after one of his players was caught on a YouTube video disparaging the Star Spangled Banner?
I would have hazarded an educated guess that had something to do with preemptive action; it's unclear how my answer would be graded on a 100-point scale.
To be fair, I'm not running for vice president.
On the third hand, how many times does the phrase "Bush Doctrine" actually come up in educated discourse (as opposed to other phrases that communicate more clearly the elements of the Bush Doctrine one is referring to)?
(I also could not name the current leader of Pakistan, despite almost writing basically that very question barely 12 hours ago.)
A Freakonomics guest poster draws a fantastic comparison.
I think water policy is the most underrated sociopolitical issue, and it's not even clear to me what the second-most would be. Unfortunately, the few people who tend to agree with me about prioritizing it are also often people whose solutions would be uniquely counterproductive.
The 21st century version of Norman Borlaug will be someone who comes up with some brilliant piece of hydro-technology.
Megan McArdle says everything better than I would have. "In Obama's defense, the public schools in Chicago are terrible. [...] What is intolerable to me is when parents who have exercised school choice for themselves then oppose it for everyone else."
"[Sarah Palin's] greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman."
--University of Chicago Divinity School professor Wendy Doniger, as published by the Washington Post.
"Community organizers are the heart beat of America, no matter what the Republicans think."
--annotation to a Daily Show link
Clarification: This was the comment a friend wrote to accompany that link. The same friend now has, as a status message, "Republicans must understand that Obama doesn't lean toward Marxism or Socialism. He leans toward common sense. Right now, common sense means activist government."
Things I love about this quote:
1. Not just a heartbeat, but the heartbeat.
2. Honestly, before Obama, I'd never heard "community organizer" used as a formal job title. I might have naively asked, "Is that like an event planner?"
3. The "no matter what the Republicans think" shows a guileless (or super-convenient) misunderstanding of the point that Rudy Giuliani et al were making. (To be sure, Rudy was cherry-picking just as conveniently when he focused so much on "community organizer" rather than "senator for 18 months" or even "constitutional law professor.") Community organizers are swell and all that, just not necessarily presidential without also accomplishing something else.
The former is of course the transcript of McCain's acceptance speech. With the caveat that Barack Obama's own acceptance speech galvanized me into seeing his presidency as a threat*, McCain's lost me somewhere around when he dedicated paragraphs to [person's name] of [place name].
*- Not the probability that Obama would win (Nate Silver says almost 70%, I say more like 75%) but rather the likely harm inflicted from his doing so, unless you assume that his worst ideas wouldn't actually pass Congress.
If you were wondering, I passed up BOTH the NFL opener AND the McCain acceptance speech to be productive at work, with a baseball doubleheader (and quite a dismal one at that!) as my accompaniment.
One of my friends posted a link to this Jezebel entry on Facebook, with the rather unsettling annotation that it was the best analysis he'd seen of Sarah Palin's speech.
The passage that particularly caught my eye:
"I want to point out to the Jezebel readership that on September 11, McCain and Obama are scheduled to appear at a forum on community service and volunteerism. Call their organizers. Let em know what McCain thinks about them" ("contact us" hyperlink removed from original)
There seems to be a lot of this tactic going around, in part by the Obama campaign itself.
Back in the 1990s, conservatives would light up Capitol Hill switchboards calling their Congresspeople about whatever issue outraged them, as encouraged by their favorite radio talk show hosts. (N.B. as I recall, Rush Limbaugh fervently denies ever giving out specific phone numbers to call; but Limbaugh's competitors apparently did/do this a lot.)
The tactic has spread, and certainly neither side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on it (Fark took one of the most egregious examples of this and turned it on its head (scroll to "Hallmark")), but I think there's a sharp partisan slant to one particular shade of it, namely lefties trying to intimidate forum sponsors away from righty guests/panelists.
The reduction to absurdity of all this is if you ever see private citizens harassed for their public endorsements: John Smith, an employee of Amalgamated Widgets, recently endorsed the Jones/Johnson ticket. Call Amalgamated Widgets and tell them what you think!
Given that we've already seen British newspapers direct letter-writing campaigns at specific voters, my worst-case scenario isn't completely implausible.
At first blush I find it deeply amusing that political party affiliation could be scandalous. But then I'm forced to admit, to myself and anyone else, that if there were rumors that a Democratic VP candidate had [literally] once been a [capital-C] Communist...
(On the third hand, the goal of the Alaska Independence party is considerably less evil than the goals of the Communist Party.)
There's been a lot of political content in Facebook status messages lately, at least among my "friends." In response to some of that, for much of last week my status message was a snarky point about experience for a president versus experience for a VP. "(can't have the n00b attending state funerals)" was part of it.
As Nate points out, though:
This picture embodies what is perhaps the essential difference between the qualifications for the presidency and the qualifications for the vice presidency. In a perfect world, we would all like a president who is Ready on Day One (TM); it is not uncommon for a newly-elected president to face a major crisis almost immediately upon taking office. But more commonly, a president takes the Oath of Office under relatively calm waters, allowing them something of a learning curve.
On the other hand, when a vice president takes over for a president, the nation is necessarily undergoing a crisis, because the death (or resignation) of a president is perhaps as traumatic an event as can reasonably be imagined (in the "best" case resulting from a slowly-developing illness, and the worst, an attack by terrorists or foreign adversaries).
(emphasis added)
So yeah, point taken, snark retracted. (I probably won't go so far as to post a contrite Facebook status message, since right now my status soliciting opinions about Obama's mandatory community service thing.
It says herethat Obama voted with Bush during the Bush era 40 percent of the time. (The study limited itself to votes which the Bush administration had taken a clear position on before the vote.)
Bonus tidbit: Obama’s party unity score during the Bush era was 96 percent (ninth highest among Democrats). McCain’s party unity score was 81 percent (the sixth lowest among Republicans).
"The Associated Press has a photo of protesters exercising their First Amendment right to smash the windows of police cars here."
--Orin Kerr (hyperlink in original)
At least that's what this article titles itself.
Nowhere is the Federal Marriage Amendment mentioned: Although the GOP platform supports it, McCain is well-known for opposing it. Assuming Palin also opposes it for all the obvious defer-to-the-states reasons, this would be a non-issue. (Though if she did support the FMA, then I couldn't blame anyone for casting a single-issue vote for Obama.)
One thing I've learned about choosing battles, that I wish I understood better ten years ago, is to understand what a given candidate plausibly can('t) accomplish. On abortion in particular, supposedly the issue with presidential candidates is what kind of Supreme Court judges* they'd appoint -- but is there some sort of Super Duper Pro-Lifer judge who'd invoke a special shortcut key to be able to cast three votes on one case? If not, then there's not any practical difference whether the VP opposes all abortions or just most of them.
*- And even at that, suppose the precedent set by Roe v. Wade were overturned (remember that there's a strong constitutional law case against it that has nothing to do with the constitutional thinker's own opinion of abortions). In the social climate of 2008 how many states do you think would sustain an abortion ban?
Getting out of the social-issue thicket, a great way for McCain to distinguish himself from Obama would be opposing the abuse of state power. His national service program in particular would require a whole lot of new bureaucratic positions to decide what does(n't) qualify as a valid community service, and to control the fate of tens of billions of dollars (not to mention tens of millions of Americans).
