Heartache with Hard Work

It might be you're just too kind

2009-11-08T19:14:00.000-08:00

With Rainer Maria not around any more, and with Caithlin De Marrais making much less hysterical records these days, there's a little bit of a hole in my life. Don't get me wrong, I prefer the older, wiser Caithlin. Still, every now and then you just want a track where it sounds like the singer is teetering on the brink of total collapse.

Signs - LoveLikeFire

This track, from San Francisco's LoveLikeFire is precisely such a song. It rages against the dying of the light, screams, hectors, crackles and bursts like pine needles tossed into a roaring fire. It's a call to war, to collapse, to chaos.

The album is called Tear Ourselves Away, and I have yet to hear the whole thing, but have just been digging this track too much today to wait for posting.

It's also worth mentioning that they've got a fun cover of one of my favorite Magnetic Fields songs "Abigail, Belle of Kilronan" available here.

Five things I do not want to be forced to listen to again

2009-11-06T16:36:00.001-08:00

1. "The problem with gay marriage is unelected courts trying to impose their will on the people. Our problem isn't with the content of the decision, it's with the process by which it was made."

The bigots won their vote in Maine, so can we lay this one to rest for good now? The reason people have a problem with gay marriage is that they have a problem with gay people. That's all there is to it.

2. "The results on Tuesday mean that x is true for 2010."

The results, at most, might suggest some general things for future elections. They don't mean that the public repudiated Obama or his agenda. They don't mean that the conservatives have officially destroyed the Republican Party. Corzine has been at negative favorability for something like two years. People like that tend to lose elections. Hoffman lost in part because he was a terrible candidate and there's every chance that he (or an actual Republican) will win the race 12 months from now. And so on. It was like 10 elections total. It's nothing.

The underlying trends which helped drive these few elections in some interesting directions may hold firm for a while longer. So NY-23 may be a sign of coming fights. But that has basically nothing to do with the results of the election.

If the economy is still crappy in 9 months the Democrats are going to lose a lot of seats. If it's not, maybe they won't. If they can't pass a health care bill, they're going to get slaughtered. If they do pass a health care bill, maybe they won't. That's about it.

3. "When the economy’s not strong there’s a lot of interest in controlling spending."

Ben Nelson has really gotten on my nerves this year.

4. Anything about the Yankees that's not this post from Joe Posnanski.

Seriously, I hate the Yankees.

5. The new Amy Millan album

How did someone involved in "Elevator Love Letter" make something so bland? Sigh.

You don't understand, you just steal my plan

2009-11-02T14:29:00.000-08:00

Not So Fast - The Lodger

The Financial Times reports:

Republicans complain they are being forced into an artificial timetable that is reducing the chances of agreement. People on both sides of the committee, chaired by Chris Dodd, the Democratic senator, say the chances of the law being passed by the year-end, as planned by the administration, are slight.
“The more time we [take], the more intelligent regulatory process we’ll have . . . and I hope we’ll take until the first quarter of 2010 to actually put something into law,” said Mr Corker.

Tim Fernholz responds:

What in the world does he want to talk about? It's not like Corker is pushing some specific agenda or has offered any major ideas, at least publicly. These issues have been at the forefront of the policy debate for a year now, and certainly have been bubbling underneath for a long time. If he doesn't have any specific concerns, its hard to conceive of this as anything but a delaying tactic that simply substitutes vague delays for substantive engagement.

The 'too fast' complaint is a constant annoyance for me. The important thing you have to remember is that "too fast" is almost without fail simply code for "I don't want this to happen." There was an argument that something like TARP or the PATRIOT act were done too quickly and with not enough oversight. Those were bills where the perception (fair or not) of imminent threats got people mobilized to act quickly.

But 99% of the time, the one complaint you CAN'T leverage against Congress is that it moves too slowly. It's an institution designed for a world where communication took place by horse or sailboat transposed into a time of cell phones and twitter and the blagosphere.

Take health care. After 2+ years of presidential campaigns where it was one of the two or three central issues. After almost a full year since a president and huge Democratic majority were elected on the back of a mandate to fix it. After 40 years since the last major reform to health care. After all that, you've still got GOP senators complaining about how fast this is all moving. If only there had been just a little bit longer to talk, then maybe something could have been worked out.

Of course, this is not helped at all by a media that absolutely adores the 'too fast' meme. It allows you to run a process story that SOUNDS like it contains meaningful content but does not actually require any digging. 'Too fast' itself serves as the complaint - no one ever demands that you articulate what precisely it is that ought to have been included. In general, there appears to be extremely little interest in questioning the motives of those making such complaints. And it's understandable why. To identify this possibility would be tantamount to accusing them of making claims in bad faith, which is dangerously close to the l-word which must never be spoken.

I've talked before about the tension between my belief that there is value in discourse and the material reality of 'discourse' as performed in modern politics. So I don't want to say that we should toss the ideal overboard, but at least in the case of this 'too fast' meme I do wish there was an expectation that those advancing it actually be prepared to discuss the content rather than form of their argument. To borrow a metaphor, we should trust but verify. Starting from the assumption that your opponent is speaking bad faith is a poor way to engage in public reason. But I don't think it's too much to ask that they actually uphold a good faith argument rather than mouthing platitudes.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum says basically exactly the same thing as me, literally while I was writing this. Though he also notes that Afghanistan is the one area where taking time to consider options is absolutely unforgivable: "Then it's "dithering" and "playing Hamlet."

UPDATE 2: Ezra Klein, too. Is there a run on making this point today??

More on NY-23

2009-11-02T14:24:00.000-08:00

One more thought on the NY-23 election. Or rather, the same thought on NY-23 but coming at it from a slightly different angle.

I think Jon Chait makes a fair point:

Rich paints Scozzafava's heresies as minor. But suppose this was a solidly Democratic district, and party bosses put forward an anti-stimulus, anti-abortion, anti-gay rights nominee. Would Rich really oppose a liberal campaign to elect a more like-minded representative? Would he employ such virtiolic metaphors? There's a lesson here about making a moral cause out of a procedural argument you're not prepared to back in opposite circumstances.

I do think it's a little weird that the people chortling to themselves about the insanity of the conservatives shooting themselves in the foot on this are a lot of the same folks who are all in favor of pursuing primaries to bump out moderate Democrats. In particular, they're the folks who are right now (correctly, of course) pointing out how much better things would be if Ned Lamont was sitting in the CT-Sen seat.

Now, I agree with them on the content. I'd rather have a Congress full of Lamonts than Hoffmans. But accusing conservatives of being naive and stupid politically for attempting to push aside people who don't actually embody the core values of their side doesn't gel very well with holding a variation on the same attitude toward moderates on your own side.

I think the really powerful innovation in Democratic campaigning that distinguishes the Clinton years from the Obama ones is the way that folks like Howard Dean managed to put together a new coalition. One where folks in 'safe' Democratic seats are expected to act like it, while those in more marginal ones are given a bit more freedom.

