Gnar

2003-03-26T16:05:00.000-06:00

Rumsfeld urges chemwar

BBC reports that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is pushing for use of non-lethal chemical agents in the war on Iraq.

Professor Perry Robinson said: "What we're really worried about is the long-term implications for our ability to manipulate chemicals.

"We can coerce and repress people by all sorts of chemical means that are opening up.

"And that's the worry. To see chemicals as weapons of mass destruction is to miss the point, because then you just think of lethality.

"We see them as terrorists' weapons, but their use against terrorists is becoming a big issue, like CS gas and fentanyl, used in the Moscow theatre siege.

"Once you admit non-lethal toxic agents in war - something specifically banned under the Chemical Weapons Convention - you are on a hard road.

"It leads to chemical weapons based on the targets' ethnicity or other factors, and results that would persist for generations."

The US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has asked President Bush to authorise the use in Iraq of riot control agents.

The US has shipped to the Gulf both CS gas and pepper spray, whose use the convention allows only in domestic civil disturbances.

The last thing we need right now is to undermine the Chemical Weapons Convention. Good God, why is this guy still around?

2003-03-18T15:12:00.000-06:00

Did a lack of gun control create Saddam?

American gun advocates have long argued that, just as an apple a day keeps the doctor away, lots of people with lots of guns will keep tyrants away. Of all of the pro-gun arguments, this strikes me as the creepiest. In America, we are ruled by democratically elected officials (well, excepting Dubya, but that's curiously not a case that disturbs the gun pushers). So the "right of revolution" propounded by pro-gunners is the right of a few self-appointed patriots to overthrow a government chosen by a majority of their fellow citizens. Whatever happened to the ballot over the bullet?

Beyond the inherent creepiness of the argument, there is a striking poverty of historical evidence for it. In the first place, widespread gun ownership is not, empirically, a necessary condition of free government. Many countries with fairly restrictive gun laws (Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, for instance) have somehow escaped the ravages of dictatorship.

Perhaps because this is so clear, gun advocates have ignored necessity in favor of sufficiency. That's why the gun lobby focuses so much on Hitlerian Germany. If the Nazis had failed to control guns and if Germans (or Jews) had all been armed, the argument goes, Hitler's tyranny and the Holocaust would have been impossible. Of course, Nazi gun control happens to be one of the great urban legends (the Nazis didn't impose gun control, and their first changes to gun laws, five years after coming to power, actually eased restrictions on gun ownership). Still, gun ownership seems to have been uncommon in Germany between the World Wars, so it doesn't quite refute the pro-gun thesis.

But Iraq does. By popular acclaim, Saddam's Iraq is one of the world's nastiest and most totalitarian dictatorships. I'm sure most pro-gunners, in particular, see Saddam as an especially oppressive dictator. According to a March 12 New York Times article about Iraqi citizens preparing themselves for post-war unrest, however, gun ownership is almost universal in Iraq.

One gauge of that fear is the trade at gun shops. Most Iraqi households own at least one gun, so there has been no particular run on armaments. But some gun shop owners report as much as a 50 percent jump in ammunition sales.

So, pro-gunners here have a real dilemma. Either they're mistaken about Saddam (since lots of Iraqis have lots of guns, he can't be a such a bad ruler!), or they're wrong about guns and oppressive government. I'm not holding out any hope that gun advocates will say lots of Iraqis owning guns caused Saddamism, although they would surely have attributed Saddamism to a lack of gun ownership if any such lack existed.

If they want my advice, I'd suggest ditching the guns and tyranny schtick: it's a stupid argument anyway.

UPDATE: Tim Noah of Slate got to this one first.

2003-03-10T16:29:00.000-06:00

Affordable housing versus the mortgage interest deduction

Jane Galt contends that the mortgage interest deduction raises the price of houses by around 25%. Wow!

I mean, I always suspected that a lot of what Americans gained though mortgage interest deductions was lost through higher prices. That's simple supply-and-demand economics. If you give people incentives to buy a somewhat inelastic commodity, prices have got to go up. So the deduction ends up being more of a surreptitious transfer payment system to the real-estate and mortgage finance industry than a subsidy of home ownership. But no one ever talks about it, and I'm sure most Americans would be pretty shocked by this argument.

