The only bowl game that matters, you know, personally.

Tomorrow at 1 p.m. Eastern, the only bowl game that matters will be played. Obscure alum SEK will be joined by the LGM regular who, because the Internet's not nearly so big as you think it is, just so happened not to laugh his Honors Thesis out of academia, John Protevi, in begging the Louisiana State University Fightin' Tigers to beat the Nittany Lions of Paterno Family Professor in Literature at Penn State, Michael Bérubé, and Penn State alum John Protevi in the Capital One Bowl.

Is that a win-win or a lose-lose proposition for one of them? The world will never know. (Unless, of course, John decides to tell us.)

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Favorites of the Aughts...

I will remember the Aughts warmly, as if they constituted a time period that spanned ten years.

Favorite Five Films:

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Y Tu Mama Tambien
Yi Yi
No Country for Old Men
In the Mood for Love

Favorite Five Television Series:

The Wire
The Sopranos
Mad Men
Battlestar Galactica
Lost

Favorite Five Albums:

Decoration Day, Drive By Truckers
A Man Under the Influence, Alejandro Escovedo
Elephant, The White Stripes
Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, Neko Case
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco

Favorite Five Life Changing Moments:

Started blog
Finished dissertation
Got job
Got married
Had kids

Actor of the Aughts: George Clooney
Director of the Aughts: Alfonso Cuaron
Baseball Player of the Aughts: Ichiro
Band of the Aughts: The Drive By Truckers
Bowl Game of the Aughts: 2007 Fiesta Bowl

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Decade in Review, etc.

Still compiling my Best of the Aughts; until then, enjoy Loomis' Top 50 films of the Decade.

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More on race and racialism in Avatar.

While the Na'vi may be blue, the people who played them are not. Consider:

1. Neytiri
   
2. Tsu'tey
   
3. Eytukan
4. Moat
5. Horse Clan Leader

It could be the case that all the other models for the Na'vi are white, but it seems clear to me that Cameron chose these actors for the central Na'vi characters according to racialized criteria; i.e. while he didn't necessarily choose them because they weren't white, his vision of a primitive, native culture didn't include white people. The representatives of humanity, however, were not only overwhelmingly white, even the exceptions played to stereotype: Dileep Rao played an Indian scientist and Michelle Rodriguez played a Latina tough. My point in my previous Avatar post about the film indulging in the white fantasy of becoming the proverbial other is, then, made literal by Cameron's casting decisions: Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver and Joel Moore play three white characters who inhabit bodies otherwise occupied only by actors of color. I'm not normally one to invest much of anything argumentative based on what happens on a casting couch, but in this case, Cameron tipped his hand with all the subtlety of an overconfident drunk: the purpose of the avatars is to place white brains in blue bodies that would otherwise be inhabited by black ones.

Stop howling already: I know that, within the film, the purpose of the avatars is to allow humans to breathe on Pandora; however, the humans have masks that can and do fulfill that function. I also know that another purpose of the avatars was to allow human anthropologists to interact with the Na'vi, which is why the xenobotanist played by Sigourney Weaver establishes a planet-side school. For now, set aside Cameron's confused notion of what a botanist does, because while it suggests that his script is, at best, ignorant of departmental niceties or, at worse, internally inconsistent, it could also be the result of the Gaia metaphor, in which the population of the entire planet are semi-conscious functionaries of a fully-conscious tree. (I kid!) Focus instead on 1) the fact that the film is called Avatar, and 2) the likelihood that Cameron spent years developing this technology in order to avoid the throwaway line about terraforming required to account for the astonishing frequency of breathable atmospheres on far-flung planets.

In short, if you believe that the existence of the avatars can be justified on the basis of inhospitable environs, you've not simply placed the cart before the horse, you've put the invention of the wheel before domestication of animals. Because, as the title indicates, the avatars aren't incidental to the film: they're its raison d'être. The whole point of the film is to stuff brains in those bodies, so which brains are stuffed into which bodies is not a minor point, it is the point. Moreover, within the narrative, the bodies they were being stuffed into were utterly infantilized: the Na'vi don't think for themselves, as even animal husbandry is beyond them. They require a direct neural connection in order to domesticate an animal.

That they teach humans to be similarly dependent upon a necessarily benevolent planet is, I understand, the point—but it is a terrible one if, as many claim, Cameron wanted to press a message of ecological interdependence. The Na'vi possess all the agency of a leukocyte: they may respond individually, but they are not, properly speaking, individuals. As progressive propaganda goes, this rises to the level of what conservatives believe our nefarious motives to be. That the quasi-coherent leftist politics of the film are intended to be inspirational only makes this incoherence and, more importantly, its dubious racial politics all the worse, because "inculcating dubious racial politics in the next generation of environmental and anti-war activists" doesn't count as a victory for the forces of democratic freedom. (Or only counts as one in that hilariously limited sense.) Even in the film, as my friend Aaron argues, the result of such thinking is also infantilizing:

Jake Sully, in other words, is a Western fantasy of spoiled childhood: pure id, he revels in the toys that the world has provided for him without understanding that someone had to make them, without ever questioning his own right to have them. I think that’s why I don’t feel contempt for him, but visceral, gut-level, and troubling disgust. I recognize his desires, because we not only have to get past them to be adults, but because they stay with us. Perhaps we still are, on some level, the sociopaths we were when we were children (that I type this while home for the holidays, in the bedroom I occupied when I was seven, only seems appropriate). Yet it’s also one of the worst aspects of the American cultural tradition that going back to childhood is somehow the fountainhead of political virtue (see, for example, Jefferson, Thomas and Roosevelt, Theodore) because it’s so rarely the childhood of curiosity, games, and sociality that the tradition extols, but rather its reverse, a very particular fantasy of careless anti-social boyishness that tends into misogyny so easily because, to again refer us to Nina Baym, it feminizes the “encroaching, constricting, destroying society” that we American boys must seek to be free of by lighting out for the territories.

Finally, let me clarify a few minor concerns about my previous Avatar post:

1. Just because I didn't remember every last detail drummed into my head over the course of three dull hours doesn't mean I didn't see the film.
2. Just because you do remember every last detail doesn't mean that your take on the film is more correct than mine.
3. I chose "JaMarcus Manning" as the figure of the white-brained, black-bodied quarterback because I'm from Louisiana and graduated from Louisiana State University.
4. I know the name "JaMarcus Manning" is racist, not because you told me it was, but because that was my point: the "black quarterback problem" is the result of racist expectations that were only ever operative because they were self-fulfilling.
5. If you take issue with a point I make, fine. If you accuse me of treating you like a student when I defend a point I make, you have issues. Leave me out of them, please, and just argue with me as you would any other stranger on the internet.

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NW 253 Redux

Rob covers most of the points on 253 that I would have touched upon (as well as some I hadn't considered), but there are a few I want to add. First, as a preface, I've flown AMS-DTW six or eight times, and been on that very flight, and I'm happy to report that this experience doesn't affect my observation or the validity of my opinion (which is always questionable at any rate).

My instinct when hearing about it was "it's about time". As Jeff Fecke comments to Rob's post, "you're 99% safe everywhere, but you're not 100% safe anywhere." Probability suggest that this will happen, and it will happen again, and if this is the best that they can do, we're in pretty good shape overall. When one considers the sheer number of passenger / flights that occur daily, let alone annually, and by my (possibly unreliable) count there have only been three incidents of note on US or US-bound carriers post 9/11 (the shoe bomber, the British liquid bombers, and Detroit guy) I am not terribly concerned. Two amateur attempts, and one that MI-5 were all over.

Additionally, as commenter Hanspeter points out, this was not a TSA fault:

"Lagos airport technically passes some standard level of security competency, which is why planes leaving there are allowed to land here. Amsterdam airport also screwed the pooch, though, since that airport is supposed to be very good at security."

