Walter Cronkite

I wasn't really a TV news-watcher during his heyday (actually, it was a habit I've pretty much avoided all my life), but Jesse Walker sums up my feelings nicely here:

It [Cronkite running for president] was a joke, of course. But it was a wistful what-if of a joke, and it resonated. Time soon ran letters hailing the idea. "He knows more about national and international problems than any other two candidates put together," declared one reader, "and, as a duty, I think he would accept the miserable job." Four years later, the newsman was still fending off suggestions that he run for the office and "make a difference." Can you imagine anyone spouting such a fantasy about any of our anchors today? Maybe Stewart or Colbert, but not someone who delivers the news with a straight face.

And that's good. Cronkite's influence was a product of the three-network era, a time we should be happy to have put behind us. I'm sorry to see the man die, but I'm glad no one was able to fill his shoes.

Rephrasing Ben Franklin's old aphorism

Benjamin Franklin is often quoted as having said "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety". Here's a modern rephrasing, "The more you cede your own well-being to an 800-pound gorilla, the more that 800-pound gorilla is going to act like a thin-skinned asshole.".

Entertaining Timewaster

This should be a doddle for USians, but not so easy for those of us who always confuse those square-ish states in flyover country: Know Your States.

I managed 90%, but I dropped New Jersey accidentally, which certainly messed up my accuracy.

H/T to "JtMc" for the link.

It's been 40 years . . . why haven't we gone back?

On July 20th, it will have been 40 years since many of us clustered around our tiny black-and-white televisions, watching the first moon landing (or for those of you of conspiracist leanings, a really convincing sound stage in Area 51). Why, after all this time, haven't we gone further? Why, for that matter, have we not been back to the moon for over a generation? Ronald Bailey explains the real reason:

The Apollo moon landings have often been compared to the explorations of Christopher Columbus and the Lewis and Clark expedition to Oregon. For example, on the 20th anniversary of the first moon landing, President George H.W. Bush declared, "From the voyages of Columbus to the Oregon Trail to the journey to the Moon itself: history proves that we have never lost by pressing the limits of our frontiers."

But what boosters of the moon expeditions overlook is that the motive for pressing the limits of our frontiers in those cases was chiefly profit. In his report from his first voyage, Columbus predicted that his explorations would result in "vast commerce and great profit." The extension of commerce was also the chief justification that President Thomas Jefferson gave in his secret message to Congress requesting $2,500 to fund what would become the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Forty years later, as we bask in the waning prestige that the Apollo missions earned our country, we must keep in mind that humanity will some day colonize the moon and other parts of the solar system, but only when it becomes profitable to do so.

Back in 1969, my friend Alan Fairfield and I sat in fascination (at least in the golden memory, they do . . . we were nine: I doubt that we paid as much attention to the broadcast as his mother thought we should). Mrs. Fairfield told us that we'd be able to go to the moon ourselves by the time we were grown up. It didn't turn out that way, and at the current rate of progress, it may not turn out that way for my grandkids.

But I still hope, one day . . .

Monticello: Jefferson's machine for living

While I enjoyed my visit and tour of Monticello, back in 2006, I didn't get the full story. Wired tries to rectify that problem:

Thomas Jefferson loved new technology and modding his surroundings to his lifestyle. From food to comfort to efficiency, he was always looking for ways to improve his living space with inventions and hacks. If he were alive today, we like to think he’d be reading Wired.

Jefferson thought of his house, Monticello, as a machine for living. As such, it contains many insights into how a DIY gear-nut of today might have fared in the 18th Century.

“I would argue we are trying to debunk the madman-genius, nutty-professor image of Thomas Jefferson,” said Monticello curator Elizabeth Chew. “He is someone who was trying to adapt the latest technology in every realm of existence: science, how the house functions, in the garden. He is trying to put into use new ideas.”

Sauce for the goose

Rick Newcombe provides an insight into why Los Angeles is suffering from a killer combination of rising unemployment and tax rates that no longer meet expenses:

[. . .] 15 years ago we had a dispute with the city over our business tax classification. The city argued that we should be in an "occupations and professions" classification that has an extremely high tax rate, while we fought for a "wholesale and retail" classification with a much lower rate. The city forced us to invest a small fortune in legal fees over two years, but we felt it was worth it in order to establish the correct classification once and for all.

After enduring a series of bureaucratic hearings, we anxiously awaited a ruling to find out what our tax rate would be. Everything was at stake. We had already decided that if we lost, we would move.

You can imagine how relieved we were on July 1, 1994, when the ruling was issued. We won, and firmly planted our roots in the City of Angels and proceeded to build our business.

Everything was fine until the city started running out of money in 2007. Suddenly, the city announced that it was going to ignore its own ruling and reclassify us in the higher tax category. Even more incredible is the fact that the new classification was to be imposed retroactively to 2004 with interest and penalties. No explanation was given for the new classification, or for the city's decision to ignore its 1994 ruling.

Their official position is that the city is not bound by past rulings — only taxpayers are. This is why we have been forced to file a lawsuit. We will let the courts decide whether it is legal for adverse rulings to apply only to taxpayers and not to the city.

The rule of law requires that both parties are equally subject to the outcome of a trial, win or lose. The city clearly feels that it's above that.

Was Palin really the "It Girl" of the GOP?

Unlike some (like my virtual landlord), I've not been all that impressed by Sarah Palin as a potential presidential candidate. Maybe I'm missing the blindingly obvious:

"This unusual move might be the right move for her to become president of the United States," insisted William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard. Columnist Jonah Goldberg assured the governor that no matter what, "You are the 'It Girl' of the GOP." National Review editor Jay Nordlinger confessed, "I am an admirer and defender of Palin's. Oh, what the heck: I love the woman."

Why on earth are they infatuated with her? Palin has hardly helped to revive the conservative cause. For all her alleged star power, she did nothing to improve the GOP ticket's fortunes on Election Day. She showed no gift for articulating conservative themes, beyond ridiculing liberals as overeducated, big-city elitists — a description that applies equally well to most conservative commentators.

[. . .]

But it's really not hard to see why Palin inspires such devotion. And I do mean "see." She has one obvious thing going for her that Miers didn't: She's a babe, and she doesn't try to hide it.

Bingo.

Update: Bonus quote from Katherine Mangu-Ward in the Los Angeles Times:

When Sarah Palin complains that people are spreading lies about her — shocking untruths that cast aspersions on her intelligence, integrity and fecundity — she is right, but it's like a stripper complaining about catcalls. There's a reason lifelong politicians are often self-important blowhards (cf. Joe Biden) — a Kevlar ego is an asset come election season. This is how we choose our candidates: It's the folks who remain standing after everyone digs dirt, turns it into mud and slings it.

If Palin is resigning now because she's trying to get ahead of a scandal, then the system — as painful as it may be for those inside it — worked. The useful, brutal mechanism of bitter partisanship ferreted out another corrupt or inept pol, discovering failings that would have remained hidden in a gentler, kinder world.

Update, the second: Jon (my virtual landlord) offers this as a commentary.

Update, the third: Over lunch, Jon suggested that it would be amusing to see someone mash the famous bunker scene from Downfall with the resignation of Sarah Palin as Alaska governor. Of course, this scene is getting over-used:

"The farmers are not our enemy"

It's sometimes breathtaking when common sense prevails: prevails:

"The farmers are not our enemy," the State Department's Richard Holbrooke recently declared, referring to Afghans who grow opium poppies. Since the U.S. government is officially determined to wipe out their livelihood, they could be forgiven for misunderstanding. To reassure those who interpret ripping up their crops as a hostile act, Holbrooke said, "we're going to phase out eradication."

This policy shift is a long overdue admission that anti-drug efforts in Afghanistan are strengthening the Taliban insurgency and undermining stability. But the reasons Holbrooke cited for the change apply more broadly than he is willing to acknowledge, indicting not just poppy pulling in Afghanistan but an international drug control regime that has been an expensive flop for nearly a century.

Holbrooke, the special U.S. envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, told A.P.: "Eradication is a waste of money. It might destroy some acreage, but it didn't reduce the amount of money the Taliban got by one dollar. It just helped the Taliban." By encouraging farmers to view the theocratic insurgents as defenders against foreign invaders bent on eliminating their income, he said, "the U.S. policy was driving people into the hands of the Taliban."

Don't expect the logic to permeate other areas of US drug control policies, however. There are too many programs running to allow a quick reversion to common sense. But, that being said, this is still a positive sign.

QotD: The Palin resignation

It is possible that Sarah Palin was both unfairly mistreated and personally attacked by the media and many on the left, and that her family was rather ruthlessly and mercilessly run through the ringer . . . and that she’s a not particularly bright, not particularly curious, once libertarian-leaning governor who sadly devolved into a predictable, buzzword spouting culture warrior when she was prematurely picked for national office by John McCain.

These two scenarios can coexist.

As for quitting her position as governor 18 months early, her rambling press conference statement was bizarre. If she’s quitting because she’s tired of politics and is ready to return to private life for good, good on her. If she’s quitting the job she ran for and committed to because she thinks she’s now too big for the office and wants a higher profile to position herself for national office, then she deserves all the scorn and derision coming her way.

Radley Balko, "Dear God, Please Let This Be the Last Time I Feel Compelled To Post About Sarah Palin . . .", The Agitator, 2009-07-06

Re-examining Roosevelt's New Deal

That bipartisan spirit

Political mashup cartoon

Tweeting California

Gerard Vanderleun sent this tweet last night, which ideally captures the destiny of California:

"The salvation of Calif. will be partition. The south gets Hollywood and Tiajuana. The North: All the water and marijuana."

Update: Bonus USA twitterage from Ghost of a Flea:

"My American cousins: Congratulations on cap-and-trade. You are now to the left of Canada."
"WAY to the left of Canada.

QotD: Get out while the getting is good

I have tried pointing Americans at the British example to show them what an appalling idea it is to have the state directing any industry, let alone medical care. But alas it is very hard to overcome that special kind of insular American optimism that does not think what happens in another advanced first world nation can teach them anything, because in the USA things will be different.

Well yes, it will be different . . . in that the control obsessed Obama's of this world will find new, innovative and oh so wholesome American ways to end up with a third rate health care system much like Britain has today.

This might be a good time for Americans to invest their money in Swiss medical clinics as I suspect in the coming years expatriated medical care will be a serious growth industry... plus it has the added benefit of getting your money out of the USA and US dollar.

Perry de Havilland, "A stupidity of voters'', Samizdata, 2009-06-21

Was Heinlein's Friday a forecast?

Friday, one of Robert Heinlein's later novels, postulated a world where America had lost its way to such a degree that it had fractured into numerous balkanized regions, including a fascistic nation based in Chicago, a California-on-steroids, a free-wheeling no-holds-barred Las Vegas, etc. (Canada was shown to be in a post-secession state of tension with an independent Quebec). Paul Starobin sees something remarkably similar in America's actual future:

Remember that classic Beatles riff of the 1960s: "You say you want a revolution?" Imagine this instead: a devolution. Picture an America that is run not, as now, by a top-heavy Washington autocracy but, in freewheeling style, by an assemblage of largely autonomous regional republics reflecting the eclectic economic and cultural character of the society.

There might be an austere Republic of New England, with a natural strength in higher education and technology; a Caribbean-flavored city-state Republic of Greater Miami, with an anchor in the Latin American economy; and maybe even a Republic of Las Vegas with unfettered license to pursue its ambitions as a global gambling, entertainment and conventioneer destination. California? America's broke, ill-governed and way-too-big nation-like state might be saved, truly saved, not by an emergency federal bailout, but by a merciful carve-up into a trio of republics that would rely on their own ingenuity in making their connections to the wider world. And while we're at it, let's make this project bi-national — economic logic suggests a natural multilingual combination between Greater San Diego and Mexico's Northern Baja, and, to the Pacific north, between Seattle and Vancouver in a megaregion already dubbed "Cascadia" by economic cartographers.

Update, 20 June: James Bow writes:

Regarding . . . the possible break-up of the United States, this is actually an older subject. Even late in the Bush Administration, there was talk that California and Washington might go their separate ways. I could see this happening, but more in the context of the gradual folding up of the Nation State as a world institution. Similar movements are pulling power up (to Europe, NAFTA, WTO) and down. So Washington and Ottawa's days may be numbered, AND I might be able to drive from St. John's to Los Angeles without encountering a customs booth.

Here's my post on the subject here:
http://bowjamesbow.ca/2008/03/12/and-the-walls-c.shtml.

"You keep using that word . . ."

Paul Marks has his Inigo Montoya moment . . . "Capitalism. Newsweek keeps using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means."

The front cover of the edition has the headline 'Capitalist Manifesto' and this article is odd enough - page after page of standard statist stuff (supporting the bank bailouts and so on) written by one Newsweek's high ups. Why the high up is being given about half the magazine for his statist musings (rather than doing his job of editing the articles of real writers) is not explained - and the title of 'Capitalist Manifesto', for standard statism that one could hear and see on the BBC or American 'mainstream' broadcasters any day of the week, is also not explained.

However, this is by no means the most odd article.

There is also an article about a group of 'rebels' who are out to "save capitalism" from President Barack Obama. I was astonished to see such an article in the 'mainstream media' (especially in Newsweek) and read it. That is when the utter insanity of this edition of Newsweek hit me.

* Obligatory Princess Bride reference.

QotD: Sex lives of the powerful

Why do we care about the sex lives of the powerful? Mostly, we don't, because it's bad enough looking at these guys (and with the rare exception of someone like former Sen. Helen Chenoweth, it always seems to be guys) with their clothes on, much less imagining forming the beast with two, three, or more backs. But in the cases of folks such as Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) and New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, the rampant hypocrisy brings home the point that most of these people can't run their own lives, much less yours and mine. So there's a lesson to be learned here: Don't do this at home, kids. Or, if you do, then don't run for office. And if you do run for office and manage to get elected, don't moralize in a way that is grossly at odds with your lifestyle.

Nick Gillespie, "DC Pols Have Forgotten More Sex Than You'll Ever Have in Your Whole Lifetime!", Hit and Run, 2009-06-18

Stimulus, dissected

If you'd like to find out how the American government is "stimulating" various parts of the economy, you'll want to bookmark Reason's Taxpayer's Guide to the Stimulus:

Reason Foundation's Taxpayer’s Guide to the Stimulus breaks down each section of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to explain just how all that money is being spent, who is spending it, and what the whole stimulus means in layman's terms.

Losing comforting myths of the past

Ta-Nehisi Coates looks at some of the lost myths of his childhood:

I think, when you're in your intellectual infancy, myth keeps your sane. When I was young I believed, like a lot of us at that time, that my people had been kidnapped out of Africa by malicious racist whites. Said whites then turned and subjugated and colonized the cradle of all men. It was a comforting thought which placed me and mine at the center of a grand heroic odyssey. We were deposed kings and queens robbed of our rightful throne by acquisitive merchants of human flesh. By that measures we were not victims, but deposed nobles — in fact and in spirit.

I don't propose that blacks are alone in our myth-making, or in our desire to ennoble ourselves. But given the power dynamics of this society, we're the ones who can afford the comforts of myth the least. This is doubly true for those of us who are curious about the broader world. By the time I came to Howard University, I was beginning the painful process of breaking away from the "oppression as nobility" formula. But the clincher was sitting in my Black Diaspora I class and learning that the theory of white kidnappers was not merely myth — but, on the whole, impossible because disease (Tse-Tse fly maybe?) kept most whites from penetrating beyond the coasts until the 19th century.

In no way does this excuse the whites who were the sea-going transporters and final auctioneers/owners of the enslaved blacks, but it does help to put a bit of perspective on an issue that for too many people is starkly black=good/white=bad. There's lots of historical blame to be shared, and it doesn't break down conveniently on racial lines.

QotD: We'll take option three

Estimates of the cost of Obama care start at $1.2 trillion over the next decade. The administration believes it can cover about half that amount through tax increases on the rich and greater efficiencies in Medicare and Medicaid. But it's hard to find anyone else who shares that touching faith. When I asked Robert Bixby, head of The Concord Coalition, a bipartisan fiscal watchdog group, he said, "I don't see any plausible way of getting the savings they need to add the expanded coverage in a deficit-neutral way."

There are only three ways to pay for this expansion of health insurance coverage: increased taxes, reduced benefits, or shiny gold ingots falling out of the sky. Voters emphatically prefer the latter option, so that is the one most likely to be embraced by Congress and the administration.

Steve Chapman, "Indulging Our Health Care Fantasies: The problem with Obama's health care plan", Reason Online, 2009-06-15

EMP is not your friend

Mark Steyn's lastest column is a potentially disturbing read, starting with the effects of an EMP blast and moving to odd investment advice:

And at that point I stopped thinking of One Second After as a movie-thriller narrative, and more in geopolitical terms. After all, the banks in America and western Europe are already metaphorically weed-choked, and may yet become literally so. In the Wall Street Journal a couple of months back, Peggy Noonan predicted that by next year the mayor of New York, "in a variation on broken-window theory, will quietly enact a bright-light theory, demanding that developers leave the lights on whether there are tenants in the buildings or not, lest the world stand on a rise in New Jersey and get the impression no one's here and nobody cares" — or, to put it another way, lest the world stand on a rise in New Jersey and get the impression Manhattan's already been hit by an EMP attack. A friend of mine saw his broker in February and asked him where he should be moving his money, expecting to be pointed in the direction of various under-publicized stocks or perhaps some artfully leveraged instrument novel enough to fly below the Obama radar. His broker, wearing a somewhat haunted look, advised him to look for a remote location and a property he could pay cash for and with enough cleared land and a long growing season. My friend's idea of rural wilderness is Martha's Vineyard, so this wasn't exactly what he wanted to hear.

And this is before EMP hits.

And North Korea would probably be quite happy to detonate a nice big nuclear weapon that would wipe out most of Japan's or North America's electronics . . .

QotD: Fix Medicare First

Think about this for a moment. Medicare is a huge, single-payer, government-run program. It ought to provide the perfect environment for experimentation. If more-efficient government management can slash health-care costs by addressing all these problems, why not start with Medicare? Let's see what "better management" looks like applied to Medicare before we roll it out to the rest of the country.

This is not a completely cynical suggestion. Medicare is, for instance, a logical place to start to design better electronic records systems and the incentives to use them. But you do have to wonder why a report that claims that Medicare is wasting 30 percent of its spending thinks it's making a case for making the rest of the health care system more like Medicare.

Virginia Postrel, "Medicare First!", The Dynamist, 2009-06-04

Act Now! Free Government Money!

P.J. O'Rourke on the end of the American love affair with cars

P.J. O'Rourke bids a fond farewell to a different era:

The phrase "bankrupt General Motors," which we expect to hear uttered on Monday, leaves Americans my age in economic shock. The words are as melodramatic as "Mom's nude photos." And, indeed, if we want to understand what doomed the American automobile, we should give up on economics and turn to melodrama.

Politicians, journalists, financial analysts and other purveyors of banality have been looking at cars as if a convertible were a business. Fire the MBAs and hire a poet. The fate of Detroit isn't a matter of financial crisis, foreign competition, corporate greed, union intransigence, energy costs or measuring the shoe size of the footprints in the carbon. It's a tragic romance — unleashed passions, titanic clashes, lost love and wild horses.

Well, actually, it is a story involving a lot of managerial loss of will, union short-sightedness, and inconceivably bad planning . . .

Of course, the automobile had a very important role in shaping modern North American life:

But cars didn't shape our existence; cars let us escape with our lives. We're way the heck out here in Valley Bottom Heights and Trout Antler Estates because we were at war with the cities. We fought rotten public schools, idiot municipal bureaucracies, corrupt political machines, rampant criminality and the pointy-headed busybodies. Cars gave us our dragoons and hussars, lent us speed and mobility, let us scout the terrain and probe the enemy's lines. And thanks to our cars, when we lost the cities we weren't forced to surrender, we were able to retreat.

More on the grim details for GM in this New York Times story.

Milk - gateway drug

H/T to Jones Report.

Baloo's "Great American Show"

US birthrate for unmarried women increased substantially

Cathy Young looks at the recent report from the National Center for Health Statistics, which shows a significant rise in the number of births to single mothers from 2002 to 2007:

Complicating the discussion, single motherhood comes in many different forms. An unwed mother is not necessarily a solo mother: about 40 percent are living with the baby's father when they give birth, and some later marry. A mother without a partner could be a teenage high school dropout trapped in poverty, or a 30-something professional who decides not to wait for "Mr. Right." While older, better-educated women are far less likely to become single mothers, one in three births to women in their late 20s and almost one in five births to women in their 30s are out of wedlock.

[. . .]

For many feminists, the ability to choose single motherhood is an essential part of female autonomy. According to American University law professor Nancy Polikoff, "It is no tragedy, either on a national scale or in an individual family, for children to be raised without fathers." Nation magazine columnist Katha Pollitt has put it more bluntly: "Children are a joy; many men are not."

But would the children agree? Of course, not every father is a joy to his child. Yet there is abundant evidence that children generally fare better with two parents—and many children without fathers keenly feel their absence.

In one positive development, unmarried fathers today are much more likely than in earlier generations to be a part of their children's lives, even if they are not living with the mother.

I think it'd be safe to say Radley isn't a Michael Savage fan

I don't listen to much radio at all (unless I'm caught in traffic and need to find out how bad the situation is), so I hadn't heard of Michael Savage until quite recently when he was banned from entering Britain. I disagree with this sort of thing, as it provides the banned person or group with a free shot of publicity and a brief frisson of victimization (which is catnip to certain parts of the media).

Radley Balko has concerns that certain Libertarians are lending credibility to Savage and this this is a terrible idea.

I'm not a member of the Libertarian Party, so perhaps my advice doesn't mean much to them. But I'm going to give it, anyway:

Stop this, now. Either persuade [former LP vice-presidential candidate Wayne Allen] Root to stop going on Savage's show, or show Root the door. I'm all about building coalitions where appropriate. But there's nothing remotely appropriate about Michael Savage.

Michael Savage is a raving bigot. He regularly uses phrases like "turd-world countries" and "ghetto slime." He once wished rape on a group of high school girls who make trips into San Francisco to feed the homeless. He's a blood-thirsty warmonger, and a feverish culture warrior. He once said on the air that, "When I hear someone’s in the civil rights business, I oil up my AR-15!" On social issues, he's far to the right of just about every elected Republican official I can think of. He has wished AIDS and death on homosexuals. He regularly denigrates drug users. He is virulently anti-immigration. In short, there's nothing remotely libertarian about him.

If Root's aim is to take the LP in the direction of Michael Savage, the LP should distance themselves from Root right now.

Fate of the G.O.P.

Shikha Dalmia, of Reason, is now doing a biweekly column for Forbes. In this initial entry, she outlines what is wrong with the Republican Party and what might be their best bet to re-attaining relevance:

If Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter's defection to the Democratic side of the aisle affected only the fortunes of the Republican Party, it would be no cause for concern for non-Republicans like me. But America's democratic scheme depends on a robust opposition to check the government's tendency to grow — especially now that the White House is occupied by Barack Lyndon Roosevelt. Yet Republicans are as far from serving that role as the Detroit Lions are from winning the Super Bowl.

So what should the Grand Old Party do to resurrect itself enough to mount some semblance of resistance to the advancing Democratic juggernaut? The answer is that it needs intellectual coherence around a powerful idea, and that idea should be liberty. This is a principle that is both strong enough to intellectually moor the party in the way that those who want a "purer" GOP desire — and grand enough to appeal to a broad swath of the population, as those who advocate a more Big Tent approach recommend.

This would be the exact opposite of what Bush did. He, remarkably enough, managed to combine every anti-individual liberty idea from the right with every pro-big government policy from the left. From the right, Bush acquired: a super-hawkish foreign policy; contempt for civil liberties; and religiously informed positions on gay marriage, abortion and end-of-life issues. And from the left he got: high-spending ways, including the massive drug entitlement for seniors; expansive ideas about the federal government's role in education policy; and the chutzpah, just before leaving, to engineer a massive government bailout of banks and auto companies.

Update, 22 May: Tom Kelly asks if I've considered awarding a "Quote of the Year" accolade, and offers these two quotations from Shikha's article as nominees:

1 - "especially now that the White House is occupied by Barack Lyndon Roosevelt"
2 - "Yet Republicans are as far from serving that role as the Detroit Lions are from winning the Super Bowl."

I hadn't considered such a thing (and I'm perhaps not well-enough organized to do it properly), but I have to agree that these two selections are worthy contenders.

News bulletin from a universe just next door

Damian Penny (who still seems to be managing to stay away from blogging) sent along this link from a dimension where Sarah Palin was elected President last November:

The first 100 days of the Palin presidency, according to a consensus of media commentators, have proven a near disaster. Perhaps it was Palin's scant two years' experience in a major government position that has eroded her gravitas, or maybe it was her flirty reliance on looks and informal chit-chat. In any case, the press has had a field day, and it is hard to see how President Palin can ever recover from the Quayle/potatoe syndrome. Here is a roundup of this week's pundit mockery.

LET THEM EAT MOOSE
"Ted Stevens may have gotten off," wrote Bob Herbert in the New York Times, "but he taught our Sarah something first — like using $100-a-pound beef for her state dinners. And what’s this $50 mil for her inauguration gala? Since when do you fly in your favorite pizza-maker from across the country on our dime? Or send the presidential 747 for a spin over the Big Apple for a third-of-a-million-dollar joyride? Does Palin think she's still in Alaska and has to have everything flown in from the South 48 by jumbo jet?"

WASILLA CHIC
Also in the Times, Gail Collins weighed in on the already-tired yokelism of the new commander in chief. "What we're getting is Wasilla chic. That's what we're getting. She arrives in the Oval Office, and first thing sends back Blair's gift of the Churchill bust as if it's a once-worn Penney's outfit. Then she gives the Brits some unwatchable DVDs as a booby prize — as if she idled the old Yukon and ran into Target's sale aisle. Did Sarah send Bristol into Wal-Mart back in Anchorage for that 'engraved' iPod for the queen? And what's this don't-bow-to-the-queen stuff, but curtsy for a Saudi sheik? Maybe that explains why she brags to Stephanopoulos about her 'Muslim faith.' So far, the best things going for her are Todd's biceps.”

As Damian says, "Americans sure dodged a bullet by not electing that Palin idiot, didn't they?"

This story "Godwin's" itself from the lead photo onwards

I'm never fond of arguments which devolve down to "Hitler and the Nazi Party did this" to attempt to tar a group or activity with Nazi-like similarities. This, however, cries out for that treatment:

The Explorers program, a coeducational affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America that began 60 years ago, is training thousands of young people in skills used to confront terrorism, illegal immigration and escalating border violence — an intense ratcheting up of one of the group's longtime missions to prepare youths for more traditional jobs as police officers and firefighters.

"This is about being a true-blooded American guy and girl," said A. J. Lowenthal, a sheriff's deputy here in Imperial County, whose life clock, he says, is set around the Explorers events he helps run. "It fits right in with the honor and bravery of the Boy Scouts."

The training, which leaders say is not intended to be applied outside the simulated Explorer setting, can involve chasing down illegal border crossers as well as more dangerous situations that include facing down terrorists and taking out "active shooters," like those who bring gunfire and death to college campuses. In a simulation here of a raid on a marijuana field, several Explorers were instructed on how to quiet an obstreperous lookout.

The conversion of police departments into paramilitary organizations has been bad enough (see the extensive collection of items on Police Militarization by Radley Balko for lots of examples), but now we're seeing the Boy Scouts being given the same "overhaul"? 35,000 Scouts are involved in this program, according to the article, and this is explicitly intended to "create more agents".

All they need to do now is change the name of the program to "Homeland Security Youth" and they're done.

QotD: The stupidity of an Anti-Flag-Burning Amendment

As a veteran, I love my Constitution too much to cheapen it by using it as a tool to restrict people's rights. It is, and always has been, a restriction on the GOVERNMENT. It's but a step from banning flag desecration to banning alcohol (we tried that, if you recall) to regulating relationships (also proposed) to seizing people's assets for the good of society.

I refuse to cross that line.

Norm Eadie says: Patriotism gives symbols meaning. Enslaving people to symbols destroys patriotism.

The Flag is a symbol of our greatness. Do not make it a symbol of our shame.

I will not destroy the Constitution for a mere symbol. To do so over a symbol that represents it would be a sick irony.

I expect to receive a donation envelope from you today — one of your fundraisers called me late Sunday night.

You can expect to receive it back, minus a check, with a paper copy of this comment. I will not pay to support fascism, no matter how noble it pretends to be.

I am saddened that so many veterans' organizations are disgracing themselves, and willing to destroy the Constitution, over a matter of free expression, one of America's founding principles.

If this filthy travesty of a proposal gets added to the Constitution, I expect to personally desecrate a great many flags, because at that point, it will represent nothing, and be a symbol of all we have lost.

Michael Z. Williamson, "So Furious I Could Start A Revolution Single Handedly", mzmadmike.livejournal.com, 2009-05-12

First big scandal of the Obama administration: DIJONGATE!

Jon, my virtual landlord, sent a link to this Hot Air post on the distressing revelation that President Obama ordered a burger . . . with Dijon mustard:

Maybe it’s a slow news week, but it’s not that slow. After NBC broke the big news about Barack Obama’s burger run, some people apparently discovered a media conspiracy to cover up a scandal that occurs at the lunch counter. Did Obama get a freebie? No, he insists on paying for his lunch. Did he cut in line? That’s inconclusive. [. . .]

NBC’s regular news reported Obama’s order as follows: “”I’m going to have a basic cheddar cheese burger, medium well, with mustard,” Obama said. “Do you have spicy mustard? I’ll take that.”
Actually, the quote was “you got a spicy mustard or something like that, or a Dijon mustard, something like that” (at 0.55 of the unedited video below without Mitchell’s talkover).
Obama ordered his burger with DIJON MUSTARD! Bet he had to seek John Kerry’s counsel on that.

I have to agree with Obama here . . . I always prefer Dijon mustard on my hamburger. That violently yellow wallpaper paste that most Americans refer to as "mustard" is repulsive.

An innovative approach to overseas military basing

A constant concern for the US armed forces is how to support military action in areas where you do not already have an effective base. For anything larger than a company action, success depends on ready access to food, fuel, and ammunition supplies, and this is impossible without an organized, effective support organization. A proposed solution to this problem is called "seabasing", which would use temporary lash-ups of either ships or specially designed platforms to provide ongoing support to military operations from offshore. The Economist has more:

The original approach to seabasing was extremely Legolike. Modular rafts — platforms mounted on pontoons — would be linked together by hinges to create large, flattish surfaces that could nevertheless bend with the waves. Such a system was tested in a peacetime operation off the coast of Liberia in spring 2008. Instead of armaments, hospital supplies and the materials to build a school were unloaded from a ship to the platform, and thence to landing craft which disgorged them onto a beach.

The experiment worked, but there are doubts about taking it any further. One question is how such a raft of rafts would stand up to severe weather. There is also scepticism about whether the original goal, a surface large enough to create a floating runway that could accommodate transport aircraft, is either financially or physically feasible. It would be far larger than the largest aircraft-carrier now afloat, and thus expensive to build, and it would have to be both rigid and stable enough to act as a runway and flexible enough to withstand rough seas. The difficulty of squaring these requirements has led designers to abandon the idea of strict modularity in favour of a system that uses an array of more conventional but still specially designed ships. According to Robert Button, a seabasing expert at the RAND Corporation, a think-tank, America's navy plans to build 35 ships designed for seabasing over the next decade.

The core of such a ship-based seabase would be something known, in the strangulated jargon beloved of military men, as the Maritime Pre-Positioning Force (Future). America's marines already use pre-positioning supply ships as floating warehouses. The 14 ships in the new replacement class will continue to store supplies in this way. But, in addition, they will have room to berth 2,000 servicemen, or between 20 and 30 vertical-take-off aircraft, or hundreds of ground vehicles. More impressively, each ship will carry a folding bridge, about 30 metres long, to connect it to its neighbour. These bridges — regarded as the linchpins of seabasing — will remain stable in swells of up to 2 metres. They will allow vehicles the size of lorries to drive from one ship to another.

I wonder how the Chinese PLAN design bureau is going to approach this problem . . . as they're likely watching the American efforts with some interest.

QotD: American Government

We live in democracies. Rule by the majority. Rule by the people. Fifty per cent of people are below average in intelligence. This explains everything about politics.

Not that we'd want to live in a country ruled only by the best and brightest. That would be too much like being married to Cherie Blair.

So we have to keep supporting democracy. Even when democracy acts up the way it's done in Russia, Pakistan and the American presidential election.

Long term there's only one thing that gives me hope as a right-winger - the left-wing.

It's going to be hard to do a worse job running America than the Republicans did, but the Democrats can do it if anyone can.

P.J. O'Rourke, "The ditch carp of democracy", The Canberra Times, 2009-04-22

He's finished Biden his time, now he's gonna speak his mind

Well, it was a nice 100 days of administration peace and harmony, wasn't it? Who'd have expected the Vice President to be the one to finally sound the klaxon of alarm that the media have been tuning up for the last little while. Here's the official Vice Presidential health advice for today:

I would tell members of my family — and I have — I wouldn't go anywhere in confined places now [. . .] It's not that it's going to Mexico. It's [that] you're in a confined aircraft. When one person sneezes, it goes all the way through the aircraft. That's me. [. . .] So, from my perspective, what it relates to is mitigation. If you're out in the middle of a field when someone sneezes, that's one thing. If you're in a closed aircraft or closed container or closed car or closed classroom, it's a different thing.

So much for the President's rather more careful advice about the situation. At least Obama didn't call for everyone to abandon mass transit and avoid air travel at all costs.

The magic of big numbers

H/T to Radley Balko.

Paul Hellyer's American student

Paul Kane has written a New York Times op-ed which sounds disturbingly like something cooked up by former Canadian Defence Minister Paul Hellyer. The modern Canadian Armed Forces were formed by amalgamating the formerly separate Canadian Army, Royal Canadian Navy, and the Royal Canadian Air Force. The arguments for this highly disruptive move were primarily economic and bureaucratic, not military in nature. It's to the credit of the members of the separate services that things worked out as well as they did, but many careers were cut short and much bitterness still exists from that re-organization so many years ago.

Hellyer claimed that "the amalgamation . . . will provide the flexibility to enable Canada to meet in the most effective manner the military requirements of the future. It will also establish Canada as an unquestionable leader in the field of military organization." In one sense this was true: Canada was the first nation to completely amalgamate the military services. But to be a "leader" requires that someone else "follow". That part never happened. The hoped-for cost savings may or may not have been achieved, but the economies all seemed to reduce the combat effectiveness, morale, and equipment inventories of the combat arms. A unified armed forces was no better able to resist militarily ignorant political moves than the separate services had been.

Kane doesn't go quite "full Hellyer" here, but you can see the same sort of thinking:

First, the Air Force should be eliminated, and its personnel and equipment integrated into the Army, Navy and Marine Corps. [. . .]

Yes, air power is a critical component of America’s arsenal. But the Army, Navy and Marines already maintain air wings within their expeditionary units. The Air Force is increasingly a redundancy in structure and spending.

It's quite possible that the current division of responsibilities between the USAF and the other branches of service need to be re-adjusted. The USAF is notoriously uninterested in ground-support missions, which is of very high importance to ground troops. Allowing the Army to run its own attack helicopters was the compromise arrived at — the Air Force still had to maintain some ground-attack aircraft, but the Army's helicopter forces took on most of the close-support duties.

