Edwards' bright ideas.

I have to say I'm intrigued by Ezra's account of John Edwards' emerging 2008 platform -- which appears to be a rather straight-up appeal to rich-country and rich-citizens-of-rich-country noblesse oblige. Edwards' basic pitch is the need to acknowledge income disparities and go about fixing them, whether it be from the West to the developing world and from the rich to the poor.

That's the thematic pitch. Substantively, though, it's hard not to adore gutsy, common-sense planks like:

1) Reform the poverty measure, which is a 1950s era anachronism based on food costs. Get an accurate metric which delivers an accurate count. Early estimations show that we'll have about a million more folks in poverty using such a standard.

It's true that the US poverty line is an anachronism and a disgrace, just like Gregg Easterbrook (I know, I know) effectively raged about a couple of years ago. Here's a great overview (pdf) by Howard Glennerster of LSE of how the US poverty line -- three times the income needed to purchase a minimum bundle of food -- came to be and why it hasn't been changed even as food has gotten cheaper relative to housing and energy costs. In a nutshell:

When Orshansky (1963) came to settle on her minimum food budget she chose the very lowest of the food budgets on offer from the Department of Agriculture. It was meant for those in emergency need... She remains appalled that it has been set in aspec ever since....By the late 1990s [her] poverty line had fallen to the equivalent of less than a third of median household income. This was a harsher measure than it had been in the 1960s and much harsher than most international poverty standards. The European Union has increasingly been using a measure of 60% of the median as the poverty line. This is much the same, in practice, of Britain's use of 50% of the mean...


But here's the part of Edwards' thumbnail platform that really grabbed me:

3) Raise the minimum wage to at least $7.50, triple the Earned Income tax Credit for workers without children, and end the marriage penalty hidden in the way it treats low-income couples.


Note that "without children". Yes, yes, yes. One problem with the EITC is that it discriminates horribly against poor people without kids. Here are this year's EITC tables. A single person working full time at $5.75/hour -- $11,500 a year -- gets an EITC of $17. A couple without children sees its EITC phased out at $13,500. Both figures just slightly above the current (abysmally low) U.S. poverty lines for one and two-member households. And the comparable EITC at those incomes for single parents or couples with two or more kids is $4400.

This is heinous public policy. Of course, the EITC should be higher for households with more members, with some allowance for the cost of child care. But the discrepancy as it stands right now (compare the figures at all incomes for a couple without children and a single parent with a child) is ridiculous. For one thing, it's essentially a way of bribing poor people to have kids. For another, it discriminates against those who can't have children and against those are, frankly, too responsible to try to support a child at the poverty line. For a third, it offers basically no additioanl income stability to young working-age men, the group who are the most vulnerable to income anxiety and also the most likely to be socially disruptive, to engage in crime, or to have weak labour market attachment.

Democratic politicians often tailor their policies rhetorically and substantively to families and kids because there is more public support and votes for "family-friendly" policies. I don't mean to get into dreary "character" analysis. But suffice to say, Edwards bucking that trend and proposing to put dollars where they're most needed -- among politically neglected constituencies -- actually speaks volumnes to me.

Beautiful man, beautiful game.

Yes, it was lovely, wasn't it?


Update: Like various things I blog about, I know substantively nothing about football, other than that it's nice not to be in North America during the World Cup. However, I have to disagree with particular complaint from Aleksandar Hemon at the Goal Post:

I used to like the English: they have a few exciting players; and I love Liverpool and Gerrard. But they have devolved into a bunch of lazy, unimaginative poster boys for the tabloid industry. Today, after Beckham scored, the cameras showed a reaction shot of his dumb-ass bimbo wife, while one can read daily reports in the English papers about the ways the footballers wives wasted their lives and money in Germany.


The way I remember it (I might have missed an early reaction shot while people in the bar jumped up and down and waved their arms in front of the screen), after Beckham scored, there was footage of him hugging his teammates, a couple of replays of the goal, a couple of crowd shots and only then -- as I thought to myself where's Posh? -- a reaction shot of Posh. At which point, I leaned forward in my fair-weather-rooting happiness and said to the lady in front of me, "I can't believe they're still married!" She said "If you can call it a marriage". Then we watched another couple of replays, more crowd shots, more mussing of Becks' hair by happy teammates, then another shot of Posh hugging the couple's son. At that, even my cynical barmate had to give in and say, "Oh, that's so sweet." And after that, no more Posh.

This strikes me as rather discreet, all things considered. And that the English papers obsess over the footballers' wives living large in Germany surely isn't a reflection on the footballers themselves. It's far more a reflection on the sad, sad condition of people like me.