Schiphol Amsterdam indeed has excellent security; even pre-9/11, flying an American carrier from AMS to wherever in the US (typically NW) involved an additional "interview" at the gate for every passenger (they ask for all manner of ID, including frequent flyer membership cards, thumb through your passport and inquire about certain trips, etc.); post 9/11, they added an additional security checkpoint at every gate for American-bound US carriers. (Oddly enough, these measures didn't apply to KLM flights to the US). However, I'm not sure how Schiphol screwed the pooch; if the technology to stop this guy wasn't installed, it wasn't installed.

Furthermore, to my knowledge there are no direct flights from Nigeria to the US, because security is not up to standard. (UPDATE: a commenter points out that Delta fly a couple direct flights between Lagos and the US).
Lagos to Amsterdam was a KLM flight. Indeed, to my knowledge passengers connecting through AMS from Lagos have to go through an additional layer of security because Nigeria security is not considered adequate by the EU. If a pooch was screwed here, it wasn't that security at Schiphol allowed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board the DTW flight, rather it was a simple old fashioned intelligence failure.

My rather sanguine attitude expressed above does not place me in the 'don't violate my privacy dammit' camp, however. I have no problem that Schiphol is installing the very machines that may have prevented the Detroit thing; I'm comfortable with some random stranger noting that I'm probably carrying around ten post-holiday extra pounds than I should be. As AMS is one of my primary transit hubs (indeed, my flights back to England in early January take me through Schiphol) I'm certain to experience this new technology in any event.

But I'm not going to freak out about the Detroit thing. It may have been professionally conceived, but it was rank amateur in execution. If this is the best that they can do given our widely assailed security vulnerabilities, I'm fairly relaxed about it.

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It's like that time I hung out with Derrida and we only talked about our cats.*

I'm easing back on the Internets by trying to find the most optimistic spin on the Jason Bay signing—Dewan ranking him at -1 runs defensively wins so far—but three of the most respected baseball minds out there are silent on the issue because they're arguing about the greatest movie musicals of all time. I'm not kidding: Keith Law, Joe Posnanski and Tangotiger are currently debating the relative merits of Mamma Mia instead of telling me how I should feel about my beloved Mets signing a 31-year-old outfielder with old-player skills to a four-year deal with an easy vesting option for his age 36 season.

*True story.

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Various Flight 253 Thoughts

Briefly, regarding the Detroit-Failure-to-Explode-Thing:

• The successful destruction of Flight 253 might not have threatened American power, or the material foundation of American life, but it certainly would have sucked; any plausible conception of national security would expect that the government take reasonable measures to prevent such attacks.
• It is nevertheless pretty lame that this is apparently the best that Al Qaeda could manage at this late date; any self-respecting terrorist organization should have been embarrassed to claim responsibility for this pathetic failure.
• It's not clear to me that "the system worked"; it seems, in fact, that the system failed at some key point, if only in its inability to recognize someone who (to the admittedly untrained eye) really seemed like a serious threat.
• That said, there is no way to reform the system to eliminate all such threats; reforms may result in additional false positives, or may results in holes in different areas. Such are the trade-offs of intelligence and law enforcement work.
• That said, not all intelligence failures are the result of trade-offs. Sometimes people screw up to the extent that they should be fired, and some procedures produce distinctly suboptimal outcomes. Unfortunately, determining whether the problem is in the trade-off or the bad procedure is hard;it's often bloody difficult to tell the difference between a .400 hitter having a bad day and a .200 hitter having a normal day. My guess in this case is that there's a bit of both; there seems to have been sufficient evidence to have kept this guy off of a flight to the US.
• However, difficulties associated with the coordination of information across agencies or division are probably the most common kind of problem associated with intelligence and law enforcement work. There really is no over-arching solution; bureaucratic divisions are necessary for a variety of reasons, yet invariably cause difficulties of communication, jurisdictional overlap or underlap, and so forth.
• Finally, Law Prof pointed out to me that the one major positive (other than the failed bomb) is that dude's dad felt strongly enough about the threat dude posed to go to the US embassy and inform on his own son. I have no idea what his thinking was, but just maybe there's a tiny upside to treating the rest of the world as if it exists and has feelings.

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A collision of hacks

What the hell?

It wouldn't have been difficult to predict this, but the stupidity of Deborah Solomon interviewing John Yoo does indeed approach the density of a degenerate dwarf star. After describing Yoo's new book as "an eloquent, fact-laden history of audacious power grabs by American presidents," Solomon offers him the chance to set forth, without challenge, his usual fact-free assertions about how the Constitutional framers really wanted to recreate the British monarchy.

The idea is that the president’s power grows and changes based on circumstances, and that’s what the framers of the Constitution wanted. They wanted it to exist so the president could react to crises immediately.

I continue to marvel at the willingness of self-described journalists to describe views like this as "history," given that supporting historical evidence for them is in fact nowhere to be found. For Yoo's interpretation to be even remotely plausible, we'd have to find something in the Constitutional debates proving that the framers imagined circumstances in which the middle third of Article 1, Section 8 would somehow be switched off. That would require as well that we discover some proof that the framers -- operating on republican principles that far exceeded those existing in the British constitutional monarchy -- suddenly decided that the president should enjoy greater war prerogatives than the dreaded king of England had at his disposal. And we'd have to overlook the fact that the convention of 1787 was primarily animated by concerns about the weak legislative authority of the federal government and not by some brew of anxieties about the absence of vague, emergency powers vested in its executive.

But hey, I'm sure Yoo's book has a raft of eloquent, fact-laden ripostes to these small historical problems. Though I'd also imagine the book contains fewer dick jokes bout Bill Clinton, nor would it reveal the awkward fact that Yoo has no idea or interest in what his parents do for a living. Leave it to Deborah Solomon to produce something that actually makes reading John Yoo seem more appealing.

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Waaaaaaaambulance Caller of the Week

Roman Polanski.

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Ridiculous Republican Puke Funnel of the Day

Andrew Malcolm. (See also known Man of Ethics Mark Foley.)

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You Don't Say

Apparently, spending hundreds of billions of dollars to construct a facility used 8 time a year with contracts that ensure that virtually all of the profits go to the subsidized plutocrats isn't a good deal for municipalities.

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WAPO: Robert Nozick is the Only Acceptable Definer of Human Rights

Shorter Fred Hiatt: FDR was a total commie; King and his so-called "civil rights" maybe even worse. They probably didn't even understand that "human rights" should be defined exclusively in the terms that will maximize the imperialist power of the United States. Let's also completely ignore the fact that, in practice, the protection of even "negative" rights requires the substantial expenditure of state resources, making them no more "natural" by our logic by any other.

...Matt has more about the editorial that "really breaks new ground in terms of red baiting and absurdity."

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Juan Gonzalez Stole My Lunch Money!

In the process of dubbing Juan Gonzalez the Least Valuable Player of the aughts, Jayson Stark deems Long Gone Juan an embezzler:

The ability to steal money is a quality I always look for in an LVP. And clearly, that became one of Juan Gone's specialties. He had one season in the '00s (2001) in which he hit 30 homers and drove in more than 75 runs. Yet he managed to parlay that season, and past reputation, to a total of $46.925 million worth of paydays in the '00s.

Yep, $46.925 million. That's more than Chase Utley, more than Miguel Cabrera, more than Hanley Ramirez, more than John Lackey. More than David Wright, Joe Mauer and Prince Fielder combined, for that matter. Yikes.

It's also more than the salaries of the five AL MVPs from 2000 through 2004 put together. And it's more than the opening-day payroll of 56 different teams in the '00s. So how impressive is that?

Indeed. It's clear that Stark understands this failure in moral terms; the term "steal" and the tone both indicate that Juan Gonzalez managed this theft because of a string of serious moral failings. While some might suggest that 34 year old outfielders often suffer from a series of nagging injuries that sharply curtail both playing time and effectiveness, Stark will have none of it; Gonzalez figuratively robbed, virtually at gunpoint, the Kansas City Royals of $4.5 million in 2004. Neifi Perez, oddly enough, isn't considered a thief for the $4.1 million that the Royals paid in 2002 because "it can't be just about the ability to string together production-free numbers," and Derek Bell isn't eligible for LVP even though he claimed explicitly that he was reducing his productivity because of unhappiness with the team.

