Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Shameless rumourmongering

If this is true, it's absolutely fantastic news: Zarqawi reported captured on Syrian border.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Good news, if you can believe it

Apparently, the buzz in Washington is that when the Office of Management and Budget issues its mid-year budget review, the budget deficit projection is going to come in at $420 billion for this fiscal year.

Now, most of you, like me, will be thinking that that's about $420 billion too much. However, this is still great news, because the original projection in the budget was about $525 billion. Instead of our budget deficit being over 4.5% of GDP, it will weigh in around a dainty 3.5% of GDP, much more in line with historical averages (although still above them). Even better, if this year's budget deficit projection drops precipitously, we can be sure that next year's deficit projection looks even better.

The fly in the ointment is that since 2000, the OMB's budget projections have been growing consistently more optimistic than those done by the Congressional Budget Office, largely because of more optimistic assumptions about the underlying economic conditions. The CBO is currently projecting a deficit of around $480 billion, which is still a nice reduction from previous projections, but not as nice as we'd like. Is the OMB blowing smoke to provide some political cover in the election, or is that optimistic bias the smart way to bet now that the economy's recovered? Only time will tell.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Shoot vaccines, not heroin

Do you read Mark Kleiman? If not, you're missing out on a good thing. Like this piece on the benefits -- and limitations -- of immunizations for drug addiction.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Question of the day

Sorry I haven't posted -- I've been super busy, a condition that will probably continue through the end of the week. Meanwhile, perhaps my tech-savvy readers can weigh in on a question that is currently fascinating the technophobe journalists in my office: do those electronic plug-in pest repellers actually work? Feel free to share experiences, scientific opinions, or any other thoughts. And while we're on the topic of roaches, go read this terrific article from the New York Times on how we've achieved at least temporary gains in the war on roaches.

Update A reader offers this answer to my question. Sigh. Combat it is, then.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Enemy of my enemy

From the 9/11 report - another nail in the coffin of the old conventional wisdom that warring or ideologically opposed camps would never cooperate in terrorism against the U.S.

Even after bin Laden approved funding for Mohammed's plot in late 1998 or early 1999, Mohammed resisted invitations to swear loyalty to bin Laden and formally join al Qaeda. He resisted in part, he told interrogators, because he had a prior allegiance to Sayyaf, the Afghan warlord, who was in turn allied with the Northern Alliance, led by Ahmed Shah Massoud.

Bin Laden was allied with the ruling Taliban, which was actively at war with Massoud. In fact, to aid that war, al Qaeda plotted the assassination of Massoud, which occurred just two days before Sept. 11. Mohammed eventually did join al Qaeda, Mohammed told interrogators.

Of course KSM's connections go everywhere.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Question of the day

According to news reports, the steepest part of the Tour de france is a 10% grade. Can some of the engineers, hikers, or amateur surveyors in my audience translate this for the uninitiated? What angle are they biking at? Because there's really nothing more pathetic than a bunch of journalists sitting around trying to do math.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

It depends on what the meaning of "inadvertent" is . . .

I have absolutely nothing useful to say about the Sandy Berger brou-ha-ha. I did want to note, however, that this morning I heard one of our resident Democratic spin-doctors explaining that the removal of all of these documents was "entirely indavertent, as Mr Berger has explained." This is not, in fact, what Mr Berger has said, but what I'm more entranced by is that someone actually had the guts to go on the radio and proclaim that Clinton's former national security advisor had "indavertently" stuffed a large number of classified documents down his trousers.

But perhaps we should not be so sceptical. I recall that someone, who shall remain nameless, was unfairly subject to a similar investigation while we were in high school. This person had, entirely inadvertently, stuffed some things into their trousers while browsing in their local supermarket. Unfortunately, they forgot to take them out again to pay, resulting in the sort of grossly unfair investigation that Mr Berger is now suffering, although in their case it was conducted by a bystander who turned out to be an agent of the NYPD. The story was then "maliciously leaked" to our hapless victim's parents, resulting in much embarassment as they attempted to explain how they had 'forgotten about" a pack of bologna, two one liter bottles of soda, one jar of Vlasic Extra Large Dill Sandwich Pickles, and a can of whipped cream. The years have not dimmed the fallout from this malicious smear, perpetrated by a store owner who was no doubt a member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. As this stories develop, we need to keep in mind that many Americans use their underwear to store things when they have too much to carry. Innocent until proven guilty ain't just a river in Egypt.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Tee-hee!

Laugh of the day. It's almost as good as the immortal Donald Rumsfeld Karate Technique.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Hey, it goes with the tie....

We mustn't judge Alexander Hamilton by his biographer's clothing:

Now there's a jacket that could provoke a duel.

Oops, I suppose the title of Hamilton's biographer belongs to Ron Chernow at the moment.

Don't miss the additional..er...color in the comment threads.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Another "global warming isn't caused by carbon" story

This time in The Telegraph.

A study by Swiss and German scientists suggests that increasing radiation from the sun is responsible for recent global climate changes.

Dr Sami Solanki, the director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, who led the research, said: "The Sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures.

"The Sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently - in the last 100 to 150 years."

Dr Solanki said that the brighter Sun and higher levels of "greenhouse gases", such as carbon dioxide, both contributed to the change in the Earth's temperature but it was impossible to say which had the greater impact.

This is, as I see it, the real problem with global warming research: you've only got one atmosphere to study. All the research is mostly looking at the warming over the last 150 years, which is, though certainly worrisome, well within known geological variation.

The problem is that that 150 year period, when we've started to emit serious carbon, could also coincide with other things. It coincides neatly, for example, with the widespread introduction of thermometers across the world, which means that for earlier, non-carbon-emitting periods we're relying on proxy data. Some of which, like tree rings, may respond to both heat and carbon presence--tree rings grow thicker both in times of elevated carbon, and elevated heat, making it much more difficult to get an accurate historical proxy.

Because the period is short, and things liike the sun's heat can vary, it's much harder than it otherwise would be to establish causation from the correlation between carbon emission and warmer temperatures. That means we have to be sceptical about the studies. But then we have the risk that we might scepticise ourselves right into an early grave.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Is Efficient Markets Theory dead?

John Quiggin thinks so:

In 1994, the efficient markets hypothesis (the belief that asset markets invariably produce the best possible estimate of asset value based on all available information) was an open question, and the standard account of the Dutch tulip mania was evidence against it. In 2004, the falsity of the efficient markets hypothesis is clear to anyone open to being convinced by empirical evidence.

We have seen billion-dollar valuations placed on companies that proposed to home-deliver dogfood at prices lower than those charged in discount stores. We’ve seen unimportant subdivisions of profitable companies valued at more than the companies themselves. We’ve seen a dozen different companies simultaneously priced at levels that made sense only if they were each going to monopolise the industry in which they were competing. And don’t even get me started on the US dollar bubble (now burst) or the bond bubble (still inflating).

. . . It’s true that dramatic episodes like the dotcom mania don’t happen all the time. But even one such episode, occurring in a well-developed and sophisticated financial market like that of the US in the late 1990s is sufficient to undermine the assumption that asset markets ever yield the best possible estimate of asset values, except by chance.

In his comments section, the redoubtable James Surowiecki disagrees:

It’s certainly true that the EMT is not right. But if you had a system that offered the best possible forecast 90% of the time, would the fact that it was wrong 10% of the time — even if when it was wrong it was really wrong — mean that its success the other 90% of the time was due to chance?

Take horse-racing. We know that the odds on horses predict almost perfectly how likely it is that a horse will win (over, say, 100 races subjective probabilities are essentially identical to objective probabilities). In the Belmont Stakes, it seems pretty clear that the market overvalued Smarty Jones and undervalued Birdstone. (I don’t mean just that Birdstone won, but that the odds on these horses did not reflect their objective chances of winning.) Should we really conclude from this that the accuracy of odds is due to chance?