This set of anti-Palin talking points contrasts Palin with Obama on, among other things, educational background: University of Idaho vs. Harvard Law School.
I will readily agree that the latter is a better institution, and that other things being equal you'd expect a Harvard alumnus to do more impressive work. But the bigger you assume the difference is, the more of an elitism trap you're falling into. Don't turn college credentials into a pedigree.
Several pundits who wrote this weekend seemed to take a demonstrably false premise to an easily rebutted conclusion.
1. The faulty premise: Nobody had heard of Sarah Pain. On the contrary at least two of my GOP friends have extolled Palin's virtues for months -- one who'd supported Ron Paul in the primaries, the other a moderate whose favorite GOP presidential candidate I never knew.
2. The shaky conclusion: She owes her nomination to being female. On the contrary, ignore gender completely for a moment and ask yourself who McCain could pick to accomplish these goals:
A. Energize his base, and turn his lukewarm supporters (who might otherwise not bother to vote, much less campaign) into fervent supporters.
-yet-
B. Don't alienate moderates, nor alienate one faction over another.
This list demonstrably can't include any Bush administration figure (incidentally, would all the people ragging on Palin's foreign policy non-background be willing to claim that Condi Rice would be an obvious improvement? - I suspect they wouldn't), and McCain's primary opponents are also out: Huckabee because of his feud with Rush Limbaugh (all the more problematic given how McCain himself gets along with Limbaugh), and Romney/Giuliani/etc. because if they were really that well-liked they'd have won the nomination.
The rest of the realm of plausible candidates (basically sitting governors and ex-governors, unless I'm overlooking something -- is the world ready for a business leader to begin his political career that high up? there are military leaders, but as McCain's VP such a background would be uniquely redundant) includes a few who might be solid, but not much in the way of excitement. From what I can tell it'd basically be Palin or Jindal.
So if Palin were otherwise the best choice, imagine trying to make this case against her: "We can't pick her because everyone would think she was picked for being a woman." And she'd end up being denied the pick specifically because she was female -- which is exactly what we want to move beyond, right?
Have I expressed my opinion on this much, or more importantly my meta-opinion?
Evolution/creation isn't one of the ten most important issues IN EDUCATION, much less in the greater political sphere. More important education-political issues, off the top of my head and in no particular order:
1. 10-15% of public school teachers are so incompetent that they're literally ruining young lives, yet tenure prevents them from being fired.
2. By contrast about 20-25% of public school teachers are so amazing at what they do, and add so much value to society, that they deserve 3-4 times the compensation (salary or otherwise) that they actually get -- but as long as seniority is the only thing that matters, they'll never actually get what they're worth as teachers.
3. Regardless of the merits of any teaching subject matter (evolution, creation, sex-ed, phys-ed, fine arts, you name it), would it kill someone to give kids a proper math education? I'm not talking about just Why Johnny Can't Add, but why Johnny can't string two coherent thoughts together and use basic logic.
4. Writing skills are also generally abysmal, though this is a bit similar to #3 in that it involves linking coherent thoughts into sequence.
5. Testing in schools: Are the tests we give the right tests? If not, how could they be improved?
6. Charter schools: No matter where you stand here, this will make a greater magnitude of difference (one way or another) than how much ink Darwin gets in the classroom.
7. Classroom bullies: How do we handle kids who can't or won't behave, to the point that they impede others from learning?
8. Special Ed.
9. What's the most effective way to teach the scientific method in school? Yes, this is closely related to evolution/creation, but really this is the more important issue of which the Flying Spaghetti Monster kerfuffle is just a special case (if not a sideshow).
(A different special case of this general problem: What's the best way to teach Newtonian physics? We already know that it's "just a model," one that loses some accuracy under some well-known conditions, but one that continues to do a great job of reflecting reality as experienced on a human scale.)
10. What's the most appropriate length/shape of a school year.
(Honorable mention: Single-sex classrooms, home schooling, et al.)
Going into McCain's running mate pick, Sarah Palin was probably my second choice -- behind Bobby Jindal but comfortably ahead of any other candidate I could think of. (No idea who was third for me: Pawlenty? I know nothing about him other than that he governs Minnesota.)
I don't quite get the venom directed at her selection from otherwise calm, measured venues like The Volokh Conspiracy. I understand that there's now a shoes-on-opposite feet situation with regard to "experience," though I think it's much easier to defend a neophyte VP than a neophyte president: The former gets all sorts of experience while still being basically an understudy (and attending state funerals).
Anyway she's still a bit of an unknown quantity, sort of like how Barack Obama himself would have been circa October-November 2007. She's generally made great first impressions (also like Obama recently) and has a soaring popularity level. My general sense is that she's actually accomplished things (mainly anti-corruption); by contrast what would you say any of {McCain, Obama, Biden} have actually gotten done in the Senate? She has more executive branch experience than the other three combined, no? (I don't remember whether McCain was ever CEO of a particular company; from their biographies I'm pretty sure neither Obama nor Biden ever started or ran a business, unless I've forgotten something obvious.)
Getting to the point, though, this July 2007 Weekly Standard article by Fred Barnes was, I think, the first in-depth Sarah Palin profile by a national media outlet. It's generally sympathetic, given the point of his bothering to write about her then ("the one shining victory in which a Republican star was born"), and yet these were the things I learned about her in that piece:
Political analysts in Alaska refer to the "body count" of Palin's rivals. "The landscape is littered with the bodies of those who crossed Sarah,"
That's a bit fraught, though as long as she's never called herself a "f'g steamroller" I'll ignore my trepidation about whether people with that reputation can avoid spectacular career crashes of their own.
She fired the Alaska Board of Agriculture because it wanted to let the Creamery Board shut down. Think that through: She overhauled a state agency so that she could KEEP ALIVE an anti-free-market government program.
"Though Alaskans tend to be ferociously anti-tax, she persuaded Wasilla voters to increase the local sales tax to pay for an indoor arena and convention center." ...because what on Earth would Wasilla have done without a taxpayer-funded venue?!
Her campaign for governor was bumpy. She missed enough campaign appearances to be tagged "No Show Sarah" by her opponents. She was criticized for being vague on issues. But she sold voters on the one product that mattered: herself.
That passage ends with an oddly backhanded compliment, no?
Barnes also threw in a paragraph about Palin's religious faith, with this quote from her (that I find neither good nor bad): "I believe everything happens for a purpose. In my own personal life, if I dedicated back to my Creator what I'm trying to create for the good . . . everything will turn out fine."
Somewhere else I saw a thread about Palin's opinion of evolution and/or creationism as taught in schools. Just Google her name and the quote "Teach both." I have a fervent opinion -- about the legitimacy of that as a political issue, and the kind of people who have strong opinions either way about it. But that's for another post.
Strongly rumored to be K.B. Hutchison. My first choice has been Jindal for awhile, but by the time you see this it will probably be announced one way or another.
"But the record's clear: John McCain has voted with George Bush ninety percent of the time. Senator McCain likes to talk about judgment, but really, what does it say about your judgment when you think George Bush has been right more than ninety percent of the time?"