No; the villain is Long Gone, who had the temerity to accept the contract offers that teams made, then went on to perform, repeatedly, the outright dastardly act of actually cashing the checks that team offices handed to him. What a monster! And then, just because he wanted to steal MORE money from the fans of Major League Baseball, he played half a season in the Atlantic League, and three years in the Puerto Rican League.

This would all be just plain stupid were it not for the fact that Stark is part of a sports journalistic machine that habitually blames players for the idiotic mistakes made by team owners. Somebody gave Juan Gonzalez $4.5 million? Blame Gonzalez! There's a strike? Those greedy players are at it again! Ticket prices going up? Stupid greedy players! And of course, it would be nice if this pattern weren't duplicated in coverage of labor-management disputes in the rest of the economy.

There's certainly a way in which someone might determine the decade's Least Valuable Player, and it would involve comparing salary and productivity. It might, moreover, be the case that Juan Gonzalez actually was the LVP, although I rather doubt it, and it would almost certainly be because of the $24 million he made in 2002-3 from the Rangers, rather than from the $4 million that the Royals wasted on him. But that rather gives away the show. Accepting a $4 million contract offer from the Royals on the heels of several unproductive seasons doesn't make you a thief; it just means that you have a pulse.

...I think that one LVP candidate has to be my beloved Ken Griffey, who was paid $97 million for 17 wins above replacement over the course of the decade. Other possibilities?

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But Bob Kaplan Said that Europeans Have Lost Their Will to Live!

Quick question: Did the news that a Dutchman was the first to tackle Shoebomber #2 remind anyone of how, in United 93, the appeasement-minded coward was clearly European?

Me neither.

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"Just take a left after the big black Mammy."

Those would be directions given to me the first time I tried to visit my in-laws without the wife there to navigate. I hadn't a clue what he meant. Then, as I crested a hill south of Natchez, I suddenly did:

Texas advertises itself as a "Whole 'Nother Country," but that's only true if you live off a farm-to-market road. Houston's sprawl is as uniformly bland as the city that extends from Los Angeles to San Diego; but in the actual South, even the metropolitan areas surprise you.

This is my way of saying: as I'm writing from a location where the power—much less the internet—is intermittent, I'm not going to be able to address the arguments in Avatar thread for a couple of days. I will do so soon, though, as I value your new low opinion of me.

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CBO projections as political props

Glenn Greenwald has a nice catch here, on Matt Welch's egregious hackery. Calling a document traditionally labeled a report a report 'lying' is pretty rich, but the larger issue is, as Greenwald demonstrates, Welch and Reason's writers are perfectly happy to cite CBO "reports" as accurate and reliable when it serves their purposes to do so.

There's a sense is which Welch is kind of right, of course--CBO budget forecasts change quite a bit from year to year. This kind of projection is just inherently speculative, as all kinds of important complicated factors for program cost and cost savings, including but not limited to the performance of the economy overall. Welch points readers to the Peter Suderman piece on the CBO, which isn't bad, but doesn't really offer much new information and insight, other than reiterating what we all knew--economic projections are volatile and uncertain. Suderman labels them "Gatekeepers" and means to suggest tehy are a powerful independent actors, but their power is rather clearly limited to the power politicians wish them to have. Somehow, CBO cost projections failed to prevent the Bush tax cuts or the Iraq war. Suderman obviously overstates the CBO's independent political power; their power is clearly a product of other political actors.

Interestingly, Suderman cites this Jon Gabel op-ed from August, in which Gabel demonstrates that the CBO has systematically underestimated cost savings from previous Medicare reforms. If this is continuing to occur, then obviously the use of the CBO is making good HCR more difficult. The current director of the CBO responds to this and other charged here. On the other hand, the CBO dramatically underestimated the costs of the Iraq war. What I'd really like to see, though, is some more systematic data on the accuracy of the CBO's projections, and the directional trend of their inaccuracy. (This may well be available, and if it is please point me to it. I'd conduct a more thorough search myself, but my current internet connection is intolerably slow.)

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Annals of Bad Amazon Reviews

While working on my Statecraft and the State syllabus, I happened upon this Amazon review of Margaret Levi's Of Rule and Revenue:

"As specialization and division of labor increase, there is greater demand on the state to provide collective goods where once there were solely private goods or no goods at all."

From the second sentence of this book, it charts its course in oblivious contradiction of reality. In reality, of course, economic activity individuates and privatizes as society develops. The few exceptions, e.g., the Soviet Union, are typically short-lived and embarrassing to their promoters.

Ms. Levi is obviously a clever person, but sadly, as with many clever people in academia, her intelligence in this book is deployed mainly to play games of self-referential abstraction.

This book's obscurity and practical uselessness mean that it is unlikely to be of any consequence. There probably is a good book to be written on a general theory of comparative taxation, but this ain't it.

That's just... super. Anyone have other examples of Amazon review that exceed stupid by utterly missing the point?

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Today In Yoosta-Bee Concern Trolling

Shorter William Daley: The Democratic coalition needs to be big enough to encompass legislators who oppose every significant item on a moderately progressive agenda, or the party is doomed.

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We Can't Get on Any of the Best Enemies Lists...

How is Noon not on this list?

H/t GC.

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Relevant Seasonal Videos

To echo Rob, Happy Holidays, and take care of each other!

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Merry Christmas and So Forth

Happy holidays. Be good. Stay safe.

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Wait, Acorn Did Not Commit Voting Fraud?

You're kidding, right? At least that's the line by the reasonable representative from Iowa, Steve King (R). After weighing his complete lack of evidence to the contrary, he finds this report "unconvincing". Instead, he goes with his well honed imagination:

“This report doesn’t begin to cover the transgressions of Acorn,” Mr. King said.

Admittedly, the authors of the report were likely unable to interview the voices in King's head, so he does have a point.

“I think Acorn is bigger than Watergate.”

To which all I can think is that I'd like some of that eggnog he is drinking, but I have to drive back down to Oregon from Kitsap County today.

Of course, maybe with that eggnog and King's imagination, my car might be sprinkled with fairy dust, sprout wings, and we could fly down to Oregon . . . because it must be powerful stuff, seeing as how King has voted in favor of Acorn projects early and often.

Life's ironies can be delicious.

As an aside, it appears that Congressional legislation cutting off Acorn is vulnerable to a constitutional critique as a bill of attainder. I'd search to see if Scott or Paul have picked up on this, but I can see the wings unfurling from my car as I type . . .

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Dinga Dinga Dee!

This is indescribably awesome in every way:

Via Danger Room.

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The Enemy of My Enemy Really Isn't Necessarily My Friend

I'll bet that there are some things that I'd agree with Grover Norquist about. He has a nice beard, for example. If somebody asked me to co-sign a "Defense of Facial Hair" letter with Grover, though, I suspect I'd have to shave.

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I Always Suspected That Peter Mandelson Was a Wanker

I'll have more to say about this later, but I'm out the door for a Christmas dinner with my partner's family. Merry Christmas, Lord P.

Of course, the British university system never really recovered from the Thatcher slash and burn approach, only just recently recovering a modicum of respectability. Nobody really believed Tony Blair's desire to see 50% of British "school leavers" in university was possible (or even desirable), but this is the same government, right, that now claims this:

Lord Mandelson made his position clear in the Secretary of State’s annual letter to the Higher Education Funding Council for England. He said: “My predecessor repeatedly made clear the risks of student over-recruitment putting unmanageable pressures on our student support budgets.”

And people wonder why most people no longer believe a word that the Labour government has to say about, well, much of anything.

