This FiveThirtyEight.com post has such a beautiful graph, yet such muddleheaded logic.
Nate Silver finds a correlation between a Congressman's receipt of lobbying dollars from insurance PACs, and that Congressman's position on taxpayer-funded health care. (A loaded expression to be sure, but c'mon, Nate himself refers with a straight face to "Supporting Public Opinion.")
Now, on a highly ideological topic* (where the competing ideologies involve the proper role of the federal government / scope of the federal budget, balanced against "lives are at stake"), which path makes more sense to you?
1. Congressman X gets a bunch of donations from group Y, and consequently supports Y's platform.
2. Congressman X supports group Y's platform, and consequently gets a bunch of donations.
(Helpful hint: How do you think group Y might have chosen which politicians to support?)
*- This is vastly different from earmarks and other pork barrel spending, since "bringing home the bacon" and "looking out for my district" aren't exactly principled stands.
(Full disclosure: While thinking through this post, I stood and ate Triscuits, guacamole, and an absurd number of cheese squares.)
Given all the scorn and (well-deserved) mockery directed at John Ensign today -- but also the tortured half-defenses (search for "temptation"), I was reminded of this bizarre David Kessler work.
Ensign is apparently so horny that he wouldn't even trust himself alone with a woman in a car; Kessler, meanwhile, described himself as "helpless when confronted with a plate of chocolate chip cookies," to the point where "he couldn't focus on anything else until he had eaten them all."
Both of them seem to assume that everyone else has the same weakness they do, and thus that the government needs to protect us all from culinary/sexual temptation.
Both are profoundly wrong about the role of government, and dangerous to the extent that they have the power to pass laws, but good luck finding (anywhere other than Reason.com, or this post itself) this particular moral equivalence.
(On the other hand, David Kessler is convinced that big evil corporations have literally addicted us to their food; Ensign probably has a similar belief about Satan and women/sex, but since every sophisticated person knows that big evil corporations exist and the devil doesn't...)
"Many people in Iran liked Obama, but his conservative way of reaction is really bothering us these days."
Are you following the Iran elections? (If not, you should be!) If so, you've probably seen the thesis that the best thing for American politicians to do is nothing. It's a prominent sentiment on Slashdot, less so on Fark.
I'm deeply skeptical about the logic behind this thesis. I'm well aware that some of the loudest pro-democracy voices on the right don't really bother to address the thesis, and that it seems to make sense at first glance: We don't want the reform effort to be branded (and thus buried) as an American infiltration.
But suppose for the sake of argument that Barack Obama (et al) actually wants liberty in Iran, and wants to purse the most effective strategy to that end. How could silence (and thus perceived indifference) possibly be the optimum strategy?
A. You could argue that we don't want to alienate the Iranians themselves, you know, the ones who have been inundated with propaganda about the Great Satan. But which Iranians are we talking about here, and what decisions are they facing?
1. In theory there could be Iranians who would actively support the protest movement if (and only if) someone persuaded them to. Maybe these are people who are otherwise sympathetic but then conclude something like "Oh, this is an American thing? Well then screw it." Plausible?
2. Much more likely (in my opinion) there are Iranians enraged at the sham election and sick of the theocracy itself, but not sure whether they're in any position to make a difference, and not sure whether it's worth the personal risk to speak up. If Americans are -- if Barack Obama himself is -- afraid to speak up, why on Earth would they have the courage of their own?
B. You could argue that we don't want Ahmadinejad to be able to plausibly paint the reform movement as an American intervention. Well, guess what: To the extent that he sees personal gain from doing so, he's going to accuse us of that anyway. (He already has!)
The set of people in any position to fall for, or be motivated by Ahmadinejad's rhetoric, is the set of people too fanatical, or too uninformed, to care whether what he says is true.
If you spend enough time with Russians (or Eastern Europeans) of a certain age, you'll find a lot who revere Ronald Reagan. It shouldn't be too hard to figure out why. Now imagine, for a moment, that a real, non-sham democracy actually took hold in Iran, with or without American moral support. Try to picture a pro-democracy Iranian with a framed photo of Barack Obama who tells his children and grandchildren, "Thank god the American president was smart enough to keep his mouth shut."
C. Maybe someone out there thinks Iran will do the right thing if we're nice enough to the powers-that-be. Because, gosh, seeming to be afraid of Iran has accomplished so much in the recent past. No matter who's in the White House, or what particular dogma some particular authoritarian espouses (or claims to espouse), it should be abundantly clear what they'd gain from picking a fight with America and "winning." Well, what do they have to lose? If they think we think we're better off keeping silent about one atrocity, then about what future atrocities would we (supposedly) be better off keeping silent?
(UPDATE: On further blog reading, I'm heartened to find the pictures of Reagan analogy already used much more compellingly.)
"Small wonder [Tina] Fey gets along so well with co-star Alec Baldwin, whose crude voice-mail to his 13-year-old daughter should have made him unemployable for life. But he supports abortion, so OK. The girl had it coming."
--Don Surber
News flash: Actors do horrible, indefensible things in their private lives, yet somehow manage to go on the set and brilliantly portray characters completely removed from their own personae.
Jack Donaghy is one of the ten best fictional characters on TV today. I have no idea to what extent Baldwin himself would think of Donaghy as a caricature, nor do I much care: Just as Carroll O'Connor inadvertently created a reactionary folk hero, Donaghy represents a sympathetic (and uncannily frequently correct) executive.
Every minute of every hour that Alec Baldwin spends portraying Jack Donaghy is less time for him to be himself, and given how rotten a person he is in real life, that's all the better.
(Notice how I don't touch with a ten-foot pole the ugly straw-man at the end of the quoted text, nor the (in the link but no the quote) assertion that Tina Fey's best-known impression is "cruel"? (The object of that impression has been known to disagree.) And while we're here: Late-night talk show hosts bomb now and then, and have been known to offend people now and then. I'm aggressively indifferent to the political identity of anyone on either side of the fallout to that.)
Very belated, but heartfelt, condolences to the family of Dr. George Tiller.
This Will Saletan piece contains a misguided, maybe even pernicious, argument. Saletan argues that if one equates abortion with murder, then one should applaud the killing of Tiller, advocate the jailing of women, etc. (The implicit conclusion seems to be that we thus can't -- or, at least, secretly don't really -- draw that analogy.)
Where does one even begin to address this folly? In no particular order:
1. Two wrongs don't make a right. Except when the judicial system says they do, but even there we leave that to judges and juries because we're civilized that way.
2. Is it even obvious that killing Tiller would (after accounting for the indirect effects) result in fewer abortions being performed? There's an intimidation effect, but there's also a backlash effect. The best long-term strategies to reduce the number of abortions performed are all antithetical to killing a doctor.
3. The same logic that leads someone to an outspoken pro-life position, also leads to the sort of moral absolutism practiced by someone who would allow five people on a railroad track to die rather than pulling a switch that caused the train to divert to a different track and kill one person.
4. Did I already mention that we're civilized people and not barbarians?
While we're here: I'm glad Jesse Walker posted this reminder that, no matter what you want [other people] to believe, "extreme rhetoric" isn't the moral culprit for despicable acts. As Walker's colleague Brendan O'Neill points out:
To seek to restrict a broadcaster's speech on the basis that it might inflame viewers to do something awful is an insult to all of us, since we're treated as little more than dumb attack dogs that hear "orders" and then carry them out. And to seek to restrict speech on the basis that it might coax one or two unhinged loners to do something awful would be turn society into the equivalent of a lunatic asylum, where everyone watches their words and controls their tone of voice just in case they give a madman the wrong impression.
Finally, this 2009 study echoes this 2003 study with the suggestion that fish feel pain. (I first read about the former study here on Slate, probably around the same time I read the Saletan column linked above.)
You might think that has nothing to do with the subject at hand, except that (as I understand it) the received wisdom always had been that fish didn't. It may very well be the case that the things we do to fish are shockingly inhumane compared to how we perceived those things.
The salient feature of my own opinion about the legitimacy of abortion isn't any conviction about where human life begins (and certainly not any religious stipulation); rather, I'm interested in the probability that, generations from now, the things we've learned about pre-natal development give us a radically different understanding of the fetus than we have now. It's a remote probability, but it's greater than zero, and also greater than the probability of any given frivolous hypothetical ("what if it turns out rocks feel pain?" or such).
If there were only (let's say) a 0.1% chance that abortion should properly be regarded as the taking of a human life, then dividing the total number of abortions performed by 1,000 would result in a still-disconcerting figure for human lives lost. It would be no more or less legitimate for this figure to inform public policy, than for estimates of highway deaths to inform traffic laws (or helmet laws).
(To be sure, the tradeoff is radically different: Having to wear something on your head for a few minutes can't even begin to be compared to gestating for the better part of a year. I'm just saying that there are many public policy debates where a change in mortality rate is one of the many relevant factors.)
I finally got tired of the Facebook ad saturation (at least on my account; your micro-marketing niche may vary) for this book (presumably the longer version of this Atlantic article).
So I read this review, and this shorter, much more pointed one.
I have to take issue with the transition sentences: "And so I go on to college, and they don't. Percentile is destiny in America."
They immediately follow an anecdote about his high school buddies' drinking on the way to take the SAT, and his refusal to take even a sip. Unless you reject the existence of free will, the lesson here is that he wanted to go to the best college he could get into (and understood the process) and they didn't (or didn't).
I will also quote, with great approval, the last paragraph of the Herald review:
"But really, was it so bad? He went to Princeton, for God's sake! How many inner-city kids would put up with being snubbed for such a chance? And for all the boo-boos inflicted upon him, he still managed to have fun. He made friends, enjoyed a goodly quantity of sex and academically acquitted himself well enough to be tapped for a post-graduate fellowship to Oxford, a 1,000-year-old university located in a class-obsessed country where snobbery has been elevated to an art form. Talk about leaping from the frying pan into the fire."
And finally, if the point is that rich well-connected people can be unbelievably self-important jerks, here is a much shorter, funnier, Twitter-driven exposition of that thesis.
Of people who frequently read blogs (and have at least passing acquaintance with this one), I think I'm in the 90th percentile of holding McArdle's financial/political analysis in high esteem. (Other than what she wrote last September-October about the original bank bailout. Given what we now know, I'm fairly confident she got it wrong, though obviously it's impossible to prove this rigorously.)
I can't even claim that she has a blind spot when it comes to first-hand issues, since this post about inhalers is quite compelling.
But...
"If I had been a normal borrower, the whole deal would have sailed through at a low interest rate. My $120,000 base salary and my assets were easy to document."--Edmund Andrews describes his personal credit crisis (and in passing, his remarkably shrewish second wife)
From which McArdle's takeaway is
"Until we're comfortable with talking publicly about the fact that we don't make much money and likely never will, that our lives are risky, and that this has obvious impacts on our ability to consume on the level of our educational peers, writers will keep getting into trouble."
Could she have missed the larger point in any more solipsistic a fashion?
Continuing the sports-jurisprudence analogy theme from a couple posts below, this Volokh.com post (see also this follow-up) reminds me of this Justin Wolfers paper about disparate NBA foul calling.
Using Sotomayor's logic, it may just be that the backgrounds of black and white NBA refs have led them to completely different understandings of how the game of basketball is supposed to be played. Should we hope that, paraphrasing Sotomayor, a wise old African-American ref with the richness of his experience would make a better no-call than a white male who hasn't lived that life?
(The funny thing here is that if you strip out the racial/ethnic component, Sotomayor's premise might actually work... for a sports league! That is, somebody with extensive high-level basketball playing experience is (so I wild-guess) less likely to call silly touch-fouls, yet in such a way that the players on the court will instinctively understand what will/won't get called. Maybe in sports this actually works. At the highest level of jurisprudence, you can guess how appropriate I find Sotomayor's premise to be.)
Ball or strike? Well, it was really a borderline pitch, may or may not have painted the outside corner. That kid on the mound just got called up, and he's sort of a beanpole. This game could make the difference between his getting big league meal money for a few more days, or going back to the minors. Meanwhile that fat cat with the bat just signed a huge contract, and all he ever does is take pitches or try to hit home runs. Plus, isn't he suspiciously bulked up? Strike three!
Safe or out? I've heard through the grapevine that baserunner is in his manager's doghouse, and the language barrier doesn't help. Imagine, getting to this country with nothing, coming of age in this strange land. And anyway the home team is trying to get a rally going; the fans would like it a lot better if this game got closer. Safe!
Empathy: It's all the rage!
In fairness, there are far sillier criteria by which an arbiter could be picked.
N.B. This entry was inspired by a Google News story I saw last night; as of today when I try to replicate this search I get a lot of conservative bloggers, from a week ago (on or about May 6), making basically the same point as above. So call me slow. The analogy still stands, of course.
Back-to-back Fark items:
Interviewed on Good Morning America, new mom Bristol Palin says abstinence is a realistic method of controlling teen pregnancy (w/video)
Well, let's see: If you don't have sex (and aren't the Virgin Mary), there is a 0% chance you will get pregnant (or impregnate someone). If you do have sex, there is more than a 0% chance you will get pregnant (or impregnate someone). Maybe the condom breaks, maybe the pills are forgotten. Unlikely, but still more likely that you (or your partner) happens to be the Virgin Mary.
Now I know full well that abstinence education is a waste of time, but are we (that is, Fark) really saying that abstinence itself (before, say, college) is "unrealistic"?
Maine comes the fifth state to legalize gay marriage and to be crossed off Joe the Plumber's vacation list
At first I thought that was an uncalled-for non-sequitur, until I looked it up and found this interview. How sad.
Let's think through all the problems this country faces, many of them self-inflicted (that is, caused directly by the idiotic decisions by politicians that, for whatever reason, enough of us voted for). Economic issues, foreign policy issues.
When the fate of America as we know it hangs in the balance, it makes me very angry that people on either side of the issue want gay marriage (of all things) to be their deal-breaker, compared to sound economic policy or good diplomacy.
I'm going to give this McSweeneys piece benefit of the doubt about the extent to which it is self-satire.
The flip side of this: How do you take a blind eye to corruption, or worse yet a naked power grab, and make it funny?
In no particular order:
Judges railroading kids to juvie to get kickbacks.
Grandmothers busted on spurious child-pr0n charges.
Teen text messagers, ditto.
Rogue narcotics squad looting Philadelphia's immigrant grocers.
The federal defense budget as one man's personal fiefdom.
The federal transportation budget as another man's personal fiefdom.
Social workers who let a kid starve to death because they figured out they could keep bogus visitation records and get paid for doing nothing.
All this, and I haven't even touched their asinine liquor policies or their even more asinine senior senator (pompous blowhards transcend party lines).
That's a shocking amount of appalling state-sanctioned behavior. (Until some of those last few stories broke, I honestly thought Georgia would never be topped.)
San Jose Unified School District assumed that a pizza making machine would take care of itself.
In New York, the MTA doesn't grok the concept of price elasticity.
Now obviously these aren't exactly White House-caliber minds, any more than Amy Poehler's Leslie Knope could compare to Amy Poehler's Hillary Clinton.
Even so, stories like the above strongly inform my opinion that, no matter how dire any given economic recession might seem, our government is the last set people we should be relying on for a way out of the mess.
Just last night we watched Cartman's Silly Hate Crime (you can too! - if I screwed up the deep link then just go to the South Park Studios main page).
And now look what's in the news today!
I guess you can't really say "ripped from the headlines of nine years into the future" since this Hate Crimes push isn't exactly new. If one were to stipulate that hate crimes laws are otherwise laudable, then the trans-gendered are no less worthy of protection. As you might guess, though, I reject the entire premise: If you kill someone, they're dead; and if you killed them on purpose, you killed them on purpose. Why you killed them on purpose doesn't change the fact that they're dead and that you did it.
I just got my weekly fund raising letter 'From the Office of Michael Steele.' Two pages and not a single mention of April 15th or the Tea Parties. Doesn’t look like the Republicans are going to change into the Tea Party any time soon. I haven’t contributed a dime in the last year. I wonder if he wonders why.
--a reader's letter to Glenn Reynolds
I thought I knew what teabagging meant [...] But during a recent conversation about the Republican teabagging craze, my boyfriend told me [...]
--a reader's letter to Dan Savage (warning: some Not Safe For Work text)
We all know that second letter-writer is laughably misinformed, right? (Probably a CNN viewer (link actually goes to Fox News but you'll see why).) I'm crestfallen if that's the impression random people already get, because to be honest, I don't want either major party to come anywhere near this tea party movement!
It's a legitimate cause, with well-deserved across-the-board support, where the worst possible outcome would be for some politicians to hijack it. (So ironically, that particular Instapundit reader might actually more ignorant than that particular Savage Love reader.)
What muddle-headed city editor cleared this piece of work?
1. Of all the stuff from ten years earlier that "today's high school kids" shockingly do(n't) know, I really wouldn't put the name of the school where a massacre took place as high on the list. Sure, if you play quiz-bowl the name Columbine should ring a bell, in the same sense that I could have identified Jim Jones (or Guyana) when I was in high school (as of today I can't pull the name of his cult, not sure whether I could have then). Since I was a senior in 1992, maybe a better comp is the Tylenol tampering case, though "what is Tylenol" is a fundamentally different question from "what is Columbine." Maybe "What are the Falklands?"
2. "It can happen here." Eh, maybe. Everyone sharply underestimates the level of sheer evil on the part of those perpetrators. Everyone has a lot of misconceptions in general about that whole story.
This is the canonical example of a one-off event to which people overreact and put in breathtakingly stupid policies.
(Not sure whether this is really politics, since I'd like to think it's non-partisan.)
Yes, despite this guy's incredulity (and these commenters' pique), even if an injured person is near an emergency room, if they're immobile and not actually in the emergency room, then the set of patients as a whole gets faster, BETTER care if the ER calls an ambulance for the injured person outside instead of sending a nurse out.
1. Paramedics are designed to give care on the go; emergency rooms generally are not. (The "we have a patient down exactly 10-100 feet away" use case doesn't really come up so much, I would guess.)
2. Sending a nurse out there is a domino effect of opportunity cost for the care that nurse could have given to the patients inside.
3. "They can't even move him ten feet?!?" Well, that's the thing! If the patient is immobile then it takes first response to determine whether it's safe to move the patient at all.
Anyway, this is "only" a non-outrage and not one of those where I'm actually counter-outraged by the level of original outrage, if only because the (ultimately wrong) knee-jerk answer seems at first to be so obviously right.
"One thing is certain. The defendant has won second prize in the piracy lottery. So far, deterrence is not on the horizon. From the moment he was captured by US forces, the alleged pirate's life expectancy went up by decades. In the coming months, years and maybe decades, he is likely to get the best nutrition and accommodation he or anyone he knows has ever had. Given that he did not kill or injure anyone, a life sentence is very unlikely. If he serves 15 years in a federal prison and is then allowed to remain in America, he will likely come out the healthiest, most educated and perhaps oldest former Somali pirate around."
--Eugene Kontorovich, guest-blogging at Volokh.com
This can work to my detriment, of course; I'm sure I've grotesquely under-reacted to the Gitmo situation. But in the grand scheme of things people don't think through nearly enough both that the quoted passage is true and why it's true.
(Sort of relevant to the "why it's true": we can safely deduce that Tyler Cowen didn't like The End of Poverty. I got the same thrill from this review that many people get from Roger Ebert's finest work.)
It says here PETA has run a "Buy One, Get One Killed" ad campaign about the effect of breeders on the euthanasia rate at shelters.
Would this happen to include PETA's own shelters? (The link reports a kill rate around 95% and an adoption success rate below 1 in 300.) And if you compare the cost of a single 30-second TV spot to the cost of kibble, how many animals is it fair to say died per any given airing of that commercial itself? This is beyond hypocritical: It is, without hyperbole, evil.
A hundred years from now, I predict (sort of in the spirit of this Volokh.com thread -- though not quite, since Orin specifically excludes "ideas or practices that you personally find barbaric or immoral today") that cruelty to animals will be seen as a greater offense than cruelty to children (in turn a greater offense than cruelty to adults, the sliding scale involving the affected creature's ability to defend itself). I also predict that social historians will consider PETA to be a major impediment to this evolution of moral philosophy.
(If it wasn't clear from context, or you didn't see it here earlier: I strongly disapprove myself of people who buy from breeders animals they could have adopted from shelters. I also consider animal abuse to be roughly as heinous as child abuse: I can't say "more heinous than" because the abusive behavior isn't quite an apples-to-apples comparison; sexual molestation, for example, is inherently different.)
Which is more unsettling, this (only 53% of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism) or this (FBI raids Texas data centers, carts off a bunch of servers)?
I'll say the second one, by a large margin, since it doesn't matter what the populace thinks until they vote. (Also, "free market" should poll much better than "capitalism," since the latter has corrupt fat-cat connotations.)
"But my strong suspicion is that at the end of the day most of the super-rich would ultimately find it a relief to get off the treadmill of status-competition and the not-quite-so-rich would be thrilled to see their betters cut down to size."
--Yglesias, requoted here
That's nothing if not (stunningly) myopic. At least he didn't threaten to put anyone in camps. Small favors...
I know you think you're God's gift to journalism (most of these Farkers certainly do), but if I may point out:
(quoting Taibbi's straw-man summary of the Jake DeSantis op-ed)
3) I could have left AIG for a better job several times last year; 4) but I didn't, staying out of a sense of duty to my poor, beleaguered firm, only to find out in the end that
No, I'd say the retention bonus itself was at least a minor reason why he stayed. (You see, that's why companies who fear that their employees will jump ship choose to offer retention bonuses.)
Now, if you buy the case for bailing out AIG to begin with (I emphatically don't buy that case, but that's another story -- without the idiotic bailout, none of this would be an issue because Chapter 11 would make it all moot), then you understand that somebody has to pick up the pieces and keep this all from getting even worse.
Making a convenient scapegoat out of people who are already ridiculously unpopular is exactly the wrong way to do that. Not that taxpayers were ever going to get a damn thing out of "owning" AIG, but this bonus kerfuffle makes it even less likely.
The overwhelming degree of populist fervor this has generated is also literally, without hyperbole, the most ashamed I've ever been of my country as a whole. (Yes, individuals and groups have done heinously evil things, and larger segments of the population have taken repugnant offensive stances, but never have so many people believed something so antithetical to limited government.)
Somewhere in the midst of the AIG retention bonus fracas, and in particular Barack Obama's claims of outrage, I lost the ability to opine, with any credibility, that Obama was doing better as president than Hillary Clinton would have done as president.
So Hillary fans (and especially lesser-of-two-evils Hillary settlers), mea culpa.
"I don't think [Obama] has what it takes (knock on wood) to lead us off of cliff. I don't think enough people will follow him."
--Tom Smith, quoted on Volokh Conspiracy by Randy Barnett
"After a week in which President Obama thanked himself for inviting him to the White House, compared AIG executives to suicide bombers, and did the first Presidential retard joke on national TV, I was impressed to find that Slate is bravely keeping up its Bushism Of The Day feature"
--Mark Steyn
What's even more impressive is just how much of a reach the supposed Bushism actually was.
Despite my immense reservations about the title of this post (shouldn't trotting out that Pastor Niemoller quote be some corollary to Godwin's Law?), I can't not share the important passage:
If Congress suddenly discovers that it can take away money that they decide that someone doesn’t deserve, if we let them get away with that, there'll be no stopping them.
All that will be necessary is to gin up the necessary "outrage" that someone got more than they should have.
Even if you agree that the AIG folks don’t deserve the money, this is not the way to handle it.
So ask yourself; how much do you make? Is it more than your neighbor? Might someone else think that its not fair that you got something that they didn't?
Because that's all it will take.
Although I don't immediately see anything wrong with this "Third Way," I'd keep my eye out for potential barriers to entry.
Huge businesses love to throw up roadblocks that in theory apply to all companies equally but in practice have a disproportionate effect on their smaller competitors.
On one hand... really??? We're still at the point of walking on eggshells over everything in this country?
On the other hand, that's the best Our President can do? It's a very human mistake to make, of course, but where exactly is this brilliant (one might say messianic) orator I've heard so much about?
Oh, while we're here, a Google News headline just caught my eye, something like "Federal Deficit Soars Past Previous Estimates." Well, gosh, what bill(s) do you think might have passed when those estimates were made and now?
...is the first person I've seen to articulate exactly my position on the AIG bonuses. Meanwhile (coincidence, or just remarkably good set of first principles?) he's also dead right about the [lack of] importance of baseball's steroids scandal, not to mention the appropriate perspective on Michael Phelps.
This column is inelegantly headlined but illustrates a double-standard that I find galling: people who object to embryonic research on when-does-life-begin grounds are tarred as anti-science, yet people who (for example) oppose genetically modified crops get a free pass despite a point of view that is no more "scientific."
Most importantly, he's communicated -- better than anyone else I've seen -- the slippery slope problem with Obama's salary cap ideas.
The executive pay cap bill may not be the end of the world. Many, though not all, executives were reckless, irresponsible and selfish. (The salary cap, incidentally, does not retroactively punish anyone. However, it will certainly discourage competent CEOs from taking over troubled companies.)
Then again, what could possibly be more reckless than spending $1 trillion you don't have on a plan that you have no evidence will work? What could be more irresponsible than doubling the generational debt for your partisan pet projects in a time of crisis? And what could be more selfish than stifling debate by deploying fear to induce voters into supporting it all?
