Anarchy is Hyperbole

Solar

2009-07-09T00:59:00.003-04:00

I have long been a fervent advocate for the solar grand plan. One of its major flaws, however, is that it assumes technological advancement. This is a just criticism. But lo and behold, even without the level of investment the plan would have brought, the much lower current funding for research has yielded much, much cheaper solar cells that will soon be just as efficient (~20%) as the expensive current silicon ones. The copper-indium-diselinide cells don't need to be vacuum-processed and just just poured and baked (essentially). In a few months, their efficiency has improved from 1% to 9%, and the researchers are optimistic (reasonably so) that the cells will hit 20% within a few years.

A Few Things

2009-07-09T00:19:00.002-04:00

I have read the whole internet and here are some things.

Bradford Plumer at TNR about cap-and-trade and how it's worked in Europe.

Gerard Magliocco at Concurring Opinions on different "canonical statutes" that are considered sacrosanct.

Daniel Indiviglio at Atlantic Business on how the unemployment stats are quite off, and how it will spike quite high when matters improve (deceptively). Look for it as an empirical sign of an improving economy.

David Kahane at the National Review is sickeningly filled with hatred for liberals. It's a disgusting bile-filled slab of venom prompted by what he sees as unjust attacks on good ol' Palin by the elitest media. I am not exaggerating.

Stanley Fish (an epic name and a legend in his own time) points out in the Times that the stumbling and shocking nature of the Sanford passionate interview and the Palin stuttering resignation are prompted by genuine emotion, and that shouldn't be overlooked.

Google is releasing an operating system, and the Atlantic Business does a pair of gimmicky posts for both pro and con, and neither one is actually insightful or worth reading. Read the Opinionator about it instead, since it's as good as the Opinionator usually is.

Wonkette mocks Brian Kilmeade from Fox and Friends for accidentally being a hilarious eugenicist

Only one guy voted against a bill in Congress designed to commemorate slave labor's role in the creation of the Capitol, Steve King (R-IA). He says he voted against it to protect our "Judeo-Christian heritage." He goes with Bachmann in the crazy hyperchristian category, a populous segment of politicians.

Conservative Reactions to Palin Resignation

2009-07-06T08:07:00.002-04:00

Jonah Goldberg (author of Liberal Fascism and asshole) thinks it's maybe his fault because of his advice to her earlier that day (that seems to mostly just be a rehash of Roger Simon's Politico piece), but still doesn't understand.

Well, aside from my timing being impeccable, the best I can say is I'm flabbergasted.

Not running again could make sense as a pre-presidential move. Resigning strikes me as very strange.

Mark Steyn of the National Review thinks it was stupid.

As a political move for anything other than the 2010 Senate race, today's announcement is a disaster. And I'm not sure it's a plus for the Senate - and, even if it were, the manner and timing suggest it was not a professionally planned event and therefore is unlikely to have any grand strategy behind it.

Bill Kristol of the Sarah Palin Fan Club thinks it's great.

After all, she's freeing herself from the duties of the governorship. Now she can do her book, give speeches, travel the country and the world, campaign for others, meet people, get more educated on the issues - and without being criticized for neglecting her duties in Alaska. I suppose she'll take a hit for leaving the governorship early - but how much of one? She's probably accomplished most of what she was going to get done as governor, and is leaving a sympatico lieutenant governor in charge.

Kellyanne Conway of WomanTrend, a polling company, thinks it's about protecting her family and it's swell.

But, as a private citizen, Governor Palin can unbind her hands, quit swallowing hard, and respond. She can also make a boatload of money with a bestseller or two, a spot on the speaking circuit, and a steady media gig. Palin can steep herself in foreign policy, become an advocate for issues that people actually care about — like special-needs children, a cause for which savaging her would be difficult — and help a national Republican party that is in no position to turn away any volunteers, let alone one for whom thousands cheer at events.

Mary Matalin, noted political consultant and lich, hates Barack Obama and forgot to say anything about Palin.

As we have been saying for decades, elections have consequences, and we are now experiencing the scariest consequence of an election in decades. This president is reordering, at warp speed, the relationship between lawmakers and citizens; he is reshaping the role and scope of a constitutional order two centuries in the making.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) thinks Palin sucks.

I am deeply disappointed that the Governor has decided to abandon the State and her constituents before her term has concluded.

Palin Resigned

2009-07-05T03:10:00.003-04:00

Sarah Palin resigned. No one knows why. It surprised everyone in the local Republican party, her spokesperson, her Lieutenant Governor (soon to be Governor), and pretty much the nation. She wasn't under investigation, so this wasn't damage control.

It seems to me that this is pretty obviously her crazy impulsiveness. She quit her job as mayor of Wasilla before she finished, and she quit from the state petroleum board - it's pretty clear that when she sees a bigger goal possible, she is inclined to drop her responsibilities and go for it. She'll certainly make a lot of money and she can spin it enough with her fanatical base so that she'll be okay politically. But I think she has again miscalculated badly: this ends her 2012 hopes, if she still harbors them.

Sanford's Victimization by teh Gayz, Palin Infighting, and Glenn Beck

2009-07-02T02:29:00.006-04:00

Let's just let this stand alone and appreciate it. Rush Limbaugh claims that Mark Sanford cheated on his wife with a hot piece of Argentina because gay marriage is legal:

“It’s finally happened,” said Rush Limbaugh, conservative radio personality. “America, I’ve been warning you for years that gay marriage would destroy the American family and look… there they are, a husband, wife, and four children — destroyed. When is this going to stop America? When will the liberals be satisfied? When all the marriages break up? This wasn’t Mark Sanford’s fault, this was Ted Kennedy’s fault. Sanford didn’t cheapen the value of marriage, he was victimized by the cheapening of marriage.”

Hm. Moving on...

Everyone is abuzz over the Pardum piece on Sarah Palin in the current Vanity Faire. And for good reason: it's amazing.