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Give 'Em Enough Rope

This largely fawning Times Magazine profile of Robert George nonetheless manages to be quite damning. George's purportedly major intellectual contribution, Fitzpatrick explains, is to apply tautology and bare assertion natural law to contemporary questions of jurisprudence and political theory. You will probably not be surprised to learn that this would-be modern Aquinas has discovered that "natural law" and "practical reason" reveal...a near-perfect photocopy of the 2008 Republican platform:

Last spring, George was invited to address an audience that included many bishops at a conference in Washington. He told them with typical bluntness that they should stop talking so much about the many policy issues they have taken up in the name of social justice. They should concentrate their authority on “the moral social” issues like abortion, embryonic stem-cell research and same-sex marriage, where, he argued, the natural law and Gospel principles were clear. To be sure, he said, he had no objections to bishops' “making utter nuisances of themselves” about poverty and injustice, like the Old Testament prophets, as long as they did not advocate specific remedies. They should stop lobbying for detailed economic policies like progressive tax rates, higher minimum wage and, presumably, the expansion of health care — “matters of public policy upon which Gospel principles by themselves do not resolve differences of opinion among reasonable and well-informed people of good will,” as George put it.

[...]

The “rights” to education and health care are another matter, George told his seminar. “Who is supposed to provide education or health care to whom?” George asked. “Health care and education are things that you have to pay for. Resources are always finite,” he went on. “Is it better for education and health care to be provided by governments under socialized systems or by private providers in markets or by some combination?” Those questions, George said, “go beyond the application of moral principles. You can get all the moral principles dead right and not have an answer to any of those questions.”

It is to his credit, I suppose, that he's so straightforward about his cafeteria Catholicism. But it is nonetheless clear that the argument he's making fails on its own terms. Surely the truism that "you can get all the moral principles dead right and not have an answer to any of those questions" applies no less to abortion policy than anything else, which makes it highly relevant that George's preferred policy mix (draconian criminalization of abortion, reactionary gender politics, minimal welfare state) in fact has a notably dismal record even when it comes to reducing abortion rates. Indeed, there's much better evidence that robust welfare states reduce poverty than that abortion criminalization substantially reduces abortion rates (as opposed to the incidence of safe abortions.) Moreover, it seems rather clear that grubby politics rather than natural law is the primary factor in determining why George and his adherents are more concerned with same-sex marriage than, say, no-fault divorce when addressing alleged offenses against traditional marriage.

As a punchline, I'll also highlight this tidbit:

Later that year, when Bill Clinton denied Casey a chance to speak about abortion at the 1992 Democratic convention, it was George who had helped to write Casey’s speech.

Yes, the fact that Casey was denied that speaking slot sure was an outrage...

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Lee Sigelman

Rest in peace.

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Where Are The Votes?

I think Nate Silver's decimation of the reconciliation dodge is definitive. Granted, I roughly share his ideological priorities, and as a result I don't think there's a very serious argument the bill doesn't improve the status quo (and any such argument would apparently have to rely on some pretty reactionary propositions, such as "compensation in the form of health care should be permanently exempt from taxation.") So any argument for blowing up this bill does indeed have to rely on claims that a better bill could be obtained through reconciliation. Which seems implausible in the extreme. As I see it, the key points:

• There's no way that there's even 50 votes for a public option sufficiently robust to be worth risking the bill's regulate-and-subsidy provisions over.
• Once you consider the lost votes of Feingold and Byrd -- as well as God knows how many centrist wankers who would use reconciliation, and the threat is poses to their leverage, as a pretext to vote nay -- it's not even obvious that there are 50 votes for a weak public option through reconciliation.
  

The bottom line is that holding out hope for a better bill through reconcilation is to fundamentally misunderstand the politics of the situation. The fact that pre-existing majoritarian Senate rules would probably result in a better bill most certainly doesn't mean that using reconciliation would result in a better bill -- many Senators have a vested interest in the existing rules. So killing the bill in the hope of reconciliation would almost certainly make the rest of the bill much worse, and at best would result in a weak public option in exchange. As a percentage move, this would be roughly akin to having Babe Ruth circa 1923 bunt with a runner on second down three runs. It may be true that the threat of reconciliation could have led to a better bill, but I doubt it for these reasons -- especially once Feingold made it clear that he wouldn't play ball, I don't think either conservative Democrats or Republicans would have viewed the threat as credible.

At any rate, the only reason to oppose the bill is if you think it's worse than the status quo on the merits. The rest is ice cream castles in the air.

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Right Addition, Wrong Subtraction

I'd have to agree that Richard Cohen -- if only for his status as a nominal "liberal" -- merits addition to this list. But I'd remove the merely boring Hoagland instead; while I understand Duncan's point, I'll insist that three years of Kelly is worth a full decade of the typical winger. For those who don't remember, read this.

I'd also have thought that Applebaum would be an easy choice, but honestly I can't identify anyone else I'd remove...

...Henley, despite his inclusion of Dionne (hey, electing Obama was always going to fray the libertarian/liberal alliance) makes a good case for Cohen. And he's also right about how horrendous Broder is.

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Teenage Runaways Need to Up Their Game

Because there's running away from home, and there's sailing away from home.

OK, technically, they're not sure how she transported from The Netherlands to the Dutch Antilles, but I would think that it's somewhat difficult for a 13/14 year old to just up and buy a KLM ticket and board without any indication that this is approved by a parent / guardian / the state.

Of course, it probably didn't hurt that Laura Dekker could withdraw €3,500 from her personal bank account. When I was 13 (or 14, as The Guardian reports her age to be) I didn't have a personal bank account, let alone €3,500 to put in or take out of it. Hell, come to think of it, I don't have that now.

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British Party Leaders to Have Three Debates

Because apparently nobody watches the weekly PM's Question Time.

This is a good idea in general, but a bad idea for Gordon Brown and Labour. As his approval ratings are trailing those of his party, and likewise he is trailing David Cameron, I'm not sure how this will help him. Especially as a lot of his negatives are tied to his personality, not his policies.

I expect that if it adds anything to Cameron's chances (growing somewhat after having dipped for a few weeks) it will solidify and reassure the support of those who voted Labour or Lib Dem in 97, 01, and 05. The real winner here could be Nick Clegg, because a) nobody knows who the hell he is at the moment, b) like Cameron, the five people who have heard of Nick Clegg have no idea what the hell he or his party stand for, and c) he will appeal in contrast to Gordon Brown even if he fails to utter a single word all night.

I also anticipate that these debates will be of a vastly superior quality to their American inspirations, both in terms of the type of questions asked as well as the directness of the responses. But I'll miss the Palinesque moments . . .

. . . and I do look forward to the British reaction to their first ever debates, wondering how soon, and how often, some media turd will bemoan yet another Yank import sullying the culture, like Halloween and a currency that one can divide by 100.

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Winger of the Day

Treason In Defense Of Slavery Yankee.

Although Erick certainly gave it a nice effort.


...added (by davenoon): And today, TIDOS Yankee withdraws himself from the hindquarters of a pig, dons his John Calhoun wig, and expresses his doubtlessly sincere hope that a dormant posse of armed yokels decide not to wake up and begin shooting people over HCR and cap-and-trade legislation....

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2000!

Sorry, Drexel:

Back in 1903, W.W.H. Mustaine, the director of physical education at the time, called some students together and passed around the hat until there was $3 in it -- enough to buy a ball. He then told them to start playing.

The first season got off to a bumpy start. The Wildcats went just 1-2, their only win an 11-10 escape over the Lexington YMCA.

The next year, Mustaine was out.

From those modest beginnings, a powerhouse emerged.

Over a century later, what started with a handful of students and a single leather ball has grown into one of college basketball's biggest brands, one that has woven itself into the fabric of the Bluegrass.

There have been 1,998 victories since that squeaker over the Lexington YMCA, including seven NCAA titles and 25 Southeastern Conference tournament championships.

Now the program which proudly proclaims it has "the greatest tradition in college basketball" can add another bullet point to its resume. A win over Drexel on Monday would make the third-ranked Wildcats (11-0) the first team in NCAA history to reach 2,000 wins.

As one UK professor tweeted:

Note to Univ. of Ky fans: Anticipating 2,000th bball win today, I have conveniently placed unwanted items, matches in front yard.