Blair Force One.

It's not that British politics is actually any more silly than North American politics. But the current dustup over the possibility of Tony Blair getting his own jet really is pretty funny. The situation got so bad for Blair a couple of weeks ago that he and his wife took a well-publicized econoflight from Rome to London (which, of course, their presence held up by half an hour, requiring the importation of sniffer dogs).

Not surprisingly, the editors of the Tory-leaning Telegraph are Fox News-style outraged at the potential extravagence. But an Observer panel is more sympathetic. Here's how one panelist put it:

Those who criticise the Prime Minister for ordering two private jets are being petty. The planes will be shared with the Queen; all the PM's flights for the past two years have been, we are assured, carbonneutral and the additional cost of the jets is relatively modest. The Prime Minister has an official residence, so why the outrage over an official plane? Rather Tony Blair or Gordon Brown in a private jet than the cynical, cycling Cameron with accompanying car conveniently out of sight. American Presidents have had official planes for more than 60 years. Last week's announcement merely confirms the drift towards presidential politics in this country and signals that, these days, the Prime Minister is more than simply first among equals..


Hmm, the Guardian and Telegraph reports both made a similar complaint, though with various degrees of tongue-in-cheek: too American. Post-Iraq, that's got to be the last thing Blair wants to be reading all the time.

Amos Oz

Some 2004 quotes from liberal Israeli novelist Amos Oz reprinted in David Remnick's Reporting:

Suppose Sharon gave a Sadat-style speech to the Palestinian National Assembly expressing empathy, saying we'll do anything to heal the Palestinian wonds short of committing suicide, saying it will be hard but you will have an independent state with a share of Jerusalem. Suppose he said it on the anniversary of the massacre of Palestinians at Deir Tassin. Can you imagine the earthquake? And suppose Arafat went on Palestinian television and said that after a hundred years of bloody wars I finally realize that this is the Jewish national home, too. We need a two-state solution. I realize that this is not a likely scenario, but this is what was missing in the nineties. Imagine the reverberations in every Palestinian refugee camp and the entire Muslim world. But no one is ready to do it.

...

Many Americans and Europeans are sentimental about conflict resolution... They think the first thing to do is solve the hatreds, make friends out of enemies, and only then make peace. But, historically, dealy enemies, swearing inwardly to cheat and betray, sign peace treaties. This would be a divorce that rsults not in a honeymoom but in an emotional de-escalation that will take generations. Look at the Europeans. It took them a thousand years to make peace. Even as they wag their finger at use like a Victorian governess, they have a history of rivers of blood. I will risk a prophecy: it will not take the Middle East as long to make peace as it did Europe. And we'll shed less blood.

...

[T]he children of the same opprssive parent can often be the worst of enemies. The Palestianians look at me, the Israeli, as an extension of white, sophisticated, colonizing Europe, which returned to the Middle East to do the same old thing: dominate, humiliate, like European crusaders. The other side, the Israelis, see the Palestinians not as fellow victims but as pogrom-makers, Cossacks, Nazis, oppressors in kaffiyehs and mustaches playing the same ancient game of cutting Jewish throats from the fun of it. You will hear this in many synagogues: they are pharoahs, the goyim, and we are the lambs surrounded by seventy wolves. Neither party will ever give up this sense of victimhood and will forever dispute who was David and who was Goliath.

...

The Arabs were deeply injured by the creation of Israel, by its relative prosperity, by what they regard as an endorsement of Israel by most of the West. The Palestinians were injured by the fact that they lost a signficant part of their homeland. But this is not war of civilizations. Just the term - 'the clash of civilizations' - is a hopelessly Hollywood thing, kind of like Star Wars. This is a conflict about hundreds of thousands of people who lost their homes, Palestinians and Jews from Europe and the Arab countries... It is about one very small country inflicting a terrible, humiliating defeat on a people who have not had a military victory since the days of Saladin.


Pretty moving stuff, hey?

Tear Foer away from that soccer blog...

Truth be told, I'm usually on Zengerle's side in these New Republic vs. Daily Kos feuds. But frankly, at this point, both sides should stop writing about each other completely. Zengerle's recent attempt to incriminate Kos on the grounds that he asked his blogger friends in an email not to weigh in on the "Kosola" scandal is, for all the reasons Ezra gives, somwhere west of dumb. It's so dumb that Zengerle's editor should have torn himself away from the football match and stepped in to stop it. And, of course, it's provoked another one of those obnoxious hyperbolic anti-TNR screeds over at DKos.