There’s no doubt that markets suffer from enormous periods of irrationality. But it seems possible that, although we don’t have the analytical tools to do this yet, these periods are objectively distinct from the way the market works most of the time, and that while they shed light on the potential perils of markets, they don’t invalidate the use of markets to set asset prices. The fact that someone occasionally gets sick is not proof that they’re not healthy.

I’m not sure, in any case, what follows from your conclusion. Every day, the US stock market values more than 7000 stocks, which entails, roughly speaking, predicting what the future will be like for those 7000 companies (and their competitors, etc.) for the next 15-20 years, depending on valuation. That’s a near-impossible task. The difficulty of the task isn’t going to change, but what’s a better way of doing it?

Now, both John Quiggin and James Surowiecki are about a hundred times smarter and more knowlegeable than I, so I tremble to differ with them. But I'm not so certain that EMT is, in fact, incorrect.

I think that what they're saying is that the "strong" version of EMT -- that market prices correctly incorporate all possible knowlege about the stock price -- is incorrect. And in that I concur. But there are also "semi-strong" and "weak" versions of the theory.

The weak version says only that you can't make excess returns--basically, profits above the economic costs of finding the investment opportunities--based on historical financial data. I think it's safe to say that pretty much every economist thinks this is true, and that "chartists", who attempt to predict price movements based on past trends, are doomed to fail in the long run.

The semi-strong version says that share prices adjust instantly to new public information, and you therefore can't make money trading on that information. I think, again, that almost all economists would agree with this.

Now, I was at the University of Chicago Business School, intellectual home of effi cient markets theory, during the stock market bubble. Even the strongest of market advocates among my professors didn't try to argue that we weren't in a bubble; they could read a P/E as well as anyone. About the only people trying to argue that prices were sustainable were my classmates who had taken out $100K of student loans so they could hold on to all of that valuable Webvan stock.

What my strong market efficiency professors argued was, not that prices reflected some metaphysically true value for the stock, but that the prices reflected all the information anyone in the market had, and that you therefore had no hope of being able to consistently generate excess returns.

I say consistently because anyone who brings up efficient markets is told that Peter Lynch or Warren Buffet has beaten the market for years. This is true. But what about all the guys who underperformed the market for years and then went out of business? If you flip 16 million coins 50 times, some of them will come up heads every time. That doesn't mean the coin flippers handling those coins are "outperforming" the others. If you plot all the returns on a line, apparently what you find is a nice normal bell curve (truncated at the left, since underperformers tend to exit the money management business), with Peter and Warren out on the very far right tail of the distribution. If you run a regression on the returns of mutual fund managers, there is a no-better-than-random correlation between their performance this year, and their performance next year. This is why it's such a terrible idea to pick mutual funds based on their recent performance. In fact, it's why Chicago tends to preach index funds as the only sane investment for 99% of investors.

In short, prices may not match the intrinsic value of the stock. But the odds are against you systematically outperforming the market in estimating what that intrinsic value is.

Now, there are a lot of caveats. Efficient markets theory only works as long as a sufficient number of people don't think it does; if we all stuck our money in index funds, the market would lose the information it needs to be efficient.

And I'm acquainted with a value investor, a disciple of Warren Buffet's, who makes a convincing argument that the Uncle Warren School of Value Investing in fact does generate excess returns for those who follow it closely. This may well be true, but it's somewhat recursive: value investing (like efficient markets) only works as long as a lot of people don't think it works. If a lot of people pursue a value strategy, value opportunities will soon be arbitraged away. It tends to work best in thinly traded areas of the market; you are vanishingly unlikely to make money (as Uncle Warren did), by buying Coke because you think it's undervalued.

There's a third problem in the US market, which is that with selling short (borrowing shares of a stock in order to sell them, which is basically betting that the price will go down) severely restricted, many argue that the feedback mechanism in the market is sort of permanently broken, introducing an upward bias into prices.

There are a whole lot more caveats, so many that I can't remember them all to tell you about them. But ultimately, I think what even the Chicago folks are now selling is the not-entirely-crazy idea that trying to beat the market is basically gambling. You might win a lot of money tonight. But in the end, the percentage is always to the house.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Your Faithful Correspondent

This letter to the Princeton Packet stands out from the rest and brightened my day:

To the editor:
Three recent Packet articles require responses.

1) What saps New Jersey's media must be to have ever gone along with this Machiavellian (hee-hee-hee) misnomer "millionaires' tax." It is an example of that adage of politics: "Any program that robs Peter to pay Paul will have the enthusiastic support of Paul.

However, I cannot accept the filthy lucre of this McGreeveyist robbery. I think I'll give the increase in my property tax rebate to the first victim of this "millionaires' tax" who contacts me.

My increased rebate is supposed to give me some relief from the profligate spending by my township, school district and county. But I cannot think of any reason that "millionaires" in other parts of New Jersey should be forced by the state to subsidize profligate spending by my township, school board and county.

If my fellow locals and I don't like being gouged by our local governments, we can — at least in theory — kick them out of office. But the "millionaires" who are being tapped by Gov. McGreevey and the Legislature have no say over my local governments. And it's a whole lot harder for them to eliminate profligate state government than it is for us locals to eliminate profligate local government.

2) Our area has a decades-old problem of vandalism that the police have been unable to solve. I have a quick fix. Just one, maybe two incidents in which vandals catch a load of buckshot from their victims would most surely redirect the sociopathic energies of the area's little darlings.

3) Finally, an explanation of why the Legislature doesn't give towns the authority to ban smoking on private property. For the same reason it doesn't give towns the authority to ban liquor: It's wrong. Even New Jersey pols get it right occasionally.

You don't want to eat, drink or work in a smoky room? Then pick a nonsmoking establishment, persuade the owner of the one you like to ban smoking or open your own. It is not government's prerogative to dictate which legal activities you can allow in your business.

Terry Wintroub
Trafalgar Court
Lawrence

Three cheers for Terry! I can only imagine the howls of outrage throughout Mercer County.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Public service announcemnet

If you are a blogger or journalist coming to New York City for the convention, please shoot me an email at janegalt -at- janegalt dot net. I'm scoping out demand for a blogger event.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Fun tidbit of the day

All government sites apparently have to have kids sections. Even the site on Yucca Mountain. . .

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The Mystery of Hyde Park

Longtime readers know that before I was the blogger you know and love, I attended business school at the University of Chicago. Apparently, Chicago bloggers have been wondering why Hyde Park, to put it bluntly, sucks. I grew up within shouting distance of Columbia, and attended undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania, which is located in a deeply poverty-stricken area. (Although not--for those who are about to angrily email me--as deeply poverty stricken as other areas in the tragically poor city of Philadelphia.) Hyde Park is uniquely bad for an urban school neighbourhood.

There are no bars. There are no stores where you would want to buy anything more upscale than pet food. There are no high-end restaurants, and only a few decent low end restaurants (Dixie Kitchen, Harold's, and the caribbean place are all that spring to mind, although I also enjoyed my occasional sojourns at the pancake house.) Apparently, undergraduates are theorizing that it is the unique nature of the Chicago student that prevents enterprise from springing up.

This surprises me, because everyone at the business school knew exactly why Hyde Park was such a wasteland. Jacob Levy explains, far more elegantly than I could: it's the zoning.

Just goes to show you: when there's something puzzlingly, inexplicably wrong, you need generally look no further than the government to find out what's causing it.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Who died and made us the world's policeman?

The ever-brilliant Robert Lane Greene has a piece in this week's New Republic about France's antagonism to the US, and why it's leading France to make a big mistake on its military policy -- France, and Europe, should be building skills complementary to the Global Policeman, not looking for ways to combat it.

This caused me to wonder something for perhaps the first time: why did we agree to be the world/s policeman? The rest of the developed world essentially opted out of military development in favour of building their welfare states--why didn't we? After all, we were perhaps the country least threatened by the Soviet Union.