The second part of Kane's proposal is actually pretty good:

Second, the archaic “up or out” military promotion system should be scrapped in favor of a plan that treats service members as real assets. [. . .]

Treating service members like so many widgets — in particular, the enlisted men and women who make up 85 percent of the ranks — is arbitrary and bad management. I have seen many fit, experienced officers and enlisted Marines arbitrarily forced out because there were only so many slots into which they could be promoted.

The military should develop a new accounting and personnel system that tracks the cost of developing its human capital and tallies each service member as an investment with a fixed value based on his education, training, experience and performance. This would reflect the departure of a valued service member as an asset lost, not a cost cut. Why are fit men and women who have served in combat, a human experience that a million dollars can’t buy, being pushed out instead of retained for 15, 20, 30 years?

But after the solid part of his proposal, he quickly dives into the worst solution available:

Third, the United States needs a national service program for all young men and women, without any deferments, to increase the quality and size of the pool from which troops are drawn.

Because, as we all know, a well-trained, loyal, and dependable armed service can be created by dragooning free individuals against their will. Calling it "conscription" does not make it any less repulsive. Forcing people to "serve" at gunpoint makes a mockery of the whole notion of being a free country.

The "denizens" at Castle Argghhh! also weigh in on Kane's proposals.

Focus on the wrong things, and invent new categories of "terrorist"

Nick Gillespie finds things to critique in the performance of Janet Napolitano's DHS:

On the one hand, you've got the former governor of Arizona who manages to keep talking no matter how many of her own feet she's got stuck in her mouth. Janet Napolitano's agency released a report implying that if you think Ron Paul is onto something or that state governments should ever challenge federal ones, you're a terrorist [. . .] Even more recently, she fretted and then apologized for worrying that some of our boys coming home from Iraq might be anti-government. Imagine.

On the other hand, she's starting an Obama-sanctioned jihad against illegal immigrants who work in America and the "evil-doers" who hire undocumented workers to cut your grass and clean your sheets. From an appearance on State of Our Union:

What we have to do is target the real evil-doers in this business, the employers who consistently hire illegal labor, the human traffickers who are exploiting human misery.

In what alternate universe is the secretary living where it's evil (E-VIL!) to hire immigrants who are willing to work? Napolitano is also in favor of the idiotic border wall and "boots on the ground," meaning an unending harassment of all residents within Fortress America (after all, if you aggressively pursue illegals and their employers, it means you have to check everybody's papers and payrolls.)

The popularity of "getting tough on illegal immigrants" is bound to wane, as part of the "getting tough" will be much more vigorous enforcement of employment laws . . . which will require everyone at a targetted business to prove that they have the right to live and work in the country. It will literally mean having to show "your papers" to every jumped-up Jack-in-office who takes a notion that you might not be "legal".

As long as this sort of thing is conducted largely out of sight of most people, it's tolerated. They've already been moving to make this sort of enforcement effort much more visible.

Nobody (well, damned few people) argue that the border needs to be monitored, but the over-expansion of the definition of what constitutes the border is a very bad thing. 100 miles is an arbitrary number . . . who can object if the government decides it javascript:editPlacements()should be 200 or 300 miles? At what point can anyone say "this far, but no further"? If you've already conceded 100 miles, there's no logical stopping point, is there?

QotD: "America is kooky"!

Here's a stone truth: Every political protest, and indeed just about every political gathering, is filled with kooks, on account of America is kooky! A commentator's protest kook-detector works great when he disagrees with the protest, then gets turned off when the kooks on his side get busy. It has ever been thus, and it will always be.

Matt Welch, "Army of Dicks Goes After Dick Armey", Hit and Run, 2009-04-16

If you say it with enough sincerity, maybe it'll become possible

Dave Demerjian reports on President Obama's latest high-speed rail (HSR) pronouncements:

President Obama delivered on a campaign promise Thursday when he announced a plan to lay the groundwork for a high-speed rail network that would serve 10 of the nation's busiest transportation corridors.

The president, joined by Vice President Joe Biden and Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood, argued improving the nation's rail system is an economic and environmental necessity. Our overburdened highways and air traffic control systems are stifling growth, he said, and it is time to embrace rail.

"What we need, then, is a smart transportation system equal to the needs of the 21st century," he said. "A system that reduces travel times and increases mobility, a system that reduces congestion and boosts productivity, a system that reduces destructive emissions and creates jobs.

"There's no reason we can't do this."

Well, actually . . . there are several reasons why you can't do this:

[. . .] what's often missing from reports like this (contrasting HSR in other countries with regular rail service in the US or Canada) is that all HSR solutions require separate, reserved rights-of-way that never see non-high speed traffic (that is, no freight trains). The cost of developing and building the locomotives, coaches, signals, and control infrastructure pale in comparison to buying the land anywhere in North America on which to build the new railway. Passenger rail service, to approach sustainability — let's ignore the whole notion of profitability — has to be located in densely populated corridors . . . exactly where the costs of acquiring land are going to be highest.

Yeah, I know, it's bad form to quote yourself . . . but even eight billion dollars won't buy you anywhere near enough for one of these proposed systems, never mind ten of them.

Update, 17 April: Nick Gillespie isn't a fan of HSR:

And now this morning, Obama was on the tube again, yapping about traffic jams. What the hell is going on here? The president of the freaking United States is talking about traffic jams? Then again, in grammar school we did all learn that part of George Washinton's Farewell Address where he warned against entangling alliances and the dread menace of highway jughandles and traffic circles. That Obama's big solution is, ta-da!, "high-speed rail" is simply one more sign that he is simply not serious about anything other than paying off 19th and 20th century legacy special interests. I look forward to tomorrow's press conference, when Obama trains his laser-beam brain on the question of whether Razzles is a candy or a gum. [. . .]

If you're the president of the United States and you're talking about goddamn traffic jams and you're proposing high-speed rail as anything other than an unapologetic boondoggle that will a) never get built and b) never get built to the gee-whiz specs it's supposed and c) be ridden by fewer people than commuted by zeppelin last year, you've got real problems, bub. And by extension, so do we all.

F-22 orders to be reduced, F-35 increased in defense budget

Updating a post from back in February (for which Chris Taylor was kind enough to provide the core material), the plans will change for USAF fighter planes in the latest Defense plans. Defense Secretary Gates makes it official — he's hoping to cut off the F-22 production run after four more planes are built (making it 187 in total, well short of the USAF's plan for 300), but increasing F-35 orders to 2,443 (which implies a worldwide production run of around 4,500):

The budget rolled out Monday for Congress to consider looks remarkably different from the budget Gates authored while working for former President George W. Bush; so does the economy.

North Texas congressional delegation members said ending the F-22 program was a bad call that could hurt local employment.

"The world remains a dangerous place, and this vital program is integral to maintaining a strong national defense," said Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Lewisville. "Now is not the time to impose policy decisions that will only add more workers to the ranks of the unemployed."

Other congressional leaders applauded the Pentagon's new direction.

The horrific consequences of failing to pay your taxes

Rednecks for drug legalization

Britain's decline: from America's closest ally to "slightly smaller than Oregon"

I guess it was inevitable that Britain's profile with the Obama administration would be lower than with any other, but the the descent from "World Power" to "just another country" has been faster than even the most dedicated declinist might have predicted. Tony Harnden reveals the contents of a recent press kit provided to American reporters:

Those fretting about the demise of the term "special relationship" might not be reassured by this briefing book. There's talk of a "strong bilateral relationship", of the UK being "one of the United States' closest allies" and of "close coordination" and "bilateral cooperation" between two countries who "continually consult on foreign policy". Everything except "special".

After the country sections, we're introduced the personalities, with information mainly culled from their websites. Queen Elizabeth "enrolled as a girl Guide when she was eleven, and later became a Sea Ranger", we are informed. During the war she "put on pantomimes with the children of members of staff for the enjoyment of her family and employees of the Royal Household".

Gordon Brown's entry reads a little like one of those awful Christmas round robins. Young Gordon, we are told repeatedly, was very, very clever. He "did well a school from an early age" and then "excelled at sport and joined in every aspect of school life, quickly becoming popular".

He "took his exams a year ahead of his contemporaries" and "went on to University at the age of 15", where he edited the student newspaper "in a prize-winning year" and won "a First Class Honours degree and a number of prizes for his studies".

There goes the last prop for the "punch above our weight" folks as far as British influence with the American government. But I'm sure Mr. Brown will enjoy those storied DVDs . . . if he can find a DVD player that they'll work on.

Michigan re-invents the debtor's prison

The ACLU of Michigan issued an incredible press release yesterday, documenting the legal plight of Edwina Nowlin, who has been jailed for the crime of being unable to pay the court $104 per month to pay for her son's incarceration in a juvenile detention facility:

The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan asked for an emergency hearing today on behalf of an Escanaba woman sentenced to 30 days in jail because she is too poor to reimburse the court for her son’s stay in a juvenile detention facility.

“Like many people in these desperate economic times, Ms. Nowlin was laid off from work, lost her home and is destitute,” said Michael J. Steinberg, ACLU of Michigan Legal Director. “Jailing her because of her poverty is not only unconstitutional, it’s unconscionable and a shameful waste of resources. It is not a crime to be poor in this country and the government must stop resurrecting debtor’s prisons from the dustbin of history.”

In December 2008, Ms. Nowlin’s 16-year-old son was sentenced to the Bay Pines Center and Ms. Nowlin was ordered to pay $104 per month for his lodging. At the time of this order, Ms. Nowlin was homeless and working part-time with a friend after being laid off from her job. She told the court that she was unable to pay the ordered amount, however the judge found her in contempt for failing to pay. In addition, Ms. Nowlin’s requests for a court appointed attorney were denied.

Frankly, if this was dated tomorrow, I'd dismiss it as an obvious over-the-top April Fool prank. I'm sure there's some toxic combination of restrictions and penalties that could be worse than this, but it'd take some deep legal scholarship to uncover it. The law really is an ass.

QotD: Bailing out newspapers

I have never had anything but contempt for America's "greatest" newspapers. During my lifetime, a little over six decades, they have never been anything but contemptible. Everything that was foreseeably harmful to individual liberty — or later proven to be so — they have championed. Everything that would have been good for it, they have opposed.

Regarding a small, exceptional handful of dire matters of life and death — the ugly little war in Vietnam comes to mind — where they finally aligned themselves with the proper, decent, moral, and Constitutional side of the issue, they were opinion followers, not leaders.

Now, according to the "new media" to which I happily switched ten years ago or more, in preference to being libelled, threatened, and lied to on a continuous basis as a member of the nation's Productive Class, America's "greatest" newspapers, on the brink of financial collapse as millions of other readers and advertisers make the same change I did, are looking to be "bailed out" by the current political administration. They've agreed to stop making political endorsements, giving us to wonder what good they'll be after they seal this devil's bargain.

L. Neil Smith, "No Bailout for America's Newspapers!", Libertarian Enterprise, 2009-03-29

Outsiders simply don't understand that "sorry" means "go screw yourself"

Stephen Marche gets to the point quickly:

It began with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, which has recently run a couple of Canadian items, some of them long. That never used to happen. 30 Rock had that great line about Toronto: "It's New York without the stuff." And on the show How I Met Your Mother, one of the central characters, Robin Scherbatsky, is a Canadian expat trying to make it in New York; Canada is a running joke of the show. Unfortunately, none of the Canadian comedy is that funny or accurate. The jokes mostly involve maple syrup, the cold and/or the pronunciation of the word "about," which 97% of us don't actually mispronounce. The Great White North casts a long, ludicrous shadow - Canada in the American comic imagination corresponds roughly (very roughly) with the region of the country that stretches from Northern Ontario to Alberta and does not include cities, or the Maritimes, or the West Coast. The only other gag Americans seem to get is how polite Canadians are. ("How do you get 10 Canadians out of a swimming pool?" "Say, ‘Hey guys, can you get out of the pool?' ") Even this joke, complimentary to us, isn't mildly true. Canadians are one of the rudest peoples on Earth. Outsiders simply don't understand that "sorry" means "go screw yourself."

What explains this resurgence of Canada jokes on U.S. television? There are two possibilities. We are the last group that can be made fun of without risk. Political correctness has made almost every other ethnicity off-limits. Americans can't even make fun of the French anymore. The "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," as The Simpsons once called them, have turned out to be right in nearly every disagreement with their American cousins. It's quite easy to make fun of Canadians because Americans can't really distinguish us from themselves. So it's innocent. They're more or less making fun of people who are like them.

Another in a series: "Having solved all other problems . . ."

Steve Chapman doesn't like your state flag. And he thinks you should do something about it:

The Oklahoma flag is one of many that seemingly were all created by the same designer on a rush order. They bring to mind Henry Ford's line that you could get a Model T in any color you wanted, as long as it was black.

Like more than a dozen others, it's a variation on a humdrum theme: A blue background with something obscure, cluttered, and gold in the center. If you climbed up a flagpole in Lansing and replaced the Michigan ensign with that of Louisiana, New York, Virginia, or Nebraska, I promise, it would be months before anyone noticed.

Oklahoma stands out slightly more only because, like Montana, Oregon, and Kansas, it prominently features the state name. Idaho goes them one better by doing it twice.

Given that most flags fly almost exclusively in their home state, including a name disparages the mental acuity of residents. It implies that without a prompt, some people would forget where they live.

On a distinctive, well-designed flag, the name is unnecessary. Imagine Old Glory with the name of the country prancing across it. Or Canada's maple leaf. Or Israel's Star of David.

The only good thing to be said about the popular blue-bedsheet style is that it assures a state flag will be forgettable instead of just plain homely. Maryland's clashing juxtaposition of black, gold, red, and white shapes could have been used to extract information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The image of George Washington on the Washington flag brings to mind a Presidents Day sale.

Canada's selection of provincial and territorial flags are a bit better, in the sense of being distinctive and evocative:

Original image from Craig Marlatt's website.

Ontario and Manitoba, of course, are far too similar (both being variants of the Canadian Red Ensign), and Alberta's flag isn't much of an improvement, but once you've seen the flags of B.C., N.B., N.S., Nunavut, P.E.I., or Quebec, you're not likely to mistake them again.

A.I.G.: Less passion, more fact

Megan McArdle sums up recent discussions on AIG, then adds some uncomfortable facts:

Of course the AIG bonuses should go back! They were paid to people in the very group that lost money! They were paid to people who have already left the firm, putting the lie to the idea of retention bonuses! Also, they couldn't get jobs anywhere else anyway, so retention bonuses are unnecessary! And it's all just unmitigated greed! They're lucky to have jobs at all! They should be volunteering to work for free, wearing sackcloth and ashes, and grovelling on the ground in front of every taxpayer they can find, begging for forgiveness!

The information now emerging from AIG tells a different story.

Of course, it's much easier for politicians and media pundits to whip up a frenzy against evil "capitalist exploiters" than it is to point out that they're actively scapegoating the innocent.

Incomplete headline of the day

This headline at the BBC News website is incomplete:

Top AIG bosses 'to repay bonuses'

It should continue with the much more informative ". . . to avoid Bill of Attainder". More information (and an explanation) here. Other recent posts here and here.

A.I.G. bonuses taxed

Steve Chapman points out that the spasm of anger in which congress passed a retroactive 90% tax on the A.I.G. bonuses is being directed at the wrong people:

Congress is outraged. Really, really outraged. Unbelievably, incredibly outraged. And there are certainly grounds for anger.

Not at the insurance company AIG, which paid bonuses that are seen as intolerable, but at Congress, which blithely declined to prohibit them but is now shocked to find AIG doing what it was allowed to do. The Democrats who control Capitol Hill want revenge, as do many Republicans. So the House voted by a 328-93 margin to impose a 90 percent tax on the payments.

In doing so, members resolutely avoided a couple of inconvenient realities. The first is that the fault, if any, lies with the same people who are now angry. The second is that the tax conflicts with the clear intent of the Constitution.

The whole bonus scheme is intended to retain key personnel, and it makes perfect sense. In good times, high-performing executives can always try to move on to other firms who (in theory) offer more money, more opportunities for advancement, or both. The bonus payment is to try to keep those executives where they can do the most good for the corporation paying the bonus.

In these trying economic times, the bonuses actually make even more sense for the rest of the economy. They function to keep those same executives who made a total balls-up of A.I.G. from moving to other companies to do the same pillage-and-burn-and-sow-the-fields-with-salt to them. It's cheap, from the larger economy's point of view, to pay relative peanuts to keep all these folks from moving on and infecting other companies.

Update: Mark Steyn speaks for the outraged:

Are you outraged by these AIG bonuses?

No, no. For Pete's sake, you're an A-list congressional big shot. Try to get a bit of feeling into "outraged." The president's teleprompter puts it in italics, bold, capitalized and underlined: OUTRAGED !

That's better. Don't forget to furrow your brow and fume. No, not like a camp waiter when you send back the arugula salad drizzled in an aubergine coulis. We're looking for primal, righteous anger: You're outraged, OUTRAGED that bonuses are being handed out at companies the American taxpayer is bailing out. Yes, to be sure, the bonuses were specifically provided for in the legislation, but, like all busy senators and congressmen, you don't have time to read every footling trillion-dollar bill before you vote in favor of it. And yes, true, the specific passage addressing these particular bonuses was, in fact, added to the bill in your name, but that was nothing to do with you — you just did that because the White House asked you to, and just because their people called your people and some intern in your office drafted some boilerplate with your name on it is no reason for you to be denied 10 minutes of grandstanding on MSNBC. It's an outrage to suggest you're anything other than outrageously outraged!

QotD: The Jimmy Carter legacy

The current depression was born when the administration of Jimmy Carter, and a Democratic Congress, irrationally demanded that lenders approve mortgages for individuals who really couldn't afford them and would almost certainly never be able to pay them back. The political strategy of giving goodies away like this, in exchange for votes and other kinds of popular support, was probably old hat by the time the Romans got around to plying urban tenement dwellers with bread and circuses.

At the same time, housing for the poor appears to be some kind of bizarre obsessive-compulsive fetish for President Peanut. He's spent decades since his deeply flawed and humiliatingly failed presidency, hammering nails into future residences under the Habitat for Humanity program. How ironic it is that, just as the economy begins collapsing, so are the former president's shoddily-constructed houses across the country.

L. Neil Smith, "Cambodian Road Trip", Libertarian Enterprise, 2009-03-15

Headline of the day

Winner of today's headline of the day award:

Florida Marlins Hope to Stimulate South Florida By Sucking $634 Million Out of Miami's Economy
Nick Gillespie

Whole thing here.

A.I.G.: a lightning rod for discontent?

It's apparently not just the top executives who're feeling the backlash over AIG putting some of its government rescue money toward bonuses for executives:

Now these executives are toxic, and those communities are rattled and divided. Private security guards have been stationed outside their houses, and sometimes the local police drive by. A.I.G. employees at the company’s office tower in Lower Manhattan were told to avoid leaving the building while a demonstration was going on outside. The memo also advised them to avoid displaying company-issued ID cards when they left the office and to abandon tote bags or other items with the A.I.G. logo.

One A.I.G. executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared the consequences of identifying himself, said many workers felt demonized and betrayed. “It is as bad if not worse than McCarthyism,” he said. Everyone has sacrificed the employees of A.I.G.’s financial products division, he said, “for their own political agenda.”

Update: The Economist suggests a new pain indicator:

This crisis has brought a burst of creativity in the development of indicators of pain, from the subprime implode-o-meter to the downgrade-o-meter for structured securities. Perhaps it is time for the outrage-o-meter. Its needle would have jumped off the scale this week as America’s public, politicians and media huffed and puffed over the $165m in bonuses paid to members of the financial-products division that brought down American International Group (AIG). Troubles in that unit have forced the government to bail out the giant insurer, so far to the tune of $173 billion.

AIG’s wayward eggheads are not the only ones squirming. The affair is a test of the Obama administration’s handling of financial excess — and so far it has been ham-fisted. After flip-flopping over whether it had the authority to meddle with employment contracts, the Treasury eventually seized on a clause in the recently passed stimulus bill that may allow it to retrieve payments deemed contrary to the public interest. Tim Geithner, the treasury secretary, promised to recoup the money by deducting some of it from the next $30 billion tranche of aid for the company.

QotD: Partisan view of the presidency

When a Democratic president goes from being wrong to being damn wrong is always an interesting moment: Bay of Pigs, Great Society, Jimmy Carter waking up on the morning after his inauguration, HillaryCare.

P.J. O'Rourke, "Stem Cell Sham: The president as sophist", Weekly Standard, 2009-03-23

Truth no defence against libel action?

A disturbing case in Boston implies that you may not be able to claim that what you published was the truth to ward off a libel case:

Journalists who believe truth is the ultimate defense against libel suits fear that a federal appeals court has created a dangerous exception that could chill news reporting.

The US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston ruled recently that a former salesman at Staples can sue the company for libel after a vice president sent an e-mail to about 1,500 employees saying the salesman had been fired for violations of company procedures regarding expenses reimbursements.

Although the decision did not involve a news outlet, it has alarmed journalists, bloggers, and media law specialists, who worry that it could discourage news organizations from pursuing true stories that might cast subjects in a bad light.

Whole thing here.

More colour photos from the FSA

Whether we realize it or not, our mental images of the 1930s and 1940s are highly influenced by the fact that most photos from that time period are in black and white. Given the economic conditions at the time, there's a self-reinforcing image of bleakness. Not everything looked gray, even if it was a desperate time for many:

"Photo by Russell Lee. Jack Whinery and his family, homesteaders, Pie Town, New Mexico, 1940"

"Photo by Alfred T. Palmer. Crane operator at the TVA’s Douglas Dam, Tennessee, 1942."

Here's an earlier post on the same topic. H/T to Ben Barby for the link.

American Beer

PLAN plays silly buggers at sea

The Chinese navy (formally called the People’s Liberation Army Navy) appears to be stepping up their program of harassment:

The incident happened on Sunday as the USNS Impeccable was on routine operations in international waters 75 miles (120km) south of Hainan island, a US statement said.

The ships had "aggressively manoeuvred" around the Impeccable "in an apparent co-ordinated effort to harass the US ocean surveillance ship while it was conducting routine operations in international waters", according to the Pentagon.

[. . .]

When the Impeccable radioed requesting a safe path to leave the area, two Chinese vessels dropped pieces of wood in its path, forcing the US ship to make an emergency stop, the Pentagon said.

"The unprofessional manoeuvres by Chinese vessels violated the requirement under international law to operate with due regard for the rights and safety of other lawful users of the ocean," said Pentagon spokesman Marine Maj Stewart Upton.

Whole thing here.

Update: Longer CNN version of the incident here.

The 281.5-foot Impeccable is one of six surveillance ships that perform military survey operations, according to the Navy. It is an oceanographic ship that gathers underwater acoustic data, using sonar.

It has a maximum speed of 13 knots — or about 15 mph — but it travels 3 knots, or 3.5 mph, when towing its array of monitoring equipment. It carries a crew of 20 mariners, five technicians and as many as 20 Navy personnel.

The Chinese ships involved were a Navy intelligence collection ship, a Bureau of Maritime Fisheries Patrol Vessel, a State Oceanographic Administration patrol vessel and two small Chinese-flagged trawlers, the statement said.

American responsibility for Mexico's drug war

L. Neil Smith summarizes the reported reasons America is said to be to blame for the current shooting war along Mexico's northern border:

Reportedly, this third war, although it is said to have begun as a struggle over turf between Mexican drug gangs, is being waged between those gangs and the Mexican government, which stupidly stuck its nose in when the intelligent strategy would have been to simply police the sidelines, in order to minimize potential casualties among uninvolved non-combatants, and let as many violent gangsters kill each other as possible.

Now I suppose you will anticipate who, according to politicians and the press, the great villain is, in all of this. That's correct, the good old U.S.A. Two reasons are offered for this. (There may be others, but although I fancy myself as sort of a political profiler, I get headaches trying to "think" like a socialist for too long at a time.)

The first reason is that, supposedly, Americans are the biggest drug consumers on the planet. There may be some truth in this: it becomes more and more difficult, every day, to live inside the mess that the Democrats and Republicans have fashioned for us. Chemicals do help, indeed; I prefer tequila, another run-for-the-border import. The Ragnorak del Sud is over territory in Mexican states that butt up directly against California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, making it relatively easy to smuggle drugs into this country over (or under) the border.

More recently, it develops that the second reason that the United States is to blame for this war in Mexico between uniformed thugs and non-uniformed thugs, is that we Americans have all these guns, see? And left to themselves, whenever the damned evil contrivances aren't spontaneously murdering family members up here, they take it in mind to crawl over the border all by themselves and wind up in the vile hands of poor, innocent gangsters whom they seduce into pulling their triggers.

Never mind that there are no respectable facts that support this contention or anything even remotely like it. Mexican authorities support it because it makes them look minutely less incompetent and corrupt than everybody on the planet knows they are. To American politicians it's nothing more than another socialist lie constructed to justify the eventual seizure of every semiautomatic across the country — the very weapons best suited to fulfill the role intended by the authors of the Second Amendment: keeping the government in line.

Shorpy: a seductive time-waster

I'm probably not alone in this: every time I get a link to Shorpy, I lose an hour of time looking at old photos like this one:

This is only a part of a much larger image of a Buffalo street in 1900. Click the image to see the full-size version.

How do you say "gaffe" in Russian?

Tom Kelley sent me this link on an unfortunate translation error which may further degrade US/Russian relations:

After promising to "push the reset button" on relations with Moscow, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton planned to present Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a light-hearted gift at their talks here Friday night to symbolize the Obama administration’s desire for a new beginning in the relationship.

It didn’t quite work out as she planned.

She handed him a palm-sized box wrapped with a bow. Lavrov opened it and pulled out the gift — a red plastic button on a black base with a Russian word "peregruzka" printed on top.

"We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?" Clinton said as reporters, allowed in to observe the first few minutes of the meeting, watched.

"You got it wrong," Lavrov said, to Clinton's clear surprise. Instead of "reset," he said the word on the box meant "overcharge."

I'm guessing that there'll be a vacancy in the State Department's translation bureau by Monday morning.

Whole thing here.

USMC expands recruiting guidelines

The United States Marine Corps may have quietly changed their guidelines for recruiting to allow older recruits to join . . . or they've had some database normalization issues lately:

Still a couple of weeks away from retirement, Opal Blackwell Walker already has received another job offer.

The 79-year-old Crestview woman says the Marines has expressed interest.

Last Monday, recruiters from New Jersey sent a letter to Walker by Federal Express.

"I had to sign for it. It was sent priority overnight," she said.

The letter from the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps Recruiting Command asked Walker if she thought she had the stuff to be a Marine.

"It says 'Dear Opal, Do you think you have what it takes to be a Marine? Are you prepared for one of the most demanding challenges you will ever face?' " said Walker.

"The fact is, if you have the fortitude, confidence and will to improve yourself, then the Marine Corps may be right for you," she continued.

"This just floored me," Walker said. "I thought, ‘well it's some kind of joke. Somebody's trying to play a joke on me.' "

The Crestview resident hasn't contacted local recruiters yet.

An ugly picture

This is what happens when you allow significant distortions in the real estate market (especially mortgage interest deductability):

Okay, it's clearly not the whole reason for the distressingly large number of "underwater" mortgages, but it clearly has some responsibility for the result. When people are given incentive to over-invest in housing through tax deductions, everything works well . . . as long as the price of housing continues to rise. This is what happens when that is no longer true.

H/T to James Lileks (for extra depressive realty/reality, watch the video clip in this post).

Sending the Veep some lovin'

"Here's to you, Mr. Plagiarizing, Gaffe-Prone, Hair-Plug-Wearing Vice President."

QotD: Stop the spending

Last night, President Barack Obama underscored that, despite being in the Senate for the past few years and his party being in charge of Congress since 2006, he's just mopping up for the bungler in chief who preceded him. I yield to no ink-stained wretch in my vast and bottomless dislike of George W. Bush but let's hold Obama's feet to the fire here: He has consistently pledged to, you know, stop spending right after well, you know, he and Congress stop spending.

Seriously, we're really going to knuckle down and cut some "eliminate wasteful and ineffective programs" costing $2 trillion over the next decade. Spoiler alert: That comes to a whopping 5 percent or so of baseline projected spending over the next decade. Break out the champagne, 'cause happy days are here again!

If Obama is serious about restoring trust and confidence in the government's ability to live within its gargantuan means (and he should be), he should start by rewriting the $410 billion Omnibus Spending Bill that the Democrats have just dropped like a big, wet, steaming, stinking pile of...pork barbecue.

Nick Gillespie, "The Deficit That Obama Didn't Quite Inherit But Will Almost Certainly Vastly Expand", Hit and Run, 2009-02-25

Penn on "Is Dissent Still Patriotic?"

David Harsanyi's article, which is what Penn is addressing, is here.

Home invaders become "Runaway!" specialists

Stuart Vernon sent this link from KVOA TV in Tucson, including video footage of an attempted home invasion by four armed men:

A homeowner, alerted of an impending home invasion by his security cameras, arms himself and takes matters into his hands last Thursday when four armed suspects attempt to break into his home.

The video the owner caught is incredible, and you can see it by watching the video link to the left. You see a vehicle pull up, and four men run out. One of them is carrying what appears to be an AR-15 or M-16, a weapon which could be fully automatic.

The robbery happened last Thursday in broad daylight at a home on West Vande Loo Street. All the action was caught by the homeowners outdoor surveillance system.

In Canada, of course, it'd be the homeowner on the run from the police, and the attempted invaders being treated like heroes . . .

Baloo's view of the stimulus

P.J O'Rourke on what to expect from the Obama administration

P.J. O'Rourke may be recovering from the malaise of the Bush years (where he seemed to have difficulty being as funny as he was in the Clinton era), as evidenced by his introduction to the Obama years:

The killjoys are back in charge — the mopes, the fusstails, the glum pots. Their wet blanket has been thrown over the White House and Congress. They're worrying up a storm. (Good thing that George W. Bush is no longer in charge of the weather and FEMA the way he was during Hurricane Katrina.) America is experiencing a polar ice cap and financial meltdown, causing sea levels to rise and sending cold water flooding into Wall Street where the rapidly acidifying ocean is corroding our 401(k)s and releasing mortgage securities full of hot air into the atmosphere until our every breath is full of CO2 especially when we exhale, which should be banned when children are present lest their uninsured health care be harmed by second-hand greenhouse gases that are causing endangerment of plant and animal species (Republicans are extinct already), leading to a shortage of green, leafy vegetables vital to the fight against America's growing epidemics of obese hunger and housing foreclosures on the homeless.

You remember the killjoys. They've been all over liberal Democratic politics like ugly on an ape since the Carter administration. They are the people who conceived the late, little-mourned, double-nickel speed limit, which is doubtless now rising undead from its grave to turn us all into road zombies dragging ourselves down I-70 numbed to a state of murderous catatonia by our 55-mile-per-hour rate of travel.

You'd almost think he's been holding back on criticizing his own team during the last eight years, wouldn't you? Perhaps the muted criticism also muted the humour?

He's clearly on happier terms slashing away at Democrats than Republicans:

Being a poke-nose, a nanny-pants, and a wowser satisfies the pathetic need of the political class to feel self-important and powerful. Banning paper and plastic and making shoppers carry their groceries home in their mouths like dogs is just the thing to make a little tin humanist in the Obama West Wing think he's admiral of the Uzbek Navy.

Not that Pecksniff Buttinskiism is a strictly partisan matter. Long-lipped howler Republican Drys teamed up with spigot-bigot William Jennings Bryan to enact Prohibition. The GOP is home to blue noses of a size as if room had been made on Mt. Rushmore for a bust of Andrew Volstead. Meanwhile Democrats do have their pleasures — drinking bong water at gay weddings and so forth. Plus there is the Kennedy family to be considered, with their penchant for exciting risk — skiing into trees, sleeping with the babysitter, and claiming entitlement to New York Senate seats.

See! It is possible to poke fun at the Kennedy family without making jokes about bridges!

Republicans stick their schnozollas into other people's underpants and stashes (but not gun cabinets). In the matter of scolding foreigners and muscling in on the governance of lesser breeds without the law, Republicans are a regular pain in the atlas. But it is the Democrats who've learned to make political honey out of minding other people's beeswax. Not satisfied with mere bossy irritation of the public, Democrats have created whole branches of government — the Department of Labor, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, the Department of Tofu and Sprouts. Democrats have opened barrels of (USDA inspected!) pork sufficient to feed all of their high-binding and wire-pulling friends, relatives, cronies, and the state government of Illinois. Democratic wisenheimers have managed to get themselves elected Big Chief Itch-and-Rub of every worry and to be appointed Pharaoh of Fret for every concern. They are the Party of Eliot Spitzer. And we the citizenry are Eliot Spitzer's wife.

Welcome back, Mr. O'Rourke.

QotD: Springsteen at the Super Bowl

ST: Why has the Super Bowl become a de facto national holiday? Do you watch it and prepare a table of fast food and snacks, and do you care who wins? And do you think people who say "I only watch the Super Bowl for the commercials" are full of shit?

NG: I have never quite gotten over losing a $5 bet to my father when I foolishly bet on the Redskins to beat the Miami Dolphins in Super Bowl VII (that's 7, for those folks like me who have trouble with regular math, let alone Roman numerals). Why would anyone, even a stupid 10-year-old kid, ever bet on Billy Kilmer to win anything other than a hot dog eating contest? That stupid fucking one-bar facemask! Like the rest of America, I walked away from that game a huge Garo Yepremian fan.

Now I watch the Super Bowl for wardrobe malfunctions. I mean, who doesn't want to see Ken Whisenhut split his pants? I think America lost its innocence when we witnessed Justin Timberlake touch a woman, any woman. It was like staring directly into a total eclipse of the sun, the heart, you name it. And it started the current cycle of FCC mania about protecting TV viewers from anything other than really shitty halftime shows.

In short, watching the Super Bowl is a great way to kill some time. Just make sure your bungee cord is secured properly and don't stint on the Tostitos.

ST: Are you as appalled as me that Bruce Springsteen, that Philip Berrigan kind of liberal who eschews materialism, is playing the half-time show at the Super Bowl?

NG: Why Springsteen? Is Gary Glitter still stuck in Thailand? Is Buddy Holly not returning the NFL's phone calls?

I grew up in Monmouth County, New Jersey, which contains both Springsteen's hometown (Freehold) and his early haunt (Asbury Park), so I can't stand him in the same way that only a New Yorker can really, really hate the Yankees. I'll say this much about the Boss: His output over the past 25 years or so would make even Beethoven nostalgic for the first few albums. Springsteen is in that elite group of rock stars who have objectively sucked two, three, or even four times longer than they were ever any good (are you listening Sting, David Bowie, R.E.M., Patti Smith?). That, and in the video for "Glory Days," he had the worst fake baseball throwing arm since Gary Cooper in Pride of the Yankees. Which is saying something.

Watching Springsteen perform at the Super Bowl — and before him, rock mummies like Tom Petty and Rolling Stones — let's just say I'd rather go straight to the Bodies exhibition, where at least no one is pretending that the corpses on display aren't actually dead.