Moreover, it looks like this has a huge reverse-Robin Hood effect. The deduction may make houses worth 25% more for an average-income household, since that will be heavily skewed towards those in the top income bracket, but the tax advantage for a median-income household is surely far less than that. So the deduction may actually make home ownership less affordable for most Americans.

I can see the slogans already. Promote affordable housing! Eliminate the mortgage interest deduction now!

2003-03-10T15:43:00.000-06:00

The evil that men do lives after them

The New York Times article I cite in the previous post also connects the wave of lynchings in Guatemala to the right-wing death squads responsible for anti-Indian genocide during the civil war.

In Huehuetenango, the police were actually run out of five villages for reasons ranging from trying to save a suspect from a lynch mob to trying to enforce laws against cutting down trees illegally - thus depriving impoverished residents of income.

Rights advocates see the attacks on the police and judges as a worrisome harbinger of increased violence at the hands of newly reorganized Civil Self Defense Patrols. These groups of villagers, forced to take part in massacres during the war, have demanded payment from the government for their wartime service.

Looks like rule-by-death-squad is making a comeback. The last paragraph of the article returns to this theme.

Almendra Teresa Gutiérrez, a judge in the western town of Santa Barbara, said armed patrollers in one village told her that they were more powerful than the police and had refused to stop their nighttime rounds. She suspects that they are responsible for two deaths since October. "Like during the war," she said, "if someone is outside at night after a certain hour, they are up to no good and must be executed."

So, even a decade after the Reagan and Bush I administrations, we are still harvesting the fruits of their support for right-wing dictatorship in Guatemala.

2003-03-09T22:23:00.000-06:00

Ideas have consequences

From Saturday's New York Times, we get more news about the consequences of evangelical thinking. In this case of rural Guatemala, evangelicals have promoted widespread lynching.

CONCEPCIÓN TUTUAPA, Guatemala - In this market town tucked into the western highlands, picking a pocket can be a capital offense.

The smallest crimes have provoked the most violent deaths in countless villages like this one, where the end of Guatemala's 36-year civil war has brought neither law nor order to remote regions most ravaged by the conflict.

Just this January, a screaming mob of 2,000 people grabbed two pickpocket suspects, tied their hands, dragged them to the outskirts of town, drenched them in gasoline and burned them alive. Police officers responding to the violence said they barely escaped with their lives, fleeing to the station house with no hope of pursuing justice.

It was one of hundreds of lynchings since the peace accords were signed in 1996, officially ending a conflict that claimed 200,000 lives.

Further along, we learn

Several factors lie behind the violence. The shared experience of decades of war and the resulting breakdown in village leadership left divisions and suspicions that set the stage for vigilante outbursts.

Several human rights advocates also said that fast-growing Evangelical churches, whose preachers work independently in small congregations, had frightened villagers about the dangers of satanic cults and encouraged retribution with strict interpretations of Scriptures.

Such teachings by locally trained Guatemalan preachers, they said, played a role in whipping up hysteria among the villagers of Todos Santos, a western mountain village famous for its colorful textiles, where a lynching in 2001 claimed the life of a Japanese tourist who tried to photograph a child.

Days before he arrived in the town, a religious radio station had warned listeners about rumors of a satanic cult that was snatching babies for grisly rituals, said Guillermo Padilla, who has studied lynchings and is an advocate for indigenous rights in Guatemala.

"The evangelicals like to fish in turbulent waters," Mr. Padilla said.

"All week the evangelicals warned, `Take care of your children because there will be satanic rituals and children will be carved up and their organs removed,' " he said. "There was so much panic that the school was closed that Friday so the children could stay home. By the time the Japanese tourist arrived, there was a state of paranoia."

Back in the day (a decade or so ago), conservatives were wont to flog the slogan "Ideas have consequences." That smugly sententious phrase summed up a key right-wing tactic: oppose not just the policy, but the ideals and reasons behind it, because the ideas create the policies.

