Repeal the Second Amendment.

I'm in love with this New Republic piece by Benjamin Wittes on why the U.S. should repeal the Second Amendment. Beautifully written and, despite offering itself as a "modest proposal", absolutely convincing.

Also just the sort of political stand with which a brave, smart well-meaning liberal candidate could bury the Democratic Party for a generation. That's why we need smart op-ed writers like Wittes to make them instead.

This too shall pass.

As a way of procrastinating, I wiki'ed my favourite saying, "This too shall pass" (which is my favourite phrase despite containing my least favourite word in the English language, "shall"). Wiki is really quite amazing although, in my case at least, I'm not sure it's good for academia.

Republicans on Republicans Pt. 1

American Spectator reporter Philip Klein kicks Mitt Romney where it hurts:

Supporters of Romney argue that his past stances are not as important as long as he is saying the right things now. Isn't at least saying that you're pro-life better than being openly pro-choice? Isn't being a member of the NRA better than not being a member? Isn't being an opponent of campaign finance reform better than being a supporter of it?

There are several problems with this line of reasoning. It's one thing if Romney changed his position on a single issue such as abortion, which a lot of politicians have trouble navigating. However, Romney has changed his mind on so much, so soon, that it raises doubts about anything that he promises to do as president. The only thing that's consistent about his rather thin public record is that he always takes the position that is most politically expedient at the time. Right now, he's saying what he needs to to win the Republican nomination, but what happens when he's no longer beholden to conservative primary voters?

A new era dawns.

Maybe Flaherty was right:

"In the short term sovereignty is impossible," Mr. Boisclair stated unequivocally. "It is clear that we have to change our platform."

Wow. But oh, wait. They lost. What are the winners saying?

Mr. Dumont, meanwhile, warned the rest of Canada that it would be a mistake to perceive him as an unequivocal defender of federalism.

"I hope that is not how they perceive me," he said. "That would be a mistake. But they certainly realize that the desire for another referendum in Quebec is low and they certainly see me as someone who does not support another referendum. ... The vision I put forward is autonomy."

Mr. Dumont has yet to clearly define how much more "autonomy" Quebec would need within Canada and did nothing yesterday to lift the ambiguity except to say the ADQ will tackle Quebec-Canada relations "one issue at a time."

Does this sound like a man who believes fiscal imbalance is "over"?

Least worst.

I'm sympathetic to this post at Scott's DiaTribes collecting some people's thoughts about the rather horrible choice faced today by liberal anti-separatist Quebec voters. Stephen Harper's good buddy Jean Charest, who is Liberal much in the way Gordon Campbell's Liberals are Liberal; a bunch of untested fiscally right wing soft separatists; or the Bloc. All in all, though, I'm always glad to see the PQ take a hit even if it makes Stephen Harper happy.

RIP

John Backus.

Lithium chronology.

This isn't really a big deal, but I was reading Eric Alterman going after Joe Klein again today. Eric writes:

Which reminds me: The point about Klein's [December 2000] prediction about Bush is not so much that it was wrong -- as were almost all MSM pundits not merely about Bush but also about Gore, whom Joe Klein called "harsh and stupid," for his 2000 convention speech and who he said "looked like a madman" when he gave his now famously prophetic Commonwealth Club speech opposing Bush's war, about which Klein's fellow Time columnist Charles Krauthammer, a psychiatrist, said the vice president had "gone off his lithium" -- but that he insisted his prediction for Bush's future was the "only" conceivable course.


I've see variants on this (minor) mistake time after time in the liberal press, not just from Alterman. Krauthammer's comment about Gore being "off his lithium again" came after Gore's May 2004 speech to MoveOn.org, not the earlier 2002 one to the Commonwealth Club. In fact, I would guess that when Joe Klein himself made the comment last year about Gore looking "like a madman", he was also confusing the two speeches.

Also, at the risk of being a jinx, is it maybe fair to argue that the liberal blogosphere/counter-noise-machine or whatever you want to call it has actually had some success in influencing the way Gore is covered in big media these days? A case in point is the recent Mark Leibovich / Patrick Healy NYT piece about Gore returning to DC to testify on Capital Hill. A lot of bloggers were angry at the blase tone of the piece and the "recovering alcoholic" line, and their arguments are right on general principles -- the piece is a pretty awful piece of journalism. But it's also pretty... flattering, if you read down a ways. Although somewhat less so than this recent WaPo piece.

