Are we in denial about the threat of home grown jihad?

We in the United States have been both extremely lucky and to a degree that for obvious practical reasons we cannot know the extent of protected by active intervention by our intelligence services, law enforcement agencies and armed forces that no terrorist attacks of the scale of the 9/11/01 attacks or even horrific smaller scale attacks on foreign soil like the bombings in Madrid or London have been successfully perpetrated. While some plots have been publicly unearthed before they occurred and their plotters arrested, those apparent successes have been quickly forgotten. The list of foiled plots that have been dislosed to the public include an eerily similar plot to shoot soldiers at a military base in New Jersey--Fort Dix-- by a group of Albanians living near Cherry Hill in the Philly suburbs, sparsely outlined plans to bomb various financial office buildings in Newark and New York including the headquarters of Prudential, a recent plot to blow up a synagogue in the Bronx was foiled in a sting operation nailing a group of stooges who were fooled into buying fake missiles from a group of Feds, et cetera, as I'm sure I am forgetting other publicly disclosed abortive attack plans.

These stories are edifying but both common enough and lacking in sensational detail that they hardly register in the public consciousness, since when we hear about how would-be disasters are squashed into foiled plots and would-be notorious terrorists are thrown into the clink as ineffectual conspiratorial losers it seems we immediately forget both the broad strokes and the details of these thankfully non-sensational, non-memorable stories. But things we've learned from these foiled pots are that while sometimes the perpetrators of these would-be attacks have connections to the international, highly organized, Al Qaeda-type terrorist groups that other plots involve those whose backgrounds and motivations are diverse and not necessarily rooted abroad. While Mohammed Atta like fundamentalists are almost surely still trying to hit us, Saudi or other Gulf Arab foreign nationals, relatively well educated, in the country illegally, with logistical and monetary support from some well-funded and highly ideological mastermind hidden in a far off land, other threats derive from less organized, more "lone wolf" type operators.

The Fort Dix shooting plot, though, was planned by Albanians who blended into a suburban New Jersey community--I never learned if they were in the country legally, illegally or if they were citzens--who likely never had any connections to high-ranking, notorious terrorists like Bin Laden. The plot to blow up a synagogue and Jewish Community Center in the Bronx--and to acquire weapons of mass destruction including missiles-- involved a group of men who were Muslims and probably Haitian and/or African-Americans who happened to be radical Muslims, of course the media helpfully forgot to mention whether they were citizens, linked with foreign terrorists, or even to confirm if they were Muslims.

This tendency of our prominent print journalism and over-air and liberal cable television media and perhaps worse our elected officials to ignore or downplay, for reasons of political correctness, the existence of a small cohort of radical Islamists in the U.S. is an embarrassing failure to confront an uncomfortable truth: While certainly not a thriving or widespread phenomenon, and one that seems to be generally well contained via intelligence and law enforcement, violent, radical Islam and the potential for terrorist attacks that entails is a domestic concern for the United States. Either embodied by foreigners illegally in this country, or by a thankfully very limited subset of the broader Muslim community, a litany of foiled plots and now possibly another armed massacre either clearly or apparently are the product of Islamic fanaticism.

The MSM response to the Fort Hood shootings has been somewhat breathtaking in its projection of loathing for Bush-era foreign policy onto a killing spree that was either a case, similar to many we've seen before and will see again, of a man (who in this case just happened to be a Muslim) dealing with mental illness reaching a breaking point and lashing out in an act of random mass violence, or else possibly a premeditated, politically motivated act of mass murder that could be described as a terrorist attack. However, the reaction in the media has been to point to Hasan as virtually a victim in all this; a particularly egregious characterization that differs mostly in degree, but not in basic assumptions, ran in Newsweek and carried the basic politically correct narrative: Hasan snapped as a tragic but predictable consequence of the horrors of prolonged war on soldiers that have resulted from Bush's invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Newsweek takes it a step further and suggests that this is a harbinger of things to come, as stressed out soldiers turn into gorked out killing machines once deposited back in civilian society:

Details remained murky, but at least 13 are dead and 30 wounded in a killing spree that may momentarily remind us of a reality that most Americans can readily forget: soldiers and their families are living, and bending, under a harrowing and unrelenting stress that will not let up any time soon.

Here's a problem with that thesis: this would have been Hasan's first deployment overseas. After choosing to have the military pay for his medical education, choosing to stay in the armed services, making the rank of major, he was going to be deployed, for the first time at age 39, into a war-zone, not as an active combat soldier but as a behind-the-front-lines doctor treating our soldiers' psychological wounds. Unless post-traumatic stress disorder is contagious and he was so mentally perturbed by treating soldiers who had been through that very stressful situation, Hasan did not snap due to the stress of combat.

Furthermore, a long list of indicators that at the very least disagreement with American foreign policy played a role in Hasan's disillusionment with the military if it was not his prime motivation are allegations that he shouted "Allahu Akbar" as the attack began, that he had had argued repeatedly about U.S. foreign policy invading Islamic nations even while treating combat veterans for mental illness, that he had surfed radical Islamic websites and offered a rationale for suicide bombing, and that he had several run-ins with institutional authority during his education and military service for incidents of inappropriate conduct.

There are also indications he planned to die on Thursday at least a short while in advance; he acquired the weapons recently and specifically for the attacks, he didn't just grab guns he already owned in a furious, hastily made decision to kill; he reportedly gave away or otherwise disposed of his possessions, a classic indicator that an individual is planning suicide. These actions, of course, do not mean that this was an act of domestic terrorism, and nor do the above mentioned alleged details that indicate he was at least opposed to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and that he perhaps empathized, sympathized or was supportive of a radical Islamist cause. The motivation for this act may never be fully explained even if Hasan regains consciousness and explains himself; I believe that his motivation could be anywhere on a broad spectrum from personal disaffection that motivated killers like Seung-Hui Cho (the Virginia Tech shooter) to an outright act of political violence I would classify as a terrorist attack.

As a native-born U.S. citizen who happened to be Muslim, Hasan having, to say the least, mixed feelings about his role as a part of an organization that has killed thousands of other Muslims is understandable. Having presumably heard horrific stories about what those wars had done both to the inhabitants of the invaded countries and the American soldiers he treated one can also imagine that his feelings had a particularly emotionally charged aspect to them. However, a rabid television watcher or newspaper reader can tune into our media which has a seemingly insatiable hunger for sensational and emotionally wrenching stories that describe the toll this war has taken on the bodies and psyches of American troops. Furthermore, millions of Americans hated George Bush, hate the wars, et cetera, and yet do not act out in violence as a result.

In other words, while it is understandable that Hasan would be in a emotionally conflicted state being forced to go to Afghanistan to participate in part of an effort he didn't believe in and perhaps even thought was evil, that still leaves us searching for an answer to the question of why his reaction was random mass murder. While personal disaffection, political disagreement with military action, or some chaotic mixture of the two in his mind are all possible explanations, and perhaps the latter explanation is the most likely, we must face up to the fact that if it was a mainly political act of violence then this is essentially the act of a lone terrorist: he committed an act of random violence against a representative group of innocent people (American soldiers and civilians) as a way of revolting against a political policy he disliked.

Even if Hasan's sympathetic feeling towards the radical Islamist cause was only a partial motivation for the attack, the denial by our media and leaders to admit that radical Islam could have played a part in this and numerous other failed plots and that this could even be an outright domestic terror attack is disturbing because it minimizes an inconvenient fact for those who would like to paint the struggle against radical Islam as something remote whose main relevance is on the level of America's geopolitical standing in the world. The fact of the matter is that while America does not face the demographic challenges of European countries with substantially larger Arabic and other Islamic minorities, it remains apparent that the battle against radical Islam in the hearts and minds of individuals is not limited to the Middle East, foreign countries, or as evidenced by John Walker Lindh, Adam Gadanh, etc., those who were born into Muslim families. A common concern when pointing out such inconvenient facts is that the civil liberties of Muslim Americans will be trampled or that they will be ostracized by their neighbors; I fail to see how mere denial of such obvious facts that not go ignored by the average American makes these undesirable outcomes less likely. It is time that we admitted to ourselves that the fight against radical Islam is not limited to "overseas contingency operations" and that jihad is born of a mindset, not a geographic locale.

Why everyone can say yes to "The Party of No"

Tuesday's elections sent mixed signals that could be spun positively by those on either side of the political spectrum. Republican chalked up their most noteworthy victories in statewide elections, specifically gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia, in the former state Democrats had held the Governor's mansion since Christie Todd Whitman left Drumthwacket 12 years ago, and in Virginia an easy victory in the Governor's race reversed a trend of steady Democratic gains in a once solidly red state. Republican wins in VA included all 3 top posts in the state executive branch (Governor, Lieutenant Governor and AG) in a state that has gone increasingly blue due both to changing demographics and shifting cultural milieu in northern Va. as ever-growing sprawl of the D.C. Metro has made part of the state that was the northernmost outpost of the Solid South increasingly more similar to the Democratic leaning bedroom communities of the Beltway in Georgetown and Maryland's suburbs.

On the other hand, voter turnout was low and just as many Virginian voters said they were voting to show their support for Obama (about 20%) as said those who were voting against Obama. In Presidential elections NJ is obviously solidly blue, and the vote was more a condemnation of John Corzine than an endorsement of Chris Christie, the Republican challenger and Governor-elect who couldn't even firmly promise to cut either of the state's near highest-in-the-nation rates on property and income taxes. On the one hand not offering specifics was not a great campaign strategy and the election was surprisingly close for such an unpopular incumbent with many disaffected voters casting their votes for an independent third candidate who did pledge to specifically cut taxes. While as a campaign promise, though, pledging property tax or income tax relief in New Jersey is almost perfunctory, especially for a Republican, Christie displayed a possibly pragmatic and possibly simply naive commitment to reality by not getting into specifics. Maybe his candor will help his re-election bid, since when he gets to Trenton a firmly Democrat state legislature is almost certain not to play ball and cut deals that would be absolutely crucial to any responsible plan that includes state-wide tax cuts for a state already already hemorrhaging red ink to slash spending written into law through years of insider bargain making with state coffers drained by commitments to teacher's, state employee's and other unions and myriad other special interests. Those laws that pleased corrupt party bosses mainly function to set up wasteful spending for which tax revenue from the state's middle class and upper class inhabitants collected via property and income taxes are funneled to the money-hole Democratic political machines that run the states' many poverty-entrenched, egregiously corrupt, tax-base lacking and patronage-heavy cities. In other words, as in VA, where a bitter Democratic primary and electoral discontent with the Democratic status quo led to the Republican win, this election was very much a local one, and it was basically a choice between a guy who at least is fuzzily in support of stomping out the corruption from New Jersey state politics even if he has no clue how to do it and a guy who played the corrupt game for years and in the process added to the tax bills' of the state's inhabitants while the economy went into the shitter. And even still, tens of thousands of people voted for an independent with no chance of winning since both major parties' candidates were unpalatable... and I can't say I really blame them.

Due to some of these fractures revealed amongst any group of voters that would put a really game-changing number of seats into the GOP's hands in 2010, Democrats may draw an opposite conclusion that may be countered by the same criticism (that these local elections were not de facto plebiscites on the Democratic agenda) as the one hotly contested special Congressional election handed a more than century-long GOP seat over to the Dems after a strong, grass roots movement of support for Conservative Party candidate Dough Hoffman made up of many elements of the traditional conservative base as well as a newly coalescing political force--the small-government, anti-spending "Tea Party" voters--fractured support in a largely conservative congressional district in northern upstate New York. The fact that the GOP-party picked liberal candidate (pro-choice, not unfriendly to all elements of the Obama agenda, etc.) Dede Scozzafava essentially withdrew from the race but endorsed the Democrat Bill Owens didn't heal the fracture and a split conservative electorate handed a 100+ year old red district to the Dems. The lesson supposedly on display here is that either outright electoral spoilers (in the form of third party candidates or scorned GOP primary losers running as independents) or internecine claw-fights within the GOP may mean that the GOP will not be able to capitalize on disaffection in unseating newly elected Dems in many relatively right-leaning Congressional districts.

There is too much time between now and 2010 to say what this election really means; my main reaction is to say it's the economy stupid... it always seem to be. The recession seems to have ended by official econometric measures, but it surely doesn't feel that way yet and jobs numbers don't seem to indicate. If a continued malaise on the economy is still being felt 12 months from now the idea that Obama just inherited problems too big to solve will likely ring hollow, and 4 years of Democratic control of the Congress with 2 years of near absolute autonomy in passing legislation will likely be met with severe Democratic bloodletting. On the other hand, if the unemployment numbers are on the upswing and the mood in the country is that things are getting better, while I still think the Dems will shed a fair number of seats in the House, at least, they could still retain significant majorities in both chambers of Congress and it could bode well for Obama's re-election. I predict we are in the end of the actual contraction of the economy but whether the recovery will be particularly robust and whether that will translate into more money flowing into the wallet of John Q. Voter in 12 short months is much harder to say.

Frankly, the Republicans, ironically, by being the "Party of No" are saving Democrats seats both by trying to defeat legislation that will stifle business activity and hurt the economy (and thus Democrats in 2010) as well as handing the politically inept Democratic Congressional coalition at least one arrow for their quiver (all the Republicans do is say no!) While the latter is not specifically true--the Republicans do in fact have a health bill... commonly omitted from characterizations of the GOP as "The Party of No" is the fact that it's very difficult to get your party's policy position onto the Congressional agenda when you're a super-minority in both chambers of Congress.

However, given the hand that they've been dealt--most liberal President since Carter, one of the most "progressive" groups of Congressional leaders who want to radically expand the Federal government's role in the individual's life since the New Deal, what policy position makes more sense than principled opposition until they are simply forced into an ineffectual nay vote against the Obama agenda if it makes it to the floor?

Obamacare, for instance... it won't add to the deficit? Does anybody believe this is not a massively expensive new entitlement, as every expansion of entitlement spending has always been and always will be? Is anyone not cognizant of the fact that the country's borrowing to finance its spending is not just unsustainable in the long-term, but utterly reckless in the medium to near term? That this is a massive tax on the young--who have less money--to subsidize a service that people who vote more consistently, the old, want? We already know from liberal state legislatures and the Federally enforced compartmentalization of state health-care policy what happens when mandates, community rating, and compulsory coverage of all regardless of health status results in: look at what has happened Massachussetts, New York and Maine for various mixed examples of the consequences of all those policies. "Competition," a nominal goal of Obamacare, in the sense at least of there being a large number of providers who offer different, more cost-effective services to meet consumer demands in order to capture market share in a competitive marketplace, completely dries up. The few providers who can fulfill the governments mandated smorgasbord of treatments for which they will reimburse doctors are faced with a problem: they cannot charge their customers rates that reflect anything like the expected cost of covering their medical expenses since the spread between the price offered to those who will likely need very little treatment--the young and healthy--must be some sigificant fraction (1/2, 1/3) of what the old and/or sick who will certainly rack up massive expenses can be charged (community rating.) Without a mandate the result is massively high premiums (in New York where this is basically the situation insurance covering an average family costs nearly $17k per year.)

If you have a mandate like Maine did you can cut costs by taxing the young (who are at the bottom of their lifetime earning curve, generally speaking) to subsidize a cost to the old. Obama has said this is not a tax and that this is like the requirement that all drivers have basic insurance; however you choose to use a government provided system of infrastructure when you drive a car. You had to obtain a car, a driver's license, and it would be useless without publicly maintained roads. You can opt out by moving somewhere where a bike or public transit gets you where you want to go. Further, your actions on the road continually pose a potential risk to total strangers; only when medicine is socialized does your medical problem become a financial concern of mine--your decision to run a red light on the other hand can impact me violently and we are both using an infrastructure which the state maintains and which we agreed to use as a privilege in exchange for giving up certain freedoms--to drink and drive or refuse to take a blood alcohol test, for instance. When you incur an obligation to buy insurance simply by being alive, phrase it anyway you like, that is a tax. It is money you will pay, by force of the government at the threat of punishment by that government, whether you want the insurance or not.

And finally, the most insane, the requirement that insurance companies accept those who are already sick. While horror stories about penny pinching insurers denying payment for necessary care certainly shock, the idea that it is equally practical to force insurers to take anyone defeats the entire purpose of "insurance." If you could buy car insurance after you had an accident and still have the damages paid for a) no one would buy insurance before they had an accident and b) the system would be pointless since to turn a profit insurance companies would simply become middlemen in paying mechanics since your "premium" would essentially be the cost of getting the car fixed itself, since only those with banged up cars would buy insurance. Combine it with with a mandate and prices will stabilize eventually, but the whole point of the reform process is that there is a large population of presumably sick, uninsured people who heartless Republicans simply want to find a quiet place to die. So to return to our analogy the policy is essentially that you will have a system like we currently do where everyone who drives has to have insurance but all of a sudden small fraction of the population with cars with massive damages from acccidents are going to be injected into the insurance system and the insurers must take them. Obviously to cover the costs of paying for all this new auto work, everyone's premiums are going up.

No matter how you spin it the results of states that have tried this shit (New York--most expensive insurance for a family in 2007, Massachussetts, 2nd, Maine, 9th) are that premiums cost more. So attached to the comprehensive reform is money to subsidize the care for those who can't afford the (much higher) new premiums. And you're telling me that this won't add to the deficit?

Why can't we try non-comprehensive, step-wise health-care reforms? Start with changing trade laws so that American developed pharmaceuticals cannot be bought so cheaply by the rest of the world, for one; ask not why Americans can't buy pharmies for the same cheap price as Canucks, ask why Canadians and all the other inhabitants of wealthy first world countries with some form of socialized medicine don't have a de facto moral responsibility, as a society, to shoulder their fair share of the burden for pharmaceutical R&D as Americans, who pay a disproportionate fraction of that cost for purely structural reasons. Their societies don't make quite as much per capita as us but they're hardly paupers; Canadians benefits just as much from their nationally negotiated, government bought pharmaceuticals as the saps in the U.S. who pay retail so Big Pharma can keep paying scientists to make new drugs, right? I guess they only like the idea of everybody getting equal benefit regardless of ability to pay on the level of individuals, not nations.

Go after the trial lawyers; don't just cap damage limits: make the plaintiff and their lawyer (especially) responsible for at least a portion of the court costs if the charges are found to be frivolous or fraudulent; if the distribution of doctors needs to be more focused on GPs and OB-GYNs as opposed to Dermatologists and Surgeons then have the government subsidize the malpractice insurance or med-school loans of a GP or OB-GYN. Allow real competition by de-regulating what insurance carriers have to cover and let the young and healthy buy a bare-bones, catastrophic only insurance pacakge with very high co-pays that put them; across the system reduce payment from premiums disconnected from consumer choice and make consumers cognizant of the cost of routine treatment: instead of having a business pay thousands of dollars for premiums behind the scenes and have their employees get their medicine "for free" or $5 or what have you, let them see that money as income in an account that can only be spent on health-care and let them shop around for the best price on a medical treatment.

Those are ideas the "Party of No" would probably support, but when the options are say NO! or get on board with defective ideas that will increase costs on everyone, tax the young, and create a massive new deficit-bloating entitlement at a time when that is the last thing we can afford, well, you say no. Ironically if Obamacare passes, and especially if it has anti-business taxes included where the wealthy (who own small business) and those who are in charge of human resources decisions at large businesses it will have, as the Obama Administration seems to fail to appreciate, a chilling effect on business. Uncertainty about future taxes and other costs associated with adding new employees and more generally adding uncertainty about the future regulatory and business climate is never, ever a stimulatory mechanism for increasing investment either in physical or human capital. I mean, if you were a businessman, and you were looking at what was going on in Congress, and you had to make a decision about whether to hire a new permanent employee out of college or to buy a new piece of technologically advanced equipment or to build a a new factory, but you had to try to read the tea leaves to figure out what it it will cost you in a year, or two, or three, let alone ten or twenty years, to, oh, let's see, pay for an employee's health-care, pay in income and capital gains taxes, borrow money with a possibly much higher interest rate or buy foreign goods with a possibly much weaker dollar, pay for electricity or other carbon generating activities, comply with possible new regulations on what gas mileage your automobiles can get, etc. ad infinitum, would you be encouraged or discouraged to make quick, rapid decisions to add employees to the payroll?

So, you see, the more effective the "Party of No" is in defending the status quo and preventing radical legislation that creates the potential for huge shifts in costs of business inputs that are highly unpredictable, the more likely the recovery is to be robust and to yield the kind of tangible results that voters care about: decreasing unemployment and more money in the family bank account.

It's unfortunate they won't get any sort of positive credit and will get actually get blamed and painted as a bunch of obstructionists if they succeed in preventing Obama's brain trust from creating--for realz this time--a social engineering project that will make us all better off. They might even pick up less seats in 2010 if Obamacare goes down in flames and voters don't get "free" goodies from their more wealthy neighbors they were hoping for... that's a shame, but when the alternative is, well, the radical transformation of health-care and energy policy, tax hikes, lord-knows-what sort of regulatory shenanigans, massive debt bloat, unsustainable deficits, possible soaring interest rates and a return to stagflation, well, "NO!" is a more palatable alternative.

The Obama Administration's Ass-Backwards Approach to Public Diplomacy

The United States has, like every other country that has played a major role in world history, committed national actions through state organs like its military, intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement agencies that have, both in the U.S. and abroad, been, frankly, evil. From the original sins of our nation such as the importation and exploitation of hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of African slaves and their descendants or the massacring, obliterating through disease, or forcibly relocating the indigenous inhabitants of what is now the U.S. to make space for European-style settlement to the more modern acts of savage barbarity in the context of a war to save the world from totalitarianism from Dresden to Tokyo to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to coups and complicity in right-wing, anti-communist death squads from the assassination of Patrice Lumumba to sending arms to the Nicaraguans, we've done some bad fucking shit.

Are we some sort of historical special case? Just in the permanent 5 of the security council, both Russian and China are today totalitarian states that do not allow basic human rights, and to look at those countries in the recent past they both had massive apparatuses for the crushing of the human spirit from the gulag to the re-education camp. Famines in Ukraine caused by forced collectivization, the starving to death of tens of millions during the Great Leap Forward, the material support of movements far worse than the Contras like the Khmer Rouge and North Vietnamese... and that's two countries.

A litany of the official acts of evil of all the countries with whom the U.S. must try to interact--even if we restrict ourselves to say, the past 10 or 20 years--would be interminably long. And yet for some reason Obama's role as the first post-George-Bush President somehow means that an important new part of statecraft is apologizing, post hoc, for policies that were not his own and in some cases were carried out so long ago that none of the aggrieved parties have been alive for decades. Obama has apologized to our European allies for the U.S.'s go-it-alone foreign policy of the previous administration and perhaps fair enough, but apologizing to essentially all of Latin America for basically all of American foreign policy in this hemisphere dating back to the Monroe doctrine? And the public excoriation of Israel and not its foes is curious due to the fact that in the major wars that Israel fought in the few decades following 1948 it was always in response to an attack (sometimes an organized ambush) from either one or an allied group of Arab states. Disproportionality of its modern military actions has been questioned, but the inability to fight on level ground and to spare civilians has been taken out of its hands by its enemies, not by its choice. Only since its Arab neighbors stopped trying to destroy it in war (mainly because they kept losing the wars they'd start) has Israel had to engage its military against more loosely organized terrorist groups who intentionally use asymmetric warfare and attacks on civilians to kill Israelis and force any Israeli retaliation to by definition cause collateral damage to the civilians amongst whom they hide.

The policy has seemed to be if you're being a provocative, human rights violating asshole (Chavez, Ahmadenijad, Putin, Zelaya, Castro) you get conciliatory talk and sometimes actual policy action rewards: Putin got us to very publicly and suddenly announce that--setting aside the wisdom of the missile shield as a military project--that the U.S. would abandon plans to establish a permanent military footprint on the soil of its new allies in Eastern Europe where Russia would like to once again like to fall under its sphere of influence. In Honduras after being removed from power due to a ruling from the Supreme Court where he violated a Constitutional ban on eliminating term limits--explicitly set up to preserve democracy and avoid a Chavez like power-grab--ex-President Zelaya has been supported by the U.S. in his attempt to IMHO illegally retake his former position as President. Ahmadinejad went from cracking the skulls of Iranian college students after likely stealing an election to retain his position as President to being courted by the State Department to please, please don't make nukes--even after the public disclosure of us and our allies' intelligence agencies discovering a secret, obviously military oriented Uranium enrichment facility near Qom.

What have our allies gotten? We pissed on Poland and the Czechs, we continue to fail to ratify free trade agreements with South Korea and Colombia, and most recently after Pakistan's army launched and continues a bloody campaign stabbing the heart of insurgent held territory to try to dislodge Al Qaeda from its perch in the tribal wasteland of Pakistan's oxymoronically named Federally Administred Tribal Areas, Hillary Clinton went there and essentially publicly accused them of at the very least being inept in their pursuit of, if not corruptly in bed with or downright complicit with the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

While strategic miscalculations about how and when the U.S. should have walked back plans for an Eastern European Missile Shield that probably tactically was not a great plan or waylaying ratification of a free trade deal with Colombia or being bizarrely supportive of an illiberal, nascent Central American Chavez disciple in Honduras all show naivete and discredit America's foreign policy team, miscalculations in the Middle East have far more strategic gravity and threaten geopolitical situations and relationships that cannot be repaired in the future nearly as easily as our relationships with small countries in Latin America or Eastern Europe.

Secretary of State Clinton's questioning of the Pakistanis commitment to dislodging Al Qaeda in public is particularly baffling. I do not mean to suggest that her concerns are illegitimate; she clearly has non-public information that I do not and Pakistan's previous actions on its western border suggest that factions within the Pakistani government--particularly the quasi-sovereign intelligence agency, the ISI--could very well be doing things like arming the Taliban or spying on other parts of the government more loyal to the more moderate power-base in Islamabad and tipping off the insurgents and terrorists as to where and when military strikes will come. But that seems like a conversation to have in private. In such a fractured and volatile nation such questioning does not seem like it can possibly have any beneficial effect for American strategy: Pakistani public opinion likely will not be swayed to demand more accountability from its current government by the U.S. questioning whether it has elements complicit with Islamic hardliners; to those who support the fight against Al Qaeda but who dislike the Americans (which I assume is the moderate position in that country) this seems like an offensive and very serious accusation. For those who hate the U.S. and either tacitly or actively prefer those who believe in the Taliban's worldview to that of either the Pakistani government or the U.S., the suggestion that the central government in Islamabad has been playing both sides seems like it will only stir up more distrust of the central government.

Across the border in Afghanistan President Obama argues that on the issue of Afghanistan, where dozens of soldiers are killed in action every week and every week of uncertainty allows the Taliban to consolidate its power and worsens our strategic position, unlike domestic health reform, he wants to ponder things over and get the policy decision right and not rush things. In another situation of being absolutely ass backwards wrong, while seriously flawed, we can muddle along without daily Presidential action to move us away from the status quo on health-care; in Afghanistan failure to make not only the right decision but the right decision in a timely fashion could threaten our strategic interests in that country.

The possibility of disengagement and not doubling down in Afghanistan as successfully happened in Iraq seems ever more curious as the days pass; wasn't this the "good" front in the war on terror? Or was that only when less American blood was being shed in Afghanistan than Iraq? Certainly America was far more justified to intervene militarily in the first place; we had been attacked and the Taliban admitted what we knew, that those who had planned the largest attack on the American mainland since the war of 1812 were being given sanctuary by that ruthless band of petty despots. The idea that we could withdraw and disrupt terrorist activities from afar is a policy that already failed in recent memory; 3 years prior to 9/11 Al Qaeda was high enough on the U.S.'s radar as a threat after the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that the Clinton Administration tried to strike back with cruise missiles against what was thought to be a weapons factory and a terrorist training camp in Sudan and Afghanistan, respectively (this was immediately before Bin Laden was kicked out of Sudan permanently.)

The flaw that is being stated now and is evident in a post-game analysis of that action (Operation Infinite Reach) was that while carrier groups and long-distance drones and whatever new toys our defense spending has paid for may give us nearly infinite logistical reach to put a hurting on some remote corner of the globe with a missile that the effectiveness is only as good as the intelligence that told you where to reach out and touch. Turns out that they were cooking up medicine in that "weapons" factory in Sudan and that a lack of boots on the ground in Afghanistan meant that we didn't know that the fact that we had arrested one of the Kenyan embassy bombers meant that a meeting planned including bin Laden at one of the camps we hit was canceled so we basically shot a couple dozen half million dollar cruise missiles at some dusty ground in Afghanistan.