Well, both the phrase and the tactic are worth reviving for a more deserving target -- conservative evangelical Christians.

Some bloggers have argued for laying off on criticizing evangelicals, except when we have a specific policy disagreement. That's a mistake. The anti-rationalism of evangelicals is a bigger problem than any specific policy dispute. That anti-rationalism is at the root of their policy positions. (And as the lynching epidemic in Guatemala shows, there's almost no limit to the kinds of policy evangelical thinking can bring.) If we give their ideas a free pass, we're doomed to lose the fight over policies.

2003-03-06T13:20:00.000-06:00

Cynical or Delusional?

In The American Prospect's article about the Bush administration's ugly initimidation campaign against Mexico, there's this little gem:

In the Feb. 27 Economist,that magazine's correspondent
in Mexico City reports that "a stream of American
officials, sounding much more hostile than sorry,
have been trekking south to argue the point" that
American banking and corporate boardrooms, which
obviously have considerable clout in Mexico's affairs,
would look askance at a "no" vote by Mexico
and pull back from financial commitments.

Despicable, for sure, but what stuns me is the sheer absurdity. As I pointed out yesterday, American business leaders have already expressed their economic opinion of the war: the stock markets are tanking and hiring is at a standstill. If they aren't willing to risk bad investments at home to support a war, what on earth makes the Bushies think that war fever would make them forego good investments in Mexico? Are they stupid enough to believe this, or just brazen enough to lie about it?

2003-03-06T12:53:00.000-06:00

Marketing 101

According to the New York Times, a Harvard economist wants to offer a new freshman economics course at the university. Professor Stephen Marglin wants to correct the right wing-bias of Martin Feldstein's freshman economics course with a more balanced approach.

Mr. Marglin said that he was politically to the left of Mr. Feldstein, but that he mainly wanted to offer students a class with a diverse range of readings and discussions. The class would also question some of the assumptions of standard economics and introduce students to the increasingly popular field of behavioral economics, which tries to explain why people often do not seem to act rationally, Mr. Marlgin said.

"The point is not to substitute one set of biases for another," he said. "It's to provide a more balanced approach."

The article goes on to mention that a student group has endorsed Dr. Marglin's effort.

On Saturday, a student group called Students for a Humane and Responsible Economics posted an online petition to support Mr. Marglin's effort. About 300 undergraduates have added their names to it, said Daniel DiMaggio, a junior who took Mr. Feldstein's class last year and is a member of the group.

My question is this: why choose the name Students for a Humane and Responsible Economics? That's just a rhetorical gift for conservatives. "Humane and Responsible" just plays into the stereotype that liberals are fuzzy, muddle-headed bleeding hearts. It also cedes exactly the turf that the conservatives want, namely, the claim to being objective, hard-headed realists. "Well," they will say, "we have to face up to hard truths; we can't be sentimental; little as it pleases our humane instincts, economics proves that we must bribe the rich with huge tax cuts, etc."

Liberals could learn some marketing savvy from conservatives. Conservatives choose names to steal the ground from under their opponents. So, for instance, they have groups called the Global Climate Coalition and the Environmental Conservation Organization to fight against stronger environmental protections.

So, come on guys, let's have another try at it. You need to say conservatives are wrong about economics, and that they have distorted it. You need to paint them as partisan ideologues. So, how about Students for an Empirical and Scientific Economics? Or Students for an Empirical and Non-Sectarian Economics (which produces SENSE as an acronym!)?

2003-03-05T16:53:00.000-06:00

Has Bush no shame?

How disgusting is Bush's chintzy proposal for investigating the September 11 attacks, and the failures that led to them? Consider this: the University of Minnesota spent $2.5 million just to investigate an academic fraud case in their basketball program. And now we're going to spend just half a mil more than that to find out how we let terrorists slaughter 3000 people on American soil.

2003-03-05T16:04:00.000-06:00

Voting with their wallets

Reuters reports in a story today that businesses are cutting back on hiring because of war fears.

The huge U.S. services sector
slowed its pace of growth last month and the number of jobs
in the sector fell, reinforcing views of a U.S. economy
struggling with a hangover from the boom years and, now, fear
of war.