What does it say about the nature of modern American politics that a public official who often seems proud of what she does not know is not only accepted but applauded? What does her prominence say about the importance of having (or lacking) a record of achievement in public life? Why did so many skilled veterans of the Republican Party—long regarded as the more adroit team in presidential politics—keep loyally working for her election even after they privately realized she was casual about the truth and totally unfit for the vice-presidency? Perhaps most painful, how could John McCain, one of the cagiest survivors in contemporary politics—with a fine appreciation of life’s injustices and absurdities, a love for the sweep of history, and an overdeveloped sense of his own integrity and honor—ever have picked a person whose utter shortage of qualification for her proposed job all but disqualified him for his?

Politico has an exceptionally poorly-written article about how this has sparked a lot of infighting, but better is this tidbit from conservative blog RedState, where the Republican enforcement squad is pretty well exampled:

Since everybody else is piling on, let me add my own comment to the fray. If you were one of the people who participated in that Vanity Fair hit piece, and we find out your name, you will be a net drag on any national campaign for the rest of your professional career. Not because you helped the Left go after Governor Palin, but because you are an untrustworthy sneak who is dedicated to propping up the elitist system in DC, not fixing it. Any candidate that hires you will have to overcome the base’s natural reluctance to work with a campaign that would hire someone like you.

Finally, Glenn Beck has written a new book. Beck emerged onto the media scene in my hometown of Tampa Bay, Florida, where he started off as a radio host doing pretty standard crap. He then got a show on CNN Headline News, where he basically just did his radio show while pointing at the camera a lot and putting up bad photoshops. And now of course he is at Fox News, having steadily migrated ideologically. Back in the day, he declared that he didn't follow politics. Then on CNN, he was a hawkish libertarian. Now on Fox, he still calls himself a libertarian, but it's that trendy kind of libertarianism that basically is identical with being a neocon but sounds less mainstream.

He's done a lot of unbelievably hackneyed nonsense, including his 9/12 project, which claims to set out the nine values embraced by America immediately after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Among them are "I believe in God and He is the center of my life." Yeah, since of course that directly opposes the mindset of the radical Muslim attackers. If there's one thing we need, it sure is more people who devote their lives (and deaths) to their deity! It seems like Beck's thoughts after 9/11 were pretty much just "Goddamn do I love the Republican party, let me imagine some of their talking points!"

Beck has written a new book called "Common Sense." The fact that Beck has the gall to crib the title of one of the most influential pamphlets in Revolutionary American history is unbelievable. But far worse is the content.

It is almost without exception the most contemptible pile of regurgitated tripe I have ever seen, because it essentially is what Beck thinks is "common sense." His solutions to things are facile and thoughtless. In most cases, it boils down to "spend less" and "tax cuts." What a new tune.

I dislike Beck intensely.

Random Nutjob: "The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States. ..."

Glenn Beck: "I totally disagree." (HAHA JUST KIDDING THAT IS A MISQUOTE HE DIDN'T DISAGREE AT ALL)

Waxman-Markey

2009-06-29T05:35:00.003-04:00

So Waxman-Markey is the big bill that recently went through the House and is making a run for the Senate. You can usually tell someone's position on it just by how they describe it: if they call it a "climate bill," then they probably want it to pass because they want a looming problem addressed, but if they call it an "energy bill" then they probably don't want it to pass because they think it will cripple America's energy supply and industry. But that's not always true. Sometimes you have to read their nonsense.

Jim Lindgren at the Volokh Conspiracy offers a pretty standard conservative view:

The idea that a government of one country could appreciably change the world's climate over the next 40 years is the ultimate hubris. ... With the Climate Bill, if someone had to waste as much money and destroy as many jobs and as much wealth as possible — and still have only a trivial effect on the environment — the Climate Bill would be pretty much the ideal piece of legislation.

This is a very common sentiment on the right, but it's very unfortunate that it's cropping up at Volokh, which is usually a solid repository of well-thought-out conservative bloggers. It's disappointing they put up such standard hogwash about the bill. Lindgren doesn't bother to offer many facts or silly things in his post, but he has previously supported himself with such gems as this WSJ editorial (the height of scientific data) which is so bizarrely myopic that it's painful. The right's dialog seems to have gone:

We'll support this bill if it doesn't cost very much, but it will cost every household thousands of dollars. The CBO will prove it.
Well, the CBO actually says it will cost only $175 a year per household, but the CBO study is flawed.
The EPA may agree and in fact say it will cost much less than that, but the requirements are still unrealistic. It's part of a renewable energy scam, and global warming isn't going to cause much harm since it will only bring down global GDP by 5%.
Okay, that 5% might represent a huge number of extremely poor countries and their billions of residents, but... um...

Unfortunately, that's where everyone seems to end. It doesn't help conservatives that polling has a lot of people favoring this bill: Nate Silver at 538 did his usual mathemagic and found that there was an "indifference point" in household price below which people were willing to pay to help the climate, and Waxman-Markey is below this even by the higher CBO estimate.

Let's put it frankly: from an environmental standpoint, this bill sucks. It demands 20% renewable energy in ten years (with allowances for 5% efficiency savings to be part of this total), when we should be aiming for at least 30% in that timeframe. It tries for a 17% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020, when we should be aiming for double that number. There are no international provisions to speak of. It's not a very good bill.

But it's the best one that can pass, and even then it's going to be tough. Big industries in the Midwest own a lot of people in Congress, even the most socially liberal Democrats, and a hell of a lot of concessions had to be given away to make this happen. Plus, in ten years when disaster hasn't struck from above, it's going to be a great stepping stone to the next effort.

So all in all, I support it strongly. Let's hope it passes the Senate.

Redesign

2009-06-25T03:31:00.003-04:00

I'm tweaking my blog's layout a bit, trying out a new graphic at the top and a colors change. I like it.