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One market under God

Jon Chait has an interesting piece in TNR on the sclerotic condition of contemporary conservative free market dogma, as it tries to parry the Obama administration's response to the financial crisis, global warming, and health care reform. As Chait emphasizes, all of these issues are textbook cases of market failure, which means that as an ideological matter contemporary American conservatives have difficulty acknowledging they even exist:

Partisan self-interest--an accurate belief that Obama’s legislative failure offers Republicans the most likely road back to power--surely accounts for some of the party’s obstinacy. But at least as powerful is the deepening hold on the GOP of anti-government ideology.

Several years ago, I wrote in these pages that the fundamental difference between economic conservatism and economic liberalism is that the former is driven by abstract philosophical beliefs in a way that the latter is not. Conservatives believe that small-government policies maximize human welfare. But they also believe that they increase human freedom. Liberals, by contrast, believe in government intervention only to the extent that it increases human welfare.

If liberals could be persuaded that tax cuts would actually increase living standards for all Americans, they would embrace them. (This is why nearly all liberals believe that some level of tax rate, be it 50 or 70 or 90 percent, becomes counterproductive.) If conservatives came to believe that tax cuts failed to increase economic growth, most would still support them anyway, because they enhance freedom. As Milton Friedman once put it, “[E]conomic freedom is an end in itself.”

For this reason, liberals tend to do a better job at devising policies that maximize human welfare. They do not do a perfect job, nor is there always a singular definition of “human welfare”--some of the thorniest dilemmas of public policy involve trade-offs over whose welfare to maximize. Still, you’re going to fare better at maximizing human welfare if that is your sole goal, rather than one of two oft-competing goals.

Conservatism can succeed at maximizing human welfare when faced with government failure or some other circumstance that naturally lends itself to ideologically congenial tools, like inflation in the 1970s. But conservatism is plagued by blindness in the face of even textbook cases of market failure.

The piece also contains an amusing review of the too-seldom referenced GOP flip-flop on Medicare, which in the space of a few years has been transformed from the ultimate instrument of socialist tyranny to a sacred human right.

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Things that will suprise no one

Hey, it looks like Sarah Palin is just making stuff up again:

Former Gov. Sarah Palin, who has had a rocky relationship with the state's capital city, says in her book there were some ugly threats made against her daughters while they were attending Juneau schools.

Those threats reportedly caused daughter Willow Palin to be removed from the Juneau School District.

Palin said it ended the "honeymoon" for her kids in their new role as children of the state's governor, though she admitted the honeymoon had already ended for her.

The alleged threats made against Palin's daughters are raising questions among officials who would likely have been made aware of them at the time, had they been made or had Palin taken them seriously. . . .

Palin provided no details about where the Internet site was, how seriously she took the threats, how she knew it was posted by students, or what steps she'd taken to ensure her family's safety.

Former Juneau School District Superintendent Peggy Cowan was superintendent during the period in question and said she never heard of such concerns. . . .

Juneau Police Chief Greg Browning similarly said his department has no record of ever being alerted to such threats.

His department's school resource officers are in Juneau schools daily, and would likely have been alerted to such threats, had they been made, he said.

The Alaska State Troopers provide a security detail for Palin, but trooper spokeswoman Megan Peters said the first they heard about the allegation was from Palin's book.

"AST has no record of a report like that being made to our agency," Peters said. "Additionally, we have no way of determining if a report of that nature was made to another agency."

I figured someone would report on this sooner or later. Juneau is a small town in many ways, and of the many stories I've heard about Palin's kids -- especially the two older ones -- this one had never come up. And now I suppose we know why.

I've pretty much given up on trying to plumb the psychology of someone like Palin. But as far as this latest fable goes, it seems possible that she invented it to add greater (albeit fabricated) detail to the outrage she expressed over David Letterman's tasteless joke about her daughter being impregnated by A-Rod. More likely, I suspect, the story is one more aspect of Palin's deranged relationship to Alaska's capital. Describing Palin's relationship with Juneau as "rocky" would qualify as a major understatement. Her loathing for the city was palpable during the brief periods she actually spent in residence, and her absence from the capital city during legislative sessions (especially 2008) was the stuff of legend. Her book is almost completely uncomplimentary about Juneau, which she portrays as a swamp of political corruption and extramarital affairs. She congratulates herself for living in the governor's mansion for a few months (and for firing the chef), but about the only thing we learn about the people of Juneau is that she was happy to annoy her neighbors by installing a trampoline in the front yard. (As an aside, I'll note that I have acquaintances who live in that neighborhood, and no one recalls her putting a trampoline there. Nor would anyone have given a shit if she had.)

With that in mind, I'm not surprised that Palin would make up stories about her imperiled kids to justify her decision to leave Juneau and take a state per diem for living in Wasilla. Palin ranks among those Alaskans -- most of whom live in the Anchorage region -- who would prefer to remove the capital entirely from Southeast Alaska, where it's been since the Russian purchase in 1867. (Juneau has been the capital since 1906.) Over the past decade, the loss of government jobs in Juneau has been a source of growing concern; the past several administrations have relocated significant positions (including commissioners' offices) to the Anchorage area, producing a phenomenon known as "capital creep." Several formal efforts to move the capital -- most recently a ballot referendum in 2002 -- have failed, but the informal process continues to be a problem. As everyone knows, the departure of government entirely from Juneau would absolutely wreck the region, hacking away a quarter of its economy at the very least. And Sarah Palin was the sort of person who seemed to believe that outcome would be completely acceptable.

So is Sarah Palin the sort of person who would make up stories about threats of gang rape to provide literary cover for her personal and political aversion to her state's capital city? I dunno. Her fabrications usually have such a random quality to them, it's hard to imagine she's operating with much of a method. Like a Zen koan, Palin's lies can only be understood by relinquishing the quest for understanding.

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Intentions be damned, Avatar is racist (as is praying for and/or to "JaMarcus Manning").

Annalee Newitz writes that "[w]hether Avatar is racist is a matter of debate," but it isn't: the film is racist. Its fundamental narrative logic is racist: it transposes the cultural politics of Westerns (in which the Native Americans are animists who belong to a more primitive race) onto an interplanetary conflict and then assuages the white guilt that accompanies acts of racial and cultural genocide by having a white man save the noble savages (who are also racists). Unlike King Kong—which wrestled with the racial logic of the original—Avatar reproduces the racist logic of its source material. This is not to say the film is not also a condemnation of American imperialism or disastrous environmental policies, because it's that too. I'll address the racial politics more in a moment, but let me address the portrayal of the military (much bemoaned here) first:

It all adds up to crossing a line that I’ve never experienced in a major American film: drawing the audience to cheer the brutal deaths of Americans who are clearly symbolizing the military.

Blackwater/Xe Services LLC is not the military. Mercenaries are not symbols of the military. They are a perversion of the military. James Cameron has an unabashed love for the military (Aliens, The Abyss, etc.) but that love does not extend to those who make war for profit. It's obvious that the only authentic military man in the film is the protagonist, Jake Sully, who lost his legs in a legitimate conflict. He turns from the soulless mercenary-logic like a good proxy for the audience, and this is where the racial politics become problematic.

The titular "avatars" are genetically designed Na'vi bodies that can be remotely piloted by people like Sully with the intent of studying the natives. (Think anthropological immersion at its most literal.) The Na'vi are not merely distrustful of "the space people," they're inherently xenophobic, incapable of trusting any sentient being that doesn't look like them. If that mistrust is justified for some other reason (like a hairy first contact), the film never mentions it, meaning (in a classic case of projection) the humans assume that the Na'vi will be xenophobic before they even meet them.

But the racial essentialism of the film creates a whopper of an unintended thematic irony.* The planet and everything on it do not simply coexist in a harmonious balance of the New Age variety: they are hard-wired into a single neural network that makes the entire planet into a single entity and "the space people" less like a colonizing mercenary force than a disease. The humans are to be resisted not because they are economic imperialists (though they are) and not because they glory in militaristic combat (though they do) but because they are different. They do not belong to the planet and therefore there is no possibility for peaceful coexistence. The only way humans can be accepted is for them to forsake their humanity and become Na'vi. (Think literal assimilation.)