--Barack Obama's acceptance speech, as prepared
Granting that I'm an economic libertarian and a defense/foreign policy hawk, I say "90%" is a pretty darned good estimate of how frequently George W. Bush has been right. Certainly not much more than that (if any) but not much less either.
You may respectfully disagree, but to dismiss that estimate as "take a ten percent chance on change" is to be an idiot, a demagogue, or both.
More thoughts on [the prepared text of] Obama's speech after the fold; maybe he had a damn good delivery of it, but on paper, with all the hard-left economic rhetoric, he's not even trying to win over someone like me, and he's certainly not a centrist reformer.
"We measure progress in the 23 million new jobs that were created when Bill Clinton was President" -- and by golly, Obama will see to it that while he's in office the next version of the dot-com bubble happens.
"[B]usinesses should live up to their responsibilities to create American jobs, look out for American workers, and play by the rules of the road." Why did people give Obama so much undeserved crap for calling himself a citizen of the world, yet so little for pandering to native jingoism above economic sense?
"Our government should work for us, not against us. It should help us, not hurt us." True at face value, yet I'm absolutely reminded of Ronald Reagan's line about some of the most terrifying words in the English language, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
"That's the promise of America - [...] the fundamental belief that I am my brother's keeper; I am my sister's keeper." That's almost an Orwellian about-face, like claiming that the promise of the Soviet Union was the right to pursue individual happiness.
"And now is the time to keep the promise of equal pay for an equal day's work, because I want my daughters to have exactly the same opportunities as your sons." The sort of red tape required to enforce this as a rule of law is exactly the sort of thing no government has any business taking part in.
Orin Kerr inexplicably lauds this deranged rant. Where to begin?
"One of the most ludicrous aspects of American politics in the last generation is how Republican politicians in Washington—who live in perfect gilded opulence, and who devote their professional lives to servicing the rich—somehow became the party of the people. And Democrats, whose legislative agenda revolves around helping the middle-class, turned into effete elites." [whole lot of emphasis added]
Maybe someone who actually knows what he's talking about can correct me on this, but isn't the lavishness of Washington parties (the dinner kind, not the political kind) pretty non-partisan? Especially for somebody whose next paragraph refers, without any trace, to "the reality-based community," isn't the conceit that Democratic congressmen live an entirely different, relatively restrained, lifestyle just a bit naive?
For that matter, a really good way to miss the whole point of the exercise is to assume that money = status. In America, of all countries, I think we generally know better than that. I still remember when conservative radio hosts would gush over this book, and for good reason - the "millionaire next door" was a key part of their demographic!
A particular strain of liberal politician (this description may or may not fit Obama) wants to take my money away by force, all because he thinks he's better than I am at judging how to spend it. What could possibly be more elitist than that?
I found (via Marginal Revolution) this Ezra Klein post alleging that anti-Obama people are just experiencing "resentment of the meritocracy."
Coincidentally, I'd already become intensely aware of the envy going the other direction -- Joe Biden's Saturday speech brought this home.
As Ezra concludes:
"This election, in other words, is becoming a contest to decide which type of elite voters hate -- or fear, or mistrust -- more: A social elite or an economic elite?"
The salient difference here is that so much of the Obama appeal rests on the faux-messianic role he plays, while (as far as I can tell) nobody's going around claiming that McCain wealth is itself what makes him extra-qualified[1] to be president.
On the other hand, if somebody excels at leadership because the meme spreads that he's a good leader, maybe it's not a chicken-and-egg problem so much as a virtuous cycle. So hey, Obama: exceptionally gifted leader of the masses. Wonderful! Will he make the right decisions? That's another story, where a lot depends on the initial assumptions and ideological baselines you set for your own opinion of "the right decisions."
[1] But now that I mention it, Joe Biden's own absurdly low net worth (relative to how long he's had a senator's salary) suggests that, regardless of the political decisions he makes, he's really not very good at financial planning! So Biden's qualifications are a good test of how much relative weight you assign to seniority versus actual merit.
(Can you tell how distinctly unimpressed I am by him, totally aside from party affiliation or ideology? But conversely, some people I'm close to have a lot more trepidation about Obama as leader of the free world than I have. No matter what happens over the next few years I fervently believe that Obama was the best option of the three plausible Democratic candidates.)
FoodMaxx radio ads promise that their milk prices will always be the lowest that the State of California will allow. Rhetorical questions that immediately come to mind:
1. Why is it any of the State of California's business how much FoodMaxx charges for milk?
2. Even if it were the State of California's business, what's the point of a minimum price on a staple of life that, meanwhile, the government is giving people welfare to help them afford?
(You already know the answer to these, right? It involves an incredibly powerful lobby of dairy companies who pretend that they're doing anything other than naked rent-seeking.)
This is one reason why I'd much rather have a president who understands evil for what it is, rather than one whose knee-jerk reaction is to assume that everyone is culpable and that somehow the UN can work things out.
(Though I'll readily admit that the former requires common sense and rational calculation, not absurd snap judgments that result from supposedly looking into Putin's soul.)
'These disgruntled women—whether they plan to vote for John McCain, sit out the election, or simply gobble up airtime—are tacitly working toward electing McCain; a candidate who claimed last week at a presidential forum at Saddleback Church that life begins "at the moment of conception" and who voted against legislation ensuring equal pay for women.'
--Dahlia Lithwick
I've mentioned this hundreds of times, and will probably have to mention it hundreds of more times (at least as long as Lithwick, Anna Quindlen, and their ilk continue to write for a living), but:
1. One's opinion about socialist economic polices NEED NOT flow from some bizarre set of gender animus.
2. Ditto one's opinion about prenatal biology. Where you think life actually does begin is... not even a judgment call so much as a wild guess. Where you think it would be CONVENIENT TO STIPULATE that life began may have all sorts of gender-political undertones, but BOTH the death-of-a-person argument AND the bodily-autonomy argument address the world as it is rather than as we might wish it to be.
(Yes, Chad, this was good old XX blog.)
(Or maybe even David Brooks?)
"If [Thomas Frank] really believes, though, in constant sinister calculations by conservatives (who always get exactly the results they wanted in the political realm!), I have a great conspiracy theory for him: I think the Wall Street Journal hired him as the ongoing default left-wing columnist precisely to remind their right-leaning readers what complete idiots there are on the left. (Has it never crossed your mind that this might be why you were cast in the role, Mr. Frank?)"
--Todd Seavey, via the Reason Blog
Not sure if I've ever mentioned this here but the one time at a bookstore I picked up What's the Matter With Kansas and flipped it to a random page, Frank spent just a few too many words explaining how he'd never listen to G. Gordon Liddy on purpose but just happened to be a captive audience in a taxicab. The paragraph in question really didn't serve much purpose.
(This post might be penance for my making a big deal out of planning to ignore the Olympics, yet then watching them after all.)
This Fareed Zakaria piece ("What Bush Got Right" - I read the print edition at an opportune time yesterday) has its moments, but he lost me at Taiwan.