If we pull out ya think the currently anti-Taliban village elders who give us info will still get on the blower and give us fresh coordinates to hit from afar with cruise missiles? They have to live there; the Taliban may forgive American collaborators as a pragmatic step if they reconquer a vacated Southeast Afghanistan, but the development of intelligence assets and the work done to sway the average Afghan away from supporting things like Taliban control of their village, opium production that funnels operational funds to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and general support for an alliance of mainly non-Pashtun Afghans and foreigners to capture and kill Taliban and foreign Al Qaeda fighters will be completely and permanently obliterated. And yet how the strategic calculus differs from the immediate post-9/11 period is not clear to me; then a Taliban at the height of its power controlled enough territory in what is a land of tribal fiefdoms that they had the resources to both deny Western countries access to capture or kill terrorist leaders like Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri and to shelter the world's most active and well-coordinated organization and infrastructure for planning terrorist attacks, training those who would commit them, and accomplishing relatively complex logistical tasks necessary to implement those plans like organizing and smuggling into the U.S. 19 suicide bombers and laundering and funneling the money into the U.S. to fund the hijackers ability to live and to learn to fly, etc. Today, a resurgent Taliban threatens to retake enough land and to sway enough of the local population away from helping the U.S. that without a large military contingent on the ground there that the same terrorist leaders would again control enough territory and manpower in a land beyond our military reach that if not the same situation, then at least a substantially similar and unacceptable situation would resume. Do we declare victory if the only change from the status quo ante is that Osama bin Laden has to worry about a cruise missile strike but he and his cohorts have retaken a substantial fraction of the territory they controlled before they launched the deadliest attack on the U.S. in modern history?

That a surge of troops would change the security situation and reverse the strategic picture as quickly in Iraq is certainly not obvious; a confluence of factors there helped the U.S.'s strategic position improve that were not necessarily caused by the surge in manpower: the Sunnis tired of effective rule by murderous foreign militants who had triggered a bloody civil war--remember the Sunni awakening councils? Certain other actors were negotiated with (bribed) into less violent means of exerting their influence, and all these improvements happened alongside a new dedication of manpower to counter-insurgency. Furthermore, while a very difficult to navigate tribal and ethno-religious factional situation exists in Iraq it is much less complex than that of Afganistan; in Iraq a primary fault-line of Sunni and Shi'a that are not nearly as internally fractured along tribal lines pervaded the military conflict, whereas the many tribal feuds in Afghanistan as well as a country that includes a large number of ethnic and religious minorities who must all be placated: Sunni Pashtuns who may or may not be favorable to the Taliban's brand of Sunni Islam, Shi'a Hazaras, Sunni minorities like Tajiks, Uzbeks and Turkmens all make it questionable whether an Afghan surge would produce a relatively cohesive, more stable nation-state where security was improved. Add to that the much less amenable geographic picture--clearing and holding an essentially flat country is very different than the mountainous terrain that has bedeviled every previous invader of Afghanistan--and doubling down seems risky... but what other option is there if you hold to the logic that the assault in October 2001 was essentially justified? What has changed?

And so I question why it seems we are constantly excoriating and putting on hold our allies--be they minor world players like the Czechs or Colombians, major and long-enduring allies like the Brits who for once are more hawkish on Afghanistan, or most disturbing crucial and embattled allies in volatile parts of the world like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Israel and Iraq. Meanwhile, it seems like we are concurrently placating and pandering to the worst of the worst of our enemies: from Caracas to Cairo, Moscow to Managua, Tehran to the Taliban's presently-growing stronghold. I hope it's naivete, but I fear it is rather Obama trying to consciously disavow what I believe is a misconception about what American power abroad represents. Amongst the progressive left the opinion that America is an "imperial" power is taken as axiomatic, and I believe that Obama at least implicitly buys into this formulation of American power as well. Forget that the Taliban protected and is ideologically in agreement with those who planned and carried out 9/11, the U.S. should end its imperial activities in the Middle East, period, and prevent further terrorist attacks via surgical strikes from afar or law enforcement alone.

If we are an empire, though, we are one of the worst empires ever; for every past empire has taken to the sword in order to conquer territory which becomes part of the empire in order to plunder wealth, take territory for colonization, or to conquer a prosperous territory and take its share of the wealth they produce. Our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, however, have cost us far more than we ever could plan to recover from some benefit of the invasions, and such benefit, if there were any, would not come in the form of tribute paid on oil profits or selling oil on our own behalf; Iraq would drill and sell its own oil and reap huge profits, while for our efforts we might slightly depress world oil prices by increasing production of a globally priced commodity. Some empire. Most empires, historically, have sent colonizers as opposed to diplomats to try to organize the conquered country into a politically independent polity whose stability would allow the empire to remove its imperial troops. When the Nazis conquered territories they murdered or enslaved their inhabitants to make room for their settlers, at worst, or at best in the West forced the conquered territories to become vassal states to a different sort of European Union where Berlin would rule over the conquered territory. Chaotic and unstable as they may be, the Karzai and al-Maliki governments are not run out of Washington.

The U.S. has done some shitty things in the past but in the scheme of things was invading Afghanistan to dislodge the Taliban--and the current effort to stabilize that country so that democracy and not theocracy take root--the action of an essentially evil, imperial power whose actions have been so shameful that it must almost in penance withdraw from the world stage and let the countries who haven't been bullies ineffectually try to sort things out?

Poll: American Voters support hovercars, fusion power plants

Scott Rasmussen and his eponymous polling outfit are sometimes seen as biased in favor of the GOP, since they often find polling numbers on things like Presidential Approval Rating that are a few points more in favor of the GOP than other polling organizations. Rasmussen attributes this to the fact that different polling organizations use different sampling criteria, and that the fact that Rasmussen polls likely voters as opposed to many polls that simply sample random adults or registered voters as opposed to likely voters tends to skew polls towards the GOP, since conservatives tend to turn out more reliably due to their demographic breakdowns, such as being older. That said, they were one of the most accurate polling organizations at the end of the Presidential campaign last year, off by 1 percentage point, and they tend to do well generally in predicting winners in non-tossup elections.

At any rate, Scott Rasmussen wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this summer that Democrats would benefit to pay attention to now.

We all know that despite the increasingly desperate accounting tricks the Democrats are trying--while they failed at putting $250 billion in spending in a separate bill the basic fact is that their budget scoring counts 4 more years of revenue than it does spending since the taxes start right away but the benefits don't kick in 'til 2013--that this bill is not deficit neutral. Recent polling from Rasmussen indicates that all voters care a lot more about the deficit (38% rank it as the top priority) than health-care (23%, about the number who strongly support health-care, and about the number of people who identify themselves as liberals.)

More importantly, I think that Democrats might be fooling themselves about what Americans actually want since their answers to poll questions are so self-contradictory as to indicate more about how Americans' think than what they actually will like when legislation is written and signed into law. Basically, Americans want free health-care. Not government run health-care that's paid for by taxes on somebody else, but a free-lunch, no-strings-attached, deux-ex-machina free health-care. Or at least that's what the polling indicates. The problem with the polls is that Americans want things that are mutually exclusive, and therefore, as indicated in the title of this post, are asking for something that no one could actually create.

For instance, 63%, a healthy majority, support the basic premise of the Democrats' reform, to expand coverage to more Americans and make sure Americans are never denied care. Only 28% are willing to pay higher taxes to achieve that goal (presumably increased health-care premiums driven by employer or personal mandates, taxes or competition from a subsidized public option would not be pleasing, either.)

Only 31% of voters are in favor of the individual mandate that forces young people to buy insurance coverage. But 74% want to provide care to that same young person in the E.R. even if they don't have insurance, when asked in a follow-up question. Presumably, though, when that young person doesn't pay the bill, they don't want their tax dollars used to make up the difference, either.

Despite the 63% mandate for more coverage of health-care, when this was written, 50% of people thought that quality of care will decline if reform is passed, 53% thought reform would make care more expensive, and 78% thought reform meant middle class tax hikes. And as Rasmussen emphasizes, 68% of likely voters were happy with their current care, meaning they have more to lose than to gain from a big government reshuffling of the status quo. These numbers indicate a fundamental distrust of the government to administer any big bureaucracy with any sort of competence, and I would say that skepticism is justified. The post office, often held up as a government edifice that works, runs at billion dollar losses every year (imagine the amount of red ink ObamaCare will generate) and the litany of government failures to provide basic services to those in need, or to people generally, are numerous: the DMV in every state--not even a Federal bureaucracy--is uniformly horrible, Federal programs like old-school welfare were such a failure that they were repealed by a centrist Democrat, Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security may be appreciated by some of the people who benefit from the transfer payment but they're all fiscal timebombs as Obamacare is bound to be, the housing projects that were built by liberal do-gooders in the 1960s either are dens of criminality and poverty or have been razed due to their utter failure, and across the country the Feds can't even keep basic infrastructure like highways in good repair while simultaneously subsidizing an inefficient, unused rail system (the Government subsidized Amtrak to the tune of $32 a passenger last year.)

With the jobs situation still in the crapper, the dollar and our national credit rating both in non-negligible danger, and in the face of an absolutely impossible to believe claim that this bill will not be a budget-busting disaster, let alone deficit-neutral, Democrats are hoping that all the problems and conflicting things that voters don't like that will be involved in Obamacare will be outweighed by the fact that 63% of Americans believe everybody should have health-care. I think everyone should have a pet Unicorn and that we should use nuclear fusion power plants to end our dependence on foreign oil. I think that the government should pay for my drinks at the bar. Do I think I should be taxed to pay for everyone's bar tab to be picked up? Hell no. So maybe liquor reform, like health reform, ain't exactly as popular as a cherry-picking reading of the polling numbers would suggest.

Net neutrality: neither position is really neutral

The necessity of the FCC is an unfortunate consequence of the laws of physics. Before cable television, both television and radio stations were chosen by dialing a doohicky in your device to listen for a signal being broadcast on a carrier wave that had a specific frequency. At the very beginning of the medium, there was no FCC, but eventually the proliferation of radio was such that the electromagnetic equivalent of a town commons was becoming overcrowded, with stations bleeding into one another because their carrier frequencies were too close and the broadcasters' signals were some combination of too powerful and broadcast from locations too close together geographically.

Legitimate government intervention was called for, to be sure; laissez-faire for radio would have meant nobody was better off. Being a public good, therefore, limited band-with provided a rationale for all sorts of rules, some good, some asinine, some in between over the years. The good rules allocate the bandwidth so that you can tune into 88.3 FM near Newark, New Jersey and hear the world's greatest jazz radio station, WBGO, and when you drive away from Newark at some point you lose the signal and pick up another station on 88.3 but that system of geographic distribution of frequencies is systematic and regular. The asinine rules include the old "fairness doctrine," the almost impossible to believe requirement that equal time be devoted to (I guess in theory) all sides of a controversial issue. Taken to it's logical extreme, mentioning the anniversary of the moon landing would require bringing on a moon-landing conspiracy nut to dispute that we actually landed on the moon. The intention might be described as good (although whether it was developed with pure-hearted intentions is unclear) but the result was that there was no coverage of political issues, a market force that the success of right-wing talk radio has made abundantly clear was being under-served. In-between rules include things like obscenity rules; people getting outraged by a split second view of Janet Jackson's breast might seem insane, but imagine if there were no regulation of content; even basic cable television which includes channels you don't overtly choose when you get cable have standards and practices departments, and it's due to the fact that when a medium has the possible exposure to millions upon millions of people, it is just impractical to broadcast clearly obscene material. South Park cleverly made a satire of these rules by counting the number of times they used the word "shit" in an episode that was, I believe, the first time a basic cable show used the word, at least repeatedly (over 100 times, as the running counter visible throughout the show recorded.)

South Park is not given enough credit and is far more than "shit" jokes, but it often shocks to make a point. Give broadcasters free reign, and less intelligent uses of shocking images and words would no doubt proliferate to draw attention. It's not a question of whether a person has a right to say something obscene in our society, it's a question of whether or not when you have a limited commons that demands government regulation (the bandwidth over which TV and radio are broadcast) if there should be codified standards of conduct. It's a gray area.

Similarly, both sides of the net neutrality debate are painting as black and white an area that is very gray. It's not a question of "do we bow to corporate giants or do the fair thing?" as the question often seems to be framed by net neutrality advocates. Of course, on the other hand, it seems to be the position of the big wireless carriers that oppose net neutrality that they own their slice of bandwidth, which, even as a strong believer in property rights, I find it hard to contemplate the metaphysical concept of owning a section of the electromagnetic spectrum, with which you can do whatever you want. However, much of the internet is not delivered wirelessly (although it increasingly is moving that way) and on that score I feel like it should be like HBO or Showtime: the FCC (or some other bureaucracy) can't say what you can send over infrastructure that was built privately and whose owner you've negotiated a deal with.

Reading about what its effects will be, it's not clear that siding with the forces of goodness and righteousness who support net "neutrality" will actually lead to a neutral condition as far as how fair the market is, or a particularly good set of consequences for the consumer. The net neutrality activists, as I see it, are essentially in favor of a policy that charges tractor trailer drivers and each member of a carpool the same amount to go through a tollbooth on a highway. That is, since network providers can't discriminate against traffic, watching viral videos of dogs dancing which eats up gobs of bandwidth must be treated the same by the network carrier you pay to get internet on your phone as their proprietary service which fetches real-time text-based sports updates. In other words, whether your web site or service is a massive contributor to a traffic jam (the tractor-trailer/YouTube) or a very small burden on the system (the carpoolers/text alerts when your favorite baseball team scores.) We don't prevent discrimination of different forms of literal traffic on another physical shared piece of infrastructure, our highways, in fact high occupancy vehicle lanes and increased tolls for bigger vehicles, or in NYC surcharges for riding taxis during high traffic times all are meant to discriminate against what we deem more costly and less efficient users of the network (big trucks, people who could be taking the subway instead of a cab at rush hour) than less costly and more efficient users of the system (carpoolers.) So the idea that net neutrality is some sort of status quo, or how every other problem of sharing public infrastructure clearly gets solved, you're just not on solid ground.

On the other hand, complete control of what is publicly managed infrastructure (a band of the spectrum) by corporations could lead to very bad consequences too. If AT&T is allowed to discriminate against traffic in whatever way it wants it can give its competitor, Apple, a leg up on its competitor, Google, by only allowing practical streaming video and music access via the iTunes store and either charging Google prohibitively expensive rates so that its videos on YouTube take forever to stream or shutting them out entirely. In other words, it can channel traffic to its corporate partners' sites by having them be blazing fast and the rest of the net numbingly slow by comparison. This seems like an extreme case, though, and empowering the FCC to regulate such cases seems like a proper middle ground, to me, as opposed to taking the view that all traffic on the net must be treated equally by anyone who carries bytes.

And as far as wired up carriers go, I don't know enough about the internet infrastructure to discuss this intelligently, but my feeling is that if the providers either own or can contract with those who own the infrastructure then there's no commons being trampled on; there's nothing stopping Google or some non-profit consortium from wiring up a neutral or anti-corporate set of lines. I believe, however, that the internet backbone lines are integrated enough and not owned by any one company enough that things like Comcast deciding to favor traffic from certain web-sites who pay it money is not likely technically feasible, but I don't know. However, it's not like the public air-waves, I do believe somebody can own their fiber optic network and if they built it it doesn't necessarily fall under the FCC's purview.

With respect to wireless, though, I think some level of regulation and discrimination against low-value, high-bandwidth content is going to be necessary; as the linked WSJ piece notes, in NYC and SF iPhone users are already noticing sluggish performance because of the neutral format of AT&T's current service and the bandwidth demands of so many iPhone users looking at dumb videos at once. To prevent such discrimination outright seems foolish, as does ceding all control of what is a public infrastructure to big corporations. I think the really neutral stance, and this is probably one of the few times I've ever come down on this, is more government regulation, with intervention if the net bends too far from neutrality in either direction.

The oxymoron of "Bi-partisan health-care reform"

I really don't have a strong prediction about what we're going to get in the end in terms of health-care reform. If forced to make a prediction I'd say that a relatively watered down but still over-the-long-term too expensive reform of the kind that was written in the Senate Finance Committee recently will pass. Democrats can literally pass anything they can agree on and while the progressive wing of the party cares about getting something more closely resembling socialist health-care than what the centrist Dems are proposing I think at the end of the day they care more about the success of theiir party which is inextricably linked to the success of Barack Obama. After Obama has called this an emergency that must be addressed for intra-party bickering among House Dems to derail the passage of a bill entirely would be politically explosive, whereas jamming the progressive bill down the throat of Americans who don't support it would be political hari kari and would both deepen the sure to be coming loss of seats in Congress and possibly make Obama a one-termer, since he will "own" this bill.

But I have no crystal ball and if I thought the same way Nancy Pelosi did I wouldn't disagree with her on virtually every issue, so predicting what she and other progressive members of Congress will do is impossible to do with any certainty.

However, the "gang of six" in the Senate Finance Committee hopes to make the health-care bill "bi-partisan" by attracting Olympia Snowe's vote (in the same way the stimulus was bi-partisan when it was passed with 300+ Democratic and 3 Republican yea's.) We see some effort in this direction in Obama's rhetoric, too, since in his big prime-time address he perfunctorily mentioned tort reform and illegal immigration (and after the "You Lie!" flap language providing normative language providing a mechanism a broad, objective statement that illegal immigrants wouldn't get health care from the gov't plan.

However, in general, the very notion that we can quit the feuding and a fussin' and come together and get a bi-partisan solution that embraces "common sense" that everybody thinks is fair is just insane. The Republican platforms or perhaps better termed the "conservative" or "small government" platforms for reform--so termed since there is no unified plan, even moreso than "ObamaCare" which is a hodgepodge of ideas and a number of bills the furthest advanced of which have only made it out of committee-- are defined by three general properties: being incremental, being market-based, and generally starting out with reforms that would change the structure of the system and wouldn't require any government funding. The platforms generally start from the premise that health care is too big of a part of the economy to overhaul all at once since if you make a mistake it turns an imperfect system (with different problems from countries with (more) socialized medicine) into a massive bureaucracy that combines the worst of the American and European health-care.

So therefore Republicans and libertarians likewise favor solutions that occur one at a time and are things like addressing the cost of defensive medicine by taking on the trial lawyers; allowing insurers to compete across state lines so that true compettion is given to all Americans in the form of being able to subvert overly harsh regulations that may make the insurance market in their state either very expensive (due to community rating or extra-inclusive rules like in NY and MA) or have very few insurers to choose from (like Alabama.) Another idea would be reforming the model of insurance where claims are filed for almost all services and changing it so that a small premium covers catastrophic care but relatively inexpensive treatments like doctors' visits are paid for out of pocket are permitted in order to increase consumer sensitivity to the price of such visits, procedures and tests in order to drive down costs. If these increasingly drastic changes to the rules fail then more draconian measures (in a relative sense) might be needed if the political will exists to expand coverage: forcing insurers to accept sick consumers and paying for it with rules like forcing younger, healthy Americans to buy private insurance (which I believe is Unconstitutional but which if true is not necessarily a hindrance to it being enacted) alongside some relatively weak form of community rating to pay for (i.e. the cheapest policy given to a healthy 20 year old is no less than 1/3 or 1/5 the cost of the most expensive policy given to a person with a chronic, expensive disease.)

Basically the idea would be to try to drive down costs by putting consumers actually increasing business versus business competition, reducing government interference and its market distorting effects in various states, reducing the cost of malpractice suits, and if those ideas don't suffice then using compulsion to pool the risk in a market that's still relatively free.

While both Democrats and Republicans claim they want increased competition, I really don't understand what Democrats mean by wanting to increase competition. The idea of the public option is to "keep insurers honest" by providing competition. But in any other sector of the economy we don't get rid of ineffective or outright nefarious companies by creating a government alternative, the free market does this for us by allowing a competitor to drive them out of business. I've said it before and said it again: does Wal-mart reap its massive profits because it screws its customers, using bait and switch tactics where advertised prices can be signed up for in advance and when the time comes to buy the product the price has doubled? Any retailer who did any sort of bait and switch like that would be driven out of business by true, free market competition. Wal-mart's competition from Target forces it to try to provide its customers products they're happy with for as cheap as possible. If Target didn't exist and Wal-Mart's profits were hugely inflated because nobody had a choice but to shop there and in addition to having a huge market share they had huge profit margins (instead of razor thin profit margins with huge volumes of sales) and the government tried to reform the retail industry by setting up a big box store that was run by bureaucrats with little or no business experience and could eventually run a loss that was backed up by taxpayer money would you describe that as competition? I'd describe it as racketeering. The government store provides the desired service that a free market could provide (affordable products) not through successful business practices but through its ability to backstop negative cashflows with tax dollars, and then uses this politically achieved "competitiveness" to force other stores to lower their costs to match, or else they go out of business. It might not be the same as going over and asking for the profits at the threat of broken knee-caps, but the effect would be the same, and would use the unique ability of government institutions to do so.

This is why "bi-partisan" health care reform is completely doomed; the visions are absolutely at cross purposes. Amongst the most progressives there is demand for single payer (and this concern arose in several Democratic town halls) and the mainstream seeks single payer which as described above is "competition" in the form of using government's ability to use government money to compel the actions of private actors into a system that's much closer to single payer than the current system. The Republican agenda is to incrementally try to drive down costs and then, possibly, if the reforms are not successful enough to drive down costs enough to increase access, then perhaps use more incentive driven solutions to expand coverage. The two are at absolutely cross purposes, and are driven by irreconcilably differing philosophies on the role of the government in health-care. The liberal position, while I don't want to speak for such a large swath of the country, judging from what I heard specifically about this idea from liberals at town halls, is generally something like this: access to health-care is a right to which Americans are entitled, in a way essentially undifferentiated from the way that they have a right to speak their mind, choose their religion, or own property.

The take on this issue amongst opponents of the government health plan is more complex and varies a bit more and I won't try to offer a single encompassing definition (and would note that my claim of the liberal view is not all encompassing, but appeared common amongst a large number of liberal question askers I listend to.) My own view, though, is probably similar to that of libertarians and libertarian leaning Republicans, and is a countervailing opinion that offers a moral rationale for why whole-cloth, nearly immediate reform is not necessary. The idea that one has a "right to health-care" is not specific enough; if you claim you have a positive right--a right that by implication makes demands of the private property of others-- it's insufficient to claim that you have a general positive right, you must explain what your positive right is to and why you have this right.

To whit, your right to not be robbed doesn't place any demand upon me other than that I don't rob you; your right to speak your mind doesn't put any cost on me other than if I choose to listen to it and find it offensive I will be offended. If you speak in a way that does impose a cost on me--for instance, by putting my life in danger by shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater, then your right to free speech is not a defense. The libertarian conundrum is that while my right not to be robbed by you does not impose a cost on you directly, if we relied on human nature to enforce these negative rights we would have chaos. We need police since if there is no system of justice and no fear of being caught when you victimize others, human nature will drive people to victimize others constantly. Therefore, the negative right to own property demands that taxes be collected and a police force be established. So how do we know where to draw the line on what is appropriate for the government to do to enforce your rights in practice, not just in theory, even if in theory enforcing the right is free? Well, a general guide that negative rights that require some finite institution to be created are acceptable is a good one--the military, the police, the courts, the prisons.

With positive rights saying "I have a right to health-care" begs a number of questions. What amount of health-care do you have a right to? $500,000 worth over your life on average for all Americans? As much as you need? As much as you want? Since of any good that can be provided health-care is one that people can demand an almost unlimited amount of: people don't want to die, and while at the end of life some people have the courage to deny futile, painful treatment, the common choice is to do have the doctors keep you alive at any cost. Further, if you don't pay, and you have the choice of getting as many expensive tests--full body cancer scans, etc.-- that promise to extend your life, many people would probably opt to have these scans, regardless of the cost. There is not an unlimited amount of resources to provide health-care, and already we spend more on health-care than any nation in the world; to bring in millions of new people into a government run system, whether de jure (unlikely) or de facto, the laws of supply and demand will lead to rationing of health care dollars, meaning either waiting for care or lower quality care. So do you have a right to timely health care? Do you have a right to high quality health care? Only in utopia does the answer "you have a right to as much health care as you want" (or need, for that matter) combined with "you have a right to timely health care" and "you have a right to high quality health care" lead to a system that is practicable in the real world. The experience of Canada and Europe where sacrifices in both increased wait times and worse health care outcomes for those in the system (significantly lower survival rates for cancer, for instance) provide evidence for this.

So you need to do more work than say that you have a right to health care. Furthermore, you need to explain why, unlike the rights in the bill of rights and those recognized in common law, how it is a "right" to require others to forfeit their property (tax dollars) to provide you a service as not a method of enforcing that right, but as the essential nature of the right itself.

So if you get sick after getting fired should you die homeless and broke in the richest country in the world? No! We already have embodied in our law an admittedly completely inadequate last line of defense to try to stop this in that ED's in hospitals across the country must provide care without asking questions about ability to pay. Waiting until you have the infarction, though, is not the best system, obviously. I would reformulate the idea that "you have a right to health-care" like so: in the wealthiest country in the world we should set up our system so that most people can afford health-care for themselves without breaking them financially, but for those who cannot, we should provide them with a compassionate level of health-care, and we should do our best to minimize the number of people who fall through the cracks. One of the most crass and misleading arguments I've heard for whole-cloth reform is that something like 1500 people in the country die every day because of lack of comprehensive health-care run by the government. Well, shockingly, people in Britain and Canada die from diseases and injuries and complications that we have the medical technology to cure, and they don't die from malpractice. So should we start a death count for socialized medicine? Unfortunately, health care is a scarce resource; there are only so many doctors, there are only so many hospital beds, and dictating that everyone get great health care will not change that fact. It can change it so that more people are in the system, but so that instead of having people die because they did not have an adequate method of paying for health-care in our current system, they die because of a delay in getting an MRI to detect a brain tumor that would have been curable under the status quo.

Government bureaucracies generally are less efficient and cost-effective than their truly free market counterparts (see: USPS versus UPS in getting a package across country) and unlike government bureaucracies free market entities can't run at a loss for a sustained period of time, let alone as a matter of course. These are worrisome properties to observe when the idea is advanced of creating a massive, new, all-encompassing bureaucracy to dole out health-care--even if the providers are private entities. While the goal of a utopia where everyone has awesome health-care is just that--a goal--in no country have they solved the paradox that expanding coverage and controlling costs means longer waits and worse quality. Therefore, I propose that the "crisis" that Democrats claim exists in our health-care system is imaginary; there are problems with any system of health-care regulation, and regrettably the tradeoffs inherent in ANY of these schemes lead to deaths that were technologically preventable. Therefore, incremental reform to try to decrease the cost of care in ways that don't destroy quality, to limit the practice of defensive medicine, and if that does not increase the availability of coverage to talk about more harsh measures to spread around the risk to expand coverage are superior to creating an entitlement scheme that appears likely to be a failure as epic and costly--if not more so--as that of the War on Poverty, the original liberal scheme to reach utopia in defiance of the human condition.

Post Script:

I heard a few public reactions to the split-down-the-middle Baucus plan that aims to be moderate enough to possibly attract at least a few Republican votes while retaining enough features of the original bills that it would have broad enough Democratic support to pass and the complaints dramatized and reinforced my sense that the idea that trying to move to the center to pass this bill is a plan that can succeed, strategically, to get a bill passed, whether it's a good idea or not. Specifically, two conservatives complained about both the individual mandates that were perceived as being beyond the scope of appropriate powers of the government and then over regulation of health insurance on the state level and how they would like to be able to buy health insurance from other states. A Democratic Vietnam Vet from Montana--so presumably not a latte sipping effete rich guy-- asked when we as a nation would stop doing everything for the rich and that the real problem (and I'm reprhasing, but only slightly) that the bill didn't cut out the profit motive from the system. Another caller called for it essentially, saying that we need to adopt a system reminiscent of Japan, Germany or Taiwan, and that greed and profit specifically were the problem in our health-care system.

I would note that in Germany and Japan there is significant rationing of care, higher tax rates, in all three of those countries significantly subsidized savings from falling directly under the U.S. military umbrella, deep discontent amongst doctors who either (like in Germany and Taiwan) are salaried and make much less than they would practicing the same medicine in the U.S. In Japan strict cost controls mean that privately run medical practices leave the doctor out short and almost all of their providers are drowning in red ink. The net effect is that some leave the profession, probably less per head in those countries than there would be in the U.S. due to the overall greater income equality of those countries (a Japanese businessman doesn't make the kind of huge sum that would make someone abandon their dream of being a doctor unlike the constantly growing split in compensation between the type of doctors we lack most and, say, investment bankers.

In my view the profit motive is a necessary component in driving down costs for medical care unless you're going to just go to an outright system like one of the aforementioned or the UK where you simply implement direct cost controls. This isn't how the argument is sold since people remember the last time a good which nearly everyone has demand for had price caps placed on it, and the idea of health-care resembling the gas crisis of the Carter Administration is not how Democrats want you to picture your health care, but of course the experience of other, overall healthier lifestyle living countries with more homogeneous and less difficult to cover populations (think of how fat and non-compliant with doctors instructions those fat lazy bastards in Taiwan are, with their diet surrounding vegetables and noodles and Tai Chi, the smoking, unhealthy bastards) show that eliminating the profit motive creates doctor shortages as a result of drastic cuts in incentives to become a doctor at all let alone go into a sub-specialty that carries with it a burden like a high insurance cost or many extra years of training, and even still those countries all struggle with rationing and quality of care issues. Adam Smith's observation that (more or less) your butcher doesn't wake up at 4 AM to cut up beef to sell to you out of the goodness of his heart but because he makes a profit and because he wouldn't if the other butcher got up at 4 and he slept in til 5. Letting the states say essentially health insurance can be any cut of beef or it has to be filet mignon, and then forcing people to choose from butchers that have to play by those harsher or more lenient rules is the primary reason why in real terms health-care is basically the only good that has had its cost stay the same in real terms (i.e. measured in the number of hours of an average worker's wage) which has been the rule, not the exception, of virtually everything that you could buy that was subject to technological improvements in its design or construction over the last 40 years, despite massive improvements in quality in everything, both health-care and everything else, with a partial list including TVs, computer processing power, scientific research equipment, automobiles, etc et al. Cats and dogs getting married? Na.