Yes, it does cause endless frustration with your Nelsons and Bayhs and Landrieus. But the problems are, I think, much more about the institutional structure than they are about the failure of this particular political strategy. There simply is no way that we're going to end up with 60 strong progressives votes in the Senate. It's fantasy to expect it. Given the electoral and procedural constraints of the Senate, you have to be willing to make deals somewhere along the way.

You absolutely do need folks on the wings attempting to pull the party outward, but you also need a strong concern for the center as a mechanism for generating some sense of balance. The problem for the Republicans right now is that things fell apart - the center couldn't hold and now they're a rump party: run almost entirely out of the CAPS-lock wing.

That's why the scary thought is the possibility that such a rump party might actually manage to return to a significant degree of power without any of the restraining elements. It's a lot harder to do things that way, but oh the havoc you can wreak if it does work out.

Your tainted heart, my tainted love

2009-11-02T13:40:00.000-08:00

23 - Blonde Redhead

A friend asks:

"Is this NY23 thing a big deal? Perhaps more importantly, do we want it to be (I can't tell whether I want the Republicans to implode after a long season of infighting or return to the middle so that elections can be about more reasonable things again, assuming they ever were)?"

These are fair questions. I think the best take I've seen so far is from Jonathan Bernstein here and here. The takeaway is that the race does matter, sort of. And the dynamics of it are almost certainly bad for Republicans, but they're not necessarily that great for Democrats either. This race has clarified something that was already pretty obvious: 'mainstream' Republicans are simply not welcome in modern conservatism.

That will certainly make it harder to recruit the sort of moderate candidates who might be necessary to take back a lot of the more vulnerable seats that the Blue team won in 06 and 08.

At the same time, Hoffman has a pretty good chance of winning this thing - despite being a Glenn Beck-ite, which can't be very comforting for Democrats. Sure, NY-23 is a traditionally Republican seat, but Obama won it and it "shares a frontier with Vermont and Canada." Running against a fringe candidate should have made this a solid chance for a pickup.

Of course, while every seat matters, a swing of two votes in the House right now is pretty irrelevant. The real question is what effect this has on 2010 and 2012. And there it's all about the gamble. If there is a major sea change in attitude and the Republicans can manage a ton of pick-ups despite running candidates like Hoffman it could spell serious damage for Obama, the Democrats in general, and the idea of a sustainable new progressive majority.

On the other hand, if those gains fail to materialize, we could end up with an increasingly apocalyptic minority that spirals down the drain for another few cycles before they get things back together.

My take: Hoffman could very well win, though in a race with so many crazy twists and turns prediction is probably futile. In the longer term, I think the gamble isn't going to pay off. Districts that can support candidates like Hoffman already have them - they're the 40% of districts the Democrats haven't been able to pick off in two landslide elections. Unless there's some major external problem (scandal, crisis, or most likely a dragging economy that shows no noticeable improvements for the next 12 months), the GOP has a much better shot of putting a dent in the Democratic ruling majority by running RINOs (and then having to put up with their occasional apostasies).

But Jeebus save us all if this pays off. We could seriously end up with the same kind of united, categorical opposition from a party with enough power to literally shut down the government for a few years.

And either way, I think we're in trouble for awhile re: the goal of having elections be reasonable. Regardless of who wins, it's going to be close, and that's going to be enough to make this a template for a lot of other elections driven by Sarah Palin endorsements, breathless coverage, and total ridiculousness.

A case for majoritarianism? - part I

2009-10-30T17:48:00.000-07:00

Frank Luntz, GOP strategist, says the following:

The Democratic Party controls a 77 seat majority in the House and almost 20 seats in the Senate, along with the White House. If they cannot get a bill passed with such overwhelming control of Washington, it says there's something wrong with the legislation. Rather than forcing a bill through with only limited support, they should keep working until they can get a bill that represents the opinions of most Americans.

Now, it goes without saying that his statements have to be read with an eye on the clear political goals. What he says isn't meant to analyze; it's an attempt to persuade. But there's still a limit (or should be). In this case, it's the idea that people who might be on the fence here are going to be persuaded by the argument that the legislation must be bad if they can't get it done despite those majorities. Now, let's think about this for a second.

First, the idea that they "cannot get a bill passed." It's a little early for that isn't it? After all, the entire point of his memo is to convince people not to pass a bill. Will he admit that it WAS popular after all if it does happen? Also remember that the GOP has consistently complained about the speed with which this legislation has moved through the process. "Just slow things down a little bit so we can consider more." Whatever you think about that request, it's a little hard to take it seriously when it runs concurrently with arguments which suggest that the test for whether a bill is acceptable is if it passes quickly.

Then there's the way that huge Democratic majorities are treated as unrelated to the rest of the question. The tone clearly suggests that Democrats were just randomly gifted with big majorities. Never mind that a lot of those people won contested elections where health care was a pretty big campaign issue. Usually it's not a very compelling argument for your position that 60% of the races went against it.

What does Occam's Razor tell us? What we've got is a health care bill which has strong support from well over 50% of elected officials and (most likely) the public. Which is more likely: that there's somethign wrong with the legislation or that there's something wrong the legislative process?

Really, this is a jumping-off place for some broader thoughts I've been having recently. I've been reading a lot in the past couple weeks about variations in democracy: in particular, the differences that come with a majoritarian, parliamentary system compared to the Madisonian republic that we've got going on here in the US. There's a lot to be said for a system of checks and balances but situations like this do not put it in a very good light.

Even if you support checks and balances, there's a pretty strong argument against the multitude of veto points that we've set up. Perhaps some are essential, and maybe we dig the idea of bicameralism in general. But it does seem like we've got to a bit of an extreme here. Five committees, each of which have to pass a bill. Two houses of Congress which then have to pass a combined bill. And then those bills have to get blended. And then each house has to pass the blended bill. And the whole time, if it ever looks (even for a short period) like you don't have a clear path to your preposterous 60 vote majority needed to beat that filibuster the whole thing teeters on the brink of political oblivion.

Maybe it made sense to make it this hard for Congress to pass things back in the days of the Federalist Papers when our main fear was legislative tyranny or things moving too quickly and getting out of hand. But our institutions have only gotten more sludge-filled even while society has sped up about 700 million percent.

It's time for a change. The question mark in the title signifies my general confusion about how far we want to take things. The filibuster (in its current form at least) has got to go. But how much further should it go? Do we want to risk tyrannies of the majority? Sure, majoritarianism sounds good to me now when health care and global warming are on the line, but how will I feel when Jeb Bush is in office?

These are tough questions and I don't have a firm answer. But in part II we'll see if there's a compelling case for majoritarianism as fundamentally progressive, even accounting for these problems.

That thesis has been rendered invalid

2009-10-30T14:26:00.000-07:00

In my life, I have attended four truly excellent shows. Lots of good, even great ones - but only four that were transcendent.