Nick Gillespie, interviewed by Russ Smith at Splice Today, 2009-01-30

QotD: The Bush Legacy

In a way that was inconceivable when he took office, Mr. Bush — the advance man for the "ownership society," smaller and more trustworthy government, and a humble foreign policy — increased the size and scope of the federal government to unprecedented levels. At the same time, he constantly flashed signs of secrecy, duplicity, ineffectiveness and outright incompetence.

Think for a moment about the thousands of Transportation Security Administration screeners — newly minted government employees all — who continue to confiscate contact-lens solution and nail clippers while, according to nearly every field test, somehow failing to notice simulated bombs in passenger luggage.

Or schoolchildren struggling under No Child Left Behind, which federalized K-12 education to an unprecedented degree with nothing to show for it other than greater spending tabs. Or the bizarrely structured Medicare prescription-drug benefit, the largest entitlement program created since LBJ. Or the simple reality that taxpayers now guarantee some $8 trillion in inscrutable loans to a financial sector that collapsed from inscrutable loans.

Such programs were not in any way foisted on Mr. Bush, the way that welfare reform had been on Bill Clinton; they were signature projects, designed to create a legacy every bit as monumental and inspiring as Laura Bush's global literacy campaign.

The most basic Bush numbers are damning. If increases in government spending matter, then Mr. Bush is worse than any president in recent history. During his first four years in office — a period during which his party controlled Congress — he added a whopping $345 billion (in constant dollars) to the federal budget. The only other presidential term that comes close? Mr. Bush's second term. As of November 2008, he had added at least an additional $287 billion on top of that (and the months since then will add significantly to the bill). To put that in perspective, consider that the spendthrift LBJ added a mere $223 billion in total additional outlays in his one full term.

Nick Gillespie, "Bush Was a Big-Government Disaster: He expanded the state, and the sense that the state is incompetent.", Wall Street Journal, 2009-01-24

A Fisking! A Fisking!

It's been a while since anyone has done a proper Fisking, so up steps bold Nick Gillespie to fill the void:

Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman doesn't just accuse people who disagree with him of bad economics but of bad faith: "Any time you hear someone reciting one of these arguments" against various stimulus proposals coming out of the Obama admin, writes Krugman, "write him or her off as a dishonest flack."

Among the lies masquerading as arguments? "That the Obama plan will cost $275,000 per job created." In fact, says Krugman (without bothering to explain why his supposedly more accurate figure is so damn great):

The true cost per job of the Obama plan will probably be closer to $100,000 than $275,000 — and the net cost will be as little as $60,000 once you take into account the fact that a stronger economy means higher tax receipts.

That is incredible savings ($215,000 per job!), even before the first Obama stimulus dollar has been spent! Another bad argument, says Krugman, is the idea that

It's always better to cut taxes than to increase government spending because taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money.

Here's how to think about this argument: it implies that we should shut down the air traffic control system. After all, that system is paid for with fees on air tickets — and surely it would be better to let the flying public keep its money rather than hand it over to government bureaucrats.

I do not follow the implication above (or is it an inference?). Beyond the weirdness of talking about air travel in this instance, wouldn't people stop flying if there were no air traffic control system? Hence the airlines would have some incentive to provide an ATC system even if the government weren't doing so (and in fact, that's effectively what other nations such as Canada do, where the ATC system has been corporatized). I think the argument that taxpayers are better at spending their money implies that people are not complete fucktards, while the long list of shovel-ready, job-creating pork projects compiled by the U.S. Conference of Mayors drives home what most of us know from daily experience: That other people spend your money less carefully than you usually do.

Krugman concludes, "It's clear that when it comes to economic stimulus, public spending provides much more bang for the buck than tax cuts...because a large fraction of any tax cut will simply be saved." I'm not sure what that means, exactly, either, especially if taxpayers saved the cut in, like, you know, a bank, which might make it available to people with businesses or mortgages or what have you. An odd side note to all this: If massive government spending grows the economy, then we should all be millionaires after eight years of Bush rule, shouldn't we?

Advertising's final frontier

Gregg Easterbrook discerns a trend, based on the announcement that the New York Times will accept advertising on the front page for the first time in its 158th year:

WASHINGTON (January 20, 2022). Speaking at the White House Presented by Gazprom, Eli Manning, the CVS 46th President, said today the United States would begin to accept advertising on fighter planes, naval vessels and Air Force One.

"Just think, the next time I fly to an international conference to be jeered, your company's name and logo could be right next to the stars-and-bars on Air Force One," Manning said. "Call me in my sales office and I personally will handle your order." As for ads on the sides of military aircraft and warships, President Manning said that none of the generals in the Lockheed Martin Air Force have objected, nor have admirals for the Cunard Navy 'N' Caribbean Fun Line.

U.S. government agencies and officials began to accept advertising in 2016, the final year of the Boysenberry Diet Pepsi Barack Obama Administration, after the federal deficit exceeded the Citibank Gross Domestic Product. "The bailouts of Lexus, Tiffany and the Harvard endowment were bad enough," said a White House source who asked to be identified only as someone who finds it easy and convenient to buy office products from Staples. "Unlimited direct federal subsidies for country clubs, yachts and private jets was, in retrospect, a misjudgment," the source continued. "But the bankers told us they would refuse to lend unless they had free country club memberships. We had to do it, no one under any circumstances is allowed to question a banker!"

Speaking from the CNN/ESPN/BBC/Nigerian State Television White House Press Room, framed by adverts for toothpaste, pizza delivery and drive-through colonoscopies, President Manning strongly denied critics' claims the United States is for sale. "We cannot be for sale, the Beijing Investment Trust already owns 51 percent of our preferred stock," Manning said. Negotiations are ongoing to find new investors willing to inject funds into the Capital One United States Treasury and Payday Loan Service, in hopes that Treasury bills will be raised back above junk-bond status. "Until that happens, you can still use your Treasury bills for discounts at Quiznos," President Manning reassured Americans.

In other news, Lands End First Lady Abby Manning lit the national Christmas tree, signaling the festive start of the 2022 Christmas season.

Reason.TV's hopes and fears for the Obama administration

Hmmm. No embedding this time, apparently. Click here instead.

Adding to the "fears" category, Matt Welch has been listening to National Public Radio so you don't have to. Among the bad ideas on parade:

* A new Ministry of Culture? There was a long piece about Barack Obama will "revive American culture," boosting our allegedly beleauguered arts, taking us out of the dark days of, uh, Mapplethorpe-bashing or something.

* A European model for U.S. newspapers? I learned on Sunday that European newspapers are in "a better financial situation" than U.S. dailies (even though American newspapers are vastly more profitable, vastly more staffed, and filled with lots more and generally better journalism), and that we should be taking our newspaper-financing cues from Sweden. Where dailies are subsidized.

* A Cult of the Presidency? Where to begin? I heard a long news report on just how much of a historically post-partisan uniter Barack Obama really is. The moment after the groan-inducing Concert for Hope wrapped up at the Lincoln Memorial Sunday, the station hosts kicked it back to an analyst in Southern California for his measured take on the proceedings, and the first thing out of his mouth was "Wow, I just really wish I was back there to see such a thrilling event!" (Note: quote is approximate.) There was also an analysis of Barack Obama, the deep thinker/writer.

The Indiana Railroad

A brief look at a long-gone interurban rail system. H/T to Eric Kirkland.

QotD: The Madoff "victims"

If there is anything we have learned from the crisis in the financial sector, it's the urgent need for more regulation. Had federal regulators been more vigilant or wielded greater powers, all this suffering and heartache might have been averted. That's the story we've been told, and it must bring a rare smile to the face of Bernard Madoff.

Madoff was the manager of a Wall Street investment fund that he allegedly confessed to his sons was "one big lie" and "a giant Ponzi scheme." But "giant" fails to capture the scale of his fraud, which may have lost $50 billion, more than the entire gross domestic product of most of the countries on Earth.

Also striking is that his alleged victims were not rubes and simpletons but individuals of exceptional wealth and financial acumen — including various tycoons, as well as managers for banks, pension funds, and hedge funds. Even Madoff's own son, who worked for his father's firm, invested millions of dollars of his own money in the supposedly phony fund.

A Ponzi scheme, as it happens, is not a scam of dizzying complexity. It's the oldest scam in the book. You take money from new investors to pay off previous investors, and you keep doing it until the new infusions can't keep up with the withdrawals. It's about as simple as financial trickery gets.

So if regulators had been paying attention, they would have detected what was going on, right? After all, as one expert noted, Madoff was conspicuously unable to attract a lot of big institutions. "There's no Harvard management, there's no Yale, there's no Penn . . . no State of Texas or Virginia retirement system," James Hedges IV of LJH Global Investments told Fortune magazine.

Why not? "Because when you get to page two of your 30-page due diligence questionnaire," said Hedges, "you've already tripped eight alarms and said, 'I'm out of here.'"

Steve Chapman, "The Empty Case for More Regulation: The Madoff scandal shows why bigger government isn't the answer", Reason Online, 2009-01-08

The real problem with "green" cars

Ronald Bailey links to a column by Pete Geddes of the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE):

U.S. energy policy is best described as "keep it cheap." It's ironic that our political class is berating the Big Three for building the vehicles Americans bought in response. Congress is now poised to mandate that Detroit manufacture electric and hybrid vehicles. This approach is bound to fail, for these are cars consumers (a) don't want and (b) even if they did, can't afford. The recent plunge in the price of gas at the pump has not helped. November sales of hybrid cars fell 50 percent. U.S. hybrid sales are now back where they were in 2005. (Ford's best selling product in November was the F-150 pickup.) Only when electric and hybrid vehicles really do provide more value to consumers than the alternatives will they succeed.

[. . .]

In a masterstroke of special-interest politics, the UAW used CAFE's "two fleet" rule to forbid Detroit from importing smaller cars from its foreign operations. Forced to build small cars in domestic plants, with above market labor costs, Detroit could not make a profit. (In 2007, Toyota made 9.37 million vehicles and GM about the same. Toyota made a profit of about $1,874 per car, while GM lost $4,055.) Even Japanese and European carmakers rely on sedans with moderate fuel economy for profits. Small, super-efficient cars remain a niche product. Here's an inconvenient truth: forcing Detroit to build fuel-efficient cars in UAW factories is inconsistent with viable, sustainable manufacturing.

Critics often portray the Detroit automakers as "greedy, short-sighted profit seekers." To claim Detroit is refusing to sell cars consumers "really" want, compared with the cars they actually purchase, is a stretch. Is there a simpler explanation? Perhaps alternative cars are simply not ready for prime time?

Read the whole thing.

Belated 2008 retrospective, in song

H/T to "IllCentral".

QotD: Alberto Gonzales, self-described victim

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales actually made John Ashcroft look like the Bush administration's resident civil libertarian. By the time he left office, his zeal for executive power coupled with political ineptitude and general incompetence managed to win him contempt from both the left and the right.

Now Gonzales can't find a publisher for his book, and no one has yet offered him the cushy, high-paying job at a D.C. law firm that high-ranking public officials seem to think they're entitled to upon stepping down.

According to Gonzales, Gonzales is a victim.

Radley Balko, "Sure, Al. A Couple Hundred Tortured Detainees, 100,000+ Iraqi Citizens, the U.S. Constitution, and You", Hit and Run, 2009-01-02

Penn Central's 1974 plea for federal help

This is a fascinating look at just how bad the American rail system had become in the early 1970s before deregulation:

Penn Central was created by a merger of the former Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central system in 1968, in an attempt to save both of those lines. Eventually, the federal government took over PC and other bankrupt northeastern railroads to form Conrail.

H/T to Jason A. Ciastko.

QotD: Seasonal wishes

Chrysler spends $100K on a full-page ad in USA Today thanking American taxpayers for a bailout most of the public opposed, Congress never approved, and that you average taxpayer had no choice but to help fund, lest he go to jail.

Doesn’t exactly come off as heartfelt, does it?

Radley Balko, "Chrysler: Thanks, Suckers.", The Agitator, 2008-12-23

The history of the US auto industry

Megan McArdle attempts an even-handed look at how Detroit's automakers got into their current plight:

In the early 1950s, for various reasons Detroit developed a cozy three-way oligopoly. The UAW developed a cozy monopoly on supplying labor service to that oligopoly. In some ways, the UAW helped sustain that oligopoly. If you're a big company whose quality suffers, you have problems. But if you have a union making sure that labor quality cannot vary across the industry, you don't need to worry that your competitors will make a better car. Detroit competed on styling and power, not reliability or price.

During those years of oligopoly, the Big Three's first loyalty (after their loyalty to management) was loyalty to the union. The worst thing that could happen to a Big Three manager was a strike. Making a car that is reliable is only partly a matter of engineering; it's mostly a matter of extremely tight control over the assembly process. That tight control is necessarily less pleasing to the workers than looser rules. The unions could severely hurt a company with a strike. Whereas the customers? The customers could only go to another company where the same union was negotiating the same loose work rules.

(Yes, yes, I know that Toyota does it differently, with group responsibility. But Toyota's system was developed in the absence of a strong union; the adversarial model that the UAW had developed along, however historically necessary, made the Toyota example completely unworkable in a Detroit plant.)

After the unions, for the Big Three, the government was the next most worrisome constituent, followed by the dealers, then the suppliers. The customers were somewhere down there with the mayor of Youngstown, Ohio, in emotional importance to Detroit managers. It's not that the managers in Detroit had anything against their customers, and I've no doubt that they had lots of meetings in which moving testimonials to the gosh-darned swellness of Chevy or Buick or Mercury buyers. But the buyers had little power to punish them, and their other constituencies could make their lives miserable.

The biggest risk to any company, generally speaking, is unforeseen change. Yet, paradoxically, the safest method of planning (safe in the sense that the planner is less likely to be fired) is to base your plans on current trends continuing. The larger the organization, the greater the risk of sudden unanticipated change, yet the greater the tendency within the organization to resist any plan that deviates from the "current trends will continue" model.

Read the whole thing.

Galveston police aggressively tackle street prostitution

Or, that's what they claim they were doing when they went to the wrong block, grabbed a schoolgirl off her front porch, beat her up, and then arrested her for prostitution. Oh, and then, later went to her school, re-arrested her on charges of assaulting police officers during the first arrest. She's 12 years old:

[A] blue van drove up and three men jumped out rushing toward her. One of them grabbed her saying, "You're a prostitute. You're coming with me."

Dymond grabbed onto a tree and started screaming, "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy." One of the men covered her mouth. Two of the men beat her about the face and throat.

As it turned out, the three men were plain-clothed Galveston police officers who had been called to the area regarding three white prostitutes soliciting a white man and a black drug dealer.

All this is according to a lawsuit filed in Galveston federal court by Milburn against the officers. The lawsuit alleges that the officers thought Dymond, an African-American, was a hooker due to the "tight shorts" she was wearing, despite not fitting the racial description of any of the female suspects. The police went to the wrong house, two blocks away from the area of the reported illegal activity, Milburn's attorney, Anthony Griffin, tells Hair Balls.

After the incident, Dymond was hospitalized and suffered black eyes as well as throat and ear drum injuries.

As they often say on Fark.com, "That's some fine police work there, Lou."

QotD: Inventing even more unconstitutional Presidential powers

Even Americans whose knowledge of the legislative process is limited to the "I'm Just a Bill" episode of Schoolhouse Rock know about the veto: If Congress approves legislation the president doesn't like, he can refuse to sign it, in which case the law can be enacted only by a two-thirds vote of each chamber. President Bush's plan to aid the auto industry relies on a more obscure maneuver: If Congress rejects a bill the president likes, he can act as if the vote went the other way.

This maneuver, unlike the veto, is illegal by definition, not to mention unconstitutional, violating the separation of powers and the rule of law. But it is business as usual for Bush, who has shown no compunction about ignoring the law when it prohibits him from doing what he considers necessary in response to what he considers an emergency.

Jacob Sullum, Illegal Lending Practices: Bush's plan to help carmakers is not authorized by law", Reason Online, 2008-12-17

Beware the zombie!

Anthony Randazzo warns that we haven't paid enough attention to Japan's asset crisis (and aftermath) of the 1980s:

Killing zombies isn't typically the responsibility of America's president or treasury secretary. But if the country is going to get through the current financial crisis, President-elect Barack Obama and his economic team better get out their shotguns and aim for the head.

Today, our economy is plagued by struggling markets, liquidity concerns, and frozen credit. Twenty years ago, Japan faced nearly the exact same problems. Then they fell prey to the zombies.

After Japan's asset bubble burst in the late 1980s, their economy took a sharp downturn, prompting government officials to try bailing out banks and investing in infrastructure, much like the activity and proposals floating around America today. The results were terrible.

With the government propping up poor business models rather than allowing further job losses, firms wound up operating over the long-term without making a profit or adding any value to society. Their utter lack of vitality earned these perpetual money-leaching entities the moniker "zombie businesses." And unless American policymakers understand the failures of the Japanese response, we will suffer the same zombie fate.

Public support for bailouts? Still negative

Matt Welch rounds up the latest poll numbers for and against bailing out struggling businesses "after two months of relentless scaremongering by the nation's elite politicians and journalists":

Like Dick Cheney, I don't believe in governing by poll. But that won't prevent me from taking heart in the fact that, once again, Americans seem to have more instinctive faith in capitalism and less enthusiasm for government blank checks than their elected representatives.

In the comments to that post, "Ed" suggests the obvious solution:

I still think we should sell the rust-belt states to Canada. They must be worth something.

QotD: Modern Superstitions

A new Harris poll finds that 28 percent of you believe in witches and 40 percent of the public — including 46 percent of women — believe that ghosts are hovering in the so-called "real" world. Over 20 percent of you have claimed to have actually witnessed a poltergeist.

I, too, may believe in miracles (like 73 percent of you) to rationalize the haphazard existence of mankind. I may believe in Beelzebub (61 percent) because human cruelty could never go on without supernatural prodding. And I believe in hell (59 percent) because some people deserve to fry. I get it.

I get it because I was born under the 11th astrological sign in the Zodiac, Aquarius. According to experts, Aquarians are, among many other wonderful things, "tolerant," "opinionated," "far-sighted," "revolutionary" . . . and so on. Our character and personality quirks are predetermined by a study of random stars and planets that happen to be detectable from Earth.

Believe it or not, 20 percent of the American public believes in this gibberish. And, trust me, they will not rest until Dennis Kucinich is president.

In fact, with troubling economic times upon us, conspiracy theories, peculiar beliefs and harebrained philosophies will only flourish.

Gita Johar, a professor at the Columbia Business School, recently explained to Wired magazine that increasingly, once-normal rational adults are turning to psychics for guidance. "You have an illusion then that you can then control the outcome," she explains. "People want the illusion of control."

David Harsanyi, "I don't trust you people", Denver Post, 2008-12-16

QotD: Che Chic

Being a sunny-side-up kinda guy, the sight of college students, protesters, and/or retarded celebrities consuming Che Guevara-branded merchandise [. . .] makes me laugh more than seethe, not least because of what Cuban jazz great Paquito D'Rivera observes [. . .] There's something hilariously perverse about a violent anti-capitalist becoming a Western marketing icon. With rare exception, I don't expect much in the way of historical knowledge from Che-shirters, not least because few have been to the island-prison themselves.

Ah, but some have, and still retain their jock-sniffing totalitarian apologia, and this is what makes my brown eyes blue. A decade ago I went to a secretive gathering at a house in Havana, where rebellious youth sat around indulging in the disapproved and even dangerous behavior of . . . listening to the Beatles. It was an underground society of sorts, where the kids danced, sang, and gaped at the wonders of the G-sixth chord. None of them could understand what kind of evil, micro-managing jerkoff would criminalize "She Loves You" . . . well, except for the American woman who was nice enough to bring me there, a graying hippie named Karen Wald. Yeah, Castro might have gone a bit too far, she said, but it was an "understandable" defense in the face of "Western cultural imperialism."

Matt Welch, "But if You Go Carrying Pictures of Chairman Mao", Hit and Run, 2008-12-11

Getting tough on economic criminals

Katherine Mangu-Ward reports on how officials have responded to possible economic crime in Ohio:

A crack SWAT team of sherrif's deputies, health inspectors, and Ohio Department of Agriculture officials busted into the Manna Storehouse food co-op in LaGrange, Ohio, in a raid last week. The co-op is also the home of the Stowers family, so Katie Stowers, her children, and her in-laws were held at gunpoint while the agents took tens of thousands of dollars worth of meat, plus computers and cell phone. Chad Stowers, Katie's husband, wasn't home because he is a U.S. Navy Seabee currently in Iraq.

Their crime? The warrant listed the reason for the raid as "beef."

Manna may, perhaps, have needed a license to run a retail food establishment. Mostly a coop, they did sell some leftover products in a small store on the property. The exact nature of the business is in dispute, which is why the Stowers' wrote letters to various agencies asking for advice on how to proceed. Obviously, the best way to reply to that request was with a SWAT team.

That'll teach 'em!

Further militarization of the civil police, anyone?

Happy 75th!

It's the 75th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition in the United States. Join old H.L. Mencken in a celebratory quaff:

Radley Balko's advice to Obama

Radley Balko knows there's no chance of being heard, but offers some key ideas to the new Obama administration anyway:

• Increase government transparency.
• Open up the White House.
• Swear off executive privilege.
• Revamp the Transportation Security Administration.
• Investigate the Bush administration.
• Make fighting public corruption a top priority of your justice department.
• Use the pardon.

Chance of these ideas being taken up and implemented? Slim, unfortunately.

Alaska wins a squeaker

The worst part was the waiting:

It's official: Felonious Sen. Ted "Wounded Bull" Stevens [. . .] has lost his seat in the U.S. Senate, the world's greatest (and possibly fattest) deliberative body. From the AP:

Stevens' pursuit of a seventh term was damaged by his conviction in federal court — just days before the election — for lying on Senate disclosure forms to conceal more than $250,000 in gifts and home renovations from an oil field services company.

He was trying to become the first convicted felon to win election to the Senate. A survey of people leaving polling places conducted for The Associated Press and television networks found that two of three voters considered Stevens' trial a factor in their decision. Begich voters cited it as an issue more often.

Stevens was certainly one of the least inspiring examples of what a US senator could be. In fact, he could be a poster boy for the political pork brigade.

Decoding Palin Derangement Syndrome

L. Neil Smith examines the root causes of Palin Derangement Syndrome:

Never mind all of that. If you couldn't stand Hillary Clinton, her ideas, or her socialist politics, you were merely another misogynist, a male chauvinist pig who "just can't handle the idea of a woman with power."

But that was then, and this is now. Apparently liberals can't handle the idea of a woman with power if that woman isn't another liberal.

Enter Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. When Mad Jack McCain announced the choice he'd made of Palin as a running mate late last summer, I was delighted and surprised. It wasn't simply the only smart move the Hanoi Senator had made during his campaign, it was probably the only smart move any Republican had made since Eisenhower ended the Korean War.

I have to agree with Neil: the most unexpected move of McCain's entire campaign was the selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate. It caused incredible amounts of anguish to many on the left who'd clearly believed all along that they had the womens' vote locked up (John Scalzi did a good job of summarizing it all here). And in spite of the painful media stumbles and (reputed) in-fighting between McCain's staff and Palin's staff, the mere fact of her nomination exposed some ugly seams on the left:

What I saw and heard during the next three months exceeded even my wildest imaginings — and remember, I'm an imaginer by profession — a vitriolic spew of blind, visceral, dogmatic hatred that the nation's "progressives" hadn't lavished even on Randy Weaver, back when Ruby Ridge was in the headlines, nor on Timothy McVeigh after the explosion in Oklahoma City. Some feminists even claimed that, somehow, Palin wasn't a woman. Meaning, of course, that she dared to cherish values differing from those a woman, in their demented view, is supposed to cherish.

One so-called female so-called comedian referred to Palin as a ". . . little freaked out, intimidated, frightened, right-wing Republican, thin-lipped bitch", unintentionally describing herself by temperament, if not by political persuasion. She also warned the vice presidential candidate that she (Palin) would be gang-raped by her (the comedian's) "big black brothers" if she (Palin) visited Manhattan.

This to a real woman who, at least by implication, knows how to deal with a rapist the way a rapist ought to be dealt with, not with a little plastic whistle or a sisterly candlelight vigil, but with . . . well, let's just put it this way: there are places in Alaska where you're not allowed to venture unless you're carrying at least a .357 Magnum.

It was entertaining in a hide-your-eyes kind of way, observing just how unhinged some people got over Palin (in the same way it was fascinating watching the right lose their minds over Bill Clinton's doings ten years ago).

QotD: The Presidential power-grab

If there’s one thing defenders of civil liberties know, it's that assaults on constitutional freedoms are bipartisan. Just as constitutional darkness didn't first fall with the arrival in the Oval Office of George W. Bush, the shroud will not lift with his departure and the entry of President Barack Obama.

As atrocious as the Bush record on civil liberties has been, there's no more eager and self-righteous hand reaching out to the Bill of Rights to drop it into the shredder than that of a liberal intent on legislating freedom. Witness the great liberal drive to criminalize expressions of hate and impose fierce punitive enhancements if the criminal has been imprudent enough to perpetrate verbal breaches of sexual or ethnic etiquette while bludgeoning his victim to death.

No doubt the conservatives who cheered Bush on as he abrogated ancient rights and stretched the powers of his office to unseen limits would have shrieked if a Democrat had taken such liberties. But now Obama will be entitled to the lordly prerogatives Bush established.

Alexander Cockburn, "A Long Train of Abuses", The American Conservative, 2008-11-17

QotD: The wasted Conservative opportunity

Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye. Our 28-year conservative opportunity to fix the moral and practical boundaries of government is gone — gone with the bear market and the Bear Stearns and the bear that's headed off to do you-know-what in the woods on our philosophy.

An entire generation has been born, grown up, and had families of its own since Ronald Reagan was elected. And where is the world we promised these children of the Conservative Age? Where is this land of freedom and responsibility, knowledge, opportunity, accomplishment, honor, truth, trust, and one boring hour each week spent in itchy clothes at church, synagogue, or mosque? It lies in ruins at our feet, as well it might, since we ourselves kicked the shining city upon a hill into dust and rubble.

[. . .]

In how many ways did we fail conservatism? And who can count that high? Take just one example of our unconserved tendency to poke our noses into other people's business: abortion. Democracy — be it howsoever conservative — is a manifestation of the will of the people. We may argue with the people as a man may argue with his wife, but in the end we must submit to the fact of being married. Get a pro-life friend drunk to the truth-telling stage and ask him what happens if his 14-year-old gets knocked up. What if it's rape? Some people truly have the courage of their convictions. I don't know if I'm one of them. I might kill the baby. I will kill the boy.

[. . .]

Our impeachment of President Clinton was another example of placing the wrong political emphasis on personal matters. We impeached Clinton for lying to the government. To our surprise the electorate gave us cold comfort. Lying to the government: It's called April 15th. And we accused Clinton of lying about sex, which all men spend their lives doing, starting at 15 bragging about things we haven't done yet, then on to fibbing about things we are doing, and winding up with prevarications about things we no longer can do.

P.J. O'Rourke, "We Blew It", The Weekly Standard, 2008-11-17

QotD: Hyper-inflated expectations

Being a libertarian, I naturally think that people are too optimistic about the government. But there were people on CNN declaring that Obama was going to lower the price of gasoline and pay their mortgage if they couldn't afford it, lower their tax bill and raise their wages, and presumably, make them taller, smarter, and get the chickweed out of their hair. I'm not exaggerating: there were voters who seemed to think that about three weeks after Obama took office, all their budget problems would be solved. Not that Obama would eventually make things better, or help them get past the rough spots; they were expecting an immediate influx of really quite a lot of money, as well as a rapid and permanent increase in base wages and housing prices.

I don't recall Republicans engaging in this kind of magical thinking in 2000. They, too, seemed to have an unreasonable belief that George Bush was going to improve America a great deal (unreasonable even before 9/11), but as I recall, this was concentrated on intangibles like restoring honor to the white house, not putting an extra $3,000 in everyone's pockets.

I was eighteen when Clinton was elected, and I don't remember if this sort of thing is simply typical of Democratic victories. But the expectations I saw in those "man on the street interviews" were not fulfillable by any president--at least, not until Santa agrees to stand for election.

Megan McArdle, "Things can only get better . . .", Asymmetrical Information, 2008-11-07

Gillespie's predictions

Nick Gillespie turns prognosticator for the coming Obama administration, but only after venting some spleen over the neologism "game-changer":

Arguably the most nauseating development during Election 2008 (which, thankfully and so unlike Election 2000, actually ended when it was supposed to, on Election Day) was the rise to ubiquity of the term game-changer, a phrase that, as far as I can tell (and I admittedly haven't really called my secret contacts at the Oxford English Dictionary on this one), hit the big time only when applied to the creation of even more types of toothpaste coming out of consumer-products giant Procter & Gamble.

Was Sarah Palin a game-changer (yes, definitely, maybe even a double game-changer, first by putting McCain back in the race and then by dragging him down like a sorefooted sled dog in a Jack London short story turned real-life tragedy)? Was the final presidential debate a game-changer (no, though nobody can remember a damn thing about it)? Was something CNN yapped about at some point or another a game-changer (no)? Was the economic crisis a game-changer? The bailout package? The initial failure to pass the bailout? The unanticipated but thoroughly convincing equation of John McCain with the Penquin from the old Batman TV show? Game-changer, game-changer, game-changer, not a game-changer (but should have been one). At times, it seemed as if Election 2008 was, I don't know, nothing less than a perfect storm of game-changers. Or not.

But now that's all over with and we must ask the question: Will President Obama be a, coff-coff, game-changer?

Plenty of links in the original post.

A tough act to follow

The Brits' wrap-up of their 24 hours of election coverage

The tired, tired crew at 24 hours in America offer their final thoughts on the day:

But before we sign off there's just time for a final look at what we've learnt during this most momentous of days. Things like . . .

- If your state has a girl's name, it's going to stay red.

- Even with fewer than 0.5% of votes counted, it's never too early to tell.

- CNN doesn't have a single attractive contributor. Fox has several but they're all lunatics.

- CNN also trumps the Beeb for breathless rhetoric. 'Breaking history', anyone?

- The Black Panthers still exist.

- But above all we've learned that, given the right candidate, America is still capable of making the right decision and inspiring the world.

Now, can we all get along again?

Yes we can.

Also, if you're not one of the McCain fans sobbing quietly in the corner, check their international reactions post.

Your best choice for live election coverage

Rather than watching ABCNNBCBC, you'll probably find your time better spent obsessively reloading http://2008.24hoursinamerica.com/, where a bunch of snooty Brits pass windy judgement on the whole shebang:

Americans are voting. We are ensconsed in our super-secret day base in London. The election is on.

Across the next 24 hours, we will bring you coverage from the worlds of television, newspaper journalism, twitter, blogging, exclusive Election Night parties from London to Los Angeles, and Jerry Bruckheimer.

Between now and midnight GMT (7pm EST, 4pm PST) when the first polls close, we will be looking back at the campaigns that brought us here, and forward to possible presidencies, potential careers, and trying to figure out what kind of a world Baby Trig will grow up in. From that point onwards we’ll be covering the results as they come in, not only in the Presidential race, but in close, interesting or amusing Senate and Congressional races, and state-wide ballots.

Update: Jesse Walker offers his predictions on finishing positions from third place down:

Third Place: Ralph Nader's name recognition surpasses Bob Barr's, and he's currently outpolling the LP's man by about 2 percentage points. And no one ever went broke underestimating the electoral performance of the Libertarian Party. Nonetheless, if Barr draws mostly from the right and Nader draws mostly from the left — which seems like a reasonable outcome to expect, though there are surveys showing Nader making inroads among right-wing populists — then the Libertarian could come out on top. This time around, there are simply more disaffected conservatives than disaffected liberals out there.

Fifth Place: Chuck Baldwin should top Cynthia McKinney easily. You might at least expect her to do well in Georgia, the state that used to send her to Congress, but the Greens aren't on the ballot there.

Seventh Place: A month ago this would have been an easy call for Alan Keyes. But with Ron Paul's non-campaign polling 4 percent in Montana, he has a shot at it. If McKinney flops badly, he might even make it to sixth.

Last Place: Write-ins aside, I'm expecting Gene Amondson of the Prohibition Party to bring up the rear, despite his catchy campaign slogan: "Vote tradition, vote prohibition!"

Update, the second: Should you care to see results that include Barr, McKinney, and Nader, check C-SPAN.org.

The Ron Paul write-in surge begins

As the votes are still being cast in the rest of the United States, they've already closed the poll in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire.

Barack Obama came up a big winner in the presidential race in Dixville Notch and Hart's Location, N.H., where tradition of having the first Election Day ballots tallied lives on.

Democrat Obama defeated Republican John McCain by a count of 15 to 6 in Dixville Notch, where a loud whoop accompanied the announcement in Tuesday's first minutes. The town of Hart's Location reported 17 votes for Obama, 10 for McCain and two for write-in Ron Paul. Independent Ralph Nader was on both towns' ballots but got no votes.

"I'm not going to say I wasn't surprised," said Obama supporter Tanner Nelson Tillotson, whose name was drawn from a bowl to make him Dixville Notch's first voter.

With 115 residents between them, Dixville Notch and Hart's Location get every eligible voter to the polls beginning at midnight on Election Day. Between them, the towns have been enjoying their first-vote status since 1948.

I don't know if Bob Barr was on the ballot in New Hampshire, but the Ron Paul vote is encouraging.

QotD: Voting and retribution

Listening to my complaints about Obama, a friend of mine in New York asked what alternative I had to recommend her. Since in New York the split for Obama-Biden is roughly 65-29 I told her it didn't matter. She could write in the straight Wiccan ticket if she felt so inclined. (Not a bad platform either, as she duly reminded me: "Do as you will, as long as it harms none.") It wouldn't make any difference, any more than it would in California, where you can vote for Nader or Barr or McKinney and Obama is going to win regardless. In most states in the Union you can write in the Bertie Wooster/Jeeves ticket, and even without your vote Obama-Biden will canter home. So get out there and have fun and don’t feel excessively burdened by responsibility to History — always a left-wing failing.

And wouldn't Barr be the first mustachioed occupant of the White House since Teddy Roosevelt? Even if you don’t like the man, vote the mustache! This would be change we can see. Does that phrase have a vaguely familiar ring? It was what LBJ used to advise his staff during the Great Society build-up: "You've gotta give them change they can see." Meaning bridges, roads, new parks. Apparently the Obama pre-transition team is studying the early days of the New Deal and Great Society programs as thematic precursors for their initial two years — before they lose one house of Congress, I suppose. I like freshman Montana Senator John Tester’s notion of change we’d like to see. Tester said people "want to see the executives that drove Wall Street into the ground in orange suits picking up cans along the side of the road." He's got a hugely popular reception for that thought.

If the new Obama administration has got any sense at all, it'll start planning a series of show trials of the ci-devant Masters of the Universe, now delightedly fingering the billions handed them by Hank Paulson and the US Congress. If they get a veto proof majority the ground work could start in the Senate, in a committee armed with subpoena power. If not, in some Partisan Commission, taking testimony around the country. Or both. This is the moment to fix in the popular mind for the next couple of generations exactly who are the malefactors of great wealth along with their intellectual courtiers. Stake out the battlefield, otherwise the enemy will stake it out for you. For sure, it would be divisive. Division and unity go arm in arm.