Problem is, Kos is right to scream this time. To begin with, the email Zengerle obtained has nothing to do with furthering the allegation that Jerome Armstrong was once paid to promote a dodgy stock or the (I don't quite understand how) related issue that politicians can "purchase" Armstrong and get Kos' support. Beyond that, there's nothing in Kos' missive that even smells coersive of other bloggers or dodgy in any way -- unless we assume bloggers can't reasonably communicate with or ask favours of one another. (Hilariously, Mickey Kaus admits that he once "pursued the identical strategy myself, in analogous circumstances, though with a far less powerful and centralized institutional apparatus" right before jumping all over the "scandal". The ethical difference, I guess, lies in that "powerful apparatus" -- i.e. Kos is more popular and influential than Mickey.)

I'm perfectly willing to believe that Armstrong, and maybe Kos too, is a mercenary asshole, or (more accurately) sometimes behaves like one. But there's no additional evidence of it on The Plank. If you're too blinded by mutual antipathy to wait for and pick out the good arguments, you should just back slowly away...

Glenn and Alex.

I have no real opinion on the Kos-Armstrong scandal. But Glenn Reynold's passive-aggressive revelry -- I'm on their side, but I'll link to anybody who thinks Armstrong is the new Abramoff! -- is really something to behold. Today, though, Insta outdid himself by linking to a Counterpunch piece trashing the liberal blogs, which -- heh -- "doesn't rely on scandal for its point".

I think it's only fair to ask that if Reynolds is really going to link approvingly to Counterpunch to smack liberals, then he needs to never mention Ward Churchill again. Deal?

The British case for a minimum wage hike.

People have been writing a lot about the need to raise the minimum wage in the States. This is logical since the US has close to the lowest minimum wage as a percentage of median earnings among comparably rich OECD countries and there's very little evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, that reasonable minimum wage increases have a signficant effect on adult employment rates.

Since I'm here in the UK and too injured to much else, I'll throw another anecdote on the pile: the recent British experience of minimum wage hiking. New Labour has been raising the adult minimum wage in England since 1999, and the series of hikes is due to conclude in October of this year at an adult mimimum wage of £5.35. That's a 49% nominal increase since 1999, about 2/3 of which survives inflation over the period. That's slightly higher than the recent proposed US minimum wage hike, which the Republican Congressional leadership predictably killed. In the U.K., since 2002, the increase in the minimum wage has been ten percentage points higher than the comparable increase in average hourly earnings.

The British Low Pay Commission discussed recent minimum wage and macro experience in England in their 2006 report. In a nutshell -- as can be seen in the snazzy graph on page 17 -- the gross employment rate has risen from 71% to 75% of the British population since 1992 and hasn't changed since 1999. Over the same period, the official adult unemployment rate has fallen from 10% to 5%, the last 1% of the fall coming during the period of minimum wage hikes. (It has risen a little bit recently, but still stands below its 1999 level.) Neither is there any evidence that employment in low-paying service sectors has fallen in response to the higher minimum wages -- every sector has seen an increase in the number of jobs available. The low-wage employment drop-offs that have occurred, in agriculture and textile factory work, are part of long-run trends we all know by heart. In cleaning jobs, the number of jobs had been falling in the late 90s but has actually started climbing again with the minimum wage since 2003. There's no measurable change in retail inflation either since the hikes began.

On the plus side, the snazzy graph on page 30 gives some idea how the poorest workers continue to see their wages rise relative to the median British wage. The Commissioners estimate that 3.6% of all UK jobs saw their wages rise as a result of the last minimum wage hike and 5.2% will be affected by the final rate hike in October. That's a lot of welfare improvement for (so far) basically no discernable macroeconomic cost.

It's also worth noting that the one argument against minimum wage increases that does seem to stick a bit when confronted with data is that high minimum wages discourage employers from hiring youth. That's also true from the recent UK experience profiled in the Low Pay Commission's 2006 report. To remedy this, the Brits, since 2004, now have three levels of minimum wage: for those under aged 16-17, for those age 18-21 and for adults. The new 16-17 rate is set low enough to encourage teenagers to stay in school but to keep them from being completely exploited if they leave. I can imagine problems with such an age-tiered system, but it seems a far more reasonable policy option than letting teenage employment dictate a national minimum wage.

On vacation.

Posting will be sporadic over the next couple of weeks.

International employment performance.

How's that for a sexy title?

Via New Economist, here's a new study (pdf) from the UK's Work Institute on labour market flexibility in Europe.