1. Carissa's Wierd, Valentine's Day, 2003. The Decemberists opened and it was the first time I had ever heard them. So that was a wonderful surprise. But it's really all about my favorite band at the time playing an absolutely beautiful set.

2. Bruce Springsteen, November 18, 2007. I can only imagine what it would have been like to see him back in the 70s.

3. Okkervil River, September 25, 2007. It was almost religious.

4. They Might Be Giants, Bumbershoot, so long ago that I honestly don't know what year it was. 1998, probably.

The thing that was so amazing about the TMBG show was the absolute control they had over the crowd. You have to understand that Bumbershoot is this massive 4-day long festival in Seattle over Labor Day weekend with about 7 million different shows, arts and crafts, food, and an almost unbelievable number of people. Basically all the shows are free - you just pay a general admission to get into Seattle Center. The result is that you get a LOT of folks at shows who aren't really fans of the band per se. Or haven't even heard of the band perhaps.

For this show, they were in the old Mercer Arena - which is a seriously big space for a band like TMBG. Just to offer some perspective, it's the same place I had seen the Smashing Pumpkins a few years earlier on their Mellon Collie tour. So it had all the makings of a crowd that was not going to be terribly receptive to the John's unique style.

Which is why it was such a wonderful experience. A few songs in people were up and dancing and cheering like crazy. A bit later they had what had to have been hundreds, if not thousands, of people up doing a conga line. And when they did roll out an "Istanbul" or "Particle Man" that people were familiar with the entire place was singing along.

I bring all this up partly to reminisce but also as a way of pointing out that TMBG are still around - and if they have never managed to put together an album that matches up to their work of the 80s and early 90s, they still know how to put together a great song now and then. What's more, they are clearly still enjoying what they do, experimenting with styles, subjects, and the like.

Meet the Elements - They Might Be Giants

Hence, the new album Here Comes Science, which follows their recent kid-friendly albums but in a more explicitly educational context. Effectively, it's the most fun album you'll ever here that includes lines like "Chlorophyll cells take in carbon dioxide" or "Plants, bugs, birds, fish, bacteria and men / Are mostly carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen." Admittedly, I'm a bit of a nerd about this sort of thing, but honestly who can turn down a band this earnest about actually trying to communicate legitimate science?

The absolute best part of it is the problem of their long-played standard, a cover of the 60s-era song "Why Does the Sun Shine?" It's a great song and they've been playing it so long that it clearly needed to be included. But, as often happens with science, the theories of past eras need to be reformed based on new evidence.

When they were fact-checking this one, they ran headfirst into a pretty big problem. The hook for the song is, of course, "the sun is a mass of incanescent gas." But, it turns out, that's not what the sun actually is. As we all know these days, the sun is actually composed mostly of plasma. So what's an enterprising band to do? Write an answer song of course. The result is back-to-back variations on "Why Does the Sun Shine?" the latter of which closes with an emphatic: "Forget that song, They got it wrong, That thesis has been rendered invalid."

The other big highlights are "Meet the Elements" which is as exuberant as anything they've done, "Roy G. Biv" which, of course, helps us to remember the color spectrum, and "Cells" which tells us why some things turn into kangaroos and others turn into Dwight D. Eisenhower.

They've got videos for the songs, too, which you should definitely check out.

You don't know what to do, so you do anything you like

2009-10-29T12:50:00.000-07:00

Change - Lightning Seeds

Health care is dead because of the town halls. No wait, it’s totally revitalized because of Obama’s big speech. And in fact, it’s basically inevitable because Olympia Snowe voted for it out of committee. And look, not only is health care inevitable, but the public option is going to pass because Harry Reid grew a backbone. Or, it turns out, it’s dead because Lieberman and Nelson and Landrieu and company are against it.

My general feeling about all this is there’s a lot of fuss about the swings because we all love a news cycle, but that the underlying fundamentals haven’t changed all that much. All year I’ve assumed that health care had a strong chance of passing, but that what actually made it to Obama’s desk would be a lot weaker than the folks on the blue team would have wanted. In short, I haven’t varied too much in my best guess that odds were probably 2:1 in favor of passage, but that a public option was extremely unlikely (unless in one of its most diluted variations) and that subsidies were not going to be as high as they really needed to be.

That’s what I thought in January, in May, in August. And it’s more or less what I think now.

Perhaps the biggest real change has been the revived potential for the public option. This, I think, was genuine news. The underlying dynamics started to shift over the summer with a massive liberal pushback on this issue and the willingness of the House and Senate leadership to really work for it.

That said, I still don’t think things have tilted THAT much. It’s not that I really think any of these ‘moderates’ would be willing to take responsibility for filibustering a health care bill because it contains a generally popular program that will reduce costs and – in the worst case scenario – will simply fail to displace a meaningful portion of the private insurance market. When push finally comes to shove and there’s an actual bill that needs to pass, these folks are probably going to vote for it regardless of disagreements at the margins.

The reason why I still don’t expect a strong public option is that even if we can be reasonably sure Evan Bayh is not going to derail the single most important piece of progressive legislation since LBJ over something so trivial, we can’t be sure. And more importantly, the White House and Democratic leadership can’t be sure. They all want a public option, of course, but they simply want a bill more.

What could be very interesting is the deals that take place assuming the stronger opt-out version does actually end up in the bill. How long will the supporters fight for it? How hard? Are they willing to play chicken on this? As things drag on, are they going to keep together the votes needed to shoot down GOP amendments as they pile up and up and up?

My guess is no. At some point, the leadership is going to loosen the reins, tell the wavering members that it’s okay to kill the opt-out. And the best case scenario will be that all of the fighting on this will have shifted opinion about where the ‘center’ is on this question sufficiently that the other side will take a trigger option that isn’t totally pointless (i.e. – that has meaningful targets).

Recent twists and turns might have changed things a bit, but I’d still wager that health care reform will pass before 2010, and that whatever variation on the public option that it includes will be so watered down as to be (relatively) meaningless.

Until things change again in a few hours.

You're smart enough to make the numbers appear

2009-10-28T18:23:00.000-07:00

Idiot Son - Loud Family

More health care posting coming tomorrow (hopefully). But for right now, a few thoughts on Joe Lieberman (#@%$#&%, CT):

At this point it is clear that he is a massive tool and I completely take back all the things I ever said about making nice with him. I get a fair number of predictions right - and tend to consider myself a fairly astute judge of political stuff - but good lord did I get this one wrong. My theory was that he would want to win another term in 2012, would see the value of tacking back left, and would deliver a solid vote on domestic issues (which were going to be the things most in need of filibuster-busting). It turns out that he apparently is only interested in lashing out like a petulant, spoiled child.

Now, I don't take his posturing on this all that seriously, and I don't think it spells doom for health care reform writ large or even necessarily this variation on the public option. But Jesus H. Christ he is ridiculous. That someone who can demonstrate such utter lack of character or empathy can exercise such influence over the political process is only a sign of how broken our system is.