"On the most important issue to Beijing—that of Taiwan—Bush not only sided with the Chinese but has done so in a more direct manner than any previous president. He made clear to the then Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian that were Taiwan to make any moves toward independence, the island would lose the support of the United States."
"make any moves toward"?!?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but who takes care of the garbage in Taiwan? Who hires the police force? And what are those periodic elections all about? The Communist Party of the PRC can fantasize all it wants about fictitious territorial bounds, but for all practical purposes, the only effect the PRC has on life in Taiwan is all those cruise missiles it has aimed there.
(And as we all know, aiming cruise missiles at a piece of land is exactly the right way to indicate that there's still somehow national unity. Just like all those missiles we point at Hawaii, right?)
Presidential TV ads. Are these REALLY catering to what The American People (think they) want?!
Based on what they chose to emphasize in the ads they bought during Olympic coverage, one major-party candidate intends to "create 5 million jobs" by pursuing alternate energy sources, while the other intends to "stand up to Big Tobacco and Big Oil."
Yeah, that's exactly what a president should do: "Create" jobs by force of will (hell, if that were the goal in and of itself, we could hire 10 million people to dig holes, and 10 million more to replace the dirt, and just print an arbitrary amount of currency to pay them all -- what could possibly go wrong?), or better yet pointedly stoke an adversarial relationship with whichever industry happens to be least popular at the time.
(The part about pursuing alternate energy sources is plausibly laudable, but on the other hand is this really something that requires top-of-the-agenda presidential leadership? Are we really to believe that alternate energy has to be a U.S. government thing because somehow nobody else would ever be interested in it?)
The last time I checked our constitution (no, I've never been one of those guys who carried a pocket-sized constitution everywhere, though such people are underrated), the president is in no particular order:
*- Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. armed forces
*- someone who signs some bills into law and vetoes others
...and less officially someone who gives stirring orations. (On that note I actually quite liked Obama's recent Bill Cosby routine.)
Another outrageous story about what a man can('t) do in his own home.
To be sure this isn't even 100th as outrageous as SWAT teams raiding innocent people's houses and killing their dogs, but it's outrageous for about the same reason.
As Radley Balko points out, "the National Campaign to Stop Red Light Running is funded by three private companies: Affiliated Computer Systems, Gatso USA, and Redflex, Inc. All three are in the automated traffic enforcement business, and all three stand to make millions should the campaign prove successful."
1. He isn't John Edwards (I presume a link isn't even necessary)
2. His campaign isn't the Clinton campaign
The most interesting paragraph in that Atlantic piece (so far):
In the days leading up to Ohio and Texas, the campaign kept arguing over whether to air the [3 a.m.] ad. With the deadline looming, Bill Clinton, speaking from a cell phone as his plane sat on a runway, led a conference call on Thursday, February 28, in which he had both sides present their case. As his plane was about to lift off, it was Bill Clinton—not Hillary—who issued the decisive order: "Let's go with it."
While we're here, I haven't been following commentary-about-political ads very closely (mainly because I don't watch much TV thus don't actually see most of the ads first-hand), but am I really to believe that any ad run by John McCain is presumed to have racial overtones on the grounds that the ad depicts white women? Explain in 25 words or less how this is anything other than crazy.
Matt Welch has found some genuine stupidity among a variety of pundits.
The worst of the clunkers aside, I must say McCain's first response was significantly more appropriate than Obama's.
"For three years, students at a rural North Carolina high school have planned for college, encouraged by the promise of scholarships for all. But John Edwards has withdrawn financial support for College for Everyone. [...]
Supporters say it was always meant to be a three-year pilot, an odd time frame for a program aimed at high school students. The kids who started ninth grade taking college-prep courses to earn the scholarship will discover that they’re on their own financially.
If Edwards had won the Democratic nomination, he'd still be talking about College for Everyone - and funding it. But now his backers are spending more than half the cost of a year’s scholarships for every Greene County grad to support Edwards' mistress and baby in a $3 million mansion."
--Joanne Jacobs
"The real issue, it seems to me, is a nation-state taking the official position that a 7-year-old girl is too ugly to represent it, and making no bones about that position. That's pretty disturbing. But it's not among the most disturbing positions staked out by that particular nation-state."
--King Kaufman
"I think every single candidate for president, Republican and Democratic have lives, personal lives, that indicate something about what kind of human being they are. And I think it is a fair evaluation for America to engage in to look at what kind of human beings each of us are, and what kind of president we'd make."
--John Edwards on 60 Minutes, March 2007 (via Mickey Kaus)
...not that I will (at least it's exceedingly unlikely), but if I did...
The root cause would probably be quotes like this.
I don't think (para)military tactics are the right way to fight crime.
Rigorous censorship of the John Edwards page. But take that link with a grain of salt -- Gawker Media is notoriously right-wing.
Ted Stevens (Alaska) is now both.
My favorite part of this leaked memo (wherein a LA Times editor prohibits bloggers from covering a well-known politician's philandering) is the closing.
As presented by Mickey Kaus...
From: "Pierce, Tony"
Date: July 24, 2008 10:54:41 AM PDT
To: [XXX]
Subject: john edwards
Hey bloggers,
There has been a little buzz surrounding John Edwards and his alleged affair. Because the only source has been the National Enquirer we have decided not to cover the rumors or salacious speculations. So I am asking you all not to blog about this topic until further notified.
If you have any questions or are ever in need of story ideas that would best fit your blog, please don't hesitate to ask
Keep rockin,
Tony
(mostly political)
The Obama Internet fund-raising forward seems to be a complete fabrication. While we're here, does this really even count as a gaffe? If the next president serves two full terms then he'll leave office late January 2009, or eight years, six months from now. Since 8.5 > 8, "eight to ten" is a perfectly reasonable shorthand for "eight-and-a-half." Don't stoop to this kind of fluff when there's much more compelling anti-Obama case to be made on substance.
On the other hand the Irena Sendler story is true. Even at that it's not Al Gore's fault that the Nobel committee chose him over a worthier nominee; it's the same group that chose Rigoberta Menchu (now known to have faked her autobiography), Mikhail Gorbachev, Le Duc Tho, Jimmy Carter, and of course Yasser Arafat.
Speaking of Gore he recently suggested a very bad idea.
The best rebuttal to this post about Tony Snow and 401K plans would seem to involve some logic similar to that of Pascal's Wager. If you save a lot and die early, what's it to you? You're dead either way. But if you under-save and life long, oy.
Maybe as a non-Catholic I don't have the privilege to enjoy this as much as others would, but the Onion man-on-the-street responses to pope decries materialism are fantastic!
Tax rate factoids: As of 2005 the richest 1% of Americans had 21% of the income and 39% of the tax burden; the richest 5% of Americans had 36% of the income and 60% of the tax burden.
I've been thinking about my biggest reasons (in pecking order) to vote for McCain rather than Obama, and in particular the thought experiment of which candidate to support if everything else were equal but they had each other's positions on Iraq. (Given their biographies and primary campaigns maybe there's no way for that even to make sense.) I think we're at the point where their domestic views (mainly taxes and health care) would matter more to me.
And finally... it did my heart good that the comments to this drunk driving simulator story included the obvious WKRP reference so quickly.