The most fun part of the report is its bite-size history of the dominant trends in macro/labour economics in Europe (and the West in general) during my lifetime. The "New Right" economics -- monetarism in England and supply side economics in the US -- were rejected in the early 90s in favour the neoliberal model: a renewed emphasis on fiscal responsibility/austerity (but with a Keynesian spend-out-of-recessions foundation). The neoliberal cw also emphasised investment in human capital, hostility to large-scale collective bargaining, "making work pay", and discouraging people from subsisting outside the labour force, mainly by making unemployment and welfare benefits small and difficult to qualify for. The major document of the neoliberal/ New Labour/ Third Way policy concensus was the OECD's 1994 Jobs Study. The movement's buzzword was (labour market) "flexibility".

According to David Coats and the Work Foundation, however, there's recently been something of another sea change in how European economists and policy makers approach optimal labour market policy. From page 23:

Indeed, the OECD believe that they have identified two demonstratively successful policy packages, which might be summarized as follows:

The Anglo-Saxon model: This is characterised by strong product market competition, low welfare benefits, relatively low levels of taxation and "light" EPL. Trade unions are weak and collective bargaining plays a limited role. The results is a high employment rate achieved at a low cost to the taxpayer. But these countries have also experienced rapidly growing earnings inequality and a high leve lof in-work poverty.

The Nordic Model: These countries are characterised by a strong emphasis on collective bargaining and social dialogue. They offer generous welfare benefits but impose stringent job search requirements and limited durations. EPL is more restrictive than in the Anglo-Saxon countries. Taxes are higher to fund a more generous welfare state. Earnings inequality is narrower and there is a relatively low level of in-work poverty.

The only element common to both approaches is the emphasis on competition and low levels of product market regulation -- otherwise everything else is different - taxes, the strength of employment protection laws, the role of trade unions, the generosity of benefits and the importance of government funded active labour market programmes.


There's a lot more in the report, and certainly many of the neoliberal goals (public fiscal responsibility, active labour market policies, the need for flexible work time regimes, limited regulation of product markets) remain in place in the various studies and reports cited. But the authors argue that, starting with the Lisbon summit in 2000 and continuing in follow-up reports, in the OECD's most recent research, and in recent analyses from Britain's Treasury department (with the exception that the latter remains sceptical of union power), the powers that be have been backing off the neoliberal consensus. That's in the face of empirical evidence that other, more regulatory and redistributive, policy and institutional arrangements can also produce good growth and employment outcomes, like the ones in Denmark, Sweden, Austria and the Netherlands. Who says economists can't learn?

Better mood blogging.

Some good stuff from good liberals:

Both Peter Beinart and Michael Tomasky make truly excellent points in their Slate pissing match. Tomasky really hits the nail on the head regarding the problems that liberals who opposed the Iraq War from the start have accepting the Iraq liberal hawks back "into the liberal internationalist fold", and in a way I thought his original review was too churlish to adquately get across. (I especially love the part about how "punditry has consequences".) For his part, Beinart (not my favourite pundit), is tough and smart enough to make Tomasky improve on his original offering.

On a roughly similar topic, Mark Schmidt's piece on "The Myth of Scoop" made my toes curl with pleasure.

In Canadian political news, although the snotty McLeans link caused me to make rude gestures at my monitor (the Liberals aren't a national party anymore? wtf?), Cerebus is absolutely right that Joe Volpe needs to drop out of the Liberal leadership race. Not just becuase his corporate-kiddie fundraising snafu is embarrassing and unethical but because he sounds like he might be an Ignatieff mole. How else to explain his spectacularly dumbass ""very Republican-minded" remark after the leadership debate? Michael Ignatieff owns a dragon!*

And finally, via Brad Delong, this is an awesome post at yet another really good blog. I couldn't help thinking how appropriate it is in light of Jonah Goldberg's latest climate change column. Peter Beinart! Come back! We love you!


*For the full dragon joke, go here, Week of January 17, click on "A Message from the Liberal Party".

Bad mood blogging.

Time to fire a few rounds at my favourite targets.

First, this bit of profound meaninglessness from Joe Klein, asked by the WaPo what the Dems have to do to win back Congress:

Reread Rudyard Kipling's poem "If." Any other advice is extraneous.


Actually, coming from Klein, that's probably true.


Second, while I'm more forebearing than Brad Delong, they have really got to learn how to keep Martin Peretz off the TNR blog, where his most recent contribution is turning Leon Wieseltier's perfectly fine blast at Juan Cole into toxic sludge. What a fucking embarrassment for a progressive magazine.