Republicans 101

2009-06-25T01:45:00.004-04:00

Listed in order of prominence:

Rush Limbaugh - Now widely considered the head of the GOP, this popular radio host who has struggled with addiction to prescription painkillers is reviled by almost everyone outside of a core of strong conservatives. Limbaugh has long led the charge against moderation in the party, snarling at "RINO"s (Republican In Name Only) and heaping vitriol on those who disagree. He did, however, help instill a large part of the notorious GOP discipline (his followers willingly call themselves "dittoheads") - since anyone who steps outside the lines gets immediately and forever attacked.
Dick Cheney - Another figure who is considered a leader of the party, this former Vice President is also not in elected office. He has spent a great deal of time in political gamesmanship of late, trying to defend the Bush administration. With both him and Rush being so strongly influential yet not beholden to an electorate, the GOP has swerved further and further away from the kind of politics that actually win elections. They have no incentive to promote GOP action on what the people actually want, like the 73% who want a public option in healthcare.
Newt Gingrich - A former Congressman and Speaker of the House, Gingrich is often remembered for his Contract with America that started a massive Republican resurgence. He is also remembered for the epic showdown with President Clinton about government spending; what began as a fight for "fiscal discipline" was revealed to be more politics and personal when Gingrich snapped that they wouldn't have had to crack down if he hadn't been snubbed by the President and put in the back of Air Force One. Humiliated and removed, he has become yet another highly vocal and influential Republican figure who isn't in elected office.
Gov. Bobby Jindal - A folksy Indian-American and governor of Louisiana, Jindal's star was rapidly on the rise - he was sometimes called the "Republican Obama" - when he was called upon to issue the response to Obama's State of the Union last year. The miserable effort was bizarre (attacking "volcano monitoring" as wasteful!) and strongly resembled a goofy character named Kenneth on the popular television program and commerical 30 Rock. In short order, his futures dimmed and haven't brightened.
Gov. Sarah Palin - Yeah. Palin.
Gov. Mark Sanford, Sen. John Ensign, Sen. David Vitter - All three of these well-thought-of Republicans recently confessed to some degree of hypocrisy, admitting that they cheated on their wives. Sanford's own misdeeds have been the most prominent and serious, as he disappeared without word to Argentina to be with his mistress for most of a week without making any preparations for disaster (such as informing the Lt. Governor).
George W. Bush - Yeah. Bush.

The GOP is making two severe mistakes: the most prominent Republican leaders are all in unelected positions of demagoguery, and they have purged almost all moderates from their ranks. The effect is to engage in a vicious cycle of inquisition, where the increasing absence of an effective moderating voice has made it almost impossible for Republicans to win in any district but those that are already certain, ghettoizing the GOP in the South and Midwest. Unless the elected leaders of the party assert themselves and manage to redefine the message as the "big tent" that so effectively fooled the electorate for so long, then the GOP may cease to be a serious national party for at least four years. The party system favors a Republican-Democratic duality too strongly to eliminate them forever, but a drastic change or an FDR-style perpetual domination is not impossible.

Jim Manzi at National Review Online

2009-06-23T10:57:00.001-04:00

Quoth the jackass:

I’m also glad to see that Ezra Klein is explicit about his acceptance that climate change is expected to have extremely limited effects on the United States for at least the next hundred years. I figure that ought to be pretty important when debating the proper policies for the government of the United States. On the other hand, we continue to disagree about the financial efficiency of the foreign aid program defined by transforming the energy sector of the American economy in order to very slightly ameliorate a predicted problem that might affect people who might live in low-lying equatorial regions of the world decades from now.

Yeah, fuck those people, we'll all be dead, and everyone knows small changes now can't make a big difference in a century.

From "A Farewell to Arms"

2009-06-23T06:38:00.001-04:00

Once in camp I put a log on top of the fire and it was full of ants. As it commenced to burn, the ants swarmed out and went first toward the centre where the fire was; then turned back and ran toward the end. When there were enough on the end they fell off into the fire. Some got out, their bodies burnt and flattened, and went off not knowing where they were going. But most of them went toward the fire and then back toward the end and swarmed on the cool end and finally fell off into the fire. I remember thinking at the time that it was the end of the world and a splendid chance to be a messiah and lift the log off the fire and throw it out where the ants could get off onto the ground. But I did not do anything but throw a tin cup of water on the log, so that I would have the cup empty to put whiskey in before I added water to it. I think the cup of water on the burning log only steamed the ants.

2009-06-23T05:35:00.002-04:00

Politico reports on widespread rumors Palin is dumping Alaska.

No candidate, including Palin, has yet filed papers with the Alaska Public Offices Commission. Palin’s office declined an opportunity to explain her thinking on the 2010 race, and the Republican Governors Association said it would not comment on discussions it has had with the governor.

But a number of Democrats and Republicans in Alaska and Washington who spoke to POLITICO believe her silence is a sign she will not pursue a second term as governor so that she can play a larger role on the national political stage.

Is she taking Roger Simon's terrible advice?

Two Assessments of Obama

2009-06-23T04:22:00.002-04:00

One is from the New Republic's The Plank, and the other is from the National Review Online. I don't think it's too hard to guess which way each one spins.

Let's start with the Plank piece first. It's a brief bit about Obama's style, and I think the often-clever Jonathan Chait is especially insightful in it.

This is a perfect summation of Obama's strategy. It does not presuppose that his adversaries are people of goodwill who can be reasoned with. Rather, it assumes that, by demonstrating his own goodwill and interest in accord, Obama can win over a portion of his adversaries' constituents as well as third parties. Obama thinks he can move moderate Muslim opinion, pressure bad actors like Iran to negotiate, and, if Iran fails to comply, encourage other countries to isolate it. The strategy works whether or not Iran makes a reasonable agreement.

The results remain to be seen. But it eerily resembles the way Obama has already isolated the GOP leadership. Obama began his presidency by elaborately courting the opposition party. Republicans in Congress believed that, by flamboyantly withholding cooperation, they could deny Obama his stated goal of bipartisan harmony and thus render him a failure. Instead, they wound up handing Obama the alternative victory of appearing to be the reasonable party. Polls showed that the public, by overwhelming margins, believed that Obama was trying to work with Republicans and that Republicans were not reciprocating.