(some paragraph breaks removed, because I think one-sentence paragraphs are overdone in both op-eds and sports columns, and didn't want that over-the-top style to take away from the larger point)
Anyway, despite my shocking ignorance of his past work (I vaguely knew of this book but felt no need to read it) (and this ignorance is all the more shocking given how much he contributes to Reason), I now have a new favorite op-ed columnist.
"I don't think you'll get much voluntary cooperation from banks if you declare that any acceptance of government funds will involve substantial risk that they will appropriate your paycheck."
--Megan McArdle
I sympathize with everyone who's outraged about AIG retention bonuses but most of those outraged people (including the ones who comment about blogs) are missing both an important point about contract law, and the larger issue that Uncle Sam had no business taking over AIG to begin with.
Sometimes they actually exist.
In this thread search on the username hillbillypharmacist.
Best quote along those lines: "I've heard about Mississippi's problems. It speaks to me that since some states can't seem to get their sh*t together, and since doctors are necessary to a civil society, we probably need federal guidelines and national entities."
Or, states with idiotic legal regimes could face the direct consequences of their own stupidity, and the people who know better will leave. Pick your poison.
(...writes the California native who knows full well how unsustainable the whole budget situation is here.)
This should have gone without saying, but apparently in this day and age it needed to be written.
While we're here, there are two things that shouldn't simultaneously be true, yet (as reported and spun) somehow are:
1. The set of victims of the burst housing bubble, that is the people "at risk of foreclosure," somehow now includes everyone who's just under water.
-yet-
2. The stories written about government programs for those people tend to refer to actions that let them "keep their homes."
Now I know full well that real estate is many things, including both an investment vehicle and (literally) shelter. But conflating those two purposes is beyond pernicious:
If you own a home, none of the supply- and demand-driven fluctuations of your home have one iota of effect on your foundation, your roof, your pest control, your insulation, your square footage, and so on. It's the same house, just valued differently by people other than whoever actually lives in it.
"I'm not sure consumers wouldn't have more confidence in a car made by a GM-in-bankruptcy, in which the sharp decisions necessary for survival were being made, than in the current GM-in-political-limbo, in which all parties are trying to appeal for White House billions to postpone those decisions as long as possible (while sales crater anyway). Which company is more likely to be around in 10 years?"
--Mickey Kaus
"From Obama's perspective, it seems, letting people keep their own money qualifies as a "wasteful and ineffective program." That makes sense if you believe all resources are the government's to distribute as it sees fit."
--Jacob Sullum
(By the way, when do the people who demanded that other people apologize for calling Barack Obama "socialist" make apologies of their own, given the extent to which the name-callers turned out to be right?)
Hi, it's Matt again, and I'm here to talk to you about a very important, some would say tragic, economic issue:
Did you know that all across the country, restaurants are dying?
It's true! They open, a few customers show up, and then next thing you know (maybe three months later) the place is gone. Oh, the building is still there, but new management, new theme, new menu... and pink slips for all those waitstaff and all those amazing chefs.
Do we really want our nation to slip into culinary mediocrity? (In principle, no.) Shouldn't we do something about this? (I hope you see where this is going, understand the right answer is intuitively obvious, and understand how best to apply that other answer to certain other vocations who have made themselves the news lately.)
1. Get a massive (on the order of $800 billion) spending bill passed. Tell everyone it's critical to get this passed now now now, that there isn't really even time to read the thing.
2. Immediately after this bill has passed, profess your goal of halving the budget deficit in the next 3-4 years. (To paraphrase Augustine: grant him fiscal responsibility, only not yet?)
3. Seeing as how there are basically two ways to balance a budget, and one of them (spending cuts) is really hard to accomplish so soon after a massive spending influx...
Such a fine art to keep debt responsibility off the table until after the spending half is already a fait accompli.
Anyway, it should be obvious to everyone else both what actually will happen (grab your wallet) and what ought to have happened (at least some semblance of context for how the spending of 2009 will lead in to some spending-side budget consciousness in 2011).
...that I hope has a very simple answer:
Suppose you borrow a large sum of money from me, and that I then sell to a third party the rights to your repayments.
Why on Earth (be as specific as you can with the legal citations: case law, statutes, boilerplate contractual language, whatever it actually is) would that ever affect your obligation to me, or your [lack of] obligation to this random third party?
Unless I'm just sorely mistaken, this has to be a first principle of contract law: you should not have any obligations to parties other than the one with whom you actually made the bargain.
That seems so obvious to me, and yet it's so absolutely not reflected in the world of mortgage transaction securities (see for example this news story and this very long Fark thread).
Otherwise what's to stop a completely fraudulent entity from coming to you and claiming that you now owe that entity instead of me? How are you going to know whether I really did[n't] transfer the loan?
Assuming there's some valid/obvious legal reason why I'm completely off-base here, I then have to ask: What morons set the law up like that? How could it POSSIBLY be equitable for a lender's interactions with a third party to change the borrower's obligations?
This post uses as an example the distinction between "deficit spending" and "stimulus package."
If only we were so lucky as to see consistent references to a term as value-neutral as "stimulus package"! (If I had a nickel for every headline writer's doe-eyed reference to "Obama Economic Recovery Plan," I mean for crying out loud, who could possibly be thick enough to stand in the way of an 'economic recovery plan'?)
Maybe writing about Obamanomics isn't worth the time spent, given that human nature (more importantly public choice theory) already tell you about stuff that will end up getting passed (interesting insight on that specific point from Megan McArdle).
At least if I raise a fuss about asinine zero tolerance policies or even more asinine asset forfeiture laws (highway robbery - literally!), those are the sorts of issues where a reader has a snowball's chance of making a difference in the future.
(Parting shot, though: Given what we now know, and especially the implied triumphalism of this Newsweek cover, don't a lot of people owe a few other people an apology for taking offense when anyone dared to label Obama with the s-word?)
Does he realize how utterly insulting it is, when he wants to spend a TRILLION dollars of our money, that he condescends to the [majority of] Americans who oppose this plan (or even just want to see a much better case made for it than has been so far) by dismissing that opposition as "the usual political games"?
Either he does or he doesn't realize this, and it's basically a stupid-vs.-evil dichotomy.
Unrelatedly, this is the most offensive URL I could idly come up with. (Do not click if you prefer not to see major religions mocked.)
Actual annoyance at Barack Obama's e-mails; parody of same (well, I guess the parody isn't quite the same, since Obama and MoveOn are ostensibly different animals...).
Paragraph of the day (actually of yesterday), from Matt Welch:
Why do people oppose the stimulus? Here are a few actual reasons: There is no strong evidence that stimuli work, and plenty of evidence that they don't (a relevant consideration, no?). Like the deeply flawed PATRIOT Act, the deeply flawed Iraq War resolution, and the deeply flawed bank bailout, it is being rushed through the legislature in an atmosphere of pants-wetting crisis and presidential warnings of impending doom. It is filled with special interest giveaways, big-government featherbedding, and "Buy American" considerations that have about as much to do with stimulating an economy as playing violin has with putting out fires. By taking from fiscally responsible states (like South Carolina) and giving to fiscally irresponsible states (like California), it violates basic notions of fairness and creates still more moral hazard in an already hazardtastic universe. These will do for starters; there will be more and better reasons in the comments.
[But wait, didn't you (Matt B., not Matt W.) support the Iraq War? Well, yeah: we knew that (and why) regime change in Iraq was an official goal of U.S. policy going back to the first Gulf War. I'm not convinced it's the right example, but the rest, especially Patriot Act, fit to a tee.]
Just what "the middle class" needs, a "task force."
This is beyond appalling.
Suppose Ryan Frederick were convicted of first-degree murder. Would we have consensus in these parts (i.e. among readers of this weblog) that this was a gross miscarriage of justice?
Where would he rank among U.S. prisoners for degree of injustice involved?
To an order of magnitude, how many people in the current U.S. prison population have cases such that, if impartially presented and reviewed, most reasonable people would consider their continued imprisonment to be a gross miscarriage of justice? Maybe a thousand if we're being very conservative?
If the new president felt like it, I think I see an easy way both to reduce prison overcrowding and to make this country a tiny bit more fair.
Remember the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change?
He recommended investing 1% of GDP per year on reduced emissions, based in part on applying a discount rate of zero to the costs and benefits of our descendants. There was, of course, quite some controversy as to whether this was the right discount rate.
Now, of course, we're contemplating a new bill that would spend a trillion dollars of taxpayer money (above and beyond normal year-to-year operation) -- more precisely, it would either borrow or print a trillion dollars, all to get ourselves out some economic pain that was indirectly caused by (ironically) people borrowing and spending too much.
It says here that debt service (i.e. interest) alone would be $347 billion over ten years. Remember that all debt (including the National Debt!) has to be paid back eventually*, and think about the obligations we're passing along to our children and grandchildren. Awfully greedy of us, no?
*- sure, the U.S. could just default, and then say "Come and get us! You and what army?" - that seems to be a good recipe for chaos and warfare
This post about Dick Fuld (Lehman Brothers CEO) reminds me that as a general rule we have a very subtle misunderstanding of who the biggest villains of the current financial crisis were.
If you read the NY Times business section you know that Ben Stein, nearly every Sunday, manages to mention in passing that most of this (supposedly) could have been avoided by bailing out Lehman, winding down their obligations in an orderly fashion and so on. My impression from following the news in September was that Korea Development Bank wanted to buy Lehman but that Fuld held out for better terms, assuming that Uncle Sam had his back. You can see why this was NOT an notion that (at the time) the Treasury Department would have wanted every greedy CEO to entertain. I have no idea how fervently they tried to signal Fuld otherwise, but obviously they didn't get their point across until Lehman forced the issue.
Inspired by the long-overdue removal of Bill Kristol from the New York Times:
Suppose you ran a newspaper that had (or aspired to) a national role roughly comparable to the New York Times. Suppose you wanted to assemble the best possible team of [let's say six] op-ed columnists, and suppose further that you're at least somewhat interested in a diversity of viewpoints. (That is: regardless of your own views, a team that consisted entirely of people who agreed with you would be perceived as hackish.) Let's say that money is no object but that the people you hired would have to, as of 2009, be expected to write top-notch weekly columns.
My off-the-cuff team below the fold; it turns out my hires would be overwhelmingly bloggers, because they're who I've read lately.
Eugene Volokh: top-notch analysis of legal issues in the news
Radley Balko: to expose manifest injustices with the same legwork he already does
Nick Gillespie: yes, that's already three libertarians, two associated with Reason. Still, Gillespie's columns (and TV appearances) are outstanding. Did you know he also wrote for the late Suck.com under a variety of pseudonyms?
James Lileks: gotta have a social conservative, but not a stodgy one
Markos Moulitsas: gotta have a liberal, and I'd much rather have a movement activist than a sclerotic Frank Rich type
Christopher Hitchens: the one who's hardest to pigeonhole, but also my top priority of the six
On further review it does stick out that all six of these are white males. So I'd add Robert A. George (but it's not clear whom I'd boot: Gillespie? that'd be sad; should I have instead specified seven columnists?)
Then for women we have a quandary: Megan McArdle? Virginia Postrel? Surely not Peggy Noonan. I guess we could swap out Gillespie for Postrel, simply add George and claim we meant seven all along.
...after which we can mercifully put the whole thing to bed.
The tag line to this Wall Street Journal op-ed captures a viciously, obscenely sad irony that ties in with what I wrote about "Good Government" a few posts back:
"He expanded the state, and the sense that the state is incompetent."
Either of those by itself would have been bad enough.
McSweeneys hasn't bothered to attempt humor in their main article in coming on two weeks. (There have been little sidebars that were hit-or-miss.) I understand it's mainly that they have a book to pimp, but these "kids have advice for Obama" snippets have been run into the ground, especially since that was Garrison Keillor's turf going back five or six Democratic National Conventions ago.
This Reason blog article cites various comics describing the Obama presidency as the end of comedy, which is a bit striking in light of the reasons why irony supposedly died the last time it died. I'm going to assume that the anti-irony people don't actually think of President Obama as something analogous to September 11.
Take a bow, Maureen Dowd: Neither the first nor the last time she'll get a similar honor.
For what it's worth I think that David Paterson had no intention of ever naming Caroline Kennedy, but also no desire to humiliate her. Shouldn't she have gotten the hint weeks sooner than she apparently did?
Meanwhile with one exception, there's a startling correlation between things Maureen Dowd hates about Kirsten Gillibrand and laudable things. (Or in one analysis, made by Don Surber and quoted by Glenn Reynolds: "Gillibrand’s major crime seems to be that she is 15 years younger and better looking than Miss Dowd. The biggest obstacle a woman faces in seeking a high office is other women.") The one exception is the Tracy Enid Flick reference but really, do we have any reason to believe Gillibrand is either the first or the last female politician to face that particular comparison?
(I'd written "smear" instead of comparison, but then I remembered comparing Hillary to Flick, and I do stand by that analogy.)
One from Christopher Hitchens, one from The Economist; both are 90% correct.
Going into Iraq was the right thing to do, and will ultimately work out that way. (As Hitch reminds us: "both Bill Clinton and Al Gore had repeatedly and publicly said that another and conclusive round with Saddam Hussein was, given his flagrant defiance of all the relevant U.N. resolutions, unavoidably in our future.") Even Gitmo can be defended up to a point, with the disclaimer that we've done a piss-poor job of sorting out who actually belonged there from who was caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Meanwhile The Economist cites India, Japan, and Africa as places of diplomatic success.
But domestically Bush was the worst president of my lifetime (even Carter has the mitigating factor of making Reagan possible), and across the board his worst failings went beyond convictions about the right thing to do and into hubris about the right way to do it.
(What else can you call it when someone inexplicably thinks Harriet Miers would make a passable Supreme Court justice, or Mike Brown a passable FEMA head?)
He also spent like a drunken sailor and regulated like a harridan (the prescription drug benefit is the worst of both worlds: massive robbery of the young to prop up the old, yet (apparently) implemented in some fiendishly confusing fashion), yet because of the popular myth that he was in favor of free enterprise (maybe he was in theory), there's still an outside chance that he will have indirectly killed the market as we know it.
(Another point about the importance of a threshold level of competence to good government: The SEC didn't need any new regulation to catch Bernie Madoff; by all rights it should have shut him down with what it already knew and was already empowered to do.)
Anyway, as an antidote to all this, David Frum on how the GOP can dig itself out of the hole that Bush put it into.
I've been thinking a lot about the inauguration ticket snafu, as described here and (much more eloquently) here.
Should we have expected better? On the one hand, this absolutely can be done: For example, at least six times a year over 100,000 people gather at the same place in Ann Arbor, Michigan. You can argue that one more order of magnitude makes the difference, but National Mall has at least ten times the perimeter of (thus in principle you could set up ten times as many entrances as) Michigan Stadium, no? The metal detectors themselves didn't have to be such a limiting factor: airports have (sort of) figured this out, and I infer that not many inauguration ticket-holders brought luggage.
On the other hand, this isn't exactly something one gets a chance to rehearse (to the great sorrow of Justice Roberts), and more importantly these are government employees. I don't mean that as a flippant condescension, what I mean is there's no direct sense of customer accountability and so the incentives aren't lined up to make customer satisfaction the top priority -- so if it's at risk, it basically won't happen.
Most of the George W. Bush presidential retrospectives put the Iraq War as the defining context of his administration, or else September 11 and its aftermath, but I think his presidency (and our reaction to it) is best understood with reference to Hurricane Katrina.
Of course he got massively unlucky that it happened on his watch (and that the New Orleans levees had been neglected for decades: unless you want to believe that he personally weakened them, and/or that he personally wore out the materials in the Minnesota bridge, along the lines of P.J. O'Rourke's sarcastic comment about Ronald Reagan sneaking out of the White House to sell crack), and even unluckier that Ray Nagin and Kathleen Blanco (New Orleans mayor and Louisiana governor) had their heads up their nether regions. Still, once FEMA exists in the first place, it has to be where the buck ultimately stops, and must not be where incompetent political appointees go. Say what you will about federalism in theory; in practice the American people expected better, and weren't entirely unjustified.
Part of this expectations management involves a common sense understanding of the sort of things any government (U.S. or otherwise) will never be able to do with any semblance of competence, and shouldn't be involved with in the first place. Still, there are quite a few services best left to government (every time someone wants to turn libertarians into straw-men, you'll see the litany of fire engines and roads and so on), and a bare minimum threshold requirement is that the people in charge of those have a basic level of operations management competence.
This is as good a time as any to mention my sorrow when I heard a prominent California politician (female, one of the three obvious ones but I forget which one) refer to California getting its "fair share" of any 2009 stimulus package, as though we were all just pigs at the teat. This mentality itself is a major limiting factor on what government can do competently/effectively.
Anyway, the platonic ideal government (which we'll never have, but one can dream!) would adopt something like the Serenity Prayer approach: Anything that absolutely must come from central authority (ironically, emergency response isn't always one of those) gets absolutely done right; anything else the government stays completely out of; "...and the wisdom to know the difference."
Pre-Oath: Feinstein's little speech seems somehow inappropriate. Why does she get to try to set the tone and talk about "necessary" change? As if that's her role on this day, as opposed to the new President's--as if the audience needs that stage directions read to them. It doesn't help that her words are banal. ... 8:52 A.M.
___________________________.
Conservatives I've met in D.C. so far have been near-ebullient, not downcast or bitter. Why? a) They know how unhappy they'd be now if McCain had won; b) Obama has not fulfilled their worst fears, or even second-to-worst fears; c) now they can be an honest, straight-up opposition. .... 8:37 A.M.
Odd side-note: Kaus apparently hand-types underscores to separate some entries. Reminds me of the first few comments in this thread, wherein some engineers rise to the defense of hand-rolled HTML as opposed to DreamWeaver or other proprietary code. The right compromise of course involves one or more of Rails, PHP, JSP, or at the very least some well-chosen stylesheets.
If I hadn't already been familiar with the posts you'll see linked here then I might have been mildly surprised that Google's home page did not commemorate Barack Obama's inauguration. As it stands, I'm not at all surprised since I'm aware of their policy to go out of the way to mark events that are independent of national origin rather than nation-specific events.
Anyway, behold the outrage here and here, versus the silence today from such quarters.
(Conservatives these days have enough legitimate gripes that it annoys me to no end when they fixate on illegitimate ones.)
I'm proud of our president today and happy for his supporters; glad to live in a country where this could happen. The one and only negative thing I will say today involves a specific, perhaps very small group of people:
Americans who claimed to be Canadian (or more likely claimed to claim to be Canadian) until now but starting today are suddenly proud to be American after all. Welcome back to the bandwagon, I guess, but I'm not entirely convinced you're worthy of the mantle you want to reclaim.
(This sounds like a strawman, doesn't it? But this post is in response to an actual Facebook status message - and no, I didn't have the [adjective in the form of a noun] to express these thoughts directly to the poster.)
Fivethirtyeight.com has, of course, shifted in topic a bit since the November 2008 elections. It still focuses on national electoral politics, but without the central mission of prognosticating.
Nate Silver is an outstanding researcher and statistician, who has proven in three different fields (baseball, politics, poker) that he has a mastery of probability theory and can make profitably accurate forecasts. But that very background may hurt his cause when he turns from (the equivalent of) horse races over to policy arguments. (Here I'm referring to his throw-away comment at the end of this post, and also to this post.)
Somebody that good at numeric analysis will naturally be more of a technocrat than an ideologue, but in some ways Nate may be exactly the wrong type of technocrat. He has well-placed faith that he can apply statistical analysis correctly himself; he may very well have misplaced faith in, and vast overestimation of, the ability of people not nearly as smart as him to predict the future and to dictate central policies accordingly.
Ironically that's the least weak element of his own case against Greg Mankiw on tax cuts: The extended (tortured?) metaphor in that exchange involves whether the prescribed cure (tax cuts) has been adequately tested for the context to which they would be applied.
Still, I infer from his posts on the bank bailout and the stimulus package that Nate favors increased government spending as economic policy -- and remember that even if you think of spending in abstract, in practice those dollars have to be spent on something. Here we get the epitome of the idiocy of non-crowds (ad hoc opposite of "wisdom of crowds") and the problems with some central committee basically picking winners and losers (even if that's not the intent, it's the effect) instead of watching the free market do the same thing much more efficiently.
Blah blah blah read this book and and this one etc. (I have no doubt that Nate is familiar with both and long since informed by their central theses.)
As a post-script on the same theme, this post is outstanding (any coherent stimulus-based tax cut plan would be strictly FICA) even though some of the rhetoric involved begs a lot of questions about Republican motivations.
(inspired by the first handful of posts on this Fark thread; what was I thinking when I clicked?)
1. Israel has nuclear weapons. (They kept this purposefully vague for decades until Olmert accidentally admitted it.) If their intentions (and actions) were a fraction as bad as their opponents claim, why would they pussyfoot around when they could end the conflict (in their favor) in seconds?
2. Americans with a favorable opinion of Israel sharply outnumber those with a favorable opinion of Gaza, Palestine, or certainly Hamas. I suspect that almost none of us are getting AIPAC money, and quite a few of us are neither Jewish nor Evangelical.
3. If you, as a government, cannot prevent your citizens from firing mortar shells into the country next door (or if you can but choose not to), the country next door has every right to bring down your regime by the least bloody means that would actually accomplish that much.
Did you know about the new strict liability standards for children's goods, even second-hand stuff sold at thrift or by auction?
Snopes says not to worry (with both a fatuous sentence that includes the phrases "a reasonable interpretation [...] that the agency will focus its attentions on [...] blatantly take a cavalier attitude").
Overlawyered says, yes, you should worry -- and I'd be inclined to agree with Overlawyered.
The criminal standard under the new regs would be STRICT LIABILITY: As far as I know, nobody has ever escaped strict liability prosecution by pointing out that they didn't "blatantly" take on a "cavalier" attitude -- for that matter, I don't think anyone has ever escaped negligence prosecution that way (words like "blatantly" and "cavalier" would relate to a standard of recklessness, which is short of criminal intent but beyond negligence and way, way, way, WAY beyond strict liability).
Snopes postings should be considered harmful, if one were to rely on them for legal advice (the Mickelsons might want to consider judicious use of the "IANAL" acronym; it would be at least as useful as their anti-copy-and-paste annoyance).
Exxon CEO and Climate Alarmist Agree:
--subject line of this Volokh Conspiracy post
Now in the specific case they may both be right (I didn't examine the arguments closely), but you should remember that big business very frequently favor policies that would raise the barriers to entry in their respective fields and kill the little guys going after their market share.
Big Business != free market
So several weeks ago I was going to excoriate a New York Times editorial that existed entirely to attack one man and his surprise hit book.
The premise of the op-ed was that publishing this book crowded out the book market from other, qualified writers, and that the book writer in question shouldn't fancy himself a writer if the columnist himself didn't fancy himself a member of that man's real profession. Accepting this editorial at face value required accepting certain assumptions that I found elitist if not offensive: There is not, for example, a guild of book writers (that I know of) or any form of apprenticeship. Books sell by market demand.
Now a major blog consortium has sent the very subject of that editorial to Gaza to cover the Israel-Hamas war. (You didn't even need the link: If you read some of the same political blogs I do then you've been saturated with the banner ad.) I maintain that anyone can write a best-seller, even a non-fiction best-seller; foreign affairs journalism is quite a different story, no?
And if the point of the exercise is an Everyman scenario (rather than a cheap publicity stunt), why does the attention always have to go to the same Everyman? The question about Obama's tax policy was an excellent question, and Obama's response sadly revealing, but let's get over ourselves already:
If one insists on crowning whoever makes the most brilliant expression of the principles I hold most dear, then shouldn't most of the adulation actually go to the president of Knox Machinery?
(Surprisingly I made it through this post without referring to any Alaska natives - after all, the title refers to "cult heroes" plural - but maybe that's just as well.)
I had of course been following this BART shooting story (since I live around here), and saw this tragic story on CNN via Fark. They are now the subject of back-to-back Reason blog posts, in particular because of this follow-up about Oakland rioting.
Let's start with some first principles that I'd like to think are obvious:
1. If a gunman shoots (and kills) an unarmed man in the back without provocation, that is murder. It doesn't matter what uniform the gunman is wearing.
2. If the gunman is a cop, the definition of "provocation" might very subtly change, but leaning up off the ground to look into the fate of one's mother has to fall short.
3. Both of the above are true regardless of the race of the assailant. I know "A white gunman shot an unarmed black man in the black" sounds all that much more outrageous, but really -- was it not outrageous enough to begin with?
3a. Racial disparity alone is never enough (not even close) to infer racial motive.
4. There is NEVER an injustice to which the correct redress, or correct form of protest, is to loot and/or vandalize the business of an innocent third party.
With that last one in mind, I have a new candidate for worst quote of the decade, and possibly also for "too stupid to live":
"I feel like the night is going great," said Nia Sykes, 24, of San Francisco, one of the demonstrators. "I feel like Oakland should make some noise. This is how we need to fight back. It's for the murder of a black male."
Sykes, who is black, had little sympathy for the owner of Creative African Braids.
"She should be glad she just lost her business and not her life," Sykes said. She added that she did have one worry for the night: "I just hope nobody gets shot or killed."