The first I heard of this NY Times kerfuffle was from the linked-to Volokh Conspiracy post (by Jim Lindgren) that I just read a few seconds ago.
The Times does a lot of things that reflect bias (I've mentioned before my amusement at some of their framing choices, as for example when Republicans "attack" but Democrats merely "criticize") but in this case I see nothing wrong with putting both candidates on an even footing (aside from the unavoidable "one or the other had to be published first").
Letting both candidates set their views out is quite different from putting one on the spot and then giving the other a "rebuttal" as such.
I Don't Have Time For Noncontroversial Art Exhibits (The Onion)
An artist's video game that is being exhibited at a free-speech exhibit in Chicago challenges players to kill the president. The video game is part of a "confrontational art" exhibit by Chicago-based artist Wafaa Bilal.
--Instapundit
This isn't actually the next New Yorker cover, just a creative rebuttal. I'm quite skeptical that this would actually offend anyone, notwithstanding the spectacular degree of missing the point on the part of commenters here.
Has everyone gone shat-bit crazy?
(Oddly I first heard of the controversy myself from the Glenn Reynolds bon mot: SO IT JUST STRUCK ME AS FUNNY that supporters of Barack "I'm really not a Muslim" Obama are now getting upset about a cartoon.)
Don't even attempt to feed me the "but the public will actually take it seriously!" line. The readers of this blog are better than that (I'd like to think); certainly less patronizing.
Ta-Nehisi Coates says to "Expect that image to be on tee-shirts within two weeks" -- I agree, but because I think it will be pro-Obama people who (rightfully) recapture that image and the satire behind it.
(Of course that phrase comes from this headline.)
MBTA general manager Dan Grabauskas is spending tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars urging suburban commuters to “Dump the Pump,” brave the heat and take the T, yet the transit boss continues to drive to work from Ipswich to Boston in the cool comfort of his T-owned SUV. . . .
As for driving to Lowell to promote his Dump the Pump campaign, Grabauskas said taking the commuter train there and back to Ipswich would have taken too long. The message of Dump the Pump, he added, is to encourage people with less demanding schedules to take the T.
--Boston Herald via Instapundit
Ironically, it's illegal to be an unlicensed tour guide in Philadelphia.
Wal-Mart employees overreact(?) to nude photos. Left out of the story, though it makes a huge difference to how one should react, is the age (and how old the looked) of the subjects of the nude photos - also the context. Four-year-old in the bathtub? 21-year-old (who looked 16) sprawling on a bed?
Drug war hype leads to a lot of unreasonable math. Unless you realize believe 104 pounds of marijuana could have a seven-digit street value.
(Which isn't quite the same as speaking ill.)
I agree with Jim Lindgren here, and am saddened that so many right-wing groups disagree.
Virulent anti-Communism (and courageous acts in that vein, like the Solzhenitsyn visit cited here) almost makes up for the virulent bigotry -- but there's too much ugliness to overcome.
...all from Megan McArdle.
(Several weeks ago Anna Quindlen wrote a Newsweek column that incensed me, basically asserting that any pro-female candidate would by definition have to support a bunch of hard-left economic politics that happened to pander to women as an interest group. I meant to kvetch about this here but never did. McArdle's context seems to be completely different but the basic points are the same.)
I differ from the feminist mainstream on many of the questions of how we should change [societal limits to and double standards against women]. I don't think that subsidized childcare should be a civil right, I think comparable worth is a very bad idea, and I don't view abortion rights as fundamentally a question of female equality, but rather as an incredibly complicated attempt to trade off two important and incommensurable values that has no overwhelmingly obvious answer. [...] But the basic thing, to me, is that I endorse the project of changing social values to increase the scope of human possibility.
But for many feminists, that's too basic. For many, to be a feminist, you have to want to make radical state-sponsored change to the economic system in order to promote equality. You have to grant rape accusers extraordinary presumption of truth-telling. You must endorse a hard line on abortion rights. If you do not agree with these propositions, you are a non-feminist, or an anti-feminist.
Then later in her blog, in a post that begins with a book about slavery and goes on to address many topics, a concept I wish some of my college peers had understood better (I didn't need them to agree with me, but I had hoped at least they'd realize that I wasn't a priori crazy or evil):
Most traditional feminists would say that being pro-life is an automatic disqualifier for calling yourself a feminist. I find this argument dramatically uncompelling. Fetal personhood is a quasi-empirical value judgement that should not be made for instrumental reasons--we can't decide [for example] that six year old children aren't persons simply because this would possibly make it easier to advance female equality.
What Fogel brings to mind is that the argument about the personhood of slaves was a similar sort of instrumental argument. Recognizing their personhood would in fact have destroyed a highly functioning economic system; therefore, many people advanced the argument that slaves couldn't be persons. This is rubbish.
To be sure, it's obvious to me that slaves are persons, while I find the personhood of fetuses deeply problematic. But I don't think it's facially ludicrous to declare that they are persons. To me that means that "Feminists for Life" cannot, as I've heard declared, be an oxymoron; it seems perfectly possible to embrace all the other tenets of whatever you want to define as feminism, and also regretfully believe that since fetuses are persons, we cannot embrace this particular means of women's liberation.
He's one step removed from that.
(Guaranteed accurate until the next time I change my mind, or election day itself, whichever comes first.)
Start with the Real Clear Politics map found here. Flip Virginia, Indiana, and New Hampshire over to McCain (right now Obama's poll numbers will be inflated because the Democratic primary has gotten more attention, though that effect should gradually recede) - election still goes to Obama.
And yes, I read fivethirtyeight.com when I think of it.
Two quote-of-the-year nominees to follow, brutally sarcastic, and consistent with my most fervent political beliefs.
It's also critical that you avoid the fatal mistake of getting creative and comparing people you don’t like to other evil dictators, such as Joseph Stalin or Fidel Castro. With few exceptions, white people are actually fond of almost any dictator not named Hitler, and your remark that "this is just like something Mao Zedong would do" will be met with blank stares and possible social alienation. This is because, with the exception of Hitler, oppressive dictators share a passion for many of the things white people love- such as universal health care, conspiracy theories, caring about poor people while being filthy rich, and cool hats. Stick to the script and compare things you don’t like to Hitler, and Hitler alone.
--a Stuff White People Like contest winner puts Godwin's Law to good use
Seriously, did we kick communism to the curb only to suddenly discover, centuries after the French, that a free market will attract (and benefit from!) suspiciously smart people in pinstriped suits who are using their money to − wait for it − make more money? "Speculators" provide crucial liquidity (which is marketese for "money with which to buy the stuff you want to sell"), and perform a valuable function in helping locate assets that are under- or over-valued. Even those nassty speculatorsses at the end of the real estate boom (the evil "flippers" mom told you about) did some good stuff: They allowed people to sell their houses at a tidy profit, and fixed up old properties in preparation for resales that maybe never came. Many gambled and won (as did the people who sold to them), many others gambled and lost (freeing up "winners" who will buy those properties at firesale prices). That's all kind of the point.
--Matt Welch, over at Reason
1. When Reining In an Imperial President Was the Conservatives' Cause
--headline on a sidebar article accompanying "The Executive Power Awaiting the Next President."