I don't think the standard imperialist answer holds. Sure, we have done some unsavoury things in order to promote our country's economic interest, but shockingly fewer such things than any other country I can think of. The US has generally pursued its imperialistic expeditions in ways that are fairly altruistic -- either ideological, or in pursuit of broadly stabilising actions such as trying to keep the Middle East fairly peaceful so that oil continues to flow, an action that benefits anpetrological countries far more than the US. Why did we take on the superpower project, and why didn't we exploit our role as much as we could have?

(Answers implying that Americans are just nicer than the rest of the world warm my patriotic little heart, but aren't quite useful in this discussion. Stick to things like specific national values, institutions, or geopolitical imperatives, if you would.)

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Delay, or not delay-- that is the question

The blog issue of the day is the Bush administration's apparent decision to set up procedures for delaying the election in the event of a terrorist attack. Daniel Drezner has the roundup.

My take: on the one hand, this gives me that deeply creepy, "Reichstag Fire" kinda feeling. On the other hand, it is manifestly obvious to me that we could not have had an election on, or within two weeks of, 9/11: the country was simply too shell-shocked. And it strikes me as prudent to plan ahead for how we will handle this.

My criteria: it should require an independant, highly bipartisan commission. The commission should not be able to delay an election without at least a supermajority of its members. And the delay should be time-limited to, say, three weeks or a month.

But I strenuously disagree with Jack Balkin's idea:

The fact that a terrorist attack might influence voters one way or the other is not a reason to cancel an election. Lots of things happen before elections that can influence voters. Rather, the reason to postpone an election is that it is simply not possible to conduct the election in a particular jurisdiction, because, for example, there are dead bodies lying everywhere or buildings have been blown up and local services have to be diverted to matters of life and death. The September 11th attacks shut down large parts of New York and diverted essential services. It was no time to have an election. If a terrorist attack occurred on Election Day, it would make sense to postpone the election in the place where the attack occurred, but not everywhere in the country. (Note that under current law, states may pass new legislation rescheduling the election without Congress's intervention). One can imagine situations in which an election would have to be postponed everywhere, but they would be truly terrible situations, ones that effectively brought the entire country to a halt....

I disagree both because its obvious to me that if there were a large number of "bodies everywhere", the whole country would be affected, and because this seems to violate everything we learned in Florida. The whole point of having strong, before-the-fact laws in place, and simultaneous elections, is that it prevents those running the election from knowing how many votes they have to get in order to turn the thing.

This was why I was against the recount in Florida: the predominantly Democratic canvassing boards knew that by fudging just a very little bit, they could bring in enough votes to throw the whole country to Al Gore. I don't say that they did fudge; only that it is hard to get a legitimate election result -- one that will be viewed as legitimate by the losers -- in this situation. This was, of course, thoroughly reinforced by the sight of the two Democrats continually outvoting the one Republican on the subject of what did, or did not constitute a vote for Al Gore.

Now, imagine there's another squeaker, and we've delayed the election in one state, a swing state. Whichever party controls more of the local party machinery gets to mobilise all its resources to that state, and will probably carry the election. This strikes me as a fundamentally ungood outcome.

Of course, I think that if there were a really serious terrorist attack, we probably wouldn't have a squeaker--either we'd rally round the flag, or throw da bums out. But still, I think the chance of such a thing is worth preventing. If we delay the federal election in one state, I think we should delay it in all of them.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Tee hee!

Laugh of the day is here.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Wierdest thing I saw on my vacation

At the Borders bookstore in Newark Airport, where I was forced to wait for an hour due to my complete incompetence at conveying the correct arrival time to my ride, the "Social Science" section is filled apparently exclusively with political screeds, 90% of them of the "George Bush is the Bastard Son of Satan and Adolf Hitler" variety.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Is a third party the Great White Hope or the Great White Whale?

While I was away, the left half of the blogosphere has been very, very earnestly discussing the question of whether Barbara Ehrenreich is, or is not, misguided--and by misguided, I mean that many think she has about as tenuous a connection to reality as the folks who brought us Pepsi Clear.

Matthew Yglesias has, I think, the best post on this question, a tenative win for the "Pepsi Clear II" side. Henry Farrell, however, argues that she's exactly right:

Brad DeLong tells us that Barbara Ehrenreich's version of left-wing politics are an ‘infantile disorder.’ In support of this claim, he quotes in extenso from a Nation piece that she wrote in 2000, advocating support for Ralph Nader rather than Al Gore. Brad is being both condescending and obtuse - I have difficulty in seeing any evidence whatsover of infantilism in the piece that he quotes. Ehrenreich has two points to make. First - that if you're really committed to major reform of the US political system, voting for the Democrats isn't going to do it. The only way to create a real alternative is to build an alternative social movement - and alternative party - on the ground, which necessarily is going to involve conflict with the institutional interests of the Democratic party. Second - even if we are stuck in a two party system for the foreseeable future, the way for leftists to get their voice heard by the Democrats isn't to roll over and play nice - it's to credibly threaten to vote for somebody else unless the Democrats start pushing for the things that you care about.

There are some very good counter-arguments against voting for Nader, and they're even better in this election than the last one. Because of basic personality flaws, he's an improbable candidate for real social change (although I should say that I know and like some of the people who work for him). He'd be a bad President. This time around, he doesn't have the support of the Greens, or much in the way of supporting organizations (apart from the Republicans). Thus, voting for him wouldn't do anything to help build a viable alternative political movement. Finally, the alternative to a Kerry Presidency is demonstrably too horrible to be contemplated. Still, Ehrenreich is posing a very serious question that Brad doesn't start to answer. If you believe (as Ehrenreich does, and as I do) that the current two party system in the US is systematically flawed, and produces deeply inequitable results, then why should you vote, year in, year out, for candidates who have no intention of changing things? The lesser of two evils; argument may cut it this year; it isn't going to cut it forever.

I don't think I agree. Despite my youthful fantasies, I think we are stuck in a two-party system for the foreseeable future. Exactly why this is so crystallized in my mind this weekend, as the talk at the conference I attended turned to the differences between the American and the Canadian systems. The reason this is so is that a) we have first-past-the-post voting and b) we have a presidential, rather than a parliamentary system.

Other countries, notably Canada, Britain, and New Zealand have first-past-the-post systems, but they're parliamentary, rather than presidential. In these systems, if you don't vote for the party that wins, it doesn't matter which other party you voted for. The country is basically run by the head of the winning party (currently Labour in Britain and NZ, and the Liberals in Canada) and the ten folks he appoints to run it with him. You do yourself some marginal good by voting for a Labour or Liberal MP, who can be expected to exert a little pull over the PM because the PM will want said MP's support in staying at the head of the party. But if you don't vote Labour or Liberal, you can vote Green or Communist or Separatist or Free And Unlimited Coinage of Silver at a Ratio of 16:1, for all the good it will do you, because no matter what party carries your district, your MP is going to do exactly the same thing for the rest of the legislative term: fruitlessly whinge about those bastards running the government. Since you will be doing the same thing at home, this will no doubt make you feel good, but will not change any outcomes.

Indeed, in those systems, there is always the possibility that the winning party will not win quite enough votes to form a government, and thus your little party will get to be the coalition partner reaping political rewards out of its weight class--as the Greens in New Zealand, and the NDP in Canada. So in some ways, the parliamentary system actively rewards third party formation.

In the United States, on the other hand, being the guy in the little third party won't get you the presidency, and will be a positive handicap in the legislature, because our legislature, for various reasons, doesn't have anything like the party discipline of British-style parliamentary systems. Thus, our opposition often gets to help shape policy. This means that there is a large benefit to voting for the dominant opposition party.

But, as Henry says, why not use a third party to pull the Democrats back to where we want them?