And finally, there's Marshall Wittman, writing yesterday about YKos:

And a gaggle of supposedly centrist Presidential wannabees flocked to Vegas to genuflect before a blogger convention that had as much to do with winning mainstream America as Paris Hilton does with winning the hearts of Focus on the Family. Ironically, the once edgy bloggers have become yet another Democratic interest group - people with screen names - that is pandered to by politicians looking for "buzz" and money.


Does Wittman think before he types? To say the high-profile bloggers are an "interest group" is to define "interest group" down to nothing. There's nothing inately wrong with interest groups, but they're called "interest groups" because they have special demands that serve the interests of their group more or differently than those of the electorate at large. The teachers' union is an interest group because it pushes for policies designed to insure job security for teachers, even though opponents of such policies say they damage students. The teachers may be right but they clearly have a vested interest.

Except for net neutrality (on which they may be right but have, by definition, a vested interest), there's no comparable narrow set of interests that are being pushed by bloggers. The big liberal bloggers want the Democratic Party to win elections and implement basic liberal policies. Their tactical advice might be wrong, but it hardly constitutes a "special interest".

In the very same post, Wittman offers up this bit of profound meaninglessness:

There is the model of Clinton and there are the models of McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore and Kerry. This is a time to choose.


McGovern. Kerry. Really, what's the difference?

Mockingbird revisionism.

I didn't know this, but according to Stephen Metcalf at Slate, there's been a recent revisionist literary assault on To Kill a Mockingbird (from which Metcalf dissents, lightly).

I guess I should read the criticism. But as a gut reaction, that's just... terrible. Why bash To Kill a Mockingbird? The gist of the complaints is, and has always been, that it's not objectively great literature, either from a pure literary perspective or -- in the recent comdemnations -- from a social commentary perspective, seeing as it can be read sort of as a belated love letter to white professional noblesse oblige right in the heat of the civil rights era.

Well, ok, it's not great literature. But it's profoundly good literature... and isn't goodness kind of timeless, or at least doomed to be archaic and black sheep no matter when it's produced? Do I really need to find Atticus Finch altogether credible or 100% sufferable in order to find him memorable? Afterall, there is a sort of inate prudery built in to tolerance, particularly tolerance that's brave enough to clash with social norms. That should make us a little uncomfortable, shouldn't it?

That's the difference.

Having stupidly missed seeing Al Gore when he came to UBC, I did finally see his movie last night. It was quite an experience. The audience for the early show was fairly small but very, very enthusiastic. At the end of the film, the whole audience applauded and pretty much everyone stuck around for the Melissa Etheridge and the closing credits -- not a typical moviegoing experience by any means.

Basically, I came away rather baffled by the common complaint that the movie looks like a piece of campaign propoganda. It really doesn't. Yes, it was clearly made by Gore's friends, and they swallow the personal details of his exposition and aren't interested in challenging him on his own history. The one real "huh?" moment of the film for me was Gore's passing reference to passing carbon tax in 1993, something the Clinton Admin was unable in the end to push through the senate, ending up with only a small gas tax, a similar measure which Gore had tried, as a senator, to eliminate from the Bush tax hike just a few years earlier in favour of a higher top rate for millionaires.

Brutal personal-political honest this isn't. But the fudging, the political gloss, is, in a way, important in itself.

First, there's the matter of the science. Majikthise had a great summary of film's substantive content a week ago. Basically, I came out understanding the basics of climate change science better, far better, than I went in: not just the process of global warming, but what's melting and where, what the controversial issues in the literature are, how the sea currents and heat redistribution cycle of the oceans work. Contra Gregg Easterbrooks' sneering take on Gore as "Ask Mr. Science", Gore doesn't affect to be some sort of technical expert. On the contrary, he's a pure popularizer. His presentation isn't supposed to convey only ideas a brainiac could digest. The fact that the facts of carbon buildup and its consequences are accessible doesn't mean that they're widely accessed. Most people don't understand the issues and Gore wants to change that. Going in, I thought I understood more about global warming science than it turns out I did.

But Gore also says a lot, implicitly, about politics. And what makes the movie so upbeat isn't the we-can-overcome-this-challenge ending so much as its message about public service, public issue advocacy. It's easy to obsess over the gloss, like we do over polticians' motivations, tastes, performances, rhetoric. Gore and his presenters don't back down from any of it. He gives us the sister dead from lung cancer, the black and white family photographs, Katherine Harris in rouge, lists of dubious (and some less dubious) accomplishments. The point isn't that it's tasteful or entirely honest or appropriate. The point is it doesn't matter if it is or not. We -- liberals, pundits, all of us who claim to care seriously about politics -- get hung up on this crap at our own peril. There are, in the end, those politicians who think we need to take steps to stop Greenland from melting and there are those politicians who don't, who are in hoc to the interest groups that insist that they don't. Gore is, of course, a bit of an extreme example on the wonkitude scale. His issue-obsession makes him a better activist than politician. But, then, he was also as periodically cynical and poll-tested and bought-off and controversial within his own party as the rest of them. Frankly, he almost certainly would be again were he to run another campaign (he won't). But he's still a walking symbol of what democratic politics ought to be about, maybe even could be if we'd let it.