Alexander Cockburn, "Change You Can See", Counterpunch, 2008-10-31

The good part of tomorrow's vote

Although the choices offered up by the major parties are dire, there's still one good thing about tomorrow's election: it'll be the end of George Bush's political career. Steve Chapman enumerates the reasons why it'll be good to say goodbye:

Regardless of what the polls say, it's not clear who is going to win the presidential race. But it is clear who is going to lose: George W. Bush. If this contest proves anything, it's that the electorate is sick of him and eager for someone very different.

They might even prefer the candidate they elected in 2000. The one who promised to be "a uniter, not a divider." Who said he would "call for responsibility and try to live it as well." Who said the United States should be "a humble nation." Who faulted Al Gore for plotting to enlarge the government.

That candidate soon became famous for exploiting divisions, refusing to hold himself or his subordinates accountable, letting expenditures soar, and making America synonymous with arrogance in much of the world. Whatever Americans hoped Bush would provide, it's safe to say that an open-ended war, an assault on the Constitution, and an economic panic were not among them.

Election lists, Scalzi style

John Scalzi is busy posting election lists. Here's number 3: Things Sarah Palin Has Shot Or Would Shoot From a Helicopter:

1. Wolves
2. Coyotes
3. Arctic foxes
4. Deer
5. Giraffes
6. Tortoises
7. Dolphins
8. Salmon
9. Katie Couric
10. That son of a bitch that divorced her sister
11. Kittens
12. Whoever made that Photoshopped picture of her in a bikini, holding a rifle
. . .

And don't miss People/Things I Would Vote For President Before I Would Vote For John McCain. Bob Barr made number 2!

Worst economy since . . . 1991?

Matt Welch examines some of the hyperventilation over the current economic crisis:

Finally, a number that could be the worst on record since the Great Dustbowlia, though it's a number of direction, not position, and (just like GDP) when combined with the prior quarter it shows net growth.

I don't mean to minimize the pain here. But as Nick Gillespie pointed out a couple weeks back, "Any comparison with the Depression, which featured an unemployment rate of 25 percent and a contraction in GDP of over 33 percent at its worst moments, strains credulity."

Both the outgoing administration and the incoming one (whichever wins) have been using such inaccurate, scaremongering analogies to justify massive, ill-conceived federal interventions all over the private economy that will likely have profoundly negative long-term consquences in the forms of renewed inflation, managerial inefficiency from central planners, offshoring of capital markets, and what I fear will be the biggest Bubble of them all: Having the federal government guarantee damned near every large financial risk anybody takes. In a world of ever-increasing guarantees, why shouldn't every investor pour maximum money into whatever federally backstopped financial institution is offering the highest rates? And how do you suppose said institution will be able to afford paying out those high winnings? It won't be through sound investments, boyo.

As a confirmed apocalyptic, I continue to expect the sky to fall; but as a stat dweeb I'm just not seeing the elephant tracks. Right now, during our Worst Economic Crisis Since the Great Depression, unemployment is at 6.1 percent, inflation is at 4.9 percent, and GDP shrank 0.3 percent this quarter, though it's still up for the year. I don't see how that even begins to compete with the late-Carter, early-Reagan era, when GDP shrank in both 1980 and 1982, unemployment never dipped below 8 percent from November 1981 to January 1984, and inflation never dipped below 8 percent between September 1978 and January 1982.

Libertarians (both large "L" and small) discuss Barack Obama

In a piece from the November issue of Reason magazine, several libertarians look at what an Obama administration might encounter:

[Virginia Postrel] "The president's power has a face, and Obama's most fervent supporters believe he can repair the world with his face alone. Perhaps they're right, at least for the first month or two. We can only hope that he will respect the multiplicity of American dreams and the unpredictable ways in which their pursuit provides the basis for a better future."

[. . .]

[Brink Lindsay] "Obama, to his great credit, resisted the urge to panic all along. After eight years of George W. Bush and all the damage he has done to American interests and influence in the world, it is vitally important for the next occupant of the White House to be able to face a messy and dangerous world with a clear head. Only Barack Obama is equipped to do that."

[. . .]

[Richard A. Epstein] "Unfortunately, on the full range of economic issues, both large and small, I fear that [Obama's] policies, earnestly advanced, are a throwback to the worst of the Depression-era, big-government policies. Libertarians in general favor flat and low taxes, free trade, and unregulated labor markets. Obama is on the wrong side of all these issues. He adopts a warmed-over vision of the New Deal corporatist state with high taxation, major trade barriers, and massive interference in labor markets. He is also unrepentant in his support of farm subsidies and a vast expansion of the government role in health care. Each of these reforms, taken separately, expands the power of government over our lives. Their cumulative impact could be devastating."

[. . .]

[Jonathan Rauch] "Barack Obama? Not a chance," I said last year, when he announced his candidacy. "Too inexperienced." The last time I was so wrong about a politician was in 1980, when I had the excuse of being 20 years old. "Ronald Reagan? No way. A simpleton."

What I misjudged about Reagan was that he was a deeply substantive man. His ideas were the most important aspect of him. With my record on Obama predictions, I hesitate to try again, but the editors of this fine publication have offered me the price of lunch chez Denny's, so here goes: Obama is the un-Reagan, inasmuch as his ideas are the least important aspect of him.

QotD: Rationalizing your vote

I'm probably going to vote for Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) this year, and my reason is particularly indefensible. It's a straightforward case of reverse racism. For most of my life (beginning, I think, with a broadcast of that paean to racial harmony Brian's Song), I have figured that America should have a black president, and that if such a candidate ever came along who wasn't a complete disaster, I'd vote for him. That moment has arrived, yet it's full of irony: Usually I throw away my vote by betting on some third-party forlorn hope, but this year Obama's lock on California makes my vote especially superfluous and irrelevant.

And the candidate himself comes quite close to being a complete disaster. Obama has taken positions and even — with the slight peevishness of a man who knows he's been singled out by destiny and doesn't see much point in going through the usual channels — documented and supported them. To the extent we can piece together a portrait of the candidate, it's awful. He's a strident anti-trader and industrial-era dead-ender, persuaded that protecting decades-gone jobs in the Midwest is a national responsibility. He will try to enact some version of universal health care. On most issues where he's not worse than Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) — foreign policy, wiretapping, finance — he's just as bad. He may or may not be friendly with too many anti-American jackholes, but he's definitely too friendly with jackholes in general. His budget projections are fanciful. Worst of all, for at least the next two years he will almost certainly have the support of the majority party in Congress.

And yet in a dream, in a Nixon-era fog of progressive uplift, I'm ready to vote for him. And I'm pretty sure my reasons for voting for Obama are no dumber than your reasons for voting for whomever you're voting for.

Tim Cavanaugh, "Don't Vote As I Vote: Everybody's got a reason for voting, and they all stink", Reason Online, 2008-10-28

When the lesser of two evils is still too evil

Jacob Sullum tries to determine which of the two major party candidates qualifies as the "lesser evil":

As we saw during the first six years of the Bush administration, which featured profligate spending and unchecked executive power, the White House and Congress tend to enable each other's excesses when they are controlled by the same party. Since the Democrats are expected not only to retain but to strengthen their grip on the legislative branch, this consideration counts in favor of the Republican nominee.

Another important advantage of a McCain presidency is that he would be more likely than Barack Obama to appoint judges who see their job as interpreting and applying the Constitution, rather than rewriting it to fit their policy preferences. Since the two oldest members of the Supreme Court tend toward the latter approach, McCain could have a chance to make the Court more faithful to the original understanding of the Constitution.

While McCain would be better than Obama in this respect, it's not because he cares much about legal philosophy but because the people advising him would. Likewise on economic issues, where the people McCain consults seem less interventionist and more market-oriented than Obama's advisers. Then again, McCain has cast doubt on the superiority of his economic instincts by condemning "reckless conduct" and "unbridled greed" on Wall Street while backing taxpayer-funded bailouts of reckless and greedy lenders, investors, and borrowers.

So, hold your nose and vote Republican? Maybe not:

With the glaring exception of the Second Amendment, which Obama supports in theory but not in practice, he has a substantially stronger record on civil liberties than McCain does.

Obama is also superior on the related issue of executive power, rejecting Bush's contention that the president may do as he pleases in matters related to terrorism or national security. McCain initially sounded better than Bush on this question, agreeing that the president is obligated to obey the law and renouncing the use of signing statements to evade that obligation. More recently, however, his campaign has indicated that McCain's view of the president's authority is broad enough to permit violation of statutes governing surveillance of people in the United States.

The extent of the president's powers, although hardly mentioned during the general election campaign, is probably the most important consideration in choosing between McCain and Obama.

Either way, it's still an unpalatable choice for limited government fans.

John McCain . . . Karl Rove's instrument?

Ryan Sager examines the hard-to-imagine transition of John McCain from Rove victim to intellectual heir:

Back in 2000, Texas Gov. George W. Bush's political savior, Karl Rove, was performing nothing short of an electoral resurrection, running around South Carolina calling Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) an unpatriotic, illegitimate-black-baby-fathering Manchurian Candidate.

Who could have guessed that eight years later, the senator from Arizona would be dedicating the remainder of his political life to finishing Karl Rove's good works on Earth?

And yet, as McCain runs around the country this fall, calling Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) an unpatriotic, socialistic terrorist-paller-around-with, it seems he's taken it upon himself to complete what should be called the Rove Realignment.

No, not the once-envisioned "rolling realignment," under which the Republican Party would add to its base of white Evangelical Protestants, bringing in Hispanics, culturally conservative African Americans, and economically vulnerable whites — those who supported Medicare Part D and opposed gay marriage in equal measure — to create a "permanent" Republican majority that would last at least a generation.

McCain's working on the other realignment: The one where eight years of fiscal recklessness and cultural warfare alienates swing voters and withers the Republican Party until the very base of the conservative movement cracks in half — splitting a coalition that has endured since the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964.

Of course, the libertarian wing of the Republican Pary has grown smaller and less influential . . . to the point that most Republicans see them as gadflies or worse. Kicking them out of the GOP must seem like a good idea to those currently running the party.

Alexander Cockburn on the Obama candidacy

In a recent column in The Independent, Alexander Cockburn explains his unease with the Barack Obama candidacy:

Obama invokes change. Yet never has the dead hand of the past had a "reform" candidate so firmly by the windpipe. Is it possible to confront America's problems without talking about the arms budget? The Pentagon is spending more than at any point since the end of the Second World War. In "real dollars" — an optimistic concept these days — the $635bn (£400bn) appropriated in fiscal 2007 is 5 per cent above the previous all-time high, reached in 1952. Obama wants to enlarge the armed services by 90,000. He pledges to escalate the US war in Afghanistan; to attack Pakistan's territory if it obstructs any unilateral US mission to kill Osama bin Laden; and to wage a war against terror in a hundred countries, creating a new international intelligence and law enforcement "infrastructure" to take down terrorist networks. A fresh start? Where does this differ from Bush's commitment on 20 September 2001, to an ongoing "war on terror" against "every terrorist group of global reach" and "any nation that continues to harbour or support terrorism"?

Obama's liberal defenders comfort themselves with the thought that "he had to say that to get elected". He didn't. After eight years of Bush, Americans are receptive to reassessing America's imperial role. Obama has shunned this opportunity. If elected, he will be a prisoner of his promise that on his watch Afghanistan will not be lost, nor the white man's burden shirked.

Whatever drawdown of troops in Iraq that does take place in the event of Obama's victory will be a brief hiccup amid the blare and thunder of fresh "resolve". In the event of Obama's victory, the most immediate consequence overseas will most likely be brusque imperial reassertion. Already, Joe Biden, the shopworn poster boy for Israeli intransigence and Cold War hysteria, is yelping stridently about the new administration's "mettle" being tested in the first six months by the Russians and their surrogates. Obama is far more hawkish than McCain on Iran.

After eight years of unrelenting assault on constitutional liberties by Bush and Cheney, public and judicial enthusiasm for tyranny has waned. Obama has preferred to stand with Bush and Cheney. In February, seeking a liberal profile in the primaries, Obama stood against warrantless wiretapping. His support for liberty did not survive for long. Five months later, he voted in favour and declared that "the ability to monitor and track individuals who want to attack the United States is a vital counter-terrorism tool".

As many people have noted, aside from the symbolic positives (first black presidential candidate, first female Republican VP candidate), this is not the American electoral system's finest moment. Neither major candidate brings much substantive difference from the outgoing George Bush administration's foreign policies, and there are more points of agreement between Obama and McCain's domestic policies than differences. In too many ways, votes for both Republican and Democratic tickets really do mean "more of the same, please".

Part four of the social security story: Broken Trust

Worried about the viability of Social Security? Unless you're already collecting it, you should be!

Follow the animated adventures of Sonny, exactly the sort of youth who is set to get screwed by a system designed during The Great Depression, when workers were plenty and retirees rare.

In Episode Four, Sonny learns the big secret of Social Security: That all payroll taxes go into the federal government's general fund and are spent on all sorts of programs and activities that have nothing to do with individuals' retirements.

Is it racist to call someone a socialist?

Michael C. Moynihan responds to an editorial in the Kansas City Star, which tried to pillory John McCain for calling Barack Obama a socialist:

Now let me, as a card-carrying member of the libertarian establishment, say from the outset that while the prospect of an Obama presidency and large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate stimulates my acid reflux, I am optimistic that our presumptive leader will govern more in the style of L.B.J. than Eugene Debs. Thank heaven for small mercies. So yes, I expect the next four years to be pretty grim, but those who foretell massive grain collectivization, the requisition of SUVs, a liquidation campaign against the kulaks, would be advised to take a deep breath.

But buried in these charges of socialism, Diuguid, the Star's in-house racial cryptographer, finds clear racist intent. He explains that "J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI from 1924 to 1972, used the term liberally to describe African Americans who spent their lives fighting for equality." Indeed, "freedom fighters" like "W.E.B. Du Bois, who in 1909 helped found the NAACP which is still the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization [and] Paul Robeson, a famous singer, actor and political activist who in the 1930s became involved in national and international movements for better labor relations, peace and racial justice . . ."

This is a sort of reverse McCarthyism; the presumption that because an activist was denounced as a 'socialist' he was obviously no such thing. But here Diuguid is, whether out of luck or ignorance, partially correct. Du Bois and Robeson were most certainly not socialists — they were Stalinists.

QotD: The negativity race

In part, the hypocrisy stems from the sincere conviction that one's own hatred and fear are justified because the other side really is evil: Palin would usher in an American Taliban; Obama is a friend to terrorists. (By the way, it is appalling that so many mainstream liberals were willing to embrace the unrepentant Ayers — but it's hardly better for mainstream conservatives to "pal around" with Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy, who once plotted to murder his fellow Americans and more recently counseled gun owners to shoot federal agents in the head.)

Many people who are tired of the mudslinging can't wait for the election to be over. But Nov. 4 is unlikely to bring much relief. The dogs of war are loose, and they won't be easy to leash. If, as seems likely, Obama is elected, a large number of people on the right will see him as a stealth radical who won thanks to media bias and rampant voter fraud. If McCain pulls off a surprise upset, at least as many people on the left will blame racism, Republican dirty tricks or both—and some will regard the results as proof that the right-wing cabal behind Bush will never let go of power. Either way, a substantial minority of Americans will see themselves as living under an illegitimate and evil regime.

And that's more frightening than the economic crisis.

Cathy Young, "The Campaign Turns Nasty: American voters deserve better than this vicious squabble", Reason Online, 2008-10-22

When border security goes too far

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has posted a fact sheet on the US Constitution Free Zone, where the normal protections of the 4th Amendment don't apply:

* Normally under the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the American people are not generally subject to random and arbitrary stops and searches.

* The border, however, has always been an exception. There, the longstanding view is that the normal rules do not apply. For example the authorities do not need a warrant or probable cause to conduct a "routine search."

* But what is “the border”? According to the government, it is a 100-mile wide strip that wraps around the "external boundary" of the United States.

* As a result of this claimed authority, individuals who are far away from the border, American citizens traveling from one place in America to another, are being stopped and harassed in ways that our Constitution does not permit.

* Border Patrol has been setting up checkpoints inland — on highways in states such as California, Texas and Arizona, and at ferry terminals in Washington State. Typically, the agents ask drivers and passengers about their citizenship. Unfortunately, our courts so far have permitted these kinds of checkpoints — legally speaking, they are "administrative" stops that are permitted only for the specific purpose of protecting the nation's borders. They cannot become general drug-search or other law enforcement efforts.

* However, these stops by Border Patrol agents are not remaining confined to that border security purpose. On the roads of California and elsewhere in the nation — places far removed from the actual border — agents are stopping, interrogating, and searching Americans on an everyday basis with absolutely no suspicion of wrongdoing.

* The bottom line is that the extraordinary authorities that the government possesses at the border are spilling into regular American streets.

As Radley Balko says, "we're not exactly to the point of 'Ihre Papiere, bitte' Berlin yet, but the ACLU does warn that the area of the country 100 miles from every border and coastline would include about 190 million people, or nearly two-thirds of the U.S. population (see map below)."

Nobody (well, damned few people) argue that the border needs to be monitored, but the over-expansion of the definition of what constitutes the border is a very bad thing. 100 miles is an arbitrary number . . . who can object if the government decides it should be 200 or 300 miles? At what point can anyone say "this far, but no further"? If you've already conceded 100 miles, there's no logical stopping point, is there?

The toxic endorsement game

John McCain gets the nod from those noted election fans, Al Qaida:

Al-Qaida supporters suggested in a Web site message this week they would welcome a pre-election terror attack on the U.S. as a way to usher in a McCain presidency.

The message was posted Monday on the password-protected al-Hesbah Web site. It says if al-Qaida wants to exhaust the United States militarily and economically, "impetuous" Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain is the better choice.

It says that's because he's more likely to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Economic vain hopes

Jacob Sullum makes an excellent point in regard to the exaggerated hopes (at least on the part of Obama-favouring media pundits) for job creation if Barack Obama is elected:

[Many Americans] probably will be disappointed, because Obama seems to view job creation not only as something the government does with taxpayers' money but as an end in itself. That's a recipe for wasteful spending that will divert resources from more productive uses and ultimately result in lower employment than would otherwise occur.

Obama says he will "transform the challenge of global climate change into an opportunity to create 5 million new green jobs," which he likens to the economic activity triggered by the personal computer. This way of looking at climate change is a variation on the broken window fallacy, according to which the loss caused by a smashed window is offset by the employment it gives the glazier.

By the same logic, Obama should view war, crime, and hurricanes as opportunities to create jobs. All three generate economic activity, but we'd be better off if the resources spent on bombs, burglar alarms, and reconstruction were available for other purposes, instead of being used to inflict, prevent, or recover from losses.

Almost as a throw-away introduction to the article, Sullum also points out that the turmoil in the real estate and banking sectors has not directly impacted other sectors of the economy yet:

Despite all the facile comparisons between the current economic situation and the conditions that preceded the Great Depression, the most recent figures show GDP continuing to grow, with unemployment at a historically modest 6.1 percent.

It must be remembered that all economic data is collected after the fact, so that what we think of as the "current" numbers are only indicating the situation from one to three months earlier.

The deeper meaning of Palin's SNL appearance

Greg Beato looks beyond the surface of Sarah Palin's appearance on Saturday Night Live:

Like Patty Hearst brandishing a semi-automatic carbine during a SLA bank robbery, Sarah Palin didn't actually do much during her celebrated appearance on Saturday Night Live this weekend. But it was a shocking tableau nonetheless. After mocking Palin relentlessly for the last month, the liberal terrorists at SNL actually kidnapped the vice presidential candidate, brainwashed her, and made her complicit in their crimes against democracy.

Is it time, perhaps, to get serious about the War on Punchlines? Surely it must have been tough for conservatives to watch Palin's uncharacteristically docile performace; instead of Sarah Barracuda, she was Miss Congeniality, reduced to accepting smarmy compliments from Alec Baldwin. But she was there on her own accord, apparently without preconditions. And however much one might want to rail about the show's liberal bias and its double standard—would Barack Obama have been treated so dismissively?—it ultimately makes the most sense to simply treat late-night comedians like late-night comedians—and that means realizing they're exempt from journalistic notions of fairness and balance.

Update: Welcome, New York Times readers! Do feel free to look around, but you'll quickly figure out that this is just a quotation from a longer piece by Greg at Hit and Run. I recommend you go there for the rest of his post.

The Powell Endorsement

I'm still out on a brief wine-tasting trip (hence the lack of posts for the past couple of days), but I thought this article at Hit and Run was worth linking:

[When it comes to] Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama, sometimes I wonder if some people have any sort of memory, particularly the journalists now playing up this story as if the messiah had spoken.

That's not to say there is no story here; Powell is a stalwart of the Republican establishment and one of the few, far too few, African-Americans who until now has had a genuinely good chance of becoming president of the United States. My problem is that he is a man on whom the establishment has bestowed the title of foreign policy sage, when in fact he proved to be one of the most mediocre secretaries of state in recent memory, in a field including such nullities as Madeleine Albright, Warren Christopher, and the opportunistic but hollow Condoleezza Rice.

Why on earth do we listen to Colin Powell? When he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff he opposed George H.W. Bush's decision to remove Iraqi forces from Kuwait militarily, even though the decision was ultimately a sound one. At the end of his term as chairman he advocated a disastrous U.S. operation in Somalia, contradicting his own near unworkable conditions for overseas intervention, the so-called "Powell Doctrine." As secretary of state under George W. Bush, the first item on his agenda was a botched effort to impose "smart sanctions" on Iraq. Powell visited Damascus to persuade President Bashar Assad to end illicit cross-border trade between Iraq and Syria, which was providing vital economic oxygen to Saddam Hussein's regime. Assad promised Powell he would, then ignored that promise, embarrassing the secretary early in his stewardship.

Episode 3: Policy Warrior

"Worried about the viability of Social Security? Unless you're already collecting it, you should be! Follow the animated adventures of Sonny, exactly the sort of youth who is set to get screwed by a system designed during The Great Depression, when workers were plenty and retirees rare. In Epsiode 3, "Policy Warrior," Sonny, John McCain, and Barack Obama compete in various game show contest and learn that a few tweaks aren't going to save anybody's retirement account."

Damian Penny resigns from the right wing

No, not really. But to many rabid McCain fans among the Canadian right, it's almost the same thing:

. . . even if you agree with many of the Bush Administration's foreign policies, you can't deny that the rest of the world will be more receptive to a Democratic President than another Republican. I'm uneasy about Obama's position on Iraq, but as Mark has noted several times on this site, the Senator from Illinois appears committed to Afghanistan. And if that conflict becomes "Obama's war," I believe you'll see America's (and Canada's) allies redouble their efforts.

I still like and respect John McCain, and I even believe Sarah Palin has much to offer once she gets more years of experience under her belt. (Memo to the Trig troofers: I'm endorsing Obama despite you creeps, not because of you.) Ideally, the GOP would control the Senate and/or the House, to keep Obama in check. There's no hope for that in 2008, but the mid-term elections are only two years away. For that long, at least, I'm willing to give him a chance.

Boy, am I going to hear it for this one . . .

Not being a paid-up member of the "right" (that is, I'm not a Conservative), it'll surprise few of you that I completely understand Damian's position. While I wouldn't vote for Obama while there was still a chance to vote for Bob Barr or Ron Paul, I'd much rather see someone other than John McCain as president. President Obama might well be the second coming of Herbert Hoover or Jimmy Carter, but President McCain would be the spiritual heir of William Henry Harrison . . .

If the blog disappears later today it will be because my virtual landlord has "evicted" me . . . he's a huge Sarah Palin fan.

QotD: That's gonna leave a mark

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez mocked George W. Bush as a "comrade" on Wednesday, saying the U.S. president was a hard-line leftist for his government's intervention of major private banks in the U.S. financial crisis.

Chavez, who calls capitalism an evil and ex-Cuban leader Fidel Castro his mentor, ridiculed Bush for his plan for the federal government to take equity in American banks despite the U.S. right-wing's criticism of Venezuelan nationalizations.

"Bush is to the left of me now," Chavez told an audience of international intellectuals debating the benefits of socialism. "Comrade Bush announced he will buy shares in private banks."

"Reporting by Patricia Rondon; Writing by Saul Hudson; Editing by Anthony Boadle", "Chavez says 'Comrade Bush' turns left in crisis", Reuters, 2008-10-15

Planning an escape to Canada?

Brilliant, just brilliant.

H/T to Diogenes Borealis (by way of SDA).

Christopher Buckley, official heretic

Christopher Buckley is no longer an employee at National Review, the conservative magazine founded by his father. It's not for corruption, drunkenness, debauchery, or even badly written columns. It's because he's endorsed Obama:

I had gone out of my way in my Beast endorsement to say that I was not doing it in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column, because of the experience of my colleague, the lovely Kathleen Parker. Kathleen had written in NRO that she felt Sarah Palin was an embarrassment. (Hardly an alarmist view.) This brought 12,000 livid emails, among them a real charmer suggesting that Kathleen's mother ought to have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a dumpster. I didn't want to put NR in an awkward position.

Since my Obama endorsement, Kathleen and I have become BFFs and now trade incoming hate-mails. No one has yet suggested my dear old Mum should have aborted me, but it's pretty darned angry out there in Right Wing Land. One editor at National Review — a friend of 30 years — emailed me that he thought my opinions "cretinous." One thoughtful correspondent, who feels that I have "betrayed" — the b-word has been much used in all this — my father and the conservative movement generally, said he plans to devote the rest of his life to getting people to cancel their subscriptions to National Review. But there was one bright spot: To those who wrote me to demand, "Cancel my subscription," I was able to quote the title of my father's last book, a delicious compendium of his NR "Notes and Asides": Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription.

Within hours of my endorsement appearing in The Daily Beast it became clear that National Review had a serious problem on its hands. So the next morning, I thought the only decent thing to do would be to offer to resign my column there. This offer was accepted — rather briskly! — by Rich Lowry, NR's editor, and its publisher, the superb and able and fine Jack Fowler. I retain the fondest feelings for the magazine that my father founded, but I will admit to a certain sadness that an act of publishing a reasoned argument for the opposition should result in acrimony and disavowal.

Proving, if it needed further proof, that conservatives can lose their cool just as gracelessly as liberals . . . and at equal speed.

I can easily understand someone holding generally conservative views still being unable to endorse McCain: he's not conservative in the majority of his opinions, and he's dismayingly populist where he's not alarmingly authoritarian. Obama is no prize for the small government fan, but the differences between him and McCain may well lead wavering conservatives to stay away from the polls or even pull the lever for "the opposition" rather than the devil they know all too well (because nobody would want to "waste their votes" by voting for Bob Barr, right?).

Boom Baby Boom!

Hitchens proposes a common-sense solution to the drug problem in Afghanistan

Christopher Hitchens outlines the best possible way to both deflate the Taliban and provide Afghanistan with a legitimate market for their primary agricultural product:

The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime tells us that last year Afghanistan's poppy fields, on 193,000 hectares of land, produced 93 percent of all the world's opium. The potential production could be as high as 8,200 metric tons. And, unsurprisingly, UNODC also reports that the vast bulk of the revenue from this astonishing harvest goes directly to the Taliban or to local warlords and mullahs. Meanwhile, in the guise of liberators, NATO forces appear and tell the Afghan villagers that they intend to burn their only crop. And the American embassy is only restrained by the Afghan government from pursuing a policy of actually spraying this same crop from the air! In other words, the discredited fantasy of Richard Nixon's so-called "War on Drugs" is the dogma on which we are prepared to gamble and lose the country that gave birth to the Taliban and hospitality to al-Qaida.

Surely a smarter strategy would be, in the long term, to invest a great deal in reforestation and especially in the replanting of vines. While in the short term, hard-pressed Afghan farmers should be allowed to sell their opium to the government rather than only to the many criminal elements that continue to infest it or to the Taliban. We don't have to smoke the stuff once we have purchased it: It can be burned or thrown away or perhaps more profitably used to manufacture the painkillers of which the United States currently suffers a shortage. (As it is, we allow Turkey to cultivate opium poppy fields for precisely this purpose.) Why not give Afghanistan the contract instead? At one stroke, we help fill its coffers and empty the main war chest of our foes while altering the "hearts-and-minds" balance that has been tipping away from us. I happen to know that this option has been discussed at quite high levels in Afghanistan itself, and I leave you to guess at the sort of political constraints that prevent it from being discussed intelligently in public in the United States. But if we ever have to have the melancholy inquest on how we "lost" a country we had once liberated, this will be one of the places where the conversation will have to start.

Of course, no politician in America can countenance such a change in policy: it might "send the wrong message". But it's the single best way to achieve multiple worthwhile goals, not least of which is to provide Afghan farmers with tangible reasons why they should reject the Taliban.

US Healthcare: the Gillespie Plan

Protecting children from . . . themselves

Most of us would probably have the common sense not to send nude photos to others. Especially if the receipients were teenagers. Unfortunately, an unnamed 15-year-old girl from Ohio didn't have the sense to avoid this:

A 15-year-old Ohio girl was arrested on felony child pornography charges for allegedly sending nude cell phone pictures of herself to classmates. Authorities are considering charging some of the students who received the photos as well.

The unnamed student from Licking Valley High School in Newark, Ohio was arrested Friday after school officials discovered the materials and notified police. She spent the weekend in juvenile detention and entered a plea of "deny" on Monday, according to The NewarkAdvocate.com.

Charges include illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material and possession of criminal tools. If convicted, the girl could be forced to register as a sexual offender for 20 years, but because of her age, the judge hearing the case has some flexibility in the matter, an official told the Advocate.

Well, if telling someone not to send nude photos of themselves doesn't work, 20 years in prison will sure get the message across clearly, won't it? She'd be facing less time in prison for just about any violent crime short of murder . . . and this kind of disproportional sentence makes sense?

The keynotes of the last debate

Radley Balko watched last night's presidential debate (I had better things to do . . . like sleeping). Some of his observations:

McCain was much stronger than last time, and may well have won on points. But debates aren’t about debating skill, or even public policy. They’re about likability and not screwing up. I suspect the image most voters will take away is that of an angry, cantankerous old man with clear contempt for his opponent debating a young, articulate, good-looking guy who smiled and appeared gracious. Obama wins.

Obama’s answer on the "Obama Doctrine" sounded like it was written by Sarah Palin. He clearly didn’t have an answer about what criteria he’d use in determining which humanitarian crises are worthy of U.S. military force. He was all over the place. What we’re left is, then, is, "Iraq never posed a threat to the security of the United States. Which is why we should have sent troops to Darfur, instead."

[. . .]

The most depressing part of the night for me was watching CNN’s real-time reaction from undecided Ohio voters. When Obama promised health care for everyone, promised that you could also keep your employer-sponsored health-care, promised to do all of this and bring health care costs down (he really must be Jesus), and capped it all off with a pledge to maintain the current system of employer-sponsored health care, his ratings were off the charts. The Ohio group gave McCain his strongest marks when he promised to buy up all the troubled mortgages. Is there any way to pull off this "democracy" thing without using actual voters?

[. . .]

The choices last night on foreign policy: Four years of lots more small wars versus four years of a couple more big wars.

That last point is the nail in the coffin for any hopes of a less-interventionist US foreign policy. Not that it was a healthy, robust hope before the debate, of course.

The world's greatest bailout body

Michael Flynn discusses the "secret history of the bailout bill":

The Senate is overly fond of referring to itself as the "world's greatest deliberative body." Barely 48 hours after the House rejected the Treasury's bailout plan, the august body took a previously passed House bill mandating that insurance companies cover mental health benefits, added in the core $700 billion bailout, laced in money for rural school districts and disaster relief, expanded FDIC deposit insurance coverage, and topped it off with over $150 billion in old and new tax breaks for businesses, individuals in high-income states, individuals living in states without an income tax, and various interests such as wooden-arrow makers and film production crews. GOP Leader Mitch McConnell, almost choking back tears after the Chamber passed the 451-page monster, said it was the Senate "at its finest." The Age of Pericles this ain't.

I'll leave it to others to comment on this mother-of-all-Christmas tree bills. The bulk of the Senate legislation is essentially the same as that rejected by the House. It authorizes the Treasury Department to use $700 billion to buy up bad loans. Certain banks get cleaner balance sheets immediately and the feds supposedly will minimize the risk to taxpayers by selling the bad loans when the market "stabilizes" and the prices of the loans have improved.

To paraphrase Mencken, this solution is neat, plausible, and wrong. The first failing is something that is only now being openly stated: Treasury expects to pay some unknown premium above any current market price for mortgage-backed securities (MBS). We don't know what the premium will be nor how it will be determined. Well, in a sense we do. It will mostly be determined by politics, not economics. This is the foundational flaw in the Treasury plan.

QotD: Redefining "market failure"

In an interview with The Los Angeles Times editorial board last December, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson made clear that he defined "market failure" as any instance in which investors, including home owners, lost money. In discussing various grand plans to buoy the economy, Paulson said, "What we're doing is avoiding a market failure that would have forced housing values down in a way that was not in the investors' interest, and in a way that the market wasn't intended to work."

You can read more of that exchange here, where it's reprinted in a recent reason column by Tim Cavanaugh. It's a pretty stunning and open admission of how Paulson conceives his job. Basically, his job is to maintain or increase prices, period. He doesn't want to oversee a market that acts as a discovery process because, as Dr. Zaius, the patron saint of all great Platonic experts, could tell you, "You may not like what you find." Indeed, you might find that you misunderestimated what people think your crap is worth (has Paulson, one wonders, ever gone to a garage sale, that ultimate testing ground of the subjective theory of value?).

So Paulson wants to socialize losses by the investing class with his economic PATRIOT Act, a hasty, hurried, and not-clearly-warranted piece of legislation that will somehow manage to change everything without addressing basic incentives in the financial sector (other than underscoring the idea that the American economy is too big to fail, so the feds will oddly bail it out in the name of capitalism).

Nick Gillespie, "The Fearsome Fear of a Looming Recession", Hit and Run, 2008-10-01

Bumper stickers of the future

More here.

Want to become an American citizen?

Be prepared to wait a long, long, long time. Mike Flynn and Shikha Dalmia detail the process, illustrated by Terry Colon.

Why did the sub-prime crisis happen?

It was a subject of discussion in the office yesterday, as we tried to come up with plausible reasons why banks and other lenders were so eager to lend money to borrowers who could not reasonably pay back to the loans. We came up with a very short list of "a) sheer idiocy" and "b) some form of government policy". Apparently option "b" is correct:

Consider the low lending standards that were a significant component of the mortgage crisis. Lenders made millions of loans to borrowers who, under normal market conditions, weren't able to pay them off. These decisions have cost lenders, especially leading financial institutions, tens of billions of dollars.

It is popular to take low lending standards as proof that the free market has failed, that the system that is supposed to reward productive behavior and punish unproductive behavior has failed to do so. Yet this claim ignores that for years irrational lending standards have been forced on lenders by the federal Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and rewarded (at taxpayers' expense) by multiple government bodies.

The CRA forces banks to make loans in poor communities, loans that banks may otherwise reject as financially unsound. Under the CRA, banks must convince a set of bureaucracies that they are not engaging in discrimination, a charge that the act encourages any CRA-recognized community group to bring forward. Otherwise, any merger or expansion the banks attempt will likely be denied. But what counts as discrimination?