And don't even get me started on the fact that this guy was one Supreme Court pang of conscience away from the Vice Presidency

Going off the deep end

2009-10-28T17:01:00.000-07:00

Alan Grayson was briefly a hero in the progresso-sphere, as a sort of liberal counterpart to Michelle Bachmann. Except, as people loved pointing out, while he was uncivil he was actually (more or less) stating things how they actually were. People loved him for that, and that was all well and fine. But there was always danger in trying to set up a liberal equivalent to Michelle Bachmann...namely that he would quickly steer into bomb-throwing for the sheer sake of it. Which may very well be what's happening.

All of which only solidifies my belief that the truly progresssive response to lunatics like Bachmann and Glenn Beck and the like is reasoned discourse. We can't out-shout them, and the more we try the more we're adopting a form of rhetorical engagement which plays into their hands.

There's the old Clinton line: "if one candidate's trying to scare you and the other's trying to get you to think...you better vote for the person who wants you to think."

Well, he's right. All other things equal, the more that people think the more we win. Which isn't to say there's no rational argument for a conservative position, obviously. It's just to say that on balance conservativism is an attitude of disengagement. Vitriol, screaming, and general nuttiness aren't intrinsically conservative, but the type of communicative process they embody certainly trends that way.

Tired of feeling cold and alone

2009-10-26T14:00:00.000-07:00

The Odds - Saybia (from Eyes on the Highway)

I don't even care about basketball, but I can't help but point out the breakdown in logic in this recent post by Matt Yglesias. Taking issue with Bill Simmons' prediction that the Trailblazers will go 41-41 he says:

To merely go 54-28 again would require the team to regress somewhat. To win 41 games would involve a regression as big as the step forward that would be require to win 75 games and become the greatest team of all time.

Yikes.

What is missing in this analysis is a recognition of the importance of 'regressing to the mean.' Put simply, on balance any performance is substantially more likely to revert to the mean performance of the pool from which it is drawn than it is to go further toward the extreme.

In this case, the pool is professional NBA teams and the mean is (obviously) .500. All else being equal, we'd assume that any team who wins more than 41 games is going to do worse in the next year, and vice versa. And the further away from the mean, the harder it will be sustain their performance. And it will be particularly difficult to improve.

Like I said, I don't care about basketball, but the principle is pretty important for a lot of areas. It's the general idea which helps us remember that exceptional economic performances are...well...exceptional, and thus unlikely to be sustained or improved upon. It's what reminds us that if we gamble and win, it was still a gamble. And if we try again, the odds are much closer to 50% than they are to 100%.

In short, it's a principle which we very easily lose track, meaning that we end up making extremely important decisions based on a false sense of security derived from a relatively small sample size. Forgetting to regress to the mean, and failing to gather a significant enough amount of data to minimize the effect this causes, is a deadly combination: whether it's for sports predictions or the global economy.

It's not too late to be with me again

2009-10-24T11:56:00.000-07:00

Looking through the archives, it seems like I never got around to posting about Ravens and Chimes a couple years back when they had a very nice little indie-pop record called Reichenbach Falls, in particular the jaunty and emphatic "General Lafayette! You Are Not Alone." Oh well. Consider this a much belated recommendation.

But in blog-world two years is a lifetime, so obviously the only reason I bring this up now is that the band is back with another perfect little slice of quirky and melodic guitar pop.

Hearts of Palm - Ravens and Chimes

I'm sure this reference isn't going to help many people, but I can't help but hear them as a slightly more sunny variation on Hefner.

"Hearts of Palm" is scheduled for release on their as-yet-untitled second album. Given that it doesn't even have a name yet, I'm guessing mid-2010 before we'll actually be hearing anything. But in the meantime, enjoy this one and maybe pick up their debut.

I'm sorry, but I'm not allowed to argue anymore

2009-10-23T20:33:00.001-07:00

Let's play a game of "I totally was going to say it when I had time, but someone already got around to it, and said it better anyways." In this case, it's Daniel at Crooked Timber, on the Super-Freakonomics climate denialist bust-up that happened this week:

The whole idea of contrarianism is that you’re “attacking the conventional wisdom”, you’re “telling people that their most cherished beliefs are wrong”, you’re “turning the world upside down”. In other words, you’re setting out to annoy people. Now opinions may differ on whether this is a laudable thing to do – I think it’s fantastic – but if annoying people is what you’re trying to do, then you can hardly complain when annoying people is what you actually do. If you start a fight, you can hardly be surprised that you’re in a fight. It’s the definition of passive-aggression and really quite unseemly, to set out to provoke people, and then when they react passionately and defensively, to criticise them for not holding to your standards of a calm and rational debate. If Superfreakonomics wanted a calm and rational debate, this chapter would have been called something like: “Geoengineering: Issues in Relative Cost Estimation of SO2 Shielding”, and the book would have sold about five copies.

Yep, that's about the size of it. For me, the big story here isn't that the new Freakonomics book has a bunch of stuff in it that wasn't particularly well researched and is there more for shock value than strong evidence. I've been reading the Freakonomics blog for a while now and the mixture of smug economic rational choice contortionism and smarmy contrarian dodginess is pretty common there. It's worth putting up with because about one in four posts are actually pretty fascinating, but that's precisely the stuff that was least likely to go into the new book.

No, the real story is the way it demonstrates the general ridiculousness which is contrarianism these days.

It's a little rich to act like you're telling truth to power and bucking trends when the crux of your argument is that we should just go on doing exactly what major economic movers and shakers want. And then there's the Slate thing where you act like you're a rebel because you brazenly accuse both sides of every single issue of being misleading. The subtext, of course, is that since the truth is always at the precise midpoint between any two positions, we should probably just keep on doing what we're doing.

I'm exaggerating of course, but it does sometimes seem like there are only two types of argument that are allowed to appear on a public stage these days: 1) deliberate exaggeration of things that most people already wish were true in order to confirm what we expect, but in such a radical, cool way that it seems edgy. 2) a 'pox on both houses' style that suggests the impossibility of making actual firm judgments about important issues.

(I don't even want to get into the recent Slate article suggesting that Creed is actually a good band. I have a friend who declared them the kings of suck-core back when they were big in the 90s and nothing since then has changed my opinion one iota. I'm far more willing to listen to the "Sarah Palin punched Putin's big head when he rose over Alaska and thus is qualified to have her own personal nuclear arsenal" theory than an apology for Creed.)

Anyways, what is truly aggravating about all this is the way that those who make purely political arguments (made in a particular way in clear-eyed awareness of the way that subtext and connotations will help them sell, sell, sell) immediately fall back into this sense of victimhood - where the true villain is the 'tone' of arguments.

I'm not saying tone doesn't matter. When you have people arguing in good faith, there are few things more damaging to legitimate debate than the intrusion of an antagonistic and angry tone. But when you have people attempting to manipulate other people to make a buck...