While I think Obama is far too moderate on a hell of a lot of issues, I have often and forcefully said that his personal skill is unparalleled at this time. And in a case like Iran, where I can be confident his goals coincide with my own, I believe Obama will play the situation perfectly. In other words, I think it is seldom wise to question Obama's ability, no matter what you think of his ideals. Republicans who think otherwise should ask themselves why exactly he has been drubbing them at every turn.

Thomas Sowell from NRO, on the other hand, has a considerably more acid contribution:

The current intramural fighting among Republicans does not necessarily mean any fundamental rethinking of their policies or tactics. These tussles among different segments of the Republican party may be nothing more than a longstanding jockeying for position between the liberal and conservative wings of the party.

The stakes in all this are far higher than which element becomes dominant in which party or which party wins more elections. Both the domestic- and foreign-policy direction of the current administration in Washington are leading this country into dangerous waters, from which we may or may not be able to return.

He then starts in on some things he thinks Obama has done, and that he thinks are absolutely shameful.

A quadrupling of the national debt in just one year and accepting a nuclear-armed sponsor of international terrorism such as Iran are not things from which any country is guaranteed to recover.

Just two nuclear bombs were enough to get Japan to surrender in World War II. It is hard to believe that it would take much more than that for the United States of America to surrender — especially with people in control of both the White House and the Congress who were for turning tail and running in Iraq just a couple of years ago.

Perhaps people who are busy gushing over the Obama cult today might do well to stop and think about what it would mean for their granddaughters to live under sharia law.

That's right: the National Review is suggesting that Iran is going to nuke the United States, and that the Obama administration will immediately submit. Then Iran will invade us and impose Sharia law.

Let's just consider this for a moment. A mature and presumably reasonable person who works at a respected national magazine is seriously making the suggestion that this is a danger, and that Iran can't be "accepted" as a nuclear power. He doesn't really offer any alternative, of course, because it must be unspoken that there aren't a whole lot of things one can do about it short of war, as North Korea has amply demonstrated over and over ("Yeah, we're nuclear now. Oh, you don't like it? Yeah, that's tough. Screw off, UN.") All you can do is work to remove supplies of raw materials and technology (which no doubt and thankfully Obama is doing behind the scenes, no matter his rhetoric) and use diplomacy.

Then comes the acorn:

Unfortunately, the only political party with any chance of displacing the current leadership in Washington is the Republican party. That is why their internal squabbles are important for the rest of us who are not Republicans.

Ah! So that's why he was frightening us with an absurd "think of the children" scenario: you have to vote Republican so they can save us! He doesn't even argue in the piece for why they have good policies or anything like that... it's simply and irrationally, "If you don't vote Republican in the future you will be nuked."

Absolutely brazen and shameless scaremongering.

Roger Simon's Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Politico Article

2009-06-18T04:50:00.002-04:00

I don't know why, but Politico has taken the unusual business model of sprinkling a few great articles amidst a great deal of nonsense. They have a chair in the White House Briefing Room and get called on a lot by Gibbs and Obama, though, so I guess it's paying off. 1

Still, Roger Simon put up a particularly terrible article the other day, and I thought it would be amusing to look at the many ways in which it is awful, both as a piece about politics and as a work of purported journalism.

First of all, it's called "7 Things Sarah Palin Must Do Now". Right away, that should be a tip-off it's going to suck. The only time clever little lists should be masquerading as opinion pieces are when they're lists of World's Hottest Butts or Top Ten Most Gruesome Murders. And while Palin is vaguely attractive when compared to other people in politics (who's her competition - Gillibrand?) she doesn't quite have the caboose necessary.

Then it starts right off talking about Palin, in order to make her interesting and relevant enough for Simon's advice to be interesting and relevant to his poor readers. The only problem is that she's not very interesting or relevant right now, which is why she did an Abraham-and-Isaac with her younger daughter in order to make a few news cycles this past week. So Simons hauls out some numbers:

True, her approval rating as governor of Alaska has dropped to 54 percent, her lowest ever, but it is not that far below Barack Obama’s national approval rating of 62 percent.

So now a popularity of 54% is "not that far below" 62%, eh? I guess that kind of holds up, even though eight points seems like a hell of a lot to me, especially when you note that Palin's popularity has been plummeting. I guess it's time for her to bribe every citizen of her state by redistributing the wealth gained from their natural resources - then she can get back to attacking socialism without worrying about them much more.

There is little doubt that Obama is the most popular politician in America (and probably the world). Yet when voters were asked last week in a Diageo/Hotline poll if they would reelect Obama today or would like to see “someone else” be elected president, Obama got 46 percent, and “someone else” got 30 percent. That’s a nice margin for Obama, but it’s not astronomical.

Nice margin? They asked voters whether they want Obama there, or if they'd like "someone else" - a question that essentially is asking if there's anybody they can think of they would like to see as President more than Obama. It seems to me that means that Obama is thus more popular than any other high-profile politician in the country all at the same time. He's not quite as popular with yours truly, but I'm not fool enough to pretend that beating out every possible other candidate by sixteen points is merely a "nice margin."

Simon's advice to Sarah begins:

1. DUMP ALASKA. She doesn’t need to run for reelection for governor in 2010 for name recognition or to get media attention. And being a governor these days is like having a target on your back. (Republican Tim Pawlenty, who has his own plans for 2012, announced earlier this month that he will not seek election to a third term as governor of Minnesota.) But there is a bigger reason for Palin to give up the governorship: Maybe you can see Russia from Alaska, but you can’t see Iowa and New Hampshire from Alaska. Alaska is too far away from where she needs to be. She can live, skimobile and hunt moose in Alaska, but she needs to spend a lot of travel time in the Lower 48 without having to run back to Juneau every week.

Name the last person elected to the Presidency after quitting a governorship when they were unpopular in their state. W, Clinton, Reagan, Carter... you just can't go up to the bat without your team solidly cheering you. Advising Palin to abandon her home state is incomprehensibly poor advice: imagine every news story summing her up as the "unpopular former governor of Alaska." In a world defined so much by the media, you need to have your highest accomplishment be an unblemished one.