This is the delusion of both the right-wing and left-wing fringes. How many times have I heard libertarians bemoaning the lack of proportional representation? Sure, libertarians would get a couple of representatives, but so would Uncle Ralph's Raiders, counterbalancing and possibly overriding any libertarian influence. There is an emotional failure here to recognize that the reason that all of your ideas aren't getting enacted isn't that there's something structurally wrong with "The System" that is preventing it, but that "The System" is rather efficiently weeding out ideas that a majority of the population disagrees with. The problem that libertarians, Naderites, and Henry Farrell have isn't that The Man Done Us Wrong--it's that most people stand foursquare against us.

Given that, I think the only power that Uncle Ralph, or any far left third party has, is the power to make the Democratic president lose -- and ditto the Libertarian party, if it ever manages to get its act together and nominate someone with a decent media profile. It can't make meaningful inroads into the legislature, both because too many people don't like the platform, and because there is too high a premium on voting for a member of the strongest opposition party who can really bring home some pork. Pretending that it's something else -- some deep structural flaw that prevents the American public's true preference for subsidized day care, $5/gallon gasoline and nationlised health care--is the kind of self-delusion that is going to keep the American left in its current state of disarray for as long as its members continue to cling to tired old practice of looking for outside conspiracies to explain its failures.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Meanwhile, back at the ranch . . .

While I was away, the "Bush lied" meme seems to have pretty convincingly blown up, although of course Josh Marshall has tried a hail mary pass, arguing that it's really all a fabrication of that well-known Right Wing Spin Machine, the Washington Post.

I feel somewhat vindicated in my repeated insistence that while I was (and remain) willing to entertain the notion that the Bush administration was stunningly incompetent, I am not willing to entertain (without proofs an order of magnitude better than those so far offered), that Bush & Co. are uniquely venal, dishonest, and manipulative. Dishonest and manipulative are the entry requirements for politics, the sound byte being a horrifically poor means of communicating anything useful. And venality is surprisingly rare among politicians--almost all of them could be making more money doing something else, and George Bush certainly doesn't need any more money than he already had before he ran for office.

This is the problem with the strategy of slinging all the mud you can in the hopes that something -- anything! -- will stick. It's a lesson I would have thought the Democrats would have learned from the Clinton years: if you make a federal case out of every half-assed conspiracy theory, it erodes your credibility when you really have something on your enemy. The relentless attacks on the president since 2002 for everything from his military records to his grammar have made it difficult to make the comparitively easy case that he screwed up the execution in Iraq.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Separate but equal?

I was away last week at a conference on public choice sponsored by the Liberty Fund, which taught me, among other things, an enormous amount about the Canadian political system. The Canadian system seems to me, after this weekend, to be much more fragile than I thought it was -- apparently an Alberta separatist party has just registered itself, and is polling 25% support for breaking off from Canada. Alberta has 10% of the population of Canada, and is a huge net contributor to the country's coffers, not only in tax revenue, but through a variety of gimmicks having to do with commodity prices and such things. If Alberta broke off (probably taking British Columbia with it), it seems unlikely that Ontario could continue to carry the rest of the country on its shoulders. At the very least, that vital portion of the Canadian identity, the lavish federal safety net, might well have to be rethought.

This is not to say, of course, that this is at all likely. But I confess I hadn't really thought it was even possible.

I got much more out of the conference than that, of course, and may have more later. But that may be the most surprising thing I learned during my time in Montreal.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

It takes a village

One of the phrases I like to use at work is "It takes a village......to really f*** things up"

Lots to be upset about in the senate report, but this is one that bugs me right now:

Conclusion 100. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) did not have a focused human intelligence (HUMINT) collection strategy targeting Iraq's links to terrorism until 2002. The CIA had no BLACKED OUT sources on the ground in Iraq reporting specifically on terrorism. The lack of an official BLACKED OUT U.S. presence in the country BLACKED OUT curtailed the Intelligence Community's HUMINT collection capabilities.

Other related parts of the report indicate that we had no HUMINT sources whatsoever after 1998.

For all the scary language in the Bush and Clinton administrations about Iraq's potential for joining WMDs and terrorism, the CIA doesn't appear to have been doing bugger-all about it other than watch from the sky and repeat what UN inspectors and Iraqi-exiles say.

This is a black mark on both administrations. I guess September 11 did change everything. It is just terrifying how unserious we were.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Another angle on the "Defense of Marriage" and a new blog to read

In our rather tortured comment threads on gay marriage, Myria describes chromosomal anomalies that could seriously complicate policing marriage for gender differences. I can't judge the quality of her science, but it seems credible in the level of detail given.

There are any number of other examples, exceptions to the neat (if useless) XX/XY chromosomal sex rule. The degree of fun this could cause in legal proceedings is pretty horrifying to imagine. Either a lot of people (just the Klinefelter's 1:1,000 amongst 300,000,000 adds up to a lot of people) could find their marriages subject to challenge and dissolution by the courts, or the courts would have to create so many exceptions as to make the definitions pretty useless.

This is an issue getting far too little attention in this entire debate because frankly most people are wholly ignorant of the complexities involved. Put simply, "male" and "female" are not definable terms in any meaningful sense. Any attempt to define them rigidly for legal purposes is going to not only screw gays and lesbians, but also have the unintended effect of screwing a whole lot of other people walking around right now, many of whom may not even be aware there's anything different about them from the norm.

It would be a fitting irony if some senator was to vote for the FMA and later have their marriage challenged after the death of their wife by an insurance company that didn't want to pay out and knew there was a chance that by challenging the marriage in court there was a chance that marriage could be dissolved if said senator had some chromosomal anomaly. That is exactly the direction we're heading with these ill thought out attempts to codify prejudice.

Anyone who thinks that wouldn't and won't happen is fooling themselves.

The state and many private entities (including insurance companies) have willingly accepted gender definitions as proffered, or at least as given on a birth certificate, the latter not being the outcome of chromosomal testing. However, such a lawsuit may be a likely by-product of a divisive legal and cultural battle on this issue.

Myria's very nicely designed blog also has a four part series on homosexuality and genetics , and this well-phrased post on defining yourself by what you hate.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Gunned Down

I opened the paper today to find that an old classmate has been shot to death:

MOSCOW (AP) -- An American journalist who launched Forbes Magazine's Russian edition and gained attention for publishing a list of Russia's wealthiest people was shot and killed outside his office in Moscow.

Paul Klebnikov, a 41-year-old of Russian descent, was hit four times and died in a rescue vehicle, Russian news reports said. The radio station Ekho Moskvy said shells of two different caliber were found at the scene, indicating at least two assailants.

That's a shame. Although I didn't keep up with Paul, I enjoyed him when I knew him.

UPDATE: Well now that's just weird. Opening to Paul's yearbook page I find Julian Benello on the facing page. Julian died on Pan Am 103.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Pertrousorating

Some have commented on my use of 'pertrousorating' ("The fine art of talking through your pants") in a prior post. I came up with this word while studying Latin in high school, an unfortunately long time ago. Rich Hall's 'sniglets' were big at the time and my hallmates and I were running out of synonyms for the constant B.S. we were hearing.

I entertained the idea of using this word for me or my blog a while ago, but I was concerned people would think it was even more off-color than....well, than it is. It's a bit awkward - "The Pertrousorator".

"blogosphere" it ain't, but I'm glad to have made a contribution after all these years.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

The Pre-emptive Precautionary Principle

Dan Darling hits the nail on the head (hat tip to our commenter 'Average Joe'):

Suffice it to say that there is more than enough evidence available to support any given conclusion that one might desire to entertain concerning any number of complex issues, like say Iraq and al-Qaeda. The problem as far as policy-makers or the broader intelligence community are concerned then, comes to the issue of making a judgement call. Unfortunately, given the charged political atmosphere that exists within Washington these days, what is all too frequent an occurence is that the people who lose the policy debate have a nasty way of going to the press in order to receive a sympathetic airing of the dissenting view to the general public.