Granted, this could have more to do with the media's obsession with celebrity than any pressure from liberal bloggers and watchdogs exerting itself on the press corps' residual guilt. And this harmful and disingenous "Science" piece by William Broad certainly stands as a fairness-and-balance counterexample. Still, it seems to me we've come a long ways from the lithium days of 2004.

It's enough at least to give one hope. At this rate, maybe someday we'll even reach a stage of discourse at which it's unacceptable for a mainstream pundit to call a prominent female politician a bitch.

Apples and O's.

I first watched the 1984 Apple Computer-ad sendup of Hillary Clinton a few days ago, and found it sort of depressing. Not because it wasn't a fascinating bit of political advertising on the part of Obama's supporters, but because it made next to no point. Hillary is a manufactured , politics-as-usual candidate? Offering small-bore, digestible solutions to the nation's woes? Indulging in meaningless, condescending, poll-tested language? These are the sort of easy, the-establishment-must-be-wrong arguments you could make about any senator, including, say, Barack Obama.

Now some Clinton fans have a response video... making the same non-point about Obama (get in line, drones. Vote O! Succumb to the Bill Clinton-like speaking style!). Greg Sargent complains the video just isn't "achieving its intended effect". He's right, unless the point is just to nullfiy the whole enterprise. If this is what elections in the age of YouTube are going to be about, give me back my NYT on dead tree.

...On the other hand, it makes me especially glad that Edwards and his wife (who actually does, and has for a long time, managed to combine real courage and political brilliance) are staying in the race.

...Also, for a smart, substantive take on the problem of establishment-sounding politics and who's got'em, Mark Schmidt takes on Hillary Clinton's dreadful pollster, Mark Penn.

...Update: Edited, since I erroneously attributed the video to the Obama campaign, rather than to a non-affiliated supporter.

Here's something ironic...

Having lost the support of the White House and the GOP side of the Capital, Gonzales is on the way out. Which is great news in itself. But then the Politico explains why:

A main reason Gonzales is finding few friends even among Republicans is that he has long been regarded with suspicion by conservatives who have questioned his ideological purity. In the past, these conservatives warned the White House against nominating him for the Supreme Court. Now they're using the controversy over the firing of eight federal prosecutors to take out their pent-up frustrations with how he has handled his leadership at Justice and how the White House has treated Congress.

Complaints range from his handling of immigration cases to his alleged ceding of power in the department to career officials instead of movement conservatives.

Career officials instead of kids fresh out of Heritage! Blasphemy! It turns out that Abu just wasn't hackish enough and so he has to go.

Truer words...

"There's not enough hours in our lives" -- Ian Ball (of Gomez)

The super rich get super richer.

(Edited to fix a math error.)

Brad Delong and Kevin Drum report on the latest U.S. income inequality statistics from Emmanuel Saez. The latest news is that incomes for the top 1% increased 14% between 2004 and 2005 while stagnating again for everybody else. Moreover, those income gains "are showing strongly along all components: wages, business income, dividends, and capital gains." In other words, whatever force is making the rich get richer isn 't a bubble or a transitional accident. It's solid, structural stuff. (For my money, Brad Plumer has made some of the best arguments on how this process works.)

Here is the updated inequality money chart:

It's remarkable when you think about it, given how much wealthier, more efficient, more technologically advanced the world is than it was 30 years ago (in the days before the home computer or the modern word processor for instance) that 99% of the U.S. population isn't any absolutely richer than we were then. To an extent, of course, we're all going to benefit from the technological advance going on around us -- less waiting in lines, for instance, or the ability to download freeware to convert documents or order things we need online rather than going out the store -- but most of our private shares of wealth we've generated since the end of the Vietnam War is actually lower than it was then, the same sized piece of a much bigger pie.

Another interesting factoid from the graph footnotes:

Income is defined as market income (excluding realized capital gains) and excludes all transfers such as Social Security benefits, unemployment insurance, welfare assistance, etc. The importance of transfers has grown overtime. They represent in 2000 about 15% of personal income and around 10% in 1973, and only 1-2% before 1930.