Glenn Beck: Progressive Bounty Hunter

In this country we have the right to say nearly anything we want; as long as it's not causing a dangerous situation, inciting violence, slanderous of a person who's not a public figure, dispersed via a medium where there's a limited amount of bandwidth that must be shared and is therefore subject to Federal regulation and a few other narrow exceptions, you can say virtually anything, be it hateful, offensive, controversial, stupid, pointless, annoying, full of language generally considered profane, etc. etc. etc. Case in point: this blog.

Glenn Beck is a recovering alcoholic who's not a particularly distinguished academic originally from outside of Seattle. He got into talk radio after he sobered up, wound up with a bizarrely incongruous show on the CNN Headline News channel and then wound leaving there and winding up where his ideology was a much better fit, and people actually see his show, on FOXNews. He draws pretty good ratings for a show that's on at 5 PM Eastern, and the White House staff is clearly among the 1-3 million people who see his live broadcast or re-run each day, which I'll get to in a second. He's on at 5 PM because his ideology, format, and some of his beliefs don't quite fit into the FOXNews mold, but on the other hand he's 90% on the same page with FOX as opposed to 2% on the same page with what you see on CNN.

Bill O'Reilly occupies the coveted 8PM slot and gets the most ratings of anybody in the cable news pundit game, and he pretty much embodies the FOXNews worldview: he almost never criticizes Republicans, and when he does it's often the kind of non-criticism criticism like "he cares too much" or genuine criticism is given a counterpoint of praise "it was rude and an unseemly breach of decorum but while it wasn't the right forum the issue he raised is valid." He also is more explicitly religious and judgmental, as he deals in judgmental holier-than-thou stories about blasphemous artists (they have free speech too, just like you do, you idiot) or jerkoff irresponsible parents (great, take time on a national news program to shame one or two individuals.) Indeed, on the culture wars, he has "culture warrior" panelists sometimes who tell you whether what somebody did was illegal, but if not, shameful. On the other hand, he does somewhat try (with what I find to be just stupid results) to be "fair and balanced." On things like health-care he'll defend Obama not because he has any support for whatever bill will come out but because we don't know what the actual bill is yet so we have to reserve judgment. The stimulus might have been full of pork but he's going to give it time since if the economy recovers it will be a pure causal relationship. I'd like them to give up the charade; he and the MSM are equally hypocritical in saying they have no agenda or bias; the news stories covered on both networks carry an agenda but O'Reilly has the gall to call his opinion show "the no spin zone."

Another contrast is Shawn Hannity. Hannity sometimes picks up Beck's stuff, but (also in a better time slot) the show has liberal panelists on it, but they're always outnumbered and the message is basically always: Democrats bad, Republicans good. I typically agree with the first one on most important policy issues, but the second part doesn't follow from the first.

Beck isn't a pure classical liberal or libertarian, although on his television show that's the bent he brings to almost every issue. He's a Christian, and his radio show is somewhat more explicitly religious, but the show overall addresses Christianity and how awesome it is or how shameful sinners (against God) are almost never. Furthermore, obviously progressives don't believe him, but he says that when Bush did deficit spending that it was bad--and that he was saying so at the time-- but it's hard for him to back it up (and frankly I can't vouch for him, you have to have been a fan or take his word) since he came onto FOXNews and became more than one of a panoply of no-name, non-prime-time pundits on the cable networks other than FOX when Bush was essentially a lame duck and the issues of the day were Obama's campaign, transition, and Presidency. He has been against the bailouts, even during the Bush days, that much I know. At any rate, take his word or don't, but he is constantly reiterating that he doesn't care about a public figure's party affiliation, but their commitment to the Constitution, freedom, and a traditional idea of American values.

Now sometimes it gets a little esoteric, and the combination of the fact that he's very emotional and isn't afraid to "connect the dots" sometimes puts him out on a limb. He did a show about turn of the 20th century progressivism and the art that John D. Rockefeller bought for Rockefeller center that embodied those ideas and while frankly he was correct in his analysis, that bas relief figures of the time reflect how progressives of the time were enamored of Mussolini, he presents what are a set of interesting but not particularly relevant facts with a lot of gusto and when taken out of context makes it easy for Olbermann to make him look like a complete psychopath who thinks that NBC is run by Lenin. Of course during that show he mentioned that Diego Rivera's mural commissioned by Rockefeller that is full of socialist and Communist imagery (including a literal depiction of Lenin) was removed by Rockefeller because it was offensive, like, 90 years ago, but when shown out of context and you're left to assume he's making connections about what NBC's current agenda is he looks like a conspiracy theory whackjob.

He also gets genuinely emotional about things like the loss of freedoms, September 11th, the American people, and he cries on air, which he is constantly ridiculed for. However, the fact that liberal bloggers basically fact check every single sentence he utters and seem to be battling him as if he's some sort of out of control power broker when he's constantly stating that he's pro-freedom, not pro-Republican, and furthermore, even if he is just a lying Republican schill, the Democrats can pass ANY LAWS THEY WANT! Which brings me to the title of my post; Beck is characterized as both insane and obsessed with bizarre conspiracy theories but he also is now racking up progressive scalps in his one man quest to destroy the Obama Administration (for the victory of the White Race, obviously.)

What am I talking about? Van Jones, a "Czar," shorthand for any sort of advisor not approved by Congress--his official job title was "special advisor"--on "Green Jobs," came to the attention of the mainstream media and was forced to resign last weekend. Why? Well, a large number of videos of him saying ridiculous shit were out there, and in the order in which the MSM covered these facts (they didn't really cover anything other than the first three): he called Republicans "assholes," signed a petition indicating he thinks or thought that Bush let 9/11 happen, says that only white kids could pull off a Columbine, is a self-avowed Communist, claimed that white environmentalists traffic pollution to minority neighborhoods, oh and that money from green energy should be redistributed to oppressed races. But literally about two weeks before that happened Glenn Beck started showing these videos of these crazy radical ideas and asking questions about why the fuck this guy was in a position to distribute government money to create green jobs. He's a COMMUNIST! What a great guy for job creation.

So was Glenn Beck hammering on a crazy conspiracy theory? No! A conspiracy theory isn't really a theory; a theory explains a set of facts. The 9/11 truthers never advance their own explanation of what happened on 9/11 because identifying "inconsistencies" can be done one by one and no cohesive explanation needs to be put forward to unite the supposed observations; "the government had a conspiracy plot" is the explanation and the evidence is a set of untrue pseudo scientific observations that what happened didn't happen. What Beck does is basically the exact opposite; he asks questions of his audience, based on actual facts, generally in the form of video or audio recordings of the people in question. So with Van Jones, there was no conspiracy, it was a repetition of facts that would be very hard to dispute: he was the Green Jobs Czar, er, "special advisor," and he was on tape saying a lot of stuff that's pretty far out there. The question, then, is did Obama know and not care or simply not know that his Green Jobs adviser thought at one point that 9/11 was at the least allowed to happen, that he was a Communist, that he recently (this spring) stated that whites intentionally steer pollution into black communities, etc. etc. Either possibility is disturbing, and when it became publicized enough that not just people who agree with Beck saw the evidence he had to go.

Yesterday, Beck and Andrew Breitbart released essentially home-made investigative journalism where a young man and women went into ACORN offices in various cities and gradually revealed that they needed to get the paperwork to get a house to run a business out of. It's revealed that the business is that the woman will be turning tricks, and eventually if the workers are helpful in figuring out how to write up paperwork to get a home loan, tax return and other paperwork set up fraudulently, that they'll also be bringing over 13 El Salvadorans to turn tricks, and that those girls might be able to qualify as dependents because they're underage. It's so absurd you'd think that while a worker might disagree with prostitution being illegal wanting to help someone they feel is unjustly persecuted when they continue even after it's clear that they're going to be exploiting child sex slaves, it baffles belief. A video of this happening in a Baltimore ACORN office was released yesterday, prompting ACORN to call this "gotcha" journalism where they basically went to every office they could until they found two individual loan officers who were personally corrupt. Today Glenn Beck showed a video of the exact same thing happening at an ACORN office in Washington, D.C. Somehow I doubt ACORN will investigate how so many bad apple, child sex slave promoting employees are getting hired. Anyways, instead of perhaps reflecting organizational corruption, the MSM has ignored this story and instead basically bought the explanation that these 4 individual loan officers (all of whom were fired) were the bad apples and that there's no systematic corruption. Of course, the government saw this shit and drew the much more plausible conclusion that this organization, which is being prosecuted at the local level in a bunch of other jurisdictions for voter fraud, too, btw, shouldn't be involved in the Census, and their role in collecting data for the 2010 Census has been eliminated. So again, if this is nutty right wing conspiracy stuff, why does the government keep cutting ties when this insanity is exposed?

And finally, today, as if this were an evil, despicable thing, Beck I guess you'd say nailed another "scalp" to his wall, after he played a tape from a National Endowment for the Arts conference call from a few weeks ago that was recorded by a conservative who turned into a whistleblower. Yosi Sergant, the guy behind those dreamy "HOPE" posters for Obama during the campaign somehow wound up being the communications director for the NEA (patronage much?) On a conference call that was played on Beck's show by this whistleblower, you can here him talking about using government funds to create art that "supports Obama's agenda." Beck jumped to the crazy conspiracy theory conclusion that using government money to pay artists to make art that advances the agenda of a particular politician is propaganda. Insanity, I know, but apparently the NEA felt so cowed by the super-minority in the Senate and the huge House minority and the progressive Democratic Obama Administration and the one conservative cable news channel that they thought that they caved to that immense political pressure and fired Yosi. Beck is drunk with power.

What happened to "we won, deal with it" from the netroots? You guys are super liberal, a lot more liberal than the American people on average, but you won. You might not have both your House majority or you might have much smaller Congressional majorities in 2010 if you practice what you believe in, since as journalists are wont to do (at least on FOX) they expose facts that are of interest to the American people, like that billions of dollars for job creation in the green jobs sector would be under the purview of an adviser to Obama who was a fucking self-identified Communist.

I don't agree with everything Beck says, and he does sometimes enter territory where he's posing questions that might lead you to develop your own conspiracy theory like "What does it mean that all of these czars share a set of beliefs that are extremely radical?" But I think that question is valid. Obama's confirmed regulatory oversight advisor Cass Sunstein subscribes to the Peter Singer school of thought about Animal Rights and Animal Liberation (hunting should be banned; now that we have sufficient technology to feed everyone in a vegan fashion it's not ethical to eat meat, a horse is more rational than a month-old human baby, etc.) and also that the Second Amendment does not apply to individuals. I think that's pretty outside the mainstream. The Diversity Advisor at the FCC complimented Hugo Chavez for fixing the media down in Venezuela... you know... by going against the advice of our then government officials in the FCC and shutting down private broadcasters. You could conclude that Obama is a Communist plant, or you could make a more rational conclusion that Obama is not as radical as these nutjobs, but much more progressive than the centrist he ran as, and that to keep the netroots happy he's found jobs for folks they like, like people who think using tax dollars to create art that supports a politician's agenda is OK or that 9/11 was permitted to happen.

I'll say it again and amplify it: Glenn Beck is the only one fucking saying this shit. NBC and CBS and ABC and CNN are all in the tank for Obama and only cover this kind of shit in the most cursory way, with a pro-Obama spin, if it would be absolutely blatantly absurd to try to flush these facts down the memory hole. So you've got the conservatives who watch Beck, the netroots who for some reason worry about what he says, and then the rest of the media, Legislature and Executive branch where until 2010 they can essentially do whatever they want. So what is it? Is Beck crazy? Is he a sadist who likes getting innocent people fired with doctored videos taken out of context? Or are the views of these people who are the political allies of the left wing of the Democratic party so far out there that when people who aren't uber-liberal hear them they get concerned and the White House has to go into damage control mode if they don't want to seem way to the left of the nation's political center? If it was anything but the latter explanation I don't know why the left would obsess about anything he says. I find the coverage of how Beck is characterized from stuff that Beck says... I certainly don't compulsively watch Olbermann or one of the other annoying liberal assholes on MSNBC every day to see what today's B.S. is. I won't deny having watched Olbermann from time to time, but frankly he just pisses me off; watching him every day would drive me nuts. I wrote a post one time when I caught him saying that the Scooter Libby sentence commutation (you remember that, right?) would reverberate and taint the justice system and the Republican party for weeks or months or years. I parodied it because it was stupid...but then there was no consequence where heads rolled for making such an irresponsible decision. Now that the shoe is on the other foot and his team is in power, Olbermann is still obsessed with demonizing Republicans (I did notice he still does a worse, worser and worstest person in the world or whatever.)

The thing about Beck that's different than any of the liberals who pissed and moaned during the Bush Administration is that he is racking up "scalps" quickly as the lunacy he points out sees the light of day. So what is it about Beck that pisses off these bloggers? That he's a goofy, crazy, idiotic, malicious douchebag, or that when he points out that the Obama Administration is full of radicals they end up having to be ditched, because Americans think they're radical?

The red herrring of "What's your solution?"

The answer of what Republicans would do on health care reform is not "nothing." However, they note quite rightly that no health-care program is perfect and that blunderbuss statistics like "X people die every day in the U.S. because of lack of access to health insurance in the U.S." are mirrored and counter-weighted by "Y people die every day in the U.K. because of waiting lists for procedures like MRIs and colonoscopies and other rationing of care." The fear that Americans have that the promise that "your health-care won't change" is palpable. Reading the bills, especially the house bill 3200, you see why. The fact of the matter is that market forces that the bill would unleash would set in series a set of consequences where while nobody would force you to change your health insurance the effect would be that businesses, particularly after their typically year long contract ran out after the bill went into effect, would be droves of people whose health-care would NOT stay the same, who would not keep their employer plans and who would go into the government exchanges, particularly if the "public option" is adopted. Imagine the apprehension of the players on every Major League Baseball team if it a crazy billionaire declared his intention to buy a team and to make sure that the Royals and Pirates of the world would be more competitive, and he would do so by running the team possibly at a loss with his essentially unlimited resources. If MLB were a free market with no revenue sharing do you think KC or Pittsburgh or for that matter anybody but the Yankees and Red Sox would be playing 10 years down the road?

That said, Republicans have plenty of ideas for incremental reform. You're talking about 16% of the GDP of the largest country in the world, it seems like a bizarre notion that reform must be whole hog, all-encompassing, and immediate. Why not take single steps to cut costs, the first not costing any government expenditures, and if those fail to achieve goals of expanding coverage and "bending the cost curve" then revisit more direct subsidies. These ideas include actually increasing competition by allowing people to buy any plan in the country; health insurers are painted as raking in huge excess profits due to their capricious ability to deny sick patients from getting coverage in the first place or to rip off people who were healthy when they signed up, paid their premiums, but have their claims denied when they get sick. If that's the case then those would be traits of a monopoly or a player in some sort of cartel or oligopoly. If there were robust competition then insurers would fight for customers and have to balance their policies about when to pay out claims, how high to make premiums, etc. etc. in order to draw enough customers to say in business. Does anyone think that Wal-mart makes its huge profits because it has priced every other retailer completely out of the market? On the other hand, the very number of large competitors it has both in chain retail like Target and pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens and hardware and home furnishing stores like Home Depot mean that its profit margins from individual transactions are pretty slim. The volume of business they do is what racks up the profits.

Staying overnight in a hospital and other basic health-care services are essentially the only services in our society that over the past 40 years have not gotten cheaper in terms of how many hours the service costs in terms of hours of a median earners wages. Information technology improvements, the general profit motive to cut costs, the complete disconnect between the services a patient consumes and their knowledge of the cost of those systems (unless they buy their health-care retail) and the practicing of defensive medicine where expensive tests are ordered not to improve outcomes, but to cover asses, all are unsexy factors that make health-care more expensive. Why can't we have most of the people who actually need health insurance, i.e. those who are not sick, able to have a choice to have higher co-pays and lower premiums and perhaps an isolated fund within the health-insurance umbrella that's unrelated where everyone pays in over their healthy years with the understanding that eventually they'll die and likely suck up a lot of expensive health-care. For people currently with pre-existing conditions, provide direct subsidies until the system has enough capital to cover costs (and provide subsidies for younger healthy people who couldn't afford what would now be much cheaper insurance premiums but would have higher copays.)

But the red herring is "we can't afford to do nothing." Really? We're talking about the same issues of accessibility, portability and covering the already sick that has been, no doubt, a serious problem since Hillarycare was proposed... it's bad, but what has changed to make this an emergency other than who has the votes and the veto stamp? We can't afford, frankly, to expand entitlements. The unfunded mandates for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are staggering, but relatively simple (and painful) adjustments in the age when people get these benefits (or how much these programs pay out) would make them solvent. But any plan that has the entitlement program of a public option and isn't just a watered down set of incremental reforms as described above--except liberal, like giving the whole country community rating a la New York State, where health insurance is staggeringly, mind-bogglingly expensive--is going to simply add another masively expensive, completely unsustainable entitlement to the budget. And we can't afford it. Countries can go bankrupt and even if they don't, soaring interest rates coupled with a fragile economy could send us back into depression. Sustained recovery will probably benefit everyone more than any government plan from either party, and we get there by enacting fair regulations that have to do with being pro-markets, not pro-business--the difference being that existing businesses lobby government not for laissez-faire--far from it, they lobby for corporate welfare. If we could enact smart reforms on the financial sector (not capping bonuses, that's certain) that encourage both accountability, competition and a level playing field, keep our fingers out of ever more industries, and then let capitalism do its magic, in a few years we'll have much greater revenues, millions of people out of work will have jobs, and we can revisit increasing expenditures on healthcare. But right now, the idea that we need to completely re-write how health care will work, and in a way that will probably affect a large fraction of people who are happy with the current system in 3 or 5 or 10 years, and that it has to be enacted NOW because the opposition isn't proposing a similarly sweeping plan is just a completely fallacious argument.

Anti-death penalty author's very existence strong argument for death penalty

Legal scholars and activists often write books against the death penalty. They usually contain the same arguments and leave me in the same position of not wanting to remove the death penalty, but not being particularly concerned about the issue in general. The arguments against the death penalty vary but are all variations on a few main themes.

The most valid of these is that the death penalty is final and cannot be reversed; if later on exculpatory evidence is found and a person is found to be innocent after they're executed, you can't un-execute them like you can release a person who's served part of a life sentence. This is true, and I can't offer a complete refutation of this argument, I have to concede that this is a problematic aspect of the death penalty. I would counter, though, that the number of murderers sentenced to life without parole who are eventually released is rather low, and that the number of people out there working on freeing such prisoners is low, and that it would be even lower if the death penalty were abolished, since most of these people examining virtually every murderer's claim of innocence are doing so mainly because they're against the death penalty. In countries with no death penalty, are there people who go around looking to try and free murderers sentenced decades ago with new DNA technology and such?

Furthermore, if you are falsely accused of murder at age 20 and spend 20 horrible, miserable years in prison for a crime you didn't commit, and then are freed, it's not like the state has done anything close to setting things right. Beyond having 20 of the prime years of your life stolen, ripping away your chances at having anything like a normal life in terms of building a family, having a career, doing things that make life worth living, essentially, you've also spent 20 years in prison, maximum security prison since it was a murder charge, and you've been subject to potential sexual slavery, constant turf wars between rival prison gangs, 20 years or horror where every day brings its own special little miseries that you did nothing to deserve. So, yes, while putting murderers in prison for life does leave open the option that in the unlikely event that they were both wrongfully convicted AND someone discovered this long enough after they were sentenced that if they had been sentenced to death all their appeals would have been used up and they would have been killed, the very discovery of such injustices being often motivated by the existence of the death penalty, then they can be freed since their sentence isn't impossible to reverse. However, I'm not sure that this is the right place to worry about the injustice of incarcerating an innocent person, since as I just argued, being freed after 20 or 30 or 40 years in prison on a wrongful murder conviction would utterly destroy your life and deprive you of most of its most fruitful activities, although you would survive.

That said, the argument that we should never put ourselves in a position to have accidentally killed an innocent person is the only generic death penalty argument that carries any weight with me. However, another argument that some more forgiving people than myself make is that the death penalty leaves no room for rehabilitation or redemption of actually guilty murderers. So what? Good! If you intentionally kill someone, the only crime for which you can be sentenced to death in America, you should at the very least serve out the rest of your life in prison. The person you killed, who never did anything wrong, will get no chance at doing anything, let alone finding redemption or some spiritual revelation--why should you, asshole? You did something so bad that no matter what was done to you you don't deserve to be part of society. Like I said, I'm ambivalent about the death penalty while I don't oppose it, because to me, the idea of spending the rest of my natural life in prion--if there were no possibility of parole--seems like it would be more horrible in practice than a sentence of death.

The very existence of a new author of a new book that repeats the boiler-plate arguments against the death penalty makes me less ambivalent. Why? Because its fuckwad, asshole, motherfucker, MURDERER author was let out of prison. Not only that, his co-author is one of these poor, pathetic women who falls in love--at first vicariously--with heinous criminals in prison. I don't understand their particular psychopathology but my feeling is that they must be mentally ill. The woman's decision to fall in love with a murdering asshole cost her her marriage and her job as a reporter in Louisiana, which is good, but is not a decision a normal person makes.

At any rate, I saw this fucker on Book TV, I didn't read his book and I hope you don't buy it either although I doubt if you look into it its very lack of bringing anything new to the debate would cause you to do so--as I said, from their talk, it sounded like a very generic repetition of the anti-death penalty shtick. But the very fact that after being sentenced to die at age 20 after a murder that a liberal book reviewer of his first book claims was "unintentional"--yea, when you shoot someone in the middle of an armed robbery and they die that's just bad fucking luck--the 1972 moratorium on the death penalty made his sentence change to life in prison, which apparently meant "about 40 years," since he's now free and he's a little over 60. His hair's not even fucking gray. He was paroled because he's no longer a danger to society and he had, according to the parole board in Louisiana, apparently served his debt to society. I claim that this is impossible. The family of the young woman he killed never stopped opposing his parole, and while he now exhibits remorse and has said he's sorry, it's pretty fucking immaterial. The girl he killed doesn't ever get to be spiritually redeemed; she'll never meet a spouse and fall in love; she'll never write a book and have a room full of liberal retards applaud her writing.

The idea of executing an innocent person is horrifying (I just wonder what's so much less horrifying about an innocent person being put in prison for the rest of their life with the unlikely chance that their case will be reexamined and overturned) but unfortunately the actual event of this guilty murderer motherfucker being free, and married, and having written a book where liberals fawn over him and have him sign their copy over hors d'oeuvres is pretty damn horrifying to me, too.

As a classical liberal, I have some problems with the "prison industrial complex." Mainly, that it's full of people whose crimes stemmed from either using or selling ability to sell certain intoxicating chemicals our society has criminalized. I'm not for legalization of drugs, and frankly I doubt that the black market and criminality associated at least with drug dealing can be eliminated without full legalization of all drugs--a Faustian bargain that I believe would lead to hugely increased costs to society from drug use. Unlike pot, or tobacco, or even booze, very few people can make the choice to use drugs like heroin or methamphetamine for recreation and keep the use of that drug from seriously impacting their life. Making those hard drugs legal enough to destroy a black market in their distribution (which basically means about as regulated as alcohol... you could make it slightly more expensive than a free market to get drunk and you can regulate it a bit, but the fact is that getting loaded is cheap and easy to do anywhere. However, having prison be a consequence for getting caught with amounts of hard drugs that aren't indicative of being high up on the food chain of distribution seems stupid... even drug dealers are simply catering to a market that will always be filled by somebody.

So save prison for people who've done really horrible things like shot or robbed or raped people. Segregate the really violent assholes into high security and let people who embezzled or who shoplifted serve their sentences in less awful, less secure facilities. And on the death penalty make sure you don't let actual murderers out--ever-- and do so either by keeping the death penalty or making it so that in every state people who intentionally kill other people go to prison for life AND NEVER GET OUT. Had Billy Wayne Sinclair been executed as he was sentenced... he wouldn't be out with his wife on a book tour. Keep the death penalty or don't, but don't ever let these monsters enjoy life again. As to the problem of executing murderers who are wrongly convicted we need to solve that problem before we have innocent people convicted of murder... since while what death penalty opponents say about it being impossible to undo the death penalty is true, but they don't finish the thought and figure out that if there are other innocent murderers in places where there is no death penalty, the fate that befalls them is hardly much better than death by lethal injection, and both are fates pretty horrible to contemplate the government bestowing on anyone.

Tyrrany and hypocrisy OK from Democrats, apparently

I was watching C-SPAN's wonderful Washington Journal this morning, a forum for political crazies of all stripes (which I have called into, to talk about government basic science funding.)

Being discussed was the Lord of Darkness himself, Dick Cheney, talking about the possibly deleterious effects of President Obama not doing anything to stop Attorney General Eric Holder from appointing a special prosecutor to open a probe possibly ending with prosecuting CIA interrogators--an outcome that would seem to contradict Obama's previous statement of intent regarding this issue:

This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.Our national greatness is embedded in America’s ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence. That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future. [Emphasis mine]

The first caller I caught, Ronnie from Florida, on the Independents phone line (they have different phone numbers to take calls from self-identified Democrats, Republicans and Independents) seemed to start out with a view I disagreed with, but one that was of a surprisingly cogent and legitimate argument. She said that she was surprised that Dick Cheney had not been convicted of some crime already, that our Democracy had been subverted, and then... to get to the heart of the matter you had to investigate "what really happened on 9/11." Sigh. They already did that... and jeez, for this conspiracy to still be completely air-tight as far as anyone from the inside leaking any info after all that's unfolded since then, they really must have covered their tracks well. Frown. Why isn't it talked about that damn near 40% of Americans--presumably none of them people who vote Republican--are 9/11 "truthers" to some extent; on the other hand, the much more commonly mocked birthers--whose political affiliation is noted on Wikipedia, as if 9/11 truthers are from all over the political spectrum--make up in the worst case poll 12% of the population.

The next caller, Sheila from San Francisco, found it interesting that Cheney was speaking out so publicly now that he's a private citizen since there's a lot of information he doesn't want to come out about the Bush Administration. This theory makes quite a bit of sense, seeing as Cheney is doing about as much as he can to refocus national attention on the Bush years and Iraq about as much as possible seeing as health-care, the economy, the increasingly less successful "good war" in Afghanistan, etc., are all front page news. It couldn't possibly be that as Vice President he didn't want to, you know, talk very openly about CIA interrogation tactics, which President Obama has done, and since exactly what he didn't do is happening he's speaking out against it? Sigh.

Brian, another independent, checks in and implies that he thinks he's found a kindred spirit in noting the political Independence of Eric Holder as displayed by bucking Obama's snow-job, and perhaps he has, since for both men logic and moral clarity is not a strong suit. Brian hadn't thought out what he was going to say, which I always find strange, since you have several minutes to plan out your question or comment while you're on hold with C-SPAN, as he made the point that just like the Republicans did with Bill Clinton, the special prosecutor should be given independence, meaning that the chips will fall where they may, and that eventually if the prosecution trickles up to Dick Cheney, well, then he made his bed. Except that, of course, it was horrible that the Republicans put Bill Clinton in a kangaroo court and tried to remove him from office for sex (or, in reality, perjuring himself in a deposition related to inappropriate sex with a person who was his subordinate.) But of course, it wouldn't be horrible for Democrats to have a politically motivated criminal trial (as opposed to an impeachment trial--there was no criminal action ever taken against Clinton) and in the most stunning hypocritical statement he suggested that if (and presumably when, if an actual independent prosecution was allowed to investigate Cheney's manifold war crimes) Cheney were convicted, that he should be sent to a secret prision, the very action that so many people got pissed off about being taken for fucking terrorists picked up on a battlefield in Afghanistan. So... you're for Gitmo for Republicans, but not terrorists? Think before you speak, guy.

The last caller I paid close attention to caught the mood of the rest of the callers--aside from a few scattered Republicans who were glad not to have had any more terrorist attacks for 8 years--which was that Cheney a) was clearly a criminal b)should definitely be indicted which is not even a possibility being raised--the target would be the individual CIA interrogators who broke the laws as they existed at the time c) is a coward because he made his money in selling weapons. I think point B is the most salient, that Dick Cheney, speaking his mind, which private citizens, even public figures, which he now is, is exercising his First Amendment Right to free speech and that in doing so he incurs so much wrath that people misunderstand Eric Holder's witch-hunt in the CIA to think it's targeting Cheney.