You may recall my angry response to this Freaknomics post expressing surprise that Americans rioted so infrequently. The short answer is BECAUSE WE KNOW BETTER. At least most of us do. The ones who don't are beyond pathetic.
(Full disclosure: I know the author of the study that this op-ed tries to rebut.)
Suppose you idly wondered: Do virginity pledges actually work? That is, do people who explicitly promise to avoid pre-marital sex behave appreciably differently before their marriage than they would have without such a pledge?
A typical virginity pledger will be less promiscuous than a typical non-pledger, because of the sort of factors that would lead one to make a pledge in the first place. This is easy to find empirically but also not very illuminating because the explanation is so simple.
Of people who come from otherwise almost the exact same background, the ones who take a pledge tend to have about as much sex as -- but a lot more unprotected sex than -- the pledgers.
So everything else about their background is all well and good, but when it comes to a specific decision whether to pledge or not to pledge (i.e. whether to "encourage" your peers, or anyone who sees you as a mentor, to pledge), the pledge itself seems to be counterproductive.
(You can imagine both why the level of sex would be about the same (hormones; youth) and why the level of unprotected sex would be so high (somebody who's ostensibly trying to stay a virgin won't spend much time thinking about protection).)
In any case, the Wall Street Journal link exasperated me because it the point it tried to rebut was not the point the original study made. Indeed the WSJ piece seemed to be undecided about whether it wanted to defend socially conservative youth behavior in general, pledges specifically, or both. (You can -- and should -- treat them as separate things.)
In any given newspaper, there are few things more asinine than journalists bitching and moaning about the down job market for journalists -- as if they were either the only people on Earth, or the most important, or in any case the only people in human history who'd ever gone through what they're going through.
This sentiment is about 100 times as asinine in a comic strip.
1. As best I can tell, the Senate can't refuse to seat him (well, they could, but the correct legal ruling would be against them). I wish they could, but I agree with Eugene Volokh (and others) that they can't.
2. However, there's no reason to take him seriously as a politician. Given the previously unearthed shenanigans it's completely reasonable to assume that his appointment is tainted.
3. Neither of those questions turns on Burris's race, and frankly it saddens me that there are still people who'd base their decision on that.
I found this via Fark, and it was about what I expected it to be given the Fark headline and the URL. ["World Views" is not something I read habitually, or even at all until just now.]
As a brief, quick-read news digest, "World Views" was never intended to be an opinion feature. Nevertheless, admittedly, this reporter-writer's point of view could sometimes be discerned [...]
Given that the first paragraph of substance (after the preamble) begins this way, and several further paragraphs purse the point, I think we can safely infer that World Views did a piss-poor job of hiding the author's opinion!
Just last week, a male reader sent me an e-mail message which said, succinctly: "You idiot."
The gender of the reader is relevant because... ? (The gratuitous reference did lead me to infer, wrongly, that the blogger was female. Then I noticed the "About the Author" box on the right navigation.)
Now, as the failed and costly - in so many ways, to so many people - Bush presidency comes to an end, one can only wonder what all those flag-wavin', Bush-lovin', Bible-thumpin', gay-hatin', my-country-right-or-wrong, war cheerleaders and indefatigable apologists
Two of those adjectives are vastly different from the rest. There are large pockets of Bible-thumpin', gay-hatin' opponents of the Iraq war (they are the reason Proposition 8 lost in California even as Obama won big), and regrettable regrettably (oy, that typo sure makes a big difference in meaning) small pockets of gay atheist hawks.
(As commander in chief of the armed forces, he could call for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops with a single executive order.)
Genocidal consequences be damned, I suppose.
Will Obama have the courage to insist that Democratic law-makers formulate bills aimed at dismantling the reckless, lawless surveillance-industrial complex that has joined the military-industrial complex as one of the biggest, bleed-it-dry profiteers preying on the national treasury?
I had no idea the surveillance-industrial complex was so enmeshed in TARP (or that it made domestic cars).
The good people at the NY Times gave us a free trial of their daily subscription (we're otherwise Sunday-only subscribers), which we recently canceled [before it became unfree], leaving yesterday's paper as our final non-Sunday Times. Two particular columns on the editorial page stood out:
Up, Up, and Go Away was a guest submission by a former flight attendant wistful about bygone days of fantastic service by TWA and PanAm. The dirty little secret, of course (which I'd like to think you all already knew) is that back when airline prices were strictly regulated, the airlines competed on service because that was their only available point of competition. So air travel was this marvelous luxury that most people couldn't afford. Airline price regulation, and even the perks described in the column, were inadvertently an act of class warfare.
Speaking of which, has Bob Herbert ever written a column that wasn't crass ad hominem class warfare bereft of either useful data or coherent thought? Look, bully for UAW for negotiating such great deals for their membership. The car companies, in their infinite wisdom, made those deals, and now they have to live with the consequences. For my purposes, it's not terribly relevant how much the UAW retirement plans contribute to car companies' dire financial straits: What matters is that I, as a taxpayer, was absolutely not a party to these shenanigans and see no reason for my taxes to go to these shenanigans. If you want your company to survive, on my dime, you're going to give some ground* (or just wait around for George W. Bush to screw us all, as he's agonizingly wont to do).
Of course all of the above makes me, in Bob Herbert's eyes, an enemy of the working class. So f'k Bob Herbert -- but Merry Christmas to everyone else.
*- but blah blah blah financial companies blah blah CEOs blah? Everything I would have said about that false parallel, Megan McArdle already said better, chiefly the part about how finance workers don't have any job security (and a whole slew of them just became unemployed). A big chunk of McArdle's argument I can even set aside myself, having vehemently opposed even the bank bailout.
(Looters, too.)
If anything makes me a bad libertarian, I mean aside from the uber-hawkish foreign policy leanings, it would be this knee-jerk (but still 100% serious) reaction.
This Freakonomics post, a follow-up to this asinine previous Freakonomics post (I think the question has a very simple answer, though it's hard for me to phrase the answer without a breathtaking amount of jingoism), reminded me of this recent local news story.
Now thugs (the only reason I don't call them terrorists is the lack of sophisticated weaponry, or sophistication at all) are stupid almost by definition, but could they at least choose a coherent set of targets?
TO DRAW A VERY IMPORTANT DISTINCTION: I have nothing whatsoever against non-violent protests, even sit-ins that happen to tie up traffic (up to a point: I do think the Critical Mass bikers are seriously pushing the envelope and am ashamed of how unsympathetic I'd be if, purely hypothetically, one of them got run over), and am proud that the recent Prop 8 protests passed without incident. (In stark contrast to an incoherent Jack Dunphy (the alias of the former L.A. cop who used to write on National Review On-line a lot, perhaps still does) rant that Pajamas Media published a weeks ago, which I won't even dignify with a link.)
How else would one Dahlia Lithwick completely misconstruing Dick Cheney's words about nuclear counterstrike, or for that matter a large % of Orin Kerr's commenters missing Kerr's own point?
(George Weiss is by far the worst offender.)
What's the worst part of this article?
1. That it exists at all? (Clinton administration officials, of all people, should be estopped from writing "never again" about genocide.)
2. That you can make the case for why this column's existence is offensive without even touching Rwanda? (Remind me, who was it that raised her glass with/to Dear Lear as N. Koreans were undergoing god-knows-what?)
3. That it includes this sentence:
Moreover, a lack of dedicated resources for prevention and the absence of bureaucratic mechanisms allowing rapid analysis and response have impeded timely action.
Damn that absence of bureaucratic mechanisms! Why, with better bureaucratic mechanisms, we could have made so much more progress with Iran. And how ever would we have stopped Saddam Hussein without those bureaucratic... you get the idea.
Even without the knee-jerk partisanship, in all of humanity how frequently do you think "bureaucratic mechanisms" themselves (rather than the absence of such things) "have impeded timely action"?
I have some surprisingly fervent opinions -- usually more surprising to other people than to myself. But I surprised myself with my reaction to (and in particular how long I've held on to that reaction) this Reason profile of Warren Buffet and some of the less than honorable tactics he used to get from wealth to super-wealth.
Anyway he's indirectly back in the news.
Pro tip: If you want to be a good (grand)father, then love and [as you see fit] support all your descendants. If you want to take a stand, cut them all off. Disowning the one who (in your eyes) double-crossed you is just a dick move.
Before we get to that, a thought experiment:
1. Did you follow the same career path as one of your parents? For our purposes, if there's any doubt then the answer is "no."
2. If not, then what was your parents' greatest vocational accomplishment?
3. Now I want you to, with a straight face, apply for a position at most one rung below that, citing your parents' legacy as your most distinctive advantage. (Here's a good example of such an application.) Bonus points if you manage to pull off fawning front-page press coverage from outlets that ought to know better.
OK, where was I? Oh yeah, new single least favorite American figure... and yet it appears I've said everything that needs to be said.
But, as is often the case, my real contempt isn't for the politician in question but for some of the absurdly misguided supporters.
I have to side with the restaurant owner, but then you already know of my rabid support for freedom of [non]contract. If you own a restaurant and happen to dislike dogs, keeping them out of your restaurant shouldn't depend on what religion you belong to.
(Yes, I know full well that blind people rely on seeing-eye dogs. Blah blah reasonable accommodation blah. It amuses me that either way, one accommodation supersedes another.)
This is a surprisingly good idea from an even more surprising source. The byline almost gave me a spit take, while the circumspect "about the author" sentence nearly cracked me up.
I wonder how he feels to be not just out-crooked but out-cussed in the process. (That sentence itself reveals the Achilles heel of the idea.)
1. This fake op-ed indirectly blames Bush for, among other things, the Minnesota Bridge Collapse. (You could make a very tenuous argument that it actually makes fun of other people who blame him for that, but I don't think the onion peels that deep.)
2. "Seems like it was only yesterday that I started my first term despite having actually lost to Al Gore by more than a half million votes."
Many things irk me about some of the revisionist history of the 2000 election*, this one more than most. It's not as if Gore woke up Wednesday morning and suddenly learned "What, what?!? It's only the electoral college that counts?!? WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME?!?" Both candidates knew what it took to win and focused their efforts specifically on that goal.
I'll stop short of any categorical claim that Bush would have won the popular vote in s hypothetical popular vote contest, but you might want to ask yourself: How many more campaign resources might Bush have devoted to California in that scenario? Or Texas? The three most populous states (those and NY) were all ignored in 2000, for opposite reasons.
*- To be fair, the "Gore was robbed!" crowd has some legitimate grievances, mainly the atrocious layout of the Palm Beach ballot and their candidate's decision to try to cherry-pick Florida counties instead of re-recounting the whole state. In the end I think they're wrong but their argument is at least coherent. The "Kerry was robbed" people, on the other hand, are flat-out crazy. (Wikipedia understatement of the day: the neutrality of this article is disputed.)
"That is a do-over that I can't do." (you already saw this; I first saw it here)
As much as I fear some of Obama's economic policy, obviously there are things nobody will miss about the outgoing administration.
(Despite the title I was about to use, only the first one is an op-ed.)
1. This guy just discovered spam filters, which raise false positives to some of the turns of phrase in his newsletter. He thinks he can spin this as a slippery slope (and why not? anything that is new to you, somewhat mysterious, and somewhat inconvenient, MUST have a slippery slope, right?). The particular slope he chooses involves someone choosing to describe the Bush administration as "beastly behavior." (Oh, we all should have suspected how secretly right-wing those Bayesian algorithms are!)
2. The New York Times has discovered that property owners will exercise their property rights in a very perverse way, if that's what it takes to avoid losing their right without any compensation. Jonathan Adler has a good analysis of why perverse incentives can and should be avoided.
Perhaps neither here nor there, but both of these pieces have (as either the author of #1 or he preservationists cited in #2) curator types who are so convicted of the importance of their own work that they discount -- maybe they don't even think of -- the priorities, much less the privileges, of whoever happens to stand in their way.
On #1, for example, I'm well within my privilege to choose to let a set of algorithms dispense with my (likely) junk mail so that I don't waste my time on it. But part and parcel of this "my work is so important! mentality is that the op-ed writer here doesn't think people are smart enough to understand the workings of whatever filter tools they choose to use. (After all, he's a brilliant academic, and if he didn't understand the software...)
Despite my putting the biggest caveat in the title of the post itself, I love the first comment to this post (via Marginal Revolution, where Tyler abstracts away from the economic point to make an astute observation about rhetoric):
please take note of one of the hallmarks of U[nfettered] C[apitalism]: there will be no -- Absolutely NO -- industry lobbyists there. (They'd have nothing to beg for.)
Tyler writes:
When I see people writing sentences of this kind, I imagine them pressing a little button which makes them temporarily less intelligent.
Along these lines I know second-hand that Volokh Conspirator Orin Kerr responded himself to a post I made here (linking to his post) about the Google flu tracking. Today this day I've been too embarrassed to read what he wrote, given how what I posted looks on the screen.
Despite what you may be hearing, we are not asking Congress for a bailout but rather a loan that will be repaid.
--e-mail from "GM Program HQ," subject line "An urgent message to GM owners" (bold in original, italics added)
I'd also love to know how the Center for Automotive Research derived the factoid that "One in 10 American jobs depends on U.S. automakers"
(My position on a Big Three bailout -- including calling it what it is -- should be pretty obvious, right?)
Aside from any economic doctrine or axe to grind, I'm also generally amused that Wells Fargo (web site a few days ago, special message after the log-in page) went out of its way to tell me it's doing fine, while General Motors went out of its way to tell me it's completely screwed.
(Or if you prefer, the specific hard case.)
Via Megan McArdle, a post about how conservatives and libertarians tend to lose arguments they should win, because people overweight direct effects and undervalue indirect effects -- or, more sharply, overreact to the fate of the person they can identify rather than the person they can't identify.
Specific examples of this immediately come to mind, though I'd like to think the first one actually transcends ideological lines:
1. Taxpayer-funded stadiums. Everyone can conceptualize the teams who play there, but too few people understand the marginal effect on taypayers or bother to picture the substitution effect.
2. Alleged voter suppression versus allegedly fraudulent voting. The latter (in theory) would taint an election every bit as much as the former.
Getting back to conservatives and arguments, Megan postulates "Surely on taxes, for example, it works the other way around."
Taxes, yes; deficits and gov't budget balancing, not so much.
(Ah, crazy California voters, could you possibly have been more wrong on a slate of ballot propositions? To be fair, "my" [me personally, not any particular ideology] side carried six of the 12, but the harm of the other six will far outweigh the gain of the six results I liked.)
[To be fair, someone with principled opposition to gay marriage would fervently claim that I overweight the direct effect when I point to the specific couples hosed by the overturn -- to which the only way I could respond would be to claim that they're 100% wrong about the direction the indirect effect would take.]
Google wants to set up a real-time reporting service, telling health officials about places that see a spike in search terms related to flu symptoms.
Orin Kerr, of all people, is hopping mad about this.
What's the most diplomatic way I can put this? Or should I not bother to be diplomatic?
1. When you partake of a good or a service -- say you type terms into a search engine, or you buy a Harry Potter book from your local bookstore -- THERE IS NO PRIVACY RIGHT for you to obfuscate the fact that SOMEBODY engaged in that particular transaction, at that time, at that place.
1a. Depending on whatever contract you make -- if any -- you may reasonably expect it to be kept private that YOU IN PARTICULAR were the one who did that thing at that place and time. But you can't, no way, no how, not on God's green earth, expect it to flush down the memory hole that SOMEBODY DID IT. (In the brick and mortar use case, they have one fewer CD on inventory than they used to have. Well, gosh! I guess that means someone bought that book! OMFG what if other people find out?!?)
2. The possible gain here is almost indescribably good. Diseases spread much less frequently. People healthier. Lives saved. By comparison the perceived harm, the supposed privacy violation, is orders of magnitude smaller than it usually is when these discussions come up.
3. In a world where streakers get put on sex offender registries and SWAT teams go around shooting innocent people's dogs, THIS is what sets (particular) libertarians a-twitter?
Please, for the love of everything, pick your battles and do your best not to be idiots. (Or, much more succinctly, see this comment.)
(Pardon the expression, mom.)
Despite my visceral reaction in each case, as far as I can tell Judge Wu made the right call twice (excluding evidence of Megan Meier's suicide from the Lori Drew case, and excluding a character witness in a medical marijuana case). As the first commenter puts it, "He didn't allow emotional appeals that had no bearing on whether or not the alleged crime was committed."
Along these lines, have I ever mentioned what I hate most about the movie Erin Brockovich? The entire premise is flawed, in that "How much did these families suffer" is legally (and scientifically) useless if you're ostensibly trying to resolve a question of geology.
This is currently #5 on the Telegraph's list of most viewed articles. For it to make journalistic sense, one must accept as fact each of these assertions:
1. That "[Sarah] Palin took it upon herself to question [Barack] Obama's patriotism." The story quotes "irate John McCain aides" for that assertion yet, oddly, doesn't include anything Palin actually said. (Though it has plenty of room to tell us that those advisers "have branded her a 'diva' and a 'whack job.'")
2. That hecklers at Palin rallies shouted "Terrorist" and "Kill him!" I've seen this allegation repeated all over the place, but it says here the allegation is unfounded.
3. That either #1 or #2 would cause a spike in death threats made by white supremacists -- as if Obama being so close to the presidency wouldn't have accomplished that much on its own. (I'm obviously not condoning any of this in the least, but think about it: what's the use case for, even on the margin, a white supremacist to decide that what someone shouts at a rally is the final straw that leads to hatching a plan?)
4. That the Secret Service would not only infer #3 with a straight face, but also present that conclusion as fact to the Obama family.
I think for campaign strategy the Ayers angle was hideously overblown, not least because twits like this Telegraph reporter would write hatchet jobs like the above. That said, this is who Bill Ayers is on the off chance you've forgotten or never knew. Note especially the lead sentence and the singularly ill-timed publication date.
If you had a friend like this, even acquaintance like this, and if you were a candidate for public office who was unwilling to distance yourself from that person's views and actions, then it's perfectly fair game to ask why.
Associating your own personal/political brand with a new puppy, of all things, is sheer genius. The Clintons look like rank amateurs by comparison.
If they do it the right way -- adopt from a shelter, don't buy a vanity dog -- and legions of admirers learn virtue by example -- so much the better.
This could turn into one of those soap operas that teaches Third Worlders to wash their hands and not put up with spousal abuse. (It sounds like a flippant reference but mirth aside I seriously, highly approve of both the subtle message soap operas and the prospect of a wildly popular first family leading by example.)
(as currently implemented)
...latest in a series of goodness gracious I was already just about to post this when I noticed something else.
Well, gosh, some people can never board an airplane uneventfully again (thanks, TSA + crude database mismanagement). Others..
Nine are by the same author (who is indirectly responsible for this thread); this is the other one.
Either you can dismiss this piece out of hand for facile generational stereotypes, or you can roll with it -- and accept most of the same initial premises -- yet still come to the polar opposite conclusion.
(Namely, that a whole lot of pro-Obama posturing itself is "earnest, self-important prattle." There's a reason this Onion video is just resonant enough to be funny.)
I really, really like Barack Obama as a speaker and leader-of-people, and really, really want to like his administration, but I wish his campaign / administration wouldn't keep extending a (figurative) middle finger to my ideological neck of the woods. (I say "keep extending" because of, among other things, the actual substance of his Denver speech, not to mention the "spread the wealth" exchange that put J the P on the map to begin with.)
Rahm Emanuel was one thing, but for pete's sake, RFK Jr.?
(Please follow the links, especially the second, to understand why I think these [potential] appointments are an abomination.)
Something that occurred to me just now:
Why were so many diehard McCainiacs screaming at him to invoke Jeremiah Wright, as opposed to screaming at him to invoke Tony Rezko? Wouldn't the latter fit in much better with McCain's anti-corruption branding?
(For several days now I'd forgotten Rezko existed. Given my leanings and awareness that has to be a catastrophic message failure, no?)
1. Fantastic speech.
2. I'm still so, so glad it wasn't (Hillary) Clinton.
3. If you see the world the way I see it, a tremendous silver lining exercise: Think of all the differences between Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. I predict that on at least 80% of them you'll consider Obama to be the better of the two.
3a. On that note, Democrats have had two rock star caliber politicians in my lifetime. Depending on how much of the Reagan era you assign to me (sure I was alive, but five when he took office and 13 when he left) Republicans have had zero or one. Sadly this will still be true for awhile.
(I reserved judgment on Palin for a long time but she lost me about a week ago with her First Amendment comments.)
The unfortunate paradox is that there's no sound reason for a brilliant young libertarian-oriented Republican to go into politics, when she could just start her own company instead, with the average expected outcome that she earns more money and improves the world further than had she run for office.
Yes, at first glance this would seem to work. The law is completely on your side, as it was with us, and even common sense is on your side (for us it was at best a tossup). But don't go there: PR disaster awaits.
Much Love,
The RIAA
(Incidentally, this is why Dahlia Lithwick's "nobody has ever been prosecuted for it" point was bogus, and cynically so: Who in their right mind would pursue that kind of prosecution, especially now that we've seen the loss of goodwill that the RIAA brought on itself?)
I was barely out of bed this morning when both Google and Facebook hectored me to go vote. (Despite the verb choice there, I strongly support how both sites did it.)
Four years ago I had to scramble to figure out my polling place: couldn't find the Election Guide (how many trees die for these?), stumbled around the Contra Costa County web site, maybe even went to the wrong place (because my 2004 precinct wasn't the same as the 2003 Gray-becomes-Arnold recall thing even though my address was the same). This year Google featured a Google Maps link to get your polling place from your address: Mine was the same as in 2006.
My polling place is someone's garage. In a perfect world all polling places would be someone's garage. Not schools, not nursing homes, certainly not churches. Anyway, I walked there. 10 a.m., no line.
One volunteer asked for my address, and marked me off a roll sorted by address; another overhead my name and marked me off a separate roll sorted by name. Good system. This cuts down on a lot of potential fraud; not all, of course, but a lot.
We use optical scan ballots (at least I think that's the right term), where you take any dark pen and connect the middle third of an arrow. The best physical voting medium, bar none: Voting machines are both gratuitous and fraught (whether they be mechanical or electronic), touch screens are even more fraught (not to mention an engraved invitation for the next flu epidemic), while punch-cards and chads need no further introduction.
I was thoroughly prepared on every state question but woefully on the spot for every city/county question not to mention every city/county race. I voted for zero Libertarians, and was surprised/disappointed that only one partisan race even had one (sorry, Barr/Root, I did briefly consider you a long time ago).
My friend Corwyn has advanced the message to stupid people theory (one of many possible theories to approach the same question from several angles) regarding the choice between an underdog major-party candidate and a third-party candidate: If you don't like the favored candidate, you'd probably prefer a 51-48-1 margin instead of a 51-45-4 margin because unthinking people will interpret the latter as a landslide (thus a "mandate": ah, those days of yore when Republicans would win elections and talking heads would fall all over themselves to insist in as many words "This is not a mandate": did you ever know anyone who tried to use that word affirmatively?), yet not the former, even though the favorite got just as many votes either way.
If I were benevolent dictator I would banish Sean "The Guy Who Isn't Nate Silver" Quinn from FiveThirtyEight.com -- I would also put every Volokh Conspiracy contributor whose surname isn't Volokh on double-secret probation. Actually I'd let Orin Kerr, Randy Barnett, and Ilya Somin stick around, but terminate with extreme prejudice every Dave/David other than Kopel.
Which collaborative blogs would you prune, and who'd get the ax?
(As previously seen on this blog: Yes on 5, Yes on 11, no on the rest. None of the bond issues convinced me; both of the environmental questions seem to be boondoggles, as does the high-speed train; and I support neither harsher drug penalties nor abortion notification.)
As copied and pasted from my comment to Corwyn's comment to my Facebook status:
Both the pragmatist and the libertarian in me say no on 2 (the former for the same reasons Corwyn explained [essentially that Undecided should mean No -MLB]), but I have to wonder how much animal cruelty is too much. And "we're doing it to make money" is hardly a defense. :-) Meanwhile, although I perhaps should be swayed by the "this would just bankrupt the California companies and the neighboring states would still do the same thing" point, I can't imagine buying that argument regarding (for example) an anti-slavery question in the 1850s. Either the practices in question are unconscionably cruel or they're not. I'm still on the fence about that, but very close to trusting the Humane Society's judgment. (Now if the signature advocate were, say, PETA, it'd be a different story.)
I wish I were wrong, but I'll put the prediction out there anyway because I've come to believe that's what will happen.
One particular Hall of Fame candidate might have surprised some people.
...about his lack of media coverage.
I wonder if he's also still upset with the officiating in the 2002 NBA Western Conference final. (UPDATE: Yes, he is.)
Wow, this Google search has this as its #1 result. My head hurts: I think the guy was serious.
Militant atheist Richard Dawkins (who is also one of the ten most condescending people on Earth) intends to look at the effects of "bringing children up to believe in spells and wizards".
Oh, how dare we develop our imaginations. Ten years from now I can picture him accosting random five-year-old boys: "That's not really a gun, it's obviously just your thumb and index finger."
The comments on the link are priceless.
This Nate Silver post probably makes good horse sense, but is no less depressing.
Can you think of an intuitively obvious reason why someone who believes in the American Dream wouldn't think to use a phrase like "middle class" (or "[insert adjective here] class")?