They could have just as easily titled that article When the Imperial Presidency Was the Liberals' Cause. (Along those lines, it's always amusing to count, in NYT headlines, how frequently Republicans "attack" while Democrats merely "criticize.")
2. "Since both [a story about Syria's nuclear program and a human interest story about a wedding] are given equal weight, it can be hard to separate out the pain of one family from the strategic needs of the state. This makes it challenging for Israelis to step back far enough to gain a view of what is happening."
Do I misunderstand that passage or did the author just insult (by patronizing) an entire nation, (most of whom I suspect are at least as good at geopolitical analysis as the author himself), based entirely on overgeneralizing from 20 minutes of radio listening?
BONUS IRE: An editorial cartoon on page 2 makes fun of George Bush's hypothetical reaction to learning that off-shore drilling would take over a decade. Guess what, folks? If we had our act together a decade ago, guess what we'd have now?
I think we should all bow to the superior intellect of the cartoonist and then sit on our butts and wait for some other solution. Then, gosh, do you think we'll still have an energy crisis ten years from now? Do you think, maybe just maybe, we'll wish then that we'd made it legal to started drilling now?
DOUBLE-BONUS IRE: Thomas Friedman insults me personally (and humanity in general) when he compares energy consumption to drug addiction. Would it not be just as apt to call ourselves "addicted to" economic progress and affluence?
Meanwhile, the "Battleground" (back page) columns aren't insufferable so much as inane.
Thank goodness (in both directions!):
“We spent 18 months and millions of dollars making 'Hillary The Movie,'" laments David Bossie, head of Citizens United and a longtime Clinton tormentor. “We’re incredibly proud, but the problem is the film has no relevance anymore.”
--Reason
Americans drove 4.5 billion fewer miles in April. How ’bout that. Economics works! If you really want to change habits, let the market-driven rise in the cost of gas force people to drive less, and force energy companies to come up with new and more efficient ways of getting us around. Of course, politicians don’t trust markets. So they’ll find ways to artificially lower gas prices while simultaneously bemoaning “our dependence on oil.”
--Radley Balko, who also points out this Penny Arcade post about snacks designed to look like Legos (a lawsuit waiting to happen!)
Law School to Organize Bush War Crimes Trial
(Legal Blog Watch by way of Orin Kerr at Volokh Conspiracy)
Of the "Top Editorials" on the left nav bar, my favorite title is "Will President Obama be impeachable for allowing Bush's impeachable high crimes to continue past January 20?"
The wrong focus and the right focus -- in the same Sunday NY Times review section!
So you know those women's advocacy groups that kill who-knows-how-many trees to send those alarmist "send us money" letters? Just think what they could accomplish if they spent nearly as much effort on the plight of women around the world as they do on demonizing Republican straw men. But I guess if you really want to rake the money in you have to redefine women's issues as simply issues that affect American women.
Why did I even bother reading this piece?
"[W]ith each passing year, more Americans view something that used to be an entitlement—paid time off—as an increasingly unaffordable or unavailable luxury."
I remember when I used to accrue vacation hours. Then they stopped doing that -- those meanies! No, wait [checks pay stub], the hours still accrue.
"Many Americans are struggling to cope with job creep—the phenomenon of work quietly grabbing more and more of our leisure time. We are forever receiving co-worker or client messages on our BlackBerrys, or responding to work e-mails on our home computers on weekends, or lugging our laptops on vacation."
...because if we don't, we'll be fired?
"In the pre-air-conditioning era, many factories closed down in August. No longer."
See now, August is slave labor month at aforementioned factories. And even worse, the assembly line workers themselves have to receive co-worker and client messages on THEIR BlackBerrys!
"A common complaint is that it's not worth going on vacation for more than two or three days because, with work piling up and hundreds of e-mails waiting to be opened, it is so maddeningly difficult to catch up after returning."
An almost as common complaint is that people have become pathologically incapable of delegating, or of covering for each other.
"[T]he proportion of Americans who said they would take a vacation over the next six months has fallen to a 30-year low of just 39 percent."
Just two out of five?! [a single tear falls down my eye]
"Jeffrey Immelt, GE's chief executive, has boasted of working 100 hours a week for more than two decades. That translates to working six days a week from 7 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. One software engineer I wrote about at Electronic Arts, a video game company, had to work 179 out of 180 days during one stretch in 2004, usually for 13 hours a day."
They're quite typical, you see.
"Many economists view job creep and disappearing downtime as important contributors to the surge in employee productivity in recent years—a blessing for corporate America and its bottom line. But workers are paying for this, in the currency of higher blood pressure and stress levels."
Ah, "corporate America," that faceless monolith of evil. Why, I ran into Corporate America on the street the other day. He (it?) cackled with glee at my misfortune, and at the sheer injustice of all the things in life that benefit Corporate America and only Corporate America.
By which I really mean mutual funds, index funds, pension funds, and individual shareholders. But I'm sure some of them are no less evil.
"In researching my book, I was surprised to learn that the United States is the only industrial nation that doesn't guarantee its workers any paid vacation at all."
This is the line that inspired the title of the post -- assuming you take it at face value rather than as a slimy rhetorical trope. You're writing a BOOK ABOUT ECONOMIC TRENDS and you're SURPRISED to learn that America's work place laws are significantly less paternal than the rest of the world? Feh.
Oh, while we're here, a lefty(?) blog rant excerpt quoted without comment:
Envy is simply not good economics. It has never led anywhere except to trouble.
I'll start things off: How about the French Revolution?
Back to Mr. Greenhouse... or not. Lines like "The presidential candidates may not be able to [...] halt globalization and the way it erodes job security for factory workers and white-collar workers alike" should be in pull-quotes so that you get a distant early warning of where these people are coming from and how clearly they're capable of thinking, much less writing.
this morning anchor Dimitri Sotis was interviewing Sen. Byron Dorgan, who’s been demagoguing the gas price issue. I don’t know if he’s pissed because he filled up on the way into work this morning, but Sotis stepped completely out of character to fawn over Dorgan’s efforts to “do something” about high gas prices. “The government is supposed to help people,” Sotis pled. “Why isn’t anyone doing anything?”
After the interview, Sotis said with exasperation of Dorgan, “Well at least he’s trying. It’s about time someone tried to do something.”
Sotis and his co-anchor then reported four straight stories of government failure, including the failure of U.S. diplomats in Pakistan to properly gage that country’s terror threat, outdated and useless computer software at the FBI, delays and cancellations in Maryland’s mass transit program that forced the state to apologize to commuters, and a story about how the Virginia Lottery has been misrepresenting its payoffs to customers.
Blows my mind how media people report on government failure after government failure after government failure, then still enthusiastically embrace the idea that the solution to every problem is more government.
--Radley Balko
While we're here: I listen to about five minutes of Rush Limbaugh every month or two. This time he was being sarcastic about Barack Obama's "clinched the nomination" speech and its references to the point at which America started to ensure jobs, health care, etc. Limbaugh claimed that LBJ must be rolling in his grave.
I see the point he was trying to make but I don't think the way to tear down Obama is to give LBJ undue credit for programs that have been spectacular failures given how much money they've cost.