More disturbing was the fact that Massachusetts' Governor Deval Patrick is proposing a completely Unconstitutional, illegal, ex post facto extrajudicial move of political manipulation, the premise of which was already rejected in the recent past in a statewide plebiscite, by going outside the legal framework for appointing Senators to the Senate by having an interim political appointee serve as Massachusetts' Junior Senator for the 5 months between now and when they hold their special election to replace the recently deceased Ted Kennedy. The Senate Leadership is not opposed to the plan (surprise--they're not opposed to losing their super-majority for 5 of the 15 months they have before they lose it permanently.) Patrick admitted that appointing an interim Senator to fill out Kennedy's term until the next regular election would be (even by his own admission) blatantly Unconstitutional. Furthermore, this is clearly a politically motivated appointment--in his rationale for appointing someone to fill in for 5 months Patrick explained that many important Congressional debates regarding Health Care, Climate Change, and Education are being discussed and having two voices representing Massachusetts is very important. They may be, but you can't just go around breaking the law because you have power and your party has a wide majority over the opposition--that's the whole point of a Constitutional Republic--which happens to be the structure of both our Federal government and Massachusetts' state government.

Why this appointment would be illegal--until Massachusetts specifically changes its laws to make it legal specifically for this individual set of circumstances, not as any sort of principled matter of policy-- is simple to understand. Originally in Article 1, Section 3 the power to choose Senators was reserved to State Legislatures with the kind of power for State Governors to pick interim Senators when the State Legislature was not in session granted in situations of resignation or other unexpected vacancies (just the kind of situation Patrick would be involved in here.) This was not a bad idea, in my opinion, to have the State Legislature pick the national level Senators since frankly, it would make state level elections much, much more important and would engage people with their government and their representatives. Regardless of the merits of the idea, though, the people hold the ultimate sovereign power in our system of government, and they exercised it in the early progressive era around the turn of the last century in order to amend this part of the Constitution with the 17th Amendment. This Amendment gave the power to chose Senators to the voters of the various states, and while it provides state legislatures the power to allow Governors to make temporary appointments--as Patrick is appealing to the MA state congress to change the law to do--that simply is not what the law says in Massachusetts. The current state law is very clear: when a vacancy is created in the state's congressional delegation, a special election is held no sooner than 145 days from the time of the vacancy to choose a new Senator or Representative. To ask the legislature to change the law to fit these specific political circumstances to avoid the loss of the super-majority during a brief period of Democratic dominance is clearly against the spirit of the current law which places the people's choice of their representatives above the expediency of having a full delegation and in my opinion against the spirit of the Constitution (and while I'm no lawyer, possibly the letter of it) in that "[N]o... ex post facto Law shall be passed." This would seem to be an ex post facto law since changing the law so that the Democrats retain their super-majority as opposed to losing it for 5 months as the current law allowed (and could have been changed while Kennedy was still alive, of course) would seem to fit the definition of a law which "retroactively changes ... the legal status of facts and relationships that existed prior to the enactment of the law." The legal status prior to the enactment of the law would be a 5 month loss of that 60th Democratic Senator--the retroactive change in legal status would be such that Massachusetts changes its election laws to prevent that from happening. This is certainly against the spirit of the Constitution and the current letter and spirit of Massachussetts law, and possibly Unconstitutional.

Obviously the Constitution and even the laws of the state don't matter much in this situation to Patrick. My state was left with only one Senator as the results of a controversial election were sorted out; it was not proposed to have an interim Senator appointed because this is a completely partisan, illegal action, and the politics of Minnesota would not have allowed such a thing. Our Republican Governor would have suggested a Republican Appointee (as was the incumbent Senator before the election) but the idea that a Governor and State Executive Branch would try to alter the composition of the Senate is absolutely asinine. When confronted with the fact that previously the citizens of Massachusetts defeated this exact idea in principle to avoid its drastic, illegal partisan consequences (since their Governor was previously a Republican) he simply answered that since he wasn't governor then he didn't accept the premise that this is both illegal and against the public will. Patrick said that Kennedy asked to be replaced... so, ergo, the spirit of the Constitution and more importantly the letter of state law can really just be ignored if it becomes inconvenient.

Could you imagine if "flag@whitehouse.gov" had been a creation of Dick Cheney? How the media would have howled? Apparently when the Jackass Presidents or Governors or Attorneys General act like they are Kings or Dukes or Lords, not bound by the Constitution of the United States and the individual State Constitutions but by the divine right of progress, (as opposed to an Elephant Presidents, etc.) it's called fairness, not tyranny.

Sorry, folks, you can't have it both way. A tyrant is a tyrant is a tyrant.

A Republican eulogizing a Democrat shows us why we're all just screwed...

I won't speak ill of Ted Kennedy personally now that he's died, but a connection struck me that I felt the need to comment on and talk about at least what Ted Kennedy represented. It involves a vague relation by marriage of Kennedy's, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who commented upon Kennedy's death:

Teddy taught us all that public service isn't a hobby or even an occupation, but a way of life...

And you wonder why we're going to borrow $9 trillion we don't have (actually more like $11 trillion) over the next 10 years... Republicans, Democrats, it doesn't matter, politicians these days have no incentive to sell Americans the hard reality when they can buy their votes with "free" money. No wonder neither party is actually for fiscal discipline when it's in power; all the politicians are not just there as a hobby, or as an occupation, but as a way of life. If you're there as a way of life you can't get voted out, and the best way to not get voted out is to buy people's votes with exactly the kind of social programs that Kennedy supported where he took from the few to subsidize goods and services for the many. This is called the tyranny of the majority and it's something that our Constitutional Republic was designed to avoid.

For that reason, I think that most of our founding fathers would be disgusted by this sentiment. In an ideal Constitutional Republic our politicians would be people who out of a sense of good citizenship temporarily put their actual, productive lives on hold to spend 2 or 4 or 6 years in D.C. or their state capital. For them it wouldn't be a hobby nor an occupation, but rather an unpleasant public service taken up by the selfless--Adams and Washington and Jefferson were basically dragged by circumstances from their homes and did not want to stay in power indefinitely.

Since Andrew Jackson we've moved further and further from this ideal, but the idea that one would hold up a man who dedicated his life to amassing power to shape other people's lives as a paragon for others--that the politician's way of life is noble--is basically the end-point on this road to hell. Why should we celebrate one of a few American politicians who's been in power so long that the only other political leaders who came to power at the same time as him are dictators like Fidel Castro?

I've heard liberals defend the estate tax on the grounds that it is a bulwark against an American aristocracy. Well how can you have it both ways? The Kennedys are referred to as American royalty--something that to me, while not disgusting, is somewhat of an oxymoron. In America we don't have Kings or Queens or Dukes or Barons, we just have citizens; for a family to amass political power (and wealth, of course) and have three generations of its members wielding significant political power from President to 7+ term Senator etc ad nauseum is a much more tangible form of aristocracy than rich folks sending their kids to nice private schools and giving them more than 45% of their wealth when they die. If you hated Bush Jr. becoming President after Bush Sr. why would you mourn the passing of the last core member of Camelot? Of course... Ted Kennedy's kids are up and coming politicians, so the Kennedy Dynasty is not dead. That's Ted's legacy, such as it is. Terrific.

So what was that legacy? Except to say I won't mention them, I won't talk about the personal scandals that dogged Kennedy (suffice it to say that Chappaquiddick probably cost him a legitimate shot at the Presidency) and I'll focus on his legislative accomplishments, such as they were. Every American citizen is on the hook for for nearly $40k of debt that's on the books, but if you look at the unfunded liabilities, all of which except Social Security were supported by Kennedy and enacted when he was in the Senate (Medicare and Medicaid, specifically) the per citizen bill is damn near $200,000 for every man woman and child. In addition, in his last months on this earth, after being part of the institutional memory of a supporter of the initial government health-care programs that wound up costing 5+ times more than originally planned he was supporting a bill to expand health-care to all U.S. citizens at a time when we simply couldn't afford it.

His support of 1960s era civil rights legislation impeccable, but the expansion of civil rights legislation as the decades went by to include massive, expensive, societal changes for ill-defined, impossibly broad groups, specifically the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 was not so much a bill about treating everyone the same, or necessarily even leveling the playing field, but about turning a massive class of people, some of whom would be agreed upon by all as having a disability and some whose "disability" would be contentious if you asked an average American. ADA disabilities range under statute definition from massive physical impairments like quadriplegia, paraplegia, multiple amputations to relatively minor mental pathologies including the vaguely defined "emotional or mental illness, and specific learning disabilities." Unlike a clearly defined piece of Civil Rights legislation like those prohibiting discrimination against racial or ethnic groups, the ADA forces employers to treat people with even minor disabilities as defined under the ADA as potential law-suits:

:
X, an individual with mild diabetes controlled by medication, is barred by the staff of a private summer camp from participation in certain sports because of her diabetes. Even though X does not actually have an impairment that substantially limits a major life activity, she is protected under the ADA because she is treated as though she does.

An employee has controlled high blood pressure which does not substantially limit his work activities. If an employer reassigns the individual to a less strenuous job because of unsubstantiated fear that the person would suffer a heart attack if he continues in the present job, the employer has "regarded" this person as disabled.

Ask yourself this: if you were a small business owner and you were hiring for a new position, would you want to hire either of these people if there were a candidate without any disease, excuse me, disability, since slippery interpretations of "discrimination" and not taking into "regard" a person's disability (even if it is controlled high blood pressure or mild type II diabetes) can lead to lawsuits whose arguments are backed by a substantial Federal law. I guess separate but equal is an unworkable concept, unless "separate but equal" leads to the results that Democrats like--how else would you describe a law that creates a massive new set of regulations on hiring, physical infrastructure, etc., for a huge class of individuals who are disabled due to anything and everything from being a quadruple amputee to having high blood pressure.

Other than the Civil Rights' legislation regarding ethnicity and race and religion the rest of Kennedy's philosophy was essentially Candyland Legislation... free health-care as a central tenet of his philosophy, starting with the old and poor, and eventually bringing everyone into that tent. His philosophy included the childish notion that people have a fundamental right to health-care. This idea barely holds up to a few questions of scrutiny; if I have a fundamental right to health-care, how much health-care spending am I entitled to paid from other peoples' tax dollars? $50,000? $500,000? All the money necessary to pay for any modern health-care I demand? Democrats dismiss the idea of "death panels" as a right-wing scare tactic, but a syllogism provides evidence that the claim that they will not institute rationing is a lie: 1) The amount of money a person has a right to for their health-care is not infinite, and to be sustainable the amount spent must be relatively low on average ($100k x 300 million Americans = $300 trillion... do you want to be forced to spend $100k on health-care in your life?) 2) An optimistic projection of tax revenues is about $3 trillion a year for the near future (they topped out at $2.7 trillion a year in 2007) 3) Simply funding a "right" to health-care of $100,000 average lifetime spending every American would take 100 years of tax revenues at higher than current rates (before paying for the military, other entitlements, everything else the Feds pay for.)

The irony of his support for Obama is that finally a Candyland liberal is in power with broad Congressional support and it turns out that No We Can't Afford Any of This Shit. He signed onto the bipartisan entitlements that grew the deficit under Bush--No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D--although that never gets brought up when Democrats blame bush for the debt. Even though Bush was fiscally irresponsible, as I've said before, if you somehow use that as a rationalization for Obama's much, much worse profligacy, stab yourself in the brain. Since Bush did something stupid to a lesser extent it's OK for Obama to do something similarly stupid to an almost unbelievable extent, to the point where it threatens the creditworthiness of our nation and could turn us into a Banana Republic. And they call that progress.

The memorials for Ted Kennedy celebrate his increasingly rare ability to work in a bipartisan fashion... but why this is a political phenomenon to mourn the loss of is not clear to me. The best Presidency in recent memory was that of Bill Clinton, and I contend it had a lot to do with the fact that, as opposed to the current progressive mantra, an obstructionist, opposition party Congress worked with a centrist President from the other party for 6 of the 8 years of Clinton's two terms. If HillyCare had passed would Clinton have run a budget surplus or been the first President since the immediate post-war period to start paying down the principal on the nation's debt? Unregulated laissez-faire is not the answer and we need watchdog regulatory agencies, but the mixed economy we have (government spending has been between 20-30% of GDP for the last few decades) combined with the minimum necessary regulation to prevent actions and the formation of entities that manipulate the free markets like insider trading, monopolies, monopsonies, cartels, trust, etc., is arguably the best system for creating both prosperity and opportunity in the world.

The rise of the politics as not just a vocation but a lifestyle means that politicians on both sides of the aisle are in the business of winning elections, not representing the interests of the American people (unless there's something in it especially for their constituents) let alone living up to their oath of defending the Constitution. That change combined with the loss of either party having a true commitment to fiscal discipline means that bi-partisan legislation generally means that laws are written to help out special interests in specific states or Congressional Districts or increase spending and deficits or help incumbents. Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, the abortive attempt at immigration "reform," or the multiple campaign finance reform bills such as McCain-Feingold and other bi-partisan bills in recent memory either all fell into these categories, as it seems the only thing that the two major parties can agree on is that they like to stay in power. The first two bills mentioned (No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D) were simple government hand-outs meant to buy votes of people with children and the elderly. Immigration reform sought to pander to the vote of Hispanics (on both sides of the aisle) and also was designed to help powerful special interests (an odd mix of both businesses who wanted cheap employees and the progressive base which craves "social justice.") In the final case of campaign finance reform this set of bills is basically designed to make defeating incumbents of both parties more difficult (since unless you've got a massive personal fortune, as a not insignificant number of Senators and Representatives and Governors do) then raising the cash to challenge a well-known incumbent is very difficult, especially in a district with a long-serving and therefore especially well-known incumbent. The notion that the playing field is somehow now level is obviously bunk; if it were the case, then you'd see Presidential campaigns going for Federal matching funds (as they claim to support until they realize that being a powerful candidate allows them to raise much, much, more money.) So the arguable First Amendment right to express oneself by supporting a less well-known candidate with money is infringed--but in practice not because the existence of the right is arguable, but because the harder it is for political newbies to raise funds the less the uncertainty there is that long-time incumbents will stay in office (for instance, Ted Kennedy served in the Senate for 46 years) and therefore the less uncertainty there is about who a special interest needs to go see to get their agenda advanced.

So does Kennedy's death mean the death of bipartisanship? It wasn't particularly thriving of late-- the most bipartisan bill of any importance to pass into law under Obama was the stimulus, a bill that passed by a cumulative vote in Congress of 300 some Democrats and 3 Republicans voting aye with the rest of the Republicans voting nay. If it were dead would that be a bad thing? As the Republicans are in the minority I'm becoming more and more disgusted that even as a pragmatic, political move they are not tackling fiscal discipline in any meaningful way. I'm a classical liberal and I am not a doctrinaire partisan for the Republicans (and obviously not the Democrats) but I tend to hope the Republicans win slim margins of control in the Congress (and before Bush, the Presidency) since when Democrats have historically had control of the executive and the legislative branches of Congress the result has been massive expansions of entitlements we simply cannot afford--Candyland public policy. When the Republicans most recently had both of those branches they engaged in Candyland public policy too, although to a lesser extent in terms of how much they put us on the hook for--and aside from not funding stem cell research with tax dollars basically none of their religious insanity was implemented on a national level.

I think that Kennedy's death tells us something important about the American Republic in modern times; there is no good party or bad party, only politicians who want to stay in office and control your life in one way or another. The Republicans want to make you a Christian--and always fail--and the Democrats want to redistribute wealth and control your life with a moralizing that stems from political correctness and is at least nearly as odious as religious moralizing. The only thing that these beacons of tolerance can't tolerate is anyone who disagrees with their ideology: politically correct moralizing seeks to control your life in ways that "nobody can disagree with"... no smoking indoors, separate your trash for the environment, let us control your health-care and retirement, change out your current light-bulbs for compact fluorescents, don't complain about tax hikes because paying taxes is patriotic, buy a tiny V4 that gets good gas mileage whether you want to or not, guns are always evil, vocal opposition to liberal public policy equals insanity and racism. Unlike the probably more insane religious Republican list (teach "intelligent design" as science and mislead children about what a scientific theory is to discredit evolution, oppose any destruction of clearly non-sentient humans, make public schools a forum for Christian prayer, eliminate the woman's right to access to abortion, don't teach teens how to use condoms just tell them not to have sex as if that might possibly work, etc.) even with a large Conressional majority, control of the Supreme Court, and a Republican President, only one of the items on that list was implemented on a national level and the list of triumphs at state and local levels is much shorter than those from the comparable list of Democrats' PC moralizing rule-making.

With the system we have now, Kennedy basically teaches us that neither party is a force for good; the business of writing laws does not seem to be a business that needs to run continuously. The best form of government in my life was when Republican Congressional opposition led to 6 years of gridlock during the Clinton years. Hopefully in 2010 or 2012 we'll end up with the same deal or vice-versa... a Congress whose majority opposes the President. Then maybe those who think that becoming a politician is a good lifestyle choice can stop fucking things up for us. That is, if the country doesn't go broke first.

How well-off or healthy seniors could pitch in...

Means-testing Medicare and Social Security benefits is a political loser... people paid into their payroll taxes their whole career and were promised they'd get their government pension and health-care paid for in their old age. The most astute point I thought Barack Obama made in his health-care town hall in Montana today was to point out that to seniors who worry that a government plan could be OK, as long as it doesn't fuck with their Medicare, that Medicare is a government run program... of course the inference we draw from that point is vastly different; Obama thinks Medicare is probably a great idea, it prevents any old person from not being able to get health insurance, and old people by definition are near death and therefore to "insure" against bad health would essentially mean pre-paying the average end-of-life medical costs of a human, who, if they don't just die in their sleep one night after being more or less perfectly healthy their whole life is guaranteed to be pretty significant.

This is a large problem of what's wrong with the model of "insuring" all Americans from cradle to grave on their health; insuring people who might have health-costs that are zero or something they could afford out of pocket... adults below a certain age or children who might have to go the pediatrician two or three times a year when they get their checkup or a case of strep throat, yea, it makes sense to insure them against something catastrophic--insure a baby against retinoblastoma or other childhood cancers or autism, or a teenager against being injured in a car accident, or all of the above from some freak incidence of a rare cancer. In that case, the fact that most people don't get sick or injured in a given year when they're children or adults would mean that people who now have virtually all their health costs paid by insurance could probably afford their predictable health costs out of pocket--and if they can't, then let the government step in to patch up the hole--and then let them buy genuine insurance against a rare, very expensive illness or injury, and let insurance pay for that. You'd get lower premiums and the problem of younger people being able to afford health-insurance would be dramatically reduced.

But insuring people 65 and older, forever, well, let me tell you something, it might be hard to hear but everyone in this cohort will eventually develop a grave medical problem, a medical problem so grave it will lead to complications, one of which will certainly include death. Yes, we all die, and as we improve preventive care and increase our life spans it means that we are doing so in a one-off way that takes limited medical intervention every more infrequently. Before, people who might have had just up and died one day from a heart attack or who might have died within just a few weeks of their diagnosis of colon cancer because it was diagnosed when they went to their doctor feeling shitty and they had metastases all over their body consumed relatively few health-care resources as they neared the end of their life. This was not a good thing as far as their lives, but it sure as hell was more affordable; nowadays, some 67 year old man who has a grabber is much more likely to be rushed into the cath-lab, have his coronary arteries unblocked or bypassed, and go on to live many more years... all the while consuming very expensive health-care services such as continual check-ins with a cardiologist, having to take medications for his blood pressure and so forth, and possible going under the knife later if his heart disease worsens again. Or the person with colon cancer gets it discovered when it's a stage I primary tumor and not a stage IV set of tumors with mets in their lungs and brain. A better outcome for the patient, but a more expensive outcome from the point of view of how much money is spent on health-care in society as a whole, as their cancer treatment and follow-up treatments will cost a lot of money, as will the care for them if instead of dying from colon cancer at 70 they live to be 85 and die of Alzheimer's disease.

People don't seem to make this connection, but why in God's name should we expect health-care spending per capita as a percentage of income to be static? Of course we should expect it to rise as we develop more and more (expensive) cures or successful treatments for diseases that prevent premature death, improve the quality of the life for the aged, and extend the life expectancy of a population that has become more likely to need more expensive health-care for more problems, on average. Generally, people have become more prone to developing preventable diseases that would have killed them at a younger age 30 years ago like heart disease and diabetes (with perhaps the one exception being lung cancer as smoking rates have dropped) and no less likely to develop non-preventable diseases like cancer that develop essentially randomly with increasing likelihood as age increases. So a person who would have died in one shot with one (final) ER visit of a heart attack now survives, gets expensive treatment to help them with their heart disease, and either dies from that after getting thousands upon thousands of dollars of health-care, or dies of some OTHER disease like Alzheimer's because the treatment for their heart disease was so effective. These are good things, right? But we should all have to pay more money to reap the benefits of such miracles, shouldn't we? But while health-care has improved by leaps and bounds, leading to a population less likely to die of sudden, undiagnosed illness that commonly afflict people as they get older, payroll taxes haven't gone up fast enough to cover the cost benefits we've promised to people and currently provide for older Americans and the age at which people start getting these government subsidies that pay for utterly unremarkable expenses has not gone up to reflect the reality of a population that lives longer and is more active with higher quality of life for more years. The result? The system is "broken" because the government has promised to pay for 80% of the health-care costs of people 65 and older which, to the benefit of society at large, have gone up as doctors can now cure or treat diseases which used to be death sentences and which now lead to the need for ever more health-care. Should we try to cut out some of the "waste" like defensive medicine, unnecessary tests, and super-high insurance costs due to the fact that there is a lack of tort reform? Sure. But what is the fundamental problem here? Similarly, with people living much, much longer than when the system was designed, so too is Social Security broken because the government has to pay for part of older folks' living expenses regardless of their wealth for a much longer time due to the "problem" of increased life expectancy by nearly 20 years since the system was designed. The people in government, left and right, need to realize that increased health-care costs cannot be wished away by hoping for improved efficiency or tort reform or other cost savings--which is not to say we shouldn't try to realize those savings--since the increased cost of health-care is a symptom of something very good and desirable; improved care for the diseases that used to kill people much earlier in life. The same logic applies to social security. The rational change to make, in my opinion, would be to change the age at which we consider retirement normal, or to raise payroll taxes to levels that will pay for the increasingly expensive, better product we get when we go to the hospital versus when government-run health-care was designed 40+ years ago. But that would be politically unsalable; instead, President Obama made the case today that we could basically have everything we wanted for virtually no cost; savings realized from cutting out inefficiencies generated by insurance companies would literally save enough money so that 2/3 of the cost of expanding coverage to 45 or so million Americans would be covered; the rest could literally be covered by reducing the progressive rate at which deductions are given to the wealth. In other words, since wealthy people give a lot of income away as charitable donations for which they get charitable deductions, or otherwise get deductions for things for which the government gives tax write-offs like buying houses or getting married, since nowadays the deductions are counted as if they simply hadn't earned the money we could increase government revenues by making it so that their deduction rate is the same as that of the poor, dropping their rate from say 36% to 18%, so that if a rich guy gives money to charity instead of being like you never earned that money it's like you never earned half that money, but still have to pay taxes on the other half, even though you gave it to charity.

Anyone think that this sounds like bullshit? It will both be a massive disincentive to making large charitable donations... if you earned $20 million dollars and had a combined state, federal and local tax rate of 50% (a bit high for anywhere other than NYC, but easy as far as making calculations) last year under the current scheme you could give $10 million to charity and it'd make it like you had earned $10 million and you'd take home $5 million instead of $10 million. Under the new scheme, the same person, if their deduction rate was cut in half, would pay taxes as if they'd earned $15 million even though after their charitable giving they only had $10 million pre-tax dollars left. So their tax bill would be $7.5 million and their effective tax rate would be 75%. This is an extreme example, and giving away a million dollars would not create nearly as large of a discrepancy in tax rates, 50% for no charitable giving versus 51.3% for $1 million in charitable giving, but as you can see, the disincentive for the wealthy to give a large fraction of their wealth to charity is huge. Beyond that being bad for society if you consider charitable giving a good thing, the fact that the government will be discouraging the exact behavior that leads to increasing your tax liability means that they probably will not collect as much money as they think they will; people generally don't voluntarily do things that raise their taxes by a large amount. Even if you did believe that changing deduction rates could raise government revenue, you'd have to believe that, as Obama outlined today, it would increase revenues by $30 billion dollars per year (and that the total liability created by covering 45 million new people for health-care will be only $90 billion per year, $60 billion of which will come from saving money elsewhere.) Even assuming all those assumptions are correct (which seems highly dubious) if you take a look at the most recent data from the IRS which is for 2007, so which doesn't reflect the economic crash, but rather a "normal" year, there were about a million tax filers in the top bracket. They paid a total of about $380 billion in Federal income taxes (after deductions) for a tab of about $360,000 in taxes per filer in the top bracket. To generate another $30 billion in revenue, the changes in the deduction structure will have to generate about $28,000 in extra taxes for every single filer in the top bracket, on average about an 8% increase in the amount of tax revenue per top filer in a non-recession year of 2007. That math just doesn't work out to me--let alone the assumptions behind it, like the idea that expanding coverage to 45 million people will cost 90 billion a year--$2000 a year per person, which might be enough if they were all young and healthy, but as we've heard, many of these people are those with pre-existing conditions who have been frozen out by private insurance, in other words, very expensive people to provide health-coverage to.

But here is an idea for a novel reform that would let patriotic older Americans help achieve the goals of the Obama Administration and not leave their children and grandchildren with a massive unpaid tab: give them the option to opt out of accepting Social Security if they don't need it to maintain a decent standard of living, and let them opt out of Medicare if they're wealthy enough and in good enough of health to afford private health insurance. While eventually all people over 65 will die and that almost always entails health-care spending, the number of active, healthy people in their late 60s or early 70s is increasing; for some not insignificant fraction of them, they have a fair bit of scratch saved up since they made a good living during their prime earning years in the 80s and 90s when they were at the peak of their careers in terms of prestige and income. For those folks types of folks who have no expensive chronic conditions who are 65, 66, 67, and there will be more of these folks each year as the boomers age, private insurance companies would probably be willing to provide them, say, a package that lasts for 10 years at a fixed rate per year that has a clause in it that allows patients to opt out and take up the Medicare entitlement they are eligible for and have the insurance converted to say, supplemental coverage for the extra 20% of costs that aren't covered if costs exceed a certain dollar figure in a given year.

Basically, let people who don't need expensive social programs that are meant for all Americans be given to those who truly need them. There are lots of Americans receiving social security who could have a perfectly decent living standard without the extra couple thousand a month. There are probably not as many, but a not insignificant number of relatively young seniors who, due to improved preventive care, increased life expectancy, and the ability to get government subsidized care in a worst case scenario, who, in a totally unregulated free market, could probably come to an affordable arrangement with a private insurer to cover their health-care costs for at least for some of the years when the government pays for 80% of their health-care. But who turns down free money, right? Especially since you paid into the system your whole life? Well, maybe if you told people the truth about health-care instead of telling people that health-reform will lead to completely imaginary fiscal situations then they'd be more ready to stomach tough decisions. You're either stupid (which Obama is not) or have some mental disorder where you're choosing to be willfully ignorant (i.e. Barack Obama is in denial about the true cost of reform) or you're lying if you tell people that their health-care will be all of the following: guaranteed by the government, unchanged for people who like their current care and will be so indefinitely so that the wealthy and middle class never have to give up quality to subsidize those who will come under the care of the new system, that $60 billion a year in government expenditures can be saved as opposed to there being drastic cost increases arising from the combination cutting out waste and ineffiency in health-care provided by the government WHILE TAKING ON 45 MILLION NEW PEOPLE INTO GOVERNMENT HEALTH-CARE, etc., etc., etc.

They could give us the facts, which are that in other countries where everyone is covered, that this universal coverage comes at a cost: health-care for the middle class (and wealthiest, if buying private health-care is illegal) becomes of lesser quality, less convenient due to rationing and cost controls. Basically, that we're making a societal deal where people with less job security and worse access to health-care get a guarantee that they'll get adequate, modern health-care, but that it will be expensive, and it will be subsidized by the upper middle class and wealthy, and that many Americans who are in the above-median household income camp but who can't afford to pay for their health-costs out of pocket probably will have worse health-care if we make reforms. If you told seniors the truth that while they paid into the system and are collecting on it now, the idea that the same square deal will apply for their grandchildren is impossible, then maybe they'd give up the government handout if they didn't need it. Listen, somebody's gunna sacrifice something directly here unless we just add this to the increasingly unsustainable mountain of debt or unless Democratic revolts and unpopularity of reform in the polls either defeats or dilutes the substantive, costly parts of health reform. (Oh, also, you could mention to seniors that paying for their Social Security and Medicare is putting their grandchildren in a situation where their future tax liabilities will be unbelievably costly, and passing "reform" where nobody gets hurt... now... will only exacerbate that phenomenon to a massive extent.) We could ask people who are getting money from the programs that dominate the Federal Budget (I believe that all the various forms of welfare, Medicare and Social Security account for about 55% of the budget) Social security itself is 21%, more than we pay for the Department of Defense which is fighting 2 wars and developing bleeding edge insane science fiction weapons. Assuming, say, 1/3 of seniors have enough money that they can at least for the foreseeable future opt out of Social Security, that'd cut 7% off the U.S. budget, or $200 billion a year. That might actually provide the money to do something like provide the type of health reform Obama is talking about. But ask people to give up a government entitlement voluntarily, even if they could get along without it? Fat chance, exactly.