Hint: America is, in theory, a classless society. Yes, different people will earn different incomes in a given yet, but the whole idea is that this is very mutable.
You can tell who does[n't] get this first principle by how they react to Joe Wurzelbacher (whom Silver dismisses as a "gimmick"). Obama followers point out that Obama's tax policies would have resulted in his paying less on his 2008 income -- completely missing the point of his question!
He's interested in buying a particular business. Maybe he'd decide it was worth the risk, maybe he'd decide it wasn't. If he did go through with it, maybe it would succeed, maybe it would fail. Obama's tax policies would make it incrementally more likely to fail, and anyone who understands this (and anyone who's thinking of starting a business ought to understand the finances behind their business) would be incrementally less likely to try.
So we have business that may or may not get started in the first place, and that may or may not survive. Really we have these thousands of business plans, some of which might be pursed, some of which might actually work. Every one of those that actually survives is some number of employees hired, some amount of goods and services added to the world, some level of prosperity on the margin. Every one of those that would have made it, but doesn't, is corresponding fewer goods, services, and jobs.
With so many things in the world connected now, on the margin there's a rough conversion factor where the difference between N successful small businesses and N+i is, indirectly, the difference between some Third World child staying alive or starving to death.
The best reason not to pander, not to use phrases like "middle class," is that there's no need for us to settle for our current lot in life.
Anyway, I fundamentally object to the original poll question, which apparently asks voters to claim that Obama's or McCain's economic policies are "most favorable" to at most one of "Rich"/"Middle Class"/"Poor." If you insist on phrasing it that way then, yes, I'd be required to pigeonhole McCain to "Rich" and Obama to "Poor," even though I think all three pigeonholes worth of people would be better with McCain.
For the love of pete, you (we) are so doing it wrong!
Who ever expected the GOP to become the party of Tawana Brawley hoaxes, or worse yet if-so-and-so-wins-I'm-moving-to-Canada temper tantrums?
(Both brought to my attention via Instapundit, sorry I didn't bother with hot-linking specific posts.)
While we're here ranting, obligatory Alan Greenspan reactions: Megan McArdle; Nick Gillespie (Reason).
The only thing I can add is a piece of bitter irony: prior to September 2008 the most catastrophic mistakes anyone made in this whole mess involved vastly underestimating their risk -- the borrower's risk that the price of his house wouldn't keep magically going up, and more importantly the risk that these mortgage bundles would have a much higher default rate than anyone expected.
Now put yourself in the shoes of some of these risk-takers: What happens to them if they succeed? Untold riches! But what if they fail? Ruin Bailout! -- if you're "too big to fail" then as a general rule you're well aware of that status and will swing certain appendages accordingly. "Free market," my [certain other body part]!
Sadly it does cut both ways. I already knew Rick Renzi was a Republican, but you'd never know from this article.
Bank employees dishing out loans to people with no visible means of repayment? (Or for that matter borrowers themselves foolish enough to take out those loans -- as far as I can tell no mortgage or re-fi has ever been done at gunpoint, unless you count the next bailout plan itself.)
Obviously it was all Alan Greenspan's fault.
"Dow sinks 514 on louder warnings of a recession (AP) "
--one of the Top Stories headlines in the news box that's inexplicably now part of the Yahoo! Mail UI
But wait... as of several months ago if you didn't give lip service to the (technically incorrect) notion that we were already in a recession, the political activists would chew you up and spit you out. (And woe befall anyone who dared to tell whiners that they were whining.)
I hope economic news of the last few weeks will put some of those complaints from a few months ago in perspective. (My meta-complaint also applies to people who a few years ago would complain that $1.50 gas was outrageous.)
You'll recall a few days ago I excoriated Dahlia Lithwick for a Slate column that one could basically summarize as: "McCain supporters are overreacting to alleged vote fraud, inasmuch as vote fraud never happens."
Now comes Jack Shafer to argue that McCain supporters are overreacting precisely because vote fraud is historically so rampant.
So c'mon guys, which one is it?
Shafer's narrowest, most direct point is correct -- that any allegation of the worst fraud in U.S. history is unwarranted hyperbole -- but as a general rule pointing out that past elections have been stolen far more egregiously is cold comfort to anyone with a reasonable good-faith belief that this election were about to be stolen.
(Note the subjunctive were. My best guess is that Obama will do well enough that theft would be unnecessary. But even fraud that doesn't swing the election would still be fraud, and should be investigated as such.)
...and not just as a hedge.
Some misguided soul was inflating the McCain futures on Intrade.
The Freakonomics Blog (without attributing a specific author) asks, Will market manipulation for political candidates become the norm as ever-wealthier campaigns try to control the news cycle?
Gosh, I hope so. More money for the rest of us. (At least, I find individual speculators to be a worthier money recipient than local TV stations or newspapers.)
For a long time my blink estimate was Obama with 75% probability -- even during the McCain convention bounce. But now that he's projecting to much more than a 75% chance, I still see no reason to bet on him as any more than a 9-to-1 favorite. So who knows, maybe there's arbitrage somewhere between me and a hypothetical person who took fivethirtyeight.com as gospel.
(When they want to believe as much.)
I share the Kausfiles skepticism about just how much impact would result from Colin Powell endorsing Obama. (I'll go him one further in that I'm surprised by how many people were actually surprised by this. Maybe it's the Michael Scott in me, but I'd just assumed Powell had been in the Obama fold already. Hey, if it's reasonable mandatory to assume that Prince George's County is unanimously pro-Obama...)
Anyway I liked this line:
"Boil across You Tube"? It's not even boiling across HuffPo. It's not, you know, compelling viewing. Maybe if you put some cats in it.
Meanwhile, a silly question: Why not just tie voter registration into the passport process?
Quick notes on the pros and cons:
1. What problem is this intended to solve?
Alleged voter fraud; alleged voter suppression/intimidation; but most of all the deadweight loss from all the duplicated effort. We already have a bunch quasi-identity systems, including but not limited to passports, driver's licenses, and income tax forms.
For this exercise I ruled out driver's licenses because it already deeply offends my sensibilities that people have overloaded so many ID functions onto what ought to signify no more or less than "I can operate a motor vehicle."
Against interest I also ruled out tax forms, because you can imagine how differently people would vote if they were voting when they were taxed. (I certainly think this would yield better results; your mileage may vary!)
2. Why should people have to get a passport just to vote?
Well, why should they have to do anything to vote? Even finding your precinct can be a pain in the butt. Of course this is just balancing inconvenience to the voter (many of whom would -- or should, he claimed snobbishly -- already have a passport anyway) with fraud prevention and deadweight loss prevention.
2a. The cost of a passport: Wouldn't that amount to a poll tax?
Even aside from voting, I already find the cost of a passport to be unconscionably high given the purpose a passport serves. Maybe the cost of zeroing out those fees would exceed the intended benefit, but it's at least worth analysis.
2b. Wouldn't this mean we'd need a new passport every time we move, even if we move like half a mile?
Well, yes, just like every time we move we (assuming we remember to) give the Post Office a change of address form. And aren't we (in theory) supposed to get new driver's licenses every time we move?
2c. Wouldn't this have the effect of screening out a bunch of poor, marginalized voters? Cry me a river, at least if the sole reason for that effect is people not bothering to get a document they already ought to have. Given how much effort people already put into "get out the registration" drives, why wouldn't a "get your passport NOW if you want to vote!" campaign mostly neutralize this effect?
3. Why overload a document whose primary purpose is international travel?
Precisely because it's THE piece of documentation most recognized around the world. And I'd argue that even though in practice you use it to travel, what an American passport symbolizes most is "I am an American." Voting is a whole lot more relevant to being American than it is to operating a motor vehicle.
3a. Why should my passport care about my party affiliation?
Why should my local voting precinct care about my party affiliation? Since when it is a good idea for any given state government to be vested in (and more importantly, to subsidize) the way a particular party chooses its candidates for a particular office? In theory I like primaries far more than caucuses, but in practice I just don't see running a party primary as a proper government function.
3b. Why should my passport care what precinct I'm in?
It wouldn't; strictly speaking it would only contain your address. Address_to_Precinct would be a separate layer of the best model.
3c. Why should a federal document have any relevance to a state election?
The second-best (in my opinion) argument against passport as voter registration/ID is that it involves federal meddling into a (mostly) state process. Sure, the big headlines are for presidential races (or Congress), but most of the votes one casts are for state officials, city officials, or yes/no on ballot questions. So all the theoretical arguments about federalism apply: If every state did things the same way, we wouldn't have (for example) Oregon's "all votes by mail" as test case for the other states to follow or ignore.
4. Aren't there already fake passports floating around?
This would be relevant if the model were strictly that you showed a passport to vote. But what I'm proposing is that the voter rolls be generated entirely by the data the State Department has on passport issuance/renewal. The geocoding would be harder than this sentence otherwise makes it out to be, but the right query would just be all living people over 18, grouped by the precinct in whose boundaries the passport address lies.
Now this does mean passport status would need a 100% reliable "so-and-so died" event handler. But as it stands the voter rolls handle that use case notoriously badly given how common it is (we all die eventually).
5. How on Earth would we get there from where we stand now?
I expect this point alone torpedoes the exercise, which is kind of a shame. In all sorts of contexts this is a point people don't think about enough -- but then it's also the reason why air traffic control still uses antiquated mainframes despite the orders of magnitude better technology we could be using if we only figured out the right transition path.
Whenever there's a reference to news about Acorn voter registration people being indicted for fraud (here for example), typically someone will mention that technically the defrauded party was Acorn itself. Technically, that's correct as far as it goes.
Given how they run their operation, though, is it even faintly plausible that fake registrations would take them by surprise? If all the fake registrations were really harmless, and weren't a backdoor to fraudulent voting, then you might ask yourself what incentive Acorn would have to generate (indirectly, of course?) so many bad registrations.
I realize that the obvious answer is that fake registrations are no skin off Acorn's nose, and that their sweatshop-style quotas might just be the best way to maximize the number of genuine registrations. But even there, the fakes are imposing a massive externality on the state boards that (in theory) are supposed to process the real registrations and filter out the fakes.
So is the real takeaway from "Joe the Plumber" that when a presidential candidate comes calling, you should just nod and smile (or even close the drapes turn the lights out)?
1. A man who's spent years fixing peoples plumbing, and who now aspires to own a plumbing business of his own, is at home minding his own business.
2. Barack Obama comes calling.
3. Well, now that Obama's here, it turns out this guy has a major concern about that hike on any income above $250,000 per year: Yes, any given person making that much might be "rich," but for a small business it's peanuts.
4. Instead, Obama exhorts him to "spread the wealth."
5. Video of the incident becomes one of the hottest things on-line.
6. McCain name-checks "Joe the Plumber" in a debate. (To be fair there's a bit of exploitation here -- but the lefty pundits who are in a tither about this really really need to separate their attacks on the McCain campaign from their attacks on the random guy from Toledo.)
7. All of a sudden: OMFG he doesn't have a license! (So the City of Toledo refuses to call him a plumber. I have no idea what the people whose plumbing he fixed might call him.)
OMFG he hasn't (yet) bought the business, he merely intends to. (But of course the Obama tax plan would be just fine for where he is now, and as long as he never aspired to something bigger... but why would you aspire to something bigger when "spread the wealth" is the operative meme?)
OMFG his first name isn't actually Joe. (How dare he go by his middle name and end up being subject to a 2% catchier moniker than "Sam the Plumber"!)
For what it's worth I didn't actually watch the debate; most of what I know (from least recent to most recent) is here, here, here, here, and here.
1. The fact that one theoretically could be prosecuted for vote fraud is evidence that vote fraud must not be widespread.
2. But the fact that very few people actually have been prosecuted for vote fraud also is evidence.
Even better: "As Rick Hasen has demonstrated, here at Slate and elsewhere, even if Mr. Mouse is registered to vote, he still needs to show up at his polling place, provide a fake ID, and risk a felony conviction to do so." (emphasis added)
Given the massive hue and cry about the Indiana voter ID law and Supreme Court decision, I'm glad to see "they have to see an ID" is now part of the move-on-nothing-to-see-here debate, though it would be a lot more plausible if states (other than Indiana) actually did require ID.
Lithwick also goes on to assert that "Each time they spread the word that Democrats are poised to steal an election, John McCain and his overheated friends deliberately undermine voter confidence. That is the point." Strangely, I've never seen anyone attempt to make that argument about people with voting machine paranoia (who generally do have a good point), nor about the people who got all frothy about Ohio 2004 (who generally didn't have a good point).
So you may have heard about Tim Mahoney, the successor to Mark Foley, who now has a sex scandal of his own. Now, not to harp on media slants, but a particular detail about Mahoney was reported so... subtly, let's just say... that for quite awhile I falsely assumed he too was Republican.
As did the second person to post to this thread.
"We got into this crisis because power was overly concentrated relative to knowledge. What has been going on for the past several months is more consolidation of power."
--Arnold Kling
In any case, Freakonomics has a good guest post today explaining what's going on.
For what it's worth I think whenever you're in doubt about a ballot proposition you should vote no: The burden of proof is on the wannabe law to justify its existence. And if the proposition would amend a constitution, the burden of proof is even higher.
Having read up on them, I advocate a Yes to Proposition 11 (the anti-gerrymandering one) but a No to the rest.
On further review, the anonymous commenter (who I'm 99% sure is Chad) makes a good point. Pending further research I'm now leaning toward yes on prop 5 (reduced drug penalties).
1A. Arnold's (et al) electric train boondoggle. If it's that great an idea, auction off the rights to do it. Why expose taxpayer money (indirectly, via bond issue) to the entire loss?
2. "Chief opponents -- egg producers -- argue that without tight cages, their chickens will eat each other and their own droppings. "
3. $980 million - for children's hospitals. I assume this will pass by a wide margin, but what do I know?
4. Parental notification for a minor to get an abortion. I'm strongly opposed to this because if we stipulate, for the sake of argument, that the pregnant woman's right to bodily autonomy trumps the fetus's right to live, then I don't see any way the woman's age could change that evaluation. "You can kill your kid with impunity if you're 18, but not a moment sooner?" - just too inconsistent for me.
5. "Mandates probation..." - this briefly tempted me (you know how soft on crime I am), but any law with the words "mandates [some maximum or minimum sentence]" is very likely to cause gross injustice on the edge cases.
6. Anti-crime programs, with the added bonus of spending mandates. Spare me.
7. Some environmental regulation that even a bunch of small-time enviros oppose.
8. Needs no introduction. The California state constitution is what it is: You can try to spin verbs like "restore" or "maintain" all you want, but Jerry Brown is right. This proposition would take an existing right and get rid of it.
9. Crime victims' rights amendment. Pass.
10. Bonds for T. Boone Pickens. He seems to have plenty of money as it stands.
11. Take redistricting out of the hands of legislative incumbents. Almost a no-brainer, right? (The fact that Californians repeatedly reject this notwithstanding.)
12. Veterans access to low-interest mortgages. So I hear states are getting truckloads of money from Uncle Sam to fix whatever's wrong with the housing market anyway.
Based on a true story (requires Adobe Reader or some other program that can open PDFs).
["Legisprudence" = fancy way to refer to judges usurping the role of a legislative body.]
Now that's not literally what a 90-day moratorium on foreclosures means, but it might as well be.
I have a FANTASTIC idea: Given that the ENTIRE reason why our economic system is on the brink of collapse is that some lenders have potentially bad debts on their books (only about 2% of the potential bad apples really are bad, but good luck finding out which is which!), why not just kick those same institutions in the crotch by taking away the only collateral those loans have?
I should read Eric S. Raymond's blog more often. For example, here he rebuts an alarmingly widespread meme about Sarah Palin [that on social issues she's a right-wing extremist]:
One can then at least ask the question "Where is Palin with respect to that median?" I’m in an interesting position to address that question, because on pretty much all of the hot-button "culture wars" issues I have radical positions opposed to Palin's but nevertheless believe on good evidence that her position is closer to the median than mine.
When you see random non-political writers (a baseball column here, a real estate blogger there) run the same political joke into the ground, the least one could expect is that the meme actually be true... ESR strongly suggests that it's not true, and I agree with him.
(Unlike ESR, I'm not arguing "against interest," but I'd like to think I'd find his argument convincing even if I agreed with him on the social issues in question.)
I expected that reading this article would outrage me about the sheriff's decision (to put a moratorium on law-enforced Cook County foreclosure evictions) -- yes I'm that cold and heartless, but you understand how this would violate any categorical imperative (unless you want to see property rights abolished, which I certainly don't), right? -- but instead these things, among others, outrage me:
"[J]udges around the country had taken other steps to slow foreclosure proceedings, like requiring lenders to produce titles proving they owned the properties in question."
Am I to understand that some police carried out evictions WITHOUT lenders' proof of title? How is that not begging for widespread fraud? Throw the book at everyone involved in any proceeding that cut this particular corner.
"[F]amilies in foreclosed properties were often not notified that they would have to leave, and were not given this [90-day] grace period [to which Chicago renters are now entitled]. Sometimes their first sign of trouble was the appearance of deputies at the door, demanding that they leave."
Any sort of castle doctrine (think of those kooks who want the right to shoot someone for trespassing -- and so help it, I'm one of those kooks) has to include a grace period (even just enough time to pack) for anyone kicked out of their primary residence. Otherwise life imitates the end of Fiddler on the Roof.
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."
So I have to take a step back and admit that in two different contexts people who think like me come dangerously close to wanting it both ways:
Does the labeling and marketing of Mike's Hard Lemonade create a likelihood of harmful confusion?
When the consequence of the question is whether government agencies get to regulate the product [further], we tend to say no. Yet in this case, when it's about the actions of a father who inadvertently bought his kid alcohol, we're tempted to say yes, he just got confused, anyone could have.
Obviously those positions can't both be 100% right.
The hand-waving (or, if you prefer, measured common sense) solution is that, yes, there's a tiny chance that Mike's Lemonade could confuse someone (just as one might confuse Long Island iced tea with iced tea proper), but not enough of one to justify government action; meanwhile, the dad who bought his kid a Mike's Hard Lemonade did something stupid, but not nearly stupid enough to justify having his kid taken away from him for a week.
What Obama wishes he could say:
"Thrown off his game by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright uproar, Barack Obama’s strongest answer to Hillary Rodham Clinton is one he won’t give: Senator, do you really want to get in a contest with me over who has more unsavory personal associations? "
(via Jim Lindgren's post to Volokh Conspiracy)
Apparently Rush Limbaugh and I fervently support opposite Democratic candidates for (in part) the same ulterior motive: He seems to be under the impression that Clinton would be easier to defeat than Obama in a general election. If that's true (it's probably not: I've probably gotten the wrong idea from second- and third-hand retelling), that's crazy-talk!
The unsavory Clinton associations, and uncanny ability of the Clintons to wield personal power, feed off of each other.
Myopic leftism can (as necessary) be reigned in by branches of government and by the reality on the ground. (Obama may have some strange ideas, but he's not stupid.) That's not quite so true of corruption.
This doesn't really fit in well with my general belief that politicians will succeed more (and ought to succeed more) by recognizing the inherent goodness of this country, its people, its founding principles, etc. But it needs to be said:
America -- WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?
Why do you destroy families for lack of common sense?
How can you fail to understand even the simplest budget-balancing principles?
Why do so many of you fall back on "There ought to be a law" when the far greater problem is almost always, "There ought NOT to be a law"?
Without any prior knowledge of the issue at hand, I saw the title of this post ("The Vogue Cover Controversy:") and the image in question (direct link) without scrolling further. The problem wasn't immediately obvious to me but after a few seconds I had a good guess that turned out to be exactly right.
(If I hadn't known "this cover is controversial" I probably wouldn't have drawn the connection.)
So the furor is probably exaggerated but at least not completely out of left field (compare to Orlando Patterson's NY Times op-ed somehow divining racist undertones from, of all things, the original Hillary 3 a.m. ad).
Here verbatim is Richard's open letter to his representative (my own version would read "Dear Mr. Stark"):
Dear Mr. Waxman,
I am writing as one of your constituents to register my total opposition to Barney Frank’s mortgage bailout plan, and any other plan to use tax dollars to rescue housing lenders and borrowers from financial difficulty of their own making.
Unsustainable mortgages of the type addressed by the Frank plan could never have occurred without willful negligence and a degree of deception on both sides of the table. Such reckless borrowers and lenders deserve each other perfectly. What they do not deserve is one thin dime of taxpayer money once they find they have double-crossed each other.
Although the Frank plan is represented as aiding borrowers, in reality it would enable lenders to offload bad mortgages for 85% of the home’s supposed value. Of course, lenders will only accept this deal because in their estimation the mortgages are worth even less than that. So when the Financial Services committee supposes that only 1-2% of the new FHA mortgages will default, they are displaying much the same willful financial obtuseness as the original lenders did.
I have heard Barney Frank acknowledge that his plan will rescue the imprudent and undeserving, but he justifies this on the grounds that “the economy” will suffer without a bailout. As you know, Los Angeles has a high percentage of renters, and also many homeowners who did not gamble recklessly and dishonestly in the housing market. We too are part of “the economy.” For us to see our taxes go up or our government’s deficit increased, while the federal government blithely underwrites the worst loans made by the most imprudent lenders to the least responsible borrowers, would be the most perverse policy I can imagine.
Please safeguard the public purse from Barney Frank’s costly, immoral bailout plan.
Regards,
Hey, remember when white people rioted over the O.J. Simpson verdict? You don't? Oh, right, nobody actually rioted. Nobody threatened to shut down a city.
Twelve people-supposedly-like-you-and-me (though statistically likely to be a bit dumber) will sometimes come to really goofy unexpected conclusions. What on Earth anyone else is supposed to do about this is beyond me. Except maybe to pay the publicity whores the "hey look at me!" tax.
Aside to Barack Obama: Hey, tired of being smeared by your association (tenuous or not) with various lefty kooks? Now's your perfect opportunity; you know exactly what to do and whom to rebuke.
An exercise for people who read lots of political blogs:
Find someone who expressed a strong opinion about the firing Ward Churchill, yet also expressed a strong opinion the other way about the Berkeley tenure of John Yoo.
(For my part: I strongly defend Yoo's tenure and don't believe anything he did at the White House is sufficient to make his tenure revocable. Churchill, as I understand the story (my understanding may be flawed), got caught lying about his past scholarship. To be sure, the real reason people wanted him fired was his anti-American screeds, but on its face he was kicked out for being a fraud. I claim my positions are consistent; your mileage may vary.)
"I am happy that I am divorced now. I will be able to go back to school."
--the eight-year-old (emphasis added) whose father put her into an arranged marriage. AFP via Google News, Althouse, and Instapundit.
You know me: I'm rarely sympathetic to tort plaintiffs, at least compared to most people. But this seems like a pretty good proximate cause case to me.
The chain of events is spelled out more clearly here:
1. The original woman buys hamster at PetSmart.
2. Hamster allegedly infects new owner with LCMV, a rodent-borne viral infectious disease.
3. The original owner then dies of unrelated stroke.
4. Dead owner’s organs are transplanted into various recipients including Thomas Magee, who has a liver transplant at Massachusetts General Hospital in April 2005.
5. Magee contracted LCMV and dies.
I'd be a sympathetic juror. It's actually pretty hard to find a tort case where I'd be a sympathetic juror, but this would be one.
"Instead of watching to prevent crime, motorized police patrol became a process of merely waiting to respond to crime."
(emphases in original)
--from Cop in the Hood, via Marginal Revolution
Many years ago Tulsa got a new police chief who touted a novel-sounding concept called "community policing": That is, put cops in the neighborhoods, on the streets, so that people who lived there got to know them etc. I never understood why such a seemingly obvious plan aroused such fervent opposition.
(The loudest critics gave me the impression that they'd just as soon jail 'em all and let God sort 'em out.)
I'm too lazy to check the archives, but I believe I predicted Gore as Obama's obvious running mate in January. The latest news.
"The only position higher than a Cabinet post is vice president. While Obama seemed to dangle that possibility in his answer Wednesday, he has repeatedly said it is far too early to discuss potential vice presidents because the nomination has not been won."
Coincidentally, the ad I see on the page is one of those fake polls: "Should Hillary quit?"
"It is also not clear that Gore, who had the job for eight years under Bill Clinton, would even want to be a vice president again."
Oh yes he would. You can take the man out of the wonk but you can't take the wonk out of the man.
Meanwhile, despite my intent to vote for John McCain, I must say I'm excited by literally none of his most plausible running mate choices. Some of them frighten me (I still worry that McCain will take Huckabee out of a misapprehension that this shores up his conservative base, combined with gratitude for Huckabee focusing 100% of his attack on Romney), others just leave me cold.
The best thing one can say about McCain's running mate is that whoever it is, won't be Dick Cheney.
A NY Times op-ed contributor apparently had a recent 2.5-hour interview with Robert Mugabe. The result is this shatbit-crazy editorial.
Sure, he's plunged his country into poverty and is directly responsible for the starvation of millions. But why not engage him? Why not try reasoning with him.
Keep right on thinking that way.
Today, two posts in a row here are worth comment:
1. I strongly agree: Get rid of the penny AND the nickel. Or at the very least replace them with a design that costs far, far less to mint.