The really scary thing about Gore is that he's probably smart enough to understand this message completely and enjoy the schadenfreude implicit in it at least a little. More power to him, frankly.

The Galloping Beaver vs. Jonah Goldberg

Me and (especially) Dave jump all over The Doughy Pantload over at Galloping Beaver.

Death of a thug.

Mary Ann Weaver's Atlantic piece on Zarqawi really is well-timed, and as fascinating as everybody says.

One thing that strikes me as rather incredible in her telling is the Iranian leadership's tolerance of Zarqawi's rise to prominence despite his being a virulent Shiite-hater, moreso than bin Laden was comfortable with. And yet...

“We know Zarqawi better than he knows himself,” the high-level Jordanian intelligence official said. “And I can assure you that he never had any links to Saddam. Iran is quite a different matter. The Iranians have a policy: they want to control Iraq. And part of this policy has been to support Zarqawi, tactically but not strategically.”

“Such as?” I asked.

“In the beginning they gave him automatic weapons, uniforms, military equipment, when he was with the army of Ansar al-Islam. Now they essentially just turn a blind eye to his activities, and to those of al-Qaeda generally. The Iranians see Iraq as a fight against the Americans, and overall, they’ll get rid of Zarqawi and all of his people once the Americans are out.”


Zarqawi had told bin Laden that “Shiites should be executed”, and his useful idiocy to Iran has involved the group-targetted killing not only of countless Shiite civilians but also of various Iraqi Shiite religious leaders, all over the course of many months. Yet he and the fiercely religious Shiite leadership of Iran used and depended on each other for years.

In a part of the world in which everything we hear and read is defined in terms of religious sectarianism, there's just something breathtaking about that sort of realpolitik.

More Iain Murray goodness.

Iain Murray's ongoing crusade at the Corner against An Inconvenient Truth has got to be the funniest thing since last Christmas when the Cornerites collectively picked up their pitchforks to defend C.S. Lewis' honour from whatever godless types were apparently attacking the Narnia movie.

Jon Chait has already smacked today's entry into Murray vs. Gore: Murray assuring his readers that Gore's movie sucks because Stephen Colbert said so while parodying Bill O'Reilly. But to my eyes, the real comedy gold actually comes a bit later in the day. Seems Murray has been watching trailers for other movies that might be making ludicrous global warming arguments, I guess in the interest of guilt-by-association, though it's a bit hard to tell what he's really going for. Anyway, check out this hilarious bit of pseudo-prudery:

Well I never. Only yesterday I posted something about The Omen promoters claiming global warming causes earthquakes and tsunamis. I missed this New Scientist article from the end of last month, in which scientists, almost defining alarmism, claim global warming will cause more earthquakes and tsunamis. Pity it came too late for Al to include in the movie, although I am assured by one reader who has seen Al's full presentation that he mentions it.


Heavens to Betsy! Back in Murray's day, scientists would never dream of making such shocking allegations in major international journals! Once, scientists understood that being controversial is best left to filmmakers, or, better, to think tank hacks without any apparent academic credentials in science. Once that traditional hierarchy breaks down...well, I don't have to tell you it's a slippery slope. Politicians start quoting them in multimedia presentations! And before you know it we'll all be whacked out on government-subsdized crack and marrying our first cousins in the name of tolerance!

Be afraid, everyone. They might call it flailing hackery but we call it life.

Harebrained.

Matt Yglesias is right to be dirisive about Unity08. At least I hope he is, because they're either a silly bunch of pollyannas or they're bad news for Democrats. As Jonathan Alter explains it:

The Unity08 plan is for an online third-party convention in mid-2008, following the early primaries. Any registered voter could be a delegate; their identities would be confirmed by cross-referencing with voter registration rolls (which would also prevent people from casting more than one ballot). That would likely include a much larger number than the few thousand primary voters who all but nominate the major party candidates in Iowa and New Hampshire. This virtual process will vote on a centrist platform and nominate a bipartisan ticket. The idea is that even if the third-party nominee didn't win, he would wield serious power in the '08 election, which will likely be close.