2. SURROUND YOURSELF WITH PEOPLE SMARTER THAN YOU ARE. That shouldn’t be hard, her opponents will say. OK, let them laugh. They laughed at George W. Bush when he ran for president in 2000 and at Arnold Schwarzenegger when he ran for governor of California in 2003. Both benefited from low expectations and smart staffs. I am not one of those people who believe that staffs win or lose elections — candidates win or lose elections — but the Democratic presidential race in 2008 certainly demonstrated the difference that staffs can make. Hillary Clinton assembled a staff of loyal people who were largely inexperienced in presidential campaigning. Barack Obama assembled a staff of loyal people who were very experienced in presidential campaigning. It made a difference.

Hey, guess what: intelligence and experience are not at all the same thing! That kind of makes this point either incomprehensible (is he saying Terry McAuliffe, Clinton's chairman of her cmapaign, was stupid or just inexperience?) or breathtakingly obvious ("CAMPAIGN MANAGER WANTED: MUST BE NOT DUMB").

3. PICK A HANDFUL OF ISSUES AND STICK TO THEM. The increase in the size of government? The increase in the deficit? The increase in the role of Washington in people’s lives? All good issues for Republican primary voters. And all three are things Palin talks about already. And she shouldn’t worry if she gets attacked for being naive or simplistic. Ronald Reagan got pretty far with: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”

Okay, this is actually good advice. No fault here.

4. STUDY UP. Before CBS’s Katie Couric and ABC’s Charlie Gibson interviewed Palin, they studied hard, backed up by excellent research staffs that prepared a lot of material for them. Palin has to do the same before major interviews. While she is not bad at answering direct questions, she falls down on followup questions. She has to do what successful candidates do: Rehearse. The rule is that you have to study at least as hard as the people trying to trip you up.

It seems pretty clear that, whatever her strengths might be, Palin isn't going to wow anyone with her grasp of the issues. It was widely acknowledged by everyone (even Palin herself) that her expertise as a potential leader lies solely in the field of energy management. It's what she's built her career on, with her handling of the oil companies and her hugely ballyhooed pipeline. She doesn't do anything else, and she knew it. She handled herself very well because of this, actually: she memorized her talking points and stuck to them. If she was asked about something she didn't know, she just slid right back to something from a flashcard. The flowchart sums it up pretty well. She shouldn't try to tango when she clearly has trouble walking.

5. DON’T BELIEVE YOU CAN’T DO IT. Palin’s critics point out that she is no Ronald Reagan, and that in tough times, voters are going to turn to potential candidates like Mitt Romney, who stress competence. But Palin has a chance because of what the Republican Party has become: a smaller, more conservative party that has already driven away many moderates and “soft” Republicans. The Republican Party today is like a star that has gone nova and collapsed to its densest core. While some potential nominees will try to sell a big-tent message, demanding that the party moderate its positions to win more voters, primaries are usually dominated by hard-core activists. This is where Palin has the potential to do well.

Of course, everyone knows that you win elections by ignoring the moderate swing voters. Is Simons giving advice about how to win the GOP primary or the Presidency? She could win the former just by chanting "tax cuts" and repeating what the American Enterprise Institute beams into the chip in her brain, but if she wants to attain the latter, she might need to convince some of those who aren't Reagabots.

6. DON’T GO CHANGING. In her debate with Joe Biden, she did far better than most expected by being warm and passionate and by using everyday language like “I betcha” and “heckuva opportunity” and “darn right.” She even winked. It didn’t make her look dumb; it made her look human. She should not be afraid to stick with what has gotten her this far. She showed last week she is not afraid to be a mom standing up for her kid. But she also should not be afraid to take some risks and go back on “Saturday Night Live.” She should not be afraid to make fun of herself, even if plenty of others already are.

Being naive, fresh-faced, and natural worked for her because she was such a newbie in Washington. How long could that be effective? She is pretty good at playing the victim ("lipstick on a pig") but she was going for the #2 job before - it's hard to see anyone wanting a Victim in Chief.

7. DON’T WORRY ABOUT FAILURE. Heck, there’s always 2016.

If Palin takes Roger Simon's advice, she better hope so.

1. Especially for Obama, who gets worshipped by the netroots for being "hip to the New Media."

Health Care: the Public Plan

2009-06-16T00:37:00.002-04:00

If you are interested in the health-care debate, then you need to be interested in the details. Because it's all in the details: grand policy statements and vague notions about ideals are almost entirely useless in this discussion, given the incredibly misleading activity of the GOP, the American Medical Association (which is behaving more like the union it is than the advocacy group it has been), and the farthest left.

If you want the skinny, then Ezra Klein at the Post has a (famous at this point)pretty good primer on some of the public options. Krugman chimed in at the Times with his best efforts at a tidy narrative. But the best discussion is coming from Frank Pasquale at Balkinization, with his series of posts (one, two, and three) analyzing the nature of the public plans and addressing criticism carefully. It's an invaluable read:

Congress or HHS or state insurance commissioners could try to outlaw or restrict risk selection practices one by one. But as Pollitz has noted, as of 1997, the "US Department of Labor had resources to review each employer-sponsored group health plan under its jurisdiction once every 300 years." The Bush years probably did not significantly address that shortage. Moreover, "state insurance department staff levels declined 11% in 2007 while premium volume increased 12%." The personnel simply aren't there, and when they are, they are as likely as not to be outgunned by private sector attorneys, lobbyists, and experts-for-hire. The right way to discipline private insurers is to have competition from a public option--not to allow them to continue a risk-selection race-to-the-bottom by deflecting regulation.

Check it out.

Why He Is Ever My Favorite

2009-06-15T06:15:00.002-04:00

The account of Washington's handling of the Newburgh Conspiracy from AmericanHeritage.com; the President addresses a gathering of rebellious soldiers who threaten the existence of the new nation. They are unmoved by his prepared speech.

He had read it all. And it had failed. He knew it had failed. They were not persuaded.