2. Philanthropic fraud?! Who knew? Well, I knew, but that's just because my knee-jerk impulse is to associate charitable trust mavens with Ayn Rand villains. Also blah blah United Way blah.
Reason's bog, of all sites, posts an approving link to a this Washington Post op-ed.
There's potentially slippery slope: You already know full well that I don't intend to pay any attention to the 2008 games (unless they're moved out of the PRC) and might actually choose to avoid Olympic sponsors (depending on how much of a pain that would be to pull off).
But please, don't use the word "boycott." In this realm, "boycott" is what Jimmy Carter forced U.S. athletes to do in 1980 (and the Soviets forced their athletes to do in 1984).
Don't even think about preventing athletes from attending. THEY'VE TRAINED FOUR #&@(& YEARS for this. (It may not but just about the competitors, but it is about them at least in part.)
All that said, I'm quite gratified that people recognize the monstrosity coming out of Beijing. A few days ago I called them "totalitarian clowns," and I'll stick with that epithet.
Stereotypically, you'd think of liberals as in favor of "international law" and conservatives as fearing and loathing same.
For punitive damages there might be a switcheroo effect.
This post claims: "[T]he FBI has taken it upon itself to arrest people in pre-dawn raids for what they say is the crime of clicking the wrong link."
That would be horrible if true; Declan McCullagh's original article seems to suggest it's true, yet that contradicts what I'd already read in Orin Kerr's post on the topic.
In Kerr's reading, "the FBI has begun using fake hyperlinks to alleged child pornography images to build cases in child porn investigations" -- and "The key question is whether clicking on a link constitutes probable cause to search a home."
(For what it's worth, I think it's obvious that there are many cases where simply clicking a link is probable cause to suspect you possess child porn, but equally obvious that simply clicking a link should never be in itself a prosecutable act.)
And yet, from the original article:
"Vosburgh faced four charges: clicking on an illegal hyperlink; knowingly destroying a hard drive and a thumb drive by physically damaging them when the FBI agents were outside his home; obstructing an FBI investigation by destroying the devices; and possessing a hard drive with two grainy thumbnail images of naked female minors (the youths weren't having sex, but their genitalia were visible)."
He was convicted on the first count (clicking the hyperlink) and the last (having images of naked minors). Given the description of those images, I suspect that they swayed the jury to convicting him at all.
Matt Welch's New York Times op-ed is bracing.
Along those lines, Mickey Kaus is wary of one pro-Obama argument. Kaus quotes Jonathan Alter: "The hard part [of the presidency] is using the bully pulpit to instruct and illuminate and rearrange our mental furniture." Kaus describes that as "four years of insufferable pedagogic condescension."
I'd be alarmed if Clinton were the major candidate most likely to just live and let live. She isn't, though none of the three are anywhere near ideal.
Some say this is heartless corporate greed; I say it's legal malpractice, and the "family lawyer" responsible for the cockup should be disbarred for epic failure.
*-behind Mugabe's Zimbabwe
No live Olympic broadcasts? Feh.
Seriously, it's not too late to move the Games to a real country, i.e. not one led by totalitarian clowns.
Just to be clear, I absolutely DO NOT want a boycott: The only think accomplished by a boycott is to hose the athletes. But I also absolutely shall not watch any Olympic coverage (in whatever form), and am ambivalent the extent to which I will actively avoid the products and services of this year's Olympic sponsors.
Idly curiosity, to what extent does the IOC (or the Beijing regime itself?) have a business presence in the U.S.? If NBC wanted its money back, and if I were on a jury...
This is abject stupidity that I fully expect some people to misconstrue as evil.
David Byrne smells a rat in the downfall of Eliot Spitzer.
"I ask myself: why haven't we been provided the names of clients one through eight? It goes without saying that all are wealthy men, and there are probably a few other politicians among them."
Let me take a stab at this:
1. I'd be willing to bet that none of clients 1-8 flew an escort across state lines. (The Mann Act may be misguided and stupid, and well worth repealing, but if #9 violated it and the others didn't, what's the point of bringing their names out?)
2. Clients 1-8 are also relatively less likely to have engaged in the financial shenanigans Spitzer used to try to cover his tracks. Remember, it was the sketchy money transfers (would look like laundering if not bribery) that let to the investigation.
But the real news here is that if enough people jerk their knees in the same direction Byrne jerks his, we might not even need to wait ten years.
""Research shows that young people who start drinking before the age of 15 are five times more likely to have alcohol-related problems later in life."
--U.S. Acting Surgeon General Kenneth Moritsugu, quoted in this piece (via Fark).
There might be a selection bias effect here: if you were going to become an alcoholic, why wait so long to begin? A much better study would distinguish people who start drinking before age 15 from people who start binge-drinking before age 15.
Either way, hear me now: I'm hosting parties for my teenage kids, and yes I'm going to serve liquor. (You'll know where to find me.)
(Ironically, this morning someone on Facebook tried to invite me to join the "charity" Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. I took a deep breath, acknowledge that life is short, and calmly clicked the "Ignore" button.)
She's as proud of herself as ever.
I defy you to find more obnoxious writer in a more influential position. You can't.
"Obnoxious" isn't quite the right word, but it's this bizarre combination of self-righteousness, snark, and complete echo chamber existence.
Maybe I single her out too much but it still baffles me that her anti-fan club isn't larger, given that every piece she ever writes is in the same style and makes the same mistakes of condescension.
Here's the text of Obama's speech, which Clinton didn't bother to read or listen to.
Take my opinion with a grain of salt given my likelihood to vote for McCain in November either way. But if you'd still honestly rather have HRC as the Democratic nominee than Obama, I don't know what to say.
Required reading: "The Audacity of Friends."
Like Walker I'm completely baffled by this church scandal thing, though you might have guessed that from my apathy towards various Republicans' Bob Jones trips and association with weird anti-Catholic crackpots.
Is it possible that the whole point of the new New York governor's unsolicited confession is a TMI saturation-bombing that will lead nobody to care about anything?
If ten years from now the prevailing wisdom is that puritan busybodies hounded Spitzer out of office for daring to see a prostitute, promise me that by having been around when it happened, you'll know better.
OK, apparently Barack Obama has said some arrogant things. But compared to his opponent(s)?
Who would have ever predicted the downfall of Eliot Spitzer and Dickie Scruggs in the same week?
And who's left? Peter Angelos (massive contingency fees on asbestos suits) is busy running a baseball team into the ground. Some of Radley Balko's favorite Mississippi forensics people may be #1 by default now.
John Edwards is a dark horse, as is Michael Bloomberg.
If you ask me, it's immoral to play a concert on land controlled by the People's Republic of China and NOT yell "Tibet!"
Don't expect me to follow the 2008 Summer Olympics. If you choose to do so yourself, take a least some small portion of the time you think about those Olympics to ponder the atrocities routinely committed by the host.
This video became a lot more entertaining when I started playing this oldie-but-goodie at the same time.
Unsettling insight about John McCain from TNR. He's still the least bad (in my opinion) of the three plausible next presidents, though he does have his warts.
But wow: "Some economists favor higher tax rates and others prefer lower tax rates, but none would oppose a tax cut and then oppose its repeal simply because it had already been enacted."
Am I really the only person who understands that people have rational expectations about things like marginal tax rates, and that when you're making decisions that would be affected by future tax rates, the intuitively obvious point of comparison is the present (not the past)?
The same logic used by the repeal-the-Bush-tax-cuts crowd could be used to say "No, we're not raising your taxes, just restoring them to what they were in 1980 before all that Reaganomics schtick."
I agree with Eugene Volokh that the wording quoted here is ridiculously unhelpful.
As Eugene says, "either the kid knows about sex, in which case the best option is to explain this bluntly to him (especially since he's likely to hear something about it elsewhere, so it's better that he get the straight dope -- coupled with relevant moral commentary -- from you); or he doesn't know about sex [...]".
If the latter, I think "he paid people to be his friend" is close to the least bad way to put it.
"[John McCain's] new position is that he's for making the Bush tax cuts permanent simply because he never wants to vote for a tax increase. But if these tax cuts were a bad idea, why should they be continued?"
--E.J. Dionne
For good or bad, I think a lot of people have planned their futures on the implicit assumption that tax rates would stay what they are. If we're going to be all bleeding-heart about people who couldn't understand the fine print on their mortgage contracts, then we have to give a lot of benefit of doubt about how rational that assumption actually is.
The rest of Dionne's column is precious.
The three examples he gives of "all the issues on which they disagree with McCain" are "his commitment to continuing the occupation of Iraq indefinitely," the aforementioned tax cuts, and "his opposition to government-sponsored universal health coverage."
If those are the litmus test points then -- 3 for 3! -- I am decidedly not a liberal.
(How many presidents in a row have committed to continuing the occupations of Germany, South Korea, et al, indefinitely?)
And am I supposed to have heard of that anti-Catholic guy? It strikes me that a lot more people have at least heard of Louis Farrakhan, and know exactly how he feels about Jews.
Quoted for truth, and because the same thing that bugged me also bugged Tyler Cowen. The Clintons set a trap and Obama fell right into it.
(At least two of which strike me as grasping at straws.)
The leap of logic: A governor is in a scandal. Didn't the Clinton administration also have scandals? Apparently Spitzer will turn the general public against the Clintons by reminding us that scandals exist?
I find your ideas intriguing, and I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter: It's not that Orlando Patterson is wrong, so much as that he can't possibly be right or wrong just from being so random. This kind of scholarship seems incredibly easy, to the extent that it pulls things out of one's own nether regions.
Sinbad! Surprisingly this is the least weak of the three links (all three of them via Instapundit).
In her Iowa stump speech, Clinton also said, "We used to say in the White House that if a place is too dangerous, too small or too poor, send the First Lady."
Say what? As Sinbad put it: "What kind of president would say, 'Hey, man, I can't go 'cause I might get shot so I'm going to send my wife...oh, and take a guitar player and a comedian with you.'"
It's probably irrational to think of silly stories like this as a valid reason to favor one candidate over another. And yet, just as I was about to find Obama ideologically unacceptable (mainly the free trade thing), Bill had to go pull a weasel move that reminded why I'd go to great lengths to keep that particular couple from getting back into power.
(If you play Diplomacy -- I tried it once; I was terrible but I understand the general flow of the game -- imagine the situations in which it would(n't) make sense for someone to offer you a deal that gave first place to that person and second place to you. I mean sure, they might offer it anyway, but there are times where an offer like that deserves a scornful guffaw.)
Eliot Spitzer caught up in prostitution ring.
Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy!
He has previously claimed to be "a fucking steamroller." Citation is an exercise for the reader.
This article is almost a complete waste of space.
"[V]eterans have shown even less interest in protesting the war than has the public at large. This is largely the legacy of the end of the draft."
Ya think?
(The best part of all is that when he finally gets around to the one sentence that should have been his entire article, he casts it as the answer to a loaded rhetorical question rather than to the real question. ("shunted aside"?!).)
Oh, and people aren't generally "interested in protesting" things they don't actually oppose. To answer my own question (as posed in this post title), you can write two pages instead of one sentence if you're begging the question (taking for granted that the Iraq war should be universally opposed) through your whole piece.
BONUS SLATE VAPIDITY (this time the vacuity is actually by a reader):
"A reader of my Election Law Blog asked me whether anything could be done to stop [Rush] Limbaugh's [pro-Hillary] comments, which have the potential to distort the outcome of the nomination process. The short answer is no. Much as many people would like Rush Limbaugh to be quiet, the First Amendment certainly bars any attempts to prevent him or anyone else from urging a vote for or against a candidate for virtually any reason."
--piece about the Democratic primary
So we have freedom of speech in this country? Sweet. Good to know.
Even though I flatly disagree with Rush's premise that we'd be better off with Clinton as the Democratic nominee (even at that, the second guessing is pretty strong), I think it's hilarious that these liberal journalists think that Republicans are crossing over solely because some talk show host told them to.
What kind of Republican manages to lose Denny Hastert's old seat? Jim Oberweis, that's who. I remember hearing about him when the Senate primary was about to happen for Peter Fitzgerald's seat (obviously now better known as Obama's seat). Now that I remember who he is, I'm utterly unsurprised he lost.
Bill Foster becomes the first Democrat to represent my parents in the House since James R. Jones. In between there were Jim Inhofe, Steve Largent, and of course (after the move) Hastert.
By contrast I've in the past 10 years been "represented" by Joe Kennedy II, Tom Lantos (RIP! - I meant to post a tribute but never did), Nancy Pelosi, Ellen Tauscher, and now Fortney Stark. (You can call him Pete if want.)
To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.
Gosh, I wonder whether the authors of this article wanted the reader to draw a specific alarming conclusion. That last sentence I quoted is of such dubious value (especially compared to the first) that it amounts to an indirect strawman.
If you care about parts per trillion (even parts per billion) then here's a nasty thought: Do you have any idea how much fecal matter you've touched today, you disgusting person?
(Fecal matter is a surprisingly apt description of the linked article.)
I have no opinion as to whether Hillary Clinton is, in fact, a monster.
I just want to know: How is "Samantha Power" not an adult film stage name? (What kind of movie would that be?)
What we know and love isn't "insurance" in the conventional sense. (I've been waiting for months, if not years, for someone to point out the obvious.)
(Meanwhile Megan McArdle points out a crucial distinction between health insurance and, say, fire insurance. Both links via this post.)
Despite everything unsavory about the past few weeks of the Democratic campaign -- despite everything from the NAFTA pandering to the Rezko trial, and even the Iraq war rhetoric -- I'd still take Obama over Hillary specifically because a health insurance mandate is unnecessary and unjust.
(Maybe I could be persuaded otherwise if someone rolled out a dirt-cheap insurance program with (let's say) a $25K deductible, that covered only life-threatening injuries and illnesses.)
Workers in this building may have to go up (or down) one flight of stairs because the elevator only stops every third floor? The horror!
(I'm ambivalent about the climate control part, and actually somewhat aghast at the social engineering involved here, but dumbstruck that having to take one flight of stairs is complaint-worthy -- and contemptuous of the able-bodied people who are too lazy to do even that, and thus crowd the disabled-access elevator.)
Sometimes campus conservatism confuses me. Let me get this straight:
It's wrong for a university to have a single-sex gym, even for a few hours, yet it's also wrong for a university not to have single-sex bathrooms?
Sure, several years have passed, and it's not the same people, but in general it's the same movement.
(I'm ambivalent about the restroom issue, but offended that other people are offended by the gym accommodations. What possible harm could this do? When we do silly things that gratuitously offend Muslims, we lose all leverage for arguing the non-silly things (the societally crucial things like free speech) that also offend Muslims.)
Rezko accused of paying a bribe to get an Iraq contract. Some anti-Obama analysis, with a link to this piece. ("Guys, I mean come on. I just answered like eight questions")
Clinton hasn't come back far enough
More about NAFTA as campaign issue
The case for foreclosures would be much more compelling if there weren't so many houses just sitting there empty.
Am I crazy that I'd rather have four more years of Bill than four years of this?
While we're here talking about the Democratic nomination: Didn't everyone know a month ago that the primary sequence had a bunch of Obama-friendly states followed by some Clinton-friendly states? It seems like there's been a lot of overreaction both directions, by people who either didn't realize this or didn't remember to account for it.
It's the political equivalent of overrating a team that built up a big winning streak against cupcakes, then underrating the same team right after it lost to a division leader.
How are you supposed to clean up after your dog?
Stupid drug war. It's bad enough that we can't use the best available cold medication.
Clinton, Obama campaigns both complain about Ohio voting irregularities.
That darn Ohio GOP, always disenfranchising Democrats, even in their own primary.
But Welch is deeply disappointed in the latest tabloid piece.
Ohio and Rhode Island to H. Clinton; Texas too close to call.
No Democratic candidate goes to the convention with the nomination mathematically clinched, in fact it's close enough that kissing up to the superdelegates matters a lot.
(But after all that Obama holds on.)
Which is worse: A scientifically ignorant candidate, or an economically ignorant candidate?
Hey, I have a great idea: Let's blast the current president for not cooperating enough with the rest of the world, but then at the same time promise a bunch of tariffs and import quotas. That won't anger anyone.
(Remember the original NAFTA debate, when Al Gore and Ross Perot went on CNN? This comes up any time there's a discussion of the most watched shows in cable TV history; I think one or two Monday Night Football games on ESPN have since surpassed it. Anyway, Gore was the voice of reason in that debate, and he so badly trounced Perot (at least in my opinion) that I never thought being a fervent free-trader would imply the need to support one party or the other.)
UPDATE: Here's everything you need.
If all else fails just play all five of these at once.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UO3PAQodYg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XXBTAVOMyM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K0eknfuix8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M70emIFxETs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8HxuDcZQsk
Please apologize for committing treason.
(It's a shame certain righties laughably overused that word a few years ago, given how perfectly it fits this situation.)
Non-issue of the day: Fred Armisen (white; part-Asian) played Barack Obama in a Saturday Night Live sketch.
I think the broader issue (blacks underrepresented on SNL casts) is a good point, but is it seriously wrong to cast a half-white actor to play a half-white role? (Some of the commentary centers on the darkened face makeup (by the way, they should have also put some on Fred's left hand). It's plausible that blackface is a red flag, but are we really so crudely incapable of using common sense that dark makeup is a priori racist?)
In any case, let's think about historical SNL cast members who could(n't) have played Obama. Phil Hartman could pull it off, for example. Tim Meadows would've been tremendous in the role(probably the best hypothetical Obama in my personal SNL viewing history). Chris Rock probably couldn't, and Tracy Morgan definitely couldn't.
I don't want the leader of the free world to be reading blogs any more than I want that leader to be reading all the e-mail addressed to president@whitehouse.gov
Life is short, and that's what aides are there for, to summarize the important parts.
"I never considered myself a Buckleyite conservative but as a kid I was much taken by his show Firing Line."
--Tyler Cowen
I was too. (These would have been later editions of Firing Line than the ones a child Tyler Cowen saw.) His "Notes & Asides" were also the best, always with their "Cordially, WFB."
There's lots of right-blog commentary lately on just how miserable a place Cuba has been, at least from Ilya Somin and from Tyler Cowen. (My new favorite red meat sentence, from this earlier Cowen post: "It's time to stop apologizing for communist dictatorships; are you really so taken with the idea of confiscating property as to overlook decades of tyranny, impoverishment, and human misery?")
Meanwhile the Lancet thinks it should be an "international crime" (their phrase) to hire doctors who come from poor countries. They want serfdom -- almost literally!
If you want to really cut to the chase about my political philosophy, the most important problems we face, by far, have to do with an entire world out there of people living in abject misery. (Coincidentally, that gives me about the same frame of reference as some of the most strident lefties you could imagine.)
Now the huge difference between me, and someone else who would look at the same problems and decide to soak the rich, is that reducing us all subsistence just isn't going to solve all those problems, certainly not any time soon. Instead, what are the best ways to solve some of those problems relatively quickly?
Until the next Norman Borlaug comes around, our best options basically amount to free trade -- and just getting rid of a handful of the absolute worst despots.
And if we spent even a fraction of the time thinking about how to deliver clean water around the world that we spend pimping ethanol...
USA: Health insurance company cancels breast cancer patient's policy.
UK: National Health Service refuses to treat breast cancer patient.
They're strikingly similar scenarios. I wonder how many times you'll hear someone flog one or the other of those to demonstrate the horrors of the {free market health care system, government health care system} they revile so much, conveniently omitting the analogous story.
Additional commentary by Tyler Cowen and Jacob Sullum on those respective stories.
And yet this article is full of it, though not intentionally.
As far as I know, all the major partisan political magazines have been holding cruises for years now. For a hefty fee (I presume), you could meet William F. Buckley and so on. The National Review has been advertising theirs for years, ditto The Weekly Standard. I'd be shocked if The New Republic didn't also do this.
Not that I mind choosing The Nation, if you can only choose one. But wouldn't the article have been far more interesting if it compared and contrasted different magazine's cruises rather than going "gee whiz, hey Martha!" about just one of them?
Bonus stuck-under-a-rock euphemism:"It's like an S.D.S. reunion on the Love Boat," said a guest speaker, Mary Mapes, the former CBS news producer who helped break the Abu Ghraib story among others, before being fired over her involvement in a "60 Minutes" piece on George W. Bush’s military record.
If it's worth mentioning at all that Mapes got fired, which of these points do you think is more useful context?
A. The piece was about Bush's military record?
B. The piece relied on documents that were laughably amateurishly forced?
Or was it Paula Parkinson? I wish there were a way to liberate brain cells by force.
(If you care, one of the latter two was a GHWB rumor and the other was a Dan Quayle rumor. Interchangeable.)
2008 candidates. 2000 candidates.
I've taken a Myers-Briggs test at least twice (self-administered on-line, so take whatever grains of salt are appropriate): First I was INTP ("the architect"), more recently INTJ ("the scientist"). Both seem apt enough. I generally identify as INTJ.
(What a weird sentence: When, if ever, one would be called upon to "identify" as an M-B type, much less "generally identify"? Except, of course, when one choose to comment to exactly these types of posts.)
102,000 political executions in a nation of 6.3M people (via Volokh.com).
I don't like those odds.
I finally watched the "Yes We Can" video. It's OK. But the introduction by will.i.am (on the leftmost column of the official site) destroys the whole message by being whiny, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, and relentlessly negative.
But despite the claims I saw on Instapundit this morning, I don't see any similarity at all between the words in that video and the lyrics of "Cult of Personality." (here's the latter if you feel like rocking out.)
I expected this Obama/Patrick comparison video to be orders of magnitude more damning than it is, instead of the polar opposite of damnation.
Are we to believe now that the very idea of stringing together historic quotes is an act of plagiarism against the first person to think of doing that? It's an especially ludicrous charge when Patrick himself (rightly) claims no unique ownership of the concept.
If you were going to pick a Democratic nominee (from the two remaining contenders) based solely on which one had the less alarming "better half," the decision would be surprisingly close. (Post titled "Is that an S-Chip on Your Shoulder [...]")
"for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country"
Really? Forgive my jingoism but WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? There's an old bumper sticker, "America; Love it Or Leave It" -- terrible cliche, mainly because I infer that it demands unwavering, unquestioning loyalty, which is antithetical to freedom. But really someone's never (as an adult) been proud of this country?
There comes a time when one should just say "OK, this must not be working out," and feel free to leave. Seriously! Find a country you like more; the exchange will make everyone better off.
1. Proportional delegate awards. This is actually the least silly point of the three, since I can see the case against winner-take-all primaries. I happen to prefer winner-take-all, but that's just the evil free-marketer in me. Even if you don't do winner-take-all, though, what's the sense in saying that a 60%-40% victory means that the victor gets six delegates to the second place person's four? There's no plausible reason the balloting would ever be even something like 75-25, so the ratio should be at least square-versus-square or something.
2. Superdelegates. I get the feeling this Wikipedia entry gets frequently edited by party hacks on both sides. As far as I can tell, the GOP seats a handful of Republican National Committee big-wigs at the convention. Based on the best numbers I could find, though, it's a difference between being 5% of the delegates and being 20% of the delegates.
3. Implausibly draconian punishments. States like Florida and Michigan ran afoul of both parties by jumping the gun with their voting dates. The Republicans cut off half their delegates and life went on. Everyone understood this would happen and adjusted for it; the sanction was (if you ask me) just about right, since those voters still get some say.
The Democrats, on the other hand... take away all the delegates? They honestly expected everyone to believe that one, and honestly didn't foresee a big brouhaha when one candidate or another had a huge incentive to get them to go back on their word? That's like a clueless parent who makes a big show of grounding someone for six weeks and then can't follow through on any of it.
So I have a vested ideological interest in claiming to believe what I believe here, but my goodness: Not that this would ever be the deciding factor, but if you're going to pick who runs the country, shouldn't it be somewhat relevant whether they can run their own election without f'king the whole thing up?
This is why so many people hate rent-a-cops.
(He seems to be an actual member of the Baltimore police force, but the conduct shown is so unworthy of a badge that rent-a-cop is still the best way to describe him.)
The very last line, cut-off mid-sentence, is wickedly meta. I'd love to know what the rest of the "If I find myself on [...]" threat was.
Your latest piece seems to be a first-person narrative, albeit a satirical one. But do you really think of yourself as "young, hip, and cynical"? (emphasis added) Having graduated college in 1990, you're surely at least 40 years old, especially given Canada's 13th year of grade school.
(Gen-X, maybe, if "born in the 1970s" isn't a hard-and-fast requirement. (Is 1966 the traditional Boomer/X cutoff?) Youthful, not so much.)
Incidentally, kudos on managing to write the quintessential atrocious Maureen Dowd column without actually being Maureen Dowd.
Re ZD's comment below, I think there's been a sharp increase in the quality of both female [vice-]presidential candidates and non-white.
Think back to 1984: Was Geraldine Ferraro (of all people) really the best available female Democrat? (Given that Paula Hawkins and Nancy Kassebaum were both Republicans, and that with Barbara Jordan or Shirley Chisholm there may have been reluctance to cross two barriers at once...)
Elizabeth Dole was a perfectly cromulent second-tier candidate; somebody will be the next Liddy Dole before someone else actually does break the female nomination/election barrier.
Meanwhile, Jesse Jackson? Al Sharpton?!? I love the conceit that someone can plausibly go from community activism direct to the White House.