Yes, it probably will be close given how well-defined the partisan coalitions have become in US politics. And, therefore, if Unity08's plan "works" -- in the sense of wooing a chunk of the 20-25% or so of regular voters with low party attachment, it will accomplish two things. First, it will drive both major parties (or, more specifically, the Democrats) straight to the interest groups that form their bases. Second, it will throw another election to the Republicans. The reason for these complementary facts is clear as day in Unity08's manifesto:

In our opinion, Crucial Issues include: Global terrorism, our national debt, our dependence on foreign oil, the emergence of India and China as strategic competitors and/or allies, nuclear proliferation, global climate change, the corruption of Washington’s lobbying system, the education of our young, the health care of all, and the disappearance of the American Dream for so many of our people.

By contrast, we consider gun control, abortion and gay marriage important issues, worthy of debate and discussion in a free society, but not issues that should dominate or even crowd our national agenda.

In our opinion – since the disintegration of the Soviet Union – our political system seems to have focused more attention on the “important issues” than the “crucial issues.” One result: The political parties have been built to address the interests of their “base” but have failed to address the realities that impact most Americans.


In other words, Unity08 promises to replace the sham issues of guns, God and gays with the sham issue that the Democrats are a bunch of extreme lefties who don't already downplay hotbutton social issues and don't care about the deficit and health care. Except it won't even do that. What's far more likely is that by taking a slice of the Clueless Independent vote, Unity will force the Dem candidate to fight a culture war campaign as well in order to hold on to those of us who actually respond to a robust, unapologetic social liberalism (just like a desperate Paul Martin did in the last Canadian election, to his credit I might add). That leaves us with more, not less, guns, God and gays.

Now I wouldn't normally consider this a terrible thing, not least because hotbutton culture war issues about human dignity merge easily with broader social and economic questions of human dignity in a wealthy society -- grappling with these issues might make a smart Democrat sound really smart and less soundbitten. The problem is that, with a Unity08 candidate drawing 10% of the clueless but more-or-less socially tolerant swing vote, that full-throated, smart, proud-to-be-tolerant Dem will lose Mondale-style and his robust social liberalism will be shoved straight down his craw in the election postmortems being written by Unity08 types in between cocktails during President Allen's inaugural fesitivities.

But back to the "silly bunch of pollyannas" theory. Leaving aside any possible risk to the real centrists in America -- the Democrats -- Unity08 looks a classic example of what Scott Lemieux at Lawyers Guns and Money once dubbed "L'electorate c'est moi" political activism. In the "internet age", that means having online primaries in which thousands of delegates prove their people power by confirming the organizers' belief that the vital center of America thinks exactly as they do and is just waiting for the right candidate offering the right policies wrapped in the right rhetoric. The problem is that even if thousands of sensible centrist online delegates show up, they represent not the "vital center" of Unity's dreams, but a tiny self-selected sample of the millions of American voters who have shown little aggregate indication they can or want to be "unified".

To this end, Alter concludes his too-positive piece by noting approvingly that more than 40% of voters now identify as independents. I don't know what figure Alter is quoting, but my guess is that it depends on whether you consider independents as anybody who doesn't ID as a Dem or Rep or whether you only count "independent" self-IDers. Via Polling Report, the latter is 22% of voters in the 2005 Harris poll, which was, if anything, slightly below the 30-year average. Nor is nonpartisan pox-on-all-of-them disgust apparently at high historical levels. For instance, the percentage of voters telling ABC/WaPo that neither party can handle the nation's problems is hovering around, or just slightly above, the low level (8-14%) it's been since 1998. Most people really do believe that one party or the other can to carry out effective government. Their party.

Which is to say that, although there is certainly apathy and nonpartisan disgust out there, it's not evidently the defining characteristic of the majority of the politically active population. Partisanship is not a riffraff outlier. It's who we are at this point in history. And maybe, just maybe, it's not that awful a thing... especially if Unity08 or some equivalent doesn't go and put its thumb on the scale for the GOP.

Canadian welfare rolls.

I know that the use of straight cash welfare as social policy has fallen massively out of favour in liberal economies over the past 20 years... with mixed results for actual human welfare. But I have to say I was surprised to read today (pdf, p.93) about the extent of straight welfare replacement in Canada. Canadian rolls fell from over 3 million in 1995 to only 1.7 million in 2004. Based on the numbers in the 2006 Statistical Abstract, that's a larger percentage decline in total recipients of cash benefits (not just AFDC/TANF recipients, but including SSI recipients) than the U.S. experienced between 1995 and 2002. And that's despite the fact that, despite the federal government permitting time-limiting in 1995, no provinces have chosen yet to extensively do so.