Washington shuffled his papers. He had labored over his speech. But it held long, involved, cumbersome sentences. When spoken, the muscle was lost in the flesh of ornate composition. Washington could not match Brutus as a writer.

In desperation he took a letter from a pocket of his regimentals. In it Congressman Jones praised the army and pledged his support. Perhaps this would help. As Washington opened the note, there was a murmur among his officers. Washington took that as impatience. He cleared his throat and attempted to read.

He could not. The script was too small. His eyes could not focus. The dim letters blurred. Helplessly he fumbled in another pocket for his spectacles. As he donned them, the murmur increased. Again he thought it impatience. He adjusted the spectacles. “Gentlemen,” he said, “you must pardon me. I have grown gray in your service and now find myself growing blind.”

It was enough. They’d not been impatient. The murmur was one of sympathy, understanding, affection. In their eight years together they had never seen Washington wear spectacles. He had seemed tired and worn before. Now he seemed older and vulnerable. He was only fifty but had aged this week. He had problems they didn’t even know about. If he still trusted the Congress, they could do no less.

Few heard as Washington haltingly read from Jones’s letter. No matter.

When he stopped, the officers crowded about him in reassurance and contrition. Some wept. Others simply stood, stunned and silent, as the general left the room.

If Gates hoped to regain the initiative, he had no chance. Henry Knox quickly moved to thank the commander for his speech. Then, after a quick review of McDougall’s report, General Ruf us Putnam moved that Knox’s committee prepare new resolutions for the officers’ consideration. In short order the officers resolved their “unshaken confidence” in Washington and in the Congress. The crisis was over.

Cairo Speech

2009-06-15T04:54:00.002-04:00

Well, I am no closer to an answer. I may have to spend another year teaching abroad, maybe in Korea or somewhere else. I'm going to have a sit-down with Lizzie and figure out what we want to do. At least now she's no longer just going to have to follow me somewhere, so there's an upside to it: we can meet her goals as well. My mother is going to freak out, though.

The news have been filled with items of amazing interest. Of particular note was Obama's speech in Cairo. It was respectful and well-phrased, but then, we would expect nothing less from this President.

Just as Muslims do not fit a crude stereotype, America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire. The United States has been one of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known. We were born out of revolution against an empire. We were founded upon the ideal that all are created equal, and we have shed blood and struggled for centuries to give meaning to those words -- within our borders, and around the world. We are shaped by every culture, drawn from every end of the Earth, and dedicated to a simple concept: E pluribus unum -- "Out of many, one."

But even better, the speech was candid in some ways. Obama didn't simply defend Israel as is the norm for American Presidents (as Israel is the beneficiary of a half-dozen powerful interest groups in Washington), but he also endorsed the two-state solution and condemned further illegal settlements. He sums up effectively:

For decades then, there has been a stalemate: two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive. It's easy to point fingers -- for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought about by Israel's founding, and for Israelis to point to the constant hostility and attacks throughout its history from within its borders as well as beyond. But if we see this conflict only from one side or the other, then we will be blind to the truth: The only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security.

The President took some criticism on the speech from both the right and the left. Peretz at the New Republic took him to task for ignoring Zionism and associated historical movements and oversimplifying Israel's founding as being essentially compensation for the Holocaust. And even though I think this flaw doesn't seriously diminish the impact of the speech, it's a good criticism that hits on target.

When Obama attributes the establishment of Israel, and also Israel's fear that the Iranian government and many Arabs would quite happily visit another devastation on it, to the Holocaust, he is in fact accepting Dr. Ahmadinejad's analysis of the Zionist triumph and also one of the tenets of Palestinian rejectionism, which is that the Palestinians are correct in their phobia that they have paid the price for what the Nazis did to the Jews.

But even though he took some flack, by and large the President's Cairo speech was well-received. It was even more well-received a few days later, when Iran and Lebanon went to the polls to vote. While Iran returned Ahmadinejad to the Presidency (something which read as a defeat to - surprise surprise - that same critic at the New Republic who hated the speech), Lebanon surprised all forecasters by turning out Hezbollah, and the pro-western coalition won a comfortable victory instead. Commentators on the left have been quick to call the speech a major factor. Hertzberg at the New Yorker opines:

The words of an American President, even one from Chicago, were not necessarily foremost in the minds of the Shiites, Sunnis, Druze, and Christians of many theological varieties and political persuasions who lined up to cast their ballots and dip their thumbs in ink. But most analysts agreed that Obama’s speech, and the carefully constructed edifice of public diplomacy of which it was the keystone, was a factor in the outcome.

Amidst a sea of delayed gratifications (Don't Ask Don't Tell repeal) and questionable accreditation (stimulus results), this looks to me as a clear and firm evidence of Obama being a great President.

Also, check out Inside the Obama White House. Regardless of how you feel about the President himself at this point, it's an amazing look into the West Wing. Carefully controlled, but with astonishing access. Yet another display of Obama's political skill and message control. Regardless of his policies and ability as a leader - I think they're good, but there are legitimate reasons to think otherwise - it has to be said that he is one of the most adept politicians of this age. It helps a lot these days that the Republicans are tearing at their own flesh; yet another moderating Republican (Bennett) is going to have to pour money into a challenge from his compatriots, unsettling a seat long considered GOP territory.

Classy

2009-06-11T02:00:00.002-04:00

I bought Dowd some flowers to make her smile but she still didn't like me, she must be bitter. Can I have another blended baby smoothie?

I don't like her much either, but you're a real class act, Rove.

Screwed

2009-06-11T01:36:00.004-04:00

So, as some know, I have been fixing to go to graduate school in New Zealand. I was pretty much settled on the University of Canterbury, a decent enough school on the whole and an international one (New Zealand being a rather more exciting place to live for Lizzie than Cincinnati). I am admitted and whatnot, and the only remaining hurdles are obtaining extensions of my U.S. federal loans and getting a visa to the country.

But alas. There are problems.