This is not a vision of a racially harmonious social politic: it is an inversion of the logic of passing that seems acceptable only because it imagines the experience of becoming a person of color as necessarily ennobling. The film argues that once a white person truly and deeply understands the non-white experience, he becomes an unstoppable combination of non-white primitivism and white rationalism which is exactly what happens. In order for the audience to support the transformation of Jake Sully into Braveheart Smurf, it must accept the essentialist assumptions that make such a combination possible ... and those assumptions are racist. In football terms, this is a variation of the black quarterback "problem."

For decades, coaches and scouts wished they could find a black body with a white brain in it. ("If only someone could find a way to stuff Peyton Manning's brain into JaMarcus Russell's body!") The essentialist logic at play there is obvious: black people are more athletic than white, and white people are smarter than black. No matter how descriptive these people thought they were being, in truth they were creating the conditions they claimed to describe: black quarterbacks were increasingly valued for raw athleticism, white athletes for their pocket presence and tactical acumen. That's an expectations game based on racist expectations ... and it works according to the same logic behind the narrative of Avatar.

*I'm analogizing race and species here because Cameron's space fable encourages me to do so with all the subtlety of a fry pan upside my head.

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In Fairness, There's Also A Strong Consensus Against Waste, Fraud and Abuse. And For Limiting Welfare Recipients to Three Escalades A Year.

One thing to add to the fact that foreign aid is one of the tiny number of specific areas in which cuts to government spending are actually popular is that (unless public awareness of federal spending levels has increased to implausible levels since 1995) it's quite definitely the exception that proves the rule:

The weekend before President Clinton's State of the Union Address, the Wall Street Journal assembled a focus group of middle-class white males to plumb the depth of their proverbial anger. These guys are mad as hell. They're mad at welfare, they're mad at special-interest lobbyists. "But perhaps the subject that produces the most agreement among the group," the Journal reports, is the view that Washington should stop sending money abroad and instead zero in on the domestic front.

...a poll released last week by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland which stated that 75% of Americans believes that the US spends "too much" on foreign aid, and 64% want foreign aid spending cut. Apparently a cavalier 11% of Americans think it's fine to spend "too much" on foreign aid. Respondents were also asked, though, how big a share of the federal budget goes to foreign aid. The median answer was 15%; the average answer was 18%; the correct answer is less than 1%. A question about how much would be "too little" produced a median answer of 3%--more than three times the current level of foreign aid spending.

I really don't think California style fiscal theories would be more viable at the federal level...

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Saturday Night Science Debate

Do anthropogenic factors play a role in climate change? Some say no:

(CNN)– In a late night posting on her Twitter feed, Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin continued to blast climate change believers Friday, calling the talks in Copenhagen, Denmark a representation of man's "arrogance," for believing people have an impact on nature.

"Arrogant&Naive2say man overpwers nature," Palin tweeted.

"Earth saw clmate chnge4 ions;will cont 2 c chnges.R duty2responsbly devlop resorces4humankind/not pollute&destroy;but cant alter naturl chng," the former Republican vice presidential nominee wrote.

More reputable experts argue that history shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men:

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Do You Have What it Takes to be Royalty?

Hey; anyone who finds a principality that will elect me Prince wins a free LGM t-shirt.

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India's Carrier Fleet

No, India will not be purchasing one of the Royal Navy's Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers, or at least not in the short term. The most important reason, I suspect, is that the British aren't selling; despite a mish-mash of reports to the contrary, the Royal Navy seems as committed as ever to moving down the two carrier path, even if it guts the rest of the fleet. Reading Joshi's article, however, I'm increasingly convinced that the purchase of the Russian Admiral Gorshkov was a serious mistake. She's over budget, behind schedule, likely to be less capable than new Indian construction, 32 years old, and was built in Russia. I suppose that the deal may have made sense when the Russians promised that they could deliver the modified Gorshkov in 2008, thus helping to close the gap between the old Hermes and the new Indian carriers. Right now, however, Gorshkov seems the whitest of white elephants.

Kitty Hawk would have made more sense. I'm just sayin'.

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Hope That There's No Confrontration in Crimea...

I don't understand how I had missed this:


H/t Chet.

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The Golden Slates

LGM is proud to announce the 2009 nominees for First Annual Mikey Kaus Award For Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence in Contrarianism:

• Jonah Weiner: Creed may be the greatest American rock band since Limp Bizkit (alas, Nickelback, being Canadian, don't count.) I think you can understand why I think music criticism is a waste of time.
• Armond White: Bandslam is one of the great achievements of American cinema.
  
• Robert Harris: A rapist's family members should have veto power over whether said rapist is subject to legal sanctions.
• Lucinda Rosenfeld: If you expect your friends to not leave you unconscious in a gutter and then perhaps offer to pick you up from the hospital after you've been slipped a roofie, you need to lower your standards.
  
• Jill Hunter Pellettieri: Not only are suggestions by hotels that guests not waste energy by getting sheets washed that they don't need washed incredibly burdensome to my delicate sensibilities, they're probably bad for the environment somehow, I mean, they have to print a card!
  
• Levitt and Dubner: Passim. [See also.]
  

This year's lifetime achievement awards:

• Jonah Weiner: Limp Bizkit's oeuvre may represent the greatest peak in American rock music since Starship followed up Knee Deep in the Hoopla with significant contributions to the Mannequin soundtrack.
  
• Jann Wenner: With his new masterpiece Dogshit in the Doorway, the vocalist and co-writer responsible for one of the greatest runs of music in pop music history has been reduced to working with Lenny Kravitz and Rob Thomas. I mean this as a compliment.*
  
• Pretty Much Every Affluent White Male Nominally Liberal Pundit In America: Overturning Roe v. Wade would be the greatest thing ever to happen to abortion rights.
  
• Peter Beinart: Trust me, supporters of gay and lesbian rights will be even happier that the courts rejected their claims than the Democratic Party would have been to nominate Joe Lieberman in 2004.
• Mikey Kaus: passim, of course, but I'm especially partial to "the success of Brokeback Mountain in arch-conservative suburban Dallas proves that its appeal is strictly limited to gay liberal elites."

Further nominations are what comments are for...

*I'll admit that this probably crosses the arbitrary line where "contrarianism" just becomes straightforward "whoring for your powerful friends." But I'm leaving it in because anything-for-a-buck and sucking up to powerful interests are generally integral to Slate-style contrarianism...

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Bowl Mania Reminder

Today is the last day to join the LGM Bowl Mania league, or to fill out your bracket if you've already joined. Remember: READ the instructions, or you might find yourself ranking the games in exactly opposite the manner you intend.

League: Lawyers, Guns and Money
Password: zevon

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Bradley!!!

I, for one, am delighted by the decision to trade a bag of moldy Fritos for Milton Bradley. I appreciate that Bradley rather goes beyond the typical "difficult player" tag, but damn, he can hit. Maybe they think that having Griffey in the clubhouse will help keep him in check?

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Random Text Exchange of the Day

Yesterday, I received a text on my US cell that read:

"Hi, I need your address xoxo."

Fairly certain that it wasn't from a creditor, yet completely uncertain about the source (the area code is south western Florida, and I don't think I know anybody who lives there) I replied:

"Uhh, I'm not sure I know you."

In English, that is usually perceived as an invitation to supply a name or something similar, right? This is what I received in response (names changed to protect the guilty):

"Love, I have had Track in the hospital i've never been so tired i'm broke n Todd and I are over".

This mystery was followed by a picture message, which I can't view as I use an ancient phone for my US cell that I originally obtained while still living in Holland back in 2002.

I've only had this US number for about six months or so, and I don't circulate it all that widely, so I'm 99.99% confident that I don't know this person. If it was my British mobile, maybe it was from someone whose number I deleted five years ago or something, but this is a mystery to me. The previous owner of my number didn't exactly notify all of her people that her number had changed, so I received a string of calls for her for about two months. This may be of that genre.