Dan's right. When working with intelligence it is simply unreasonable to expect 'beyond a reasonable doubt' certainty. We will always be operating with incomplete information and tremendous uncertainty. The conversion of these uncertainties into "Lies" and partisan rhetoric, is a somewhat laudable loophole of our liberalism that networks like Al Qaeda and kleptocracies like the former Iraq or Syria can drive a truck through.

Operating in uncertainty inevitably raises the 'precautionary principle' - a willingness to make dramatic and painful changes, or incur significant costs to avoide consequences without ironclad evidence or causality. Consider the following issues:

	Event/Problem	Precautions and cost
1	pollution and potential man-made contributions to global warming	Employment, efficiency, mobility of population
2	concentration of economic power in private hands; pricing and barriers to entry	efficiency, economic freedom, incentives
3	Children born into circumstances with poor chance of success; life-changing accidents in youth	abortion
4	potential unkown environmental effects of genetically engineered crops	Food costs, efficiency, starvation
5	Deterioration of marriage, unstable homes for children, low birthrates	Discrimination against new social structures such as gay marriage
6	Suffering repeated attacks and regional instability from a transnational fundmanentalist terrorist movement residing primarily in, but not officially supported by a group of failed kleptocratic states suppressing or distracting internal rebellion.	War; mistakes and innocent victims, violating U.S. norms of justice such as "innocent until proven guilty"; economic costs of increased regional instability, cost to taxpayers, 'crowding out' of private sector activities by government expansion
Please note that some of these events or effects are stipulated; In some cases, such as gay marriage, I don't really see connections between the cost to mitigate and the event.

At present, the republican coalition would be more likely to invoke 'precautionary principles' in the case of 5 and 6 than in the first four. Democrats are more sympathetic to precautionary principles in items 1 to 3. Four, I believe, really belongs to the fringe anti-globo movement of the left. The anarcho-libertarian view might not allow for precautionary principles at all (look for a comment suggesting that is why that is the only 'consistent' philosophy and a subsequent discussion on the merits of that consistency).

I continue to feel that item 6 is unique. It is the only issue where the problem and the actors' intent are aligned - these people are trying to kill us in large numbers. Furthermore, the actors understand the obstacles we face in eradicating them and use those legalistic obstacles to increase our level of uncertainty.

Unaddressed in much of the political rancor is the fact that "pre-emptive" and precautionary are closely related. Precautions involve forecasting and uncertainty. It's a cheap point to call that lying.

Somewhat off topic, the bit of Mylroie evidence that gets to me, given my proximity to both WTC attacks, is the bit about Khalid Mohammed and Ramzi Yousef having their identities laundered in Iraq-controlled Kuwait. That is about as official as Iraq would dare to be in supporting Al Qaeda.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

More cheap rhetorical tricks

Townhall features two editorials against gay marriage today. Frankly, it's hard to get worked up about them as they are both completely lame. The first is by Maggie Gallagher, who has actually found - gasp - a women who was dissatisfied with her upbringing by lesbian parents:

What was it like for Cassidy being raised by two women she called "Mom" and "My Pat"?

"When growing up, I always had the feeling of being something unnatural," Cassidy says. "I came out of an unnatural relationship; it was something like I shouldn't be there. On a daily basis, it was something I was conflicted with. I used to wish, honestly that Pat wasn't there."

Oh the horror. Well, so far the score is unhappy children from gay marriages: 1, unhappy children from traditional marriages 8 billion. And then there's "more silencing of dissent":

Some people will say if Cassidy's mom and "my Pat" had been legally married, everything would have been fine. Cassidy doesn't think so. "Even if society were open to it, there's just the whole issue of your self-identity. I always had the feeling I was in a lab experiment."

She feels driven to do something, say something to protect other children like her. "Whenever I see it on TV, something inside of me says NO. I don't think it's fair that the kids are being put in this situation. They don't have a choice about it."

Do any other adult children with same-sex parents feel the same way? Will we allow any space in this intense debate between adult combatants for something as simple as one child's feelings?

Gee, do ya think?

Then there's Chuck Colson, who quotes a well-known expert on 'what gays want':

According to Bryce Christensen of Southern Utah University, homosexuals don’t want marriage, at least not marriage as understood for most of the past two millennia. They want what “marriage has become” as a result of cultural changes and bad policy choices.

In addition to the pertrousorating expert* speculating on the motivations of others, Colson also tries his hand at the 'noble savage' fallacy :

Traditionally, the “husband-wife bond” was defined by “mutual sacrifice and cooperative labor.” But that has been replaced by “dual-careerist vistas of self-fulfillment and consumer satisfaction.”

I do agree with one thing in his article:

According to Christensen, no one should be surprised that homosexuals want “the strange new thing marriage has become.” After all, “contemporary marriage . . . certifies a certain legitimacy in the mainstream of American culture.” In addition, it “delivers tax, insurance, life-style, and governmental benefits.”

As I've said before, the state aspects of marriage consist of subsidies and entitlements. These are inherently discriminatory. Why should it be so surprising that all types of couples or unions want access to them? And I suspect Colson's right that gay people, just like everyone else, would like to define the more personal aspects of the relationship themselves, taking from tradition as they see fit.

Ultimately, Colson's article fails, where many polemics do, on being primarily about motivation. This is not about anybody's motivation to destroy marriage, it's about people with different coupling habits wanting access to the same entitlements and legal status as heterosexuals.

One of my commenters declared Marriage a 4,000 year-old institution and worth defending on that basis. But the meaning of marriage has changed, both in a legal and cultural sense. Let's not get too nostalgic for the days, not long ago, when a wife was property and marriage often meant seriously diminished legal standing. Colson might want to read more about Puritans redefining marriage before he waxes too nostalgic.

It's a shame if anyone fells they need the state to 'confer a certain legitimacy' on their private matters. As for the government, politicians should understand that subsidies are inherently discriminatory. There is a slippery slope here, operating by the mechanism of discrimination lawsuits and activism, eventually extending targeted subsidies to all.

* Pertrousorating: the fine art of talking through your pants.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

More vaguely obscene statuary

The esteemed proprietor of Cronaca, David Nishimura, informs me that the statue shown in this post is (loosely) based on the Hercules Farnese (illustrating one of the benefits of a comment section).

Well, fine. Here's some more from the same place. What are these based on? And what are those rabbits doing?


(the pig is vaguely familiar - I thought maybe Bremen Town Musicians, but there was no pig ).

From the desk of Jane Galt:

A fine bit of ranting

Let me rant, please.

Democrats who have been saying that Michael Moore's new movie is misleading drivel that will convince voters of things that are patently untrue (and evidently it's working, to judge by the people I was sitting near on the fourth of July), but that that's okay, because after all, well, y'know, I really, really hate George Bush . . .

Well, I know y'all don't care about my opinion, but I'm going to give it anyway, because frankly, I'm ashamed of some of the people I've heard taking this position. I expected better.

Is it okay because George Bush does it? I dunno, if I find John Kerry making up all sorts of ridiculous nonsense about how his policies will make every American taller, smarter, and sexier, lying to voters about some fictional secret plan to get us out of Iraq by getting Europe to contribute money and troops they don't have, and wouldn't give us if they did, falsely claiming that his platform will reduce the budget deficit, covering up his family's financial activities in order to prevent embarassment--well, y'all just gave me carte blance to make up whatever ridiculous nonsense I can. I don't want to hear any complaints when I dredge up that veterans group Kerry was associated with that plotted to assassinate a few people, and then just accidentally--oops!--forget to mention that Kerry had nothing to do with the plot, and tried to quash it when he found out. All's fair in love and war, baby.

But I wouldn't do that, even if I were supporting Bush for re-election, which, as I explained here, I am not. I wouldn't because it's dishonest. And because when you lie to people all the time, eventually they notice.

But what about Bush? the Democrats wail. He lies all the time!

Children, gather round. I have something very, very difficult to tell you. You aren't going to like it, I'm afraid. None of us likes it -- it makes us all very unhappy. But it must be faced, just the same.