A couple of months ago, I crowed about one of my loans being paid off. They contacted me about a few cents remaining on my account, and I laughed as I sent them a check for $0.14. It was silly of them and a waste of everyone's time, but it wasn't really a big deal. Hard for me to complain about when it made a funny story and didn't do any harm, right?

Well, I discovered yesterday that my Perkins loans have gone to collections, because it seems I sent those few cents to the wrong loan company.

I found this out because I can't extend my loans when any of them are in collections. And this also explains why I am still waiting to hear that UC received my transcripts from Wake Forest. A quick check confirmed it.

Hi Alexander,

We are federally mandated to send any unpaid Perkins loans to a collection agency. It is policy to place a hold until all financial obligations have been met. This does include any collection accounts with outside agencies.

...

Thanks,
Susan

So. I have to pay the whole balance of my Perkins loans (the one being pennies, the other being substantial) before I can get loans to go to grad school. And if I were to pay off the loans, I wouldn't have enough money to pay for my whole first year of grad school as well as living expenses, something that is required to get a visa.

In other words, I can either get the money to go to grad school but be barred from the country, or else I can go to the country but without being able to go to grad school. And I cannot see any way out of it.

Careful checking and perhaps more invective than was strictly necessary informs me that there is no way to work around it. There is no process or possibility of getting my loans out of collections until they are paid off. There is no possibility of getting a visa unless I can demonstrate I have sufficient resources to pay for a year of school (plus the sum needed for a ticket home).

And I have only a month to solve this problem, if it can be solved, since deadlines are already approaching.

I. Am. Screwed.

News Feed

2009-06-09T03:41:00.002-04:00

Now you can check out my Google Reader's Shared Page if you would like to see some recent articles I found interesting, or subscribe to the Atom feed. The most recent items are also on the left, along with a photo feed.

Agenda

2009-06-05T08:21:00.003-04:00

It seems pretty long odds that it's coincidence the NYT ran a piece called "The Deadly Toll of Abortion by Amateurs" two days after the murder of prominent abortion doctor George Tiller.

While it must have been in progress for quite some time before the Tiller murder, since it's in a foreign bureau and a reasonably in-depth piece for its length, it also isn't immediate news and could easily have been held for a week or two until after the controversy subsided somewhat.

Sure, one might ask why they should hold it - shouldn't a worthy subject get timely coverage without bending to pressure to be falsely balanced? - but I think that a fairly good case can be made that a piece that so strongly highlights only one side of the debate looks like outright advocacy. And while there's a place for that in every paper (except the weak modern editorial page in the Times these days), that place is not in the straight news articles. Even if I agree.

Absolute Brilliance

2009-06-04T05:45:00.002-04:00

NYT with an amazing piece about a work of performance art by Icelander Ragnar Kjartansson:

[W]hat anyone who stops by his work space at the palazzo will find, now or over the next six months, is a farcically romantic idea of what the end of the world might look like, at least for an artist: Mr. Kjartansson, standing at an easel day after day, relentlessly painting the portrait of a man who poses before him in a black Speedo, cigarette and beer in hand.

As time passes, the canvases Mr. Kjartansson makes — he plans to complete one a day — will mount up around him, as will the empty bottles and butt-filled ashtrays, all of it a monument to artistic ruin.

I like only the occasional work of performance art - it's one of the easiest mediums in which to become lost in self-indulgence - but this sounds like one of the most brilliant and beautiful performances of which I have heard in some time. I wish I could be in Venice to see it, or get one of the paintings. Alas. Check out the article, though.

Heinlein

2009-05-28T07:18:00.003-04:00

I recently came into a digital collection of many science fiction books, and took the opportunity to brush up on my Heinlein. I had previously read and very much enjoyed Stranger in a Strange Land, his most popular work about a transcendant human being who leads a revolution in thought when he comes to Earth after having been raised by Martians. It was excellent, and fully deserves its reputation. There is good reason why some of the concepts in its pages have been incorporated into the language, although virtually every use of "grok" actually just means that the writer is a pretentious asshole who didn't want to use the more apt word "know."

Since I have been reading a great deal about libertarianism, though, I knew there was other Heinlein that was considered exceptional, and indeed his work The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is considered one of the most "libertarian" books by many proponents. So I decided to read much of his work, most particularly the aforementioned libertarian treatise and his famous Starship Troopers (I liked the movie, but mostly just because I like any movie with tits in it).

So I read The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers, Glory Road, The Cat Who Walked Through Walls, Job: a Comedy of Justice, Time Enough for Love, and The Number of the Beast over the course of about a month. And let me tell you this: if creating Mary Sues was a crime, Heinlein would be verging on the death penalty for his multiple offenses. In almost everything he writes, there is an older male character with a crusty yet paternal personality, who is clearly Heinlein's ideal self. Invariably, they are pursued by incredibly desirable women. These women are either much younger than him, or else older but with the appearance of being much younger (thanks to future-science). They always see through his gruff mannerisms and laughingly call him an "old fraud" (same words, every time). And he's always libertarian.

To be frank, most of what I read was disappointingly mediocre.

Starship Troopers is almost without a plot; it's simply the story of how one man goes through boot camp and then several battles. There is no suspense, nothing really happens beyond long recountings of how X Device works or how tough is Drill Instructor Y. Heinlein tries to disguise this by shifting the narration around in time, starting in media res and skipping back and forth. But when you get down to it, it's not even a story so much as a technical recounting of a future military.

The Number of the Beast, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Time Enough for Love, and The Cat Who Walked Through Walls were all in the same imaginary universe, and the only one that was decent was Moon. This is probably because it's the first one of these I read, and the social innovations and ideas present in this universe were interesting when first presented. Polygamy, certain libertarian features of his idea of space colonies, superpatriarchism, and so on are all very intriguing, especially in the way Heinlein presents them.