This isn't the first signal of war worries from the business sector. After all, Wall Street has been growling bearishly about Iraq for over three months. But now Main Street has joined Wall Street. Even more than increasingly shaky poll results, this shows the political damage Bush is taking for his war push.

Business leaders are just about the most likely people in America to support Bush and the Republicans. If anyone is going to give Bush the benefit of the doubt, these guys will. Furthermore, executives and market traders aren't going to make important business moves based on whims or flights of fancy. Their very lucrative careers are at stake, after all. So when these guys are so sure that the war will trash the economy that they dump equities and slash payrolls, Bush has really lost the battle for the hearts and minds of Americans. Some of his most fervent supporters are voting with their wallets, and they're voting against the war.

2003-03-04T16:10:00.000-06:00

Eschatological politics

Kevin Drum is bothered by an article that claiming end-of-the-world theology sets the agenda for Bush's foreign policy. Generally, he's uncomfortable with the idea that all evangelical Christians could be considered a lunatic fringe. He also asks whether end-time evangelical Christian beliefs really influence the Bush administration's foreign policy. He finds that idea particularly implausible because so many Jewish neo-conservatives hold prominent positions among Bush's foreign policy elite.

Well, last things first, as is appropriate for a post under this title. Israel is a beleaguered country. Israel and its supporters have long been reconciled to welcoming support wherever they found it. Today, they are finding their strongest international support among eschatological evangelical Christians. Israeli leaders have openly embraced that support for over two decades. For instance, see the 2001 Yossi Klein Halevi article in the New Republic here (Google-cached version; scroll to the end for the part on evangelicals).

As for whether Rapture-intoxicated Christianity shapes Bush's foreign policy, well, yes, it surely does. As the current Newsweek cover story shows, Bush and his administration are fairly saturated in a brand of pietistic, millennial Christianity. That aggressively uncritical faith is at the root of all Bush policies, foreign and otherwise.

Finally, we should not shy away from reality. The whole point of evangelical Christianity is to put a lot of debatable views beyond debate by making them a matter of faith. That doesn't make all of those views wrong. (Resolute support for Israel is a good thing, for example.) But it's no way to run a country.

2003-02-28T12:41:00.000-06:00

Olonga update

So now the the Zimbabwe cricket team selectors are determined to keep Henry Olonga out of the squad. Nothing to do with protests, mind you, they claim, just so you don't get the wrong idea. Uh huh. Did I mention that the guy they're keeping in the squad in his place is too crippled by injury to field?

Well, if you find the Zimbabwe Cricket Union credible, then I'm sure you'll believe that Glen Hubbard has resigned as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers because of "family needs."

2003-02-28T01:05:00.000-06:00

The idiocy of Donald Rumsfeld

Remember when Donald Rumsfeld threatened to punish Germany by pulling our troops out and sending them eastward. Of course, it was stupid because it was a clumsy threat, one more likely to convince Germans to oppose us than join us. But that's not the only reason it was stupid. As Cass Freeman pointed out in the New York Times on Wednesday, the Germans actually contibute a pretty hefty subsidy to keep those bases open. So, whatever those bases are contributing to the German economy is basically being paid for by the Germans to begin with. They're not going to quake in their boots when we threaten to save them a lot of Euros.

2003-02-27T23:07:00.000-06:00

Why telemarketers want to call you if you're really hard to get to

Calpundit asks why telemarketers go to so much trouble to defeat systems that screen out marketing calls.

I think marketers want folks withTeleZappers for the same reason that credit card companies want debtors just out of bankruptcy court: it's virgin territory. People who just filed a Chapter 7 have no debts, and the TeleZapper-equipped aren't getting calls from anyone else.

To see why that's important, think about why you really hate telemarketers. For me, anyway, it's quantity. It's getting those damn calls six, eight, ten times in a day. If you haven't had any telemarketing calls in a long time, you're a lot less likely to just bang the phone down in annoyance and rage.

2003-02-27T18:44:00.000-06:00

Undercover police officer shot by fellow officer, sparking some thoughts on race and gun control

An undercover Minneapolis police officer was shot by a fellow officer on Tuesday.