[End rambling]

While I'm on the subject of argument though (and given the 40th anniversary of Monty Python's Flying Circus), how about a nice video for a palate cleanser:

The malleability of public opinion

2009-10-20T14:23:00.000-07:00

Ezra Klein and Kevin Drum both talk about a recent poll on the question of mandated insurance. In the poll, 56% said they support requiring people to get health insurance, and 41% were against it. But...if you tell the opposers that low-income families will get subsidies to help them pay, then a third of them switch.

Klein says “In other words, a solid majority supports the individual mandate. And a third of the opponents become supporters if they learn that there will be subsidies for people who can't afford insurance.”

However, I think that’s a misleading way of characterizing it. Or, if misleading is a bit too strong, it’s at least incomplete. Because what’s left out of that analysis is a deeper effect, which Drum points to, namely that “when you add some additional detail you always get a certain number of people to flip sides.”

He wonders about this in a general sense: whether work has been done to quantify just how big of a swing is usual in these sorts of circumstances.

But I think it also reminds us that you can’t uncritically add the original 56% and one-third of 41% to get 70% support for mandates. Because we don’t know how many of the supporters could be just as easily convinced to change their mind. Perhaps if they knew subsidies were being offered, they’d stop supporting it. They like the idea of forcing everyone to participate but don’t like the idea of their tax dollars going to support it. That’s not a completely insane position to have.

The point being that it's very easy to take these sort of polling numbers and extrapolate a general sense of where the society is at. But ultimately, the numbers are so fluid and unstable that it's really hard to draw meaningful conclusions at all. Even the idea that 97% of people are remotely close to having a formed opinion on this question is laughable.

That doesn't mean polls like this are useless. They definitely help to clarify a general sense of attitudes and give us a window into what sorts of arguments might be useful. But we really should strive to remind ourselves that they are at best rough indicators and certainly are not dispositive.

The cost of living

2009-10-19T09:41:00.000-07:00

Bruno's Torso - Death Vessel (from Nothing is Precious Enough For Us)

Two things about the cost-of-living bonuses and social security.

Background: Social Security has an automatic cost-of-living increase that has taken effect every since since the adjustments were instituted in 1975. This year, however, since there was no inflation (and in fact there was deflation) no increase will happen. This creates a problem because people assume those increases will happen and if they don't, they get angry. So, in lieu of the cost of living increase, the administration is proposing simply cutting them all a $250 check.

The first point to make about this is well stated by Kevin Drum:

this does go to show the power that sustained inflation holds on our imaginations. Technical arguments about CPI calculations aside, the fact is that seniors haven't gotten a benefit increase for decades. It's just not the way the program works. But the fact that their checks keep going up makes it seem like they have. So now, despite the fact that the huge benefit increase of last January combined with the deflation of the past 12 months means seniors really are getting higher benefits for the first time in recent memory, it doesn't seem like it.

This is a larger problem of how we talk about money in our society. We all understand in a general sense that inflation means things are always going to cost more over time. And yet when it comes to specific instances it's hard to keep track of that. And that's nowhere more apparent than something like this.

Given this, there is a general sense of outrage about this. And at first glance it makes sense. 'Look how ridiculous our system is!'

But in reality this is an excellent problem to have at this particular moment. We should be spending a lot MORE in stimulus than we are, but the political winds made it impossible to get the extra several hundred billion dollars. Situations like this, where an immensely powerful sub-group expresses a sense of entitlement to extra cash, are perfect in this context.

Even though it's a stupid reason for the policy, the underlying dynamic is perfectly rational. Build in a cost of living increase and any time when that doesn't kick in is, by definition, going to be a time when it's a good idea to get extra money into the hands of folks who will be somewhat inclined to spend it.

It's a much smaller microcosm of some pretty serious public engineering issues. Medicaid, for example, is a policy that could potentially serve this same effect. It's a counter-cyclical program. When the economy falls, more people need it, but that's precisely when state budgets are smaller and less capable of covering the cost. The result: cuts in spending when they are most needed. Which may be a good argument for putting it under exclusive federal control. As a federal entitlement, it would enable more money to go to those who needed thanks to the federal government's ability to deficit spend.

Of course, it's easy to take this kind of thing too far. As much as I'd love a well-constructed liberal-socialist state that took on WAY MORE entitlements, we do not have such a state. And as such, trying to graft in too many of these sort of entitlement-fixes into the structurally unbalanced system we've got risks political backlash that could eviscerate some major elements of the social safety net.

So you've got to calibrate this stuff. But a few billion of extra stimulus in the disguise of a check to compensate the lack of a cost of living increase...that's easy business that helps everyone.

Raise a little family on Schlitz and Mickey Mouse

2009-10-18T11:53:00.000-07:00

Optimist Vs. The Silent Alarm (When The Saints Go Marching In) - Casiotone for the Painfully Alone

Casiotone for the Painfully Alone has been around for years and years, occasionally putting out a track that I enjoyed but mostly losing me in the meanders of the uber-lo-fi tones. In 2009, though, Owen Ashworth finally emerges in the cool light of day, with real instruments and everything on Vs. Children - without a doubt his most accomplished effort. The most notable change is the powerful presence of organs, pianos, keyboards and the like. The old Casiotone has been swapped on many of these tracks for big old fashioned gospel romps.

The highlight of these is "Optimist Vs. The Silent Alarm (When The Saints Go Marching In)" - which carries all the urgency and presence of a great escape, combined with the the wild sentiment and urgent dreams of somone on the run. And nothing could feel more appropirate than the final 20 seconds, when the theme of "When the Saints Go Marching In" takes over. It's the most insistent song he's produced to date - you can almost feel the stolen bills fluttering out the back of the car as it tears down the road.

Shortly after comes "Traveling Salesman's Young Wife Home Alone On Christmas in Montpelier, VT" which offers another dose of acute longing. Here the delicate balance of intricacy and simplicity is carefully negotiated.

There are too many tracks that never quite launch for this to work perfectly for me as an album. But the highs are superb.

Right wing, left wing, chicken wing

2009-10-16T12:43:00.000-07:00

Kevin Drum talks about the currently growing brand of right-wing lunacy, talking in particular about John Shadegg (R-Arizona), who described the current bills on health care reform as "Soviet-style gulag health care":

it's a good example of what I mean when I suggest that today's right-wing lunacy is different from left-wing lunacy of the Bush years. Sure, there were lefty bloggers who went over the top about Amerika and how the NSA was bringing 1984 to life and so forth, but for the most part you didn't have members of Congress taking to the House floor and joining in. They largely managed to keep a slightly more even keel. But on the Republican side, after a mere few months of Obama, this kind of stuff has become routine. They've joined the Caps Lock crowd feet first.

I would posit that any significantly large set of people contains an extreme wing - not just extreme in the content of their beliefs but also in the form that they use to express those ideas. As Drum calls it: the CAPS-lock wing of the group.