At least Cliff Lee is still a Mariner, there's a rumored Carlos Silva - Milton Bradley swap in the works as well (will the brilliance never cease?), and I'm eating Christmas cookies for breakfast, so some semblance of sense still remains in the universe.

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English to Gibberish Translator

This is just creepy:

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Sick.

usually it's the Michele Bachmanns and Glenn Becks of the world who afford me with soft, juicy targets, but the bloody BBC?

And watch in stunned silence as Liliane Landor, the BBC World Service acting head of Africa region, tries to cover her ass: "The programme was a dignified exchange between people who have differing beliefs".

This isn't even on the road approaching the suburbs of dignified.

At least both my license fee and the Foreign Office funded this exchange, so I have the pleasure of having paid for it twice.

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Exchanges that Make My Month...

At the CNAS holiday party last night:

Me: General Dunlap, it's an honor to meet you; my name is Robert Farley.

Major General Charles Dunlap, USAF: [Looks at my head] Really? Robert Farley? You don't have horns!

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Anti-Choicers: We Still Believe Life Begins At Pregnancy And Ends At Birth

Indeed, it's still true. And it's true that even if the votes he casts are much more inevitable than those of Lieberman, Nelson merits a substantial amount of contempt.

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The Higher Nagging sinks to new lows.

I am, most likely, the only person on earth currently taking a break from the serious work of reading and writing about comics by reading a novel whose cover declares that it "only [could] have been devised by a literary team fielding the Marquis de Sade, Arthur Edward Waite, Sir James Frazer, Gurdjieff, Madame Blavatsky, C.G.Jung, Aleister Crowley, Franz Kafka." But because academics are not allowed to take vacations, the World reminds them of what they should be doing at all times—the idea being that if you can make words, you must be making words that count.

I thought that this Higher Nagging would absent itself from my current project, but clearly I was wrong. There I was yesterday, next to a stack of unread comics, and because I had the temerity to be reading a thick late-modernist novel, the World retaliated:

"I found myself in France a little more than six weeks after I enlisted. I had no aptitude with the rifle. I could not even bayonet an effigy of Kaiser Bill convincingly. But I was considered 'sharp' and they also discovered that I could run quite fast. So I was selected as company runner, which meant I was also a kind of servant, I forget the word ..."

"Batman!"

"That is it." (123)

Which is precisely what I was thinking (albeit with a bit more bluster) as I hurled the book across the room. But as the trolls will quickly remind me, I live a privileged life that allows me to do whatever I want whenever I want to, because guilt has never motivated anyone to do anything that made them miserable.

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Throw grandma down the well

So your taxes can be free.

The current estate tax mess is a story of almost mind-numbing greed and legislative incompetence. A quick summary: In 2001 Congress greatly decreased the (already tiny) number of estates subject to taxation, by gradually raising the exemption to its current level of $3.5 million per individual ($7 million per married couple), while lowering the tax rate on the non-exempt portion of estates from 55% to 45%. This by far the most progressive tax in American law, as it currently affects less than 1% of taxpayers while raising, even at the current radically reduced rates, tens of billions per year.

Because of various procedural manuevers, the law was scheduled to sunset in 2010, and then spring back to legal life in 2011, at the 2001 rates (individual exemption of $1 million/$2 million for married couples; 55% rate). This meant that if nothing was done there would be no estate tax in 2010. For the No Billionaire Left Behind wing of the GOP, this created a long lusted-after opportunity to eliminate the tax altogether (at a modest estimated cost of $1.3 trillion over the first decade after elimination, i.e. the price of one extra medium-sized Middle East war, which explains why the Neocon wing has been quietly opposing repeal. Or, if you prefer, the cost of one health care reform bill).

Still, nobody outside one of Grover Norquist's more elaborate onanistic fantasies really believed the tax would be allowed to lapse altogether. A couple of weeks ago the House voted to make the 2009 rates permanent, with every single Republican present voting no (along with 26 Democrats).

Well today the Senate refused to go along, meaning that as of now there will be no estate tax next year. (One ironic consequence of this is that instead of subjecting a tiny handful of families to estate taxes, the disappearance of the tax will impose capital gains taxes on more than 60,000 heirs who would otherwise avoid them, thus proving that our leaders remain willing to tax the sort of rich if the only alternative is taxing the ultra-rich).

Blanche Lincoln and Jon Kyl are working on a compromise proposal that will raise the estate tax exemptions to $5 million individual/$10 million married couple with a 35% rate beyond that, but it now looks like any such measure will have to be applied retroactively to 2010 estates -- a move which seems likely to trigger quite a few lawsuits. So at least trusts and estates lawyers (not to mention their richest clients) will be happy.

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The Mustache of Understanding

Wow. Just, wow. Whatever our disagreements about Taibbi's polemical style, I think we can all agree that if there are any flaws in this classic they result from not going far enough...

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The Devil and Rand Paul

Just when you begin to think that it's literally impossible for Rand Paul's Senatorial campaign to get any more entertaining:

The gentleman behind the mike is Chris Hightower, Rand Paul's campaign spokesman. In addition to his affection for Satan, Mr. Hightower appears to have demonstrated an unfortunate aversion to "Afro-Americans." LOL!

As an aside, it really isn't all that surprising that white supremacists flock to Rand Paul and his daddy. Neiwart has detailed this in the past; the particular vision of libertarianism that Paul and his father propound is attractive to white supremacists, in large part because the supremacists believe that the federal government invariably acts in the interest of racial minorities. Anything that prevents the good white citizens of this country from keeping the darkies down is an affront to God, the Constitution, etc. The white supremacy is rather the point of the anti-statism, explicitly for some and implicitly for others.

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Abortion Access in Uniform

Bad:

For military women, who lack all rights to medical privacy, facing an unplanned pregnancy is a daunting obstacle. Thanks to anti-abortion forces in Congress, military hospitals are banned from providing abortion services, except in cases of life endangerment, rape, or incest (and for the latter two, only if the patient pays for the service herself). Amy says her options were “like being given a choice between swimming in a pond full of crocodiles or piranhas.”

“I have long been aware of the stigma surrounding this circumstance and knew my career would likely be over, though I have received exceptional performance reviews in the past,” Amy explains. Although Fallujah has a surgical unit, and abortion is one of the most common surgical procedures, Amy knew that if her pregnancy were discovered, she would be sent back to her home base at North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune, where she would then have to seek a private abortion off-base, or she could request leave in Iraq and try her luck at a local hospital. She also knew she could face reprimands from her commanding officers for having had sex in Iraq (part of a broader prohibition on sex in war zones), and that she might not be promoted as a result: a potentially career-ending situation in the Marines, where failure to obtain regular promotions results in being discharged. Moreover, as a woman in the military, accustomed to proving herself to her male peers over her six-year career, Amy was wary of appearing a “weak female.”

It's not just about the dominance of the religious right in the US military; it's also about Congressional cowardice and inane bureaucratic politics.

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A random walk down Wall Street

Whoops.

If you had bought $1000 worth of stock in each of the ten recommended companies on the day this article was published, and then held them until today, you would have watched your $10,000 investment transformed into $5,160 (or about $4,475 in 2000 dollars). By contrast if you had simply bought a passive mutual fund that tracked the S&P 500 you would have about $7,470.

Fun quote:

The same reinvention skills are apparent in the management at Houston-based Enron. That company has successfully transformed itself from a traditional natural-gas outfit (complete with a 32,000-mile pipeline) into a middleman for the new economy. Last November, Enron launched an e-commerce site that lets companies trade electricity, coal, gas, and other energy commodities over the Internet. Total amount of deals brokered so far? Try $100 billion, which is more online commerce than anyone else--Amazon.com included. In conjunction, Enron is about to complete a 15,000-mile fiber-optic network that will help it broker the sale of that most precious resource right now, broadband capacity. Need extra pipes to run your telecom network during a busy season? Enron can actually buy bandwidth from one customer with excess capacity and sell it to another. That's a lucrative strategy, given how explosively broadband demand is growing. Gannon at SunAmerica estimates Enron's core gas business can easily grow profits 15% a year--a big jump over its competitors. Tack on the broadband service, which should turn profitable in a few years, and annual earnings growth can top 25%, he says. "Enron is going to become one of the leaders in broadband communications." Not bad for a gas utility.