You see, difficult as you will find this to believe, politicians lie. All of them lie. Even nice politicians who agree with us, and are smart, and have really good hair and a nice speaking voice, lie. They lie frequently. They lie about the outcomes of their policies, and they lie about their reasons for enacting them. They lie about their past accomplishments, and they lie about their future plans. In the vast soulless meat market that is our political process, the guy who gives the most misleading impression, without actually getting caught in an out-and-out falsehood, generally wins.

Welcome to adulthood. Sorry I couldn't break it more gently.

If you want to sign off on Michael Moore's tactics because George Bush misled people, you will have not a leg to stand on when your guy misleads people. As he will. Of course, you and everyone who agrees with you will stand around yelling very loudly that what your guy did wasn't lying, not a bit like what those scurrilous bastards on the other side got up to. However, as you may have already noticed, no one except people who already agree with you pays any attention when you say things like this. And the reason that they pay no attention is that it is not true. If you'd step outside the college pep rally atmosphere that passes for partisanship these days, you would already have figured this out.

Politicians lie, and people know they lie, which is why their speech is so aggressively discounted by everyone except their campaign workers. But the reason I don't get worked up over this, the way I do about journalists and movie makers who lie, is that politicians lies are balanced. Every Republican out there alleging that he singlehandedly saved 90,000 orphans from forest fires while in office has an equal and opposite Democrat claiming that said Republican likes to eat babies for breakfast, and invented scurvy.

Michael Moore's two hours of venom-laden innuendo has no counterpart on the right. Oh, you'll complain about Fox News (and I find the relentless cheerleading a little wearing myself), but you'll find just as many conservatives complaining about CNN. Castigate Rush all you want -- you've got Al and Randi now. There's no right wing Michael Moore, though, and when there was, (that Clinton whatever-thingy I couldn't bring myself to watch), I don't recall y'all saying it was okay because Clinton, y'know, lied.

What about me? I say things that are misleading all the time, don't I? I hope not, but I have certainly unwittingly promulgated half-truths in my time.

But here's the difference: I don't have a couple years to work on this stuff. I write off the cuff, and y'all know I write off the cuff. I dredge facts out of dim memory, rely on speaking to experts whose names I'm too lazy to look up, and otherwise am carrying on a conversation, rather than a journalistic enterprise.

But I also do journalism. And when I do journalism, I check stuff. So, of course, does Michael Moore, which makes it even worse, because he knows that what he's saying is true in only the most legalistic sense of the word.

I don't, for example, invite you to draw hazy inferences from the fact that the Saudis gave a defense contract to a firm that was a subsidiary of the Carlyle Group, an organization Bush pere joined -- without mentioning that Mr Bush joined the Carlyle Group only after it had already disposed of the subsidiary. Both facts are, of course, true in one sense -- but putting them together without the third fact gives a completely false impression. Perhaps this is technically not lying. But had I tried to pull such a stunt with my mother, I'd have been walloped just the same.

What Moore does is not journalism--but it is taken as journalism by a significant portion of the audience. He wants it to be taken as journalism. And apparently, so do a lot of people who think they can't win the election without dressing up their campaign ads as documentaries.

I have no stirring closer to wrap this up with, except that I'm disappointed. I mean, are we trying to figure out what the truth is here, in this great social experiment we're all running, or are we just trying to delude people into going along with us? Because while I've certainly, in my time, said stuff that wasn't true, I've never knowingly done so. Everything I write, I pretty much believe -- not in some "larger truth" sense, where I feed you a bunch of completely false statistics in order to convince you to support something I favour, but in the smaller, terribly bourgeois sense that if I tell you that marginal income tax cuts don't measurably increase work hours, it's because I believe that marginal ncome tax cuts don't measurably increase work hours. I may be wrong, and certainly my beliefs about things like taxation are influenced by my beliefs about larger issues of personal liberty and so forth. But I do at least try to tell y'all what I think is true, without leaving anything important out. I would like to think that most people out there feel the same way.

Of course, I know that people do stretch the facts and so forth when they're advocating passionately. But endorsing lying as a policy strikes me as really, well, wrong. I'm sure that's terribly naive and outre. But there you are--when the revolution comes, I'll be the first one with my back against the wall.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Those who live by the sword . . .

Hey, maybe that spontaneous order stuff works after all:

A group of armed, masked Iraqi men threatened Tuesday to kill Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi if he did not immediately leave the country, accusing him of murdering innocent Iraqis and defiling the Muslim religion.

The threats revealed the deep anger many Iraqis, including insurgent groups, feel toward foreign fighters, whom many consider as illegitimate a presence here as the 160,000 U.S. and other coalition troops.

In a videotape sent to the al-Arabiya television station, a group calling itself the "Salvation Movement," questioned how al-Zarqawi could use Islam to justify the killing of innocent civilians, the targeting of government officials and the kidnapping and beheading of foreigners.

"He must leave Iraq immediately, he and his followers and everyone who gives shelter to him and his criminal actions," said a man on the video.

The video marked the first time that an Iraqi group made such a public threat against al-Zarqawi.

. . .

In the video, three men, their faces covered with Arab headscarves, were flanked by rocket propelled grenades and an Iraqi flag. The man speaking had a clear Iraqi accent.

"We swear to Allah that we have started preparing ... to capture him and his allies or kill them and present them as gift to our people." the man said. "This is the last warning. If you don't stop, we will do to you what the coalition forces have failed to do."

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Things that make you go 'Eew'

On my way home from work, there is a roadside place that sells statuary. Waiting at the light, I wonder - has this fellow's course of steroids gone horribly wrong?

Thankfully, there is a better angle, but the steroid theory still seems reasonable:

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Prostitution Discovered

Boy, if he said this, he's wrong, but he may just have been Dowdified:

In his book tour, Bill Clinton has been defending the 60's, noting that the polarization of American politics began with the civil rights, women's rights, gay rights and abortion rights struggles of the 60's and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

I happen to have in front of me Richard Brookhiser's introduction to the Hamilton edition of the New-York Journal of American History (gee whiz guys, take some of that Gilder money and update the site). It describes a scene immediately after John Jay's negotiation of a treaty with Britain (1795):

On July 18th, angry New York Republicans called a meeting at the intersections of Broad and Wall streets to condemn Jay and his handiwork. Five thousand people showed up - one out of every ten New Yorkers. Alexander Hamilton, who had retired as Treasury Secretary six months earlier, also came, along with Senator Rufus King and a few other Federalists, and tried to put in a good word for the treaty, but the crowd would have none of it; they heckled and booed him, and according to some accounts, stoned him.

The papers of Rufus King, held by the library of the N-YHS, contain a letter to King from the Massachusetts Federalist George Cabot commenting on the affair: "It was observed here that your Jacobins were prudent to endeavor to knock out Hamilton's brains, to reduce him to an equality with themselves." Cabot could joke about it, but barely. But to put the fracas in perspective, imagine an angry crowd of 800,000 New Yorkers; imagine that some former cabinet secretary, Henry Kissinger or Robert Rubin, tried to argue with them; and imagine that he was injured for his pains. That is how seriously the founding generation took war and peace.

I was at an Ivy League college when a considerably smaller group managed to keep Jeane Kirkpatrick from speaking on campus. Fortunately, no stones were involved.

At any rate, 'political polarization' is hardly a 20th Century invention. I might also observe that the most vituperative rhetoric tends to concern the smallest stakes while extraordinary compromise often marks the largest and most serious. I'm not a historian, but it does seem this is one reason slavery survived the Constitutional Convention even as smaller matters provoked several states to hold out on ratification.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Clintome

I was happy to blow $25 (yes, it's being discounted) on Clinton's autobiography. I figured Kakutani's review erred on the catty side. I was wrong. I'm only 25 pages in and I can't stop putting it down. I keep thinking it was ghost-written by George W. Bush's caricature.