This is an unbelievably good op-ed, from the opening anecdote (almost too good to be true -- but it has names! (I hope the 83-year-old doesn't get angry)) to the final intonation.
Paraphrasing Tony Shalhoub as Monk, Dowd has "a gift -- a a curse" that she seems to be capable of producing outstanding op-eds when, and only when, she's in the process of burying one Clinton or the other (or both), for example describing their own marriage as "a series of unappetizing compromises, arrangements and dependencies."
Has it really be 16 years (no: actually 15.5) since the first time I tried to explain to a college freshman classmate the point embedded in this MoDo quote?
"Hillary is not the best test case for women. We’ll never know how much of the backlash is because she’s a woman or because she’s this woman."
(emphasis in original, but changed here from italic to bold)
Abstracting away from the politics (if that's even possible), I think one key to the greatness of this piece is that she avoids gratuitous cutesy pop culture allegories. (Gratuitous cutesy pop culture allegories are to her what gratuitous typecasting (with even more gratuitous neologism) is to David Brooks; those are arguably different flavors of the same embarrassing writing tic/crutch.)
(Kaus's February 12 entry explains what's reprehensible here far better than I could.)
The "cult following for Obama" meme is a quintessential straw man, in that I've seen it attacked many places without ever really seeing it embodied. Maybe I just have blinkers on (but nowhere near the blinders Krugman has: from which planet did he file that one?).
The link in the parenthetical comment above is via Ann Althouse's blog, and it turns out the common element to this post is Richard Nixon of all people.
Che?! (The original source video seems to be here, from Houston local news.) I realize he can't control everything his local branches do, but I'd love to hear someone ask his opinion of Che for the record.
This isn't "Patriotism" so much as the basest social engineering. (I like that team Barack understand behavior economics, but please, use it as a shield, not a sword.)
Bad news about taxes, if true.
So how irrational am I if, having read all that, and believing what I do about what to do with/in Iraq, I still think he's the preferable Democratic nominee? (Blame B. Clinton's January antics.)
Or so The Onion claims, as the news straight line to their man-on-the-street punchlines. (The news hook there is always genuine news, but this one I don't have any immediate other source for.)
So I just have to ask, what took them so long? A world-class city like NYC, with so many tourists, I would have assumed this had become common practice years ago.
The first punchline is "I'd like to refer everyone to Lou Dobbs for my opinion on this matter." -- that reminds me just how appalled I was by how outraged other people were that some Texas pizzeria franchises would dare to take pesos.
You already knew he had the best anti-earmark position.
It says here he outscores H. Clinton or Obama on free trade issues.
Virginia Postrel is still skeptical about him as a person.
If we've learned anything from the current administration, it's that "stubbornness, and loyalty" can produce some bad results, and might be antithetical to democracy. Honor and honesty, however, are nonpareil (if you prefer, "second to none").
You might say McCain lacks a coherent ideological platform (oh, weird conspiracy theory of the week: that McCain will purposefully nominate Supreme Court justices who would pretend that McCain-Feingold isn't unconstitutional; see Kausfiles, et al, where the evidence -- ironically -- is that he goes out of his way not to promise ideological purity among his nominees). I think he has just enough of one. It's more "national greatness" and less libertarianism than I'd prefer, but it works for me.
If he wants to have a bully pulpit, he has it. But unlike some of the nanny state people out there, he doesn't strike me as a president who'd take office with an ambitious legislative agenda. He can't sign bills that Congress didn't already pass, and is relatively unlikely to abuse executive orders.
How do you think we got from subsistence agriculture to super-cheap food? By mandates?
--Tyler Cowen, in a post whose main function is to cite, approvingly, a health care economist who advises Obama.
Briton jailed four years in Dubai for a speck of cannabis on the tread of his shoe.
The ensuing Fark thread somehow manages to claim that Amerika [sic] is worse. (Search for the username King Something.)
Even apart from some people's astonishing inability to sort things along a continuum, it occurs to me that, unlike the guy in the Dubai jail, anyone currently in the U.S. is free to leave. Anyone not currently in this country is free never to come here, if that's how you happen to feel.
Vote with your feet. We'll all be better off.
This is a very well-thought-out post about issues that transcend party affiliation.
So on a first order, one of the most important issues to me is effective pursuit of the war on terrorists, and keeping our freedom here and around the world. That I was about to write "aggressive pursuit," if anything, brings this next point into great relief:
I think it's reasonable to assume that John McCain would make the best commander-in-chief of the presidential candidates who were still viable as of Super Tuesday. The conservatives who disagree with this notion tend to be people who see some of McCain's opinions about the correct way to go about this (for example, his outspoken opposition to torture), and who go on to confuse bugs with features.
(The sharp expansion of executive power, the whole Guantanamo situation, and so on, are at best necessary evils, where the word "necessary" might be even more debatable than the word "evil.")
With the very notable exception of campaign finance reform*, of all the issues where McCain sharply disagrees with conservative orthodoxy, I have trouble thinking of one where he's the wrongheaded one. (Maybe immigration -- I think his heart's in the right place, but I think no bill at all is better than any reform bill I've seen to date.)
*- There's a good chance Brian disagrees, inasmuch as he's been a big fan in the past of Russ Feingold.
Happy mediums do exist; you of all people should realize this, given some of the well-thought-out pieces you've written about issues other than whatever your hot button was at the time.
Politicians obviously don't need to "pander to" Hispanics to win their support, but there's a big difference between giving up the store and the "y'all wetbacks go back where you came from NOW" undercurrent of so much enforcement-first rhetoric.
Kaus-specific digression: This is a hilarious irony.
Modest proposal, not obviously related to Kaus: I would love to offer every "undocumented" immigrant this opportunity. Take the equivalent of a high school graduation test (this one for example). In English, of course. If you pass... instant citizenship. If you fail... detain and deport.
Feel free to explain why that would fail miserably.
You're f'n kidding me. I don't know where to begin.
UPDATE: To be more precise, Hillary by 24 in the state where I grew up and by 16 in the state where I live now?
Huckabee to a lesser extent, but this is more about the Dem race.
If you insist on using buzzwords, at least pick ones with some bearing on reality.
"Unfortunately, this is what Sen. McCain's inside Washington ways look like: He cut a backroom deal with the tax-and-spend candidate he thought could best stop Gov. Romney's campaign of conservative change."
"Spend"? Not so much.
"Conservative change." Whether that makes sense is an exercise for the reader.
This Volokh Conspiracy post links to another post suggesting that a McCain presidency would be worse than a {H. Clinton, Obama} presidency, partly because voters might subsequently blame bad policies on Democrats rather than Republicans.
You know what I hate most about that line of argument? Four years is a really really really really really long time. The specific issues this country faces, and the facts on the ground, will change so much in that time.
The underlying principles may stay the same, but for that very reason do you really want to see four years of so-much-worse policies just so that you're, say, 20% more likely to see the president after that be someone closer to your ideal? The discount rate that implies can't be too far above zero. (Maybe even negative?)
Rachel Lucas made a similar point a few days ago, quite a bit more colorfully than I would have. (I don't think I'd go quite as far as she goes, either, but you get the general idea. I'm squishy that way.)
Incidentally, every time a group of peace activists gives massive love to Obama, I get a bit more uneasy. (That might be why on Facebook today I decided to become a "fan" of McCain.)
It says here:
California currently has a "modified" closed primary system. SB 28 (Ch. 898, Stats. 2000), relating to primary elections, was chaptered on September 29, 2000 and took effect on January 1, 2001. SB 28 implemented a "modified" closed primary system that permits unaffiliated ("decline to state") voters to participate in a primary election if authorized by an individual party's rules and duly noticed by the Secretary of State.
Alas, there's a crucial difference between "declined to state" and "stated a third party." So, barring election fraud (i.e. helpful polling place worker insists on handing me one major-party ballot or the other, as allegedly happened a lot in Florida last week), guess which candidates are available to me Tuesday? Some of them have links to their official sites here.
(Since life is short I'll cut to the point: My big choice would be between George Allyn Root and Alden Link, and would partly depend on whether Link has any plausible shot at the nomination.)
George Phillies gave me a Facebook ad recommending himself specifically as a way to "Vote Against the War." Say no more. (except: how do you get the surname Phillies?! couldn't his ancestors have had the foresight to become Eagles? or even Mets?)
Michael Jingozian wants to "Prosecute the Bush Administration for War Crimes." Next...
Bob Jackson: At first blush I could go for a Business owner, registered professional engineer, Eagle Scout, family man. Nothing here is a deal-breaker, though I admit that "unacceptable economic and social disparity in America caused by creeping socialism" gave me a "Wait, what?" feeling. And here: "Libertarians are for the promotion of maximum freedom for each person. [...] However, I am a Christian and I personally believe that abortion is wrong." A threshold requirement for any presidential candidate should be the ability to present issues cogently without non sequiturs, even if they're brutally disarmingly honest non sequiturs.
According to Daniel Imperato: "My strategy for Iraq is to implement an immediate cease fire, strengthen our troop base, and join with the Arab states for a long-term peace solution." (emphasis added) Is that how it works with insurgents? I didn't get the memo. I don't think anyone would oppose the concept of a ceasefire. Good luck getting nameless, faceless, gutless guerrillas to respect it.
Christine Smith has a blog. Last entry is titled "The Hopelessly Enslaved - Awake!" and begins I received quite a few responses to my recent (Jan. 23) opinion piece "Abolish the Federal Income Tax and replace With Nothing,". Like the incrementalist that I am, here's where I back away slowly.
Robert Milnes (link goes to a text interview, not a candidate site) is a progressive activist from New Jersey who seeks to lead a "Progressive Alliance" campaign, uniting the Libertarian and Green parties. Several passages in that interview led me to realize this isn't quite my guy.
According to the article posted at his web site, Alden Link has a fairly simple idea: Nuclear power for all. I could actually go for that. He also wants to convert the UN Building to a casino. I bet George Allyn Root didn't even think of that! Further research will be needed to see if Link stands any chance of winning the nomination.
Steve Kubby (according to Wikipedia) announced his presidential campaign at Seattle HempFest. Not surprising, since medical marijuana is his signature issue. "Immediate, unconditional withdrawal from Iraq" -- at least he's not actively calling for a ware crimes prosecution.
Dave Hollist needs to look into line spacing. An exercise for the reader is why his idea of "Contract Insurance" is just wrong.
Barry Hess is running for president, yet the top Google hit for his name is his Hess for Governor site? OH, SNAP: He might not be notable enough for Wikipedia.
John Finan: I didn't even need to get any further than the Google Search results page: I would like to offer our nations [sic] assistance to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his aspirations to have a successful nuclear program.
And finally Wayne Allyn Root. Here's his position page, very helpfully targeted to a broader audience who might not already be grounded in libertarianism 101. And Wikipedia reminds me that he already has TV fame as a football picks guy. So for all I know he has a groundswell of support among people angry they can no longer play on-line poker for money.
Are you going to vote for the same candidate that Ann Coulter supports?
I was honestly prepared to be crestfallen that Barack Obama said something stupid. (Like a week or two ago when he railed against NAFTA, or like the rumor of an Obama-Edwards ticket were that rumor to become truth.) But if you're going to accuse someone of "Hispandering," shouldn't that accusation at least have some substance?
Here are the three parts of Obama's answer last night to which Kaus gives annotated objections:
"to suggest somehow that the problem that we're seeing in inner-city unemployment, for example, is attributable to immigrants, I think, is a case of scapegoating that I do not believe in, I do not subscribe to."
Take any given unemployed American -- more consistent with Obama's statement take any given unemployed inner-city American. What are the five biggest reasons why that particular American is unemployed? Lack of skills, under-education, lack of previous job experience (the "you need experience to get experience" catch-22)? Does immigration even crack the top five?
Kaus gives a link (to National Review! - no better source of unbiased empirical data was available?) indicating that immigrants push down unskilled wages. No joke! That's economics 101. And on the margin I'm sure immigration does have some effect on unemployment -- but rather less than you'd think from the hype.
"We can't have hundreds of thousands of people coming over to the United States without us having any idea who they are"
(The bold tags are in Kaus's annotation.) Benefit of doubt would be that the "without us having an idea" highlights an additional problem rather than stating the only problem. But why give benefit of doubt when you have an ax to grind and a blog to push?
"hiring folks who cannot complain about worker conditions, who aren't getting the minimum wage sometimes, or aren't getting overtime. We have to crack down on them."
Kaus complains that Obama refuses to be explicit that "hiring illegals" qua hiring illegals is part of the moral wrong here. That's a breathtaking lack of perspective. Imagine meeting a businessman in hell and asking him why he was eternally damned. Do you think it was because of slave labor conditions -- or because he hired people who didn't have their papers?
Dear Slate,
Even if your thesis is dead-on, there are some mental images I just don't need.
Presented without comment:
Arlo Guthrie has endorsed Ron Paul.
Maxine Waters has endorsed Hillary Clinton.
I don't think this Slate piece was meant to be political, though I do think it's deeper (and meant to be deeper) than it positions itself (Applebaum is self-effacing here). Final sentence:
"So, cheer up next time you see a Siberian blonde dominating male attention at the far end of the table: The same mechanisms that brought her to your dinner party might one day bring you the Ukrainian doctor who cures your cancer or the Polish stockbroker who makes your fortune."
...unless enough nativist idiots decide that the assembly line jobs of 50 years ago are exactly what everyone should still be doing 50 years in the future.
Maybe "idiots" is the wrong way to convince agnostics here. Maybe everyone has a pet issue where they can't believe just how wrong some people are. I've hesitated to link to this Steven Landsburg op-ed because it's patronizing enough to make Al Gore blush, yet it's also dead right.
Remember when you cared about more than one particular issue? (Or at least when that one particular issue was something worthy, like welfare reform?)
Giving your blog over entirely to immigration is great when there's a dumb bill to be defeated. Bully to you for your role in that last year. But now... (first the good point, then the insult to everyone's intelligence):
McCain's National Finance Co-Chair appears to be Jerrold Perenchio, who made a fortune with Univision and has been a major defender of failed bilingual education policies. The longer people speak Spanish and not English, after all, the more they watch Univision., right? (link removed from original)
Fair enough.
Some behind-the-scenes evidence of what McCain really thinks about making sure that English remains the common language amid a flood of Spanish-speaking immigrants. (link in original)
That's disingenuous at best. Helpful hints:
1. Consider the difference between how you think an issue should be resolved and how important it is (if at all) that politicians actually spend time on that issue. (One analogy: in theory I'm against the death penalty. I'm also against the millions of dollars wasted on last-ditch appeals for death row inmates, under any circumstances other than someone's good-faith belief that the inmate in question is actually innocent. Those millions of dollars wasted, however, are exactly why I'm against the death penalty: The opportunity cost of all that time and money exceeds the benefit we get from the execution.)
2. Consider the bigger difference between a "common" language and an official one.
Violence on the streets in Britain. I blame the rampant gun culture over there.
Tony Rezko has been arrested. Yesterday the Chicago Tribune endorsed Obama (and McCain), but a John Kass column warned Obama to be forthright about the extent of his ties to Rezko.
If you see the same Google ad on this page that I do, the juxtaposition is fantastic (blogger expresses fear and loathing of a McCain-Huckabee ticket, ad is for Huckabee's presidential bid).
(I'm not very familiar with the blogger in question but here was his previous post: Some people don't use their blogs to advocate (nor inform) so much as to vent spleens.)
Progress against earmark. Yay.
The throwaway line on this post uses the exact same rhetorical scenario from a question I asked Julia on Sunday while we read that day's paper.
A brilliant stimulus package: Let people make tax-free 401K withdrawals. This puts more money into circulation and is revenue-neutral.
Any other plan is needlessly complicated (and riddled with unintended consequences) compared to this.
Obama's biggest Illinois state-legislative achievement: All police interrogations are videotaped. Simple(?) and effective(?). The question marks are there because I'd love to see some empirical evidence of what's changed since that bill passed.
Inspired by two Facebook "Which [Party X] candidate would you LEAST like to see win?" debate questions: In full, top-to-bottom order of my personal preference as of today.
1. John McCain
2. Fred Thompson
3. Rudy Giuliani
UPDATE: A serious gap opened up here the moment Obama dissed NAFTA. I'd move Obama behind Romney if the latter weren't busy pandering to all these people whose specific jobs really aren't coming back (and who ought to focus instead on what to do next)
4. Barack Obama
5. Mitt Romney
6. Hillary Clinton
7. John Edwards
8. Ron Paul
9. Mike Huckabee
10. Dennis Kucinich
8 vs. 9 is a close call. Other than that, from 4 onward, the pairwise difference between any two candidates is greater than the difference between 1 and 4.
Most of the political commenters here are from somewhere other than California. But if you're local, or just well-informed on it, how should I vote on these Indian gaming propositions that are getting so many TV ads both ways?
My gut instinct here is Yes. I think if these really were corrupt sweetheart deals, the No side would have far more compelling evidence than it actually does.
Does Scott Adams owe John McCain $1000? I say yes.
How eagerly would Mike Huckabee be McCain's running mate? Their mutual respect, and seeming cooperation worries me a little.
Does this amount of corruption disqualify Obama as a presidential candidate? (More here.) I say no, I'd still rather have him than Hillary, though it sharply reduces my inclination to vote for him.
On the other hand, I've learned via e-mail from a respected peer that controlling and destroying nuclear stockpiles has been one of Obama's key issues in the senate. We already know he's been relatively aggressive about advocating pursuit of Osama bin Laden into Pakistan. Does that make him a good anti-terror candidate? It might be plausible.
(By the way, Hillary deserves credit for pointing out in a debate that we'd really need to warn Pakistan that any given attack was coming from us rather than from India.)
On balance I agree with this post (as you might guess). But Thompson's reference to Lawrence vs. Texas as the decision that "decriminalized sodomy" will alienate a lot of people, even though it's exactly the right point of reference for his specific target audience.
For what it's worth I not only believe, but also want to believe, that the strict constructionist view of the Constitution is more accurate than the loose constructionist view -- yet that Lawrence was decided correctly.
Fortunately for me, Randy Barnett's view of the Constitution is one way to resolve those competing instincts.
I approved of this quote the first time I heard it. (Think of the contrast between Ronald Reagan's image, and the caricature of Jimmy Carter overhauling the White House tennis court schedule.)
But then Mickey Kaus had to go convince me otherwise:
there are cris[e]s requiring quick, coordinated action, and the type of leader who can act effectively in a crisis is likely to be a good "operating officer" rather than a visionary
Obama would make a fantastic peacetime president.
As far as I can tell this article never mentions a party affiliation.
I thought I finally knew which presidential candidate would get my ballot in the California primary. I considered posting it, and asking whether my choice surprised you.
Then I talked to my wife about it and she talked me out of... not out of the choice itself so much as out of being certain about it. She reminded me why I'd previously been so opposed to the same candidate. I told her everything I've picked up from reading blogs and news articles (sadly, in about that order) over the past couple weeks. I came away from that conversation thinking that although I'd kept closer track of how the races were going, she had a better perspective on the candidates precisely by taking the longer view.
Anyway, I think my choice is between four candidates. Feel free to talk me into or out of one. (If you want me to vote for someone other than those four, feel free to advocate, but understand that you probably won't sway me.)
1. Barack Obama. This isn't a vote against Hillary so much as a vote against {Hillary and John Edwards}. I told Julia that I'd learned two things from Iowa and New Hampshire, respectively -- Iowa showed me Hillary can be stopped; New Hampshire told me she must be stopped.
What's so great about Obama? His leadership skills are tremendous. Of all the candidates, he's the one I like most as a person (from what I know about them all at this point). He's certainly one of the smartest.
To the extent that this article describes his positions accurately, his economic platform includes most of what I'd want from a Republican (with the conspicuous exception that the last full paragraph implies that he'd raise taxes). Based on the first few comments to that article, those positions are feared and loathed by a lot of the same people whose own economic views I fear and loathe.
To the extent that this NY Times piece accurately describes Obama's approach, he understands a very important point about how the world works (and how unintended consequences work) that I think even some people who mouth GOP talking points too frequently forget.
The big red flag here is foreign policy. Obama's certainly more dovish than I would be (though less dovish than, say, Ron Paul), and there's a worry that the rest of the world would treat him as a pushover. If I did end up backing Obama, you could safely infer that I've become a lot more optimistic (foolishly so?) about our chances of avoiding/withstanding the next major act of terror.
2. Fred Thompson. If this election were decided by position papers I think he'd have my support, just like seemingly every conservative blogger has that "Fred '08" logo. But I'm ambivalent about whether he's a viable candidate, and with the races so close I'm not interested in throwing away my vote if he isn't.
Regrettably, I also tend to agree with this Glenn Reynolds critique: "He can give good speeches and make sound policy decisions, but his management abilities, as demonstrated in this campaign so far, have been less than stellar."
3. Rudy Giuliani. Unlike a lot of people I'm not too worried about whether he can win the nomination. Remember that as polling data goes he's still the nationwide ostensible front-runner. Would he really win in November though? Also, I worry that he'll descend to self-parody, or at least remain one-dimensional. Finally, even though he's plainly pro-business, there's a big difference between pro-business and pro-market; I'm not convinced he's pro-market.
4. John McCain. Most of the national security motivation I'd have for supporting Rudy also applies to McCain. On the other hand, like Rudy he has way too much faith in what the government can do (without screwing things up) and way too little discretion in what the government ought to be up to.
I also think there's a very strong game-theoretic chance of a McCain-Huckabee ticket, especially if no GOP candidate gets to the convention with a delegate majority.
I agree with (identify with?) nearly everything in this column.
Except the end: "I hope Mr. Romney does well enough in Michigan today that he gets the opportunity to introduce the public to the real Mitt Romney."
Never, ever trust a politician who comports himself (or herself!) so ineptly that supporters have to keep insisting that you don't know "the real" Mr[s]. X. The correlation between skilled campaigning and skilled governance is flawed at best, but this is surely part of the common ground between the two.
Plus side: Is it really accurate to call him left-libertarian? Does the linked-to article accurately describe Obama's positions? If so, sign me up!
(It seems strange to me that there would be ambiguity, or argument, about what a candidate's positions are. You can argue about whether those positions are correct, whether supported programs are consistent with supported positions, unintended consequences, etc., but in this information age you'd think candidates' own views would be more widely circulated.)
Minus side: I guess this should be worrisome, though honestly I don't see any particular problem. If I were ambivalent about Obama this might have had some small effect; if I disliked him as a candidate maybe this would have lowered my opinion. It doesn't seem to tell us much about him, though, or so I claim.
(N.B. I've also utterly failed to object when various Republican candidates have visited Bob Jones University during their South Carolina campaigns. Either they're not doing this in 2008, or it's not making the news, or I'm just not noticing.)
I want a clinic inside my local Walgreens'.
The use case is pretty obvious, especially this time of year: The sore throat that won't go away. The twisted ankle on ice, by someone who sort of understands first aid but can never remember when you ice something versus when you heat it.
I think one of these four options is miles ahead of the other three; your mileage may vary:
1. Make a doctor's appointment, see your primary physician a week from now
2. Go to Emergency Room, wait six hours
3. Go to Urgent Care clinic, pay $100
4. Go to CVS, wait five minutes, pay... $5? $10?
"Allowing retailers to make money off of sick people is wrong."
That sounds so noble, yet it's so catastrophically misguided. Replace "sick people" with "children" or "education" or "poor people" or heaven only knows what else.
Kucinich has asked for a New Hampshire recount. I know he's not asking strictly on his own behalf, but I still immediately thought of an Edna Krabapple quote:
"One for Martin. Two for Martin! Would you like another recount?"
"No."
"Well, I just want to make sure. One for Martin. Two for Martin!"
National polling data. Democrats: Clinton, Obama in dead heat. GOP: Huckabee, then Giuliani and McCain knotted up, then Thompson then Romney.
More word on the Indiana photo ID case. Helpful hint: If you want to establish your bona fides as an Indiana resident, whipping out your Florida driver's license isn't the way to go.
Interesting Tim Cavanaugh piece on Ron Paul. I couldn't read a word of the all-cap first comment.
Texas Monthly reported on Paul's atrocious newsletters six years ago.
Dear Susan B. Anthony et al.,
I realize (at least I hope) that most women would find this thought process appalling, perhaps nauseating. On the other hand, demographers tell us that many of the women who'd be most appalled by this are in the Huckabee camp.
The next time a Democratic party insider raises a stink about the electoral college, or any other issue with a "one person one vote" premise, I hope someone remembers to call them out about "superdelegates."
(It's their party, they can choose their nominee however they want to. Smoke-filled room for all I care. I just find it ironic, given the parties' reputations, that 20% of Democratic convention delegates are unelected VIPs. Any given Republican has distinctly more say about his party's presidential nominee than any given Democrat.)
Speaking of RealClearPolitics links, here's why a crowded GOP field gives Mike Huckabee a big advantage. Sent to me by the biggest erstwhile Ron Paul supporter I know. (I don't actually know that he's shirked Paul, but he's the kind of guy who'd quickly disavow all the racist newsletter stuff mentioned in that TNR story. Long Islanders aren't typically into racism/anti-Semitism that I know of.)
