Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

W

If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash, And the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash, And your data is corrupted cause the index doesn't hash, Then your situation's hopeless, and your system's gonna crash.

I have fixed the 'W problem' in the comments. You can stop using 'vv' (as in Vvhat I'm trying to say is, 'I vvant to suck your blood'). If you have problems with other banned strings, our complete blacklist is here. 'Jane' and I can remove strings on request, but they have all found their way on the blacklist because of spam attacks. I don't know how 'W' got in, but I suspect Jane or Contributor A used the 'blacklist this' option in an email and stuck it in inadvertently.

I now return to not blogging. Many thanks to contributor A for filling the void.

By the way, all bloggers get around to the donut question eventually. I did, twice.

From the desk of Contributor A:

A note for Jane, a shout-out to y'all, and my valediction

Jane, I don't know how I broke your site, but commenters can now not use the letter W. I am the only one with that wonderful wordy power. Wwwwww. Ooh, it feels so good! Sorry guys. It just does. But Jane, you might want to look into fixing it.

It's been interesting week (ooh, there I go again - wwww...). This was my first actual blogging experience, as in writing daily commentary on this and that. (My Mistakes Were Made was quite a bit different.) I've learned a lot. Blogging can be caricatured as an arrogant guy sitting around thinking that each of his thoughts are so perfect and valuable that the world must have access to them. But in reading all the comments I've realized what a two-way street it is. I learned a lot from the comments and found it humbling to have a couple of my hastily posted opinions so thoroughly grappled with by so many smart people.

I didn't do much political stuff, because it's been kind of a slow news week. But several commenters have wondered: am I really so politically different from Jane? Abusing my power with the W key a few more times, I'll finish by answering that question with a few questions:

Why doesn't the president promise to fire anyone who outed a covert CIA expert on WMD to score short-term political points?

Will abortion be legal across America in five years' time?

Who is going to pay what I like to call the "George Bush debt" that has been racked up by the current "conservative" administration?

What is the plan for repairing America's all-time low esteem in the eyes of the world?

Why doesn't anyone in the administration seem to think the answer to this last question matters?

Will the Republican party be the political wing of the evangelical movement again in 2008?

Who's it going to be, GOP? Give me a choice. Tempt me.

Thanks guys, and welcome back, Jane.

From the desk of Contributor A:

I must be dreaming

God, how I hate celebrity advocacy. Oh, how I hate celebrity advocacy. This is roughly 35% because I think most celebrities who plump for some cause are stumbling airheads doing so because their publicists told them it would be good press, and about 65% because they back causes that are either silly or actually make me angry. I have dreams of Tim Robbins on fire.

But I never thought I would dream this: Celebrities backing a cause I wholeheartedly agree with -- and one without any cutesy appeal whatsoever! Yes, I am talking about celebrities against farm subsidies, a new campaign from Oxfam America.

Are you wiping your screen with a hankie, unsure you read that right? Yes, Michael Stipe, Coldplay, Antonio Banderas, Thom Yorke and more have taken on a cause darling to economists, but to few others. America, Europe and Japan egregiously subsidize farms, wasting their own tax dollars to produce food that's dumped on world markets, depressing prices and undercutting poor-world farmers. Yet there are too many links in that chain, too many supply-and-demand issues going on here, to make this the kind of huggable issue that attracts celebrities.

And yet! And yet! Minnie Driver: "People think more aid will help, but it won't. Trade is the surest way of decreasing the savage amount of poverty in our world. These countries have got to be able to trade fairly." Minnie, you were not only adorable in Grosse Pointe Blank! You are speaking my language! Will you marry me, right here, on this blog?

Ahem. Sorry. Got carried away there.

From the desk of Contributor A:

Friday favorites

Ok, this is my blog for only one more day, and I haven't worked up anything newsy to get outraged about today (it's not yet noon, though). So here are a few things I like that I'd like to pass on before I hand the baton back to Jane G.

If you're interested in langauge remotely--and most people are--read Language Log. Most smart people think language as the set of rules they learned in English, and how to apply them to writing and speech. This blog by a few academic linguists shows you how scientists who study language think about it, which is quite different. Many of my myth-busting ideas have had some genesis in something I read there.

Achewood. A comic strip. You will think it is genius or you will shake your head in total confusion. I am in the former category. It takes a few strips to get into it. Then you are hooked, forever.

Speaking of comics, my friend Emily Flake does a great strip too: Lulu Eightball.

If you like photography and you are not on Flickr yet, you are basically crazy.

I bet lots of you are both way into politics and way into statistics. So you probably already know about Dave Liep's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, but if you don't, you should.

If you are way into politics and language--recurring themes here--you may be as dismayed as I am about the miserable state of political rhetoric in America in 2005. It wasn't always so.

Happy clicking.