The editor's red pen must have been out of ink. Every page contains a useless phrase or sentences, such as "It was an interesting experience" or "it was an exciting time to me" or, despite a molehill of subsequent evidence to the contrary "A lot happened to me while I lived on Thirteenth Street." Yawn.

There's plenty of awkward usage as well:

Once, when I was mowing the lawn, I looked down to see a rattlesnake sliding along with the lawn mower, apparently captivated by the vibrations. I didn't like the vibes, so I ran like crazy and escaped unscathed. (p. 24)

Didn't like the vibes? I guess that rattler wasn't groovy after all.

Then there's the useless detail, piled high like some aging rock star screaming city names. Apparently, he didn't want to leave anyone out, even if they play almost no part in the following narrative*:

My grandmother's brother, Uncle Buddy and his wife, Ollie, were the primary members of my extended family. Buddy and Ollie had four children, three of whom were gone from Hope by the time I came along. Dwayne was an executive with a shoe manufacturer in New Hampshire. Conrad and Falba were living in Dallas, though they both came back to Hope often and live there today. Myra, the youngest, was a rodeo queen. She could ride like a pro, and she later ran off with a cowboy, had two boys, divorced, and moved home, where she ran the local housing authority. Myra and Falba are great women who laugh through their tears and never quit on family and friends. I'm glad they are still part of my life. I spent a lot of time at Buffy and Ollie's house, not just in my first six years in Hope, but for forty more years until Ollie died and Buddy sold the house and moved in with Falba.(p.14)

On top of all that detail, we have a hefty helping of cliches and bromides:

I learned a lot from the stories my uncle, aunts, and grandparents told me: that no one is perfect but most people are good; that people can't be judged only by their worst or weakest moments; that harsh judgments can make hypocrites of us all; that a lot of life is just showing up and hanging on; that laughter is often the best, and sometimes the only response to pain. Perhaps most important, I learned that everyone has a story - of dreams and nightmares, hope and heartache, love and loss, courage and fear, sacrifice and selfishness All my life I've been interested in other people's stories. I've wanted to know them, understand them, feel them. When I grew up and got into politics, I always felt the main point of my work was to give people a chance to have better stories. (p.15)

Perhaps, as our final thanks to this surprising President, we could give him a better story. Or at least an editor worth a damn.

____

* Clinton's insistence on throwing in a good word for everyone reminds me of a "Little Bit of Fry and Laurie" skit (called "The Burt") where Hugh Laurie plays a relatively unknown showbiz hack who pretends to know everyone Every woman is a 'fascinating woman, fascinating" and every guy is an "amazing character with a derived nickname:

S: Did you actually know Richard Burton?
H: Oh yes, yes. I knew him, yes. Well, in as much as anyone really KNEW Burton. Aah, yes. I was very fond of 'the Burt'. He was an amazing character, amazing character.
S: Mmmm, now Elizabeth Taylor, of course...
H: Well now, Liz you see, was a joy... a dream... a treasure... marvelous. If you could have seen them together... wuh huh!
S: Did you ever...
H: Oh good lord yes, yes. As a matter of fact I was, uh, I was, uh, best man at their wedding.
S: Really?
H: Hmmm.
S: Which one?
H: All of them.
S: Now Geilguld and Richardson were...
H: Yes. They never married, of course.
S: No.
H: No.
S: Did you know them?
H: Oh good lord yes, yes I knew. Yes, yes. Amazing characters, yes. "The Geil" and "the Rich" used to ask me for advice. They used to call me their "guru". Huh huh huh huh.
S: Now, around this time you must have met...
H: Well, just about everyone, really.
S: Really?
H: Yes. I knew everyone, and everyone knew me.
S: You knew everyone?
H: I knew absolutely everyone, yes.
S: And everyone knew you.
H: And absolutely EVERYONE knew me. Yes, yes.
S: Right. What did you think of Simon Condywust?
H: Simon...?
S: Condywust. Didn't you know him?
H: Oh yes, yes, I knew him. Oh yes, yes. Well, everyone knew "the Condy". Yes, he was an amazing character, amazing.
S: Mmm hmmm. What about Maureen Limpwippypippydodo?
H: Oh well now, yes. She was a fascinating woman. Fascinating. I was fascinated by Maureen for, oh, many years.
S: Mmm hmmm. Was she an amazing character?
H: Well no. She was a woman. The men were amazing characters, the women were fascinating. Yes.
S: Colin FenchmosleythinkIhave?
H: Oh, oh lord, yes. What a charac... yes. What, "the Fench"? Yes, yes, knew him terribly well, terribly well. Yeah.
S: What did you think of Fenella HaHaHaHaHaHaHa-spuit?
H: Fascinating woman, fascinating... yeah, yeah.
S: And what about Peter Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee?
H: Well yes. Well, you see... ha ha ha ha. They broke the mold when they made Peter. Ha ha.
S: And Evelyn Brokethemoldwhentheymadepeter?
H: Delightful... woman?
S: Anthony Delightfulwoman?
H: Oh, splendid chap.
S: Dick van Dyke?
H: You just made that up!

I definitely recommend the tape if you can get your hands on it. Don't miss the "locust' sketch.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

I've got a cunning plan!

Given recent discussions, I'd like to point out that the individual quoted below is typical of only a certain lunatic fringe. As ever, despite the continuing existence of idiots in most parts of the political spectrum, no 'proportional representation' is promised. Despite your best effort to make me read Coulter or listen to Limbaugh I won't. So there.

If you are not a "Black Adder" fan I'll have to explain the title phrase. One of the recurring characters in the Black Adder series is Baldrick, a 'dogsbody' who aspires to living in a giant turnip. Baldrick's constant slow-moving machinations provide canon fodder for Rowan Atkinson's wordy insults. Pondering Blackadder's latest predicament for a few minutes his eyes widen suddenly and he announces "I've got a cunning plan!" - such as this one to escape a French prison:

BA: "We do nothing."
EB: "Yep. It's another world-beater.
BA: "Wait -- I haven't finished. We do nothing until
our heads have actually been cut off."
EB: "And then we spring into action?"
BA: "Exactly! You know when you cut a chicken's head off, it runs round and
round the farmyard."
EB: "Yeees..."
BA: "Well, we wait until our heads have been cut off then we run round and round
the farmyard, out the farm gate and escape."

Lloyd Williams, of Princeton NJ (see page 9, left column of the pdf) provides an amusing example of the 'cunning plan' school of anti-administration rhetoric in which reasoning is tortured into confessing such evil motivations on the part of the administration that any number of ridiculous prognostications seem plausible.

Four years ago, when George Bush perpetrated an unthinkable fraud on the political process by fixing the presidential election, the only people to get suspicious were the under-classes long accustomed to being exploited in such an evil fashion. Most Americans didn’t care because they failed to comprehend that a wholesale plan to disenfranchise Democrats had been painstakingly planned and carefully implemented.

In the interim, Dick Cheney, who really wears the pants in the White House, seized on every opportunity to fleece the government’s coffers, awarding billion-dollar, no-bid, no-compete contracts to his already rich cronies. And only after the fact do most people now realize that the invasion of Iraq was all about war profiteering, especially for Halliburton, Cheney’s old company.

If I could 'fix' an election, I would certainly deliver a more convincing victory. Must all be part of the plan! Also important, call your 'wholesale plan to disenfranchise Democrats' a "Campaign". Bastards!

Since conventional wisdom suggests Dubya's a moron, it's time to establish Nosferatu'sCheney's incredible long-term planning skills. Who cannot see that it is simpler to make years of preparation for war and spend huge amounts of the budget and international credibility than to just sign contracts with the old corrupt regime in Baghdad? Before making Halliburton rich, Cheney diabolically got rid of the bulk of his financial stake in it. To further cover his tracks, he made it's stock price go way down first so that the remainder of his stake was 'temporarily' reduced in value. Then he pledged to give away his upside, and keep only fixed-value payments unaffected by profits. Only a genius could both sell out of a deteriorating companies to fleece investors AND stay in to make a killing on war profiteering for charity! Martha Stewart eat your heart out.