I tend to be skeptical of all the lefty hand-wringing about the 'tone' of things these days, and consider the youtubization of politics that enables all the crazies who have been around forever to suddenly have an easy route for public consumption. That said, I do think there's something going with the "CAPS-lock theory of right wing politics."

Which is not to accuse every - or even a significant percentage - of Republicans of going ALLCAPS on us. There are always going to be nuts in any crowd. It's just to say that it's striking how easy and comfortable the respectable parts of the right-wing seem to be jostling elbows with the nuts.

To the fountain of perpetual mirth

2009-10-09T14:50:00.000-07:00

Ballad Of Sir Frankie Crisp (Let It Roll) - Yim Yames

Given my absolute soul-clenching hatred for the last My Morning Jacket, it's such a breath of fresh air to hear Jim James (pseudononymously going by Yim Yames) getting back to his roots on Tribute To, a short EP of songs covering some of the more obscure George Harrison cuts.

Okay, maybe 'fresh' isn't really the right word - since there is definitely nothing surprising or new here. In this case, the Pitchfork review from Paul Thompson is quite apt: "Not only does he sing these Harrison songs just like Jim James, but if you've spent any amount of time around either, what you're currently hearing in your head couldn't be closer to the truth."

That's just about right. He doesn't add anything tremendously unique to any of these tracks - or rather, he adds one unique thing, his voice, to each of the tracks in pretty much the same way.
The thing is, I don't seem to mind. Most of the songs are from Harrison's debut solo record (All Things Must Pass) - which is probably the second best solo record any of the four ever made, and it's well suited for James' brand of reverb-drenched vocals and faded sonic pictographs.

I appreciate this record mostly for its sense of genuine appreciation. Almost across the board, the originals are preferable - but I don't necessarily see that as a problem. The care with which one artist treats the work of another. The feeling and passion that it reveals can be worth it for its own sake.

And there is one track that I think is improved: "Ballad Of Sir Frankie Crisp (Let It Roll)." It was always one of my favorite Harrison tracks, but I still felt like there was something that didn't quite gel. James nails it, slowing things down and letting the darkness rise all around.

Some optimism on health care

2009-10-07T17:02:00.001-07:00

Will It Float - The Triangles

Two optimistic takes on health care. First, Jonathan Chait points out that despite all the public fights and sensationalist coverage, the real matter here is whether 60 Democrats will be willing to simply not filibuster whatever bill actually ends up on the floor of the Senate. And it appears that this is the case. There's a lot of time left for things to go wrong, but ultimately if all sixty of those Democrats come to the conclusion that it will be a disaster for them personally and the party overall to actually FILIBUSTER health care reform to death...then it's going to pass.

And that's pretty significant. They don't have to vote for the thing - maybe there's currency in voting against it while still not filibustering it. They don't have to LIKE everything that's in the bill - they almost certainly won't. They just have to realize how much of a disaster it will be for them if they end up singly responsible for killing the single most important progressive bill in 40 years.

Ezra Klein, meanwhile, points out that all the fretting and backlash has failed to actually turn any votes. Not a single Democrat seems willing to filibuster now, after all the August screaming. Which means there's not a whole lot of reason to think they'll balk down the line. The media loves a good story to cover, but Klein sums it up nicely: "They had the votes in the beginning. The question is whether they can keep them together at the end. That is all that has ever mattered, or really been possible. Everything else is just noise, and the players who matter appear to have ignored it entirely."

I'm not saying it's a sure thing. But I do think that at this point something pretty fundamental is going to have to change to kill health care reform. The real issue was whether ephemeral polling was going to scare the moderate Dems off the ship. That doesn't seem to have happened. Which means that if things continue along their current path, the incentives to filibuster aren't going to get any stronger.

There's still a lot to worry about, but it's important to remember that we're already further into the process than the Clintons ever got. The Finance Committee is going to pass their bill soon (particularly given the pretty strong CBO scoring it got). The other four versions have already passed. It'll go through the two main chambers, they'll put together a bill in conference, and then we'll see if anyone is so angry about the modest pains it'll impose on insurance companies that they're willing to annihilate their own party.

Of course, there's still all kinds of chances for perfectly reasonable parts of the process (the public option, the Kerry amendment to help choose options, etc.) to get cut out. And when some of them don't end up passing, it will be incredibly frustrating.

But if we get the majority of the bill, I'll be happy to make those things supplemental efoorts for the coming decade.

No color , no race, no religion, no creed

2009-10-06T12:06:00.000-07:00

Kent Brockman: Senator Dole, why should people vote for you?
Kang: It does not matter which way you vote! Either way your planet is doomed! Doomed! Doomed!
Kent Brockman: Well, a refreshing bit of candor from Senator Bob Dole!

I've been thinking a lot about the state of public reason in this great republic of ours. In part because it plays pretty significantly into what I'm trying to do academically. The more cynical I get about the capacity for our public politics to incorporate reasoned debate and argument on things like health care, the more pessimistic I get about my broader goals of trying to recuperate the core of some type of political liberalism.

Yeah, yeah, theories of justice are great in principle, but what do you do about a political landscape that appears to be wholly uninterested in the faculties of reason? Is that proof that we just need to do better, or is it proof of a fundamental paradox built into this type of system?

No Reason - Against All Authority

I don't have any firm answers. But it's hard to avoid thinking about it. A couple recent posts in particular got me wondering about where we stand as a nation right now on this sort of thing.

First, there's Ezra Klein a few weeks back, pointing out something deeply troubling:

There is a famous poll from 1994 that shows the American people had a clearer idea of Clinton's health-care reform bill at the beginning of the process than at the end. This is a serious problem: Polls are a good barometer of the mood of the public, but if the public is systematically misled, it's hard to say what the poll is measuring. A few months ago, health-care reform was quite popular. Today, it's unpopular. Is that because the public knows more about the bill? Or less?

He talks about this in the context of polling, suggesting that Democratic legislators ought not rely too much on them to guide their actions. And I think that's an excellent point. There are just structural elements of this process (a deeply ingrained status quo bias being the most powerful) which mean that the side proposing change is going to do worse and worse in the polls the closer it comes to actually passing something.

People love 'change' when it's abstract, but the more particular it gets, the scarier it becomes. This is to be expected. The job of legislators is not to freak out too much about public opinion in the short-term. If you drill down to just a single moment, you'll get a far less useful understanding of the situation than if you recognize the rolling and fundamentally temporal nature of social attitudes.

There's every chance that 'health care reform' will be polling under 50% when this thing finally comes to the floor. What Democratic legislators need to understand is that a few years down the road people will have become accustomed to their new levels of health coverage and things will be well on their way to turning the 2009 health care bill into another third rail.

In short, it's not a coincidence that the Republicans are demonizing the current health care bill by trying to claim it'll hurt Medicare (the last significant expansion of public health care). Whether it makes sense matters a lot less than whether it appeals to a sense of unease about change.