Update: I totally forgot, a thing for all you who love the blogs and think mainstream media isn't keeping up with them: a new radio show, distributed by PRI, called "Open Source", which makes bloggers and IMers an integral part of their show experience in the same way callers have always been for talk radio. Check out the blog, and become a source yourself. Full disclosure that a close friend, Brendan Greeley, is the blogger/producer/wizard behind many of the show's innovative aspects. Friendship aside, it's still pretty rad.

From the desk of Contributor A:

MythBusters: Special Donut Edition

Did Kennedy really say he was a jelly donut?

This came up in the comments, and I tried to reply there, but MT wouldn't let me, flagging words like "was" and "way" as "questionable content". Huh? Anyway, I have the power, for one week only, to clear this up in a main post.

Kennedy told the audience in Berlin "Ich bin ein Berliner." Nouns derived from a place name in German, used in this kind of sentence, don't normally take the indefinite article ein. Standard German is Ich bin Berliner, Ich bin Deutscher, Ich bin Amerikaner, etc. If you learned any German in elementary school, you might have learned the ditty "Ich bin Ausländer und spreche nicht gut deutsch." Ausländer comes from Ausland, "abroad", and so takes no ein.

By contrast, if you want to say that you are an inanimate object, you would use the indefinite article ein: "Kein Mensch ist eine Insel" -- "No man is an island."

So when Kennedy used the ein, everyone knew what he meant--in the audio, you can hear a hearty cheer--but it did kind of sound like he was referring to himself as the donut known as a Berliner. Some say you can hear laughs in the cheers. I leave it to you to decide.

UPDATE!: One of the comments links to an About.com piece quoting a German linguist saying that the indefinite article "ein" can and should be used when you are identifying yourself or someone else as metaphorically a member of a group like "Berliners". Under this logic, Kennedy was right to say "Ich bin ein Berliner." To have said "Ich bin Berliner" would have been to say that he was literally from Berlin.

Quite so, it seems, and this subtlety never dawned on me in my student year in Germany. Googling "Ich bin ein Bayer", "I am a Bavarian", turns up in the first few hits, this exchange between an interviewer and his subject:

[Interviewer]: Daß ich ein Norddeutscher bin, habe ich erst bemerkt, als ich nach Bayern kam, indem ich eben Nichtbayer war.

Prof. Hoyer:
Ich denke ja. Es ist mir ziemlich bald aufgefallen, daß alle sich hier als Bayern fühlen. "Ich bin ein Bayer aus Überzeugung", habe ich hier oft gehört.

Interviewer: "I first noticed that I was a north German when I came to Bavaria, in that I wasn't Bavarian."

Prof. Hoyer: "I think so. It occured to me quickly that everyone feels Bavarian here. "I'm a Bavarian by conversion," I've often heard here.

[Emphasis and translation mine.]

Donut myth status: debunked! Well done, President Kennedy, and well done, commenters.

From the desk of Contributor A:

Chill out

Fred Kaplan has an angry "war stories" column in Slate today. The feature is subtitled "military analysis", but as is sadly often the case with Kaplan, there is no such thing in this piece.

Instead, there's an incredulous attack on the fact that the Bush administration seems to be replacing the phrase "global war on terrorism" with "global struggle against violent extremism". Kaplan poses three questions. I'll do him and the world the favor of answering them:

First, this is the administration's solution to the spike in terrorist incidents, the Taliban's resurgence in Afghanistan, and the politico-military deterioration in Iraq�to retool the slogan?

No.

Second, the White House and the Pentagon are just now coming around to the idea that the struggle is as much ideological as military?

No.

The Times story doesn't notice what appears to be the driving force behind the new slogan�a desire for a happier acronym... Does [Steven] Hadley, and do all our other top officials, really believe this nonsense?

No.

Regardless of what you think of both the GWOT metaphor and Bush's terror-fighting policies, this is a pretty silly column. To expand on the above:

1) I seriously doubt the National Security Council met, came up with the GSAVE acronym, knocked off for a three-martini lunch and took the rest of the day off, too proud of themselves to speak.

2) Bush has been talking about the need to defeat extremist ideology for years, a fact that Kaplan well knows.

3) I can't speak for Steven Hadley's state of mind without being Steven Hadley, but I'll be that he doesn't think defeating terror requires nothing more than a happy-sounding acronym.

Kaplan seems outraged that the Bush administration focused on the military aspects of fighting terror for too long. This is, at least, debatable and possibly true. So why the outrage that they've decided to tweak a catchphrase to reflect the evolution of their thinking in a direction he agrees with?

I'll pose my own question: can I have the "war stories" column? I promise at least to attempt military analysis.

From the desk of Contributor A:

MythBusters

Over at Language Log, a fun story and a debunked myth. The reconstructed Globe theatre in London is putting on Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida in what is as close as possible to the actual speech of Shakespeare's time. But the BBC story cited here also makes a ridiculous statement -- that the Elizabethan pronounciation is "completely comprehensible if you happen to come from North Carolina". This is probably based on the silly myth that in Appalachia people speak like Shakespeare. (At best, they retain a few pronounciations, words and usages that have been lost elsewhere.)