(Yes, I'll readily acknowledge the strong argument that the Iraq War could also be so described.)
(Certainly not Islam)
"Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul."
--Mark Morford, SF Chronicle (as requoted here)
The world would be a slightly better place without the JFK diehards, or for that matter the Diana diehards.
"Citizens generally have no idea when they have to do what an officer tells them to do, and I would think there is some sort of Due Process requirement of fair notice that the order has to be obeyed before an arrest can be made."
--Orin Kerr, Volokh.com
Wouldn't most people assume by default that they have to do what a police officer tells them to do any time a police officer tells them to do something? I'm not saying that's actually true, nor ought it be, but I think people are far more likely to obey in situations where they didn't realize they had a right to say no than vice versa.
I should emphasize of course that the D.C. checkpoint plan is blatantly unconstitutional, not to mention against everything America stands for ("papers please!").
"In the coming days, as Hillary Clinton moves to the sidelines and Barack Obama takes the stage alone, many people will suggest that America just wasn't ready for a female president."
--The XX Factor (Chad's favorite blog!)
"As devastating as their 29-17 Super Bowl XLI loss to the Colts was for the proud Chicago Bears, it was worse for their coach: Lovie Smith will forever be remembered as the first African-American coach to lose a Super Bowl."
--The Onion
It's not a perfect fit but you see why these two quotes belong together, right?
(We were guaranteed to "learn" at least two of these things from the 2008 Democratic presidential primary: Either America wasn't ready for a black president, it wasn't ready for a female president, or it wasn't ready for a blow-dried pretty-boy North Carolina trial lawyer to be president. At least two!)
It's a sad day for media when the most astute political [meta]commentary comes from a guy better known for covering the Kansas City Royals.
This post accurately points out that McCain and Obama are a huge step up from Bush and Kerry.
Actual interview of Allen Ginsberg, conducted by a religious conservative.
I can't argue with this, despite my visceral dislike for the candidate being touted (not to mention that candidate's spouse).
The big news yesterday was reports of Barack Obama "clinching" the Democratic nomination -- which has symbolic meaning, but which I'll believe if and when he's actually nominated, and no sooner. (This post pretty accurately describes why all the speculation about what Clinton would do was meaningless: She has no incentive to campaign further but also very little incentive literally to concede: Maybe Obama is found with a dead girl or live boy, as the old saying goes.) There's still a tiny hypothetical chance of Clinton getting the nomination -- or the other half of the ticket -- and I'd just as soon wait until that chance hits zero (perhaps waiting in vain).
No matter what happens, apparently all of the major candidates will go out of their way to rig the market and try to keep me from ever owning a home, because they'd rather kowtow to people dumb enough to live beyond their means (and dumber enough to ignore fine print).
Even if I had my own home, in California it wouldn't be safe from somebody deciding they'd rather take it away from me. (Here's more.)
And speaking of being safe in your own home, this story needs no further comment.
So yeah, Obama's nominated, dawn of a new day and all that. Knock yourselves out.
This Robert Novak map (found here) actually leads me to believe Obama should be a heavy favorite.
Novak gives a 270-268 McCain lead -- with McCain carrying all of (Ohio, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico). By contrast the only Obama states (on Novak's map) that I see McCain with a chance of swiping are Colorado and New Hampshire.
I just don't see a Republican presidential candidate winning Ohio in 2008. Maybe the foreclosure mess somehow solves itself in the next few months but I doubt it.
Good initial post, depressing comment section.
(You could say that about most political blog entries but this much more than most.)
To be fair, this comment is a very good refutation for the original hypothetical.
What did the Jewish Libertarian pray?
Barr/Root Atah Adonai!
A story that he'd supposedly never told anyone else.
It says here (the source is a charter jet company that says it uses carbon offsets against all its flights):
"The typical American is responsible for 10 tons of CO2 emissions annually through their direct energy use of home, cars and air travel, and about 24 tons of CO2 including their purchases, activities and the other services we all share throughout the economy. By comparison, a Gulf Stream III business jet (10-12 passenger) from New York to Los Angeles will emit around 31 tons of CO2 during the 6 hour flight. Obviously this is much much more CO2 than the typical American emits."
Anything you or I could do to reduce CO2 emissions is chump change compared to just a handful of corporations and moguls agreeing to cut down on their private plane travel.
This is what passes for scholarship*?
Given some of the books on the guy's list (The Prince, mainly) I can only wonder whether there's an alternate universe in which The Screwtape Letters makes the list.
("That book gave all those evil people IDEAS!")
This is the EXACT SAME mentality behind all the people who fulminated against the Freakonomics Blog for supposedly giving terrorists ideas (in that thread about brainstorming possible security holes, the sooner to patch them).
*- The word "scholarship" chosen in part because the author pointedly puts "Ph.D." at the end of his name. How many books are written by people with doctorates -- and how many of those books list the degree after the author's name on the front cover?
Here's Robert Kaplan in the NY Times and here's Jacob Sullum discussing that piece.
Some of Kaplan's reasoning in the case against really ought to have been applied to Iraq planning, especially the part about accepting responsibility for the ensuing civil war. On the other hand, the gall of the current regime to stand in the way and just let hundreds of thousands die rather than dare let people in... my knee-jerk impulse had been to strongly support regime change there (even before the cyclone).
Thought experiment: If, instead of a natural disaster, we had simply learned after the fact that the junta itself was killing people on that scale, how strong would the case for invasion be?
(I also think we should apply the Sudan rule as necessary (though it's unclear to me to what extent the junta has rejected UN, rather than U.S., help) : Any regime that publicly conflates UN peacekeeping troops with an invasion force, deserves to be invaded and toppled.)
If nothing else, I thoroughly agree with this Kaplan passage (change the "might" to "would" to get my exact opinion):
"It seems like a simple moral decision: help the survivors of the cyclone. But liberating Iraq from an Arab Stalin also seemed simple and moral. (And it might have been, had we planned for the aftermath.)"
Over-under on number of weblogs wherein I post or comment about California's recent court decision: 2.5. (This and Volokh Conspiracy already make two.)
Over-under on number of times I take an implicitly "anti" gay marriage position: 0. (Don't take the over, unless you think there's a good chance someone on a blog I regularly read makes a fatuous comparison to Jim Crow laws.)
I'd been all set to fulminate against this misuse of poverty statistics, but Kerry Howley already said what I would have said.
Apparently Indiana's voter ID law prevented 12 nuns from voting. Is this really the best that opponents of the law could muster?!
Oh, those poor nuns!
I realize (and often point out in various contexts!) that absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. But still, a thought experiment:
Which of these are you more likely to hear about, if true?
A. Someone was prevented from casting a legitimate vote.
B. Someone was prevented from casting a fraudulent vote.
Of the 28,000 commercial airline flights that take to the skies on an average day in the United States, fewer than 1 percent are protected by on-board, armed federal air marshals. [...] That means a terrorist or other criminal bent on taking over an aircraft would be confronted by a trained air marshal on as few as 280 daily flights[.] The Transportation Security Administration [...] said the 280 number "grossly understates coverage by an order of magnitude" and that the number is "four digits," but he would not elaborate.