So in the same period in which market incomes have stagnated, real income from cash transfers has grown by something close to 50% in real terms among the bottom 99% of the population. (The fact that there has been a general trend in targetting transfers away from the very destitute and toward the lower middle class is another story.) As just one example, payouts from social security's disability insurance program have skyrocketed in recent years, a trend that many economists think stems less from greater experience of disability onset than from the decreasing attractiveness of consistent labour force participation to many workers.

In a way it makes sense. If the pie is growing and the market isn't going to dole out acceptable pieces, people will find alternative ways to absorb some of the largesse. Some, like I say, comes from general osmosis -- richer societies offer more comfort, more convenience and more things to see and do. But people will also pry it out the government by applying for more transfers, voting for politicians who offer them specific transfers, etc. etc. Conservatives who rail about the creeping welfare state and the perfidity of handouts but also hate the idea of market interventions that might force a more equal sharing of the spoils of progress should keep that in mind.

Did somebody say "neoliberalism"?

Many people have been saying it recently. Of all delicious pieces of wonkery coming down the pike, David Greenberg's overview and analysis of its rise and fall is, I think, the best and most accurate take so far. But in all the happy chatter about whether neoliberalism "failed" or not, there's at least one big theme I haven't seen cited, but which could be thought of as a point of success: neoliberals' original drive to maintain the fusion of policy and (party) politics.

Looked at another way, political anlysis is often about whether liberalism is broadly appealing in America. The neolibs actually worried that liberalism could breed cynicism and detachment from politics among liberals. In his 1983 "Neoliberal's Manifesto", Charles Peters describes one of his four major principles of traditional liberals with which he disagrees as "Politics is Bad and Politicians are Even Worse". His specific point is that liberals had gone too far in cracking down on political patronage (which doesn't strike me as right today, though I'm no expert on the subject). But the broader point I think is that liberals had, after the 60s, come to despise and distrust government and politicians -- and, in the spirit of Eugene McCarthy, to turn away from the Democratic Party as a whole.

Of course, neoliberalism was wonktastic -- politics was a means to an end, which was good government. Nor was neoliberalism exactly partisan; it was essentially factional within the Democratic Party. But it did have as a central tenet keeping policy talk from retiring into think tanks and universities and staying joined with the mess and cyncism of electoral politics. In the 70s-era movement to eliminate patronage and take the presidential nomination process out of the smoky back rooms and open it up to voters, the risk that politiking, fundraising and personality-based campaigning would eclipse policy debate in the political sphere and further sour liberals on the electoral process was probably pretty real (a point John Judis just made in an article unrelated to neoliberalism.)

This strikes me as pretty important to neoliberalism's original identity. In the "Manifesto", Peters constantly quotes and/or pushes the initiatives of the pols he likes -- Bill Bradley, Paul Tsongis, Gary Hart -- people he clearly sees and wants you to see as luminaries even though they have to raise money and scrounge for votes. Similarly, the Washington Monthly (like TNR) used to publish all sorts of wonky articles by elected officials, and even more articles about how specific policians could fuse their identities with broader ideologies to create an appealing package (here's a perfect example by Josh Green writing about John Edwards).

This doesn't seem so big a deal now. In the Bush era, rallying around the Democrats as the only alternative to something very dark and evil makes sense. John Kerry was a rock star in 2004. The liberal blogosphere sees its job to prod, but also to defend, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid as they try to reverse or at least slow the Republican agenda. Liberals and neoliberals (except maybe Mickey Kaus) tend to engage and support any politician who presents a viable alternative to the Bush agenda and worldview. The result is more strictly partisan than what the neolibs originally wanted, in that their distinctions are made at the party rather than the party-faction level. But it's worth remembering that keeping party politics safe and palatable for wonks and dreamers was definitely a very neoliberal thing.

Suffer the little kids.

Andrew Sullivan has a long whack at Dinesh D'Souza. This is especially rich:

"If children had the vote," D'Souza adds for good measure, "there would be no such thing as divorce. Children are to the right of even the Muslims on this issue."


If only! D'Souza fleshed out this line of thinking a little bit a couple of months ago in the Christian Science Monitor:

The threat bin Laden is referring to is an infiltration of American values and mores into the lives of Muslims, transforming their society and destroying their traditional values and religious beliefs...These concerns prompt a startling thought: Are the radical Muslims right? Surely, some American parents can at least sympathize. Consider the profane language on prime-time TV, or the salacious themes so prevalent in movies and music. Need I even mention the vulgarity of some rap lyrics, or the Jerry Springer and Howard Stern shows?