Polygamy. There exist various iterations of many-partnered marriages, such as "line marriages," where new husbands and wives enter into the marriage continually over the years. Some of these latter last for hundreds of years and have dozens of spouses. In Heinlein's works, these occur because of the paucity of women in the space colonies.
Libertarianism in space. Most prominently lauded and featured in Moon, but alluded to and assumed within all of these works, is the idea that in an environment lacking anything that might be called "free," since even air and water must all be paid for, and distanced from the long-existing power structures on Earth, libertarianism naturally would evolve from this mindset. Summed up in the motto of "TANSTAFL" (There's Ain't No Such Thing As a Free Lunch), Heinlein seems to think that when everything must be bought, then people would naturally begin to think in terms that anything could be bought. This commercial freedom and inability to depend on anything beyond oneself would lead to a demand for total freedom in society as well, presumably. It's an interesting notion.
Superpatriarchism. The worlds and societies in these books are all run by men with frank acknowledgement of that fact, while simultaneously putting women on an incredibly high pedestal that exceeds even Victorian estimates and giving them enormous freedom. They're Daddy Societies: the women don't get to be in charge, but they get to do whatever they want and are savagely guarded.

Ultimately, though, aside from a few other interesting ideas, Heinlein shoots his wad all at once. His main weakness - writing an interesting plot - becomes the glaring flaw in the other books. His plots are okay if condensed to one sentence (space travelers exploring Burroughs' idea of Mars; trying to convince the universe's oldest man to avoid suicide; altering past events to improve the future), but they grow no thicker when expanded to book form. It makes for thin soup, especially without the beef of new fun ideas.

I would strongly recommend The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land, and say that you can safely give the rest a pass. If you find you really like his style of writing, then maybe you should snap up a few more, but if you think that the main showpiece are just his interesting ideas about what the future can be - like I do - then there's no need to keep going.

"Ex-Basketball Player," by John Updike

2009-05-28T06:32:00.000-04:00

Pearl Avenue runs past the high-school lot,
Bends with the trolley tracks, and stops, cut off
Before it has a chance to go two blocks,
At Colonel McComsky Plaza. Berth’s Garage
Is on the corner facing west, and there,
Most days, you'll find Flick Webb, who helps Berth out.

Flick stands tall among the idiot pumps—
Five on a side, the old bubble-head style,
Their rubber elbows hanging loose and low.
One’s nostrils are two S’s, and his eyes
An E and O. And one is squat, without
A head at all—more of a football type.

Once Flick played for the high-school team, the Wizards.
He was good: in fact, the best. In ’46
He bucketed three hundred ninety points,
A county record still. The ball loved Flick.
I saw him rack up thirty-eight or forty
In one home game. His hands were like wild birds.

He never learned a trade, he just sells gas,
Checks oil, and changes flats. Once in a while,
As a gag, he dribbles an inner tube,
But most of us remember anyway.
His hands are fine and nervous on the lug wrench.
It makes no difference to the lug wrench, though.

Off work, he hangs around Mae’s Luncheonette.
Grease-gray and kind of coiled, he plays pinball,
Smokes those thin cigars, nurses lemon phosphates.
Flick seldom says a word to Mae, just nods
Beyond her face toward bright applauding tiers
Of Necco Wafers, Nibs, and Juju Beads.

Sotomayor

2009-05-27T03:51:00.005-04:00

Recently, President Obama nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor to replace Justice Souter on the Supreme Court. I'm not over the moon about his choice. Her Wikipedia page has all the relevant bio information if you're curious (and amusingly, was updated within a minute of the announcement of her nomination), and she seems highly qualified. But the NYT has a great article about how the scope of her decisions has been extremely limited (if meticulous) and her most controversial case is bizarre and has little supplied reasoning to reveal her thoughts:

[Sotomayor's decisions] reveal no larger vision, seldom appeal to history and consistently avoid quotable language. Judge Sotomayor’s decisions are, instead, almost always technical, incremental and exhaustive, considering all of the relevant precedents and supporting even completely uncontroversial propositions with elaborate footnotes.

All of which makes her remarkably cursory treatment last year of an employment discrimination case brought by firefighters in New Haven so baffling. The unsigned decision by Judge Sotomayor and two other judges, which affirmed the dismissal of the claims from 18 white firefighters, one of them Hispanic, contained a single paragraph of reasoning.

This is troubling, to say the least, when added on to the fact that she otherwise has relatively few pivotal-issue cases. To me, the situation looks remarkably like the nomination of Souter (whom Sotomayor is replacing): President George H.W. Bush had just lost with Bork and wanted to avoid a fight, so they appointed someone with relatively little controversy behind him but who seemed generally conservative. To their surprise, Souter ended up in the liberal set more often than not, and never overturned all the liberal precedents on abortion and civil rights like they hoped.

Ideally, we'd get a real liberal constitutionalist in Sotomayor, but who the hell can tell at this point? The Times magazine has a great analysis of what a liberal justice might be in the modern era, and points out that we're not going to see another Burger coming from Obama, after all. But at least conservative Volokh isn't happy; when it comes to questions like this, that's a good sign.

In the end, it doesn't really matter. The Dems are certainly all going to vote to confirm, and the Republicans won't be able to sustain a filibuster; their hispanic Senator Martinez from Florida is probably not going to be able to take the heat from a filibuster against the first hispanic nominee in history, and that one seat would do it. Politico points out some potential tactics, but it's a sealed deal.

Wonkette had a great brief piece about liveblogging the nomination that you should read:

10:32 AM — “An ordinary person who has been blessed with extraordinary opportunities and experiences.” Translation: a radical leftist lesbian radical who will take away your guns, force your children into kindergarten abortion parties, exhume the corpse of Ronald Reagan for the purposes of urinating on it, and surrender in Iraq.

Tough Questions

2009-05-20T06:02:00.003-04:00

I can't believe I just heard something worthwhile from Jesse Ventura appearing on the View:

"If waterboarding's okay, then why don't we let our police do it to suspects so we can learn what they know?"

This hits the gut, and it's one of the tough questions that are customarily avoided by a certain kind of policy advocate. It's equivalent in abortion debates is, "Do you support prosecuting women who get abortions for murder?" If abortion is murder, then it is pretty clear that Texas' death row should be getting pretty crowded with fourteen-year-old girls.

Fair questions, but with emotional impact and verve.