According to one enforcement agency, "discrimination exists when a lender's underwriting policies contain arbitrary or outdated criteria that effectively disqualify many urban or lower-income minority applicants." Note that these "arbitrary or outdated criteria" include most of the essentials of responsible lending: income level, income verification, credit history and savings history — the very factors lenders are now being criticized for ignoring.

The whole article is here. H/T to Brian Micklethwait (who was kind enough to link to an earlier QotD).

Amusing "Cease and Desist" notice

John Scalzi links to this NSFW cease-and-desist notice that may or may not be actually from Ann & Nancy Wilson to John McCain:

Cease and Desist, You Old Fart

Dear John McCain,

When we first learned your campaign was using our admittedly awesome 1977 classic "Barracuda" to introduce your terrifying joke of a running mate, we tried to be civil. As we wrote in our press release, "The Republican campaign did not ask for permission, nor would they have been granted that permission. We have asked the Republican campaign publicly not to use our music."

It gets a bit, um, earthier from that point onwards.

The Schroer case, finally decided

It's nice to see that even though the wheels of justice grind exceedingly slow, they sometimes come up with the correct answer. Diane Schroer has won her discrimination case against the Library of Congress:

A former Army Special Forces commander passed over for a job as a terrorism analyst at the Library of Congress because he was in the process of becoming a she won a discrimination lawsuit Friday.

U.S. District Judge James Robinson ruled that the Library of Congress discriminated against Diane Schroer of Alexandria, Va., by not giving her the job after the former David Schroer disclosed he would start becoming Diane before beginning the new job.

"The evidence establishes that the Library was enthusiastic about hiring David Schroer — until she disclosed her transsexuality," Robinson wrote in his decision. "The Library revoked the offer when it learned that a man named David intended to become, legally, culturally, and physically, a woman named Diane. This was discrimination 'because of . . . sex.'"

I first heard about this case over three years ago.

QotD: The state-supported wing of Feminism

Mrs. Palin's marriage actually makes her a terrific role model. One of the best choices a woman can make if she wants a career and a family is to pick a partner who will be able to take on equal or primary responsibility for child-rearing. Our culture still harbors a lingering perception that such men are less than manly — and who better to smash that stereotype than "First Dude" Todd Palin?

Nevertheless, when Sarah Palin offered a tribute to her husband in her Republican National Convention speech, New York Times columnist Judith Warner read this as a message that she is "subordinate to a great man." Perhaps the message was a brilliant reversal of the old saw that behind every man is a great woman: Here, the great woman is out in front and the great man provides the support. Isn't that real feminism?

Not to Ms. Marsh, who insists that feminism must demand support for women from the government. In this worldview, advocating more federal subsidies for institutional day care is pro-woman; advocating tax breaks or regulatory reform that would help home-based care providers — preferred by most working parents — is not. Trying to legislate away the gender gap in earnings (which no self-respecting economist today blames primarily on discrimination) is feminist. Expanding opportunities for part-time and flexible jobs is "the Republican Party line."

I disagree with Sarah Palin on a number of issues, including abortion rights. But when the feminist establishment treats not only pro-life feminism but small-government, individualist feminism as heresy, it writes off multitudes of women.

Of course, being a feminist role model is not part of the vice president's job description, and there are legitimate questions about Mrs. Palin's qualifications. And yet, like millions of American women — and men — I find her can-do feminism infinitely more liberated than the what-can-the-government-do-for-me brand espoused by the sisterhood.

Cathy Young, "Why Feminists Hate Sarah Palin", Opinion Journal, 2008-09-15

A libertarian case for McCain?

Matt Welch, author of the anti-McCain tome McCain: Myth of a Maverick (now out in paperback), tries to find the glimmerings of libertarian hopes if McCain is elected:

Lord knows, there is a libertarian case to be made against John McCain. Whether it's his hyper-interventionist foreign policy, disregard for constitutional liberties and individualism, or his up-front opposition to "the 'leave us alone' libertarian philosophy that dominated Republican debates in the 1990s," the 2008 Republican nominee has drawn fire from many free-marketeers through (as the Club for Growth has put it), his "philosophical ambivalence, if not hostility, about limited government and personal freedom."

But it would be inaccurate at best to claim that a McCain presidency offers zero potential upside for libertarians. After two years of studying the Arizona senator's habits (and coming to mostly critical conclusions), I can identify seven plausible reasons why a limited-government type might consider voting for the guy, even if I for one won't. Each reason, as you'll see, has as least one serious caveat.

Update, 20 September: Terry Michael tries to make the libertarian case for Barack Obama:

For those who recognize that "libertarian Democrat" is no more oxymoronic than "libertarian Republican," a solid case can be made for Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) as a Leader of the Free World who won't take that American Exceptionalism conceit as seriously as "Country First" Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

Sure, we'll have to endure four or even eight years of warbling by Barbra Streisand at White House dinners. And I am under no illusions: Obama has more Populist-Progressive than Madisonian inclinations. But, guys and gals, Ms. Wasilla is no less stomach-churning than Babs. And the actual Republican presidential candidate is even more authoritarian than his Progressive hero, Teddy Roosevelt. John McCain is no friend of Friedman.

Thus, seven reasons libertarians can hope for the best from Obama.

"Irrational exuberance" on the part of the regulators

This post at The Big Picture is fascinating:

As we learn this morning via Julie Satow of the NY Sun, special exemptions from the SEC are in large part responsible for the huge build up in financial sector leverage over the past 4 years — as well as the massive current unwind

Satow interviews the above quoted former SEC director, and he spits out the blunt truth: The current excess leverage now unwinding was the result of a purposeful SEC exemption given to five firms.

You read that right — the events of the past year are not a mere accident, but are the results of a conscious and willful SEC decision to allow these firms to legally violate existing net capital rules that, in the past 30 years, had limited broker dealers debt-to-net capital ratio to 12-to-1.

Instead, the 2004 exemption — given only to 5 firms — allowed them to lever up 30 and even 40 to 1.

Who were the five that received this special exemption? You won't be surprised to learn that they were Goldman, Merrill, Lehman, Bear Stearns, and Morgan Stanley.

A fisking! A fisking!

James Lileks indulges in a bit of fisking:

Anything in the Sarah-Palin-is-the-fifth-horsewoman-of-the-apocalypse-and-hence-rides-sidesaddle department? Well, there's this from the New Yorker:

There are two kinds of folks: Élites and Regulars. Why people love Sarah Palin is, she is a Regular. . .

Where was I? Ah, ye: I hate Élites. Which is why, whenever I am having brain surgery, or eye surgery, which is sometimes necessary due to all my non-blinking, I always hire some random Regular guy, with shaking hands if possible, who is also a drunk, scared of the sight of blood, and harbors a secret dislike for me.

Sigh. Well, let's turn that around. I need a plumber, so naturally I call up a professor who specializes in Roman aqueducts, because what I really need when the faucet is broken is someone who can place it in the context of the ancients' understanding of fluid dynamics and potable-water storage systems.

The term "elitist" does not mean a smart person with an area of expertise. It means a person who occupies a narrow stratum of society, usually academic — although people in think-tanks who view the world through steepled fingers qualify as well — whose Olympian perspective is usually predicated on a set of assumptions about people tinged with equal parts indulgent condescension and faint amusement, as an anthropologist might bring to the study of a Cargo Cult. It also confuses proximity to the Washington Monument with access to truth.

It wasn't a market failure

Ronald Bailey looks at the potential devastation of the insurance industry as the claims pour in from the Texas coast:

The fact that insurance companies refused to insure property located on storm-wracked coasts is not an instance of market failure. A market failure supposedly occurs when the price of goods and services do not reflect the true costs of producing and consuming those goods and services. That's clearly not what happened here. The market is practially shouting at people, "Don't build something you can't afford to lose where hurricanes periodically crash ashore."

Instead the state "insurance" scheme is an example of government failure which occurs when a government intervention causes a more inefficient allocation of goods and resources than would occur without that intervention. In this case, it's the government that's telling people that it's OK to build in dangerous areas and then not charging them enough for the "insurance."

It's one of the biggest omissions from media coverage of hurricanes . . . the largest reason for the increasing damage toll isn't that the storms are necessarily more powerful or more frequent, but that many more people have been moving into areas that are subject to greater risk from those storms. Government meddling in the insurance market distorts the necessary pricing signals to property owners . . . usually forcing insurance companies to provide below-cost policies in high-risk areas or requiring private insurers to underwrite the losses of quasi-public or public insurers.

It wasn't a market failure

Ronald Bailey looks at the potential devastation of the insurance industry as the claims pour in from the Texas coast:

The fact that insurance companies refused to insure property located on storm-wracked coasts is not an instance of market failure. A market failure supposedly occurs when the price of goods and services do not reflect the true costs of producing and consuming those goods and services. That's clearly not what happened here. The market is practially shouting at people, "Don't build something you can't afford to lose where hurricanes periodically crash ashore."

Instead the state "insurance" scheme is an example of government failure which occurs when a government intervention causes a more inefficient allocation of goods and resources than would occur without that intervention. In this case, it's the government that's telling people that it's OK to build in dangerous areas and then not charging them enough for the "insurance."

It's one of the biggest omissions from media coverage of hurricanes . . . the largest reason for the increasing damage toll isn't that the storms are necessarily more powerful or more frequent, but that many more people have been moving into areas that are subject to greater risk from those storms. Government meddling in the insurance market distorts the necessary pricing signals to property owners . . . usually forcing insurance companies to provide below-cost policies in high-risk areas or requiring private insurers to underwrite the losses of quasi-public or public insurers.

The McCain campaign's dishonesty

Steve Chapman wonders why the McCain campaign is determined to push dishonest statements instead of addressing the facts:

Why does McCain insist on running such a mendacious campaign? There is plenty an honest conservative might say in opposition to Obama: He's wrong about Iraq. He's wrong about Iran. He's wrong about offshore oil drilling. He wants to raise taxes. He favors abortion on demand. He would appoint liberal judges. He would impede school reform.

But McCain has concluded that a fact-based case about Obama isn't enough to prevail in November. So he has chosen to smear his opponent with ridiculous claims that he thinks the American people are gullible enough to believe.

He has charged repeatedly that his opponent is willing to lose a war to win an election. What's McCain willing to lose to become president? Nothing so consequential as a war. Just his soul.

And my favourite comment from the article: "McCain may be the only candidate who has ever gotten in trouble with FactCheck.org for quoting FactCheck.org."

Update: There's also the concern expressed by Radley Balko about McCain's attempt to suppress a pertinent news story:

So here we have a U.S. senator who tried to destroy the guy who blew the whistle on his wife's crimes, who then used his political power to work out a sweetheart deal with prosecutors to get his wife a slap on the wrist for those crimes (which often send others to prison), and who has then spent his entire career fighting for longer sentences and less leniency for people who commit similar crimes. And he's now running for president.

How can Rubin argue with a straight face that this isn't a legitimate story?

QotD: The Bill of Rights

I don't think many people realize it any more — many of those who do are inclined to lie about it and attempt to cover it up — but the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, commonly known as the Bill of Rights, were written not just to protect us from the would-be kings and dictators in government, but to protect us, as well, from democracy.

On both sides of the Federalist-Antifederalist split, most of the Founding Fathers expressed hatred and fear of the notion of "absolute democracy" in which the highest law was "vox populi, vox dei" ("The voice of the people is the voice of God."), an ancient proverb that novelist Robert A. Heinlein, an unusually astute observer of history and human nature, translated as "How the hell did we get into this mess?"

The rights that the Founders chose to enumerate were meant never to be decreed, legislated, adjudicated — or voted — away. They had been placed (or at least the Founders believed) beyond the reach of politicians, bureaucrats, and the people, themselves. While they were inclined to celebrate the mind and spirit of the individual human being, the Founders knew that our species doesn't play particularly well in groups, and that the collective intelligence of a mob is that of its brightest member — divided by the number of people in the group.

L. Neil Smith, "Click, Clickity-Click", Libertarian Enterprise, 2008-09-07

McCain using Muhammed Ali's famous "rope-a-dope" tactic?

Mark Steyn seems to think that John McCain's master strategy for the media is similar to Muhammed Ali's rope-a-dope technique:

Maybe it is. A conventional launch strategy for a little-known vice-presidential nominee might have involved "manipulating" the media into running umpteen front-pagers on Sarah Palin's amazing primary challenge of a sitting governor and getting the sob-sisters to slough off a ton of heartwarming stories about her son shipping out to Iraq.

But, if you were really savvy, you'd "manipulate" the media into a stampede of lurid drivel deriding her as a Stepford wife and a dominatrix, comparing her to Islamic fundamentalists, Pontius Pilate and porn stars, and dismissing her as a dysfunctional brood mare who can't possibly be the biological mother of the kid she was too dumb to abort. Who knows? It's a long shot, but if you could pull it off, a really cunning media manipulator might succeed in manipulating Howie's buddies into spending the month after Labor Day outbidding each other in some insane Who Wants To Be An Effete Condescending Media Snob? death-match. You'd not only make the press look like bozos, but that in turn might tarnish just a little the fellow these geniuses have chosen to anoint.

The Palin interview

Nick Gillespie reviews the Sarah Palin interview with ABC:

Based on the bits I saw, and the incredibly tedious, partisan commentary on last night's yak shows, I'd say Palin easily passed the Quayle test (that is, she didn't completely bomb) but failed to rise far enough above that baseline to completely silence critics (as she did with her GOP convention speech). Shockingly, the folks in the tank for the GOP said she was great, and the Dem types thought she was stunningly bad (she clearly flubbed more than a few answers); the big fooferaw coming out this will be whether Gibson deliberately misrepresented various on-a-mission-from-God quotes, which will focus the post-interview debate on media bias (a win for the GOP).

If nothing else, this interview may signal a shift back to discussing the top of the tickets, though last night's national service-a-thon forum with McBama was a grimly awful affair whose basic premise — ask not what your country can do for you but what you can be forced to do for your country — should remind libertarians and liberty-loving folks everywhere just how few people get the whole freedom-from-serving-in-other-people's-grand-schemes point of this country.

Seven years on

It's the seventh anniversary of the Jihadist attacks of 2001. Memorials will be held in Washington, New York, and at the crash site of United flight 93 near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. It's still a shock to consider how effective those attacks were, and how much damage they did, not only on the day of the attacks themselves, but also in the long-lasting repercussions we're still dealing with.

The BBC reports:

Four minutes of silence are being held to mark the times when four hijacked passenger planes hit the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.

Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain are attending a ceremony at Ground Zero in New York.

At the Pentagon, President George W Bush will dedicate a new memorial.

The memorial in Washington was built at a cost of $22m (£12.6m) on a 1.9-acre (0.77-hectare) parcel of land within view of the crash site.

In a typical result of bureaucratic mismanagement, the New York memorial is still totally wrapped in red tape, with no definite completion date on the horizon.

Mark Steyn, apparently back from hiatus, on what we should be calling the post-9/11 era:

It was launched in the days after 9/11 as a "war on terror," an artful evasion deemed necessary on the grounds that a war on any enemy beginning with "Islamist," "Islamo-," or "Islamic" might give the impression we had some, ah, issues with Islam itself and only complicate things further with various "friends" like Mubarak and the Saudis. Then, a couple of years back, the Administration rechristened (oops) the whole messy business "the Long War." And Newt Gingrich started describing it as World War III, on the grounds that it's a war on a global scale, and that's how we designate such conflicts, and as the last one so designated was Number Two, this must be Three.

Norman Podhoretz, in a famous essay, argued that it is, in fact, World War IV, Number Three being the Cold War. The author has now expanded his thesis into a short and characteristically trenchant book in which he argues vigorously in support of the "Bush Doctrine" — more vigorously, indeed, than most of the Administration or even the President would be prepared to argue these days.[1] Unlike Newt, Mr. Podhoretz is not one of nature's salesmen, but he recognizes that this product needs to be pitched. The Naming of Wars is not some semantic diversion for bored viziers on rainy afternoons, but a critical element in framing your strategic goals and — in a plump and prosperous democracy — bringing the citizenry along with you. As students of Harry Potter's sworn enemy — He Who Must Not Be Named — well know, the inability even to identify the foe speaks at the very minimum to a kind of psychological faintheartedness.

From the outset the "war on terror" was mocked by cynics as absurdly genteel — as if earlier generations of sensitive warmongers anxious not to give offense had proclaimed, in December of 1941, a war on dive-bombers.

QotD: Non-mainstream candidates

I doubt anything concrete will come out of this press conference (other than the damage to Bob Barr among what ought to be his strongest supporters). But the event reflects something interesting and valuable that's happening out there in the ideological long tail, a collection of conversations that cross the ordinary political lines. In essence, two leftists and a paleocon just held a press conference to say, "We're listening to the libertarian." They did this because actual leftists and actual paleocons are listening to libertarians. And even third-party candidates — or some of them, anyway — have sharp enough political instincts to respond to their constituencies.

Jesse Walker, "The Radical Center", Hit and Run, 2008-09-10

Scalzi gently admonishes the Democrats who are "losing it" over Palin

John Scalzi tries to calm down the folks who are doing their very best Chicken Little imitations over Sarah Palin:

Dear Democrats, liberals and the like:

I know it's a lot to ask at the moment, but could you possibly please stop publicly losing your shit all over the goddamn place? Honestly, it's embarrassing. Did you really not know that coming out of the GOP convention, the GOP candidate might have a poll bounce? Likewise, were you somehow surprised that the GOP might try very hard to make this campaign about something other than actual issues? Did you expect them to try to run on the last eight years, or even pretend that they own them? What the fuck is wrong with you?

No, seriously: What the fuck is wrong with you? The GOP picks a woman VP 24 years after you do, for the same goddamn reason you did (a contentless call to shore up a shrinking base), and you act like you've never seen this movie before? I just don't know what to say to you about that. Also: squirting yourself messy over a vice presidential candidate. Good fucking gravy, how off the fucking script can you possibly get.

QotD: Modern Feminism

But what I learned at the knee of my 1970s feminist, name-hyphenating, here-honey-why-don't-you-put-down-that-doll-and-play-with-this-truck mother was that feminism is about seeing female humans as more than just uterus-bearing beings. And that's the kind of feminist I have become. Maybe that's why I find all the feminist hysteria around the uteri of the Palin women so confusing. And that's why I don't think abortion should be the alpha and omega of female political discourse.

To me, this means that the kind of powerful woman who inspires a (hilarious) website like Sarah Palin Facts should have some claim to respect from feminists both for her joke accomplishments — "Little known fact: Jesus has a bracelet that says, 'WWSPD?' " She's a role model! "Sarah Palin can divide by zero." She's good at math! "Sarah Palin's image already appears on the newer nickels." She's on U.S. legal tender! — and for her real ones.

Truth be told, I haven't been tracking feminist hermeneutics too closely. I'm sure you'd agree, Amanda, that encouraging strong female role models is an important part of feminism. But in a world where mainstream feminists almost unanimously backed Bill Clinton during the Paula Jones scandal and now excoriate McCain for choosing Palin, I'm not totally clear on what feminism entails — if not simply support for the Democratic Party.

Katharine Mangu-Ward, "The search continues for the elusive pro-Palin feminist", LA Times, 2008-09-10

"Respect[ing] the Constitution only when it's convenient"

Jacob Sullum finds some odd juxtapositions within the Republican platform:

The Republican platform unveiled last week notes in passing that "the Constitution assigns the federal government no role in local education." Yet the same document offers opinions on all manner of local educational issues, including the virtues of phonics, the evils of sex education, the wisdom of merit pay for teachers, and the folly of social promotion.

That contradiction illustrates the hollowness of the Republican commitment to "constrain the federal government to its legitimate constitutional functions." The Republicans (like the Democrats) respect the Constitution only when it's convenient.

You might say that's old news. Yet while campaigning for president in 1980, Ronald Reagan promised to abolish the Department of Education. So did Bob Dole in 1996. After two terms of a Republican president who proudly charged in the opposite direction, the most John McCain can muster is a promise to "identify and eliminate ineffective programs" — that is, to make unconstitutional activities more efficient.

CBC's Heather Mallick considers the Republican VP candidate

Linked from Small Dead Animals, a quick summary of Heather Mallick's latest even-handed analysis of the Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin:

...Sarah Palin ... fit of pique ... the white trash vote ... sexual inadequates ... she isn't even female really ... Alaska hillbilly ... "white trash" ... trailer trash ... rural, loud, proudly unlettered ... toned-down version of the porn actress ... overtreated hair, puffy lips ... "pramface" ... roughneck fuckin' redneck ... prodding his daughter ... ratboy ... fizzing with rage and revenge ... vicious and profoundly dishonest ... good fast listing... nervous wreck with deeply strange hair ... the hick vote ... ordinary hillbilly ... racism? ... racism ... "rectal fissure" ... tense no-hoper ladies ... white female marginals ...

Original article here. Canada's tax-supported national broadcaster. Incredible/Incroyable.

Update, 10 September: James Lileks indulges in an old-fashioned Fisking on this first authenticated Canadian case of Palin Derangement Syndrome:

Hapless, confused old tool of the string yankers: check! Next, we see how it’s possible to put your head up your posterior while jerking your knee, a rather difficult maneuver they don’t teach until the fifth year of yoga class:

She added nothing to the ticket that the Republicans didn't already have sewn up, the white trash vote

Classism blended with instant clueless political analysis? Check and check. Palin added several things, including an appeal to some women and enthusiasm for a race that had come to see McCain as another Dole, right down to the war-related arm injuries. (Which are a sign of age and unfitness, of course; if a Young and Dymanic candidate had developed carpal tunnel syndrome from shaking hands or repeatedly patting himself on the back, supporters would wear slings in sympathy.) She continues to brass-band her white-trash point thus:

. . . the demographic that sullies America's name inside and outside its borders yet has such a curious appeal for the right.

Leaving aside whether Europe would like us more if we did something about those horrible people they see in "The Dukes of Hazzard" documentaries, you have to love the idea of the "white trash" demo sullying our name inside our borders — she's talking about the thin crust of coastal dwellers who regard Manhattan as some sort of precious monastery that keeps the dim flickering light of civilization alive. Why, if the hillbillies disappeared, the New Yorkers would be reduced to making disparaging remarks about people from New Jersey who take the bridges and tunnels to go clubbing in LowSoHo or MoTriVil or whatever old neighborhood has been fitted out with thudding discos and fusion-sushi joints.

Why does this demographic — the white trash, I mean, not the orange trash of the Guido Jersey interlopers — have such a "curious appeal" to the right? Because the right, perhaps, thinks of them as "voters" who cast "ballots" in "elections" for people to don't consider rhinoplasty so they can look down their noses even further than God intended.

PM tries to cozy up to the Obama campaign

There's a good reason for politicians to avoid commenting on election races in other countries . . . no matter what you say, or how you say it, it'll always come back to hurt you. This is why comedians love to get foreign politicians to make silly remarks about local politics. I can't believe that Stephen Harper let himself be quoted saying anything about the ongoing US elections:

Stephen Harper has let the world in on a little secret — he thinks Democrat Barack Obama has the edge in the race for the White House.

"I've been following it very closely," the prime minister observed Sunday as he bantered with reporters just before his own campaign plane took off for Quebec City.

Pressed for a personal prediction on the outcome of the U.S. presidential race, Harper at first demurred, suggesting anything he said would be misinterpreted.

After a pause, however, he went on to admit: "I've always said it's the Democrats' to lose."

Update: Timing may be everything after all . . . another headline on the page I linked to in this post says "Canada poll predicts strong Conservative majority":

The Segma poll taken for La Presse newspaper put support for the Conservatives at 43 percent, translating into 183 of the 308 seats in the House of Commons. It predicted the main opposition Liberals would get 25 percent of the vote, with just 62 seats.

Polls are notoriously misleading this early in a campaign, but that's the best predicted result I've seen for the Tories in quite some time . . .

The Minnesota RNC protests

Megan McArdle considers the situation in St. Paul over the arrests of protestors outside the Republican convention:

Police are arresting journalists, which is generally an indication that they're in full-on flip-out mode. And in my own experience as a protest kid, the police are generally way too willing to use force on protesters, particularly ones they find politically distasteful. This is a small minority, but once they start something, the other officers generally have to follow them in or stand silent witness to a riot. So my natural assumption with these kinds of arrests is that the police were somehow at fault.

I've never been a political protestor, so I can't speak from personal experience, but otherwise I fully agree with Megan here. The police are probably at fault at least half the time when a protest march is disrupted (not to say that they're not necessary: every protest march gathers up temporary idiots, clueless folks, and genuine agitators or would-be Weathermen to march alongside the actual protestors. It's how the police handle things when the clueless or idiotic get a bit rowdy that dictates whether the genuine troublemakers can "get their hate on" and start the violent phase.

Some police officers should never be assigned to this kind of duty; most can. A good police administration should be able to manage that sort of aptitude-based tasking.

On the other hand, Minneapolis is not a very Republican kind of town. And the offenses cited by the Strib are the kinds of things people should be arrested for. You don't protest Republican policies by smashing windows and blocking roads. If you want the road to yourself, get a parade permit just like the VFW. Also in my experience as a protest kid, there's an obnoxious element that's looking for a fight and thinks they're entitled to smash things to show they're VEEEEWWWWWY MAAAAAAD!!!!! This number is also always numerically very small, but a few people can do a lot of damage. They can also get the police adrenaline running, at which point the pepper spray and the night sticks start flying.

So as best I can tell, there were some adolescent, violent protesters who ruined things for everyone, and fault should be apportioned about equally between them, and the hotheaded police who reacted to their nonsense by spraying tear gas at everyone.

Update: If you read the comments on Megan's post, you'll find that many of her readers feel that she's ducked the issue by discussing only the arrests at the protests, not the pre-emptive arrests I mentioned here.

QotD: Torture as a litmus test issue

Eve expresses mild surprise that I haven't tried to "sway her against" Sarah Palin yet. It remains to be seen whether Palin is merely as big a fraud as most politicians or a bigger one, but Palin herself is a distraction. And, you know, she’s not running for President. John McCain is, and as Larison says, John McCain would be everything anyone hated about the Bush years minus the occasional bouts of temperance. Eve and Nat Hentoff (whom she links) wonder if Palin would be "as flip-flopping as Mr. McCain on the Bush torture policy," which is an odd way to put it. There's no evidence that Palin has a preexisting torture policy to flip away from, let alone what it would be. What there is evidence of is: Sarah Palin is John McCain's running mate, not the other way around. Sarah Palin and John McCain are running under the aegis of the Republican Party, which has made support for torture a litmus-test issue. Think about it: John McCain would not be the GOP presidential nominee if he had not flip-flopped on torture, because the GOP is a pro-torture institution. Its elites and its mass base insist on the rightness and necessity of torture. It doesn't even matter what Sarah Palin's personal opinion is: she's not being hired to be the Party's conscience on civil liberties and the treatment of prisoners.

Jim Henley, "Strange We Can Believe In", Unqualified Offerings, 2008-09-03

What about McCain's VP selection?

I'd never paid any attention to the obscure governor of Alaska (if quizzed, I certainly would not have been able to name her a week ago), but David Harsanyi thinks rather well of her:

The libertarian VP candidate

. . . or, rather, as libertarian as you can hope for on a major ticket.

For Republican nominee John McCain, there are a numerous potential political downsides and upsides to choosing a relative unknown for VP. But stepping outside the horserace aspects of 2008, Palin is the most libertarian Republican that's been on a major ticket for a long time. This ideological storyline should appeal to many Western voters.

Yes, Palin is pro-life and yes, she's made a huge mistake by supporting windfall taxes on oil companies. But she was a tireless reformer against government waste in a state that is famous for it. She, after all, shut down the Bridge to Nowhere.

Palin sued the Federal government over its outrageous listing of the polar bear as a threatened species. She is an ardent supporter of the Second Amendment. Her views on the Drug War are more reasonable than most in Washington. Her framing of cultural issues is far less divisive and strident than some of what we hear coming from the hard social right.

She was certainly a better pick for McCain than Biden was for Obama. More than that will remain to be seen.

As for McCain himself, Matt Welch (a noted critic of McCain) says that "the Sarah Palin choice epitomizes [how] John McCain has been willing to sacrifice any principle to become president."

Update: Mark Steyn posts from an undisclosed location:

First, Governor Palin is not merely, as Jay describes her, "all-American", but hyper-American. What other country in the developed world produces beauty queens who hunt caribou and serve up a terrific moose stew? As an immigrant, I'm not saying I came to the United States purely to meet chicks like that, but it was certainly high on my list of priorities. And for the gun-totin' Miss Wasilla then to go on to become Governor while having five kids makes it an even more uniquely American story. Next to her resume, a guy who's done nothing but serve in the phony-baloney job of "community organizer" and write multiple autobiographies looks like just another creepily self-absorbed lifelong member of the full-time political class that infests every advanced democracy.

Sunset over Seneca Lake

The view from the Callahan's cottage, looking west across Seneca Lake.

The spoiler?

David Weigel looks at the number three guy in the race for the presidency:

Never in the history of the Libertarian Party has an idea been executed so smoothly as the nomination of Bob Barr, a former Republican congressman — and former drug warrior — from Georgia. True, it took six ballots at the party’s national convention in Denver to nominate the man. True, the weekend before that vote was a marathon of rumors, threats, and twisted arms, with younger, more radical party members pitted against an old guard that included party founder David Nolan. But the ruckus culminated in the nomination of the most well-known and politically astute presidential candidate in party history. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), the only other former congressman to run for president on the Libertarian ticket (in 1988), had already made 2008 a banner year for libertarian politics by launching a limited-government revolt in the Republican primaries. The question: whether Barr is poised to continue what Paul began.

Barr's campaign — and the possibility of a revitalized national Libertarian Party — will likely have more of an immediate electoral impact than Paul's did. The Republican Party, after all, is teeming with antibodies that have been able to fight off the diminishing libertarian virus within. Unless lightning struck, the heavens opened, and he stumbled upon the Ark of the Covenant, Paul was never going to win the GOP nomination. It wouldn't take much, though, for Barr's popularity to force John McCain to campaign in states he thought he had wrapped up, or even to swing one of those states into the Democratic column. The Libertarian Party has its greatest chance to affect a presidential election in 28 years.

Of course, should that happen to McCain's detriment, the few remaining libertarian-leaning Republicans should expect show trials (at the minimum) or death threats from their less principled co-religionists.

Rudy's revival?

David Weigel pulls together the clues and makes a strong case for Rudy Giuliani being John McCain's choice for VP.

Ugh! So much for any hope of the VP candidate being any kind of balance for the ticket: Rudy is another instinctive authoritarian who — except for his unusual-for-a-Republican pro-choice stance — hasn't seen a civil rights restriction he couldn't support.

Rudy Can't Fail

Seriously, he can't. After his Wile E. Coyote-worthy faceplant in the primaries — $60 million in fundraising for half as many votes as Ron Paul and zero delegates — America's Mayor is giving the GOP convention keynote.

Giuliani was close to McCain before they faced off in the GOP primary and, after his disappointing third-place finish in Florida, the former New York mayor quickly threw his support to McCain.

Since then he’s been a frequent surrogate for McCain but has received no mention as a veep prospect. The keynote slot offers Giuliani, who is said to be considering a New York gubernatorial run in 2010, a high-profile opportunity to reestablish himself and tout McCain’s national security credentials.

Don't call it a comeback, he's been here for years. "Here" being "in the pro-choice ghetto of the GOP, trotted out for parties and then trundled back into his northeastern cave."

This news wouldn't be so interesting if it wasn't that the other people responsible for Giuliani's partial-birth abortion of a campaign were also falling upwards.

McCain has hired Giuliani's former campaign manager and communications director.

Wishful thinking in public health

Jacob Sullum looks at the growing support for mandatory calorie signage in fast food restaurants:

Since they overestimate the demand for nutritional information, advocates of menu mandates also overestimate the impact of making it more visible. "Menu board labeling has the potential to dramatically alter the trajectory of the obesity epidemic in California," the California Center for Public Health Advocacy claims, projecting a weight loss of nearly three pounds a year per fast food consumer. The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which began enforcing a calorie count requirement last month, predicts it will stop 150,000 people from becoming obese and prevent 30,000 cases of diabetes during the next five years.

Both estimates are based on a study conducted by New York's health department before the city's menu rule took effect. The researchers asked about 7,300 customers at fast food restaurants in the city whether they had seen and made use of nutritional information, which is typically displayed on posters, brochures, tray liners, or counter mats (as well as on the chains' websites). They also examined the customers' receipts so they could calculate the calorie content of the food they purchased.

This hopeful attitude towards mandatory labelling is a sort of healthcare cargo cult: the practitioners passionately believe that a) people will bother to read the labels, b) that having read, they'll order "better" food, and c) that this effect — should it actually exist — will be permanent.

They'd be just as effective building airstrips.

High gas prices induce lunatic "solutions"

Radley Balko observes the rancid combination of political ambition and economic ignorance in action:

Obama's opponent John McCain has smartly opposed a tax on oil company profits — and Obama has promptly attacked him for it.

But McCain isn't much better. McCain has proposed an equally ridiculous "gas tax holiday," which will also do almost nothing to provide relief at the pump. Obama has smartly opposed the idea — and McCain has promptly attacked him for it.

Economic ignorance is nothing new in politics. Neither is the idea that a candidate would perpetuate economic idiocy he knows to be false because it plays into the narrative he's pitching to the voters. But no issue seems to prompt more jaw-dropping sophistry and anti-capitalist demagoguery than gas prices.

Both candidates have promised to crack down on so-called "oil speculators," who are really only commodities traders wagering on whether the price of oil will go up or down. Speculators are an important part of the market process because they're generally knowledgeable about what they're trading, and their collective wisdom sends useful signals about supply and demand. "Cracking down" on speculators is silly. In the first place, it isn't possible. Oil futures are traded all over the world, well outside of U.S. jurisdiction. In the second place, if you own a 401(k), you're likely an indirect "speculator" yourself.

It's totally understandable why politicians are flapping their gums about high prices at the pumps: it's causing the public to feel pain, so they need to harness that for their own ends. Our best hope is that they're just tossing out the rhetorical "something must be done" notions and have no real intention of doing anything if/when elected, because almost nothing they can do will make the situation better . . . and so many of their options would make things worse.

Ethanol's downside(s)

Ethanol's day should have come and gone several years back . . . it's painfully obvious that it's not the panacea it was presented as being a decade ago (and even then, it was problematical). Reason TV features a discussion of the whole sordid mess:

Ethanol advocates claim that the biofuel is a cheap, renewable energy source that reduces pollution and our dependence on foreign oil. It sounds too good to be true — and it is.

Ethanol, especially the corn-based variety, is bad for taxpayers, bad for consumers, bad for the environment, and horrible for the world's poor. In fact, even environmentalists are critical of ethanol subsidies these days. The ethanol craze has distorted markets and increased the price of food worldwide. The only people who still support ethanol subsidies are the ethanol producers — and politicians from both sides of the aisle. Together, they make sure the subsidies keep coming.

Wallowing in conspiracies

David Weigel wanders over to conspiracy closet to discover that things are even less appealing than last time he checked:

It's been a while since I suited up and dumpster-dived in the Obama conspiracyverse. In my absence, I reckon that the average IQ there has dipped by 20-25 points. Take this latest revelation from Larry "Whitey Tape" Johnson.