So are they merely obsolete, racist, part of the vast-right-wing conspiracy or all of the above?

The title, of course, refers to the ubiquitous health-care town hall "protesters" who've had the audacity to raise their voice at their elected representatives who are passing a bill in a strictly partisan fashion without taking their opinion on the matter into account whatsoever. Howard Dean ran a somewhat interactive forum on health-care in Vermont--kind of a seminar format where a long-form interview of Dean was followed by Q&A, but of course all the questions were from Kool-Aid drunk Obamatons--and he had some good news for the uber-liberal audience. It turns out that not only are we headed towards a health-care utopia where health-care will be completely awesome, fair, and free, but that the town-hall anti-reform outbursts, an unprecedented public outburst from the typically silent majority in my view, was actually evidence that the left "is winning" the health-care debate and that this is due to a generational change that will promise a more generalized utopia. Rich white hipsters will join hands with their rich black friends they met at Yale and proclaim that Dr. King's vision has been fulfilled when, with some money from somewhere, the government gets off its ass and gives everyone a job they love directing films that pays a living wage, but even if it doesn't and you want to do something that won't pay any money like work on Wall Street you'll have guaranteed access to health-care and other necessary services like those of tattoo artists and tattoo removal.

Anyways, Dean's sense of talking about some alternate universe was the theme I took away, since to say that the left is winning the health-care debate is not something a member of the reality-based community would say; however, in some sense, I guess they probably are winning hearts and minds, it's just that using scientific polling of Americans isn't his metric--and that come September the health-care bill will have massive public support and, as mentioned, health-care will become awesome, fair, and free for everyone forever.

The media tizzy about the anti-reformers is a unique phenomenon; whereas you can display anti-Semitic or openly pro-Communist signs in a mass rally clearly organized by a specific organization and be "exercising your free speech" if you're against Republicans, the ever-tolerant Democrats apparently can't tolerate criticism of their own asinine ideas, and therefore to avoid cognitive dissonance reformulate the story... these people are not representative of a genuine opinion common amongst the American middle class about health-care because... they are part of an organized group which has generated the false appearance of a grass roots movement ("astroturf"--never mind all the SEIU and Acorn rallies in favor of Obama's causes which are blatant astroturf with all the protesters wearing the same t-shirts.) Or they are racists, according to Paul Krugman, with this really being about them hating the new black power structure. Or they are part of an atavistic, dying breed of Reaganite greed-head right-wingers... the guys who were born in the late 40s and early 50s but did coke in the 80s instead of LSD in the 60s, or else, you know, the pricks who only fucking destroyed Nazi Germany and drank booze in the 40s. The latter theory comes from Howard Dean, who theorizes that

On the heated national debate that’s presently taking place in town hall meetings, Gov. Dean pointed out that the “shouting down” is mostly being done by older Americans. He pointed out that for the first time in 2008, more people under 35 voted than did those over 65 and that they voted for Obama.

“People under 35 elected Obama,” Gov. Dean said, adding that unlike the generations before them, this “younger generation” is neither far right nor far left. “They want to talk, not fight,” he said. “They want something done.”

He also said that this generation is the first multicultural generation in America, which in turn elected a multicultural president.

“The old way of doing things is dying,” he said. “Polarization tactics don’t work. Obama speaks to them. There is a transformation taking place.”

Listen, when you're pissed off you get angry, and when you're angry you get loud, sometimes while somebody is trying to shut you up. Certainly the dude carrying the sign that says "FUCK MIDDLE AMERICA" in the link shown above wants to talk... not argue.

This description of my generation is both incoherent, but the coherent points one can infer Dean was trying to make through liberal newspeak are, if true, frightening as hell. First off, how the fuck is any individual "multicultural"? Because of mixed cultures amongst their two parents? Shit, then I'm a multicultural half-Pole half-Jew. Also, it's interesting to take in that this is the first multicultural generation; I guess all the people fighting for civil rights were white guys in blackface? Or does "multicultural" not actually mean what it would appear to mean what its root words, fused together, would appear to mean... something that embodies more than one culture. This continent has been multicultural since the ancestors of the indigenous inhabitants split into different tribes shortly after walking over the land bridge into Alaska; the founding fathers were from different cultures, with New Englanders representing the descendants of English Puritans, Pennsylvania and Maryland having Quakers and Catholics, respectively, and Virginia and the rest of the South representing a culture that would become recognized as quite distinct. American generations have certainly been multicultural for all of the 20th century, where two of the biggest historical story-lines domestically were the waves of immigration from all over the world but especially Southern and Eastern Europe in the early 20th century and then the fulfillment of the Reconstruction Amendments through the Civil Rights movement which, in its full course, eliminated most large-scale institutional racism. So I guess, given the fact that America as a nation has been multicultural since its founding and the notion that previous generations did were not comprised of people from different cultural backgrounds is patently absurd (Civil Rights, rembember?) what he actually means by a "multicultural generation" is "a generation of brainwashed PC robots."

There's transformation taking place as a new generation steps up to vote and this generation is both neither far right nor far left, is against polarization, and yet uniformly supports Barack Obama, who is decidedly not a centrist or a far-right-winger. The old way of doing things, presumably referring to running our government so that the budget was not so unbelievably unbalanced that the U.S. government might actually go bankrupt, is going out of fashion, as this new generation wants shit done, regardless of the consequences. Or, rather, it wants shit done for them, generally. Unlike Dean, I see no change in this generation from previous ones; feed them bullshit since they're children and most won't question it, and offer them the choice of accepting responsibility for the outcomes of difficult decisions and guarantees made using other people's money, people will always take the money and run.

I love how everyone who wants to engage on the health-care issue wants to talk about the minutia of whether there will be a public option or what regulations will be put on insurance companies or whether rationing will occur or whether euthanasia or abortion will become politicized. The CBO is projecting, with very, very rosy glasses on, that the house bill will add $1.6 TRILLION dollars to the debt in 10 years.

So, as if we didn't know, my generation wants to do anything they want and avoid the consequences, generally avoids hard work or sees it as an unfair imposition as if the state of nature for man is to be able to play guitar all day with his food and housing and health-care taken care of by someone else, takes the historically high standard of living in this country absolutely for granted, and most of all has an asinine view of the difference between inalienable rights and things you want. The message sent by the Obamatons who, after hearing about the budget crisis and the inconsistencies and cost of this bill, still thinks that it's fucking great, since it is not just a permissible thing, not just a good thing, but a necessary thing for the government to ensure adequate health-care... housing... education... job satisfaction... income... you name it, to all citizens. I watched the movie version of 1984 last night and equality sure as hell doesn't look like that much fun. Hearing Dean talk about how the health-plan would be a great success was like being told that 2+2=5 because the party says so; my mind is screaming "WE CAN'T AFFORD THIS!" but Dean is telling me "government bureaucracies save money, government bureaucracies have always saved money."

Unfortunately, I believe him on the idea that assholes in my generation--and it's not entirely their fault, they were, after all, among the first groups of people to grow up with the entire educational system set up under the guiding principles of Baby Boomer assholes who think like Dean--think that things are different now, that old rules don't apply, that we can have our cake and eat it too. We all have a right to health-care. Since health-care, while a very good thing to have, is expensive, especially if the quality is good or you have a severe illness, you need to be a little more specific. Do you have a right to $1 million of health-care over your life-time? $5 million? As much as you need? Where does all that money come from? Aside from the kid from Harvard a year older than me who thought up and created Facebook these ass-hats in my generation who voted for Obama are not going to be making large sums of money and the older generation of hedge fund managers will eventually retire. When the super-wealthy aren't there, who will pay for your right to $5 million dollars worth of health-care? Shit, who will pay the interest on the national debt? The suckers who voted for Obama? You don't say. At any rate, saying you have a right to health-care, a very expensive service which everyone would like to have but which you don't need, you might as well argue you have a right to a mansion or a right to a caviar or a right to Perrier or a right to a fucking unicorn. Unlike the mansion, caviar and Perrier which would provide basic human needs of shelter, food, and water, health-care is not really necessary for daily survival. Need evidence? Look at the the vast majority of all young people who are healthy as evidenced by the millions of uninsured douchebags who have the discretionary income to afford individual insurance but instead of buying it and thereby indirectly subsidizing the health-care of the screwed-over people they supposedly care about, especially in states with community rating like New York--yea, no lib-tards there--they spend their money on booze or restaurant meals or toys or any of the other ridiculously expensive shit New Yorkers buy on a daily basis. Hypocrites? Fuck yea. I just wish that when their voting for Obama causes tax rates on the whole generation in the future to spike--if we have a first-world standard of living left--that they would pay a higher rate than those who understood that if somebody offers to sell you a Unicorn or do something else impossible like lower the cost of health-care by improving its quality and subsidizing it for millions of new people, that they're either fools or manipulative bastards.

Planted Republican goons in town-hall meetings. Yea fucking right. When I lived in NYC the white hipster fucks I knew in Kips Bay and Murray Hill could have gone to Bellevue Hospital which is a public, NYC-subsidized hospital... somehow they never found their way to that swarming morass where queues of poor colored folks waiting to fill out government paperwork to get treatment filled a massive atrium and numerous hallways. I guess they found it more convenient to either use their work provided insurance or parents' insurance to see a private physician in a method that you know, had some dignity to it, didn't require signing your life over to the faceless prick minding the the government health-care bureaucracy's purse strings, oh, and doesn't take like 8 hours. Could it be that outside of NYC some people aren't pathologically demented in their faith in the religion that is being a "progressive" and recognize the difference between the Bellevues of the world and other, unique health-care providers in NYC like NYU Medical Center, where I worked, or other world-class, private providers like New York-Presbyterian and Sloan-Kettering, the best cancer hospital in the world. Perchance, mayhap, is it possible that they don't want to go ahead and support a bill that muddles the two worlds together and at best gives everybody access to the Bellevue quality care while not destroying Sloan-Kettering, at worst giving nearly everyone the Bellevue quality care. Except, ironically for the lefties who might read this, the super-rich, who, since banning paying a doctor in cash is not a topic that's even been broached, will continue to get the absolute best treatment that money can buy--no pun intended... in fact, that's not a pun at all.

Walking through a minefield with a blindfold as economic policy

In general, I don't like the degree to which politicians, especially the President, get credit or blame for the success or failure of the U.S. economy. Should President Bush or President Obama be blamed for the current economic situation? I say the answer is that this is a false dichotomy; the economy is in tatters because of a housing bubble that lead to a massive collapse in the financial sector which spilled over into the economy at large, as did fear and a loss of confidence in a bright economic future. The housing bubble was caused by many different factors; some of them were the actions of millions of different private individuals getting caught in a speculative panic; some of them were the conditions, both cultural and structural, which encouraged and allowed the actions of the individuals who bought, sold, repackaging and speculated on the ultimate fate of millions of mortgages across the country. The culture of debt, re-financing, buying a house on the premise that its equity would rise, and a set of laws and rules which in some cases created artificial scarcity in markets or encouraged unsound lending practices in addition to creating other market distortions all in their own way encouraged, let alone discouraged or banned, the actions that lead to the bubble growing then bursting. The structural conditions--the misguided rules and laws-- were numerous, and were set up by a governmental actors including executives, legislators and judges at federal, state and local levels over decades, the highlights of which we've discussed at length in previous posts.

On the other hand, most Presidents inherit an economic landscape like that which Barack Obama inherited, where an economic crisis more sizable than any in the living memory of all but the oldest Americans forced him to take drastic action or face charges of doing nothing in a crisis and leading to comparisons with Herbert Hoover (who, contrary to popular history, stuck his fingers into the economy quite a bit before getting kicked out of office--Smoot Hawley, anyone?)

I believe that the 2012 Presidential election will, rightly or wrongly, largely be a referendum on the economy; if unemployment is still hovering around 10% and the polling numbers on things like "are you optimistic that economic conditions will improve over the next year" are bad I doubt Obama will have much of a chance if the Republicans run a mildly competent campaign. This is sort of right in the sense that Obama has made George W. Bush's fiscal irresponsibility look like buying two ply, quilted name-brand toilet paper instead of the cheap-o generic stuff versus running up a $10,000 credit card debt buying shoes. It's sort of wrong in the sense that if the economy isn't in awful shape in November, 2012, it will be in spite of Barack Obama, not because of him.

Predicting which of the two will happen is basically impossible since the economy always has too many moving parts to know with any reasonable level of certainty what it will do, even generally--if I did know what way the economy was going to break with consistently good odds I wouldn't be a biologist, I'll tell you that. But as Obama attempts to implement a massively expensive new agenda of health-care entitlements and cap-and-trade something unprecedented is happening: the country's debt to earnings ratio is hitting levels unprecedented in a period of economic recession, and the only historical precedent for this level of government-held debt is the period during and immediately after World War II.

How did we get here? I would hazard a guess it has something to do with the fact that the American electorate is becoming frighteningly disconnected from the consequences of the government giving away "free" money. The top 1% of income tax filers probably wield much more political power, individually, than those in the bottom 95%, but collectively, if government spending, and worse, debt, are seen as being financed by some nebulous, tiny group of rich folks (who of course, own the businesses that employ the bottom 95% of earners, but I digress) with virtually unlimited resources to confiscate, then the tyranny of the majority is here to stay and the Constitution goes out the window. Of course, I recently heard a calculation that in order to balance the budget for just this year, the tax rate on the top bracket would have to be raised to something like 80% or 90%--believable considering the deficit will be close to $2 trillion and the GDP will be in the neighborhood of $15 trillion--and of course that would have to be ex post facto, since while the Laffer curve might be voodoo economics when you raise taxes from 35%-45%, I'm fairly certain that if you tell people that for every dollar they make over $250k they will take home one or two dimes that rich people will a) leave, b) legally avoid or illegally evade taxes or c) stop working as hard.

At any rate, before the economy crashed, the eggheads over at the CBO figured that (see Table 7.1) publicly held government debt as a percentage of GDP would top out in 2009 at a paltry 39% , in line with virtually all of post-WWII America, and a reason why seemingly unending expansion of the debt (aside from a brief respite in the late Clinton era) was relatively safe and sustainable: while the debt grew, so did the economy, so the ratio of how much wealth the U.S. was generating to how much money it was borrowing had stayed relatively fixed, fluctuating between about 25% and 50%, but never really growing out of control. The newest analysis from the CBO of Obama's budget and future budgets taking into account Obama's rejiggering of our spending and the drop-off in revenues shows that while the early estimate of government held debt as 37.9% of GDP in 2008 was only off by about 2%, in 2009 % it's off by 17.7% and a stunning 26.7% in 2010. In other words, we're exponentially running off into uncharted territory, with the last time we ran debts as high as currently projected as a percentage of GDP, 56.7% for 2009 and 64.8% for 2010, coming respectively in 1955 and 1951, when, of course, those numbers were falling as a booming post-WWII American economy paid off our war debts.

As the CBO dryly notes in a footnote:

Increased deficits and the attendant increases in interest payments must be offset by policy changes at some point or interest costs would compound relative to output over time, driving the debt-to-output ratio ever higher (under the assumption, which CBO’s findings incorporate, that the rate of interest on government debt is higher than the rate of economic growth).

As they forget to note: Holy fucking balls, we are fucking fucked!!!!

Let me ask you something: do you think it's a problem that without policy changes--and remember, this budget does not include Obamacare spending--we're in for runaway debts? That perhaps the few groups of people with enough money to lend to the U.S. what it needs to cover its annual operating deficits-- so that it can pay for things like old-people's pensions and medical care and the military and welfare and all those good things-- might not lend money to an entity whose debt, relative to its income, was growing exponentially? That perhaps that would cause us to need to both change policy and jack up interest rates on government debt quite a bit to get those people (hint: they live in China) to continue to finance that debt?

After answering those questions, let me ask you one more: even if Obamacare is the best health-care policy in the world, if it's going to cost "only" $160 billion extra dollars a year for the next 10 years (annualized) do you think it's a good idea to add it to our debt?

Liberal bloggers by implication: Obama Admnistration is a bunch of crazy right-wing conspiracy nuts

Glenn Beck is a FOX News host who probably at least once a day on his show emphasizes one of the following: while he's currently complaining about the Obama Administration, the Bush Administration was hardly pro-freedom, that we now have two big-government parties and the only political ideology he's advocating is one that is pro-freedom, that it doesn't matter if politicians are Democrats or Republicans, both can be bad or good--largely the former, unfortunately--and that it's their dedication to preserving our Constitutionally guaranteed rights that matters most. Of course, this makes him a crazy right-wing conspiracy theorist believing insane tales he's read on the internet such as Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution actually prevents Congress from making any law it feels will help the country. As such, he's often blasted by left-wing blogs, ready to call him a nutcase for spitting out a new conspiracy theory, totally in error, calling into question the pure-of-heart goals and absolutely perfectly effective polices of the dear leader, Barrack Hussein Obama.

The most recent kerfuffle occurred after Glenn Beck had a segment talking about the almost comically broad waiver of rights that car dealers wanting to claim their $4500 rebate for "clunkers" they've collected and destroyed--I say almost because if it hadn't actually been something Americans were being asked to accept then it sounds like it could have been written by a comedy writer tasked to write the absolute worst thing you could find in the "fine print" of a computer program you were installing. Part of it--since obviously the disclaimer was paragraphs upon paragraphs of legalese-- that Beck pointed out as being absolutely insane and overstepping the bounds of any legitimate purpose such as preventing fraud read:

This application provides access to the DoT CARS system. When logged on to the CARS system, your computer is considered a Federal computer system and is the property of the United States Government. It is for authorized use only. Users (authorized or unauthorized) have no explicit or implicit expectation of privacy.
Any or all uses of this system and all files on this system may be intercepted, monitored, recorded, copied, audited, inspected, and disclosed to authorized CARS, DoT, and law enforcement personnel, as well as authorized officials of other agencies, both domestic and foreign. By using this system, the user consents to such interception, monitoring, recording, copying, auditing, inspection, and disclosure at the discretion CARS or the DoT personnel. [Emphasis mine]

The moonbats over DailyKos had a rationale for why allowing your computer to become "property of the United States government" that could be intercepted, monitored, recorded, copied, audited, inspected, or disclosed was perfectly reasonable and Glenn Beck was a nutcase for bringing up such a paranoid trifle. Their reasoning was as follows: the disclaimer wasn't on cars.gov; this was clearly a crucial fact, since the actual URL of the website you need to get your $4500 back is very, very important, and Glenn's fact-checking slip-up there negates his entire point, obviously. Second of all, only authorized car dealers who had previously signed up with the Federal Government would be asked to basically allow their computers to become Federal property. As we all know, becoming a car dealer is a very sacred, solemn commitment, akin to joining the Secret Service or CIA; your life is essentially signed over the government.

Are they fucking retarded? Car dealers are private citizens just like everyone else, and since the only way they can compete with other car dealers nowadays is to get on the Cash for Clunkers bandwagon, they are essentially forced to either eat the $4500 they had to give away or else to use this computer system. The wording was so egregious that over the weekend, when this started making it into the news, the Obama Administration, apparently also full of right-wing conspiracy theorists, realized that this waiver or rights was completely overstepping any rational, Constitutional, or common-sense need for government monitoring of possible fraud in claiming rebates for "clunkers."

So what do the Kos Kids say to that? They basically are now in the position of having to either defend why the Obama Administration is agreeing with right-wing conspiracy theorists and that they were the ones who were not in touch with reality or admit they were wrong--that is, if they were intellectually honest, which of course they are not.

They will ignore the Obama Administration's reaction to what people who aren't brainwashed by the Messiah thought when they read this insane disclaimer-- that basically allowed any government agency domestically or even foreign governments that the U.S. felt like sharing info with to read any fucking file or communication on your computer is fucking crazy, Unconstitutional, and an egregious violation of your right to privacy. What they won't do is either stand up and defend their original position or admit they're wrong--so much for the "reality-based community."

Be careful what you wish for

We here at Litterblog have complained previously about how the stimulus bill was an appropriations bill in disguise which let Democrats spend huge sums of money that typical yearly earmarks don't even touch. Billion dollar programs were sent home to the states often to please a small constituency, grow a pet government program (and of course its constituent bureaucracy) or to get free money for large numbers of constituents as a way of buying votes the next time through the election cycle. Very little (something like one fifth) was in the form of direct tax remittances that would presumably directly inject capital into the market and allow the decisions of countless individuals dictate the optimal allocation of that money. One problem with this strategy (at least politically) is that economic recovery is measured in a few stats and figures and that the concept of a somewhat substantial period of economic adjustment where those figures are not "good" is unacceptable. Which leads to idiotic government programs that call some of the finest cars in the world "clunkers" and will pay you to help destroy them. More on that in a minute.

For instance, a key component of meaningful recovery, in my opinion, will be getting American savings rates up to a level more on par with other developed countries; arguably it was, in aggregate, Americans' generally spendthrift way of life where a balance between individual borrowing and spending tipped the scales out of whack with their levels of earning, saving, and investment. Why, you ask? Well, this imbalance has been a cause of all sorts of economic ills, ranging from those cared about by the conservatives--causing inflationary pressure as well as causing the government to engage in inflationary monetary policy, e.g.-- and liberals--the recent rise in income inequality, for example. As Will Wilkinson has persuasively argued, while large or rising amount of societal income inequality is not itself necessarily a problem or an immoral thing, it is typically an indicator of some underlying structural inequity. In Africa, the underlying ill might be massive government corruption and the rule of a kleptocracy where a few assholes live in luxury and peasants starve to death. In America the underlying ill pointed at by the increase in income inequality, in my opinion, stagnant real wage growth for a large percentage of the population which indicates that we as a society are not adequately preparing individuals to be competitive in the global marketplace and reap the fruits of developed human capital at the middle and lower end of the income spectrum in the way that is ubiquitous at the upper end of the income spectrum. To that end, seeing Obama promoting grants to send people to community college was heartening; in a knowledge based economy, there will not be many factory jobs, and thinking that unions are somehow going to make it so that 1950s style pensions and pay for American workers to build cars is magical thinking. But that does not mean that anyone without a PhD is consigned to flipping burgers; I think giving folks money to get the training people to do the relatively well paying service jobs that require skills and cannot be exported--be that installing people's cable or being a law clerk or being a nurse--is better than the fruitless attempt to save old-style career paths where you worked for the same company at the same union your whole life and then retired with a generous pension or the fictitious and equally futile attempt to create of millions upon millions of "green jobs," whose essential nature and process of creation still has been left undefined.




Indeed, I believe it is a good thing that virtually relentless march of declining personal savings rates that started with the Baby Boomers reaching adulthood in the 1960s and continued until this crash has finally come to an end, and in fact has reversed as Americans, scared for the future, finally hold onto their earnings and increase savings rates, even as GDP is down. Hopefully this trend will continue even once the economy starts making the tangible recovery in GDP and unemployment numbers to which I alluded earlier. You might think it incongruous that a libertarian like myself would make normative statements about what I think Americans should do with their money. Of course, I think people should have nobody stopping them if they want to rack up massive, unsustainable debt (the government is a horse of a different color, since they're doing that in my name.) In general, debt is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, used properly, many libertarian economists will tell you that debt is a good thing, especially for a young people, counter-intuitive as that may sound. The theory of consumption smoothing is that, as rational individuals, debt allows us to maintain a relatively more consistent level of consumption throughout our lifetime--not having to eat Ramen noodles for your whole 20s-- by borrowing money during youth as we acquire human capital and earn relatively little or even nothing if we are in school full-time, and then pay back that debt as the investment we made in ourselves by, say, going to college or simply gaining experience in a career leads to increased earnings and an ability to both maintain the level of consumption one is accustomed to and decrease one's debt. However, this rational use of debt has in recent times spiraled out of control, as people took on unsustainable and frivolous debts that did not square with their lifetime potential for earnings or their ability to make the payments on the debt instruments they had chosen to use. The ubiquitous anecdote about holding a dozen credit cards and tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt as well as the recent housing crisis indicate, at least to me, that this story of under-savings and an improper understanding of how to responsibly use debt is a large part of the story of the recent economic crash, and a harsh fact that the government, in a myriad of ways, does not seem to want to face up to. But how did an imbalance in saving and earning versus borrowing and spending lead to a housing crisis, you ask?


Housing prices were driven up beyond a sustainable level by a couple things. Speculation in the housing markets was certainly one of them, both by individuals (generally in "hot" real estate markets, remember the "job" of "house flipping"?) and those nefarious Wall Street (and foreign) investment managers who packaged and repackaged and sold the debt and leveraged their assets to buy exposure to this risk (as everyone seems to forget, some firms were taking the opposite bet on the loans and made a shitload of money, and those assholes who were bullish on subprime mortgages often lost their shirt--and in many cases their job and possibly even the existence of the company they worked for.) In addition to speculation, a panoply of mortgage-pushing institutions, banking laws, environmental red tape and other land use laws, both local and Federal all combined to distort the market in ways that made a bubble more likely. Various structural distortions in the market allowed runaway prices that might have kept the prices of housing stock in some locales much higher than any valuation connected to reality were used to "pool risks" and essentially use good mortgages as collateral for bad ones. One such measure of whether a property's value will hold or has been driven up due to market distortions is the multiple of how much a property costs over the local cost of building the actual house; in general this multiple is normally between 2-5 but something like 10, 20, or 30 times the cost to build an identical house became the extremely abnormal new status quo in markets that drove the housing bubble. These values were abnormal both in the sense that even in California before the mid 2000s these multiples stayed, generally, within that range of 2-5 times the price of new home construction, and furthermore, at the height of the bubble, in markets that had not become speculative hot-spots, this ratio of building costs to property values had remained at a down-to-earth area of less than 5. The government in the form of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the private financial sector drove this unmooring of local insanity to its consequences--for a time--by pooling and securitizing mortgages and turning them into financial instruments helping to drive the speculative part of the bubble mentioned above.

Other laws provided perverse incentives; the much-mentioned-here Community Readjustment Act of 1977 not only allowed but sometimes required banks to ignore sound lending practices, something which got easier as the bubble swelled and more and more money kept pouring in. Environmental laws that that are essentially intended to prevent any and all new development, in California especially, basically stopped allowing unsettled land to be used to allow supply to reflect demand in certain locales, further distorting certain markets. Equally insidious and implemented in places that range from clear-cut timberland to former farmland (and so therefore are difficult to protect in the name of endangered species) in places like Oregon as well as in rich communities across both red and blue states there are anti-freedom, interventionist land use rules such as minimum lot sizes that may be sold, ranging from 6 to 50 acres, but used everywhere to prevent development: in rich places the motive is to keep out the riff-raff; in progressive locales like outside Portland, Oregon that's presumably a hidden motivation but the publicly stated rationale behind not allowing people to do what they please as far as dividing and selling or giving away parcels of their property is to sustain an aesthetic preference for a dense urban city center not surrounded by the horror of Americans making choices to live the way they please, in suburbs with, gasp, highways.

Given that regulatory climate, in the markets now synonymous with foreclosure and housing bust such as California, Nevada and Arizona, that meant that, contrary to what common sense would dictate, the supply of housing stock while not contracting, was artificially capped from growing to meet demand. Now while there are some cases where the complete imbalance of assets versus liabilities leading to catastrophe is almost so clear as to not need explanation, like the subprime mess; people were given mortgages (sometimes due to greed, sometimes to fulfill quotas set by things like the CRA of 1977 and oftentimes both) where both the bank and homeowner should have known, and likely knew, that unless the equity on the home continued increasing, that the ability of the mortgage holder to pay once the mortgage payment became more than merely interest and adjusted to start including paying down principal was basically zero, unless they won the lottery or inherited a bequest from a long-lost rich relative or something. But even in the case of other, more "responsible" mortgage holders, some of whom may be in for trouble if interest rates rise in the next few years due to their adjustable rate mortgages, the same discrepancy between liabilities and assets held. (By the way, if the homeowners aren't in trouble, the rest of us might be, since increasing interest rates at this point seems like it will be necessary to curb inflation, or perhaps even the inflation component of stagflation. I'd convert my savings to something not dollar-denominated if I were you, since the aforementioned scenario is both all too probable and all to foreseeable.)

In California, for instance, many people who were driving the housing market to unsustainable prices and levels of speculation were not former renters from a slum in Oakland who were given a subprime mortgage on a bungalow in an East-Bay suburb that they obviously couldn't afford to pay on its face. In fact, the vast majority of mortgages taken out were by people who were not first-time homeowners, for obvious reasons. A first time homeowner, even if he's paid for a car or his rent, is still a large credit risk to a bank, and therefore--at least before the height of the bubble common sense stopped being necessary when talking about the real estate market, which, apparently people thought could only go up--was then and is now again required to put down a large fraction of the money for a home as cash--typically in the neighborhood of 20%. Saving up this much money is difficult to do, but once you've done it and lived in a house for a while in a market that's appreciating, like much of California in the early 2000s, your house has made you a lot of money, and you can use the increase in equity on your home to move into an even bigger home, which, if the housing bubble doesn't burst, promises to appreciate and allow you to either again move to a larger home or else to take out some of the equity on the house and use it to finance a lifestyle that your actual income would not support. This was a very common phenomenon across the country--at least in "hot" real estate markets where there was significant and fast appreciation in home equities--and again showed a fundamental imbalance between people taking on massive debt obligations (even if a home mortgage, in a hot real estate market, can be viewed as a speculative investment as well) and conspicuous consumption and their real levels of earnings and savings.