Here's a post from NR about just how inaccurate the polls were before the N.H. voting. No mention of the Bradley Effect, even though Mickey Kaus came very close to predicting this. (He didn't actually predict it: "I'm as flummoxed as everyone else, having gone along with the near-universal consensus that Obama would win." But it was the natural consequence of his Iowa analysis.)
Slate published an off-the-wall Christopher Hitchens piece about Obama (off-the-wall even by Hitch standards). Despite the headline, nobody I knew had any sort of obsession with Obama's race (then again, none of NY Times theater critic Pauline Kael's friends voted for Nixon.) So I was already predisposed to reject Hitch's premise, and must admit I stopped reading at "And why is a man with a white mother considered to be 'black,' anyway?"
Speaking of Slate, John Dickerson says HRC won by making herself more available to NH voters. Emily Bazelon says she won because of identity politics (that's not what she calls it -- she calls it "The XX Factor" -- but that's what it is).
I wasn't a Ron Paul acolyte, but I knew at least one. This kind of gloating is just unbecoming. (Day By Day is still making Norman Hsu references? What kind of shelf life is that?)
Photo ID requirements for voters: The case for. The case against. I find the latter article singularly unconvincing: "In the entire history of Indiana, the total number of reported instances of [in-person impersonation] fraud is zero" Yet around the country, votes are routinely cast in the name of dead people still on the polls -- and dead people are in no position to report this.
I don't know about you, but I've always been dumbfounded by the idea that you can just walk in, claim to be any given person, and vote, no questions asked. (More precisely I'm dumbfounded that at least in California, precincts find it worth the trouble to announce this policy so conspicuously.)
But then, I'm also dumbfounded by precincts that use any voting system other than those optical scan cards. It pains me when posts like this use an oversimplified dichotomy between machine counts and hand counts. (Optical scan ballots are counted by machine, but exist as/on paper such that any recount can be easily done by hand.)
You may remember a few months ago I planned to "Join Rudy." Aside from his interesting delegate strategy (which I actually do like), it's hard to take a candidate seriously whose staff is incompetent enough to let this happen.
(Someone else, maybe on the Reason blog, mentioned that he was cratering anyway because his TV ads were so unpopular.)
My theory is that he was a plant. That shows you how low an opinion I have these days of the people running the campaign that he heckled.
The Democratic returns in New Hampshire so far aren't quite what pollsters expected. A few theories are plausible:
1. People were actually sympathetic to {"Iron My Shirt" + crying jag}. I would mourn for the world if so.
2. Bradley Effect (plus Iowa's "reverse Bradley Effect," as suggested by Mickey Kaus)
Neither of those is fun to contemplate, though the former is much more horrifying to me.
Ron Paul: This is pretty damning.
Mitt Romney: Re Jason's comment to the post below, I wouldn't deride Romney as squishy so much as phony. My intuition is that the candidates who pander and posture the most turn into the presidents who are least effective in foreign policy situations. On the other hand, Bill Clinton was about as phony as they come, yet (aside from what you think of any given ideology or policy chose) he was just keeping-it-in-his-pants away from being a fine executive.
John McCain: Kaus is still tearing apart his immigration plan, seemingly deservedly. McCain is wrong about immigration now; he was wrong about steroids in baseball a couple years ago (more specifically he was wrong about whether it's worth Congress's time); and most of all he was utterly wrong about campaign finance reform. He also gets an astonishing amount of free passes from the mainstream press, and above all he's a cranky old fart.
In presidential politics I have a surprising soft spot for cranky old farts (c.f. Bob Dole), so long as they're not ideological kooks. I think it's just that my worst-case scenario for McCain is significantly more benign than for any other candidate.
(Obviously a lot of people would strongly disagree with McCain's foreign policy, or mine, or my opinion of his, etc.)
I ought to say something about Thompson, Giuliani, Huckabee, or a Democrat. But it looks like Obama has things well in hand; I've already opined about Huckabee; and it's odd to think of Thompson as a nominee since I can't picture him taking first place in any given primary/caucus. (He'd be at best a brokered convention candidate.) I like the gamble Giuliani took with his campaign strategy (concede Iowa & NH, focus on big-delegate states) but he needs to be sure people don't forget he exists (without also being a jackass).
Conventional wisdom seems to be that Obama and McCain will win New Hampshire. Seems right to me.
Every time I read about McCain on the campaign trail I like him that much more. (Except when he's belligerent about something he's also dead wrong about, which comes up now and then.)
HRC getting all teary: Move on, nothing to see. Avert your eyes if necessary.
There's a blatantly obvious choice for Obama's running mate, should he go on to win the nomination. It's so obvious that I just now checked to confirm that the 22nd amendment wouldn't preclude it. (No, nobody currently running for president, nor married to same.) I also checked various URLs that, predictably, are already taken and parked.
Is it strange that Ron Paul is the GOP candidate about whom I have the least strong opinion either way? The six viable Republican candidates include three whom I like, two whom I dearly hope don't get the nomination (Huckabee, Romney*), and then Paul. He combines so many things that I strongly like or strongly dislike, but they all get canceled out -- and he'd get slaughtered in November (about which I'm surprisingly apathetic).
*- Romney had a golden opportunity to be exactly who I'd most fervently support. But I hate 90% of how he runs his campaign, including that he's somehow managed to be both a stereotypical politician and a stereotypical Republican. Aside from military heroics**, Romney is the candidate whose pre-political career impresses me most. On paper all he had to do was be himself, yet apparently someone told him to do just the opposite and he was too weak a person to resist.
**- refers specifically to McCain, and what he went through as a POW. It's an apples to oranges comparison, though. And honestly, I'm not so impressed by what (if anything) McCain did after being a pilot but before holding office.
At least two of my high school classmates have joined the Facebook group "If Mike Huckabee Wins I Will Leave the Country." A bit premature, no?
Meanwhile, it occurred to me: You know which major cultural figure I'd be least surprised to see endorse Huckabee (excluding people already associated with the GOP or religious/political activism)? Gregg Easterbrook. You know it's coming. He'll make some thinly veiled references in his football column.
If his next TMQ has five paragraphs touting a national sales tax (instead of income tax), you heard it here first. If his next column has five paragraphs attacking high CEO salaries... it will be just like 2/3 of his columns anyway.
He probably won't attack abortion or homosexuality, but then I'd have expected his critique of Jews in Hollywood to be a lot less clumsy.
Contrary to the second part of the post below this one, the state of Illinois is uniquely unqualified to handle any act of law enforcement that involves data processing.
Still on the ABC News.com legal beat: Call me a bad libertarian but there are few things I hate more than misplaced privacy arguments.
"I don't believe that the police should be able to collect somebody's private, very intimate information, their DNA, just because they have a hunch that it will be useful."
Ah, nothing says "this is my heart and soul" like a strand of hair or a bit of discarded spittle. I'll buy the case that people shouldn't be compelled to give samples, but if they happen to do it anyway, make the most of it.
Similarly, if your ID maps to a criminal warrant and you happen to give someone your ID, guess what? Given the complete and utter lack of harmful side effects (it's a very simple flow chart: either there's a warrant out against you, and it gets served, or there isn't and life goes on), and the degree to which it actually inconveniences you (i.e. zero), "probable cause" shouldn't be relevant to whether someone bothers to run a query.
This story brings up another reason to oppose the death penalty: Victims (of crimes other than homicide) or witnesses will be more reluctant to report a crime if they know the perpetrator and don't want to see that person executed.
My main reason to oppose the death penalty (but with no motivation whatsoever to act on this conclusion) is that capital cases invariable lead to this convoluted appeals process that wastes millions (not an exaggeration!) of dollars worth of people's time that could have been better spent on something that actually improves society rather than dithering over one particular person's fate.
I haven't watched this and don't plan to.
One National Review On-Line writer suggests that Thompson "taped a 17-minute video in which he makes his case more calmly, deliberately, and and with incomparably greater respect for the issues than has any of his opponents. And? For a lot of Iowa Republicans, that’s all they needed."
Really? Maybe my attention span is criminally short but I can't see myself making it through, much less being won over by, 17 minutes of a guy talking at a camera.
This has a "can't be right" intuitive feel to it but I report what I see:
According to Gateway Pundit, "[f]or the last three months of 2007, a Venezuelan was twice as likely to lose his life to violence as an Iraqi." (emphasis removed)
Sources appear to be iCasualties.org and El Universal.
My first guess at a refutation would involve whether Iraqi deaths reported as thoroughly as Venezuelan.
This NY Times article summarizes the contrast between how two Democratic presidential candidates generally approach economic issues.
Candidate A:
believes in the promise of narrowly tailored government policies, like focused tax cuts.
has more faith that government can do what it sets out to do, which is a traditionally liberal view.
subscribes to the conservative idea that people respond rationally to financial incentives.
Candidate B:
draw[s] heavily on behavioral economics, a left-leaning academic movement that has challenged traditional neoclassical economics
[believes that] a simpler program — one less likely to confuse people — is often a smarter program.
For a quick 10 points, which is which? (And with which archetype do I agree more, and by how much?) [Answers in extended entry.]
With which archetype do you agree more, and by how much? [Answers in your comments, should you choose.]
A = Hillary, B = Obama.
Completely aside from my opinions of those specific candidates, I side with B by a wide margin.
Mickey Kaus condenses more wisdom into a single paragraph than Gretchen Morgenstern (Sunday NYT Business section) has in several weeks worth of columns on the same topic:
"Are you impressed with a drop in home values of 6.6% over a year? It doesn't seem like such a big correction, given the dramatic run-up in prices over the last decade or so. ... And don't declining prices make housing more... what's the word? ... affordable? ... This evening NBC Nightly News billboarded a "housing CRISIS." (Link available here.) I thought a "housing crisis" was when people couldn't find housing, not when it got cheaper. (NBC's expert: "It's very, very difficult to find any silver lining." No it's not.)"
--Kausfiles (lots of HTML formatting not carried over from original)
(Bias alert: I am an aspiring first-time homeowner who's waited for prices to become plausible again.)
Now I feel a bit of shame myself, to have read all sorts of sports news before I even saw that Bhutto was assassinated. (I first learned of it via Instapundit.)
We've been catching up on several weeks worth of Sunday editions of The New York Times. I'd been skipping all the Pakistan stories on the theory that the news was already far outdated.
Some political links, all via Instapundit:
""When I am President, I will work to protect children from inappropriate video game content."
--one front-running candidate
"I got into politics because I knew government didn't have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives"
--another front-runner (caveat: he said it ten years ago)
In that second quote, wouldn't the "because..." clause do more to support the statement "I stayed out of politics"?
Inspired by the graph that accompanied this post:
For each of the items on this list, identify whether it is (or is not) "one of the most important issues for [you] in choosing a presidential candidate." Also identify whether you "need more information" about that issue. My answers after the jump.
The war in Iraq
Global competitiveness
Terrorism
Education
Tax policy
Ethanol and renewable energy
Health care and health insurance
The nation's long-term debt
Relationships with other countries
Immigration
Abortion
National security
Faith and values
Global warming
Economy and jobs
Social Security
Judicial nominations
Trade policy
Gay marriage
Proceeding on the assumption that someone had asked me these by phone (so I didn't know what else was coming):
The war in Iraq - KEY ISSUE, NEED MORE INFORMATION
Global competitiveness - yes, but don't need more
Terrorism - yes, no
Education - no, no
Tax policy - yes, no
Ethanol and renewable energy - no, no
Health care and health insurance - no, no
The nation's long-term debt - yes, no
Relationships with other countries - no, no
Immigration - yes, no
Abortion - no, no
National security - yes, no
Faith and values - no, no
Global warming - no, no
Economy and jobs - yes, no
Social Security - yes, no
Judicial nominations - yes, no
Trade policy - yes, no
Gay marriage - no, no
To sum up, I need more information about the Iraq War (but nothing else); with two exceptions the issues I care about in the presidential election all relate to economic issues or global security. (Those exceptions are "immigration" (which you could argue relates to both) and judicial nominations.)
Mitt Romney seems to have made up a story about his dad marching with MLK. (Oh, Bart, why didn't you forge plausible grades? A D- turns into a B+ so easily. You just got greedy!)
Mike Huckabee seems to have made up who his favorite author was. Mr. Huckabee paused, then said his favorite author was Dr. Seuss. In an interview afterward with the news media, [seven-year-old] Aleya said she was somewhat surprised. She thought the candidate would be reading at a higher level. "My favorite author is C. S. Lewis," she said.
Ron Paul doesn't make up anything. But the gold standard is the second most important issue about which he's profoundly wrong.
(Awesome: This Wikipedia page has a higher Google rank than this one.)
Everything I know about the feud mentioned in this link, I know from the link itself.
That said: Suppose you were an up-and-coming Republican presidential candidate with huge support from a socially conservative base. Suppose you wanted to build support across party lines, and (if nothing else) reduce the odds that people first learning you exist didn't assume you were a GOP hack.
Could there possibly be a more convenient target than a lightning-rod talk show host who probably was a lot more influential 10 (15!) years ago than now?
Maybe I continue to overestimate Huckabee's chances out of abject fear.
What's gotten into Wiley Miller (Non Sequitur)?
And why is it that people who feel compelled to make Gitmo/PATRIOT ACT/[etc.] references don't seem to feel the least bit of obligation to be funny, even darkly funny?
Compare the best "America under George W. Bush" joke you've ever heard to the worst Soviet joke you've ever heard. (OK, maybe worst other than the Yakov Smirnov "In Soviet Russia, noun verbs you!" meme.) In fact, you can compare them directly just by global replacing the relevant proper nouns.
I'm dead convinced that the Soviet jokes are a thousand times funnier, and it's not just because of my own political bent.
(Obviously I couldn't fairly participate in this myself, and anyone did participate would rely on my honestly reporting the outcome.)
As of today I think the probability that I vote for a Democratic presidential candidate in November 2008 is greater than 3/4.
Oddly enough most of the best links explaining why this is the case come from Slate. In no particular order:
Baptists versus Mormons (I've known about this feud for at least 20 years now; I mistakenly believed it was common knowledge)
John Dickerson thinks Mike Huckabee jokes too much: That's actually NOT one of the things I dislike about Huckabee -- in fact it's a sign that he'll do surprisingly well. (On the issues, though, the chances that he'd win the GOP nomination greatly affect the probability that I'd vote Democratic.)
Mickey Kaus notes that the Edwards campaign has a scandal to deal with: Can you guess why the failure of the Edwards campaign would significantly increase the probability that I vote for a Democrat? (Free trade is arguably the most underrated cross-partisan issue of this campaign.)
Over at Reason, Jesse Walker breaks down the Republican race.
My latest impression of various GOP candidates, in roughly the order that I'd have ranked them a few weeks ago:
1. Rudy: Maybe I'm a bad libertarian for failing to cower in fear here, but I utterly fail to understand what make Giuliani any more statist than any other candidate apart from his being so wrong about the Second Amendment. All that said, he lost me the day he interrupted a speech to take a cell phone call, and hasn't campaigned nearly well enough to lure anyone back onto any sort of bandwagon.
2. Fred: I readily agree that politics are a necessary evil, and distrust anyone who takes great joy in the political process for its own sake. So I sympathize with someone who actively avoids 24-hour campaign mode. That said, when the best thing you have going for you is "he's that guy from Law & Order!" it's not a good idea to give common people the impression that you hate them. I'm dumbstruck by how quickly his incompetent campaign made him into a laughingstock.
3. McCain: If I voted in a primary tomorrow, I'd vote for McCain for game-theoretic reasons. Everything I like and hate about him is well worn in this forum.
4. Romney: It's bitterly ironic that a religious right darling is eating Romney for lunch, given the extent to which he prostituted himself to the conceit that he was "one of them." He could have run an entirely different campaign, as a fiscal conservative / social moderate who was great at running things. That he didn't says... something... about him.
5. Ron Paul: So right about so many things, yet so wrong about the one issue that gets him the most notice. Unfit for office in my opinion. (Yet if forced to choose between Paul and Huckabee, I'd take Paul hands-down.)
If you haven't seen Marginal Revolution today, make a couple quick guesses:
1. What share of federal tax revenue comes from the top 20% of households by income?
2. What share of federal tax revenue comes from the top 1% of households by income?
I'd have missed high on #1 and missed low on #2.
Not just the primary charade: I want that godforsaken parochial state to lose its electoral votes.
I actually had a tiny bit sympathy for this woman before reading the smarm I just linked to. Sometimes people become national laughingstocks unfairly, but this time it's richly deserved.
When did Frosty Troy* get not only a sex change but also a million times as big a sense of self-importance?
On second thought, she seems like more of a cross between Molly Ivins and Jean Teasdale.
*- If you're not from Oklahoma you have no reason to know (or care).
Laws that punish parents who serve their kids alcohol correlate with increased drinking by those kids when the parents are gone.
I don't have kids yet but I can tell you right now I plan to serve them alcohol when, in our judgment, they're old enough to drink responsibly. Despite Liz Dole's bizarre notions, that point is well shy of 21.
I've been turning this over in my head for a while, as remarks on Mike Huckabee's charm and likability have become de rigueur: Am I the only one who finds Huckabee viscerally unappealing? There's nothing endearing to me about a cross between a diet guru and a televangelist selling condominiums in Heaven, which is how Huckabee strikes me. The guy's so full of crap I can smell it wafting out his ears. He's running on a quirky-at-best tax plan that has no chance of passing, and gets a free pass from some of the same people who harp endlessly on the alleged phoniness of Mitt Romney (whose left pinky is better qualified for the presidency than Huckabee). I don't get it.
--John Tabin of The American Spectator, requoted by David Weigel at Reason
Romney is at best my third choice among the GOP field (behind the guy who was a U.S. attorney and the guy who played a DA on TV, maybe also behind the guy who spent years in Hanoi whose utter wrongness about campaign finance reform might be moot now) but as the pairwise comparison goes I'll heartily agree.
Huckabee threatens to bring together an interesting post-Reagan coalition of evangelicals, blue collars, and bleeding hearts. The biggest loser there is the free market. (Ironically, some of Huckabee's biggest flaws track closely to issues where Bill Clinton was most underrated.)
How is he stopped (and when)? That probably requires a lot of effort and cooperation between economic conservatives and social liberals, two groups that do notoriously badly in the polls.
(Has it really been 11 years since the Weld-Kerry senate race? Bill Weld was a flawed politician who wouldn't have stood a chance on the national stage but he easily won those debates, something that perhaps says as much about Kerry as about him.)
NFL looking into Rolle comment that official called him 'boy'. We learn in the body of the article that "Both Rolle and the official, identified in the NFL official guide as head linesman Phil McKinnely, are black."
There are probably three possibilities: Either boy is inherently offensive for any adult man to call any other adult man (but what about "girl"?), or it isn't offensive at all, or (my opinion) it's offensive only when the speaker is white and the addressee is black.
(By the way, I still remember the day Harry Caray was interviewing Shawon Dunston for a WGN pre-game feature and closed the segment with "You take care of yourself, boy." Until that moment, it had never occurred to me that the word "boy" could be offensive, yet at that moment the unfortunate connotations were crystal clear, regardless of whether that's what Harry had intended.)
(Thank you Fark)
Weird pull-quote from this story: "We have a right to political expression. That's what honking is."
The hell? So when I accidentally cut someone off, the ensuing honk is their way of saying "watch the road you stupid Libertarian?"
Barring specific evidence that the locale in question introduced a honking ban for some content non-neutral reason, I think honking a car horn is pretty directly comparable to exclaiming "Fire!"
(How closely the intersection in question approximates a crowded theater is one step more.)
Why does Franklin Foer need 14 pages to tell us whether "Shock Troops" (by "Scott Thomas," i.e. Scott Thomas Beauchamp) was fabricated?
Page 12: "The more we dug into Beauchamp's writings, the more clear it became that we might have been in the realm of war stories, a genre notoriously rife with embellishment."
Page 13 (referring to the only witness to the story of a guy intentionally hitting dogs with a tank): "He is one of Beauchamp's friends, and, over the course of a number of e-mail exchanges with him, our faith in him has diminished." (They spend 14 pages on all this yet they won't elaborate on this?)
Still page 13: Several weeks after the monitored call in September, we finally had the opportunity to ask Beauchamp, without any of his supervisors on the line, about how he could mistake a dining hall in Kuwait for one in Iraq. He told us he considered the detail to be "mundane" given the far more horrific events he had witnessed. That's not a convincing explanation. If the event was so mundane, why did he write about it--and with such vivid detail? In accounting for the inaccuracy of a central fact, he sounded defensive and evasive.
FINAL SENTENCE OF PAGE 14: Without that essential confidence, we cannot stand by these stories.
Pages 1 and 2 are useful only if you know nothing about the story (or enjoy seeing wall-to-wall butt-covering).
Page 3: "[T]here was one avoidable problem with our Beauchamp fact-check. His wife, Reeve, was assigned a large role in checking his third piece. While we believe she acted with good faith and integrity--not just in this instance, but throughout this whole ordeal--there was a clear conflict of interest"
The bottom of Page 4 apparently serves to tease pages 5-10 (in magazines that don't suck their thumbs as much, that function is often served by page 1):
"I hadn't worked with Stephen Glass, who made up stories out of whole cloth, but I knew the lessons derived from that scandal. Fabulists are often nabbed by the little lies, the asides they assume that no one will check. As we began our re-reporting of Beauchamp's pieces, we searched for the easily verifiable bits of information that would serve as crucial benchmarks. And, on the first full day of our investigation, it didn't look good for Beauchamp."
Page 5: Beauchamp had written a dialog that referred to an Iraqi driver's license. "It said he was an organ donor." Iraqi driver's licenses have no such things; however, he later told TNR that he'd said it as a joke.
Page 6: Beauchamp solicited lots of corroborating accounts, given by phone to TNR from his comrades.
Page 7: Crtiicisms from The Weekly Standard led TNR to convince Beauchamp to reveal his real name. Discrepancy whether the "disfigured woman" (one of three central anecdotes to his piece) had been seen in an Iraqi dining hall, or in Kuwait.
Did the long IM exchange really need to be printed in full?
Page 10: "[W]e also found some reason to doubt Beauchamp's reliability: In 2006, he had written a personal blog"
Page 12: TNR gets scooped but frames it as "we were never told." "The following Monday, September 10, the conservative blogger Confederate Yankee posted an interview with Major John Cross, the executive officer of Beauchamp's battalion who led the official Army investigation. This surprised us: We had repeatedly requested to speak to someone with substantive information on the investigation and were never told of Cross's availability."
I have a very shallow understanding of the allegations that some Democratic operatives sneaked their questions through to CNN presidential debates (both parties' debates). (This search will, in minutes if not seconds, get you to know everything I know.)
It doesn't look good for CNN but I can't remember the last time I had any respect for CNN anyway. The more important point: If these are Hillary's people planting the questions, they're doing a great job of it. That ability to get things done actually makes me support her campaign a tiny bit more than otherwise.
Dahlia Lithwick is right for once, and yet she almost lost me with her prose style here.
My favorite part where she leaves the impression (by subtle noun shift) that Jane Harman (D-CA) is part of the Bush administration.
(Strictly speaking, the subject of the mockery is the misguided adherents, misusing any given creed.)
If your faith is so brittle that what seven-year-olds name a teddy bear threatens it, perhaps you've chosen the wrong faith.
This is distinctly, emphatically, singlehandedly not worth giving one iota of deference.
Oh, it gets better: "In our culture a teddy bear is a wild and dangerous animal. It's not something to be cuddled by children before they sleep."
This is exactly why cultural imperialism exists (and should exist).
[On further review it's a pretty weak example compared to, say, genital mutilation.]
(In this context I'm not going to touch anything you shouldn't care about, especially if it just rings false.)
I got past the cover photo, with its army of youngsters and Mrs. Clinton's mandible-cracking smile, to search through the actual text, in hopes of finding some mention of Barbara Feinman who, in addition to other professional accomplishments, wrote the book. A decade ago, when [It Takes A] Village was first published, Feinman was much talked about for having gone unmentioned.
Shortly before the book came out, Mrs. Clinton boasted of having "written a 320-page book in longhand over the last six months." This came as a surprise to her ghostwriter. Feinman had often worked late nights at the White House and even followed Mrs. Clinton on vacation in hope of picking up stray thoughts she could use to bulk up the manuscript, and she had been assured her role as ghost would be generously acknowledged. Yet when Village finally appeared there was no mention of Feinman either on the cover or in the Acknowledgments. News stories appeared detailing Feinman's role, but White House spokesmen backed the first lady in her contention that the book was her work alone.
It became a minor controversy, stoked not only by Mrs. Clinton's political adversaries but also by Feinman's friends in the Washington press corps (she's a former researcher for Bob Woodward). With Mrs. Clinton's claims of sole authorship long ago disproved, I picked up this expanded edition of Village to see whether she had expanded it enough to make room for Barbara Feinman. Nope: Mrs. Clinton still believes that while it takes a village to raise a child, it takes nobody worth naming to write her book for her.
--Andrew Ferguson, reviewing a variety of presidential campaign books.
(Yet more intersection between football and politics.)
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
--U.S. Constitution: Second Amendment
Consider a fantasy football league that the commissioner used to run manually, giving each team at most one add/drop transaction per week. Then the league went on-line, but the web site in question didn't have a "one per week" option in the standard set-up, so instead the new rule was 15 transactions per year. Anyone who wanted to make more than one a week was welcome to, but still, 15 per year, enforced automatically.