So there's all that to draw from the breakdown in public opinion. And you can spin it optimistically as I've tried to do.

But still: there's something deeply and profoundly disconcerting about living in a world where years of public debate about something produces an electorate that is less well-informed about the issue. I mean, yikes.

Which leads to another thing: Ed Kilgore pondering the issue of Joe Wilson and other right wing extremists, particularly whether or not their mere presence tends to shift the public debate rightward. He is skeptical, and is even more concerned about the idea that the appropriate progressive response is to lionize our own brand of 'extremists' whose job it will be to re-balance things:

The solution, this sort of analysis invariably suggests, is to counter right-wing “framing” of arguments with left-wing framing, pulling the debate back to something resembling the actual “center.” If this approach sounds a bit too cute and cynical, that’s because it assigns roles to various players in politics based on their tactical positioning rather than the validity of what they actually believe.
[...]
But perhaps there’s something to be said after all for truth-telling and reasonableness, not in the pursuit of compromises with the crazy people of the Right, but because a majority of people in this country will ultimately recognize and reject craziness, just as they’ve generally done in the past. Progressives shouldn’t have to cultivate their own cadre of “extremists,” or feign extremism in their own “positioning,” in order to show they are actually trying to solve the country’s many problems. Sometimes it’s best to say what you actually think, with emotional empathy and passion to be sure, but with a little more faith in democracy.

Obviously, I find this idea very appealing. A big part of what I liked about the Obama campaign was its promise of post-partisanship as a codeword for precisely this kind of attitude: the belief that the public is capable of sorting out the lunacy and the nutjobs and recognizing the value of real solutions to actual problems.

You don't have to be a purist follower of J.S. Mill to find something of value in this approach. It's very easy in this day and age to become overly concerned about the Ann Coulters and Glenn Becks and so forth. And it's EXTREMELY easy to buy into the sensationalized take on things like the town halls of August that got broadcast over and over.

But the reality is that these people are on the far extremes.

Which is emphatically not to deny that they matter at all. Or to pretend that things like framing, the issue of what becomes acceptable forms of criticism and what gets relegated to unfair or 'personal' attacks, and all those sort of things are irrelevant.

But, perhaps, it's possible to worry about those sorts of things as merely elements of constructing a more robust and viable stage of public consideration. Maybe we can see the willful efforts to evade debate as obstructions rather than fatal flaws in the struture of democratic reason.

The real issue in my mind is not about shutting down Glenn Beck; it's about making it clear to those with their hands on the levers of power that this kind of thing should not serve as a fundamental barrier to the enactment of reasonable solutions.

The tea-baggers are a constituency. And we shouldn't deny them entirely. But they are only one constituency, and not a tremendously large one. That they can shout loudly and bring in a bunch of headlines has very little to do with what makes for electorally sound policymaking for the long term.

I don't want to go all Field of Dreams on you, but...if you build a good health care bill, the votes will come. People may not claim to care all that much about the super-wonky stuff, but they DO care about results. The wacko-fringes aren't persuadable, but the folks in the middle care a lot more about good old fashioned policy than you'd expect given the way political coverage works these days.

At least, I still hold out hope for that.

How this health care stuff plays out over the next few months (and then over the next few years as it starts to get implemented) may tell us a lot about the empirical question of whether public reason can really take us anywhere.

You can't hide what you intend, it glows in the dark

2009-10-05T13:06:00.000-07:00

I know it's become pretty routine for me to pop up every couple months and apologize for the sporadic posting. But, here we go again.

It's back into the school year - and I'm busier than ever now that I'm teaching as well as taking my own classes - so the pace probably won't pick up all that much. But I'm going to make an effort to do a lot more short posts. There are albums I've been sitting on for a good six or seven months now because I wanted to devote the time to putting together a complete review.

But completeness is so 2008. Instead, you're going to get summaries, dalliances, and just enough effort to let you know I'm still around. Still, I figure that's better than failing to post on an artist before they're old and gray.

So, one example: the bizarre and occasionally brilliant project Dark Night of the Soul - a joint project between Sparklehorse and Danger Mouse, with a revolving cast of collaborators including Wayne Coyne, Julian Casablancas, James Mercer, Nina Persson, and Frank Black to name a few. Oh, and David Lynch.

And yes, the whole thing ends up sounding pretty much like you'd expect given the component parts. For my money, the James Mercer and Nina Persson tracks are fairly strong, and I kind of dig the Strokes vibe that Julian Casablancas brings along for "Little Girl." But the real highlight is the Wayne Coyne track that opens the record.

Revenge (feat. Wayne Coyne) - Sparklehorse

"Revenge" is everything that The Flaming Lips have failed to be recently. It exercises a modicum of restraint, marries a beautiful melody to a mournful, almost Phil Collins beat. It exudes a deep sense of pain and loss, with just the tiniest hint of escape. You don't get a lot of Danger Mouse until the final minute, but he lends the breakdown a bit of oomph that might otherwise have been missing.

Of course, no project like this could possibly work out simply. The final twist is that - due to contract disputes with EMI - it hasn't been officially released. The artists have decided to 'sell' blank CD-Rs and suggest that enlightened consumers figure out a way to download the thing themselves.

You realize that the floor sticks to your feet, you're history

2009-10-04T11:53:00.000-07:00

History Sticks to Your Feet - Modest Mouse

I wasn't tremendously enthusiastic about the latest Modest Mouse record (or, really, the one before that). And I've posted here a number of times before about my growing acceptance of the fact that while they might have had two or three of my favorite albums ever back in the late 90s/early aughts, they've gone a different direction these days. Tastes change, and so on.

They can still put out a song that absolutely burns though. "Spitting Venom" from the last record has grown on virtually every listen and I now think it ranks among their best. So I'll take the great songs as they come and be satisfied with that, and not expect another Lonesome Crowded West.

And with the release of a new EP this year No One's First and You're Next, there's more evidence for this. It's composed of b-sides and extras from the last two records and demonstrates a lot of the unevenness, as well as some of the shades of brilliance.

I'd heard a few of these songs already. I've been listening to "I've Got it All (Most)" since 2004, and "King Rat" for a couple years now. I thought the former deserved a place on Good News... over plenty of tracks that did make the cut so it's nice to see it pop up again here. "King Rat" however felt preposterous and overwrought the first time I heard it - and doesn't gain anything from the new digs.

Of the other six tracks, there are some other lows. But the whole package would be worth it if only for the explosive "History Sticks To Your Feet." Isaac's got his bark going on to great effect, and the guitar tear everything apart - just like the staccato blade they used to wield back in the day. It's the sort of track that reminds me of how brilliant these guys really are.

Elsewhere, "Satellite Skin" is a relatively serviceable variation on the sort of songs that populated We Were Dead... It's a little bit less polished, which is only a good thing in my mind. It doesn't blow you away, but it's been growing on me the more I listen to it.