It might not be what the 24 hour news cycle wants to hear, but I think the American people have viscerally made the real reforms called for by this crash--I hope--the loss of houses, the painful realization that speculative investments sometimes fail, and the masses of people who were blindsided by a worst case scenario they never prepared for will learn that while investment and speculation are not in and of themselves bad, they must be counterbalanced with an appropriate amount of savings, and that speculative investment, spending and savings all must be commensurate with an outside income stream (i.e. your paycheck) and not some windfall which, unlike your mortgage bill, may or may not come (like a huge home equity bump.) That's a less appealing lesson than "if we all work together everyone can have a house, and great health care, and we can make money by cutting carbon dioxide emissions and we can do it without any risk while saving money" but at least it's not utopian garbage that the government appears to be trying to wish into reality.


Why the complicated story about savings and debt, assets and liabilities? Because as someone who presented a critique of the stimulus bill that essentially was that at this time that Keynsian measures like counter-cyclical deficit spending were not necessarily a bad idea, but that the way the stimulus bill was written with very little money actually funding anything that would create a good-paying, long-lasting job (i.e. by helping liquidity strapped small businesses get low-interest loans) and by creating a massive air of uncertainty about the tax-future for small businesses with possibly massive obligations for businesses, especially, small businesses, due to the cap and trade and health-care boondoggles, that the government was at fault for not actually creating a stimulus that was timely, temporary and targeted.

Well, the cash for clunkers deal would appear to be all three of those things; it has, in fact, to cost of millions of taxpayers who haven't bought new cars, spurred people who were not considering buying a new car to go out there and trade in their clunker. First of all, "clunker" is so broadly defined that virtually anything other than what I would call a clunker--a 25+ year old heap that barely runs or else a newer cheap-ass import like a '94 Honda. for instance--is in fact a clunker. A brand-new Audi R8, sticker price $150k+, V8 engine, months-long-waiting-list, 5.2 liters, 518 horses, 6 speeds and a beauty that gives me a hard-on, is, obviously, a clunker, with its average mileage of 15 mpg, whose destruction so that it could never run again--a sin against all that is good and right in this universe--will now be subsidized by the American government. That's a drastic example, but this is a clear example of politics and media coverage losing sight of the fact that, overall, this program is certainly an economic boondoggle. There is a large, overly powerful constituency for the union auto workers in Michigan to succeed, but not a large constituency--at least one that Washington listens to... yet--that is against the death by a million cuts by which Congressmen bring home the pork, the budgets and deficits swell, but since each politicians' job as bagman for their special interest groups is fulfilled, campaigns are funded, career politicians keep getting re-elected, by doing so they accumulate more power to deeper entrench themselves and the cycle continues ad nauseum. Unfortunately, the constituency with a direct financial interest in GM succeeding got much larger when Barack "I don't want to run a car company" Obama nationalized two of the three auto manufacturers in this country, but I digress. Seeing dealerships bustling with customers eager to get their evil, inefficient clunkers permanently off the road, with GM dealers selling new, "green" cars makes for great tape to show on CNN or MSNBC, but is it really good for Americans? First of all, if there are 20,000 car dealerships in this country, how many cash for clunkers deals can each one pull off with the $3 billion that has now been allocated for the program? By my California math that means there's $150,000 allocated per dealer, and since the subsidy is $4,500, we've now funded dealers to sell about 33 cars apiece. Wow, I wonder how long we can keep that up. Furthermore, the net benefit for this $3 billion dollar expenditure is to stimulate demand for about 650,000 new green cars and take off the market the same number of "clunkers."

Of course those cars which, unless the dealer breaks the law, are not to be sold for parts and must have their drive-trains and engines literally destroyed so that they can never be salvaged, are for the most part not "clunkers" in the sense that they're cars that nobody would consider buying. In fact, what the government has done has given a large subsidy (especially with dealers, desperate for business, often offering matching cash rebates and sweetheart financing deals--again, interest rates are low so borrowing money is dirt cheap) to people who probably would have eventually bought a new car eventually to buy one now. Sure, it's nice to see, in the middle of a recession, folks lining up at the GM dealer, but if the government subsidizes the purchase of any good enough people will buy them. Imagine how many people would be buying Priuses if your clunker got you its blue-book value!

Needless to say, the forgotten man here is the average taxpayer, who has no interest (beyond what Obama has thrust upon him by nationalizing the company) seeing GM dealers do well. He's certainly paying a pretty penny for it, though. So that car dealer in this country can rack up 33 sales above and beyond what the market demand was before the government distortion, the government has added $3 billion to our tab (the idea that any spending is funded with revenues anymore is laughable) for those 33 sales per dealer, which makes one question how much money will eventually be pumped into this program since I'd imagine a car dealer who's offering, in some cases, a total of $7 or $8k off combining their discounts and the government subsidy, is probably moving more than 10 units a week, and this plan has been in action for a couple months now. As it stands, those 33 extra sales add about $10 to the tax burden of every man, woman and child in this country, without interest, and by the time they get through if they do follow up on the subsidies who knows what the cost per capita will be. It is not, of course, a particularly massive cost to the individual, but of course if someone had asked you if you would have made a charitable donation of $10 to the same end, how many of you would have said yes? Of course, you had no choice, it was forced upon you by the power of the car lobby (which now that GM and Chrysler are owned to a large extent by the UAW is now almost indistinguishable from a segment of Big Labor.) But, you might argue, it's still a good plan, even if selfish assholes didn't want to give money to GM dealers they needed it!

Well, it's almost impossible to provide the evidence for this at this early date, but the history of the government trying to centrally plan economies, either in relatively mild fashions such as this to the outright central planning of economies, has a historical track record of abysmal failure and not being nearly as efficient as the marketplace. If you're concerned about the green part of the cash for clunkers boondoggle, put a tax on carbon, that would stimulate the market to use less greenhouse-gas emitting fuels without any central planning necessary. But as far as the purely economical consequences, such as, will this actually stimulate excess demand for new cars, let alone new American cars, is it a good thing that hundreds of thousands of perfectly drivable, cheap, used cars (oh, I forgot to mention, a "clunker" must, by, definition, be driveable--in other words salable as a used car) will be destroyed instead of remaining in the market, I think it's clear that this will have costs above and beyond the direct cash subsidy this already is costing. In order to get people to go into the showroom, we're subsidizing the act of taking something of value, a used car, capital, wealth, and literally destroying it. Say a few years down the line, without the cash for clunkers deal and a carbon tax in place, what would have happened to all those clunkers out there? Well, the carbon tax would have provided a minor impetus to some people to buy new, perhaps American, cars that are more fuel efficient, and the old cars, instead of simply being destroyed, could have been purchased by someone who was willing to buy them voluntarily, at the correct price for the "clunker" which may be less than forty-five hundred 2009 dollars, and furthermore, the car will not have been destroyed and sold for scrap metal. And above and beyond the simple economic idiocy of it all, as Americans are finally getting the message to increase their savings and not take on an improper amount of debt obligations, the government comes along and basically pays people to go out and finance a car.

The idiocy of this cars for clunkers program is so mammoth, and the fact that Democrats are calling it a success is so profoundly stupid, that those two facts should make you consider their competency to administer a toaster, let alone your health-care.

Change we can't believe in: President still an arrogant douchebag

Wow, there are brass balls and then there are balls made of some fucking titanium-platinum-gold-zinc type alloy that just defy description. You'd need a pair of the latter 15 megaton-nuclear-explosion proof cajones to run an administration where the message about why you need to fuck everyone in the ass and ruin their fucking health-care (Now! The house is on fire! The house is on fire! Now! NOW! NOW!!!!) is thus:

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told The New York Times Obama intends to use the news conference as a "six-month report card," to talk about "how we rescued the economy from the worst recession" and the legislative agenda moving forward, including health care and energy legislation. [Emphasis mine]

I mean, you'd need to be almost as big a douchebag as a guy who secretly always had in his agenda invading a country to kill the motherfucker who you had daddy issues over under cover of the worst domestic terrorist attack in history misleading not just the public but the U.N. Security Council with bullshit intelligence to say something that big of a blatant fucking lie.

Not only is this by far not the worst recession in U.S. history by any meaningful statistical indicator or other fact (unemployment in the Great Depression topped out in the high teens, not at 9.5%, there are not bread queues in most or even particularly many American cities except for those that were already miserably poor before the recession, standards of living to start the recession were much higher and government aid is much greater meaning that the suffering as a result of the recession has been nothing compared to what the generation living through the Depression experienced) but Obama has certainly done not only nothing to save the economy but rather quite a bit to hurt it. Evidence that he has not saved it first of all includes the fact that almost the only jobs presumably described as being "saved or created" are simply government make-work, a kind way of saying "wealth transfers," a kind way in itself to say robbing Peter to pay Paul, a euphemism in itself for being a fucking thieving douche, but even that massive make-work scam has yielded one positive economic benefit I can see from the statistics: the acceleration in the increase in unemployment has finally turned the corner. Yes, America, your dear leader has slowed the trend on how fast unemployment is growing (of course, it is still growing, mind you) and it only took six months.

Now, I personally think it's generally horse-shit that President's get blamed for the state of the economy (or at least I used to, allow me to explain.) Was it Bush's fault that he came into office as a massive bubble of unfulfilled expectations about what the internet would do and how quickly it would do it was popping, with enough broadband infrastructure set up to power the back-bone of the internet that the fiber optic installed during the dot-com bubble was sufficient for the growth in bandwidth of the internet for several years? Fuck no. Was it Clinton's fault that in a free market investors had become "irrationally exuberant" about a technology that was, in fact, one of the greatest technological leaps of all time, even though wegiveyourdogahandjob.com did not have a viable business model (great commercials after the IPO, though) and therefore an inevitable market correction took place? Fuck no. Was it Bush's fault that literally decades upon decades of irresponsible housing legislation (starting with Fannie but primarily culminating under the last asshole Democrat President, Carter--bet you thought I was gunna say Clinton, didn't you?--when we got both Freddie and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977) provided the tools with which over-stimulated and over-leveraged financial firms, individual home-buyers, and even massive quasi-private governmental institutions (the aforementioned Fannie and Freddie) all simultaneously lost all sense of responsibility and committed fiscal suicide? I personally say fuck no!

The President hasn't been, and at least shouldn't be, some sort of Casey Jones of the economy, pulling levers and switches in the form of some sort of Treasury Department-centered economic interference plan to try to run the economy; that's the beauty of capitalism: freedom to succeed or fail on the merits of one's ability to please the consumer in the marketplace, the invisible hand, the business cycle, creative destruction... all that happy horseshit. Fuck... the Fed had (before Obama's meddling) two fucking directives which was one two many: to prevent inflation and to insure economic growth. It's kind of fucked up when the central mandate of your bank is undermined by the second one. So now we'll get a whole bunch more regulation that good or bad will just be chucked on top of the bad old regulations we had before (like the above-mentioned godawful Freddie and CRA which systematically encouraged businesses to engage in slipshod business practices and bludgeoned them with a 'racist' cudgel if they didn't) with little if any transparency. Wonderful, I guess.

Some more regulation was not necessarily a bad idea although for a President who made a commitment to run the most transparent Administration ever (in one of what is now becoming an uncountable list of blatant lies, since his Administration runs with so much double-talk and bullshit that it's up there with Bush II and Nixon for opaqueness) it probably wasn't a great idea to stick new regulatory organs inside the Fed, a nominally and legally private institution already believed by conspiracy nuts like myself to be run by Joos, for Joos, which is accountable to no-one (but the Joos) and which doesn't even have to open its books to the President, let alone Joe Taxpayer.

Oh, and then there was the direct nationalization of two of the three largest auto manufacturers in the country and the nationalization or quasi-nationalization of the largest insurer and re-insurer, AIG, nine of the largest financial firms on the Street and a few dozen other banks across the country. Bravo, sir, we now have a "mixed" economy for sure, actually more like mixed, shaken and stirred until nobody knows what the fuck is going on. Might it be possible, ya think, for it to sort of have a chilling effect on business and its ability to take on new risks and grow when other companies and investors have been threatened and then had threats followed through on breaching contracts (tough shit, preferred creditors at Chrysler and GM) or to nationalize and fiscally punish companies whole cloth for even fulfilling their pre-existing legally undertaken contractual obligations (fuck you greedy pigs at AIG, not publicly flogging yourself for accepting money you signed a contract to be paid and volunteering for socialist re-education progressive community involvement.) I mean, it's not like there's an air of uncertainty because Obama apparently wants to nationalize 16% of GDP that currently plays a massive role in companies' bottom lines of how they pay for their employees healthcare, with the possibility that if this President whose rammed other godawful economic measures down business owners' throats throats that it may now become the sanest thing to do to say "Fuck you guys, go ask Uncle Sam about government health insurance, whatever the fuck that is," oh wait, nope, he kind of is doing that... Or as a smarter person than me with letters after his name (probably, our fact checking department is weak here at Litterblog) put it in a story about the 7 Joo bankers over at the Fed that control the world:

With Washington creating policy uncertainty over the future of tax rates, health care, energy prices, antitrust and so much else, businesses will be slow to rehire, if they do at all.

So let's run down that list of economic, *cough*, accomplishments... terrorized companies large and small with a climate of business uncertainty by breaching contracts, access to credit too loose for some of the Wall St big boys and too tight for some small businesses on Wall Street and absolutely no clarity on how or when that will be resolved (see the above linked WSJ op-ed), and creating a whole bunch of what-ifs that stifle innovation as businesses cover their asses trying not to stick out as greedy corporate pigs and stay afloat while Obamacare, in whatever form it will take, is hammered out... written and jammed through Congress without understanding, debate or national consensus other than that of a hysterical teenager shouting "Kill it!" about the recession as if it were a spider in her bedroom the most expensive appropriations bill (that would be the "stimulus bill") which was poorly named because the only thing it stimulated was a massive dive further into debt that an already debt-riddled nation could hardly afforded and which has certainly not stimulated the economy in any measurable way... oh, and finally he's created a new regulatory apparatus that we can never tell if it's working because it's hidden inside a black box of a private bank that answers to one Joo banker in New York. (Full disclosure: I am half-Jooish.)

Wow, this guy's a fucking miracle worker. It's like a magic trick: pay no attention to the promise of eight percent or lower unemployment, it was Bush's fault! Alakaza-alakazam, it's not our problem anymore! Which brings me back to the economy. I don't remember Bush ever bitching about Clinton's tech bubble, and other than a stupid remark about how continuing to go shopping would show those fucking terrorists, he didn't even really blame FUCKING 9/11 for the recession of 2001-2002! And yet that's what we get from supposedly the most urbane, intelligent President since, well, Jimmy Carter... no, Jack Kennedy... no, Abe Lincoln... well whatever... "I didn't do it!" Some fucking genius, that guy. But, save one important difference, I'd still be willing to grant him the same basic tenet of governance of a country whose economy is not run out of a politburo but by millions of independent decisions taken by investors large and small every day in an independent, distributed fashion which is that the President is ergo not responsible for the economy in the same way an engineer is for driving a train safely... that one important difference? He's nationalized so much shit and got his fingers in so many pieces of the pie it's hard to tell where the Federal Government ends and where the private sector begins, and created such a climate of destabilization that government might march in and take away your piece of the pie that he has either literally taken away the free choices from thousands of investors and left those who remain with a massive chilling effect of uncertainty. Not only in rhetoric ("Unemployment won't go over 8%") but more importantly in actions has gotten out there and literally taken ownership of the economy, and quite rightly Senators on the right are predicting and hoping it will be his Waterloo.

"How can you want the President to fail in a time of national crisis?" ask the indignant, usually foul-smelling and undereducated naysayers. Well, they didn't really have a problem with that particular political strategy when George W. Bush was launching stupid wars and I'll give you the answer: then, as now, when a politician is favoring absolutely insane and reckless policies it's better for the country if he fails politically. I'm sorry if this sounds insensitive and frankly it is, but while the tragedy of each and every soldier who died liberating Iraq, a country that didn't ask to be liberated and whose citizens killed many of their liberators, was certainly immense and emotionally heart-wrenching for those who knew them, the peril we face currently with our economy a shambles is dare I say it perhaps more dire. Much more dire, in fact. For while Bush was spending a paltry couple hundred billion a year on Iraq (what a quaint time when government boondoggles were measured in mere hundreds of billions, as opposed to trillions, of dollars) that fiscal irresponsibility never bordered on fiscal fucking insanity where we assume massive liabilities after just going on the most drunken spending spree with money we don't have in the history of the Republic. We're through the looking glass here, people... but seriously, I don't know why a guy as smart as Obama can't see it or doesn't care, but running up debts that are literally unprecedented as a percentage of GDP is fucked up and scary; we are entering territory where greenback backed debt may become an absolutely worthless, much like how three centuries ago John Law bankrupted the French monarchy with another scam based on valueless bonds based on the imaginary cash flowing from the Louisiana territory, a fetid, feculent swamp. Now the swamp is not on the Mississippi but the Potomac but it still fucking stinks, and another imperial leader is imperiled because of his misconceptions about the might and wealth of his own oligarchy. The American economy can hum like a dynamo, but the President needs to be like a farmer, watching benevolently as the sunshine of capitalism, the soil of property rights and the seeds of entrepreneurship yield a bountiful harvest of plenty, not a Rube Goldberg factory overseer, futilely tinkering with machines of far too great complexity for any one man or group of smart men and women to get to run better than they would unfettered with even well-meaning, highly intelligent, meddlers.

So, please, Mr. Obama, give as many speeches as you please about how you and your party have saved the economy; it may get them and you unseated soon enough that you will save the economy by the mere fact of your absence... you incredibly arrogant fucking asshole.

P.S. If you ever feel the phrase "But Bush ran up deficits!" about to pass through your lips, stab yourself in the brain. Yes, Bush ran up large deficits. They were bad for the country. A better course would have been too try to shrink deficits. Instead O-Dawg blew up deficits in an absolutely unprecedented wet-dream of pork-barrel spending on all sorts of retarded shit that we don't need and more importantly simply CANNOT AFFORD. This is somewhat akin to the argument that since Pol Pot killed one or two million people then Mao isn't that bad...because, well Pol Pot did it too, less so!

Does anyone feel like history is repeating itself?

That's because it is... from The Forgotten Man a fantastic re-evaluation of both the standard history of the Great Depression from the left and the standard rebuttal from the right. Insights like this are rarely phrased so deftly or succinctly:

The New Yorker magazine's cartoons of the plump, terrified Wall Streeter were accurate; business was terrified of the president. But the cartoons did not depict the consequences of that intimidation: that businesses decided to wait Rooseelt out, hold on to their cash, and invest in future years. yet Roosevelt retaliated by introducing a tax--the undistributed profits tax--to press the money out of them.

Such forays prevent recovery and took the country into the depression within the Depression of 1937 and 1938, the one in which William Troeller died [Troeller was a 13 year old Brooklynite who lived on Driggs Ave in Greenpoint near where a bunch of my hipster friends call home who hung himself due to his family's dire economic straits a full 4 years into the Roosevelt Administration] and Willkie worried. One of the most famous Roosevelt phrases in history, almost as famous as "fear itself," was Roosevelt's boast that he would promulgate "bold, persistent experimentation." But experimentation itself created fear. And many Americans knew this at the time. In autumn 1937, the New York Times delivered its analysis of the economy's downturn: "The cause is attributed by some to taxation and alleged federal curbs on industry; by others to the demoralization of production caused by strikes." Both the taxes and the strikes were the result of Roosevelt policy; the strikes had been made possible by the Wagner Act the year before. As scholars have long noted, the high wages generated by New Deal legislation helped those workers who earned them. But the inflexibility of those wages also prevented companies from hiring additional workers. Hence the persistent shortage of jobs in the latter part of the 1930s. New Deal laws themselves contributed to the sense of lost opportunity. This sense is what led to the famous description of the period that we have all heard-- "the Depression was not so bad if you had a job." ...

The trouble, however, was not merely the new policies that were implemented but also the threat of additional, unknown, policies. Fear froze the economy, but that uncertainty itself might have a cost was something the young experimenters simply did not consider.

Sound familiar? Perhaps this book should be on the vacation reading list we're all accustomed to hearing about from Presidents, for Barack "I don't want to run auto companies" Obama seems to not understand that the fact that we don't know what the fuck part of the economy will be nationalized or left alone next itself bears a massive cost, and that while unemployment rates are now decelerating, the economy is suffering drastically from his own unstated yet widely acknowledged policy of "bold, persistent experimentation."

Annotations on Forbes Miserable Cities list

I love to write about how awful violent and dangerous cities in America are, but I hadn't seen a list as comprehensive as Forbes's one that created a misery index using six factors (unemployment rate, violent crime, weather, superfund sites--a proxy for environmental ruin, income tax rates, and commute time.) Seems like a pretty good list of factors to me... it measures things both vital to life--do you have a job, is the place an environmental hellhole, are you going to get shot or mugged or burgled--as well as vital to a happy life--do income taxes rob you blind, is the weather shit, is it a fucking shitty ass city where commuting takes forever (on all three of those scores NYC which is safe and a hub of business activity takes the cake...every single person you will ever talk to lies when asked how long it takes them to get to work on the subway as if to justify their miserably cramped and expensive housing that's still inconvenient to their jobs... the paychecks from those jobs get taxed at 10.5% by the state, another half dozen or so percent by the city--both for living and working in the city you get additional taxes--and while the weather is certainly better than MN at least here you don't have to fucking walk to public transportation to get to your job.)

And so this list produced what to me seemed like fucking sensible results--finally a list that recognizes that NYC is a miserable fucking place to live, as is Chicago with it's godawfully dangerous South-Side and miserably segregated lifestyle that results where white folks don't travel down to the South Side unless it's on the highway to see a White Sox game. So in order, as per Forbes:

1. Detroit, MI... shocker, right? Why does anybody stay in this murder hole? They should evacuate the city, go Operation Plowshare on the city, and rebuild the crater with New Detroit. The impetus to write this blog post was actually reading a story in Massad Ayoob's terrific book The Ayoob Files where a ballsy latter day Bill Cody named Rich Davis shot two of three criminal assailants (and winged the third one sending a round through his afro) in 1.5 seconds with a POS .22 LR 6 shot revolver he picked up for $30 in 1969 when he got a funky delivery order that he knew was likely from a "customer" which was in fact three black punks who ordered a pizza and who he knew were ready to murder him (with their POS .25 ACP pistols at the ready) to steal $50 off him. Why he even took their fucking order I don't understand--even back then Detroit was a murder-hole... his wife had nearly been murdered by the same teenage criminals--children of seemingly the last generation of working class black folks to inhabit the city--and he had taken to keeping a 12 gauge shotgun in his pizza shop with a sign over it saying "LOADED!" After barely escaping with his life (taking two minor hits from his wounded assailants--one in the temple that would have surely killed him if it were from a .38 hollowpoint and not a .25 ACP round and one in the ass-- he made quite the understatement in saying that he had trouble "relating well" to his African-American neighbors in Detroit after that point and went on to become an entrepreneur in the action shooting and bullet proof vest industry... better than slinging pizzas to gang-bangers, I'd say. And 40 years later, Detroit remains just as dangerous, if not more so.


2. Stockton, CA... an empty husk of a former industrial city in the East Bay area in Nor. Cal (that's the San Francisco Bay for the geographically challenged.) All the over-regulation and green hell of living in Malibu combined with the post-industrial charm of Youngstown, Ohio! What's not to love???


3. Flint, MI... again, need I say more other than nuclear weapons make an awful tempting option for hitting the "reset" button on that piece of real estate.


4. New York, NY... thank you, Forbes, for as I outlined above, putting New Yorkers in their fucking place and getting them off their high horses... yea, you can see the Met or MoMa, but you pay 25% in taxes off any paycheck before you even get to April 15 and then pay more for a 400 sq ft studio apartment than the cost of a reasonable mortgage in flyover land. Good for you, sport.


5. Philadelphia, PA... I have a soft spot in my heart for Philly that I'm sure would dissolve if I ever ventured outside of South Street and vicarious visits to the city via "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia." Of course on the other hand I have a [expletive deleted] of an ex-girlfriend who was from just outside Philly and loved the fucking Iggles... Fuck the Eagles. I mean... I know that it's at the top of this list because it's a massive murder-pit in every direction outside of center-city for like 2 miles in every direction and that to get from center-city to Penn's campus requires what I'm sure is a very dangerous drive, but I could still envisage living in the relatively decently priced and free commuter communities in Bucks County, Pa. if I had to do a stint as a researcher in one of the many fine research institutions in the city. But living there must fucking suck.


6. Chicago, IL... more on this shit-water berg later, as a reader comment puts in their place Chicago-ans and other defenders of the city of broad shoulders and limp dicks (I think that second part is often omitted when quoting Sandburg)
   


7. Los Angeles, LA... no one even denies that this place has awful commute times and furthermore despite coming in 7th in weather this place still makes the top 10 on this list. That might have to do with them being ranked 100th or worst (out of 150) in all 5 other categories, as L.A. brings you a wonderful combination of miserable commute times, apparently high pollution, (uncounted in the stats) awful air quality, crushingly high income taxes, high unemployment that I'm sure has only been exacerbated as California has become an even worse economic basket case since this article was written a couple years ago and the unsurprisingly high crime rates in the wrong parts of town (South Central, East L.A., Compton, Long Beach, etc. since it's discussing the entire metro area)


8. Modesto, CA... like LA, except the weather is not quite as nice, this north-central California city ranks 17 out of 150 in weather (that's good) but 147th out of 150 metro areas in unemployment (that's bad.) I'm sure that foreclosures there were awesome.


9. Charlotte, NC... I thought Charlotte was a growing center for the New South, and I'm surprised that this metro was doing so generally poorly (as Forbes notes, they were in the bottom 50% in all 6 categories) even before hard times hit local economic powerhouses Wachovia (being absorbed by Wells Fargo, my new bank) and Bank of America (my old bank.) Perhaps the New South ain't all it's cracked up to be...


10. Providence, RI... Nice to see New England represented... if political corruption had been included... well, Chicago would have vaulted to #1 with Providence not bringing up the rear of the top 10. I might be wrong but I want to say that both the Mayor of Providence and Governor of Rhode Island have gone down for corruption in the last decade or so. It actually fairs well on commute times and violent crimes but suffers from stiflingly bad local income taxes (149/150) and shitty weather (121/150).

And to those who would challenge the characterization of Chicago as a shit-water berg--and apparently they were legion, and willing to DO SO IN ALL CAPS WITHOT SPELLCHICK OR ANY CONCEPTION OF HOW TO FORM A SENTENCE THATS GRAMATICAL CORRECT!!!!--I will simply post the comments of an outsider who sums up perfectly, cogently and succinctly why Chicago sucks donkey dicks.

Posted by Merc12 | 02/12/09 12:13 AM EST
I moved to Chicago a few years ago from Florida looking for culture, art, music, etc. What I found are robots lackadaisically moving to the beat of the political army's drum.

I was labeled "stupid racist redneck from the South" by Trixies (who aren't able to find their way to the "South Side" even if one dangled a Cosmopolitan and a Chad holding a map in front of them). Yet this is one of the most segregated cities I've ever experienced; rich white to the north, Hispanic to the west, and African American to the south. Even homosexuals are wrangled to their own pens.

I worked for the CPS empire as a teacher/counselor. In my classroom was mold and an antiquated Apple running on DOS. And even though I've won awards for teaching and came with outstanding experience, I was told, "What do you know, you're from the South, your schools suck!" Even though my city in Florida was ranked more than 20 points higher for academic success than Chicago. But that's what you get from an education system that only hires from within and refuses to try anything new. No wonder many students in CPS don't make it past 8th grade.

I wish that "message in a bottle" had made its way to my shore before moving. I've never experienced such apathy, defensiveness, lack of warmth, and judgment from a group of people. And, though its not scientific evidence, I've also never been as depressed as I have since living here. People are friendly when offering directions or advice of where to eat. But that's were the warmth ends and the robots traipse off to their programmed lives.

The art is mediocre, the music is awful, the venues crowded with drunks and scene kids who take themselves way too seriously, the favorite past time is "partying" or debating Cubs vs Sox, the beaches are disgusting and plagued with E-coli, there is no recycling, there is little spirituality, people are afraid of eye contact and the food is AWFUL!

The only plus is the Lincoln Park Zoo.