Recently, when challenged about the obvious conflicts-of- interest by Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, the vice president contemptuously cut him off with, “Go [expletive] yourself!” I call it a crisis when you have a regime in control that feels this comfortable hurling obscenities right on the floor of the Capitol at a duly elected representative making a legitimate inquiry about an apparent scam.

This arrogant attitude is an early indication of the Bush junta’s approach for this autumn’s assault on the White House. Sad to say, it might take more than a mere honest election to remove the scoundrels. If they lost, I wouldn’t put it past them to fake a state of emergency and declare martial law. After all, isn’t martial law the brand of democracy Bush has advocated for Iraq after the transfer of sovereignty?

Use of profanity is a crisis! Next time someone gives me the finger on the highway, I'm calling a war crimes tribunal. Anyone who says 'f**k' to continuing charges of conflicts of interest after being pressured into giving away $18 million is obviously planning a militay takeover of the government. Do I have to draw you a map?

More seriously, surely an attorney can understand the problem with this sort of insult-by-speculation. Let's try it: Since Mr. Williams calls the Bush Administration a 'Junta' I 'wouldn't put it past him' to pull out a gun and assassinate the President. After all, isn't the correct reaction to a Junta a revolt? Based on his view of the way, I 'wouldn't put it past him' to put Saddam Hussein back in power. After all, isn't Saddam's corrupt tyranny the brand of regime he has advocated?

The primary problem is that the United States today is more evenly divided between “the haves” and “the have-nots,” two groups that cannot even agree on fundamental questions of morality. And when your definitions of right and wrong differ, there’s a big problem, brother.

True. When a lawyer can't understand the difference between his guy losing a crucial state in a statistical tie and a conspiracy to 'fix' the election, there is a 'big problem, brother'.

On a brighter note, it seems a positive development we are half 'haves' and that George Soros, Therese Heinz-Kerry and most of Manhattan are not among their number!

The right feels that the war is still worth losing lives over, so it could care less about sacrificing young American lives to the propaganda machine.

They think the war is BOTH worth losing lives over AND 'couldn't care less' about sacrificing lives to a propaganda machine. Only the very cunning could hold those two opposing thoughts in one head.

It reflexively approves of this administration’s handling of the war, of the Bush Doctrine of unilateral, unprovoked aggression against the so-called Axis of Evil, of the further expansion of unchecked governmental powers under the invasive and repressive Patriot Act, of the reinstatement of the military draft, and of the homo-erotic, sadomasochistic, interrogation tactics employed at Abu Ghraib prison.

Reflexive approval is the only term for it. Have the Democrats call for draft reinstatement. Have everyone but Rush Limbaugh loudly disapproves of the tactics in Abu Ghraib. Have Brent Scowcroft object to the Iraq war; create a 'fake' alliance. Have Democrats vote overwhelmingly for the Patriot Act, but then refrain from using its incredibly repressive powers to look at library records. Diabolical indeed.

If Bush loses again in November, and resorts to some shady shenanigans to stay in the Oval Office, I fear the civil unrest likely to ensue. And unless they honor the Geneva Conventions, I wouldn’t be surprised if the domestic insurgents did the president a serious rudeness and took some naked pictures of him on a leash in a studded dog collar.

It's as if Che Guevara had kids by Tony Soprano. I'm inspired to attempt his style of rhetoric again: If Lloyd uses 'shady shenanigans' to get inside my house, some 'domestic insurgents' might see that he leaves with a logic textbook embedded in his colon..

Alas, poor Baldrick, I knew him, Horatio,
a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Good for her

Strom Thurmond's biracial daughter is attempting to join the Daughters of the Confederacy. Sniffle. Isn't integration beautiful?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Lacklustre news on jobs

This month's job report was not what we were hoping for: a mere 112,000 jobs were created last month. This, and weaker GDP numbers that were published last week, give some credence to the idea that recent strong economic growth has been too dependent on low interest rates to be sustainable. But at least two groups of people can take heart: those who want Alan Greenspan to go slow on the rate hikes, and those who want John Kerry in the White House come next January. The Iowa Electronic Markets have reacted accordingly.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Huh?

Some people, it seems, have run out of satisfying things to berate the Bush administration about, so now they are looking for hypothetical horror stories with which to scare themselves and their fellow travelers. Like John Quiggin, positing that the Bush administration is going to try to inflate its way out of the budget deficit:

In keeping with the CT tradition of bringing you tomorrow’s talking points today, I thought I’d look a bit further than the current election campaign and consider the implications of a Bush victory. On past form, there’s no reason to suppose that a second term will lead Bush to abandon his tax cuts, or to propose any significant net reduction in expenditure. At least not when there’s an obvious alternative, that only a few shrill Democrat economists and some incredibly out-of-date Republicans would ever object to. The US government has at its disposal and endless source of costless wealth - the printing press that turns out US dollars. Hence there’s no need to do anything tough like raising taxes or cutting Socil Security benefits. The only problem is that, according to some economists, reliance on the printing press as a source of government finance is likely to cause inflation.

I'm no monetary economist or anything, but last time I checked, the Federal Reserve was in charge of monetary policy, not the executive branch of the Federal government. Yes, treasury runs the printing presses, but with the invention of this thing we call the "bank", actual currency has become a smaller and smaller fraction of total money supply. (And a significant portion of our currency supply -- I've heard estimates as high as one-half -- is held abroad, by foreigners in countries where neither the banking system nor the local currency is a good store of value.) Most of the current US money supply is held in the form of bank deposits. And the growth of bank deposits is controlled, in various ways, by the federal reserve.

I suppose if the presses ran at Weimar Republic levels they might be able to get some inflationary juice, but this would hardly go unnoticed by the financial markets, who would jack up interest rates double-quick, obviating the benefits of eroding the face value of our debt -- hurting the treasury, in fact, since my understanding is that once inflationary expectations are established, debt trades at a higher real interest rate than before. (There's another benefit to the government, which is that inflation acts as a small tax on the primary purchasers of money, but I think the interest rate effect would swamp any benefit from currency sales.)

This is why, despite the fact that we've run deficits nearly continuously since 1960, no government, either Democrat or Republican, has attempted what we might call The Weimar Solution. Nor will the Bush administration, first of all because they can't, and second of all, because even if they could, they wouldn't.

Now, John Quiggin is an economist, and I am not, so maybe he has some other monetary inflation mechanism in mind. But if not--well, my goodness, don't we have enough things to criticise Bush about without making up fairy tales?

Update Several people have suggested that I'm missing a joke. Perhaps so -- if you look up the word gullible in the dictionary, you'll find my picture. Certainly, Mr Quiggin's tone is tongue in cheek. But this isn't the first time I've heard this silliness -- Michael Kinsley makes the same suggestion in today's Washington Post.

Also, I know that the Federal Reserve is not a creature of the constitution, and is thus technically open to congressional action. But this congressional action would be politically impossible, as well as having extremely nasty consequences, including, as I outlined above, spooking the markets and driving up the price of US debt, which would quickly destroy any gains from the original inflation.

Theoretically, George Bush could also appoint a new Fed chief who was amenable to inflationary action. But this would have the same results as congressional action, only quicker. Not gonna happen.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

The right kind of fireworks (did I say 'right'?)

We interrupt the partisan fireworks for some real ones. I took these tonight.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Oy Vey

Comments on the last few posts have gone in two directions - one very constructive, the other a deteriorating tennis match of broader and broader left-right generalizations.

Has somebody else already defined a 'law' for this? Let me try my version:

The comment section of any post criticizing destructive political rhetoric ultimately provides more vivid examples thereof.

If it isn't taken can I call it Dreck's Law?