Republican operatives, with help from their own island backers, have unearthed critical information on Obama and are just biding their time until after the convention to drop it on him. Such as? Having a birth certificate that lists you as Barry Soetoro.

Incredible! Ann Dunham met her second husband, Lolo Soetoro in 1966, in Hawaii. "Barry" Obama was, at this time, five years old. The only reasonable explanation is that Dunham and Soetoro built (or purchased) a Genesis Device to clone a new son, using DNA from Barack Obama Sr. that Dunham had pulled off one of his combs.

For all that Barack Obama has been involved in the — often murky — Illinois political scene, if all the conspiracy theorists have to play with is a flipping birth certificate notion, then Obama is theory-proof.

Galloping paternalism

Steve Chapman looks at the growing urge on the part of governments to force people to do things "for their own good":

Until he brings about complete prohibition [of tobacco products], the ban will have perverse consequences. The most obvious is to deprive one type of retail establishment of revenue and divert the dollars to other businesses. Marginal neighborhoods will become less attractive sites for pharmacies but more appealing to liquor stores, which is a novel approach to urban renewal.

In Los Angeles, driving out certain businesses is not a potential side effect—it's a conscious policy. The city council recently prohibited the opening of fast-food outlets in the poor, 32-square-mile area known as South Los Angeles. If you're a global corporation selling inexpensive meals to go, Los Angeles has a message for you: Invest anywhere but here. Apparently a vacant lot is better than a Burger King.

Councilwoman Jan Perry believes the measure will assure the locals "greater food options." The Los Angeles Times reports she "said the initiative would give the city time to craft measures to lure sit-down restaurants serving healthier food to a part of the city that desperately wants more of them."

This is one of the oddest things about the new paternalism: the proponents of nanny state measure "A" may even acknowledge that there are other ways to accomplish their stated goals, but that people can't be trusted to do the right thing, so the government must force them to do it. For example, it's not that long a step from passing measures that (in theory) will encourage people to get more exercise to mandating exercise sessions.

Who could object? It's for everyone's health, right?

A "Grotesque Miscarriage of Justice"

Charles Lynch, proprietor of a legal-under-California-law marijuana dispensary, has been convicted under Federal laws of distributing drugs. Nick Gillespie has more:

Lynch is one of the countless casualties of an idiotic and tragically long-running war on drugs. His shop scrupulously followed Golden State laws and when he opened his shop in Morro Bay, local officials attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony. And that kid he provided medical marijuana to? A high school athlete who had lost a leg to cancer and had a prescription from a Stanford-trained doctor (and in any case, Lynch only dealt with the boy's parents). Yes, a common drug dealer.

There's only one good possibility to come out of this verdict: That its manifest injustice and stupidity and inhumanity (to Lynch and his customers) will help spark a long overdue reaction to the drug war and its punishing toll on individuals and basic Constitutional rights.

QotD: Guarding the border from data

If someone develops a practical mind-reading device, you can expect the Department of Homeland Security to argue that skulls are merely another "closed container" that officers guarding the border may search at will. After all, government agents have long been allowed to read documents in briefcases carried by Americans returning from abroad. Why should the medium in which information is stored make a constitutional difference?

That argument is only slightly more far-fetched than the one DHS uses to justify its policy regarding border searches of laptop computers. Given the nature and quantity of the data they contain, portable computers are in many ways extensions of our brains. Yet DHS is treating them as if they were no different from purses or fruitcake tins.

Jacob Sullum, "File Keepers: The government wants to sit on your laptop", Reason, 2008-08-06

Small government as a Republican notion? Not this decade

Matt Welch clearly identifies the strawman in this argument:

In Sunday's Washington Post Outlook section, the Century Foundation's Greg Anrig published a strain of curious left-of-center analysis I'm seeing more and more this election: That the Republicans are losing because limited-government ideas don't work, and are no longer popular.

This critique requires a significant leap of logic — that George W. Bush, and his would-be GOP successor John McCain, practice and/or believe in limited government principles. Anrig glides over this problem via assertion.

[Quoting Anrig] So they advocated creating health savings accounts, handing out school vouchers, privatizing Social Security, shifting government functions to private contractors, and curtailing regulations on public health, safety, the environment and more. And, of course, they pushed to cut taxes to further weaken the public sector by "starving the beast." President Bush has followed this playbook more closely than any previous president, including Reagan[.]

Italics mine, to do violence to your morning coffee.

What's especially curious is that the intellectual left has been so busy this year congratulating itself on studying — and learning from — the modern intellectual history of the right. Because the most recent manifestation of that history has not been the triumph of limited government principles, but quite the opposite: Two Republican candidates in 2000 who, in one of the candidate's own words, "challenged libertarian orthodoxy" and the "'leave us alone' libertarian philosophy that dominated Republican debates in the 1990s." A Republican president who outspent LBJ. An ascendance of conservative intellectuals actively celebrating "the death of small-government conservatism." And a candidate in 2008 whose English translation of laissez-faire is T-e-d-d-y R-o-o-s-e-v-e-l-t.

Just calling this a "strawman" is being too generous. It's an entire football stadium packed standing-room-only with strawmen.

Read the whole heavily link-laden thing.

Update: This comment by "Episiarch", rather, um, graphically captures the sentiment:

The single theme that most animated the modern conservative movement was the conviction that government was the problem and market forces the solution.

You have to understand that to these people, what the GOP proposes is the "free" market. Showing them an actually free market is like showing anal fisting videos to someone who thinks Playboy is hardcore porn.

Another argument for media bias?

Poor old John McCain is in hot water with the media again . . . this time, it's that ultra-left bastion of socialist bile, The Wall Street Journal:

Is John McCain Stupid?

Is John McCain losing it?

On Sunday, he said on national television that to solve Social Security "everything's on the table," which of course means raising payroll taxes. On July 7 in Denver he said: "Senator Obama will raise your taxes. I won't."

This isn't a flip-flop. It's a sex-change operation.

H/T to John Scalzi.

The police state on the roadside

Steve Chapman looks at the massive invasion of privacy represented by so-called "consent searches":

The other day, the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois issued a report on "consent searches" that sometimes accompany traffic stops. Relying on data provided by local and state law enforcement agencies, the report documented that black and Hispanic drivers are much more likely than whites to suffer such invasions — even though the cars of minorities are far less likely to yield contraband.

These treasure hunts are called "consent searches" because they require the motorist to give permission. They take place only when the police officer has no grounds for suspicion. If he has probable cause, he doesn't have to ask. Only when he's acting out of a vague hunch, racial prejudice, or simple malice does he need the driver's consent.

But the term is fantastical in these instances. Stopped on a lonesome stretch of highway, at the mercy of an armed man who has the power to arrest, very few citizens feel free to refuse. The Illinois State Police report that 94 percent of white motorists and 96 percent of minority ones "consent" to such searches.

Is that because they have nowhere else they'd rather be? Is it because they get a kick from watching a cop take apart their cars in an effort to put them behind bars? Or could it be because they suspect that refusing a cop is far too dangerous?

Fishing expeditions should not be part of a police officer's daily routine . . . they don't usually turn up anything, they're far too easy to abuse, and (minor point) the 4th Amendment to the Constitution kinda implies that they're . . . oh, what's the term . . . unreasonable searches. But the courts have not consulted that particular obscure document very often in this kind of case. A few states have acted to clarify the situation (New Jersey, Rhode Island, Texas, and Minnesota are mentioned in the article), but it shouldn't need special action on the part of state legislatures.

On the face of it, they're illegal, and the US Supreme Court should find a way to point that out. As Chapman says:

In a nation founded on respect for the rights of every person, these searches give all priority to the power and convenience of the government, while mocking the liberties we are supposed to have. Why would we consent to that?

WFB's other writings

A short Gawker round-up of some of William F. Buckley's less predictable output:

Slightly late to the game of fond remembrances of the late William F. Buckley, Jr. is Fox News correspondent James Rosen's essay on how the founding editor of National Review was a frequent contributor to Playboy. Many of the details Rosen digs up about this sideline beat, so to speak, are fun, but the association isn't quite as counterintuitive or shocking as he'd like to think it is. "Yes, in a union difficult to imagine involving any of today's leading conservatives . . . the bard of East 73rd Street wrote for Hugh Hefner's oft-vilified Playboy, on and off, for almost four decades, on topics ranging from 'the Negro male' and Nikita Khrushchev to Oprah Winfrey, the Internet, and Y2K." That's a poor use of the word "bard," and also an impaired judgment. P.J. O'Rourke and Christopher Buckley have both written for Playboy and they're "leading conservatives," if not shrieking TV banshees like Ann Coulter. But even back in 1963, when Buckley the Elder made his debut in a transcribed debate he'd had with Norman Mailer, the byline and the magazine were actually rather suited to each other in a strange aesthetic way.

Minneapolis misunderstands the use of the term "fine police work there, Lou"

Radley Balko expresses amazement that Minneapolis is honouring the police officers who conducted a SWAT raid on the wrong address last year:

Last December, I posted about a botched SWAT raid on an innocent Minnesota family. Acting on bad information from an informant, the police threw flash grenades though the family's windows, then exchanged gunfire with Vang Khang, who mistook the police for criminal intruders. Seven months later, no one in the police department has been held accountable for the mistakes leading up to the raid.

However, this week Minneapolis Police Chief Tim Dolan and Mayor R.T. Rybak did give the raiding officers medals and commendations for their bravery in nearly killing Vang Khang, his wife, and their six children.

[. . .]

This is really beyond outrage. The city of Minneapolis is commending and rewarding its police officers for firing their weapons at innocent people. A family of eight was terrorized, assaulted, and nearly killed, and it's the "perfect example" of a situation that could have gone wrong?

Running the numbers on carbon-free energy

Ronald Bailey pulls out the calculator to do some rough calculations on Al Gore's proposal to produce 100% of America's electricity from renewable energy:

Of course, great-souled visionaries such as Gore do not concern themselves with piddling and mundane issues such as who will pay for this marvelous no-carbon energy future and how much it will cost. Not being burdened with a great soul, I decided to don my green eyeshade and make a preliminary stab at figuring out how much Gore's scheme might cost us.

According to the Energy Information Administration, the existing capacity of U.S. coal, gas, and oil generating plants totals around 850,000 megawatts. So how much would it cost to replace those facilities with solar electric power? Let's use the recent announcement of a 280-megawatt thermal solar power plant in Arizona for $1 billion as the starting point for an admittedly rough calculation. Combined with a molten salt heat storage systems, solar thermal might be able to provide base load power. Crunching the numbers (850,000 megawatts/280 megawatts x $1 billion) produces a total capital cost of just over $3 trillion over the next ten years.

What about wind power? Oilman T. Boone Pickens is building the world's biggest wind energy project with an installed capacity of 4,000 megawatts at a cost of $10 billion, or about $2.5 billion per 1,000 megawatts. For purposes of illustration, this implies a total cost of around $2.1 trillion over the next ten years to replace current carbon-emitting electricity generation capacity with wind power. That's assuming that the wind projects generate electricity at their rated capacity at or near 100 percent of the time. Making the heroic assumption that in fact wind projects will generate power at about one-third of their rated capacity (due to wind variability), this would imply tripling the number of wind power generators. This boosts the total overall cost to more than $6 trillion over the next ten years.

So how does it all compare to current expenditure plans for energy generation?

As a very rough low estimate, Gore's 10-year no-carbon energy plan would cost about $300 billion per year for the next ten years. According to the Brattle Group consultancy, "new and replacement generating plants will cost about $560 billon through 2030, absent a significant expansion of energy efficiency programs or new climate initiatives." That comes to an average of about $25 billion per year over the next 22 years. Gore's proposal is a "new climate initiative" that aims to spend twelve times more than the utility industry would otherwise annually invest in new and replacement generating capacity.

Emphasis mine.

QotD: The new voting screens

I'm tellin' ya, they're gonna change the electronic voting screens to say, "Click here to accept Barack Obama's Friend Request" so that these dim-witted youth voters can figure out how to cast their ballots for Obama. It'll be like ballots in Spanish. You will soon be able to request your ballot in electronic youth-speak (l337).

"aero", Comment at Hot Air, 2008-07-29

Barack Obama's love affair . . . with the media

Steve Chapman tries to understand the complaints coming from the McCain team about excessive worship of Barack Obama:

I came into the office the other day, wearing an "Obama 2008" cap, a "Yes We Can" button, a "Team Obama" T-shirt, carrying an "Obama for Change" tote bag filled with Obama bumper stickers, made a stop at the Obama altar in the newsroom, strewed some rose petals, chanted a few hosannas, lit a votive candle and had a sudden thought: Is the news media's love affair with Barack Obama getting out of hand?

John McCain and his campaign staffers have a sneaking suspicion it is. They put out a video with footage of journalists acting gooey about the Democratic candidate, to the strains of "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You." According to the campaign, "The media is in love with Barack Obama." McCain's people say that like it's a bad thing.

Chicago newspaper attempts to refute Balko

The Chicago Sun-Times responds to Radley Balko's exposé in the current issue of Reason on the failings of various American cities (where Chicago was a clear, uh, winner):

Reason mocks the city for requiring that fat cops shape up, providing them with nutritionists and trainers to help.

We don't. Police work is physical work. A cop has to be in shape.

Fair enough. But my mocking was more about the fact that after a year of headlines about police abuses, it just struck me a bit odd that the Board of Aldermen's biggest concern while I was in town researching the article was a proposal to assign cops personal trainers at taxpayer expense.

Reason knocks the mayor for regulating thousands of taverns — evil peddlers of demon rum — out of existence. Chicago has only about 1,300 taverns today, compared with about 7,000 in the 1940s.

We don't. A lot of those joints were buckets of blood that loomed within a short stagger of neighborhood schools. And nobody in town complains they can't find a drink.

Ah, yes. For the children.

And "buckets of blood?" Really? You know, I'll bet if we compare Chicago's crime rate in the tavern-happy 1940s with its crime rate now, the modern, 1,300-tavern era doesn't fare so well. In fact, let's go back a bit further. There was a time when alcohol in Chicago and the rest of America was banned altogether. What was crime like between 1919 and 1933? What was it like in Chicago? Also, is it really a good idea to make people travel farther from their homes to find a drink?

Conscription by another name

Radley Balko summarizes the most recent moves towards some new form of civil conscription in the United States:

The Service Nation Summit kickoff event is getting promotional help from Time magazine, whose Managing Editor Rick Stengel is a co-chair. Seems like an odd undertaking for a newsweekly, doesn't it? But then, Time has an annoying habit of crossing over into advocacy on issues its editors have deemed too important to leave to impartial reportage.

Lindgren points out that though the campaign is couched in terms that make it appear oriented toward merely encouraging volunteerism, some of its top officials have a history of supporting a more coercive definition "service," including support for Rep. Charlie Rengel's (D-N.Y.) bill to bring back conscription. Most ominously, one of the group's stated goals is to "[l]aunch a debate about why and how America should become a nation of universal national service by 2020."

Note the absence of the word "if."

Military conscription is indentured servitude. Civilian forms of conscription will be exactly as bad. This follows a discussion the other day where the term "generational welfare" was accurately used to describe most of these farcical initiatives.

Don't keep "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"

Mike Riggs reports from the "DA,DT" hearing:

The hearing went better than I expected, insofar as the Democratic witnesses, Navy Capt. Joan Darrah, retired Army Maj. Gen. Vance Coleman, and Marine Staff Serg. Eric Alva utterly outspoke Army Sgt. Maj. Brian Jones and Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness, both of whom testitified (poorly, and in some places, damn near incoherently) on behalf of Republicans.

Donnelly managed, somehow, to answer every question from both the right and the left with, "Sexual urges would prevent unit cohesion." Jones, when asked whether or not he thought homoesexuality was immoral, replied, "No, but if I'm 6'8" and I want to be a fighter pilot, I can't." Both think a gay-friendly military would bring on the end of the world.

As this hearing evidenced, the social conservative arguments for preserving DADT, letting the Department of Defense write its own policy, or banning gay service, range from paper-thin to non-existent. The only obstacle I see to passage of the Military Readiness Enhancement Act — the bill that would repeal DADT and implement a non-discrimination policy — is good ole' fashion homophobia.

As a recruiting policy, DADT is just plain dumb. As a "retention" policy, DADT is worse: gay and lesbian soldiers are pretty clearly determined to serve — in spite of the widespread anti-gay mentality pervasive in some units — and are being dismissed from the service for being honest. This, at a time when all branches of the US armed forces are struggling to maintain troop levels. It's a stupid, dishonest policy and should be discarded ASAP.

QotD: Is Barack Obama "black enough"?

The issue of Mr. Obama's blackness has come up. The Reverend Jackson has made it clear he doesn't feel Mr. Obama is black enough, apparently he seems to be disregarding "black issues." While I do not support Mr. Obama I have to call the good Reverend on this one. Barack Obama is not running for President of Black America. He is running for President of all America. If he intends to push the interest of one ethnic group over any others than he has no business running for President of a nation that is about eighty eight percent white, Asian, Dine, and other races.

Sooner or later a Latino will run for President and I damn well expect him to run as an American who happens to have Latino roots, not a Latino who happens to be an American.

Back in the Fifties segregationists didn't get it, their way of doing business violated both the written Constitution and the spirit of freedom and justice it upon which it was based. Nowadays the debate is on what methodology is needed to achieve desegregation, not it's desirability [. . .] The Segregationists of old have become obsolete.

A. X. Perez, "Getting It", Libertarian Enterprise, 2008-07-20

Political musical chairs

Steve Chapman finds the world turned upside down as Barack Obama and John McCain swap stances over education:

I know, because admirers of Barack Obama tell me, that this year's election poses a choice between a candidate who represents a fresh approach to problems and one who offers a dreary continuation of the status quo. That much I understand. What I sometimes have trouble keeping straight is which candidate is which.

On the subject of elementary and secondary education, the two seem to have gotten their roles completely mixed up. Obama is the staunch defender of the existing public school monopoly, and he's allergic to anything that subverts it. John McCain, on the other hand, went before the NAACP last week to argue for something new and daring.

That something is to facilitate greater parental choice in education. McCain wants to expand a Washington, D.C. program that provides federally funded scholarships so poor students can attend private schools. More than 7,000 kids, he reported, have applied for these vouchers, but only 1,900 can be accommodated.

Obama promptly expressed disdain for McCain's proposal. The Republican, his campaign said, offered "recycled bromides" that would "undermine our public schools."

Kerry Howley dissects Grand New Party

Kerry Howley views with disdain the recent book Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam:

My friends Reihan and Ross have written an extremely savvy book about how to reinvigorate the GOP with a new narrative and a new coalition. Because I like the Republican party flaccid and moribund (all parties, actually), I hope their book is celebrated, widely reviewed, and ultimately ignored. And because I find most of their social policy troubling, I hope that even those dipping into the book for some new ideas take time to question the assumptions within it.

I don't think I am overstating the R&R position when I say that my friends would like to return us to a more traditional and less pluralistic concept of family life. Through social and tax policy, they would privilege heterosexual two-parent families, fund marriage promotion programs, encourage the stigmatization of single parenthood, subsidize motherhood among married women, increase taxes on the childless, and so on. In short, they would structure incentives to encourage women to use their bodies in the one way most appealing to social conservatives.

[. . .]

Privileging one, dominant idea of the family comes with costs that R&R never really grapple with in their breezy book, and those costs fall almost exclusively on one gender. Through the tax code, R&R wish to change the relative prices of women's options, rendering childlessness more costly and early motherhood less so. They want the federal government to stake a position on the proper role of women, and that role involves a heterosexual marriage with children. While conceding that this is politically infeasible at the moment, R&R write that "we should be willing to stigmatize illegitimacy by tying a tax relief to responsible parenting." (Responsible parenting=parenting by legally married couples.) This is a policy that punishes poor women unable to find marriageable men, gay and lesbian partners unable to access legal marriage, and any other number of people who are responding rationally to their environment, doing the best they know how for the kids they have.

QotD: Buh-bye!

American army deserter Robin Long could be headed home as early as today after his bid to delay his deportation order was rejected yesterday by [. . .] Canada's Federal Court. In her ruling, Justice Anne Mactavish said Mr. Long did not provide clear and convincing evidence that he will suffer irreparable harm if he is deported. Mr. Long, 25, is the first of an estimated 200 American army deserters who have sought refuge in Canada to be deported. Bob Ages, chairman of the Vancouver chapter of War Resisters Support Campaign, said he fears the decision will set a new precedent. Mr. Ages said he suspects the deportation is in reaction to his group's recent successes — last week, Canadian courts granted deserter Corey Glass a stay of removal and, in a separate case, ordered the Immigration and Refugee Board to reconsider the failed refugee claim of Joshua Key. Mr. Long, who had been living in Nelson, B.C., since moving from Ontario, needed the Federal Court to grant a stay of his deportation order in order to have his appeal heard.

Uncredited report in the The Ottawa Citizen, 2008-07-15

Coffee, 21st century style

It's a nice comment that we can spend hours obsession about how Murky Coffee, in Arlington hires douchebag baristas, isn't it?

The nice thing is that we don't have to spend quite as much time as our ancestors did worrying about whether the crops will come up, or whether the plague will come to our village, or whether the douchebag Baron (or a neighbouring Duke, Earl, Chief, or knight) will decide to pillage the place. Isn't civilization wonderful?

Oh, the coffee thing? Here's the Lileksized version:

As for the coffee shop story — a guy wanted his espresso with ice, the "barista" wouldn’t do it, so the guy asked for ice on the side — and was given a dressing-down by the barista for insulting the integrity of the craft and the virtue of the crema, or whatever. The comments are amusing; while some people hammer the blogger for his crude reaction, others side with the barista for sticking up for the espresso, for saving it from the indignity this barbarian wished to inflict upon it. Criminey. The man paid for his coffee. If he wanted to add ground-up goat-glands and drizzle donkey spittle on the top once money had changed hands, that’s his right. I love coffee; I love good coffee. I love coffee so hot and strong it would exfoliate a yak, but I don’t regard it as some holy ichor. This is the blood of Juan Valdez, shed for you. Here is the biscotti, consecrated by a snob with a artful piercing who carefully vets the notes on the community bulletin board to make sure everyone’s using recycled paper. Coffee was simpler once. Worse, but simpler.

Amusingly, the original post ended up with the information that while the "barista" refused to serve the customer's requested iced triple espresso — because it was against company policy and it was an abomination before the coffee gods — they'd happily serve a "plastic cup with ice, filled it 3/4 of the way with water" with "four shots of espresso." So, three shots bad, four shots good?

The New Yorker editors not likely to be invited to an Obama inauguration

Jon sent me a link to this short article on the cover of The New Yorker for July 21st:

The Obama campaign is condemning as “tasteless and offensive” a New Yorker magazine cover that depicts Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) in a turban, fist-bumping his gun-slinging wife.

An American flag burns in their fireplace.

The New Yorker says it's satire. It certainly will be candy for cable news.

The Obama campaign quickly condemned the rendering. Spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement: "The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama's right-wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree."

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds quickly e-mailed: "We completely agree with the Obama campaign, it’s tasteless and offensive."

I may finally have a reason to seek out a copy of The New Yorker . . .

Banned by the Nanny State

Scalzi supports Barr for President . . . a little bit

John Scalzi finds a perfect use for his less-than-stellar "stimulus" cheque:

So what do you do with a stupid, frivolous amount of stimulus money? Well, you spend it on something stupid and frivolous, of course!

Bob Barr has about as much chance of being president as I have in getting a tomato plant to spontaneously erupt out of my forehead, but he does have a teeniest bit of a chance of peeling off just enough disgruntled GOPers to be a pain in John McCain's ass come the general election, which at this point works for me as an ersatz protest vote and the GOP economic stewardship of the country (note that this statement will undoubtedly cause some delusional conservative/Republican to opine in the comments that it will be Obama whom Barr will peel voters off of, not McCain. Dear delusional conservative/Republican commenter: Just because you're apparently huffing acetone from the inside of a paper bag doesn't mean the rest of us are). That said, I don't actually want to spend real money on Bob Barr; I don't want anyone to get the idea he's actually my guy, presidentially speaking. I mean, really. Speaking of huffing acetone. For what I want to do here, six dollars and ten cents is almost exactly the right amount to send the dude. So that's what I sent . . .

Gonzo remembered

Kurt Loder reviews the new documentary on Hunter S. Thompson:

The late Hunter S. Thompson was a dazzling writer who in his days of greatness — from the mid-1960s to the mid-'70s, approximately — misled a lot of younger writers into believing that if they just ingested enough drugs and alcohol, they, too, could write like Hunter S. Thompson. It didn't work that way. In the end, it didn't even work that way for Hunter anymore.

In "Gonzo," Alex Gibney's moving new documentary about Thompson, we meet the man foursquare: not just the brilliant, rampaging star of the "new journalism" of that period, but also the irascible crank, the drunken gun nut, the public menace. Hunter was much-loved by his many admiring cronies, among them Bill Murray, Keith Richards and Johnny Depp (who narrates the film). "On the other hand," says his ex-wife Sandy, "he was absolutely vicious." Such balanced candor is rare in any documentary, and it makes "Gonzo" the most transfixing film about a troubled artist since the 1994 "Crumb."

I first read Thompson's writing in the mid-1970s, and it was a jaw-dropping experience at that time. I thought his Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 was utterly brilliant . . . it actually made me much more aware of the American political system almost in spite of itself. The word pictures were so arresting, so outré, that they still stick in my mind now, literally thousands of books later.

His later writings fell well short of the full-court brilliance of his best stuff, but they still had glimmerings of his earlier power with words. He kept returning to the same themes — and sometimes the very same phrases — over and over, as his writing got less and less original, and (frankly) less and less readable. I recently read one of his last collections, Hey, Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness Modern History from the Sports Desk, and it was only a pale shadow . . . but even near the bitter end Thompson was still capable of startlingly accurate word pictures. Perhaps they stood out more because they were surrounded with so much dross.

L. Neil Smith looks back at Independence Day

A bit late for the US holiday weekend, but still worth reading . . . L. Neil Smith:

Thirty-one years ago, in 1977, in what turned out to be my first novel, The Probability Broach, I asked a rhetorical question about the nation's Independence day, the Fourth of July: "What was left to celebrate?"

Even then, long before September 1, 2001, Homeland Security, Abu Graib, and Guantanamo (in those days, it was just a navy base), it was clear to me that what America's Founding Fathers had worked so hard and sacrificed so much to create was being destroyed, at a faster and faster rate each year, by those to whom the very notion of individuals at liberty to control their own lives is a nightmare straight out of hell.

The holiday itself presents all the evidence one needs to reach a conclusion like that. Then, as now, if you attempt to enjoy it in the manner traditional to our ancestors, heavily-armed uniformed thugs will show up on your doorstep, steal your fireworks (which they'll shoot off later, behind the station house, when they think nobody is looking), and if you tell them to go where they belong, they'll smash down your door, Taser you into convulsions, beat you up, and haul you away.

Or kill you.

For your own safety.

Happy Independence Day.

If you were to "shoot the anvil" — by placing a charge of black gunpowder beneath it and setting it off, sending the anvil a dozen or more feet into the air — they'd soil themselves, and then call in an airstrike.

You are perfectly welcome to celebrate freedom, as long as you do it in chains. TV and radio nags, most of them government-empowered one way or another, spoil the day for weeks in advance by preaching over and over that "you'll shoot your eye out" if you try to enjoy your own fireworks, and that everything else you might happen to love about the day — especially your Fourth of July barbecue — will give you a heart attack, cancer, or (despite the First Amendment's guarantee to freedom from religion) somehow despoil and offend the Earth Mother Goddess.

Further fallout from Guantanamo

Steve Chapman points out that the "sky is falling" rhetoric about the Guantanamo inmates is seriously overdone:

"Islamic terrorists have constitutional rights," lamented one conservative blog when the Supreme Court said Guantanamo inmates can challenge their detention in court. "These are enemy combatants," railed John McCain. The court, charged former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy of National Review, sided with foreigners "whose only connection with our body politic is their bloody jihad against Americans."

The operating assumption here is that the prisoners are terrorists who were captured while fighting a vicious war against the United States. But can the critics be sure? All they really know about the Guantanamo detainees is that they are Guantanamo detainees. To conclude that they are all bloodthirsty jihadists requires believing that the U.S. government is infallible.

But how sensible is that approach? Judging from a little-noticed federal appeals court decision that came down after the Supreme Court ruling, not very.

It's mighty convenient to have a place where normal laws don't run and where you can dump prisoners, suspects, and those unfortunates who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Mere convenience is no where near enough justification for ignoring the legal framework under which you're supposed to operate . . . and that's exactly what the US military has been doing right up until the recent Supreme Court decision.

Even if the highest public estimates are correct (that is, that 73% of the detainees represent a real threat) the rest — against whom the government may have no more than a verbal assurance from an Afghan warlord that they are enemies — should never have been detained and should be set free as soon as possible. Basic western standards of justice demand no less

QotD: Free Society or Drug-Free Society — Pick One

Getting back to the WHO study, it's striking that the lifetime marijuana use rate in the U.S. (42.4 percent) is more than twice as high as the rate in the Netherlands (19.8 percent), despite the latter country's famously (or notoriously, depending on your perspective) tolerant cannabis policies. The difference for lifetime cocaine use is even bigger: The U.S. rate (16.2 percent) is eight times the Dutch rate (1.9 percet). Do these results mean that draconian drug laws promote drug use, while a relatively laid-back approach discourages it? Not necessarily; that would be a hell of a "forbidden fruit" effect. But one thing that's clear is the point made by the WHO researchers: Drug use "is not simply related to drug policy." If tinkering with drug policy (within the context of prohibition) has an impact, it is hard to discern, and it's small compared to the influence of culture and economics.

Jacob Sullum, "What's the Opposite of a Drug-Free Society?", Hit and Run, 2008-07-04

Canadians now wealthier than Americans?

In an astonishing economic turnaround, Canadians appear to have overtaken Americans in terms of individual wealth, according to Macleans:

How did this happen? Canada often comes out ahead when you look at squishy things like quality of life. But since when were we richer? Mintz credits the rising loonie, the boom in commodities, and better public policy. He says that over the past decade productivity growth in the U.S. has slowed, while we've been hacking away at our government debt and lowering taxes. In short, as a nation, we've been doing everything right, while the U.S. has been doing everything wrong.

When you look at how individual Canadian and American families make and spend their money, it gets even more interesting. The numbers show that our median household incomes are about the same, or at least they were back in 2005 when the most recent figures came out. That year the median household income in Canada was about US$44,300, after you adjust it for the exchange rate and our lower purchasing power, while the American median was US$46,300. Since then, the loonie has gained on the U.S. dollar, so we've likely narrowed the gap. But while our incomes may be similar to American incomes, we're still much wealthier because we have less debt. What you make isn't a good measure of how rich you are — to figure out your true wealth you should add up everything you have and subtract what you owe. And Americans owe more. A lot more. Here in Canada the average amount of personal debt per person is US$23,460. In the U.S. it's a whopping US$40,250. And all those numbers are from 2005, just before their housing market slipped into a sinkhole. If you looked at the numbers now, you'd find that Americans are even further behind, because their largest asset — their home — is worth less. "There has been a lot of destruction of wealth in the U.S. over the past few years," says Mintz, "and that would affect the net worth figures significantly. I would suspect that they would be even worse off today."

This is a very interesting article, although it does reinforce a few smug Canuck notions, it's surprising how different the average statistical American is from the average statistical Canadian. (Note the careful deployment of the word "statistical" in that statement.) Certainly some of the differences between Canadian and American attitude to debt can be traced to the differences in tax policies: Americans can deduct mortgage interest, while Canadians don't have that incentive. That alone would encourage people to take on a larger mortgage debtload, and with the housing market currently wobbling and the employment picture dimming, there are going to be more people discovering that they can't service those larger debtloads.

That being said, we're still disproportionally dependent on the overall health of the US economy . . . if recent anaemic economic numbers continue or worsen, Canada will still suffer as our largest trading partner does. In economic terms, no North American country is an island, and we're all much more vulnerable to economic downturns in the US economy than we used to be.

H/T to Craig Nodwell for the link.

QotD: Swift Boat Derangement Syndrome

It is impossible to overrate the rage and anguish Democrats feel at the success of the 2004 campaign 527 called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth; it would be silly to even try. When Democratic voters and establishment sheikhs chose John Kerry over John Edwards, it was in large part because Kerry served in Vietnam and returned to campaign against the war. They completely discounted the bitterness that conservatives and many vets still harbored against Kerry. They were caught flatfooted when Kerry's military record became a months-long campaign liability after the group of angry vets caught the attention of the mainstream media and started getting cash infusions from big-time conservative donors. In November, Bush beat Kerry by 16 points among military veterans. Nominating a veteran got the Democrats nothing.

This is why, when today's Democrats talk about John McCain, they can sound incredulous. After all the crap they took, why is he able to ride his Vietnam record to the GOP nomination? How could he enjoin the culture wars by bragging that he missed Woodstock because he was "tied up at the time" and get so much praise he started running TV ads on that theme? Why is he able to follow it up with an ad named for his Navy ID number (624787) and featuring video of him lying in POW camp? It's not . . . it's not . . . it's not fair! Thus, Wesley Clark.

I don't think Clark's comments can stand up to scrutiny; no experience, not even being a Joint Chief of Staff or Defense Secretary, can directly prepare someone to become commander-in-chief. McCain's occasional argument that his command of a navy squadron was executive experience is sort of risible, but not as much as when he claimed it would qualify him to manage the economy. His POW years are as relevant to his qualifications as any presidential candidate's experiences. Eight years ago, weren't we hearing about how George W. Bush's 20-odd years of sowing his oats turned him into a great leader?

David Weigel, "Swift Boat Derangement Syndrome", Hit and Run, 2008-07-01

Question [dubious] Authority, before THEY question you

I try to avoid this sort of "Oh my GOD! We're moving towards a fascist state!" rhetoric, but when you read about cases like this, where a deluded whackjob is able to ruin peoples' lives for several months, you have to start asking when people are going to tell self-proclaimed "authorities" to go f*ck themselves:

Busts began. Houses were ransacked. People, in handcuffs on their front lawns, named names. To some, like Mayor Otis Schulte, who considers the county around Gerald, population 1,171, "a meth capital of the United States," the drug scourge seemed to be fading at last.

Those whose homes were searched, though, grumbled about a peculiar change in what they understood, from television mainly, to be the law.

They said the agent, a man some had come to know as "Sergeant Bill," boasted that he did not need search warrants to enter their homes because he worked for the federal government.

But after a reporter for the local weekly newspaper made a few calls about that claim, Gerald's anti-drug campaign abruptly unraveled after less than five months. Sergeant Bill, it turned out, was no federal agent, but Bill A. Jakob, an unemployed former trucking company owner, a former security guard, a former wedding-performing minister, a former small-town cop from 23 miles down the road.

Mr. Jakob, 36, is now the subject of a criminal investigation by federal authorities, and is likely to face charges related to impersonating a law enforcement officer, his lawyer said.

Okay, read that part again. Slowly.

Someone shows up in town who "went to great lengths to make police officers think he was a federal agent", and was eagerly given effective proconsular powers to crush the evildoers in this methamphetamine capital of the United States . . . Gerald, MO. I'm not the greatest geography whiz about the US, but I had to zoom out five times on Google Maps before I found a town in the area I'd ever heard of before¹. We're talking "BF Nowhere" here.