While I won't quote on the dearth or spirituality I'll take the word of a Southerner over some asshole from Chicago any day. Discussing Chicago and its satellite cities like Gary, IN, with a friend who went to Northwestern (which is in Evanston, IL, the equivalent of Westchester County, NY in the following analogy) Chicago is basically like if NYC and it's environs were kind of flipped around a little bit and plunked down in the Midwest... you've got the massive city center where there's a ton of really violent crime-ridden city that abuts the downtown and parts that white people find habitable--in this analogy the South Side of Chicago stands in for the Bronx and Brooklyn and Downtown Chicago is equivalent to Midtown and the Financial District with the trendy North-side neighborhoods standing in for trendy neighborhoods both in and out of Manhattan like the East Village or Williamsburg. Of course Chicago is much more violent, overall, than NYC, but the analogy goes further since there are small formerly proud industrial cities on the periphery in adjoining states... Newark, NJ and Gary, IN have very similar histories and outcomes... industrial powerhouses in the middle part of the century and targets of mass migration for Southern blacks, by the latter third of the twentieth century white flight and a drying up of much of the industry that defined these cities led them to become crime-ridden murder pits, with Gary and Newark probably offering up convincing examples for which one is a more awful city... for instance... Gary probably has more abandoned buildings but Newark probably has a higher average purity level of its hard drugs.




There are, to be sure, nice suburbs in Indiana, as my college friend from Munster, IN, would not want me to forget, since he basically went to a rich public school that was I'm sure the equivalent of the nice white suburbs where I grew up in NJ. And then in the main state of the city there's your nice commuter cities (with Evanston, IL standing in for Westchester, as was mentioned, and while it's not a perfect analogy since I doubt many people commute the 90 minutes each way from Racine to Chicago whereas people do the 45 minutes each way from Greenwich to NYC there's even a third state to the north that's got some relatively nice communities with Wisconsin standing in for Connecticut.) At any rate, all the advantages of living in the Midwest are completely ruined by having a second-rate NYC plopped down in the middle of it and as I told my friend Dave who went to Northwestern while driving from New Jersey to Minneapolis when I moved out here, hitting Chicago was the only time when I felt like I was even vaguely back on the East Coast because driving through South Side Chicago where you can see ghetto ass row houses and housing projects is very reminiscent of driving the Garden State Parkway through Newark. I don't know if there's a song about Chicago--if there is I'm sure it's totally fucking stupid--but if there is, then I would write a facetious and sarcastic rewording of its main hook right here...

...but since there isn't I'll just end the post. Oh, also, Chicago sucks because it gave us Community Organizer in Chief Barry H. Obama.

What the fuck is wrong with this ass-helmet?

In an irony that's been noted by dozens of people before me...

U.S. President Barack Obama said on Monday the coup that ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was illegal and would set a "terrible precedent" of transition by military force unless it was reversed.

So installation of a tyrannical regime by legislative means and creeping addition of the powers not given explicitly at the ballot box (Venezuela, Honduras until last week, the U.S. for the last 9 years...) that's hunky-dory, as is apparently maintenance of a tyrannical regime already in power using military muscle to slaughter innocent civilians (or at least that latter case wouldn't be a proper case for U.S. "meddling" and is a case where criticism of the mullahs required several days of pontification since it would be base and crass to call the evil mullahs who run Iran evil) but it's a "terrible precedent" that needs to be immediately condemned if a country removes a quasi-legal, would-be-tyrant with a military coup in order to set up free elections in the next couple months?

That's your moral vision for foreign policy?

Can somebody kick him in the balls for me?

Insanity: 5,342,962, Common sense: 2

Since, oh, I don't know, 2002, the Federal Government has made a shit-ton of crazy, stupidly bad decisions. All three branches and both parties have participated in the lunacy... there was that invasion of the country next to the one that actually attacked us on 9/11 (small geographical oversight.) There was the Kelo v. City of New London debacle when the Supreme Court said that rich private corporations wanting your land provided a compelling interest for the Government to make you an offer you couldn't refuse to sell them the land. There was the fuck-ups of letting Abu Ghraib happen and then retardly releasing the pictures--essentially pre-made al-Qaeda propaganda--to show how open and free our society is. I think the distinction was probably lost on the jihadis. Then there was the insanity of publicizing the existence of the secret prison on Gitmo in the first place and now the equal and opposite insanity of having to keep the promise to close it as Barack Obama discovers that with terrorists who you don't want to just throw into the Supermax in Colorado that it'd be kind of nice if there were, you know, a special kind of military prison somewhere off the American mainland but relatively close to the U.S. where we could kind of just keep these terrorists--or if they're not terrorists they're at the very least by now radical anti-American muslims-- while we figure out what to do with them. Oh, wait, that would be Gitmo, wouldn't it. Damn.

There was the whole systematic failure of regulatory bodies and both parties and the executive and legislative branches to do anything about why, for a number of reasons caused both by lefties (providing 'affordable housing') and righties (providing Wall Street with a profitable new derivatives market) the government allowed banks to write so much bad mortgage paper that they could use shredded, foreclosed mortgages instead of confetti for NYE 2010, which in turn caused the economy to collapse and vaulted B.O. and the Democrats into a sudden and massively powerful stance astride the economy. Apparently Barack Obama, despite protestations to the contrary, wants to personally run the economy (maybe we all misunderstood when he said he didn't want to run a car company by assuming he meant that he didn't to run private industry at all, but rather, that he wasn't content simply running a single car company when he could run essentially the entire economy.) And sorry to say this, folks, but it looks like he's running it straight into the ground. Debt is hitting scary-high new levels--say what you will about George W. Bush, he never had government debt reach near 100% of GDP--equivalent to holding in debt to a credit card company or bank your yearly income. In fact, his record level of having debt at about 50% of GDP was quickly shattered by Obama and his very, very expensive plan to save America from everything, and commensurately ride debt ever higher. At some point, the stack of cards is going to collapse... hopefully for the Democrats at the polls in 2010 and not when Moody's rates American 1 year T-bills AA and 30 year T-bills B or junk and sends interest roots through the fucking roof.

So that's where we are... insanity and common sense have been pretty much in retreat everywhere. I count two places--one just yesterday--where one branch of the government, the judiciary, exercising its role established in Marbury v. Madison as kind of a firewall against Executive and Legislative insanity. The first is the previously discussed Heller decision where the Supreme Court affirmed what all reasonable people already understood... that the framers wouldn't put in the right to keep and bear arms as the second of 10 amendments if they didn't think it important, and that some bizarre interpretation of the independent clause about militias requiring only that, say, National Guardsmen be given weapons was insane. Clearly the founders knew they were discussing weapons that were lethal--this document was written 200 years after guns were widely used in combat in the West, not at the time of the Magna Carta when "arms" meant things like clubs and swords and spears--and they clearly thought it important to re-iterate that Americans have a fundamental right to keep lethal weapons for (amongst various other reasons) things like self-defense, a right so fundamental the founders didn't even see fit to put it in the Bill of Rights (read your 9th Amendment, folks.)

So that was good.

Yesterday was also pretty sweet. Presumed Supreme Court Justice-to-be Sotomoyer's vote to uphold a non-sensical decision claiming that tests are obviously discriminatory if the right number of minorities don't pass them was (alongside the votes and decisions of a number of other lower courts) overturned in favor of common sense. The relevant facts... the city of New Haven is rightfully afraid of law-suits in our increasingly litigious society. They administered a test whose questions have not been made public--my theory is because they will show no plausible basis for a claim of racial discrimination--for firefighters who wanted to be promoted to take. A bunch of white firefighters and two Hispanic firefighters passed the test, including the lead plantiff in the case who spent hours listening to tapes of the test material to overcome his dyslexia, while zero black firefighters passed the test.

One would presume a test about firefighting in an urban locality like New Haven would be completely race neutral, or as race-neutral as our society can make a fucking thing, where race can be dragged into just about any arena. But really, I've yet to hear or read an attempt to explain how, not even knowing the questions, a test that presumably focuses on things like the rules of being a firefighter in New Haven, Connecticut, could have any material on it that would somehow favor white people and Latinos and discriminate against African Americans. I assume this is because it would be blatantly preposterous on its face to claim that a test about things like... I dunno, what the procedures are for doing when you reach a burning building and what kinds of factors change those procedures...could in any conceivable way have anything to do with race.

So therefore the question becomes... if the claim that the test was somehow discriminatory falls flat on its face--and again, I've yet to read or see on TV or hear someone claim that this test was somehow discriminatory in content or even hazard a guess as to how it might be discriminatory--then how can you justify discriminating against the guys who apparently just studied hard for the fucking test and passed it by throwing out their promotions because since the black test-takers didn't pass there is a chance of a lawsuit without any merit whatsoever for discrimination will be brought. I mean this is like confused to the third power. You write a test with the very bland and completely non-racially charged goal of simply providing the city a measuring stick to see what firefighters are worthy of promotions. People of different races take the test, which, again, I can't imagine had any content that would be harder for African American test-takers who had studied to get right than white or Latino test-takers. African Americans didn't do as well as whites or Latinos... so therefore the test must have been discriminatory, Q.E.D. That's apparently the thinking of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who, not long for this world and in what is likely her last Supreme Court dissent went on to publicly read this mind-bending piece of politically correct, tortured, "logic" of which I'll give you some highlights:

The white firefighters who scored high on New Haven’s promotional exams understandably attract this Court’s sympathy. But they had no vested right to promotion. Nor have other persons received promotions in preferenceto them. New Haven maintains that it refused to certifythe test results because it believed, for good cause, that it would be vulnerable to a Title VII disparate-impact suit if it relied on those results. The Court today holds that New Haven has not demonstrated “a strong basis in evidence” for its plea. In so holding, the Court pretends that “[t]he City rejected the test results solely because the higher scoring candidates were white.” That pretension, essential to the Court’s disposition, ignores substantial evidence of multiple flaws in the tests New Haven used. The Court similarly fails to acknowledge thebetter tests used in other cities, which have yielded less racially skewed outcomes. [In other words... the tests were better because they gave the desired politically correct results... not because they were necessarily better tests of fire-fighting ability. Again, disparate results prove motive, means, and intent to discriminate, Q.E.D.]

...

Following a lawsuit and settlement agreement, see ibid., the City initiated efforts to increase minority representation in the New Haven Fire Department. Those litigation-induced efforts produced some positive change. New Haven’s population includes a greater proportion of minorities today than it did in the 1970’s [So apparently increasing the proportion of minorities in command positions and in the fire department is a good unto itself, regardless of whether they are good fire-fighters. It would seem that the test results, until I see evidence that there was somehow some test material that dealt with something other than fire-fighting, would provide a much more important social good: providing the city with fire-fighter who know what they're doing and who aren't promoted to fulfill some PC racial quota.]

...

By order of its charter, New Haven must use competitive examinations to fill vacancies in fire officer and other civil-service positions. Such examinations, the City’s civil service rules specify, “shall be practical in nature, shall relate to matters which fairly measure the relative fitness and capacity of the applicants to discharge the duties of the position which they seek, and shall take into accountcharacter, training, experience, physical and mental fitness.” Id., at A331. The City may choose among a variety of testing methods, including written and oral exams and “[p]erformance tests to demonstrate skill and ability in performing actual work.” Id., at A332. New Haven, the record indicates, did not closely consider what sort of “practical” examination would “fairly measure the relative fitness and capacity of the applicants to discharge the duties” of a fire officer. Instead, the City simply adhered to the testing regime outlined in its two-decades-old contract with the local firefighters’ union: a written exam, which would account for 60 percent of an applicant’s total score, and an oral exam, which would account for the remaining 40 percent. [Yea, that seems totally fucking indefensible... a 60% written test and a 40% oral test to determine which grunts get to go into leadership positions. I don't know what is unreasonable about that at all; all of these men had passed the physical tests to prove that they were capable of discharging their responsibilities as firefighters...being strong enough to charge into a burning building and break down doors to rescue occupants, etc. For a promotion to a command position, one would imagine that knowledge of relevant rules and practices of fire-fighting would be highly relevant and practical in determining who should be promoted. Why Ginsburg somehow finds this arrangement to be some sort of 40 year old racist collusion--is she implying that a test that uses written or spoken English is somehow discriminatory? I really fail to see her point here--simply because the 60% written, 40% oral formula was designed 40-odd years ago is really a stunning leap in anti-logic to me.]

Alright that's as much continual repetition of fallacious arguments as I can take. But she goes on like that for 20 pages. I'd say that it's a shame that her career will likely end on such a low note, but her decisions have read like that for her entire career... the only difference is that when she was starting her career the old boys network in places like New Haven probably was actively discriminating against blacks and women to keep them out of positions of power. In today's society the city voluntarily, in fact, took the initiative to throw out these test results because while they didn't personally think they were unfair they thought that they looked unfair and would leave them open to litigation. You won, Ms. Ginsburg, you simply fail to realize it. You can quite flogging that dead horse, the carcass rotted away in the mid 1980s and the bones are all broken, now.

Common sense strikes again. It doesn't happen often, but it's worth noting and lauding when it happens.

Memo to lib-tards, re: 2010 and your idiot Representatives

When your utility bill jumps 20% next month if the Senate passes this absolutely fucking retarded bill that won't fucking change a goddamn thing regarding the environment can you please, please, please recognize that Obammy and your Dumbocrats aren't the fucking saviors or change you voted for? You were sold a false bill of goods... it happens to the best of us (George W. Bush and his stated policy in 2000 of non-interventionism, for instance) but please, for the love of God, in 2010 THROW THE BUMS OUT!

In case you need to witness the insanity of how uncaring or misguided or foolish Democrats are regarding the carnage that will happen if this bill is signed into law and it kicks Americans in the economic balls right when they're trying to get up from a full on beat down, watch as Henry Waxman, the rat-looking fellow from California who wants to shove this godawful idea of taxing our way to prosperity (to cut carbon emissions--or, in my view, subsidize Chinese and Indian carbon emissions) down our throats, tries to stop John Boehner from literally reading pertinent descriptions of the largest parts of the 300 pages of amendments that were dumped onto this bill at 3 AM the day of the vote even though he's already been told (I watched the whole thing live) that the custom is to give the minority or majority leader as much time to talk as they please. So again, Henry Waxman, rat-looking fellow from California who wants to kick you in your economic junk to save the sky from American greenhouse gas emissions (forget the unintended consequences of this bill like just making it cheaper for China and India to pump greenhouse gases into the air... at least it won't be American carbon--or as much of it anyways--causing Florida to go underwater) is disappointed and angered by the fact that the Republicans wanted to debate (for a grand total of roughly 5 hours) an in total, with Amendments possibly modifying and changing some of the pages, 1300 pages of legislation to regulate the shit out of most Americans and give benefits to a chosen few who--wouldn't you know it, happen to know folks in Washington.

This is really disgusting, and I just hope that when the Democrats punch the lib-tards who voted for hope and change into office and when they realize that the hope and change's most tangible manifestation is killing jobs and raising bills at a time when most people are barely holding onto a job and making ends meet that they punch back--hard--at the polls to 2010

No Guns For Negroes!@!@!!!!

Ever wonder why mostly black cities have some of the highest crime rates in the country? And why those cities often exist in states that have some of the strictest gun laws of all? And that in fact some cities go above and beyond their states' gun control laws in making gun laws more harsh? (Or in the case of Washington, D.C., where it is not in a state, it had a gun law that essentially prohibited firearms that was so harsh that it was ruled Unconstitutional.)

Some interesting facts... gun laws enacted in the Johnson Administration were written by translating documents from 1938 Germany--don't need to tell you who was behind those-- that disarmed racially undesirable individuals to base those laws on. In New Jersey gun laws allow police officers absolute discretion to deny you your Second Amendment rights... while they probably don't like right-wing yahoo gun nuts who want to own guns for self-defense in the rich suburbs that aren't out in really rural parts of the state like Sussex or Gloucester county... guess what... the local cops in Newark or Camden or Trenton or Irvington or Paterson or any of the other very violent communities where violent conflict resolution and personal self-defense before police can intervene are very real issuesprobably really don't like anybody trying to get their hands on guns. I'd imagine that in these communities where the mentality isn't that having a certain percentage of the population armed deters crime but rather that guns = crime (since guns are essentially illegal unless you go through a very involved process, and only criminals have guns) it probably doesn't matter whether you're white, brown, yellow or purple, whether you're a drug dealer who has been convicted of several misdemeanors or a completely law abiding citizens without one parking ticket on your record who wants to defend yourself in a very dangerous communities, the mentality is that guns = crime and the result is that in the places where effective, credible self-defense against say, multiple people trying to harm you at once, is unavailable where it's most likely to be needed--an inner city--but readily available where self-defense and violent crime are very infrequent occurences (the sparsely populated, generally safer towns in flyover land.)

For a better history here's a very good youtube documentary called "No Guns for Negroes" which discusses the history of gun control in the U.S. and its intersection with racial politics and how hypocritical laws to "protect" black communities end up making it virtually impossible to legally own a firearm in these cities, but unfortunately, there are plenty of criminals who couldn't give a fuck which means that there are tons of gun crimes and murders (I guess one could say a silver lining is that mostly they are between "players" in the "the game" of drug-dealing and criminality and that the murdered often chose a life of violence, but on the other hand stray bullets don't have eyes and claim their fair share of innocent law-abiding folks) but the very idea that guns for self-defense would be denied to those who live in the most violent communities smacks of idiocy and a hidden agenda to me.

More letters between me and the first family

You may remember just yesterday Michelle Obama wrote me an e-mail and I wrote her back. Well guess what? Today, I personally got an email from the man himself, the Sultan President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama! Check out our correspondence below!

Dear Friend,

I will not be participating in these voluntary programs. They are indeed voluntary, correct? If so, perhaps you should avoid confusing phrases like "time to roll up your sleeves" which omits any mention of free choice, and therefore could be inferred as a command and not a "challenge." I would suggest for instance, a phrase that emphasizes the voluntary nature of the service rendered to the nation, by saying, for instance, "Roll up your sleeves if you want to help your country."

I seriously doubt you would want people to think that this was forced volunteerism, which it certainly isn't, correct? Unless you want to do the "volunteer programs" that qualify you for tangible benefits, but this is a friendly suggestion, not a quibble about semantics.

Respectfully,

Your pal,

Adam ________
_____________
Minneapolis, MN _______ [Last name and address redacted for posting on public blog]

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On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 13:19, President Barack Obama wrote:

Subject: Time to roll up your sleeves


The White House, Washington

Dear Friend,

Last week, I announced United We Serve – a nationwide call to service challenging you and all Americans to volunteer this summer and be part of building a new foundation for America.

And when I say “all,” I mean everyone – young and old, from every background, all across the country. We need individuals, community organizations, corporations, foundations, and our government to be part of this effort.

Today, for the official kick off of United We Serve, members of my administration have fanned out across America to participate in service events and encourage all Americans to join them.

The First Lady is rolling up her sleeves and getting to work too. But before she headed out today, she asked me to share this message with you.

A Message From The First Lady

Our nation faces some of the greatest challenges it has in generations and we know it’s going to take a lot of hard work to get us back on track.

While Michelle and I are calling on every American to participate in United We Serve, the call to service doesn’t end this fall. We need to stay involved in our towns and communities for a long time to come. After all, America’s new foundation will be built one neighborhood at a time – and that starts with you.

Thank you,
President Barack Obama

It's nice to know that I am personally friends with the most powerful person in the world!

My correspondence with Mrs. Obama

Mrs. Obama,

I know why I and probably millions of others received this message; because I have e-mailed the White House, in my case using my main e-mail account. In my case. and I'm sure in many cases concerning important and terribly worrying concerns that other American people and I have about the recklessness of your husband's fiscal policy.

Again, I used my real e-mail address which in turn contains and makes no attempt to hide my full, real name, and allows anyone who knows it to tell that I am in fact a real person...you could google me and find links to research I've done, my web-site, where I live, etc. I am not a crazy person, I am not one of the apparently large cohort of potentially dangerous right-wingers that your husband's Administration has publicly identified, I am an unspectacular, real American. All I ask is that if I exercise my legitimate right to petition the government... including the White house... for a redress of grievances. that the Federal Government not, if they're not going to at least take note of let alone respond to me, please don't take my email address that I have used to exercise this right and turn it into a mailing list for SPAM, OK?

To ask a final favor, please, tell your husband he's nationalized enough industries, Mrs. Obama, and that spam is not another one that he needs to try.

Thank you for your time and concern,

-Adam __________
________________
________________ [last name and address redacted for posting onto opinionated blog]

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On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 10:40, First Lady Michelle Obama wrote:


The White House, Washington


Happy Father's Day,

I’m writing to share a special video of Barack talking about fatherhood, but first I want to share some thoughts of my own.

My father, Frasier Robinson, was the rock of our family. Although he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in his early thirties, he was our provider, our champion and our hero...

[Rambling maudlin e-mail message deleted for your health.]

The goal of the Iranian protests MUST be regime change

Barack Obama on his recent tour of the Middle East, and in the wake of a tour of Latin America) where he engaged with the nation-state equivalents of your asshole neighbor who never mows his lawn and sometimes drives drunk around the neighborhood, gave a speech that was thought to be historic that was a bunch of fluffy rhetoric about how the U.S. won't impose its values on anybody by force anymore but that freedoms like those to speech and assembly and conscience are universal, and therefore the U.S. will support them.

It was fluffy rhetoric two weeks ago. Now, it's of dire importance, and he finally worked up the nerve to say the same thing again, which was, of course, a much different ball of wax given the news coming out of Iran. It's bizarre, but when there is nothing at stake, some nice words about how freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and the right to self-determination are good values universally mean very little.

People in the U.S. were on the left (and to the right to some extent) confused about why there was such a big protest about an election for a guy who is the equivalent of a Press Secretary. The President in Iran as it stands now has no power if he doesn't agree with mullahs, and the 10 mullahs of the Guardian Council are very, very conservative. So what confused me, personally, was why the mullahs didn't basically say that there had been human (not divine) mistakes in counting, and that a new election needed to be held, and that Mousavi would be allowed to actually win that election. And then, once he was President, just marginalize him like every previous "President" of the country has been marginalized. I think it's a salient fact that the first time the Iranian President became important was when he was a popular mouthpiece who was walking more or less in lock-step with the Guardian Council. People don't realize that Ahmadenijad's predecessor represented one of the "reform" parties, but of course since the Democracy is obviously a construction of man, and therefore in their system a virtually meaningless system when compared to the actual power-base of 10 men of their imaginary god who decide everything, you never heard of him.

Mousavi is no saint either, having blood of thousands of Iranians on his hands from the period of the Iran-Iraq war, but frankly his decision to say that he will be a martyr and that the shit stops now could make him the 21st century's first real political hero--and no, Obama is not even close to Mousavi in courage or moral fortitude; what principles do you think Obama holds dear enough to lay down his life for? None. I personally have been wrestling with the question of if I lived in such a fucking awful country... literally run by 10 insane muslim fuckwads, where women can't even go out in public dressed as they please, where further there's no prospects for any meaningful education, and the only thing you have to hope for is a shitty life doing some menial labor, would I have the balls as a college student to go out into the streets and put myself in the line of fire in order to protest the election results?

I would like to think so, but I believe the most truthful answer I can give is that I would have to be in the situation to know for sure; I know that my beliefs make me wish I would have that kind of courage... my courage has never been tested like that, however.

The most important thing, though, is that the point of the protests must now change... it can no longer be about installing another puppet/figure head and it must be REGIME CHANGE. The mullahs need to be thrown out, the Baseej militia must turn on their masters, have someone with guns get into the halls of power and take out the mullahs and Ahmadenijad and string them up in the streets from the street lamps in Tehran, prove that their God will not save them, and have new elections where the President who is elected has power. Power comes from Man, there are no gods, and while unfortunately if there were a just God he would make sure that the regime is toppled, but it seems unfortunate that this is not by any means necessarily a likely outcome. If Obama had some real balls he'd have CIA moving in across the porous Iraq/Iran border and get weapons to the opposition movement; their goverment sure as shit has done that to us--funnel weapons across that border to kill our soldiers-- but importantly (and this seems to be the problem that policy doves don't get is that Iranian soldiers who are still following orders are participating in what Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil."

In other words... our soldiers fight for a just cause, the universal principles of freedom and justice that Obama talked about in such a fuzzy way just a few weeks ago. Now to say those words would be a provocation and would be something Obama doesn't want to engage in, but why should we not be provocative? Why should we not use our military might or at least our spooks to push what is clearly the will of the people over the top? An Iranian soldier who follows orders follows evil orders; if he doesn't think about it that does not absolve him of having done something evil; if he doesn't believe that shooting peacefully protesting students is an evil thing to do then he is not merely evil in a banal, passive way, but is a sociopath. He may not deserve death, but evil may be fought with deadly force. Obama should understand this.

The end of the clerical dictatorship in Iran should arrive soon; I wish our President had the balls to say what he said two weeks ago now that it's in question... America stands for universal values of freedom of speech and association. Unfortunately for Obama who wants to be everybody's friend that fluffy rhetoric, if he doesn't absolutely do a 180 degree turn, now requires action at the very least telling the world that America supports the protesters, that the mullahs who are now murdering protesters for wanting to have those values are evil and cannot be coddled and must be opposed openly, and that it doesn't matter if we are seen as meddling. Support for universal values means support for those values... universally... even if it means pissing off the Government of Iran.

Fuck the Guardian Council, have Obama tell the protestors that WE STAND WITH YOU and that WE WILL NOT LET YOUR GOVERNMENT COMMIT MASS MURDER AGAINST PEOPLE EXERCISING UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS, and see what happens. I wish that Obama had the courage in his whole Administration that these heroes in Tehran have in their little fingers.

America: Monopoly Money and a Monopoly on Power

Although blatantly contradicting my post yesterday about how I don't have as much time to post, and I suppose I could have spent another hour moving stuff into my house, but I got quite a bit done today and I think it's time for at least a physical break from moving shit.

I like Unicorns. And Candyland. Perhaps the solution to developing energy independence is best likened to Candyland since our plans based on wind and solar stand about as much chance of being economically viable before Obama leaves office as planning to fly our magic unicorns to work, powered obviously by pixie dust and bottled rainbows. And straw, too; they are Unicorns, you know. I've never understood the idea of energy independence as a goal in the first place; North Korea had as a goal everything-independence--a philosophy of Juche which usually is translated as "Self Reliance" and their economy has not really turned out that great, as opposed to notoriously car un-independent South Korea which must find markets for many, perhaps most of the products it manufacturers since they are meant for export. Lunacy. Look, I am all in favor of expanding domestic supplies with off-shore drilling, but unless our trade in fuel is giving money to a country that actually wants spend it to do something like acquire a nuclear weapon (this is precisely one country at the moment: Iran) then I don't get the point of energy independence as a goal--comparative advantage is a good thing; Canadians produce natural gas cheaper than we do; Brazilians non CO₂ emitting ethanol, Venezuelans crude oil that can only be refined in the U.S.; these are cheaper ways of obtaining energy for transportation and if we, say, refuse to trade with Venezuela pre-emptively as opposed to at the end of a failed diplomatic negotiation then we have cut off our nose to spite our face, and further, it's not like Venezuela will have trouble selling oil to some other country. Finally, trade is a good, possibly even better way to align our interests with those of another country's; would human rights in China be better or worse post Tianamen Square if America had foregone trading with them? More importantly, can we please talk about these issues instead of playing Candyland with policy where if something sounds like it will be nice and fun then it's not just a good idea, but fuck it, just go ahead and do it because the world is Candyland world and we don't have to consider the consequences of our actions since if things go wrong we can just start playing a new game or a different game. Oh wait, we can't, there is no reset button, and actions have consequences, often unintended ones... so as nice as "energy independence" and "a right to health-care" (how much healthcare in dollars exactly?) sound nice... they're political Unicorns, and I don't know about you, but the only Unicorns I want are real ones to fly to work on.

Did that paragraph strike you as silly, perhaps retarded? Welcome to dark side of Obamaworld, where you're on the outside looking in at all the crazy people who think that their insane plans are going to work like a charm, as if these ideas are somehow new.

I just felt compelled to post this video that captured pretty concisely how the currently powerful people in this country are living in a vacuous mental game of Monopoly-- with regard to this video the Democrats in Congress primarily but any Republican who tries to tinker with this health-care bill and offers up only token opposition and rather doesn't fight this health-care bill kicking and screaming, but in general a massive bloc of politicians and aligned interest groups working in lockstep towards a common set of goals. The only problem is that these goals can only be achieved in their non-existent Monopology game where when there simply isn't enough money in the box to play the game you simply take out some scraps of paper and write down how much your new bills are worth. There's no inflation in Monopoly and you've actually added wealth to the game-board; unfortunately real-life does not work like this and goods and services cannot be obtained by making some new Monopoly money, and the odds of drawing the community chest card where you win second prize in a beauty pageant are slim to none.