--CNN (snipped to be more concise)
If "some four-digit number" of the 28,000 commercial airline flights has an air marshal then at most 35.7% of them do.
The discrepancy?
These sources say the marshal service considers a flight "covered" even if a marshal is not on board -- as long as a law enforcement officer or pilot in possession of a firearm is on board, even if that person is flying for personal reasons. The "covered" designation includes pilots armed in the cockpit.
The firearms training program for pilots is budgeted at $25 million. And while it is popular among airline pilots, many complain that they have to spend as much as $3,000 of their own money for lodging and meals when they take the course.
By comparison, the federal air marshal budget this year is $720 million.
Holy #&@*, where is all that money going?
Can you judge a man by the size of his cross?
So I agree with Wil about Hillary, and am deeply amused that he finally sees the Clintons for who they are, but goodness gracious:
"historical opportunity -- maybe even a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity"?
"fundamentally change how my government interacts with the rest of the world"?
"she's been moving the goalposts"? (Michigan/Florida shenanigans excepted, how exactly has she attempted/accomplished this? - it's not as though the Clintons can literally rewrite the rules of the Democratic nomination process, not if they don't even understand those rules (point #2))
"a Clinton victory in the primary about as likely as jumping off the roof of your house and landing on the moon" (futures markets still have her nomination odds anywhere from 10-15%; I'll give Wheaton benefit of doubt and assume he means the odds that she goes to Denver with a lead among pledged delegates)
"millions of Democratic voters -- many of them first time voters who, like me, finally feel truly inspired by someone"
See THIS is why people talk about a cult. Obama's nomination is not a birthright, not a sinecure, any more so than Hillary was "inevitable" as of last fall.
Close race for the Libertarian nomination, now that Bob Barr has thrown his celebrity hat into the ring.
I would seriously consider voting for Wayne Allyn Root in November, were he the LP nominee. (What have I got to lose? I predict the major networks will call California for the Democrat as soon as the polls close.)
I'd be very unlikely to vote for Barr (though nothing is impossible) and still less likely to vote for Mary Ruwart, though I'm tempted to read her books.
The rest of the LP field either is running on a fervently anti-war (if not "impeach Bush") schtick (deal-breaker for me), or doesn't stand a chance of being nominated.
"when it comes to regulations, one should never arbitrarily increase the complexity or uncertainty of the law.
Complexity is bad because it ups compliance costs, often makes evasion easier, and because complexity itself increases uncertainty: as tax laws proliferate, it becomes harder to know whether you are in compliance. It also makes the government's administrative overhead multiply like those bacteria that can kill you in five minutes after first contact.
Uncertainty is bad because it reduces the ability of people and corporations to plan for the future. It's hard to estimate your ROI if the tax laws that govern your investment change every year.
Change is bad in general because every time the tax law changes, your nation experiences a sudden loss of human capital: all the understanding of how the old law becomes useless, and people have to spend valuable hours learning to understand the new law."
--Megan McArdle
I think both my father and father-in-law would appreciate this link.
No, I don't own a business. I have some small percent of a Limited Liability Company, if that counts. The free time I'd spend running my own business would probably come at the expense of that (i.e. at the expense of writing questions, organizing quiz tournaments, etc.).
Young teachers save school, lose jobs.
"San Diego Unified needs to balance the budget; layoffs are based on seniority, not performance."
The second part is why public education as we know it is ultimately a lost cause. Those of you who disagree, and are doing something about it, have my admiration for your heroics. Do the best you can...
This Reason post is a good exhibit about why comment threads are sometimes worse than useless.
Shortening Radley Balko's bullet points even further:
In January 2008 a North Little Rock SWAT team raided a guy's home. He was asleep, thought he was being robbed, reached for a gun. A cop saw him reach for a gun and shot him. Other cops heard the shot and also shot him.
After ten days in intensive care he was transferred to police HQ, questioned for five hours, and eventually jailed, where his woulds got infected because the guards wouldn't treat him.
No drugs found. A scale and some plastic bags found (the guy's sister says they're part of her jewelry business). Guy charged with running a drug enterprise, meanwhile the neighbor who saw the whole raid may have been intimidated (by police) into silence.
After one newspaper article, the judge in the guy's case issued a media gag order. (To be as charitable as possible, this probably involves fear of a tainted jury pool.)
To recap: In today's America you can be home-invaded (on a no-knock warrant granted three weeks earlier -- Balko points out why this time lapse is incongruous), shot at, left to rot (literally!) in jail, then face trumped-up charges.
The comments started out well: Offers to contribute to a (hypothetical) legal defense fund for the guy. Then it descended into this "legalize drugs now!" (which I agree with) "wake up and revolt, people!" (which I don't) miasma, which of course is exactly what will endear a cause to ordinary people.
I'm not holding my breath for enough Reason commenters to get their act together and actually arrange funding and/or advice for the defendant. But I hope I'm wrong.
No-knock raids and general police brutality aren't a campaign issue right now but ought to be (what would've been the best high-profile example of this instead got framed as a racial issue by certain publicity whores). Certainly worthier of a candidate's time than gimmicky oil tax policies.
#1. Some politicians wear flag lapel pins.
#2. Some politicians don't.
#3. In theory, some people criticize the politicians who don't.
#4. Many people, however, criticize those critics. Richard Cohen, for example.
At this point isn't the ratio of #4 to #3 just sky-high? (And the ratio of #2 to #1 is pretty high also.)
Congratulations!
Way to set your own movement back. Few things in life are more self-fulfilling than this kind of frustration and resentment.
I would much rather have Barack Obama as president than Hillary Clinton; however, I'd much much rather have Bill Clinton as first lady than Michelle Obama, and the difference has become so vast that if I were required to cast a Democratic ballot today (May 6, 2008) I would vote for Hillary.
Just saying.
The past two times we've gone to the symphony, we've eaten at Max's Opera Cafe first but had a wait for our table and a chance to go to the next door book store. Both times I've opened a critically acclaimed book to a random chapter.
Thomas Frank (What's the Matter With Kansas) wasted several sentences pointing out that he usually wouldn't be caught dead listening to Gordon Liddy, then basically mailed in the part that was supposed to show exactly why Liddy was offensive.
Al Gore (The Assault on Reason) made the bizarre claim that it was once possible for basically anyone to get a universal soapbox for their expression -- Thomas Paine, for example. It should be obvious why this isn't true now -- we can all publish, but life is way too short for anyone to care what everyone else has to say, as opposed to whoever happens to interest them most. But even when a common forum existed, access wouldn't have been anywhere near universal. Most people would have been too busy subsisting.
You can make it easy for anyone to speak, or you can guarantee that everyone hears what is said, but shouldn't it be obvious why you can't achieve both at once?
Here.
My two favorite parts:
There's nothing the matter with honest moneymaking. Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino's box. In a free society, with the rule of law and property rights, no one loses when someone else gets rich.
...and...
I've got a 10-year-old at home. She's always saying, "That's not fair." When she says this, I say, "Honey, you're cute. That's not fair. Your family is pretty well off. That's not fair. You were born in America. That's not fair. Darling, you had better pray to God that things don't start getting fair for you."