That a place like that can be subject to the kind of mass delusion that allows "Witchsmellers" to arise and be given power is very disheartening. How many others have played this part for credulous audiences? I'd bet there are many, most of whom won't ever be forced to admit that they were fooled by con-artists.

¹ For the record, it was Fulton, Mo., and I'd only ever heard of it because that was where Churchill made his famous reference to the "Iron Curtain" in a speech there in 1946.

The need to separate politics and state

The idea of the separation of church and state is relatively well understood (if not universally accepted) in North America. The next thing we need to get general agreement on is the separation of politics and state:

In his zest to purge enemies in the government, Richard Nixon was so thorough that he set out to remove a "Jewish cabal" at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. President Bush and his subordinates may match Nixon for paranoia. Some of them lay awake nights wondering how to keep ideologically questionable applicants from infiltrating the Justice Department's summer internship program.

According to the department's inspector general in a report issued this week, they had some success in heading off this potential catastrophe — eliminating many candidates with subversive affiliations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. But the report condemned the effort, finding that it involved official misconduct and broke the law.

The Canadian federal government is a good example of how a bureaucracy can be captured by a political party — especially when that party stays in power for a significant length of time — and how the goals of the bureaucracy become ever more tightly aligned with the goals of the political party currently in power. This is a very good reason for a healthy alternation of parties in government: it counter-acts the natural tendency of the bureaucrats to align themselves with the politicians.

Steve Chapman again:

If you want to know the source of Barack Obama's success, look no further. Republicans think they will win once Americans figure out he's more liberal than he sounds. But Obama's appeal lies less in any supposedly moderate ideology than in his rejection of a corrosive but prevalent view: Government is nothing more than partisan warfare, and may the stronger side win.

The Bush administration thinks every aspect of governance should serve the ends of the Republican Party. Obama says — and may even believe — that some matters should be above politics.

In the case of federal prosecutors, that is not a new view but an old one. U.S. attorneys are political appointees but not, traditionally, political agents. They are supposed to advance justice without fear or favor. To turn them into partisan attack dogs is to make the law merely a weapon of those in power.

Opinions on D.C. v. Heller

Reason magazine has a round-table of informed civil libertarians to discuss the decision and possible ramifications:

For the past three decades, Washington, D.C. has enforced one of America's most draconian gun control laws — a total ban on the possession of handguns, not to mention strict gun lock provisions for rifles and shotguns, that has left law-abiding citizens unable to legally defend themselves and their homes. In March, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller, in which seven D.C. residents challenged the constitutionality of the ban. At the center of the case is the question of whether the Second Amendment protects an individual or collective right to keep and bear arms.

Yesterday, the Court issued its long-awaited opinion, ruling 5-4 in favor of an individual right to own guns. reason assembled a panel of 7 leading civil libertarians to help make sense of what the Court said, what it means, and what's likely to come next.

If you guessed that they're happy with the decision, award yourself five points. Of course, nothing pleases everyone . . . Radley Balko has some reservations:

I hate to pee in the pool, here, but I'm having a hard time getting too excited about today’s decision.

Justice Antonin Scalia's opinion avoids any decision on incorporating the Second Amendment to the states, and his history suggests a strong reluctance to incorporate individual rights. Scalia's opinion does interpret the Second Amendment as an individual right, but only for self-protection, and only in the home. The concept of the Second Amendment as a bulwark against an overly oppressive government seems dead.

In the past, when Scalia's limited government principles have conflicted with his law-and-order instincts, law and order has won handily. He's been a happy federalist when it comes to allowing states to infringe on individual rights, but will bring down the hammer of the federal government on states that defy the feds by giving their citizens a bit more freedom.

Burning times over in Ohio school

The bonehead Ohio teacher mentioned in the QotD on Monday has been fired from his job in Mount Vernon:

The Mount Vernon school board in central Ohio voted 5-0 late Friday to move ahead on firing a science teacher after an investigation showed he preached his Christian beliefs in class and used a device to burn the image of a cross on students' arms.

The board's attorney, David Millstone, said John Freshwater would be entitled to a hearing to challenge the dismissal.

Kelly Hamilton, who represents Freshwater, told the Mount Vernon News he would request such a hearing and that Freshwater denied any wrongdoing.

But Freshwater still has defenders: "With the exception of the cross-burning episode. . . . I believe John Freshwater is teaching the values of the parents in the Mount Vernon school district" said Dave Daubenmire.

"Don't Ask" policy in US military

According to this article, women are discharged from the military at a disproportionally high rate:

Lesbians could very well outnumber gay men in the military, according to Gary Gates, a senior research fellow at the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

"The percentage of lesbians that serve in the military is really quite high," Gates said. "It's possible that there are more lesbians than gay men serving in the military."

Gates' interpretation could explain why such a disproportionate percentage of servicewomen relative to men are discharged under the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

It's truly mind-boggling that the US military can still justify this stupid policy: being gay isn't a crime, and is becoming "normal" across the country, yet it still counts as a reason to drum someone out of the military. This, at a time when the armed forces are finding their demands for personnel outstripping the supply.

A gay man or a lesbian woman is no more a threat to the efficient functioning of a military unit than anyone else — all things being equal — and may well be more motivated to succeed because they've volunteered to serve in spite of the idiotic "Don't ask, don't tell" policy.

An excellent example of Republican thought

I've often said that I couldn't be a Republican (assuming that I lived in the United States, of course). Senator Kit Bond (R-Missouri) explains exactly why:

I'm not here to say that the government is always right, but when the government tells you to do something, I'm sure you would all agree that I think you all recognize that is something you need to do.

From a brief squib by David Weigel.

QotD: This is not what we mean when we talk about an "educational brand"

What stands in my mind, however, is this bit from the article, in which the teacher explained "he simply was trying to demonstrate the device on several students and described the images as an 'X,' not a cross." Because, you see, zapping an "X" into the flesh of your pubescent students with a tool that outputs 50,000 volts a pop is not a problem.

The particular tool comes with the following warning: "Never touch or come in contact with the high voltage output of this device." Any teacher willfully ignoring the safety instructions on high voltage equipment to use it to intentionally inflict pain and injury on his students, and to brand a large, recognizable pattern on their skin, is one that's going to land on my "fire this idiot" list. You don't even have to get into the religious angle, as far as I'm concerned. That's just the bonus round, as far as the firing goes.

Another choice quote from the article, from a friend of the teacher: "With the exception of the cross-burning episode. . . . I believe John Freshwater is teaching the values of the parents in the Mount Vernon school district," said the friend. Yes, well. That's a heck of an exception, now, isn't it.

John Scalzi, "From the 'That Doesn’t Actually Make it Any Better' Department", Whatever, 2008-06-21

QotD: Richard Nixon

Nixon had no friends except George Will and J. Edgar Hoover (and they both deserted him.) It was Hoover's shameless death in 1972 that led directly to Nixon's downfall. He felt helpless and alone with Hoover gone. He no longer had access to either the Director or the Director's ghastly bank of Personal Files on almost everybody in Washington.

Hoover was Nixon's right flank, and when he croaked, Nixon knew how Lee felt when Stonewall Jackson got killed at Chancellorsville. It permanently exposed Lee's flank and led to the disaster at Gettysburg.

For Nixon, the loss of Hoover led inevitably to the disaster of Watergate. It meant hiring a New Director — who turned out to be an unfortunate toady named L. Patrick Gray, who squealed like a pig in hot oil the first time Nixon leaned on him. Gray panicked and fingered White House Counsel John Dean, who refused to take the rap and rolled over, instead, on Nixon, who was trapped like a rat by Dean's relentless, vengeful testimony and went all to pieces right in front of our eyes on TV.

That is Watergate, in a nut, for people with seriously diminished attention spans. The real story is a lot longer and reads like a textbook on human treachery. They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to clear his name. Or at least that's what Bill Clinton says — and he is, after all, the President of the United States.

Hunter S. Thompson, "He Was a Crook", Counterpunch, 1994-05-01

The backlash to Boumediene

Steve Chapman looks at the rhetorical pants-wetting by various pro-war commentators after the recent Supreme Court decision that Guantanamo detainees have habeus corpus rights:

A lot of people who strongly believe in the war on terror are not above sowing a little terror of their own. From the reaction to last week's Supreme Court decision on Guantanamo, you would think the detainees were all going to be trained, armed and set free at Ground Zero, with free shuttle service to the nearest airport.

John McCain denounced the ruling, which said inmates may ask for federal court review under a procedure known as habeas corpus, as "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country." Former Bush Justice Department official John Yoo warned that henceforth, captured enemy fighters will be read their Miranda rights. The irrepressible Wall Street Journal had a cartoon with a judge atop a cage labeled "Gitmo" watching masked inmates stream out wearing suicide vests and lugging AK-47s.

All this outrage builds on the dissent registered by Justice Antonin Scalia. The court's decision "will make the war harder on us," he thundered. "It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed."

Well, it won't have that effect unless it leads to inmates being released—which it has not, will not anytime soon, and may not ever. If and when it does, he may have a point, though not necessarily a powerful one.

"One of the worst decisions in the history of this country"

Damon Root points out that John McCain's over-the-top expostulation (quoted in the title of this post) doesn't even come close to being accurate:

Could that possibly be true? As a measuring stick, I'd suggest using The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom, a new book by the Cato Institute's Robert Levy and the Institute for Justice's Chip Mellor.

On issues ranging from eminent domain abuse to the restriction of civil liberties during wartime, Levy and Mellor paint a consistent — and consistently depressing — picture of the Court upholding and enhancing government actions at the expense of individual rights. That's as good a definition of a "worst decision" as you'll ever get: state power trumping individual liberty.

Where does Boumediene fall on that scale? Even if you accept Chief Justice John Roberts' dissent, which argues that the Court permanently weakened the separation of powers by substituting its judgment for that of "the people's representatives," the decision hardly sinks to the depths of, say, Korematsu v. United States, where the majority upheld Franklin Roosevelt's internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

It's exactly the same as the need to defend unpopular speech to protect freedom of speech for all . . . you need to defend the right of habeus corpus even for people you deeply suspect of being terrorists or supporters of terrorism. Giving wide-ranging powers to suspend civil liberties for certain individuals or groups inevitably means weaker protections of civil liberties for everyone else, too.

Regardless of the party affiliation of the current president, any powers granted in this administration will almost certainly be accepted, used, and expanded by the following administration. If you think George Bush can't be trusted with that kind of power (and I'd strongly agree with you if you do think that), why do you think Barack Obama or John McCain would be any more trustworthy?

Eugene Debs: poster child for the right to dissent

Damon Root posted this yesterday at Hit and Run:

On this day in 1918, Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs gave a speech in Canton, Ohio denouncing America's participation in what we now call World War I. For this "crime," Debs would spend nearly three years rotting in prison, convicted of violating Woodrow Wilson's vile Espionage Act, which essentially made it illegal to criticize the government during wartime (Wilson later refused to pardon Debs, leaving that act of basic human decency to the criminally underrated Warren G. Harding). That's the story told in Ernest Freeberg's new Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent, which received a big thumb's up from Peter Richardson in yesterday's Los Angeles Times.

QotD: Democratic nomination race

But none of this "sexism" could be counteracted by organized, activist feminist groups, says writer Linda Hirshman. In Sunday's Washington Post, Hirshman mapped the fractious women's movement that failed to coalesce around Clinton's campaign. The absurdities and esoterica of the "millennial feminists" produced internecine warfare and factional fighting not seen since the Spanish Civil War. In the trenches of the gender war, the slights cited by Penn are deemed inconsequential, as is the candidate on the receiving end of them. Hirshman quotes one activist: "I . . . don't believe that simply putting a womyn's face where a man's face once was is going to solve our problems...by Real Womyn I am talking about womyn of color, incarcerated womyn, migrant womyn, womyn at the border, womyn gripped in violence, rape, and war.'" (For those whose university experience predated the ubiquity of Woman's Studies departments, the misspelling of 'women' is deliberate, a semantic kick in the patriarchy's groin.)

The Democratic primary was a lose-lose proposition for the image of American tolerance: If Senator Obama lost, ours was an irredeemably racist country. Senator Clinton lost, and we are infected by sexism. But whether viewed through the prism of radical gender feminism or a boy's club media conspiracy, the truth is considerably less complicated. The vaunted Clinton machine — devoid of fresh ideas and facing a dynamic, inspirational opponent — simply couldn't compete. Blame the media, blame the patriarchy if you so desire, but the truth is that Americans wouldn't mind a woman as president. Just not that woman.

Michael C. Moynihan, "The Feminist Mistake", Reason Online, 2008-06-13

Republican senator wants to scrap outdated concepts like habeus corpus

I usually discount this sort of thing, but according to this article, Senator Lindsey Graham is clearly unstable and probably unfit for office:

In response to today's landmark Supreme Court decision granting habeas corpus to Guantanamo detainees, Lindsey Graham has decided he wants to amend the United State Constitution to strip it of any pesky kinds of civil rights protections that have existed since the Magna Carta.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) vowed Thursday to do everything in his power to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision on Guantanamo Bay detainees, saying that "if necessary," he would push for a constitutional amendment to modify the decision.

Graham blasted the decision as "irresponsible and outrageous," echoing the sentiments of many congressional Republicans and President Bush.

There's being wrong, and then there's being so determined to be wrong that you enter a parallel universe. Senator Graham appears to have been inhabiting that other universe for quite some time.

Scalzi calls Fox News on their (not-so) hidden racism

John Scalzi works up a head of steam at Fox News over a particularly slimy trick:

Fox News Would Like To Take a Moment To Remind You That the Obamas Are As Black As Satan's Festering, Baby-Eating Soul

Back in the day — you know, when presidential candidates were respectably white — news organizations called potential First Ladies "wives." But now that black folks are running, we can get all funky fresh with the lingo, yo. So it's basically fine for Fox News to use "Baby Mama" for Michelle Obama, slang that implies a married 44-year-old Princeton-educated lawyer is, to use an Urban Dictionary definition of the term, "some chick you knocked up on accident during a fling who you can't stand but you have to tolerate cuz she got your baby now." Because the Obamas are black! And the blacks, they're all relaxed about that shit, yo. Word up. And anyway, as the caption clearly indicates, it's not Fox News that's calling Michelle Obama "Baby Mama," it's outraged liberals. Fox News is just telling you what those outraged liberals are saying. They didn't want to use the term "Baby Mama." But clearly they had no choice.

Meanwhile, over at her personal site, Michelle "Fox News' Ethnic Shield" Malkin defends Fox News' use of the "Baby Mama" phrase by essentially making two arguments. First, Michelle Obama once called Barack Obama her "baby's daddy," and as we all know, a married woman factually and correctly calling her husband her child's father is exactly the same as a major news organization calling a potential First Lady some chick what got knocked up on a fling. Second, the term "baby-daddy" has gone out into the common culture; heck, even Tom Cruise was called Katie Holmes' baby-daddy, you know, when he impregnated her and she subsequently gave birth while the two were not married, which is exactly like what happened between Michelle and Barack Obama, who were married in 1992 and whose first child was born six years later.

Guantanamo inmates do have rights, says SCOTUS

Good news for fans of the rule of law: the detainees at Guantanamo do have habeus corpus rights, according to a 5-4 Supreme Court decision today:

In a stunning blow to the Bush Administration in its war-on-terrorism policies, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that foreign nationals held at Guantanamo Bay have a right to pursue habeas challenges to their detention. The Court, dividing 5-4, ruled that Congress had not validly taken away habeas rights. If Congress wishes to suspend habeas, it must do so only as the Constitution allows — when the country faces rebellion or invasion.

The Court stressed that it was not ruling that the detainees are entitled to be released — that is, entitled to have writs issued to end their confinement. That issue, it said, is left to the District Court judges who will be hearing the challenges. The Court also said that "we do not address whether the President has authority to detain" individuals during the war on terrorism, and hold them at the U.S. Naval base in Cuba; that, too, it said, is to be considered first by the District judges.

This is an important — and long overdue — slap in the face to the US government in regard to their cavalier disregard of one of the fundamentals of common law. The detainees (I think they should have been categorized as prisoners of war, right from the start, and treated as such) have the right to be informed of the charges under which they're being held, and to challenge those charges in court.

The only remaining question is whether the Bush White House still feels any need to pay attention to those bothersome gadflies on the Supreme Court . . .

Fewer road signs = safer roads?

John Staddon examines the contrast between American and British road sign policies:

Economists and ecologists sometimes speak of the "tragedy of the commons" — the way rational individual actions can collectively reduce the common good when resources are limited. How this applies to traffic safety may not be obvious. It's easy to understand that although it pays the selfish herdsman to add one more sheep to common grazing land, the result may be overgrazing, and less for everyone. But what is the limited resource, the commons, in the case of driving? It's attention. Attending to a sign competes with attending to the road. The more you look for signs, for police, and at your speedometer, the less attentive you will be to traffic conditions. The limits on attention are much more severe than most people imagine. And it takes only a momentary lapse, at the wrong time, to cause a serious accident.

The reductio, of course, is to eliminate road signs altogether . . . except it does not end ad absurdio:

So what am I suggesting — abolishing signs and rules? A traffic free-for-all? Actually, I wouldn't be the first to suggest that. A few European towns and neighborhoods — Drachten in Holland, fashionable Kensington High Street in London, Prince Charles's village of Poundbury, and a few others — have even gone ahead and tried it. They've taken the apparently drastic step of eliminating traffic control more or less completely in a few high-traffic and pedestrian-dense areas. The intention is to create environments in which everyone is more focused, more cautious, and more considerate. Stop signs, stoplights, even sidewalks are mostly gone. The results, by all accounts, have been excellent: pedestrian accidents have been reduced by 40 percent or more in some places, and traffic flows no more slowly than before.

QotD: The press secretary

The release of former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan's tell-all memoir has Washington buzzing, though there's a certain Capt. Renault-like phoniness to all the indignation: Are we really all that surprised that this administration — or for that matter, any administration — would ask its press secretary to lie, mislead, or dissemble in front of the media?

Should we really be shocked-shocked! that the White House might also keep its press secretary out of the loop when it comes to brewing political scandals, so he can convincingly feign ignorance when the press queries him about them?

While ostensibly serving as a liaison between the press and the president, White House press secretaries serve really only one function: to boost the president's image. White House press offices are little more than public relations machines for the administration they're serving.

Radley Balko, "The Public Spinmeisters: Why do politicians get a well-oiled PR machine at taxpayer expense?", Reason Online, 2008-06-10

The end of American Identity politics?

Terry Michael is looking forward to a major change in American political dialogue:

We are nearing the end of American identity politics as we know it. Bearing that gift to those who prize the individual over the tribal is a messenger who shared a Hyde Park neighborhood with Milton Friedman, though with a public record that suggests he is more statist than classical liberal.

But Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), can't be categorized that simply. He is, rather, an intellectual and ideological work in progress. Not stuck in cable-babble caricatured time, he may be traveling the circuitous path many "liberal-tarians" — or libertarian Democrats like me — treaded as we grew and found our way back to the self-reliant values that informed our pluralistic democracy. We lost those values in the Industrial and Progressive eras, when advocates of centralized planning prized society's perfection over individual liberty. While Obama's positions don't exactly channel the Cato Institute, his departure from usual Democratic Party left-liberalism is reflected in the left's suspicion of him for not having all the 162-point plans of Sen. Hillary Clinton, or spewing the syrupy populism of trial lawyer to the underclass, Sen. John Edwards.

To me, this suggests the beginnings of a journey away from the Great Society mind-set of the Democratic Party. I was a 1960s teenage political junkie who wanted to complete the New Deal, with wealth redistribution and "social justice" managed from Washington. I morphed into a 1980s DLC centrist, embracing mushy "progressive" politics as a halfway house from statist liberalism. Now in my own sixties, I have rediscovered the founder of my party, Thomas Jefferson, in an information era in which we are desktop-empowered to seek our own way and make our own choices, much like the agrarian age inventors of our political system.

QotD: A reason to regret Hillary's departure

I personally leaned toward Obama in this contest fairly early on (I think Edwards was marginally closer to my own most perfect candidate this time around, but that was pretty much a non-starter), but as I also mentioned, as far as these leading candidates went on the Democratic side, there was no real downside for me. I would have quite happily voted for Clinton if it had gone her way, not only for her own policies and qualities, but also simply to watch conservative heads explode at the idea of the Clintons setting up shop at 1600 Pennsylvania again. There's not enough Schadenfreude Pie in the world for that sort of event.

John Scalzi, "Off Into the Sunset", Whatever, 2008-06-07

The Obama phenomenon

Steve Chapman examines the enigma wrapped in a Rorschach Test that is Barack Obama:

I was just getting used to the idea that Barack Obama is an America-hating left-winger bent on socialism and surrender. Then along comes Ralph Nader, who says the problem with Obama is that he's an obedient steward of the status quo, doing the bidding of greedy corporations. Naderites, conservatives, and many others agree he's a menace. They just can't agree on why.

Obama has said, in reference to his broad appeal, "I am like a Rorschach test"—meaning that his admirers have a knack for seeing in him exactly what they want to find. But the inkblots work the other way, too: People who dislike him have detected a multitude of reasons to justify their animus.

To Hillary Clinton's supporters, he was always a dreamy innocent who would be ground up by the Republican attack machine. To some critics, he's a sleazy Chicago pol. When he ran for Congress against a black incumbent, he lost because some voters thought he was too white. In some primary states this year, some voters thought he was, well, not too white.

The secret appears to be "don't define yourself — let others project their definitions onto you". Historically, that's been a losing pattern, but this year it seems to be working for Obama.

First Goldwater, then Paul?

David Weigel looks at the ongoing ripples in the Republican party from Ron Paul's candidacy race:

"We've seen how the politics of fear chip away at freedom at home," he declares, sounding suddenly sure of himself. "Where are the defenders of freedom today? Where are our Thomas Jeffersons? Where are our Barry Goldwaters? There are a few defenders of freedom, but they are outnumbered, and they need our help."

Singh has one particular defender of freedom in mind: Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). It was Paul's libertarian-minded presidential campaign that got Singh into politics, first as a donor, then as a Virginia volunteer, and now as a candidate for Congress. A month after watching Paul score 4.5 percent of the vote in the Virginia primary, Singh threw his hat into the ring for the 8th District congressional seat.

By the end of the 2008 elections, as many as 40 self-proclaimed Ron Paul Republicans will have run for national office. The reception they are getting from their state parties ranges from warm embraces to Terminator-like efforts to destroy them. After a year of supporting a presidential candidate the party's gatekeepers treated like a radioactive performance artist, the Paulites are used to ridicule. They want to carve out a permanent place in Republican politics, regardless of whether the party wants them to be there.

It's difficult to predict just how much influence Ron Paul's revolutionaries can have — even if they manage to get elected — but it's a positive sign for American politics as a whole. The permanent two-party system prevents viable third parties from arising (by legal obstruction, ballot access restrictions, and just about anything else you can think of), so would-be reformers have only two choices: work within one of the existing parties or work completely outside the political sphere.

This will be a live experiment for small-L libertarians on how viable the "work within" model can be for advancing their aims.

One-image psychological test

As James Lileks says "I'm not saying it's the be-all / end-all of ideological tests, but you can tell a lot about a person by their reaction to this ad.

That was then, to understate the case. Nowadays we've done away with these dangerous violent antisocial pseudo-guns, and replaced them with merry-makers like Nerf guns and Supersoakers and other items whose makers encourage you to point them at your friends.

This does not seem like an improvement, if you ask me.

Some of the ads are hilarious . . . proving that the past really is a different country. (It does have the Red Ryder BB gun, but it's not quite the way Ralphie described it.)

The Red Ryder BB gun was prominently featured in the popular 1983 film A Christmas Story, in which the main character requests one for Christmas, but is repeatedly rebuffed with the warning "You'll shoot your eye out". The movie's fictional BB gun, described as the "Red Ryder carbine-action, two hundred shot Range Model air rifle BB gun with a compass in the stock and a thing which tells time", does not correspond to any production model nor even a prototype; the Red Ryder featured in the movie was specially made to match author Jean Shepherd's story (which may be artistic license, but was the configuration Shepard claimed to remember).

QotD: Modern political corruption

In today's terms, you might call it the Medicare Part D problem: even when Congress starts out with a laudable policy goal, like providing prescription drugs for seniors, by the time the legislation gets through both houses it amounts to little more than a grab bag of giveaways to politically connected business interests. Case in point: the recent Senate-passed Foreclosure Prevention Act, which contains $25 billion in tax breaks for home-builders and other businesses while doing very little to justify its name. The reason for this is straightforward: the amount of money spent on lobbying in the last Congressional session was $2.8 billion, nearly two times more than was spent in 2000. Overall, industry has contributed $14 million to Congressional candidates in this session.

This money, Lessig says, insidiously distorts Congressional outcomes and priorities because Congress members don't experience it as corruption. "Let's say you go to Congress," says Lessig, "and you believe there are two problems to deal with: piracy of copyrighted materials and welfare mothers who are really getting screwed by the system. You open up shop, and a million [lobbyists] come in and say we've got a thousand things to tell you about piracy, and nobody comes into your office and says we're going to help you with the welfare moms. So you shift your focus, but you never feel it. You think: maybe I could've spent more time on welfare moms, but I'm having a real effect on stopping piracy! That's the dynamic that is so critical here."

Of course, good-government reformers have been decrying the influence of money since at least the late nineteenth century. For all of Lessig's status as a visionary (he literally wrote the book on cyberspace law), what's most striking is that, as he admits, Change Congress doesn't embody any "new ideas." He envisions it as a movement tool kit that connects citizens to the work of the reform groups that already exist, a kind of "Google Maps mashup," as he puts it.

Christopher Hayes, "Mr. Lessig Goes to Washington", The Nation, 2008-05-29

A forensic evaulation of the Ron Paul campaign

A scathing summary of what went wrong for the Ron Paul presidential campaign. In short: just about everything:

No organization: the campaign he ran was a completely disorganized mess, a shambolic fuck-up of such monumental proportions I'm frankly astounded you Libertarians haven't lynched his campaign staff for treason. I've seen better efforts by my city councilmen. The only real traction ever made in the campaign was by the grass-roots element. Fundraising? Grassroots. Internet viral message? Grassroots. Precinct level organization? Grassroots. Certainly, the grassroots deserves a commendation for one of the best efforts in history . . . but the grassroots cannot get your canidate ACCESS. That's the campaign's job, and they failed, leading to . . .

Locked out of the Media: As a result of the campaign's ignorance of how to handle the media, Ron Paul started out crippled. When the money bombs brought in millions, the campaign did not take out nationwide ads, it didn't take out a flood of interviews, it didn't agitate to get him on as many places as possible. Even some writers on this website tried to get him on radioshows and the like and were ignored. And that you cannot do. If you ignore the MSM, it locks you out. Dennis Kunich felt that people should judge him on how he spoke, not the media spin, and he was locked out even more totally than Ron Paul.

There's more. Much, much more.

FLDS children to be returned to parents

The Texas Supreme Court has confirmed the ruling of the appeal court last week. The children must be returned to their parents:

In a crushing blow to the state's massive seizure of children from a polygamist sect's ranch, the Texas Supreme Court ruled Thursday that child welfare officials overstepped their authority and the children should go back to their parents.

The high court affirmed a decision by an appellate court last week, saying Child Protective Services failed to show an immediate danger to the more than 400 children swept up from the Yearning For Zion Ranch nearly two months ago.

"On the record before us, removal of the children was not warranted," the justices said in their ruling issued in Austin.

The high court let stand the appellate court's order that Texas District Judge Barbara Walther return the children from foster care to their parents. It's not clear how soon that may happen, but the appellate court ordered her to do it within a reasonable time period.

It's not enough that you disapprove of someone else's lifestyle . . . they have to have actually endangered their children before the state can step in and take the children away. The FLDS may not be a particularly enlightened religious group, and some of their teachings are clearly unpopular with mainstream opinions, but that does not equate with child abuse.

The state clearly over-reached, and the courts are taking the appropriate action to rein in the minions of the state.

"And we'd have gotten away with it if it wasn't for those blasted kids!"

Grant McCracken points to a very relevant source of political and anthropological insight — The Onion:

But I think things are a little different in the world of politics. Here, the real sophistication of the under-35 voter means that you really have to watch it, and when you don't, this voter will make you pay.

Hence the article today in The Onion. This captures precisely the sensibility of the under-35 vote quite precisely. (With the proviso that The Onion is necessarily a little more observant and unforgiving.) In this wonderful piece, The Onion nails the Obama camp for its artifice in image building. Look, it says with glee, we see what you're doing. And it's precisely because you appear to think we cannot see the artifice here that we must point it out and make you pay. Play us if you must, but don't play us for fools.

The entire piece is worth reading [. . .] but if I may let me quote my favorite passage.

Obama has reportedly been working tirelessly with his top political strategists to perfect his looking-off-into-the-future pose, which many believe is vital to the success of the Illinois senator's campaign.

When performed correctly, the pose involves Obama standing upright with his back arched and his chest thrust out, his shoulders positioned 1.3 feet apart and opened slightly at a 14-degree angle, and his eyes transfixed on a predetermined point between 500 and 600 yards away. Advisers say this creates the illusion that Obama is looking forward to a bright future, while the downturned corners of his lips indicate that he acknowledges the problems of the present.

Oh, sublime. So much of politics is an exercise is posturing (figurative and here literal) that it is hard to image what politics can look like once the new voter is factored in. In the meantime, we leave it to the likes of The Onion, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart to point out to the would-be emperors that we can see right through that clothing they don't have on.

Arnie's legacy

Matt Welch finds little to be impressed with in Arnold Schwarzeneggar's time in office:

Arnold Schwarzenegger, a big disappointment as Golden State governor (to me, anyway), has at least enriched the lives of one class of Californians: state employees.

The state of California's payroll is skyrocketing, even as its budget deficit has grown to billions of dollars in recent months.

In Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's first four years, the total bill for state workers' salaries jumped by 37 percent, compared with a 5 percent increase in the preceding four years under then-Gov. Gray Davis, a Chronicle analysis of state payroll records shows.

One month before Schwarzenegger took office in November 2003, just eight state employees earned more than $200,000 a year working in the core state government, which excludes universities and the Legislature. In April of this year, there were nearly a thousand, according to records.

Okay, remind me again . . . weren't Republicans supposed to believe in smaller government once upon a time?

The Presidency

George Will reviews a new book by Gene Healy:

Healy's dissection of the delusions of "redemption through presidential politics" comes at a moment when liberals, for reasons of liberalism, and conservatives, because they have forgotten their raison d'être, "agree on the boundless nature of presidential responsibility." Liberals think boundless government is beneficent. Conservatives practice situational constitutionalism, favoring what Healy calls "Caesaropapism" as long as the Caesar-cum-Pope wields his anti constitutional powers in the service of things these faux conservatives favor.

War is, as Randolph Bourne said, "the health of the state." And as James Madison said, war is the "true nurse of executive aggrandizement." Today's president has claimed the power to be the "decider," deciding on his own to start preventive wars, order torture prohibited by treaty and statute, and arrest American terrorist suspects on American soil and hold them indefinitely without legal process. But Healy's critique of the heroic presidency ranges far beyond national-security matters.

"Tell me your troubles," said FDR, Consoler in Chief, in a fireside chat with a radio audience. In 1960, the year the nation elected a charismatic (a term drawn from religion) president who regarded the office as "the center of moral leadership," an eminent political scientist called the presidency "the incarnation of the American people in a sacrament resembling that in which the wafer and the wine are seen to be the body and blood of Christ." In 1992, Gov. Bill Clinton promised a "New Covenant" between government and the governed. That, Healy dryly notes, was "a metaphor that had the state stepping in for Yahweh."

From merely the head of the executive branch of government to combined lightning-brandishing demi-god and wish-granting genie . . . it's a hell of an evolution for a mundane political job.

Opposition to Barr/Root in the Libertarian Party

David Weigel reports on some of the remaining nay-sayers within the Libertarian Party after the Bob Barr nomination over the weekend:

On the way out of the Denver convention, defeated candidate and Massachusetts party chair George Phillies pulled me aside to express how worried he was about the Barr/Root ticket. "This is a train wreck," he said. "My delegation is majority pagan. Nominating this man is the equivalent of nominating an Imperial Wizard of the KKK to lead a party of African Americans." Phillies raised the possibility of a Massachusetts LP convention that would nominate a new candidate at the top of the ticket, like author L. Neil Smith. And as I left, I heard a rumor that Arizona might do the same thing.

I think this would amount to local party suicide. The only thing all LPers agree on right now is that Barr, by dint of his fame and national media pull, could get more votes than any previous candidate. In most states, a certain vote total will get a party guaranteed ballot access. Nominating an unkown, especially when low-information voters will head to the polls expecting to see Barr, would drive down vote totals.

This really gets to the heart of the matter: why is the Libertarian Party running candidates for the presidency? Is it with any serious intent to win (mathematically unlikely as that may be) or is it to try to raise the public profile of small-L libertarian philosophy and free market economics? In either case, a better-known candidate is going to perform the task more easily than an unknown one.

It could be argued that any principled libertarian could do the job, but the media are the gatekeepers for access to that proportion of the voting public who still pay any attention to TV, and they're not going to provide J. Random Libertarian with any notice at all, unless JRL happens to be "famous" (for some values of "famous). Even a loose-cannon candidate — the more off-the-wall, the better — will get more media exposure than a highly competent, philosophically "pure" JRL.

Does raising the profile of libertarianism make any difference to the philosophy's acceptability to the general public . . . well, that's a completely different question.

The Barr nomination

Bob Barr, former Republican congressman, has taken the Libertarian Party nomination for 2008, with his running mate Wayne Allyn Root. David Weigel was there:

The timing was perfect. Presidential candidate Mary Ruwart, a favorite among the Libertarian Party's Radical Caucus, was 15 minutes into a hard-hitting speech and Q&A with delegates at the contested LP convention in Denver, and she'd just finished enumerating what it is she couldn't stomach in a prospective running mate. In short, she couldn't stomach Bob Barr. As if on cue, Barr's twang exploded over a next-door soundsystem.

"All right!" he said, whooping up dozens of his cowboy-hatted delegates. "Are we ready to go?"

Ruwart's face froze into a devious, oh please kind of smile as Barr briefly addressed his throng. Fired up and ready to go, he marched them past the exhibit area and over into the main convention hall to deliver delegate tokens guaranteeing Barr a place in the Saturday night debate and a nominating speech at the Sunday presidential contest. As the procession went past, Neal Stephenson, a supporter of longshot candidate Christine Smith, loudly sang John Williams' "Imperial March," the song playing when Darth Vader enters the room in Star Wars.

Jim Peron, working the Laissez Faire Books table, opted for less subtlety. "Fuckin' traitors!" Peron yelled. "Go back to the GOP!" As Barr's crowd entered the hall, Peron joined in a burst of sarcastic applause and cheers. "Hooray!" yelled a phalanx of delegates. "They're leaving the convention!"

Who'll be the veep?

Steve Chapman looks at the possible choices for Barack Obama and John McCain when it comes to who else'll be on their respective tickets:

People who are under the influence of alcohol often are seized with impulses that seem brilliant at the time but end up looking like horrible mistakes the next day. We are now at the stage of the presidential election when intoxication at the prospect of the fall campaign produces ideas that, if adopted, will lead only to regret.