Absolutely. If we could but lower the voting age to six (especially for boys), all of our moral troubles would disappear.

Sadly, I couldn't find any links to D'Souza's views on spanking.

Left into the light.

That's a truly horrible title. I apologize. Still, one of the most notable things about the wave of bans on the incandescent lightbulbs (besides pending Nova Scotia and Ontario bans, the federal NDP is trying to insert one into the Conservatives' Clean Air Act) is how little sound and fury it has provoked from business interests and the (mainly conservative) politicians who represent them. The National Post is certainly taking it in stride -- quoting one flaky sounding lighting designer about the sad loss of the right to choose, but otherwise sounding pretty positive about the idea. This Red Herring article sniffs a bit about how markets don't like regulations and government-driven changes in demand. But I haven't found much in the way of sturm and drang. Hell, the whole thing was kicked off by the three-year phase out implemented by Australia's extremely conservative government, with the more pro-government opposition parties naturally on board. Germany's Angela Merkel is also a proponent.

The neat thing to me is that the ban on incandescents is a pretty pefect example of when draconian regulation of business (i.e. bans on certain technologies) is good and useful. The concensus seems to be that the household-use fluorescent replacement technology is just about there, so that the demand stimulus from the bans could push it over the edge. Moreover, there's no real risk to consumers. Under the ban, more of the cost of lighting your home is moved upfront when you actually buy a bulb, but saved later because the fluorescents last longer, produce less heat and consume less energy. But of course it's those upfront costs that keep people buying incandescents. I buy lightbulbs when one burns out leaving me in darkness in the flat -- and that 99c price tag that will let me get back to work or cook dinner or whatever is a siren song. I don't care about my landlord's power bill just at that moment. I'm not thinking long term. So, yes, I need the government to force me to behave better. There are both consumer irrationality and public good arguments at work here. And the relatively low net consumer costs involved mean there's just not much real risk of crushing nanny-state overreach.

But a whole political class of people seem to find the idea of limiting choice offensive on the merits. Moreover the lightbulb -- totally ubiquitous and a national symbol for both Canadians and Americans of our plucky historical innovation and progress (the American who "invented" the incandescent bulb bought the incomplete patent off a couple of Canadians) -- seems like the perfect outrage catalyst. It's the most in-you-face environmental regulation probably since the CFC ban, which was a long time ago now. So why aren't the usual suspects making more noise? Is it just a matter of time? Or could it be another sign that, as Larry Summers said recently, the pendulum really is swinging left (in the U.S. as in the world?) Does it mean that draconian regulation of HMOs isn't far behind? Let's hope.

Number-crunching in Africa.

James Kirchick argues that Robert Mugabe's reign over Zimbabwe is worse, in terms of human destruction, that what's happening in Darfur. Quite possibly, but like almost every article I read on Africa, the numbers -- while startling -- are too incomplete to really make sense of the charge. Kirchick writes:

In 2005, there were roughly 4,000 more deaths each week than births, a rate that the famine has surely increased.


The (militantly anti-Mugabe) CIA Factbook entry for Zimbabwe, updated today, has the death rate per thousand at 21 and and birth rate per thousand at 28. Who's right? I don't know. You can't trust the Mugabe government to produce reliable statistics and the international organization that do compile numbers are obviously limited in how rigorously they can collect data on the ground.

More startling to me, Kirchick says that Zimbabwe has "the lowest life expectancy, by far, in the world: 34 for women and 37 for men (it was 62 in 1990). Last year, 42,000 women died from childbirth; less than a decade ago, this figure was under 1,000. The weekly death rate exceeds Darfur's."

Those are WHO numbers, also reported in RW Johnson's January piece on Zimbabwe for the Sunday Times. The CIA's life expectancy numbers are slightly higher at 40 and 38 for men and women respectively, but it's true that's about 20 years less than the comparable numbers given for Sudan as a whole. This strikes me as the meatiest piece of information in Kirchick's piece, and what would serve well as a centerpiece. (Though, given the rapidly deterioration of conditions Zimbabwe recently, I'm not sure how reliable life expectancy figures can be).