See also.

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Could We Have A Quasi-Parliamentary System...If We Wanted It?

Longtime readers will know that I believe that the president's role in passing new domestic initiatives (as opposed to applying existing regulations or putting issues on the agenda) is an essentially subordinate one, and those who think that a ruthless president with partisan control of Congress can get what he wants need to (for starters) explain Bush and Social Security. My take on Obama and health care, roughly is:

• My guess is that, if we had a parliamentary system, or even a separation-of-powers system without an anachronistic Senate, at a minimum the health care plan would have a public option, with Obama's support.
• On the other hand, for obvious political as well as ideological reasons, Obama wants a health care reform to pass in a timely manner, and thinks that the current deal is about as good as he can get. Here, I agree with Obama's progressive critics that he's OK with the bill as it now stands even if he would support a better one.
  
• I think Obama's analysis of the political situation is correct; nothing he could do could assemble enough reactionary moving parts among Lieberman, Nelson, Snowe, et al. to get a public option as part of the bill.

Whether Obama deserves primary responsibility for the failure of health care reform to include a major public check (whether a Medicare buy-in or robust public option) depends largely on whether you think I'm right on point #3, which Glenn Greenwald doesn't. But while I don't disagree with all of his criticisms of Obama, I simply don't think he has the goods. The fact that the President can strong-arm some freshman House members (and perhaps one Senator coming up for re-election) simply doesn't constitute good evidence that he has significant leverage against the number of senators that would be needed to come aboard, particularly given the number of them who come from states where Obama isn't popular, a more liberal Democrat isn't viable, and/or aren't up for re-election in 2010.

Even more tendentious, however, is the fact that he takes Russ Feingold's claim that "This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place" at face value. As I think Glenn would recognize in most other contexts, bare assertions made by obviously self-interested parties don't constitute reliable evidence. As Armando -- who is much close to Greenwald's position on Obama's power here than mine -- points out, given that Feingold has made his opposition to using reconciliation to pass a better health care bill clear, he's not in a very good position to criticize anyone else's strategic choices. The supermajority requirements in the Senate are the single biggest obstacle to getting a good bill passed, and the fact that even some progressive Senators aren't willing to challenge them has crucially undermined the final bill, in a much more concrete way than Obama's excessive moderation and strategic mistakes. (I'd be much more receptive to claims that Obama not being sufficiently cutthroat is the key factor if the marginal votes he needed were in the center of the Senate rather than the tenth seat to the right.)

It's hard to know how to apportion responsibility exactly -- separation-of-powers systems tend to nullify accountability, and we can't trust the accounts of either senators or the White House about what's going on. But I certainly haven't heard a plausible account of how even a more liberal White House could magically get 60 votes for a bill with a robust public option in the Senate.

...Let's not forget Baucus and the Gang of 6, either.

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Random Musings about Baseball, College Students Having Sex, and Airlines.

I'd really like to say a few things about the Cliff Lee to Seattle trade, but Scott already put it out there, and as per usual, USS Mariner have it covered.

The New York Post has a newsflash: Columbia University students can now "live in sin - on their parents' dime." Because, as we know, college students would never have had premarital sex until the advent of co-ed dorm rooms. This changes everything!

The Times, of course, has a more balanced take. Rather unlike this one commenter to the Post article: "Let's keep looking into the future. How long would it take for another outrageous move, like government passing a law that would allow a brother and sister to get married?"

I thought that was already legal in some unnamed states?

Seriously, as my partner pointed out, is this really all that radical, or is Columbia simply acknowledging what has been going on informally for, well, generations? (One of the arguments in favor of co-ed rooms is that best friends can share, even if they are of the opposite sex. Had me and said partner done that 22 years ago, perhaps we would have fast-forwarded things. Probably not, that would have been living in sin! Unlike now of course.)

While speaking about sex, the mind naturally wanders to the French. I have a new favorite airline: Air France. When I moved to Holland nine years ago, I tied myself to Northwest / KLM, due in large part to NW 33 / 34, which is (was) a direct flight between SEA and AMS (and until 2003, on ancient DC-10s) Mileage programs create a seductive incentive: always fly that carrier or the carriers in their alliance, as once you get status, it's difficult to fly anything else, even if you have to pay a modest premium to remain tied to your carrier of choice. Also, living in Amsterdam made it hellishly convenient to go pretty much anywhere.

Fast forward to life in England. When Air France bought KLM, I was concerned, but more of the "better the devil you know" framework. When Delta bought Northwest, I was very concerned, especially after my grim experience flying through Atlanta this past October. So this trip, flying out of Bristol, I ended up on Air France on the outward leg (BRS-CDG-SEA-PDX) and Northwest home (PDX-SEA-AMS-BRS). It's probably cliche, but the food on Air France was terrific -- the best airline food I've had since flying Air Cubana a dozen years ago. It came with a menu. In coach. A menu that changes every couple of weeks, which is refreshing after having been fed the same crap on Northwest for two years.

Did I mention that the food was good? Fresh salmon and tomato starter, the beef ragout with mustard sauce was good, even if it came out of a microwave, the Camembert was a nice touch, and the chocolate tart for dessert was delicious. The wine kept flowing, and the flight attendant, when clearing the food service, asked me if I wanted another red wine (without my prompting) to which I said yes, of course; he then added "and I should think you want a cognac to go with that?"

Duh?

This is my kind of airline. The flight attendants were, well, attentive, unlike the stoic (and downright bitter during the bankruptcy and then merger period) Northwest crews, the blunt, methodically efficient KLM crews, or the generally absent Delta crews. They even served champagne in coach, kept the wine flowing happily, and were charming and amiable.

This all made me nearly forget that my bag didn't make the connection at CDG, or that we hit a patch of the worst turbulence I've experienced (the scary bad thank god for the seatbelt and this wine oh crap is the plane really supposed to do this? sort of turbulence) that couldn't help but remind me of that Air France A330 (same type as I was on) that didn't quite make it over the Atlantic this past June.

My bag was on to something, I figure. It knew about the impending nastiness of the flight, and opted instead to remain behind in an airport bar in Paris. To Air France's credit, when I arrived in SEA, they knew my bag hadn't made it, were prepared, took my details, and it arrived here in Oregon 24 hours later. Class.

Unfortunately, Air France did not supply me with a free sample for this post.

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The Strategic Value of Nihilism

The dilemma facing progressives on health care is simply that the indifference in the face of suffering that the Joe Liebermans of the world have greatly increases their negotiating leverage. His threats to blow up health care reform are simply going to be more credible than those of people who actually care about whether people have access to health insurance. When combine this asymmetry with the Senate's malapportionment and supermajority rules, this produces legislation that will produce a system vastly inferior -- far more expensive with less access and no more effectiveness -- to the health care framework of any comparable democracy.

But unlike Paul, I don't really consider the question of whether the bill is worth supporting terribly difficult. Is the bill better than the status quo? It quite clearly is. And not just in a purely symbolic way, like the 1957 Civil Rights Act, but in a way that provides real, tangible benefits. So the only reason to oppose the bill is if you think that abandoning this bill would lead to a better one. Alas, it would be understating the case considerably to say that this is implausible. Lieberman, Nelson, Lincoln et al. aren't suddenly going to become progressives. Congress will almost certainly be less progressive, not more, after the 2010 midterms. As the fact that even people like Russ Feingold oppose reconciliation for health care makes clear, most Democratic senators are going continue to support various countermajoritarian rules that increase their individual leverage even though they undermine progressive change in the long-run. For those of who believe in the Green Lantern Theory of Presidential Power Over Domestic Policy, Obama's going to be here until 2012, and if he loses, it will be to someone much worse.

Given what's at stake, playing heighten-the-contradictions would be grossly irresponsible unless one has a very convincing story about how a better reform bill is going to happen in the foreseeable future. Given that there isn't one, the bill should clearly be supported even in its current form.

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