Well-adjusted is the new alternative.

I know there are seriously bad things going on right now, but this entry is about pop music.

I don't actually claim to know anything about pop music, but I always assumed its basic purpose is to be dark and edgy -- a contrast, in our best moments, to the happy normality of our lives, or in not-so-great moments to be a bond for our misery. I never even went in for hard, shock-rock stuff; I grew up listening to late Cure and post-Curt Smith Tears for Fears, bands who were as lame as I was, but who my parents had the decency to hate and whose meladrama always cheered me up and made me feel normal. But even the worst sort of Top 40 today always strikes me as hopelessly black stuff -- Britpop lads walking the line between cheeky and Clockwork Orange; Britney-like "virgins" vamping their amazingly young cleavage, while a nation of 40 year old men wait for them to inevitably go batshit crazy; the ironic distance between the pg lyrics and the x-rated lives you're supposed to believe the performers lead; or just the sneering derivativeness of it all. Even with the most banal sort of stuff, Paula Abdul or Celine Dion or Whitney Houston, the real story always seemed to be what was going on in the person's life; anerexia, drug use, bankruptcy, bad or May-December marriages. The music was like a gloss on the tabloid picture; fake sentiments on awful realities. The tease of pop music is always about being screwed up, either secretly or explicitly in the songs.

So I went to a big outdoor concert in Seattle last weekend. The bands I actually went to see -- the Tragically Hip and the Decembrists -- fit my view of pop music perfectly; they write songs about "a generation so much dumber than its parents" or holding your crooked French Canadian uncle's guts in after he's been shot running gin. We danced to one band with the innocuous name Clap Your Hands Say Yeah who sang a song in which they chanted on and on about Satan. It was great.

But then I bought this CD by one of the acts I liked but hadn't heard before: Gomez. And they've shaken my worldview. I have discovered the most genuinely tame band in the history of the universe.

I'm not being snitty. I'm totally obsessed with these guys. They're like normal, well-adjusted (and non-religious) young men with guitars. Crowded House without the sardonic parts. I can't get over it. The (sorry, one of the) lead singer(s) can fool you for a while because he has an edgy, I-could-be-Oasis-if-I-wanted sort of voice. But on track two, he's urging some friend to stop being so competetive and "see the world/ find an old fashioned girl". Old fashioned girl? The title track sounds for a bit like your standard ode to this-relationship-sucks-but-let's-fuck-anyway ennui, until you realise that the punchline is a shockingly earnest "I'll try to see things your way / And I'm gonna love you anyway". Awww. There's not even any eyebrow-raising raunch of the sort even my all-time favourite whimsical Brit band China Crisis would stuff into a song.* There's one song about getting drunk when unhappy about the past that's maybe the sort of thing your parents wouldn't like... but good God, even I do that occassionally. The rest of the songs are just relentlessly earnest and wide-eyed and happy... but not too happy, like Robert Smith in a manic phase, or label-forced flopsweat cheer. That is, not more happy than a well-adjusted 23 year old should be. They're making me feel like a freak. Nobody should be this unabashedly, unapologetically, uncalculatedly tame, except maybe my parents. Can I really be listening to a band of young men more stable than I am? Ugh.

A friend had some thoughts on this, which are roughly: isn't it about time that nice become the new alternative? I mean, in terms of shock value, what comes after grunge and gangsta? How much more laddish can we get? Not to oversimplify: conflicts of class, gender, race, opportunity will always fuel genuinely angry music, and there will be a market for it. But at some point, the music our parents grew up with isn't going to be any less daring, intellectually or emotionally, than our generation's stuff. We can't get off on being unhappier or more complex or ironic or dumber than the fam. At some point miserable indecipherable rebellion becomes a cliche. Then, there's Gomez to rub their basic optimism in your face. I'm certainly more weirded out than I was by "Heart Shaped Box".**

The last act of the concert last weekend was Beck, who had this creepy stage-show about the band as marionettes (only clowns are creepier). But the penultimate band was called Death Cab for Cutie. They were good, but -- despite the suggestive name -- their whole stage routine between songs was just relentlessly, but quite convincingly, nice, gushing about how awesome the other bands were and how great Seattle had been to them. Maybe they're on to something.


* In case you were curious, I was thinking about the title track this album.

** Yeah, yeah, apologies for the ancient references; like I said, I don't claim to know anything about pop music beyond my basic assumptions.