Even better would be an estimate of the absolute number of deaths involved. For Darfur, the debate was written up in the press last September with a concensus ballpark figure of 400,000 more-or-less accepted by the U.N. and others. It will likely be re-debated and updated this year. For Zimbabwe, Kirchick claims that "tens of thousands if not more, every year" are dying, and quotes a government official's 2002 claim that "We would be better off with only six million people--with our own who support the liberation struggle" -- which my suggest a plan (if there's anything that could be called a plan, rather than just depraved indifference to human life in the scramble to stay in power) to liquidate 8 million over time.

Johnson also wrote of the Mugabe government's recent "re-ruralization" campaigns that:

The Murambatsvina and Maguta campaigns — sharply increasing stress and malnutrition — would be large killers, even if people did not die first of exposure or starvation. As it is, with the Murambatsvina affecting 2m people, the resulting death rate may be somewhere between the 50% reported in Bulawayo and 25% in Harare.

A million and some? That's the sort of big-sounding number that could really focus on article like this. He concludes:

After Rwanda, the UN vowed “never again” but Mugabe...[has] already been responsible for far more deaths than Rwanda suffered and the number is fast heading into realms previously explored only by Stalin, Mao and Adolf Eichmann.


Far more since when? Since the land reclamation started in 2000? Look: of course it doesn't matter what is the exact figure of deaths and expected deaths in the next years -- Zimbabwe is a hellhole, possibly of unmatched proportions. Nor is it either Kirchick's or Johnson's -- a first-hand observer's -- fault that data isn't available to them. It just isn't, and guessing is dangerous for columnists. But the fact that articles on Africa are typically strewn with shocking, horrible, piecemeal micro-figures and anecdotes but little in the way of concrete-sounding summary statistics confounds the problem both men are discussing: that the slow-motion genocide in Zimbabwe receives less attention than violent tribal-based liquidations in places like Rwanda and Darfur because it's less overtly violent, and so harder to grasp. It's horrible, horrible, that 42,000 Zimbabwean women die in childbirth every year, but it's too indirectly related to Mugabe's sins (not to mention an insanely widespread health crisis in Africa) to focus the world's attention on the political crisis in the way that 900,000 corpses in four bloody months in Rwanda did, albeit after the fact. It's tragic, but true.

The Romney-bashing; it's delicious.

Bruce Reed does Les Mitts.

And Josh Marshall explained really well a few days ago why Romney deserves every bit of it.

A Huckabee sore spot.

Like Ezra, I was pretty impressed -- in a "could the GOP actually produce a human candidate?!?" sort of way -- with this Newsweek q&a on Mike Huckabee. But this part really rankles me:

Q: Do you believe that gays are going to hell?

A:No. I don’t know that Baptists would make a statement that anyone goes to hell based on sexual orientation. Heaven is about one’s personal faith and therefore it has to do with one’s relationship to Jesus, not someone’s relationship to someone else.


Pretty good, but then:

Q: I ask because you’ve made a comment about the openly gay congressman, Barney Frank, that sounded pejorative. [Addressing Iowa's Christian Alliance, Huckabee said: "In our lifetimes, we've seen our country go from 'Leave It to Beaver' to 'Beavis and Butt-head,' from Barney Fife to Barney Frank, from 'Father Knows Best' to television shows where father knows nothing."]

A: It wasn’t intended about same-sex lifestyle. He epitomizes as far left as you can get, far away from the Main Street American way of life.


Oh, bullshit. This sort of fudging over truly ugly implications is at the rotted heart of the current GOP. Frank is pretty much right in the middle of the House Democratic pack in terms of "progressivism". Here he is getting blasted by David Sirota for accepting Fast Track. Here he is claiming that "Inequality is not necessarily a bad thing. It's necessary in the capitalist system, and I'm a capitalist," and adding that "Government doesn't have to interfere with the free enterprise system, but we can work along with it to reduce inequality".

Where Frank stands out is on social issues; he supports medical marijuana. He's a gay man who supports gay marriage and is outspoken about his support for openness and tolerance regarding sexual preference -- stances and emphases that should hardly brand somebody as "far left", but which Huckabee and his competitors in the GOP field desperately need to ensure remains the case.

But of course what Huckabee is really refering to is this. He's not noble enough to stay away from the subject and not brave enough to admit what he's really talking about. Typical but sad.