Less successful are "Autumn Beds" which has a nice enough acoustic guitar line but just can't overcome the cracks in Isaac's voice and "Perpetual Motion Machine" which has the same horns that I didn't like back on Good News For People Who Love Bad News. Both of these songs suffer from their Tom Waits obsession, which has just never done anything for me.

And then there's the rambling mess of "The Whale Song" which wanders around in a drunken stupor for about four minutes before everything blows up (in a good way). Without that payoff the long introduction could have felt like a monumental waste of time...but instead they only help build to the payoff.

All those with pride and excellence

2009-09-25T09:34:00.000-07:00

Cheat to Win - Slapstick (from Slapstick)

I always disliked John Edwards. I never felt good about it, because I couldn't ever quite explain what it was about the guy that put me so on edge. All other things equal, I tended to agree with his policy positions more than the other 'major' candidates in 2008. And I wasn't excited about suddenly finding myself being one of those people that voted on amorphous things like 'character' and 'gut feeling.'

It didn't help that he decided that the form of populism he was going to push was so anti-trade. I love that he made poverty a priority and pushed health care reform and all that. But I don't see those things as synonymous with the sorts of tariffs and trade restrictions that he was yelling about.

But if I was honest with myself I had to admit that that issue was more a post-facto justification for having already rejected him. Because the thing that really got me was that he just felt so smarmy. I never really believed in him, and felt there was something I just fundamentally couldn't trust. Even as someone who cares a LOT about the minutia of policy wonkery and who feels a lot of distaste at the "I just trust that person" method of choosing political leaders...I couldn't get past it. I agreed with a lot of Edwards platform but simply couldn't imagine wanting him to be in charge.

Of course, with several years of perspective, it turns out that my gut feeling was totally right. His affair and subsequent dealings paint the picture of someone I would not want leading the country.

Which is not to say that I think private sexual issues themselves constitute a reason for rejecting a person. I thought the whole impeachment charade with Clinton was a blight on our politics. And I frankly can't work up much outrage about David Vitter or Eliot Spitzer or Mark Sanford or whatever. And to the extent that I do get up in arms about that stuff it's when the public and private selves reveal a massive hypocrisy. When the Republican Party wants to regulate private sexual behavior it's a bigger deal if the tub-thumpers for that cause reveal themselves to be just as dirty as the next folks. And closeted politicians who push an anti-gay agenda probably deserve a bit of scorn. And if you're breaking the law in significant ways to fulfill your sexual interests that obviously matters. But really, I'm not ever going to push for someone to get kicked out of office simply because of who they sleep with.

And, generally speaking, I think that's where a lot of the public is. David Vitter is still in the Senate. Newt Gingrich never got a lot of flak about his affairs. Giuliani managed to get by without a lot of questions. McCain's stuff with his first wife was off-bounds. And so on.

So I'm curious about why the Edwards thing became so immediately toxic. I remember the day the rumors were confirmed. The general consensus was that 'this guy is 100% done in politics.' There was no speculation that he could even TRY to recover. To some extent, that's because there was no constituency that stuck by his side. His Democratic allies felt no compunctions about kicking him to the curb. In the other direction, if the Republicans in the Senate aren't going to shun David Vitter, why should we expect the media to?

But I think it has a lot more to do with the underlying dynamic that had already driven him out of the primary. People just kind of felt, deep-down, that this guy was not to be trusted with our politics, our country. And when it turned out that he made such an epic disaster of his own personal life, it just seemed like confirmation of what we already knew.

Result: I was not remotely surprised when all this came out. And I think a lot of other people felt the same way. It just seemed like the sort of thing I already expected out of him. In part because he's a politician (and sex scandals for politicans shouldn't be any more suprising than steroids scandals with professional atheletes), but in part because of what I could glean about him in particular.

Looking back, I think I seriously *underestimated* the irresponsibility of this guy. It's profoundly disturbing that someone could seek the Democratic nomination while KNOWING that this was all out there. It's one thing to cheat on your spouse. But then there's cheating on your spouse who has cancer, failing to use protection, having a child with the other woman, trying to get a friend to pretend to be the father, getting your supporters to try and buy off the other woman. And then, in the immediate aftermath you launch a presidental campaign rested in no small part on the strong relationship between you and your awesome wife. And to top it all off, you risk the absolute worst case scenario of this stuff all getting revealed in the weeks or even DAYS leading up to the election.

Imagine, just imagine, that Edwards had won the nomination. And then in September or October all of this stuff came out. How many states do you think he'd have won? Single digits? People might eventually come to forgive a politician, but that stuff takes time, at an absolute minimum.

So Edwards launched his campaign KNOWING what kind of danger he was putting the Party (and the country) in. What kind of an ego does that take? What kind of judgment does it imply? What lack of concern for all the policies, principles, and ideas you supposedly stood for. To sublimate all of that underneath your own ambition...

That's not something people are likely to forgive. It's more than a little bit scary to imagine someone that reckless running the country.

Kennedy replacement

2009-09-24T11:16:00.000-07:00

So it appears that Massachusetts has (re)changed its rules about Senate appointments to allow the seating of an interim replacement for Ted Kennedy. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, this is a crassly political move steeped in hypocrisy. After all, they only changed the rules in 2004 to prevent the governor at the time (Romney) from being able to appoint a Republican during the interim period.

So I can sympathize with this sort of attitude:

I'm not sure why they didn't avoid this problem for the future by drafting it as "Democratic Party governors shall have the power to appoint replacements to the Senate, Republican governors shall not." Surely that represents the will of the people better...

Still, it’s not really the same is it? The consistent theme in both of these cases is that the Massachusetts legislature wanted to ensure that the public would continue to receive the kind of representation that they had voted for. Romney appointing a temporary Republican sure doesn’t FEEL very democratic (small d) does it? And similarly, it would be macabre and depressing were health care reform to either fail to pass or be extremely watered down solely because Ted Kennedy died at an inopportune moment.

The people of Massachusetts voted for someone who made fixing our health care disaster one of his primary goals for his life. To deny them the chance to help make that a reality would be tragic and unfair.

So yeah, I’m okay with the appointment, even while recognizing that it’s an unfortunate process that surrounds it. All of which merely suggests that we really ought to do something to formalize this process so it can be taken out of the hands of political operatives all around. Perhaps a law that the person tapped may not run in the next election and must be selected from within the same party as the one who died.

Analogies and great mistakes

2009-09-18T22:11:00.000-07:00

I know it's not a perfect analogy, and may even obfuscate some important things. Still, I think it helps to clarify things a little bit...

Background: a new study says that lack of health insurance contributes to 44,789 deaths in this country every year.

So: if terrorists were killing 45,000 people in America every year, who would even think it remotely reasonable to suggest that it wouldn't be worth spending $90 billion dollars a year to fight them?

I'll also point out that fighting a 'war on terror' is the sort of thing that does very little to actually save lives, while even a moderately good health reform bill will go a pretty long way toward reducing the number of preventable deaths in the statistic above.