I'm not sure how often this happens, but it sure seems to happen a lot to officers from minority groups. This time the victim, Duy Ngo, was a Vietnamese-American. But the press here isn't asking any questions about that angle, and the police department sure isn't going to bring up the subject on their own.

Now, even if minority cops suffer disproportionate friendly-fire casualties, that doesn't prove race prejudice is the cause (although police departments should give it a long, hard thinking-over). Maybe a white officer would be just as likely to get shot in the same situation, but whites are just much less likely to work undercover. After all, a pretty significant percentage of undercover work in cities surely involves infiltrating minority gangs, and it's probably a lot easier to do that with minority officers. And I do sympathize with police officers who truly are making split-second life-and-death decisions. There really are bad guys out there, and a lot of them really do have guns, and if you err on the wrong side of caution, you could be dead.

But this shows that ubiquitous guns and scared cops are a particularly volatile and deadly brew for minorities. After all, if minority cops are more likely to be undercover, it's because minorities are more likely to be suspects. That means that confrontations betweens minorities and police officers are especially likely. If police departments can't protect their own undercover cops from the consequences of this predicament, then minorities in general are going to have it even worse.

Now, the one thing that would make this situation better is a lot fewer guns. For that reason, minorities in the United States would really have the most to gain from thoroughgoing gun control.

2003-02-27T16:56:00.000-06:00

All right, we know that folks at the New Republic hate Kerry and Dean. Moreover, they're entitled to push their views. They're an opinion mag: it's kind of their job to be "unbalanced."

But there is a difference between unbalanced in the journalistic sense and unbalanced in the psychological sense. Frankly, the latest spin on Dean in the etc blog has strayed into the latter meaning: you would have to be completely unhinged to believe it.

The short version: Kucinich hurts Dean more than anyone else because they are both "unconventional" liberals. Dean wants balanced budgets and opposes gun control; Kucinich is anti-abortion and for an anti-flag-burning amendment.

Of course, those positions are unconventional in exactly opposite ways. Dean appeals to crossover voters as a fiscally conservative social libertarian. Kucinich appeals to the kind of populist voters who are conservative on social issues and liberal on economic ones. Now, there probably aren't a lot populist voters in this sense in Democratic primaries to begin with, but it's pretty freaking obvious that none were voting for Dean.

2003-02-27T16:06:00.000-06:00

Defense Unintelligence

In a recent New Yorker article, Jeffrey Goldberg reports

The Defense Department had asked [its intelligence analysts] to
re-examine evidence collected by the C.I.A.
about the relationship between terrorist
networks and their state sponsors, including
Iraq and Al Qaeda, and to re-analyze the data
in the manner suggested by Rumsfeld's
ballistic-missile-threat commission; that is,
to build a hypothesis, and then see if the data
supported the hypothesis, rather than the
reverse.

There is a name for this kind of thinking, and it is not intelligence, but conspiracy-theorizing.

2003-02-14T17:54:00.000-06:00

Flower and Olonga, cricketers and men of principle

There's a big story on sports and politics afoot, and not only has the American Press whiffed on this one, but so has the world of political blogs. I'm talking about Zimbabwe and the Cricket World Cup.

Two of Zimbabwe's best cricketers, Henry Olonga and Andy Flower, are protesting against the Zimbabwean government. Just before their first match, Olonga and Flower released a statement to the press condemning the repressive policies of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe

This must have taken real courage. Mugabe's government does not treat dissent leniently, and fame offers little protection. Even the leader of the political opposition is on trial on trumped-up charges. Olonga's stand is particularly embarrassing for the government, since he is one of the country's few prominent black cricketers. For Olonga, moreover, it may mean the end of his sporting career. His club team in Zimbabwe have already suspended him, and he can have little hope of playing for Zimbabwe in future World Cups if Mugabe stays in power. (Flower plays for a county club side in England, and was expected to retire from international cricket after this World Cup in any case.)