Now suppose that league had a bit of draft chaos because of ESPN's flaky servers. Nothing catastrophic, but just people losing connectivity at inopportune times. The commissioner sent out a note (that I just looked for and couldn't find, ruining what would have been a very elegant post) indicating that because of the draft issues he increased the transaction limit to 25 per team.
If you were a league member who'd had no draft/server problems whatsoever, would you consider yourself morally obligated to make no more than 15 (instead of 25) add/drops?
(That's a real question, not a rhetorical question.)
Despite how I feel about what weight (if any) to give the first clause of the Second Amendment, I actually did intend to hold myself to 15 pickups out of sportsmanship, but then Donovan McNabb got hurt. So be it, 16.
Are we still at the point where every electoral victory by a gay politician requires "Gay" to be the first word of the headline? Even in a SF Chronicle story about Vallejo?
Further down: "[Osby] Davis, 62, a real estate attorney who aimed to become the city's first African American mayor, said Tuesday that he will ask for a recount."
Somehow I don't think his goal was in and of itself to become Vallejo's first AFrican American mayor. Strictly speaking I think his goal was just to become mayor.
"Gas in Phoenix (and probably everywhere else) has jumped almost 75 cents in the last 4 weeks. Why? Because demand is up due to the holiday season. Frankly, I hope it spreads to the point that people start actually doing something besides complaining about the prices. We need to force our governments to take action against the petrolium [sic] industry."
--some named Boritom, from this thread (emphases added)
"There was a tendency toward alarmism, and that fit perhaps a certain fundraising agenda."
--quote from this article, snarked about here
HILLARY GOES AFTER OBAMA ON "EXPERIENCE:" Well, it's true. He's never been First Lady.
--Instapundit
(Link here.)
Dear "Today's Parents,"
WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?
House Bill 1804 took effect on November 1, and seems to contain some draconian provisions about how other people deal with illegal immigrants.
House Bill 1017 involved education funding, and coincided(?) with a one-day(!) teachers' strike in April 1990(?). I think it passed but I'm not 100% sure of my memory.
Oklahoma has been a state since 1907. Once can assume that state legislation began with House Bill 1 (whatever and whenever that may have been).
Anything you can conclude from all this is an exercise for the reader.
(When I registered to vote, I joined a party of incompetents and crazy people, a party whose formal existence is sort of an oxymoron, a party summed pretty well by this Onion article.)
1. I could go to heaven!! Yay! Thank you, Howard!
2. More seriously, I could vote for Hillary in a primary. Yes, really. That is, I could vote against the man who thinks this country needs a Chief Technology Officer. He announced this at Google of all places! How in the world could Google have succeeded without central government planning?
Maybe it's lazy/hackneyed to fall back on The Onion twice in one post, but this brilliantly captures everything that's wrong with government-run tech endeavors.
Patronizing? Tone-deaf? Innocuous? Obvious? Subtly insightful?
So help me, the headline on the print edition of this article is "Can Obama Do For Politics What Tiger Woods Did For Golf?"
The intended parallel is soul-crushingly obvious but for a better comparison what would be the political equivalent of a 21-year-old winning the 1997 Masters by 12 strokes?
None of this quite rises to the level of integrating a lunch counter, but before I die I plan to, among other things:
1. Serve alcohol to teenagers (are those humongous billboards all over the rest of the country or just my neck of the woods?)
2. Play on-line poker in Massachusetts
3. [some half-baked drug use scheme to be named later, possibly moot if various jurisdictions see the light before I even get around to my first toke ever]
"[U]ltimately this is about whether management gets to screw workers"
--Atrios, about a recent strike (given the generic sentiment involved, does it really even matter which strike?)
Megan McCardle's response is where I saw that quote just now. Like her, I have no dog in the specific writers-versus-studios dispute. I'm just floored by how many people think of "workers" and "management" as two monolithic entities separated by an uncrossable chasm.
(Full disclosure: I'm an "exempt employee" (i.e. management (or "i.e. not paid for overtime")) in what basically amounts to the computer entertainment industry, where organized labor is all but nonexistent.)
Stories like this outrage me, but in the exact opposite direction of the intended outrage.
We're supposed to feel sorry for someone who was fired after 30 years of working at Taco Bell. (Italics below are blatant straw men that you should feel free to pick apart.)
Where is the reward for her 30 years of service?
Silly me, I thought it was the 30 years of paychecks.
But her 30 years of loyalty is an asset!
Is it? What possible use does a fast food chain have for N years of an employee's loyalty (where N > 5 or so)? If the idea is that she's accrued 30 years of being-good-at-what-she-does skills, then the two failed performance reviews that triggered her firing suggest otherwise.
But they made her cry! "I bawled for three days after I got fired."
I often choose my fast food based on whether the corporation in question makes its employees cry. It's right up there with food quality, price, and whether the franchise in question is on the side of the street where I happen to be driving.
(Flippancy aside, I really couldn't tell you when I had my last fast food joint meal. I didn't even remember to eat my free Tuesday World Series taco.)
Have we really reached the point where people heap scorn and ridicule on the governor of Georgia simply because he prays for rain? I find it deliciously ironic to see non-religious people acting even less rationally than religious people.
(Speaking of politics and the phrase "delicious irony," Chad sent me a link to the Presidential Candidate Selector quiz promoted on the Volokh Conspiracy. Apparently I should vote for Ron Paul -- yet I'm well aware that most of his recent popularity comes from single-issue voters for an issue on which I disagree with him.)
Interesting contrast between a recent Michael Yon photo in Iraq and an infamous Saigon photo.
Drivers licenses for illegals actually isn't an issue that concerns me much (if you're running for federal office, the decisions of a state governor aren't always relevant) but I have to agree with Mickey that how she reacts to things doesn't bode well for what kind of president she'd be.
(The catch-22 is that so much of what she's doing wrong is a stereotypically female way to do things wrong. Note the full meaning of "stereotypically": She's not doing what actual women would necessarily do, just what caricatures of women would do. Playing the gender card is, ironically, an example of that difference. Some people assume victim status more than others: compare to Elizabeth Dole, Olympia Snowe, even Pelosi.)
This satire is so dead-on that I hung my head in shame.
But after that I read the latest convergences, with the "Don't ever be the first to stop applauding!" anecdote.
THANK GOODNESS we live in the country we live in. (My point is no more, and no less, than that.)
In any case, the latest from Dan Liebert is refreshingly apolitical.
Is, inexplicably, buried within a football column.
(Start at "Housing Problems Genuine, Sense of Crisis Phony:" and continue eight paragraphs.)
Greg Mankiw has your talking points right here.
How idiotic are some people if this post even needed to be written?
"Libertarian" isn't quite the right word for it and "capitalism" isn't quite the right word for it. Whatever it is, this essay captures it to a tee. (The essay is in response to this article about the hardships faced by public interest employees.)
Most provocative sentence: "In many ways, Sam Walton was one of the great humanitarians of our time, in bringing our nation's poor closer to a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle, and he seemed to do pretty well by doing good."
Don't infer any specific policy implications from this, unless the chain of logic is pretty obvious. The general idea is that the "invisible hand" is profoundly underrated, while both altruistic intentions and regulatory schemes are profoundly overrated relative to what they actually accomplish.
(The point isn't to want to make the world a better place, the point is actually to accomplish it.)
Drew Carey takes a stand. Good for him!
"And is there any show more inherently free-market-oriented than The Price Is Right, which teaches more about price theory and the subjective theory of value in an hour than most intro econ courses do in a semester."
--Nick Gillespie
Moreover, what do you picture when you think of someone who watches TPIR? Filter out from that caricature the people who will still be alive ten years from now, and what else do you think they're doing with their time while they're sitting at home watching that show?
...steadily increases over short periods time, but with specific moments where it plunges, where she does things that make me think I couldn't possibly vote for her.
This is one of those plunge moments.
If Colbert's campaign (and the Federal Election Commission's reaction to it) brings more attention to some of this country's absurd campaign finance laws, and if some of the more egregiously unconstitutional ones are repealed, then I'll consider him a hero (without irony).
(I shudder to imagine that his alter ego might think that someone like me would already ironically think of him as a hero.)
(Godwin's law defined and made fun of: Yes, I know that despite the latter punchline the Law only relates to the probability of a reference, not its appropriateness.)
Is this a new low for Frank Rich? (I can only hope that various political blogs were all over this several days ago.) You won't find the magic word if you CTRL-F, but you might as well.
The offensive part of the central conceit (comparing "Good Americans" now to "Good Germans" 65 years ago) is that he doesn't bother to make any cogent arguments about it, instead leaving it out there as red meat that induces people to read the rest of his litany. If he were making constructive use of that conceit, he'd bother to tell us what he expects "Good Americans" to do instead of what they're (we're) already doing.
He cites the messed-up procurement system that led to troops without armored vehicles and blames Rumsfeld for being callous about it: I can buy calling him out for sabotaging the war effort, but then that means "Good Americans" have a duty to... sabotage it further?
Young men with bright futures are in harm's way -- does the "Good American" have a duty to join them, or a duty not to?
The tax rates are too low for a country at war (so says Rich) -- does the "Good American" voluntarily pay twice as much, perhaps enclosing a handwritten anti-government screed with the check?
Most of the things he complains about are civil liberties violations: the Bush administration is too pro-snooping, for example. Of course it's completely legitimate to compare all of this to a regime that packed a bunch of people onto trains and sent them to camps to be gassed or starved.
I think the column speaks for itself as to whether Rich even intended to change the mind of anyone who disagreed with him; and inasmuch as he's preaching to the choir, one can strongly infer that the "Good Americans" he mocks are third-person, not first-person.
The first letter in the latest Savage Love begins: "I think my 5-year-old nephew is probably gay."
I can see making that judgment call at 15, even at 10. But at five?
The crux of the letter is that the writer's brother has prohibited the kid from playing dress-up or watching Broadway musicals, things the kid wants to do at his aunt's house.
"Question 1: Is it even possible to tell the sexual preference of a child so young?"
I'm skeptical of Savage's claim that "There's a 99 percent chance your nephew is gay," but then Savage is gay and I'm not, so what do I know? (With the VERY limited second-hand information available, I'd put the probability around 70%, much of which is trusting the writer's hunch. I certainly wouldn't go higher than that.)
"Question 2: Is it wrong for me to indulge my nephew even though my brother (his parent) has told me that he doesn't want my nephew doing those things?"
In theory yes, if only because child-to-adult "secrets" are often a telltale sign of sexual abuse. (I don't think the writer ever wants to be mistaken for a pederast.) In practice... for heaven's sake, let the kid watch Chicago. It won't make him any more or less gay than he would have been.
In short, let kids be kids.
For example, he's right about Halloween.
In the red trunks: Richard Mellon Scaife.
In the blue trunks: Ron Burkle.
Even if the death match never happens they can argue about which one will have had the messier divorce.
UPDATE: Which is more astonishing, that Burkle has never been mentioned on Fark, or that Scaife never had been until today?
Julie Stahlhut asked this question via Facebook. My answer here differs from the one there because "Joe Buck" was a lame throwaway spur-of-the-moment (couldn't think of anyone better). Also, this time a hierarchy (my #1 below is the one I didn't think of until he came up in conversation today).
1. Che
2. Paris
3. Bono
One more NY Times link, this time not about presidential candidates. This story contains a lot of soldier impressions, both good and bad. (An example of the good, with a paragraph break removed: "Re-enlistment rates across the brigade are running above the Army’s goals, and soldiers in six platoons said in interviews that they still loved their jobs: the camaraderie, the sense of mission, the ability to play a role in history. It also helps, they said, that they will head back to Fort Drum in New York with a sense of accomplishment.") Sometimes the order of paragraphs alone says a lot about the writer's (editor's?) own view.
I have to wonder about some of the people who'd let particular war stories change their minds (or about some of the people whose minds are already made up, but who actually hope that particular war stories change other people's minds): It's not exactly a novel concept that some very bad things happen in the course of war.
(If anything, a new wrinkle to this Iraq War (and the Gulf War before it) is how much lower the casualty rate is and how many fewer horrible things are happening. World War II was the quintessential "just war," yet we (for example) firebombed Dresden.)
To be sure, there's always a trade-off, an evaluation of whether what we want to accomplish is worth the cost -- and the cost grows the longer we're over there (so if you expected in 2003 that we'd be out of there by 2007, that's a good reason to say "hey, wait a minute..."). But I feel sorry for anyone who has an epiphany like "OMG LOL I guess they really have it bad over there."
This is month-old news but who lets his cell phone interrupt his own speech? This story has no redeeming virtue.
On the other hand, people who use "Hello?!" as a sarcastic retort are among the most annoying twits on Earth. I shouldn't have been the least bit surprised which presidential candidate has this most unfortunate habit.
We have a habit of falling weeks behind.
The Sunday Magazine profile of José Saramago was one week removed (two weeks?) from the Sunday Magazine cover story about how Enlightenment values are the worldwide exception (not the rule). Both Saramago and the latter author believe religious absolutism is very powerful: Saramago thinks it causes most of the world's ills; you could infer that the other article agrees, though it doesn't quite come out and say so. The latter article had no specific recommendations (unless I have terrible reading comprehension or bad short-term memory) for how to avert theocracy, but Saramago's solution is communism. Not a very cheery pair of articles for a libertarian wannabe-optimist.
And then there was the human interest profile of the Iowa couple about to lose their jobs at a closing Maytag factory, and at risk of falling out of the middle class. (Heavens! Would they have to turn in their caste membership cards?) The husband guessed that there was demand for electricians in central Iowa (ya think?) but hadn't bothered to look around yet. Even so, the NY Times wanted us to feel sorry for them.
Kinsley might have had a point about the alternative minimum tax, except that the biggest problems are practical: It inflicts some very specific grave injustices on people who receive stock options that are briefly worth a fortune on paper but worthless by the time they could actually do anything with them.
I suppose there the problem isn't the AMT itself but some of the absurd decisions the IRS has made about what does(n't) constitute a taxable event. Apparently somebody at the IRS thinks that the stock options in question are something you can enjoy having in your possession, as if you'd frame them on a wall and admire their beauty.
Maybe this makes me a horrible libertarian but it bugs me that two of the biggest hot-button issues these days are cameras in public places and records of who's had phone conversations with whom. The former is for another post. For the latter, there's always good old Fark.
Phone companies do know whom you called (or who called you). They do not know what information was actually transmitted in the conversation. (But if you use a cell phone and don't bother with encryption then anyone who wanted to could listen in on what you're saying anyway.)
In theory this "who called whom" data could be immensely valuable to some marketing company. As far as I can tell, if a land-line phone company decided to sell that data, there's nothing that could stop them. (Did you get a privacy statement with your last phone bill? I suspect not.) Of course this would probably be a PR disaster for the company that it.
But the world won't end as a result of a database containing a row reflecting that you talked to Johnny, Sue, and or Charlie, because NOBODY F'ING CARES about your individual data point.
(And the day any given "suspected terrorist" actually does get linked to acts of terror, you're damn right I'd like the government to know who they've been contacting, who their contacts have been contacting, etc.)
The upshot of all this is that every idiot who posted over-the-top rhetoric to that thread should, as penance, go spend a few minutes reading Radley Balko's blog and learn what it really means to violate someone's civil liberties. (In other words, for the love of everything, CHOOSE YOUR BATTLES wisely.)
"It's fun to have a old-school villain in sports again, right? There's a reason every sports movie has a bad guy in it. There's a reason "USA 4, USSR 3" was the single greatest moment in American sports history. There's a reason people enjoy hating the Yankees and Duke as much as they do."
--Bill Simmons re New England Patriots
Did I miss that part of world history where the Yankees or Blue Devils (or Patriots, for that matter) starved millions of peasants, set up networks of secret police, and/or exiled freethinkers to Siberia?
On the sports side of the ledger, the column basically amounts to: "Hey, look, my favorite team is behaving like a'holes. Can't deny it, so why not embrace it. Isn't it GOOD for the league that a team so good has no class?"
(One difference between being a villain and being a jerk is that being a villain is evil; being a jerk is just sad.)
Given the gotcha-ironic text of the Instapundit link, I expected something a lot different from this story. Aren't these exactly the questions that good doctors should be asking, to the extent that parents' behavior impacts children's quality of life? Am I a bad libertarian for failing to object to this?
(Of course I would object if the "wrong" answers to these questions were singlehandedly pretext for the state to come in and take someone's kids away. But as with many situations where I fail to object to data-gathering, that's a problem with how information is used rather than how it's gathered.)
Awhile back Instapundit also linked to a story about how men were being made to feel like presumed sex offenders, guilty until proven innocent. I was willing to buy the premise, except that the author gave no hard evidence whatsoever, just his subjective impressions. (The closest thing to hard evidence was an anecdote about how flight attendants didn't want to seat an unaccompanied minor next to him. I think more likely than not this anecdote some implicit element of misunderstanding, overreaction, or both.)
Some of them are hokey. That said, this is Eugene Volokh at his best.
Gosh, I have no idea why people would be reluctant to crown as a feminist icon someone whose main claim to fame is that she needs extra time on a test.
The winning litigant, by the way, has quite a history of turning supposed disadvantages into not only special accommodation but also insanely fawning publicity.
I cannot, nor can any economically sane person, support a president who'd think this was a good idea.
Quoting an e-mail from my friend Corwyn (which in turn quotes the news story: I added green shading to the quote-within-a-quote):
"I think it's a wonderful idea," said Rep. Stephanie Stubbs Jones, an Ohio Democrat who attended the event and has already endorsed Clinton. "Every child born in the United States today owes $27,000 on the national debt, why not let them come get $5,000 to grow until their 18?"
I dunno, Ms. Jones, because maybe then every child born in the United States today will owe $32,000 on the national debt?
Why not give each child born in the US a $27,000 bond? That way, when they turn 18, they can all just use that money to pay off the national debt?!
The latest Economist has Burmese monk on the cover (caption: "Burma's Saffron Revolution").
I fervently hope they succeed.
What can we do to help?
Did boycotting Pepsi (and/or whichever other companies purportedly did business with the regime there) do any good? Apparently it did, a long time ago, except the loss of Pepsi business fell a bit short of toppling the regime.
In theory the world's best military apparatus could guarantee the fall of that regime. But they're busy in Iraq (and that hasn't turned out as well as I'd hoped).
On a scale of evil how do those Burmese rules compare to Saddam Hussein?
At least they've never invaded a neighbor.
How on earth did any center-left Americans manage to oppose the (first) Gulf War? (I could see hard-right isolationists wanting nothing to do with the United Nations and arguing that the Middle East is none of our business.) A U.N. member was invaded and annexed; the U.N. sanctioned a liberation. I could see opposing an all-the-way-to-Baghdad endeavor (notwithstanding that in hindsight it would have simplified a lot of things.)
George W. Bush uses pronunciation guides. Oddly enough, so do the trivia questions we write.
Take a shot for every sentence in which Noah begs the question.
"[A] public plan will likely be both more generous and thriftier [than a private plan]."
But almost by definition a public plan can be every bit as "generous" as the lawmakers who implement it want it to be. They have an effectively unlimited* supply of cash, in that when they need more money they can simply spend it (and raise taxes as necessary).
*- until the deficit spending and/or confiscatory tax rates ruin us all, but hey, at least that reduces income inequality in a fashion
Incidentally, the best thing about Tim Noah's health care columns is that in his eyes ("from his pen"?) any conceivable victory by the Democratic Party somehow constitutes a mandate for socialized medicine.
Republicans mismanage a war? Time for socialized medicine.
Country comes to its senses about gay relationships being basically analogous to straight ones? Time for socialized medicine.
Lobbyists busted for corruption? Time for - you get the idea.
[MEH-tu-for]
1. a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them
2. a rhetorical device at least one Reuters reporter apparently fails to understand (from Opinion Journal via Fark)
My favorite commenter is the fourth one down, who honestly thinks that because Bush said the words "Mandela is dead," he "screwed it up" and is a "jackass."
Threads full of economic illiteracy are one thing. But in the year 2007, I would have hoped there wouldn't be so many racist cretins trolling the Internet.
Along those lines, this story about a 50-year-old mom in South Carolina who scours Jihadist message boards reminded me of how one of you used to (still does?) follow a lot of white-power message boards to see what the neo-N's are up to. Does all that bile just wear you down after awhile though?
We hold onto some really tortured logic (and fervent beliefs) in the name of group identity.
"That reminds me, after CameraGate was played up for more than a week on every major network and Web site, this story was practically buried on Thursday night. That's right, it's the "we have no further evidence that the Patriots cheated and this investigation is closed" story. Sorry to disappoint everyone, although it was worth it to see Gregg Easterbrook's impression of Joe McCarthy this week. Can we all move on now?"
-- Bill Simmons (hyperlink in original)
The actual linked-to story has two main elements:
1. The NFL destroyed all the evidence that New England had given it.
2. New England "certified in writing" (oddly ambiguous phrase: does whatever they wrote down have the legal weight of an affidavit? - they're surely not under penalty of perjury) that they have no other illicit videotapes
On the scale from "Move on, nothing to see here" to "Total whitewash" those two events surely fall somewhere in the middle. Do you think Simmons even realizes the event to which his being a Patriot fan seems to skew his interpretation of events?
(If you need disclosure, here it is: I'm generally indifferent to the New England Patriots. Two of my closest football fan friends despise them, of whom one has (correctly) pointed out to me in e-mail that NFL teams have much more nefarious things by violating the league's salary cap. In previous blog posts this month I've been very skeptical of whether the videotaping incidents were all that serious, or merited the word "cheating," while commenters have taken a much harder line.)
Take this quiz. If you miss anything, learn why the correct answer is what it is.
I got 59 out of 60 (need to brush up on my Just War theory).
At least one freshman year dorm-mate took a class with Michael Walzer on the reading list (until looking him up I'd misremembered that he was the professor: the actual professor was probably Joseph Nye.
Publicity whore + police overreaction = pathetic melodrama.
I've seen political celebrities talk to college audiences. They came here a lot, and many (most?) of the audience questions were from grandstanding pompous asses who had minutes worth of preamble invective before they'd bother to phrase something in the form of a question. None of those escalated to a security situation, partly for "when in Rome" reasons, partly because at least the authorities were civilized.
In even the most enlightened democracy, if you're being escorted off the premises by police then it's generally a bad idea to show physical resistance. I hate power-trip cops as much as the next libertarian but that's just common sense. Unless your actual goal is to become a cause celebre, in which case the tasing is a small price to pay.
Deadspin commenters are generally unsympathetic, though their biggest issues with him aren't at all what a knee-jerk partisan (on either side) would suspect. (As with them, he had me at bro.)
Incidentally, how many of you have ever been asked by police to leave a campus building? I actually have: Several of us were watching this game at the Boston University student union. At 11 a janitor told us we had to leave; nobody moved. More verbal requests were ignored but when police came we left, no questions asked, no need for an escort. It didn't take too long to find a seat in a bar a couple blocks away.
Brace yourself for HillaryCare 2.0.
Would it be silly to pledge to vote for her if and only if she does NOT pull something like this? (Not that she'd need additional help in California, of all states, come November.)
Compare this hypothetical about persuasive legal writing to some of the rhetorical crutches used in this VC guest post (e.g. "two main reasons: dumb and dumber").
It's a shame, especially inasmuch as I think Amy Zegart's September 11-related conclusions are generally right. She seems to be unable to persuade her way out of a paper bag.
Ilya Somin explains. A few posts up from that one, a defense of free market choices against a misguided utilitarian critique.
An exercise for the reader is whether this Fark thread (scroll for various posts by OlafTheBent and responses to same) is relevant to Somin's (first) argument.
Christopher Hitchens on Larry Craig.
By the way, it bothers me that Larry Craig devoted so much time to explaining whether he's gay. (On the flip side it bothers me for similar reasons that Jim McGreevey devoted so much time to explaining whether he's gay. The sex of his lover didn't bear much relation to whether putting his lover on the state payroll was scandalously wrong.) One's sexual identity doesn't contribute much to the discussion of whether cruising for anonymous sex in a public restroom disturbs the peace.
(To be sure, you're unlikely to find anyone of the opposite sex in a public restroom, much less a willing sex partner; on the other hand, I'll admit someone looking for an opposite-sex sex partner is unlikely to feel the need to go to such lengths.)
I'd like to think that we can reach a bi-partisan consensus that all couples are hunky-dory (same sex or opposite sex); that their most intimate moments are best left private; that anonymous casual sex is fine in private if that's what you're into; that anonymous casual sex in public is scandalously gross; that public restrooms aren't private (but are very gross); and that, most importantly, the bathroom sex cruisers do a grave disservice to mainstream gays by casting same-sex love in the worst possible light.
IMPORTANT CLARIFICATION: I know that few self-respecting out gay man would identify with public bathroom cruisers. However, there's a large body of ignorant (in the least pejorative sense possible) homophobes who know little to nothing about homosexuality other than the bathroom cruisers they hear about. So the issue isn't whether an out gay man would identify with them but whether a third party would conflate the two. It's wrong and unfair, but many people still do make that conflation. For that reason, Craig's press conference denials are arguably worse than his original offense.
Will Whoopi also defend genital mutilation? It, too, is a cultural staple in some parts of the wo