One came in an article on the influential op-ed page of The Washington Post, proposing a simple way to reconcile Hillary Clinton and her supporters to Barack Obama's looming victory. "It's likely that the next president will face at least one Supreme Court vacancy," wrote James Andrew Miller, formerly an aide to Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker. "Obama should promise Hillary Clinton, now, that if he wins in November, the vacancy will be hers, making her first on a list of one."

In Miller's view, it would guarantee a quick Senate confirmation, gratify her supporters by assuring her life tenure in a job more consequential than vice president and add a solid liberal vote to a conservative-leaning court.

No doubt. But it would brand Obama as an unsavory deal-maker willing to bribe a rival for her blessing, badly tarnishing the rationale of his candidacy. It would also give Republicans a matchless opportunity in the fall campaign — trumpeting the specter of an Obama presidency and a Clinton court.

There'd be no escape from the Spanish Inquisition judicial activism under those circumstances. That would be perhaps the best way for the Democrats to rally wavering Republican supporters behind McCain.

QotD: The Presidency

It's a curious thing in America that each July we celebrate how the founding fathers threw off the shackles of an oppressive monarchy, that we favorably compare our republican system of governance with the world's tyrants, dictatorships and monarchies (and rightly so) — and yet we then celebrate those American presidents who most behaved like tyrants, monarchs and dictators.

Presidents like Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman are regularly put at the top of lists of America's greatest presidents. This is true when both historians and the American public at large are polled. Yet these are presidents who did everything they could to expand the power of their offices, to extend the sphere of influence of the federal government and to bully through policies that met inconvenient hurdles otherwise known as checks and balances.

[. . .]

These are odd men to call heroes.

Inexplicably, the presidents who knew and understood their constitutional limits, who respected those limits and who generally took a more laissez-faire approach to government get short shrift — even derision — from historians.

Men like Calvin Coolidge, Warren Harding, Rutherford B. Hayes and Grover Cleveland merely exhibited what Healy calls "stolid, boring competence." Historians loathe them, Healy writes, because they had the audacity to "content themselves simply with presiding over peace and prosperity" and not seek to remake the world in their own image. The nerve of them.

Radley Balko, "Presidential Power-Tripping", FoxNews.com, 2008-05-19

More on the ongoing FLDS case

Jacob Sullum finds some mild amusement in the recent ruling in the FLDS case:

I came across this tidbit while reading about today's appeals court ruling condemning the wholesale seizure of children from the Yearning for Zion Ranch. Or perhaps I should say "children" (emphasis added):

At least half the mothers taken from a polygamist sect's ranch and put in child foster care have now been declared adults, significantly chipping at agency statistics that seemed to demonstrate the widespread sexual abuse of underage girls.

Attorneys for the state's Child Protective Services agency have been conceding, one by one, that many of the mothers authorities cited as evidence that the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints committed widespread sexual abuse of girls are actually adults.

They had admitted by midday Thursday that 15 of the 31 mothers listed as underage are adults; one is actually 27. A few are as young as 18, but many are at least 20.

Another girl listed as an underage mother is 14, but her attorney said in court she is not pregnant and does not have a child.

As so often happens in cases like this one, the state has clearly reacted in haste, and is hoping against hope not to have to repent at leisure.

Update: The ruling went against the government in an appeal court in Texas: removing the FLDS children from their parents was not justified.

"Looking Backwards" from the year 2058

A most depressing read:

As we consider the current condition of libertarianism, here in the middle of the 21st century, we might pause to reflect upon the bleak fate that befell the last flowering of personal freedom. That period of liberalism and liberation blossomed in the late 20th century, before coming to a disastrous end in the first decade of this new millennium. We can call that happy period the Rand Era, in honor of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged, a book still intensely and tragically relevant 101 years after its publication.

But let's look back before we look to the present—and to the future. The Randian libertarianism that emerged in the 1950s was a fierce critique of planning and centralization, manifested in its minor (New Deal), major (Swedish), and malignant (Soviet) forms. The school of anti-statist criticism, reinforced by émigré economists, was further strengthened by the obvious failures of American "Big Government" in the 1960s, from the war in Vietnam to the "War on Poverty." Interestingly, during that same decade of the '60s, libertarianism received a major boost from the so-called New Left. These leftists were ostensibly socialist, or even communist, but, in fact, they were more typically, in practice, anarchists and libertarians. Indeed, by the decade of the 1970s, it became clear that radicals and counter-culturalists were mostly interested in "doing their own thing," an attitude leading them toward an insistence on personal freedom-or, as they put it, not being hassled in their "personal space." Thus the New Left helped spawn the New Age, producing a generation of intensely capitalist music producers, natural food entrepreneurs, and then, most portentously, computer geeks and software developers. But of course, in their private moments, these folks retained their youthful predilections for drugs, sex, and rock and roll.

If, as James Pinkerton writes, McCain does win the presidency in November, I fear that it will play out very much as he predicts. I think the Republican brand is so badly damaged that only a very severe beating by the Democrats will force them to abandon their love for big government and re-embrace their libertarian wing. Of course, that means at least four years of economic turmoil . . . but that is preferable to four years of military adventurism.

Vote McCain to continue paramilitary raids

If your one-issue hot button is the continuing militarization of police work, Radley Balko tells you how you should vote:

As Jacob Sullum pointed out yesterday, Barack Obama hasn't exactly made crystal clear his position on medical marijuana.

Fortunately, the Republican National Committee has stepped forward to clear up any confusion. If you support ending the federal SWAT raids on cannabis stores and taking a federalist approach to medical marijuana, the RNC says Obama's your man.

If you think the president must continue paramilitary raids on convalescent centers in states that have approved medical marijuana, and that anything less wouldn't be keeping with his oath to uphold and protect the Constitution, well, then you should vote Republican.

Drug frenzy

Jacob Sullum pens the headline of the week:

How Hysterical Do You Have to Be for Newsweek to Suggest That You're Overreacting to a Drug Menace?

This doesn't quite make up for Newsweek's anti-crack hysteria circa 1986 or its anti-meth hysteria circa 2005, but the magazine's latest issue includes a careful, balanced story about Salvia divinorum that could serve as a model for how the press should handle controversies involving psychoactive substances. Noting salvia's longstanding use as a Mazatec folk remedy, its modern use as an aid to introspection, and its medical potential, author Brian Braiker says media attention attracted by YouTube videos of teenagers smoking salvia "is spooking legislators and law enforcement" into banning the plant and arresting people for possession.

"Tepidly gung ho" about education reform

In perhaps the least emphatic possible way, Megan McArdle picks a favourite among the various contending educational reform notions:

But while taking away much of the teacher's union's power is definitely not sufficient, it does seem to be necessary. They resist changes to their work practices that the best evidence [. . .] seems to show works with disadvantaged kids: rote memorization, and phonics. These replace the tools that upper middle class give their kids earlier — even if you went to a whole language school, if you're reading this blog it's a safe bet you had phonics, too, when your parents taught you to "sound it out".

Instead, they agitate for things like smaller class sizes. It is true that schools with smaller class sizes tend to do better — but this is not surprising, since they tend to be more affluent. Pilot programs with disadvantaged kids also seem to show a benefit, but these suffer from the same problem that I discussed in a previous post about the Perry Pre-School: who's staffing your smaller class sizes? If smaller class sizes means employing more marginal teachers, it's far from obvious that this is a net boon. To the kids, I mean. It's an obvious win for the union.

This is why almost all educational ideas fail: they don't scale when you take the highly motivated grad students and gifted teachers out of the equation. That's why I'm tepidly gung ho about Direct Instruction: it has been proven to work with ordinary teachers using ordinary resources.

I don't care if the teachers have unions to negotiate over salary and benefits. But I think the power to block terminations and set work rules should be entirely stripped from them.

Hurrah for Jindal!

Until his name came up as a potential running-mate for John McCain, I don't remember ever hearing about Bobby Jindal. I think this will change regardless of whether he joins McCain or not. Megan McArdle is a fan:

With a river of federal money flowing in, Louisiana, which used to be stuck at the bottom of state corruption indices, could have gone back to business as usual while the politicians and the powers that be diverted a few rivulets to their own use. Instead, Jindal and the legislature passed anti-corruption laws that in a surprising turn of events actually seem to have done something about corruption — suddenly the state is getting the best scores in the country. They pushed through disclosure rules for all government officials — state and local, appointed and elected. He got a law passed that forbid legislators from doing business with the state. And he took on a tax and regulatory structure that had been built around the notion that companies couldn't go anywhere, and could hence be bled dry.

Huey Long deliberately built a bridge lower than standard so that boat traffic couldn't go upriver. The days when New Orleans could enforce that kind of dominance are long gone, but the old institutional structures remained. For example, Louisiana had special taxes on utilities, on new equipment purchases, on businesses that borrowed money. The unsurprising result was that companies deferred maintenance and refused to buy new equipment, making them uncompetitive unless they paid low wages. It's classic rent seeking behavior by the legislature, and Jindal actually got rid of it; new businesses are now locating there, and others are upgrading.

QotD: Invading Burma?

Now in all probability if the "good old U.S. military" actually does invade Burma it will incinerate every vestige of armed opposition in its path. Burmese Army units will stand about as much chance as ants before a kid's homemade flamethrower. And then all of a sudden the assumptions will collapse in reverse order. People are going to say, 'we didn't realize invasions meant killing people'; 'we didn't realize we wouldn't have allies'; and finally 'we did not think it would be so expensive'. And then we will hear that classic line: "I was for it before I was against it."

"Wretchard", " Invasion Burma", The Belmont Club, 2008-05-10

Staving off disaster in Massachusetts

Katherine Mangu-Ward realizes that she missed some key elements after her move to Massachusetts:

Massachusetts must have been a terrifying place in 1995. A relatively recent arrival in the commonwealth myself, I had no idea that the mid-90s was a time when health care was unobtainable. I didn't know about the washed out bridges and unplowed roads. Nor do I recall seeing bands of feral children roaming the streets from 8:00 am to 3:00 pm due to the lack of public schools.

But a popular ballot initiative to eliminate Massachusetts's income tax — thus bringing the state budget back to 1995 levels — is being greeted with howls of protest and predictions that the state will degenerate into underfunded chaos.

For purposes of political balance . . .

. . . if it seems like I'm deliberately poking fun at the Democrats for their current imbroglio with Obama and Clinton, I don't want to appear to be partisan. So, here's a cry from New Jersey: "Is it too late for the GOP to dump McCain?"

They can't say I didn't warn them. But do they listen to me? No, they don't. If they had, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in today.

I'm talking about the leaders of the national Republican Party. Way back in 1999, I warned them they should find someone other than a certain George W. Bush to run for president.

And now I fear I must resurrect that warning as regards John McCain. As bad as Bush has been in undermining virtually every traditional Republican principle of good governance, I fear McCain would be worse. If he wins, that is. I fear the Straight Talk Express is going to run off the road if the driver doesn't get his foot out of his mouth and onto the brake pedal.

Since winning the nomination, McCain has uttered a nonstop string of gaffes. His many statements on Iraq, for example, amount to an admission that he has no idea who the enemy is there and why we're fighting there.

Having proved himself incompetent on foreign policy, McCain has moved on to economics. The man who has confessed on several occasions that he doesn't know much about economics went on to prove it by proposing a summer gas-tax holiday that was ridiculed by every economist who heard of it — and then laughed at some more after Hillary Clinton picked it up and tried to sell it to the Democrats.

H/T to Nick Gillespie for the link.

Wil Wheaton also offers some advice

After yesterday's John Scalzi link, today's writer-offering-kindly-advice link goes to Wil Wheaton:

hillary clinton: the psycho ex-girlfriend of the democratic party

[. . .] It's over. She knows it's over. It's been over for almost three months, but she's been moving the goalposts and cynically and cravenly pandering to voters in a way that's not only insulting, but is embarrassing. John Cole frequently says that he can't believe he ever supported Bush, and I can now join him in saying that I can't believe I ever supported, defended and believed in the Clintons.

The thing about all of this is that, with a Clinton victory in the primary about as likely as jumping off the roof of your house and landing on the moon, it's become clear that this whole thing isn't about Democrats or beating McCain (who is inexplicably running for Bush's third term) or saving our country from the catastrophic failure of the Bush years. No, it's all about her. It's about her ego. It's about refusing to admit that she did her best, but voters (except those encouraged by Rush Limbaugh to cross party lines and fuck with our primary) have pretty clearly said "No thanks. You're a good senator, but we want something different now."

It's been crystal clear for weeks, yet she refuses to put party and country over personal ambition and drop out of the race, forcing Barack Obama to not only run against McCain and the Media, but also against her. It's particularly galling, because she can only win if her campaign can force Democratic superdelegates (one of the worst creations in the history of politics) to tell millions of Democratic voters — many of them first time voters who, like me, finally feel truly inspired by someone — to go fuck themselves.

Political advice from John Scalzi

John Scalzi thinks there is a way out:

You know, today would be an excellent day for the mandarins of the Democratic Party to pay a call to Hillary Clinton, sit her down and then, kindly and gently, and with full appreciation of everything she's done for party and country, stick a goddamn fork in her.

US greenhouse gas emissions up 6.6%

It's true! Of course, it pales in comparison to the 21.1% increase notched by those smug Kyoto signatory nations, of course.

H/T to Nick Packwood, who writes:

The average global increases in so called "greenhouse gas" emissions 1997 - 2004 has been 18%. The average decrease in greenhouse emissions amongst signatories to Kyoto is... let's see here... you are saying it is a 21% increase? But that is impossible. They signed an agreement.

Like shooting conservative fish in a barrel

Radley Balko posts a link to the most popular 50 pages on Conservapedia under the heading Compensate Much?:

Meet the USLP candidates

David Weigel has a look at "wildest Libertarian Party nomination fight in decades". After the big names, he presents the usual list of names nobody should expect to see on the final ballot:

9. The others. There is absolutely zero chance that John Finan, Barry Hess, Dave Hollist, Daniel Imperato, Alden Link, or Robert Milnes will get the Libertarian Party’s nomination. They are occasionally entertaining, and they are harmless. Imperato, in particular, has run a campaign worthy of Max Headroom, bidding (with no success) for the Constitution and Green Party nominations, claiming to run a multi-billion-dollar international organization, to speak seven languages, and to be descended from Emperor Nero. (If that actually was true, why would anyone admit it?) "He is the most ridiculous candidate I have ever seen," says Starchild.

FLDS update

Jacob Sullum asks some pointed questions about the state's interest in removing several hundred children from their mothers:

I'm not quite as old-fashioned as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), which hews to the early-marriage customs of the 19th century and the polygamous practices of biblical times. But I'm old-fashioned enough to believe the government needs a good reason to pull a crying, clinging child away from her mother and hand her over to the care of strangers.

The possibility that the child might marry an older man 10 or 12 or 14 years from now does not cut it. Citing that long-term, speculative danger to justify the certain, immediate damage it has done by forcibly separating hundreds of children from their parents, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services has violated its duty to take such extreme measures only when there's no other way to prevent imminent harm.

The department took custody of 463 minors who were living at the FLDS church's Yearning for Zion (YFZ) Ranch in Eldorado after an April 3 raid that was based on an abuse report police believe was a hoax. On Monday state officials said the children, who are now living in group homes or shelters, include 53 girls between the ages of 14 and 17, of whom 31 are pregnant or have children.

It's all very well to act on the basis of credible intelligence, which this case does not seem to have had, but it certainly appears as if the state is treating the FLDS children differently than they would if it had been a non-religious group (or [ahem] if it was another religion which also has a penchant for polygamy). Laws are created in order to apply equally . . . and that does not appear to be happening here.

QotD; [INSERT NAME OF MESSIANIC LEADER HERE]

Mrs Obama is most famous for declaring, a propos her husband's candidacy, that "for the first time in my adult lifetime I'm really proud of my country". Just a throwaway line reflecting no more than the narcissism and self-absorption required to mount a presidential campaign in the 21st century? Well, possibly — were it not for the fact that almost every time the candidate's wife speaks extemporaneously she seems to offer some bon mot consistent with that bleak assessment.

And when she stops looking back across the final grim despairing decades of the 20th century ("Life for regular folks has gotten worse over the course of my lifetime") and contemplates the sunlit uplands of the new utopia, it doesn't, tonally, get any cheerier. Pretend for a moment that the name of the candidate had been excised from the following remarks. Would it seem part of the natural discourse of a constitutional republic of citizen legislators? Or does it sound more appropriate to the leadership cult of Basketkhazia or some other one-man stan?

"[INSERT NAME OF MESSIANIC LEADER HERE] will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."

Barack, eh? Barack Jong-Il? Unlikely. Not too many "comfort zones" in Pyongyang. Barack Turkmenbashi, the late dictator of Turkmenistan? Possibly. But he would have exhorted his people to push themselves to grow more melons (a particular source of national pride). No, the above words were his wife's vision of life under the Administration of Barack Obama, the transformative Presidential candidate offering change you can believe in — or else. I hate to sound like I'm walled up in the Shed of Cynicism, but the constitutional right to be "uninvolved" and "uninformed" is one of the most precious, at least if the alternative is being "required" to work at coming out of your isolation and engaging with fellow members of the uninvolved, uninformed masses as we push ourselves to move out of our comfort zone.

Mark Steyn, "Mrs. Grievance", National Review, 2008-04-29

More on the FDLS case

A few links on the recent FDLS situation:

• Jesse Walker's "First They Came for the Toddlers..."
• "Grits for Breakfast" roundup of posts
• "The Polygamy Files" from the Salt Lake Tribune

For those coming in late . . . there's plenty of paranoia flowing, even this long after the notorious raid on the Branch Davidiansin Waco turned into a prolonged siege, eventually costing the lives of 82 people.

QotD: Paranoia in politics

On Tuesday the lesbian assassin of Vince Foster won Pennsylvania's presidential primary. In the larger contest for the Democratic nomination, though, she still lags behind a jihadist sleeper agent who is simultaneously a secret Muslim, a secret Communist, and a secret Republican. Whoever wins their race will go on to face a brainwashed puppet of the Viet Cong, and whoever wins that race will then get on with the modern president's central task: serving the interests of Mexico. It must be true, I read it in my email.

There's a persistant political myth that paranoia is only a feature of the fringe, something common among alienated radicals and reactionaries but rare in the great American center. In fact, paranoia has been ubiquitous across the political spectrum. You can find it in nearly every faction and movement at every point in American history, not least among those establishment figures who think they're immune to conspiracy theories. (The most lurid and destructive tales of Waco were not told by militiamen after the raid was over. They were told by the media and the government while the siege was underway.)

Jesse Walker, "The Paranoid Style Is American Politics: Fear and loathing on every campaign trail", Hit and Run, 2008-04-24

QotD: Banning "evil-looking" guns

When a rash of gun murders takes place, it makes sense for the police to do one of two things: renew tactics that have been effective in the past at curbing homicides, or embrace ideas that have not been tried before.

But those options don't appeal to Chicago Police Supt. Jody Weis. What he proposes is a crackdown on assault weapons.

I'm tempted to say this is the moral equivalent of a placebo—a sugar pill that is irrelevant to the malady at hand. But that would be unfair. Placebos, after all, sometimes have a positive effect. Assault weapons bans, not so much.

If there are too many guns in Chicago, it's not because of any statutory oversight. The city has long outlawed the sale and possession of handguns. It also forbids assault weapons. If prohibition were the answer, no one would be asking the question.

Steve Chapman, "The Cops That Couldn't Shoot Straight: Chicago police and their proposed, unworkable gun ban", Reason Online, 2008-04-24

There's regrets, and then there are "regrets"

Tom Tomorrow captures the nature of the regrets being offered after five years:

QotD: The Ron Paul Campaign

To be sure, by every conventional measure Paul’s presidential bid has been an abject failure — not a single primary win and only 14 delegates as of press time. Yet Paul managed to raise more than $20 million, virtually all of it online, and inspire an army of hyper-devoted and mostly youthful followers using a pitch — and a style — that will have much more to do with 21st century politics than whatever models of Buick and Oldsmobile the Democrats and Republicans eventually crank out this year. That’s how Paul pulled together over 67,000 people at the social networking site MeetUp (a total that was more than 20 times the number who signed up for the next most popular candidate, Barack Obama). That’s why he won raves from quarters as disparate as conservative commentator George Will (who called Paul "my man" on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos"), punk icon Johnny Rotten (who gave Congress' "Dr. No" a celebratory shout-out during a "Tonight Show with Jay Leno" episode), plus a self-explanatory group called "Strippers for Paul."

What explained the ability of this odd politician, with his inept campaign management team, to attract gobs of money, if not actual votes? Because it was only Ron Paul who said something truly distinct this campaign about the very nature of power. Namely, that government should have less of it on all levels and in every instance. "I don't want to run your life," Paul says. "I don't want to run the economy. ... I don't want to run the world." Such sentiment is simultaneously radical and fully in the Jeffersonian tradition of governing best while governing least. The right to be left alone, as Justice Louis Brandeis once put it, is at the very center of the American experiment because it allows individuals and the communities they form to pursue happiness in competing, peaceful ways. This is especially true in Long Tail America, where people are not only increasingly tolerant of alternative lifestyles but are constantly on the hunt for ways to individualize and personalize their own lives.

Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, "Tuned Out (PDF download)", Politics, March 2008

There's a reason why Fark.com has a "Florida" tag

Katherine Mangu-Ward looks at Florida's unhappy relationship with that whole "elections" thing:

If Florida had a Homeric epithet (think Hector, tamer of horses) it would be "Florida, wrecker of elections." To Hades with "the Sunshine State."

This winter, the Florida Democratic party moved their primary up to a week before Super Tuesday, eager for the nation to watch its pilgrimage to the voting booth with bated breath once again. The national party warned that there would be consequences for states that jumped the line, and lo and behold: The Florida Democrats were stripped of their convention delegates.

And now, with Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) scratching each others' eyes out all the way to the finish line, Florida, wrecker of elections—along with Michigan, builder of iron horses—could well be the decider.

[. . .] Florida and Michigan are battlegrounds, not for principle, but for pride and victory. Politicians will be politicians, but Florida's voters have graciously bowed out, turning down the chance to indulge in the sacred rite of voting twice in the same contest. For that, one can almost forgive them the havoc they've caused.

QotD: Drug hysteria

On the opening page of High Society, which aims to explain "how substance abuse ravages America," Joseph Califano declares that "chemistry is chasing Christianity as the nation's largest religion." Although it is not always easy to decipher Califano's meaning in this overwrought, carelessly written, weakly documented, self-contradictory, and deeply misleading anti-drug screed, here he seems to be saying that opiates are the religion of the masses. Americans, he implies, are seeking from psychoactive substances the solace they used to obtain from faith in God, and better living through chemistry is nearly as popular as better living through Christ.

That claim, like many Califano makes, is unverifiable, and it does not seem very plausible. Americans may be less religious than they used to be, but large majorities still say they believe in God and identify with specific faiths, making the U.S. much more religious than other Western countries, which tend to have substantially lower drug use rates. Although Americans have a bewildering array of psychiatric medications to choose from nowadays (with permission from a doctor), they smoke a lot less than they did in the 1960s and drink less than they did a century ago, when they also could freely purchase patent medicines containing opium, cocaine, and cannabis. If the devout are less inclined than the doubters to use mood-altering drugs, how is it that mostly Mormon Utah leads the country in antidepressant prescriptions? And if chemistry and Christianity are locked in competition, what are we to make of Jesus' water-into-wine miracle, or of the Native American Church, Uniao do Vegetal, and other groups that combine Christianity with psychedelic sacraments?

Already I have put more thought into the alleged connection between faithlessness and drug use than Califano did. And so it is with the rest of the book. A proper debunking would require more than the 186 pages of text that Califano, a domestic policy adviser to Lyndon Johnson and secretary of health, education, and welfare in the Carter administration, squeezes out of conversations with politicians and old reports from the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA), the prohibitionist propaganda mill he founded and heads.

Jacob Sullum, "No Bad Drugs: The arbitrary distinctions at the root of prohibition", Reason, 2008-03-20

Justifying the war on (some) drugs

Radley Balko has some thoughts on the current state of play in the war on (some) drugs:

As for Dunphy's strange appeal to a junkie's authority, there are several problems with the "if you legalize drugs, everyone will become an addict" argument. Among them:

1) It assumes that prohibition is actually preventing access to illegal drugs in any meaningful way today. It isn't. I could have a bag of marijuana in my hands in about five minutes. As fast or faster than I could get a sandwich. It would probably take me 20 minutes to a half hour hunt down a small bag of heroin, but it wouldn't be difficult. And I could get either without any real fear of arrest. And I'm not a drug user. If I had actual connections, it'd be even easier. Some survey data shows high school kids can get marijuana as easily or easier than they can get alcohol.

2) It wrongly assumes that the all of the problems we associate with drugs — the bloody turf wars, the presence of particularly potent drugs like meth, the lengths to which dealers will go to get their premium, etc. — are the product of the drugs themselves, and not the product of them being prohibited. This chart helps slay that argument.

3) It assumes that the laws against using and distributing drugs are the only thing preventing a huge portion of the population from trying them, and becoming addicted to them. Legalization may indeed increase the use of currently banned drugs. But I have my doubts about a massive increase in addicts. The social stigma would still be there, as it is with alcoholism. Perhaps more people would experiment. But it isn't clear that that's a bad thing. Use is not abuse, no matter what ONDCP says in its press releases. And the vast majority of drug users — even "hard" drug users — don't turn into addicts.

I've often argued for easing the restrictions on various drugs, not because I particularly want to use them myself, but because the costs of keeping them illegal far outweigh the benefits. It's not something Canada could do in isolation from the United States, as we are too vulnerable to trade sanctions which the current government would rush to put in place if we were seen to "weaken" in the war on drugs.

Drug prohibition is working just about as well as alcohol prohibition did in the 20th century. Believe it or not, that's seen as a positive comment in drug warrior circles.

A (fiscal) plague on both their houses!

Steve Chapman casts a jaundiced eye over the last three presidential candidates still standing:

For some time now, the three presidential candidates have been striving to outdo each other on what Hillary Clinton calls "the commander-in-chief" test. She says that she and John McCain have passed it. McCain's response has been on the order of, "What do you mean, 'we'?" Recently, Barack Obama assembled a passel of retired generals and admirals to publicly salute him.

It's good to know they are preparing themselves for that 3 a.m. phone call. But I'm not convinced any of them is ready for the 8 a.m. call from the budget director reporting that the deficit is raging out of control. When it comes to combating the fiscal menaces we face, these three are all absent without leave.

The budget situation is already dire. In the last six years, the federal government has spent some $1.8 trillion more than it has taken in. This year, the deficit will hit an estimated $410 billion. If the economy falls into a recession, the gap will grow.

Believe it or not, these are the good old days. In the next few years, the budget will begin to show the effects of a mammoth event that has long been dreaded: the retirement of the baby boomers. Social Security and Medicare already account for one-third of federal spending, and over the next 30 years, they are expected to nearly double in cost as a share of the total economy.

QotD: Revisiting Salem

American history is littered with examples of puritanism deranging the law, from the Salem witch trials onwards. Anthony Comstock, a 19th-century anti-porn campaigner, used his position as a postal inspector to seize 50 tons of books and 4m pictures. He boasted that he was responsible for 4,000 arrests during his career and 15 suicides. Under Prohibition people could be imprisoned for life for consuming alcohol.

Puritanism continues to stalk the country in new guises. The most dramatic example is America's new version of Prohibition — a "war on drugs" that helps explain why one in 100 American adults are in prison. But there are plenty of humbler examples. Schools impose zero-tolerance rules that result in expulsion for minor offences. The citizens of Texas may not buy dildos. Americans are banned from drinking until they are 21.

The combination of legalism and puritanism invariably produces the same dismal results. It creates expensive government bureaucracies that seize on any excuse — rules relating to inter-state commerce are a particular favourite — to extend their powers to boss people about or spy on them. It throws up swivel-eyed zealots who pursue their manias with little sense of proportion or decency (remember Kenneth Starr). And it ends by devouring its children. Mr Spitzer is only the latest in an endless line of self-righteous crusaders impaled on their own swords.

He certainly had no choice but to resign (as he did on March 12th) if, as it seems, he broke the law. But that still leaves the bigger question of whether the law is an ass. George Bernard Shaw once defined "Comstockery" as "the world's standing joke at the expense of the United States"; but it is hardly a joke for the people who are caught in its tentacles. There are enough real problems for America's law-enforcement officials to worry about.

"The hypocrites' club: Now with a new diamond-level member", The Economist, 2008-03-13

"I love the smell of schadenfreude in the morning"

Samizdata Illuminatus takes a good deep breath:

If I was a believer, I would be pouring a thankful libation right about now. Eliot Spitzer, one of the most nasty power crazed politicos in US politics today, perhaps second only to Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson in authoritarian thuggishness, has just shown that he who lives by the judicial sword, can oh so easily die by the judicial sword. To see a man who thought nothing of using the power of the state to intimidate those who dared cross him get caught in a Federal wiretap is . . . well . . . sweet. I love the smell of schadenfreude in the morning.

Reviews of Playmobil's latest toy

You may have heard that Playmobil, the toy company, recently introduced a toy to help train children to become jackbooted thugs TSA workers. The reviews on Amazon.com are very interesting reading:

You can also read the Fark thread for more frothing-at-the-mouth goodness.

QotD: British terrortourists

While Britain is fast catching up to America—and leading Europe—in illiteracy, obesity, and violent crime (despite ubiquitous surveillance cameras and an ineffective ban on handguns), the Wittgenstein references in Monty Python still shape our assumptions of British cultural supremacy. But as the English social critic Theodore Dalyrymple observed in 2004, to profess an interest in high culture in today’s Britain is to be met with accusations of homosexuality.

So before President Ron Paul restores the gold standard, it should be acknowledged that the sagging dollar is providing one useful service: a long-overdue corrective to our self-image as lesser Brits. Europeans, who ranked the English as the “world’s worst tourists” in a recent Expedia poll, have long ago disabused themselves of such stereotypes. Take a look around New York, Boston, or Los Angeles, and spot the omnipresent gaggle of chavs, waddling through the Adidas shop, shouting drunken insults in local Irish pubs, converting the currency on every product within reach. England is just America writ small.

Michael C. Moynihan, "Take Them Back to Dear Old Blighty: The ugliest byproduct of the sagging dollar", Reason Online, 2008-03-06

QotD: Jury Nullification

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger [link not in original article], who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren't fictional.

Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Richard Price, and David Simon (writing team for The Wire), "The Wire's War on the Drug War", Time, 2008-03-05

The evolution of the hotel

Kerry Howley finds interesting things in A.K. Sandoval-Strausz's Hotel: An American History:

Hotels, he argues, were "a significant episode in the modern idea of a pluralistic, cosmopolitan society," and conservatives invested in the status quo were right to fear them. Transportation advances granted people a new mobility, and traveling Americans suddenly required social mores not predicated on years of shared community bonds.

[. . .]

Hotels were a new institutional form that upset expectations about the arrangement of daily life and alarmed defenders of domesticity. They were full of beds and liquor, associated with sex, theft, and violence. Guests interacted with no patriarch — only a relatively egalitarian ecosystem of managers, porters, and bellboys. As people began to take longer and longer hotel stays in the mid-18th century, sometimes even living in them, "an entire genre of screeds against hotel living" was born, mourning the decline of traditional gender roles in a world where cooks and maids left women hopelessly idle.

None of this did much to dampen Americans' collective zeal for travel and the institutions that would house them along the way. By the end of the 19th century, the American stranger had a new role in the social order: He was a guest.

Canadian rednecks

ChuckerCanuck performs a service in identifying the characteristics of Canadian Rednecks:

Often, as we travel the United States, we pass folks who stick their patriotism on their bumpers — the stars and stripes pasted on their cars to advertise their unthinking love of America. For many Canadians, this overt patriotism is decidely foreign. And yet, in my corner of the world, where Liberals win ridings by margins that would make Bashir Assad blush, there is a growing prevelance of people slapping Canadian flag license plates on the front of their vehicles. Canada has rednecks. And to help you identify a Canadian redneck, I have put together a short checklist for your benefit.

H/T to Mark C. at Daimnation for the link.

QotD: Americans, from the Canadian perspective

Like all Canadians, Americans are my #1 spectator sport. I find you all hugely entertaining to observe anthropologically, and I know you pretty well by now.

Bruce Rolston, "A quiet plea", Flit, 2008-02-01

Bill Buckley

William F. Buckley, Jr. died yesterday at the age of 82. Love him or hate him, he was unique in American politics. Reason's former editor Robert Poole has a farewell column posted:

I received the news of Bill Buckley's death with a great sense of loss. No, he was not a major intellectual influence on my becoming a libertarian. I have to credit Robert Heinlein and Barry Goldwater and Ayn Rand for that. But since for most of us libertarianism as an intellectual and political movement has been an offshoot of conservatism, Buckley in truth was a great enabler.

By creating National Review in 1955 as a serious, intellectually respectable conservative voice (challenging the New Deal consensus among thinking people), Buckley created space for the development of our movement. He kicked out the racists and conspiracy-mongers from conservatism and embraced Chicago and Austrian economists, introducing a new generation to Hayek, Mises, and Friedman. And thanks to the efforts of NR's Frank Meyer to promote a "fusion" between economic (free-market) conservatives and social conservatives, Buckley and National Review fostered the growth of a large enough conservative movement to nominate Goldwater for president and ultimately to elect Ronald Reagan.

There's also a PDF of Reason's 1983 interview with Buckely available for download here.

Update: Radley Balko has a few things to add:

The guy got some things wrong, but he got a lot right (in both senses of the word).

Buckley leaves an enormous legacy, but to the detriment everyone, the right left Buckley years ago. Where Buckley stood athwart the tide of history and beat it back with wit, sophistication, and argument, we today get best-selling Regnery screeds from lowest-common-denominator clowns like Ann Coulter, Dinesh D'Souza, and Glenn Beck. Where Buckley mistrusted government and aimed to slow the world down, he's been usurped on the right by the likes of William Kristol and David Brooks, men who want to use government to remake the world in their own image. Where Buckley flourished in cosmopolitan Manhattan and took delight in life's finer things, modern conservatism has grown disdainful of the marketplace of culture, commerce, and ideas abundant in urban areas (witness the last election, where many on the right weirdly smeared John Kerry as a "latte-sipper"—real Americans apparently drink Maxwell House). In fact, today's Bush/neocon-right is often contemptuous of commerce itself, sometimes calling the voluntary, unchecked exchange of goods, labor, and services—a pure free market—"ugly" and "crude."

Obama-mania explained to Guardian readers

A brief introduction to the wave of Obama-worship currently engulfing Democratic primary voters by David Weigel:

Maybe it started with the fainting. After a while you couldn't ignore video and reports of Barack Obama supporters, sardine-tin-packed into his monster rallies, blacking out and dropping to the floor as the candidate hit his applause lines. Or maybe it started with the music video Yes We Can, a black-and-white, celebrity-studded mash-up of Obama's soaring South Carolina primary victory speech.

Somewhere on the Illinois senator's improbable march toward the Democratic nomination — and his remarkable steamrolling of the heretofore invincible Clinton family — the American commentariat tried to shake it off. Los Angeles Times columnist Joel Stein fretted about a "cult of Obama." Ne