On top of this, the English team are refusing to play their World cup match against Zimbabwe in Zimbabwe. Their public position is that security in Zimbabwe is not up to snuff, but poitical protest is certainly a factor as well.

Incidentally, Tony Blair has not come out of this well at all. On one hand, he is urging the English Cricket Board not to let the team play the match, but on the other, his government are not willing to cover any of the tens of millions of dollars the Board are likely to lose if Zimbabwe -- and possibly South Africa also -- boycott future tours of England in protest.

2003-02-14T16:27:00.000-06:00

I told you so

A couple of months ago, I debunked Peter Beinart's wishful thinking about how invading Iraq would undercut al Qaeda. According to Beinart, the best propaganda attack that Osama bin Laden has going for him right now is American troops in Saudi Arabia, whose presence supposedly sullies the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Beinart argued that an invasion would allow us to get the Americans out of Saudi Arabia, and let us station them in Iraq instead.

I pointed out then that this idea is a loser. Baghdad is the traditional capital of the Islamic caliphate. Osama wants to revive the caliphate. So occupying Baghdad would be even worse, given Osama's ideology, than being a few hundred miles away from Mecca.

Well, in his tape this week, what was the first thing that Osama complained about? Yep, he warns about "the crusaders' preparations for war to occupy a former capital of Islam."

You read it here first!

2003-02-14T15:59:00.000-06:00

A short thought on the dishonesty of the Bush Administration

The Bushies say we must attack Iraq but cannot attack North Korea because Kim has nukes and Saddam doesn't just yet.

On the 7th of September last year, however, Dubya said an IAEA report showed Saddam was just six months away from having the bomb.

OK, let's forget for a minute that Dubya's allegation has been debunked. Let's especially forget the later Bush attempts to place the report in 1998 or 1991. After all, if Saddam was that close to getting nukes that far back, he would certainly have them by now, which would make hash of the administration's distinction between Iraq and North Korea. Let's do the Bushies a favor and assume they were warning that Saddam would have a nuclear weapon six months from the beginning of September.

Well guys, that would put the ETA of Saddam's nuke at the end of February. It's pretty clear that we are not going to attack in the next week. (The Kuwaiti oil fileds are still on line, for one thing.) So, if you believe the Bushies, Saddam will already have a bomb by the time we attack. Which means, according to their argument, that we can't attack him. But this, as my logic professor used to say, is a contradiction. QED.

2002-11-26T10:40:00.000-06:00

More of this, please

2002-11-26T10:27:00.000-06:00

More conservative bias from the New York Times

A new New York Times poll not only shows that Republican policies are unpopular -- it shows that Republicans themselves are no more popular than Democrats.

Of course, you would never know that from reading the headline or even the article, both of which are typical examples of the mandatory right-wing New York Times spin of all polling and political articles. In the authorized conservative media elite version printed by the Times, most Amercians favor Republicans and almost half look unfavorably on Democrats.

If you actually look at the numbers, though, you see that both for favorability and unfavorability, Democrats and Republicans are within the margin of error. That's right, the poll shows a statistical tie. In favorability, the Republicans are at 51%, the Democrats at 45%, and the margin of error is 3%, which means there is a significant chance that the true percentages are 48% to 48%. On unfavorability, the numbers are even closer, at 44% for Democrats and 39% for Republicans.

Even leaving aside that the poll shows a statistical tie, it is hard to see how the Times could have spun this more ardently to confirm their conservative bias. Barely half of Americans look favorably on the Republicans, but all we hear from the Times is that most Americans favor them. More Americans have favorable than unfavorable views of the Democrats, but all we hear from the Times is that almost half of Americans oppose them (which could just well apply to the Republicans).

I suppose there is something to be said for predictability in life. With their lastest conservative spin, the Times shows they haven't changed. And I am counting on one other rock of stability in this world of flux. I haven't been to Kausfiles yet today, but I guarantee ol' Mick will censure the article for supposed liberal bias.

2002-11-09T01:57:00.000-06:00

Why Democrats should love property developers

I have been meaning to say something for a couple weeks about Nathan Newman's great post about density, zoning, and the environment.