Let me show you a video of Connecticut Democratic Senator and Congressional Budget Office Peter Pan (but I want to be able to create money! I don't want to behave like a fiscal grown up!) Chris Dodd standing in for ailing Ted Kennedy, the man with whom he basically drafted up our shiny new health-care legislation. Essentially his point is that he's not going to let some no-name bureaucrats (who work at his behest and which therefore makes him kind of a dick for not knowing their names) in the non-partisan yet sempiternally cost-underestimating Congressional Budget Office deter him from writing the bill he wants to write for trifling little opinions they have. Their pet peeve? Just a little concern that his bill would cost at least $1 TRILLION A YEAR (essentially a permanent increase in the size of the Federal Government's budget by somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3; that's not on health-care, folks, this bill would conservatively grow the Federal Government by 25%... one bill...think about that.) More realistic projections are that the bill will cost 1.5 or 2 TRILLION DOLLARS (in other words 10-15% of GDP) EVERY YEAR FROM NOW UNTIL WHENEVER THIS WOULD BE REPEALED (in other words, forever.) I don't know whether to be pleased or frightened that NBC is reporting that this is a bit of a SNAFU for the bill's chances of passing, but with the way that GE is in Obama's pocket this could be calculated spin designed precisely to change the take home message from the real one--"THIS IS A MAMMOTH CLUSTERFUCK THAT THREATENS OUR FISCAL SOLVENCY"-- to "the CBO's budget projections are harshing our buzz trying to get you your free health-care." The MSNBC head-line literally calls the CBO report "a major buzz kill." I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

The arrogance, loss of touch with any sense of reality or fiscal discipline, and lack of realization that this must be paid for. Options include dumping more debt onto the backs of my generation--a very, very risky strategy considering we are entering levels of debt that are without precedent in U.S. history and that we may be reaching a tipping point where borrowing becomes prohibitively expensive and possible consequences could include literally, predictably, causing the absolute collapse of the U.S. dollar in order to try to get to Candyland. So with that for background, witness the almost insane, almost literal hubris (as Dodd claims that the CBO is "not Mount Olympus") as captured on video:



Of course the Democrats have thought about how to pay for some of that optimistically low cost of $1 trillion a year, about 10% of it with sin taxes. I don't know if they could make up the difference by jacking the top income tax brackets not just to Clinton era levels where they now are (slightly less than 40% Federal Income Tax on the wealthy) but to near-1970s levels (50%, 60%, e.g.) I sincerely doubt it. Art Laffer and supply siders are generally laughed about, but the Laffer curve definitely kicks in somewhere around 50-70% top tax rate, since tax cuts from 91% to 70% under JFK and 70% to 50% under Reagan both yielded increases in government revenue. You have to have very very high taxes, but as basic logic dictates, at some point raising taxes reduces revenue taken in. We're at roughly 40% for the top tax bracket right now, and while going to 50% probably would increase revenues, there is just a problem that increasing taxes has diminishing marginal utility; a tax hike from 40% to 50% on the wealthiest 1% will not mean a 10% increase in revenues from that group; increased incentives to shelter money and decreased incentives to earn money both combine to make such a tax increase yield less than a 1:1 increase in revenue. Of course notice something else. We're talking at least, in the most optimistic projection, a 25% increase in expenditure. Even with the top 1% or 5% or 20% of earners making up almost all the Federal Income Tax Revenue, a 10% tax hike...doesn't stand a chance of increasing revenues by 25%. Right?

The Democrats have thought up a way to at least cover a pretty significant chunk of health-care, that, unsurprisingly, is used in Europe to help them pay for their "free" health-care. The solution, that would, and I believe it, raise a trillion dollars a year for health-care? The Democrats commit political suicide less than a year after gaining power. Excuse me, that would be the consequence of the solution. The solution itself would be a 25% value added tax, a tax that, well, has teh government get a taste of the profits every time economic activity occurs that generates wealth as, for instance, unfinished raw materials become half-built goods or wholesaled goods or service are distributed for retail sale. In other words, everything (EVERYTHING) costs 25% more than it does now. It would rend asunder the already blatant lie that tax hikes would only be for rich folks (yea I know that cigarette tax and these new booze taxes are going to hit rich folks and rich folks alone) tear the lie into shreds, light the shreds on fire, and then force you to eat the ashes of the lie as EVERTYHING YOU BUY WOULD COST 25% more. The Democrats will never do this of course, since a backdoor VAT can be effected by essentially printing enough money that everything costs 25% more, all the money in your bank account is worth 25% less, but the government has monetized enough debt to pay for health-care... for a year or two at least.

I want to get to what I see the power structure as thinking its doing and what I see it as actually doing to us, but first I think it's necessary to talk about who is in the power structure that is, for lack of a better word, fast-tracking Obamaism in America and what indicators we have of how successful they will be. And I want to point out that I'm not just counting as the power structure currently the men and women who would be most directly responsible for this financial kamikaze scheme, that is the Congressional Democrats and Republicans who either supporting or are not working furiously to destroy this absolutely unaffordable bill. Rather, such a vast network of individuals is involved in trying to make Obama "succeed" that it seems dubious that anything any sane, responsible Congressmen and women could do in the next before the mid-term elections can possibly save us. That is not to say all hope is lost; if the Democrats are scared enough of losing their grip on power and seeing their whole project unravel then things will be dialed back from the brink. How and why they would be able to tell that they maybe stepping too far will follow below, but first I want to outline all the forces arrayed to prevent sanity from prevailing here: I mentioned the power structure above, and I don't just mean the political structure in Congress and the White House where Democrats have the ability to jam through almost any piece of legislation that Obama can get the Red State Democrats on board with (I'm assuming that national health-care would be such a bill, since despite the fiscal insanity Red States tend to be poor and rural and enjoy having money confiscated from one group of people and given to them as much as anyone. So there's the ineffectual Republicans not defending the Constitution, the Democrats in Congress, and of course, Obama and his cabinet, the face of the Medusa's head.

Of course Obama is not merely a President; he is, unfortunately, a figure of a personality cult. In New York City I witnessed many instances of people wearing Obama t-shirts, businesses with Obama calendars, etc. I certainly in my lifetime cannot recall an American President getting this kind of voluntary and therefore less insidious treatment where his picture is posted all over the place, on t-shirts, calendars, just plain old framed photos and either hung up or worn for the whole world to see; I know it's not the same as the Turkmenbashi/Kim Jong Il/Saddam Hussein/Stalin where those folks had to have that picture up, but I still find having a picture of any politician in a place of reverence during his or her tenure, let alone during his first six months in office, kind of damn creepy: it's not a political button or slogan, it's a picture that you would save for someone you love and admire, and it seems to lose sight of the fact that he works for you and that while you can be supportive you should also be watchful and make sure that he is serving the interests and ideals you believe in. He is much more than a politician to them, he's a figurehead and a symbol, but frankly a responsible voter, while admiring a politician, should keep in mind that the President in Office is not just a symbol or figurhead, he's first and foremost a politican. I don't think I need say more. This, of course, will be useful to remember in explaining why his popularity remains so high when other indicators wouldn't lead you to believe a generic Democratic President in his shoes would be thought of as competent or successful.



So you have a head of a massive personality cult, coupled with a Congress that is so dominated by the majority party and has such a meek, spineless, unprincipled opposition that it is more a Politburo that provides a rubber stamp for Obama's and the progressive wing of the DNC's plans than a truly deliberative body that carefully considered and debated all the policies it enacted. The farce of having a speedreader at the ready to rattle off the 900 or so pages of the global warming bill that passed a few months ago was not a case of being hard to decide whether to laugh or cry; that was simply a sad day for democracy, and did more to cheapen the American experiment in my eyes than making a man who orchestrated the deaths of 3,000 innocent civilians feel like he was drowning. In case you don't remember what I'm talking about, after the Republicans sniped at Democrats for having passed the stimulus without having read nearly all of its 1000 or so pages the Democrats literally hired a speed reader who could read aloud nearly 3 pages a minute and therefore rattle off in an afternoon a 900 page bill making sweeping changes to how we deal with CO₂ and other greenhouse gas emissions to possibly get around a rule in Congress that all bills must be read if so requested. It didn't come to it, but the arrogance that was entailed there, since obviously the point of the speedreader was that the lawmakers had not and did not intend to pay attention to the many rules and regulations they were voting for, but in case the Republicans called them on it, they had a backup plan so that they could vote for it without having to know what was in it anyways (or perhaps they would have been taking copious notes during the 3-4 hours of speedreading, I'm not sure.) Does that sound like a deliberative chamber to you? It sure as shit doesn't to me. Now they're debating the health-care plan and I sincerely hope it crashes and burns because it is so expensive that if this debate fails to convince Democrats that they must at some point stop spending money we do not have there will come a tipping point, sooner rather than later with these gaudy sums of money, where America is no longer seen as any more solid of a debtor than some other first world countries whose economies have completely blown up like Germany, 1920s, Argentina, late 1990s early 200s, and Iceland, 2009. It would take quite a bit of effort to bankrupt the U.S., but open-ended commitments to spend at least a trillion extra dollars a year--really probably closer to two trillion-- on something that is more of a luxury than a necessity during a fiscal emergency is a good start. Go directly to the EU to beg for money: do not pass go, do not collect two trillion dollars.

Why is there no pushback? We may be seeing some--a bit more on that later--but a large reason is that the profligacy and disingenuousness of Obama's Administration have been very tidily spun in almost unthinkably rosy news stories in once serious media outlets. Studies of the media have shown damning evidence to an almost unbelievable extent that cuts way beyond simple bias towards supporting liberals that Obama's press coverage is fawning and uncritical; I believe the number was 42% of the articles covering him expressed positive viewpoints towards his policies versus numbers for both Bush and Clinton over the same period of their time in office of 22% and 27% favorable, if I recall correctly. But beyond simply having newspaper blowjobs in the NYT op-ed page every day there's a much more powerful set of forces all lined up behind this progressive agenda. I'm not usually an anti-corporate sort of person but I feel that corporations like GM and GE are in an often used pun no longer "General" Motors or Electric but "Government," with GE providing a very friendly arm of the propaganda ministry in exchange for some of the billions of dollars to be handed out in the "green" bill that did not need to be read at Mach 2 on the floor of Congress. I will say it's a nice business model if you can get it, but don't fucking blame this shit on capitalism; that is not an example of a free market in action by any stretch of the imagination. So beyond the personality cult and the skilled Machiavellian operators in Obama's Cabinet, and beyond the rubber stamp Politburo and beyond the fawning propaganda ministry (with those who say, hey, wait a minute, this is fucking insane on FOX News either called dangerous and insane or silly and worthy of offensive derision--remember how everybody who went to protest Obama's fiscal irresponsibility on tax day was not just a racist nutjob but also a "teabagger." I've got to tell you, for how angry and bitter the Democrats were during the Bush years they certainly did not come in trying to be treated like they would have liked to have been treated during say 2004; it was fucking payback time, not time to apply the golden rule.

And finally, speaking people who'll punch you in the gut with a grin on their face, the astroturf there-in-one-day-or-your-protest-is-free squads of liberal activist groups like ACORN and their deeply interwoven connection with unions of state employees and service workers (the SEIU sends chills down my spine when I see them on TV) and the Teamsters and teachers and probably health-care workers too, these folks are the people who teach our children and run our government and if ACORN gets its way run the census? Isn't there something a bit chilling about all of these interconnections and how lockstep they move. I mean I use hyperbole to describe how Obama has a politburo and propaganda ministry and in ACORN presumably a set of storm troopers, but it seems like using community organizing tactics to spin insane laws and effectively destroy political opponents is now par for the course, see the AIG bonuses scandal or the firing of Americorps Inspector General Gerald Walpin--I would locate the AP wire story version of this so you didn't think I was being partisan but that link is not to an op-ed, it's to a story of inconvenient facts that show how while Obama's goons don't come bearing truncheons they can still destroy you as a political opponent. FOX News is marginalized and called extreme but they're the only network that isn't simply carrying the message from the press release to your ears without any analysis. Is there conservative spin? Of course there is, but at least you can try to unpack the liberal and conservative spin that competes as opposed to simply not hearing about abuses of power or getting a New York Times magazine article about health-care reform that interviewed the Administration officials seven times. Does that sound like a critical piece of journalism or research for a writing a brochure to sell the reform package to the American people? At a time when America is in a more perilous fiscal situation than at any time in in 80 years that everything is roses and sunshine the NYT wants you to believe that putting health-care on the credit card has to the tune of $1+ trillion a year is somehow what a responsible goverment does in this situation. It's not clear that the credit limit is $20 trillion dollars and it's not clear we'll be cool if we just make the minimum payments for, I dunno, a decade or so. So what to do? Is there anything we can do? Is there any help on the way?

I am not sure in this country that if you oppose this insane power structure that you necessarily need to get out on the streets and protest; we have a much more precise and similarly powerful way of communicating political demands to politicians: public opinion polls. Unfortunately the current power structure is so vast that I think that the real truth about what is coming down the pike is being obscured very effectively (for reasons I will outline in a moment) that most Americans are, as liberals used to talk about us poor pitiful Republicans, supportive of politicians and policies that are decidedly not in their self-interest in any meaningful way, but that this is just not taking hold of a large enough swath of Americans.

It's hard to know what polls Obama and the Democrats respond to but some obvious ones are obviously Obama's job approval--this one is a bit tricky because if you look at just this graph it looks like he enjoys immense public support--which of course he does--but if you look through the individual polls and pick out the handful that are of more important cohorts like 1500 likely voters as opposed to simply 1000 adults there is a decided downward trend that is not mirrored at all by the general population, with all adults tending to reflect the numbers shown in the graph, a brilliant honeymoon that has only dimly cooled, with the most important thing to note being that while Obama still enjoys massive favorable ratings that the amount of Americans, generally, who don't think he's doing a good job, is roughly one third. More importantly, as you ask the more and more important (electorally) groups of people, the support dissipates further, with polls of all adults finding lovers outnumbering haters by 30+ percent, registered voters coming in in the mid to upper 20s, and likely voters steadily eroding down to the point where a 40 point spread has shrunk to 9% according to the latest Rasmussen poll. Unfortunately Rasmussen seems to be the only polling company that does this survey with only likely voters so confirming their numbers is difficult, but they are at least internally consistent; likely voters' support for Obama has waned steadily and while there are some hiccups (15% one week followed by 17% the next week followed by 9%) it is nowhere near that essentially 60/30 split Obama gets in all the other polls.

Other polls you'd want to watch would be things like the 2010 mid-terms (more on those in a moment) but a big one to watch out for especially as we now near 6 months that Obama has been in office and 9 months since Obama was the President-Elect and started to orchestrate policy and build his much ballyhooed "transition team." Why do I think this one is important? Because while it's very difficult to interpret I think we are starting to finally see what I'll call Bush fatigue where Bush hasn't made a substantive policy decision in so many months and the cable news cycle moves so fast that only Keith Olbermann is really frequently pointing the finger of blame at Bush.

This is very important since obviously with the country in the middle of an apparent economic free-fall right around election time and the promise of Obama coming to the rescue the fact that the number of people who though the country was on the wrong track dropped precipitiously (by damn near an astounding 40% immediately after Election Day and nearly another 20% on inauguration day) and that as Obama did things like bring in his fabled transition team, bailed out homeowners, gave cash to new home-buyers, promised economic stimulus and a stop to job losses, "free" health-care, "free" college, saving the planet both in terms of the environment and fixing our foreign policy mess to usher in global peace it wasn't really surprising that the Bush doom and gloom would dissipate and that at its apex Obama had some polls showing him having more Americans convinced we were on the right track than the wrong one. However, again, the devil in the details here is now that the 50/50 milestone has been breached it seems hard to account for new polling data that shows the wrong track numbers once again reigning supreme. Here since the question is almost always asked the same way and it's always just to adults, not adults versus registered voters versus likely voters, the right track/wrong track data pictured below from Real Clear Politics essentially works very well in doing what RCP is trying to do and shave off margin of error by pooling different polls. That's problematic in some cases (a la Obama's job approval where polls that ask likely voters are lumped in with adults who may not be registered to vote) but in this case the sample is always just American adults so by taking a rolling average you simply, I believe, decrease the chance for sample bias in any one poll and increase statistical power without any weird side effects as could result in the Obama job approval data set. So if you buy into that analysis, if you look at the above linked data and look at the chart where basically the gap between pessimists and optimists closes as Obama took office with barely a hiccup (you can just make out a tiny one a few days after the 4/15 Tea Parties) but now after he had literally closed the gap and for a time the two lines overlapped.





To me that 50/50 point is indirect but possibly important evidence that the Bush hangover, where all the pessimism was due to the clusterfuck Obama had left on his plate, has come to an end and from now on we're going to be seeing this poll reflecting more of a judgment on Obama than Bush. Bush and the prospect of an economic catastrophe of an untold scale obviously account for the October doom and gloom but what's interesting is that while the collapse of America's financial services sector or more big banks now seems remote there haven't really hasn't been much news that indicates that the economy is doing anything but accelerating toward ruin bad more slowly. Yes, sometimes the markets will rally when job loss numbers, for instance, beat projections, but the projections were, in an absolute sense, just godawful. For the three transitions where Obama was in charge for the entire preceding month that we have data for unemployment nationally has been gone steadily upwards, from 8.1-8.5% Feb-Mar, 8.5%-8.9% Mar-April and 8.9-9.4% April-May. In other words... since the stimulus bill was passed, there has been an increase in the rate at which we're shedding jobs nationally from 40 basis points a month when Obama came into office to 50 basis points from April to May. It'll be interesting to see the Labor Bureau's stats for June but will Obama claim victory if unemployment growth slows from 50 basis points back to 40? Should we be glad that his stimulus package has saved us from some unknowable fate where we'd feel lucky only to have 9.8 or 9.9% unemployment, as is probably currently the case, given the trend and the lag in the data?

In other words, I think that tiny little notch in the right track/wrong track that shows an uptick in wrong-tick believers is much more meaningful than just a tiny shift in that graph; Obama had gotten half the country on board with him, and Bush will have been out of office for a full half year as of tomorrow, and now the wrong track numbers are increasing for essentially the first time (again, other than the brief hiccup for tax day) are increasing, and it doesn't appear that Bush can be the culprit anymore. Individual tracking polls like Pew show the same phenomenon.

So are people finally getting it? Well, if they haven't, I can't say I blame them.

Why I'm not posting nearly as much

Well, first of all, I've got a shit-ton of stuff to do getting moved in and I kind of have stuff to do from when I get up to well... happy hour at least, and then even if I don't end up making it to Suzie's I just am not cooped up in the tiny little apartment and I don't need to vent the anger in a political blog. I can go to the bar where not everybody is a fucking lib-tard and talk to some people over a glass of Maker's but most importantly there's just something really, really nice about not being miserable with where you live.

I'm not sure if it's just the change of scenery but I as long as the dollar doesn't disintegrate (and I'm still following it) I guess it's not really worth it to get all wound up about Obama fucking over my generation (which he's still doing) when there's nothing I can do about it but complain.

Also, I now live in an area where I can do something instead of just complain since in Minnesota we actually have elections where the results are not cut and dried and where there's kind of a schizophrenic set of voter priorities that lead to bizarre set of election out-comes... our Governor is a rising star in the GOP who could potentially be a Presidential or Vice-Presidential candidate in 2012 and yet we're going to send Al Franken as the cloture-breaking Senator based on a vote that was essentially a tie in the sense that I don't think Minnesotans or any state with a million plus voters can get the vote down to the level of accuracy where a few hundred voters either way are definitively in one camp or the other... it's just not the nature of human-based systems, which, like humans are imperfect. But the upshot is that I'd imagine that going forward I will get to vote in elections that are unlike elections in New York and New Jersey where the pre-election poll doesn't show that the Democrat has a lead that's just 3 times the margin of error of the poll and it could be important to vote, especially when it's such dirty pool to sort out who won in a close election.

When Amy Klobuchar comes up for election in 2012 I presume that the Republicans will have a legitimate contender for that seat (we'll see what happens in 2010 but I can't imagine that blaming Bush will still be working for the Democrats in 2012 and I really can't imagine that the country will be in a very good place economically or otherwise) and I will be voting against her.

My Congressman went from being one of the absolute worst slimebags in Congress (Carolyn Maloney who runs the East Side of Manhattan) to one of the absolute worst slimebags in Congress (Keith Ellison--a lib-tard who came to Washington in 2006 to end the War in Iraq... what happened with that again? I remember there was some issue involving Iraq...) While I assume that the Twin Cities are gerrymandered to fucking shit and that it's unlikely that unless there is a massive surge of resentment or just a real bad hangover for the Democrats where an ailing economy combined with a loss of enthusiasm or a sense of complacency at having won the whole shooting match in 2008 means that the silent majority of self-identified independents (in terms of Party affiliation) and conservatives (in terms of political philosophy) both of whom number about 40% of the population if you believe the current polls that the Twin Cities will send a Republican Congressman to Washington I will be voting against him in 2010. Speaking of 2010, I really hope that at least outside of the completely fucking gerrymandered districts that don't change hands ever (like this one, for instance) that all the districts, for example, that were tossups in 2006 will turn into the geographic base for a throw-the-bums out election where basically every single House member Republican and Democrat except for a very select handful that I can think of like Thaddues McCotter of Michigan and a scant few others who represent principled opposition to the massive expansion of the Federal Government and just pissing all over the Constitution for no reason get thrown out, even if they were in office for 4 or 5 or 6 terms. Throw... the... bums... out. They are not looking out for you anymore.

If you want to know what I mean this is a very good explanation. I'm a pretty partisan person but at this point I am getting sick of fucking Republicans who care about stupid shit like abortion and evolution and retarded shit like that and who are not kicking and screaming and trying to get everyone's attention: they are tearing up our founding document! This is important! I will vote for anyone, Democrat, Republican, Independent, Libertarian, whatever, who has a chance to win and who once in office will say NO! we are not going to bankrupt the next generation and NO! we are not going to expand the government and give them more power to piss all over the Constitution anymore. Now, I moved from super lefty country to a bizarre part of the country where at the State level at least prairie populism hasn't really been hijacked by the reality of machine politics like we've got out east and I find the liberals naivete about what it's like to live in a liberal megalopolis somewhat quaint... my answer to a lot of liberals arguments for what designing a liberal paradise and what how it would work is... go visit Newark, New Jersey, where they've got most of the laws you want to pass... gun control up the yin-yang, "free" education and health-care and housing and tell me how it's working for them. The fact that it's cold up here and statistically the percentage of free-loaders who abuse the system here is relatively low keep their relatively utopian system running fairly smoothly... but trust me it could collapse.

That's not to say it's all bad from the liberals in Minnesota. While some are just a lost cause, like Keith Ellison, who represents the absolute bottom of the barrel in terms of thoughtless political parroting of politically correct retardation, a lot of local representatives, like my state Representative and Senator (i.e. the woman and man who represent me in St. Paul. For instance, I disagree with a lot of what Ms. Loeffler stands for personally, but at least her major legislative issues are things that I am not personally opposed to like designing a good replacement for the 35W bridge and not coming to reform solutions too hastily--a good lesson for Barack Obama--and while I assume that my State Senator Pogemiller is a big-time gun control supporter the fact that he is the majority leader of a body where the majority is divided over gun control with rural DFLers being Second Amendment supporters means that while Metro Minneapolis/St. Paul legislators would probably like to ratchet up gun laws in Minnesota that compared to New Jersey this is fucking Mogadishu (in the sense that weapons are easily acquired, not the sense that there are more Somalians, although there are more Somalians.)

So while this is definitely the land of Obama on the national stage and Franken's eventual coronation could be the coup de grace for any sort of check on the Democratic legislative steamroller in D.C. it doesn't really seem like there's much of a breakwater right now and that for the most part idiocy reigns supreme. For instance, while I am most dismayed by the fiscal and monetary irresponsibility that the Obama Administration is exercising--since this seems, unlike any political threat that has cropped up in my lifetime, like something that could affect how I live my life and plan my future, especially if the dollar is significantly weakened due to just a clusterfuck of monopoly money spending--I thought it'd be a useful pedagogical tool to link to how one of Minnesota Representatives represents sheer, unrelenting idiocy by deed contending that, contrary to hard-won political battles fought on behalf of people of color (in part) and to ensure the equality of all Americans that in fact, Ellison believes that some Americans are more equal than others...

Hate crimes legislation sounds good in vague generalities, but when you get down to cases it makes absolutely no fucking sense whatsoever. If I kill a person does it make it somehow less heinous if I did it because I didn't like the way they looked at me? Because they had red hair? If I do it because they're a white male and I hate white males? If they're a Democrat or a Star Trek fan and I hate those specific groups of people? No... murder is heinous and while some aggravating factors for murder can be things like... was the murder committed for a capricious reason-- like was this a pre-meditated murder based on some very sociopathic motivation...a desire to kill because it seems like it'd be thrilling, a desire to kill to obtain a small amount of money... or, to address "hate crimes," a non-personal hatred of a person belonging to some class of people that becomes focused onto an individual like a specific African American, Democrats, or white male? If so, that bizarre and sociopathic decision to kill an individual to exercise a hatred of a group could be an aggravating factor versus, say, a murder committed in the heat of passion because the murder victim was banging your wife. But why write laws outlining which special groups get an extra special aggravating factor added to their murders? Why can it not be enough to say that committing murder for the sake of killing on the basis of their membership in a sub-group--any sub-group--of humanity is an aggravating factor? Why do we need laws listing which sub-groups are especially protected? The only effect I see there is to implicitly send a message that somehow it's less heinous to kill someone for being a woman or a Democrat or a white male than it is for being an African-American or a homosexual or whatever the protected versus non-protected classes of citizens are.

This is an egregious version of liberal non-think--just an unexamined, poorly thought out implicit argument that reeks of political correctness and a lack of critical thinking skills, a disregard for the Constitution and its equal protection of all citizens, and a good representation of what has been coming out of Washington lately... an apparently non-thought-out set of policies that starts from some premise--it'd be good if everyone were healthy and smart, for instance, and then takes the "obvious" route to acheiving that goal... pay for everyone's health-care and education... even if the unintended consequences are financial ruin of the nation.

So I'm still paying attention to that stuff, and I will be able to voice my opinions in a way that matters now... by voting in elections that are close enough that it's not guaranteed that one party will win them all--as was the case in New Jersey and New York--but also I'm more just worried now and not furious. I think it has to do with the fact that people out here are friendlier... it makes the fact that most of them disagree with me politically seem more like a good faith difference of opinion as opposed to New York City where every person you interact with, say, on the phone or in the street is a fucking asshole who acts like they're more important than you, so that if you disagree with them politically you assume that it's not good-faith disagreement but rather smug, condescending even hateful antagonism.

Hey Man (Now You're Really Living)

Well i just saw the sun rise over the hill
Never used to give me much of a thrill
But hey man now you're really living

Do you know what it's like to care too much
'bout someone that you're never gonna get to touch
Hey man now you're really living

Have you ever sat down in the fresh cut grass
And thought about the moment and when it will pass
Hey man now you're really living

Now you're really giving everything
And you're really getting all you gave
Now you're really living what
This life is all about

Sorry... no video embedding but you can watch it on Youtube.

Hooray!

It's done! I'm here. It's everything I dreamed of and more. A place for the car, tons of space, about 7.7 million less people right in my backyard, a beautiful house that will soon be transformed into a beautiful home, residency in a state that at least while liberal pays for its services with tax revenues and whose tax rates look absolutely reasonable to someone coming from living and working in Manhattan.

Ah, yes, it's Minnesota. And the best part? My neighbors across the street? An empty field and some grain abandoned elevators. A bonus, down the street where the office to the grain elevators used to be... studio space for artists that's apparently been rented out already as they try to establish a colony of artists as the pioneer hipsters to make Northeast Minneapolis a trendy neighborhood (there's signs all over for Northeast Arts District... I thought it was a Polish/Ukrainian and more recently Asian/Hispanic neighborhood, but hey, you say hipster artists, I say old Polacks, what's the difference right? But seriously I actually think that if the city is successful at making the neighborhood trendy that probably would be for the best since as the people of my grandfather's generation start passing away and their kids' either move into or try to dump the houses I'd prefer to see them go to bargain hunting hipsters than to see property values tumble even further as houses either sit vacant or become inhabited by residents who will turn the area something of an eastern extension of North Minneapolis, which is one of the highest crime districts in the city (still pretty tame by New Jersey standards, but I wouldn't want to live there.) It'll be interesting to see what happens since I'd imagine that there are going to be lots of houses going on the market here in the at least 5 years I'm going to live here but frankly I have no idea if loan policies are going to loosen up and if not if there are young people of any demographic/cultural persuasion other than people inheriting houses and trust fund kids who can afford the multiple tens of thousands of dollars for down payments and proof of income that even these modest ranch houses are going to require as banks are extra cautious writing mortgages for the foreseeable future.



It'd be bad if houses sat vacant... having seen a special on TV on a former kind of upper-middle class development in the epicenter of the sub-prime/foreclosure measure in So. Cal. where the people who got kicked out weren't really deadbeats in the sense that when they got foreclosed on they probably just went and rented a place to live they could actually afford but just having a bunch of vacant houses led to all sorts of crime from just squatters moving in to squatters moving in with connections to some unsavory things like drug stash houses, meth factories, gang safe-houses, all sorts of nastiness, and also these bizarre scams where a fictitious real estate broker sets up a bargain hunter in an amazingly cheap rental property after having had a crooked contractor put in new locks on abandoned house and then after collecting a damage deposit and first and last month's rent the real estate broker vanishes and the person is left (often unknowingly for a month or so until it's way too late to track the guy down) illegal squatting in a house they thought they had a legal right to occupy. So while foreclosures in NE Mpls aren't a problem as far as I know I'm pretty sure the neighborhood's going to change pretty majorly, and if the artists are the first step in gentrification and that's the alternative to increased crime rates and a higher probability that I'll have to exercise my 2nd Amendment Rights by shooting an intruder then I will definitely take the former.