Nathan picks on supposedly green Berkeleyites, and they surely deserve it. I had the same complaints about Seattle, where almost every new housing unit has to have an off-street parking place to go with it. That rule adds a lot to the price tag of new housing, and also contributes to sprawl (since the space devoted to driveways and garages is a de facto limitation on density). Of course, it makes sure that wealthy urbanites will have plenty of on-street parking places for their second BMWs.

But supposedly libertarian Republicans are even more hypocritical. Here in Minnesota, every time a developer proposes a dense, mixed-use suburban housing and retail project, the right-wing suburbanites raise hell about the threat to their way of life -- meaning, of course, the threat to their artifically inflated property values. (Our new Republican state auditor made her reputation as the mayor of Eagan by opposing all moderate income housing development in her city.)

Democrats need to stand for affordable housing.
No other stand can do as much for working class
Americans. 28 million Americans are paying
over 30% of their income on housing.
Fighting restrictions on dense development is
the single best weapon we have to fight
high housing costs. (Changing property taxes
so that they tax land more than buildings would
be a good second step.) Not only is fighting
those restrictions the right thing to do, it is
politically smart. The Democratic Party needs
more money to compete with the Republicans.
Developers have money, and, if Democrats take up
this fight, developers will be in their corner.
It's a winning issue all the way around.

2002-11-09T01:37:00.000-06:00

Go West

Right now, it looks like Gore, Lieberman, Dean, Edwards, and Kerry are the leading Democratic contenders for 2004. They all seem like pretty good choices to me (well, maybe not Lieberman). But they share one characteristic which doesn't bode well: they're from east of the Mississippi.

In seven of the last fourteen campaigns, Democrats have run candidates from east of the Mississippi. They lost five times. Running Westerners, the Democrats have won four of seven. Republicans have won eight of twelve running candidates from west of the Mississippi, and lost both times with Easterners. That's a trend Democrats should think about.

2002-11-08T02:15:00.000-06:00

Election post-mortem, part II

Matt Yglesias is also celebrating the victory of the anti-bilingual education initiative in Massachusetts.

I doubt that passing initiatives is ever a victory for anything except bad goverment. It's a horrible way to run a state.

On the bilingual education issue, I feel that this has become too much of an ideological matter, on the anti as well as the pro side. That's a shame.

This shouldn't be about promoting the American Way or legitimizing diversity or any of that baggage. It should be about teaching kids what they need to know.

Certainly, kids need to learn English. But kids also need to learn history and math and science. Even if you think that English is the most important thing (and I do), the other stuff is not trivial, and we have to consider what kind of education provides the optimal balance between those priorities. And even then, the answer is not likely to be the same for all kids at all ages. Immersion may be optimal for first or third graders, but not high-schoolers. Which is exactly the kind of distinction that could be made in legislation, but will never be made in initiatives.

2002-11-08T00:57:00.000-06:00

Election post-mortem, part I

Matthew Yglesias accuses the Democratic leadership of fumbling the ball on choosing the right races. In particular, he thinks that money and effort would have been better spent on the Senate races in Missouri and Georgia than on Kirk in Texas and McBride in Florida--especially since, he claims, the latter had no national significance.

I might be more convinced if

(1) he had clearly better ideas about where the money and effort would have helped Democrats win,

(2) he had clearly better ideas about which races were really important,

(3) this whole exercise weren't so completely informed by hindsight.

Frankly, Democrats were already outspending the Republicans by a lot in Missouri and Georgia. Since those candidates couldn't effectively use the money advantage they already had, an even bigger dollar flush would just have been an even bigger waste. And there was simply no time to use tens of millions of dollars on the Mondale campaign.

We also need to keep in mind the real advantages of the various options here. To say that control of Florida has no consequences for national policy is insane.

The single most important goal for the Democratic Party is to elect a president in 2004. Florida is the country's biggest true swing state in presidential elections. Whoever wins Florida in 2004 will almost surely win the presidency. When the Republicans control the state government in Florida, they do everything in their power to distort elections to their advantage. Democrats simply can't afford to let Florida go without a hell of a fight.

On the other hand, losing Cleland and Carnahan was not good, but they were pretty reliable Bush allies anyway--especially Carnahan. These losses mean we will get 90% of the Bush agenda rather than 80%.

Finally, this is all after the fact speculation. Things looked totally different three weeks before the election, which is when the decisions about money and manpower had to be made.

2002-11-01T12:26:00.000-06:00

Yet more Republican and Bush corruption: Paul O'Neill

As if Harvey Pitt weren't making this a bad enough week for Dubya's doubletalkers, Paul O'Neill is getting investigated for enabling accounting fraud, too.

2002-10-23T00:41:00.000-05:00

How to make enemies

Peter Beinart's TRB column in the New Republic has some good points about how attacking Iraq could help the war on terrorism. It also has one really bad argument. According to Beinart, conquering Iraq would allow us to pull troops out of Saudi Arabia, and since the proximity of heathen Americans to Mecca and Medina got Osama bin Laden started on his anti-American campaign in the first place, that would take away his best recruiting pitch.

Now, let's suppose for a moment with Beinart that the growth of radical Islamism really would be influenced by any such concession to bin Laden's complaints (and I'm not convinced of that). Even then, what we know of Osama bin Laden's ideology makes occupying Iraq an even worse problem than being in Saudi Arabia. After all, one of bin Laden's main goals is re-establishing the Caliphate. Bagdhad was the home of the Caliphate for the half millenium when it was at its apex. If we invade Iraq, we won't just be somewhere vaguely near Bagdhad, as we are now vaguely near the holy cities in Arabia: we'll be occupying it. Osama will not be amused.

2002-10-22T23:27:00.000-05:00

Clothing analysis, etc.

Speaking of etc, they have taken up smarmy political-sartorial analysis. Sorry, but I think we had enough of that with the absurd coverage of Gore's earth tones in 2000. Can we please get back to discussing ... policy?

2002-10-22T23:04:00.000-05:00

Superstars: Krugman got it right

TNR's etc takes issue with Paul Krugman's contention that Sherwin Rosen's "superstar" theory doesn't work as an explantion of massive recent growth in executive compensation.

The superstar theory--at least in theory--could work pretty well for CEO's, which seem to be the group Krugman is mainly concerned about. In fact, Rosen invented the tournament metaphor Krugman alludes to specifically to explain CEO pay. The basic idea is that companies are hierarchies. Employees face off at each level of the hierarchy to see who'll advance to the next level, and the thing that motivates them to advance is the prospect of higher pay. When you're at the bottom level, you're motivated not only by the higher pay you'll get at the next level, but by the higher pay you'll have a chance at getting if you keep winning and advancing. Butonce you reach the level just below CEO, the only thing motivating you is the pay you'll receive in the very next round. To provide the proper amount of motivation, then, the jump in pay to that level has to be a lot higher than the jump in pay to any other level. Finally, if you take into account the fact that companies have been getting bigger and bigger in recent years, it makes sense that the tournaments would be getting larger and that the winner would be earning more money.

Now, this is a reasonable enough explanation for why
compensation for CEOs is high in a static sense -- not
necessarily correct, but plausible. But the issue
isn't the size of CEO rewards, it is how much those
rewards have grown. On that score, this explanation
is remarkably weak. It's not just that the massive
growth of CEO income has far outstripped the growth of
corporations, it's that big corporations aren't
growing at all in the sense that is relevant to etc's
argument: in the number of workers and the levels of
management bureaucracy. In fact, American
corporations have become far leaner in recent decades.
So, based on the reasoning here, CEOs should be
making relatively less, not more.

2002-10-22T13:47:00.000-05:00

Saddam, prisoners, and spin

What struck me most about Iraq's prisoner release was that the official announcement openly admitted the regime is holding political prisoners. I'm trying to firgure out why no one has made a big fuss about this. I'm not talking, of course, about the existence of Iraqi political prisoners -- no one in their right mind had any doubts about that -- but about how the Iraqi government isn't even bothering to hide their existence. Is this a sign of just how confident Saddam is about his survival? Or a sign of how his government is in such a shambles that they aren't up to controlling such a basic spin point?