If there's a field you know fairly well, chances are there are a few myths about it that drive you up the wall. Mine's language. No, Virginia, the Eskimos do not have 200 words for snow, the Chinese character for "crisis" does not combine "danger" and "opportunity", and there is a Russian word for "freedom", Mr Reagan.

People seem to believe hogwash if it validates some notion they cherish. The Eskimos (sorry, "Inuit" -- and by the way, it's also probably not true that "Eskimo" means "blubber-eater", though they do prefer Inuit) aren't simple natives--they have hundreds of words for something we just have one for! There is a secret tribe of hill people who speak exactly like the world's greatest poet, and we can find them and transport ourself to 1600! The lack of a word for X in language Y means the Y people cannot even conceive of X! There is so much we can learn from the ineffably deep Chinese!

Readers are invited to debunk their favorite too-good-to-be-true myths. (Urban legends of the "kidney-in-the-bathtub" sort not so much, though that's a fun game too.)

From the desk of Contributor A:

Toot

It is bad form to blow your own horn, but our dear Jane left her horn in my hands at just the right time, so I'll blow it for her: as several readers have pointed out in the comments, she was mentioned in John Leo's US News and World Report column this week (August 1st issue):

Today, yet another round of inflated estimates is breaking out, this one on the number of homeless veterans. A UPI story a few months back reported that nearly 300,000 veterans are homeless on any given night. If so, as blogger Megan McArdle pointed out a few weeks ago on Asymmetrical Information, that would mean that every single homeless person in America must have served in the armed forces, since 300,000 is about the total number of the homeless. The 2000 census, covering people living in shelters but not those living on the street, counted only 170,706 homeless people.

Nicely done, JG. One of my favorite things about her is her ability instantly to detect numbers and "facts" that don't pass the sniff test.

From the desk of Contributor A:

Profile me

Since Friday, my morning commute has been interrupted with an announcement: "Starting July 22nd, passengers are required to submit to random checks of packages, backpacks and large bags. This is for your personal safety."

Some might quote Franklin: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." But every day we give up a little liberty for some safety. I am not at liberty to own a nuclear weapon. You are not at liberty to carry a knife on a plane. (Slate has a handy explainer on the legal footing for bag-checks here.)

But we all want to keep this to a minimum, for both principled and practical reasons. There is no way to check every package on the subway. What to do? Random checks? Is "random" really wise?

I have a suggestion: check me, and those like me. I am a 30-year old male, who travels alone with a backpack to and from work every day. Please don't screen grandma over there, with her grandbaby. The gaggle of fourteen-year-old girls? Leave them to gossip about who's doing it at their school. Rabbi Weinstein? Move on, and have my seat while you're at it. You look tired, and it's hot out there.

Terrorists are overwhelmingly young males (with a few young females added to the mix in Israel and the Palestinian territories, which just goes to show you how grim that situation is. I don't know of any other recent female terrorists.) Would anyone object if the police's guidelines were to make sure that most of their checks singled out young men with packages travelling alone?

What about going further? This is where our stomachs churn. While young men are relatively privileged by their age and sex, if we also singled those who look Muslim, or light brown, we would be targeting groups that are already in a tight spot in America. I can't support it.

Is this a sensible moral distinction? Profiling is all right if it singles out groups that are relatively privileged, but it's not OK if it singles out the relatively weak? Or must all rules apply to everyone equally always? My gut feeling is that it's better to be inconsistent than to be racist or wildly impractical.

From the desk of Contributor A:

A muddled medical metaphor

So the AFL-CIO is bursting apart, with member unions representing about a third of membership and funding either boycotting this week's convention or leaving entirely.

This comes, obviously, at an awkward time for Democrats. They've been reeling politically. And just when they had started scoring points on the Karl Rove affair -- for the first time ever, a recent WSJ/Newsweek poll showed negative ratings on "honest and straightforward" for Bush -- the headlines were siezed away from them by one John Roberts.

And now their main organizing and get-out-the-vote people, the unions, are busy tearing themselves apart. I was put in mind of a lung-cancer patient whose begins to improve slightly when suddenly his liver and pancreas decide to go to war with one another. Then I was struck by the thought that this is a pretty grim, not to mention confused, metaphor.

Readers are invited to submit their best representation of the latest crisis for organized labor and the Democratic Party.

(See this tutorial on coming up with truly incompetent metaphors.)

From the desk of Contributor A:

Hi there

I'm very flattered to have been asked to fill in for Jane a bit this coming week as she takes a well-earned vacation. This is my first time doing regular blogging. Hello. How are you?

I am not Jane, of course. I have seen guest-bloggers filling in for vacationing bloggers who have infuriated readers. "Please come back!", they appeal to the regular blogger in the comments. "Your replacement is a moron and his politics are loathesome, and I bet he smells like sweaty socks!" I hope not to be terrible. I do.

My politics and specialties are a bit different from hers, which is why Jane--who is also my cubicle-mate--and I have been known to drive coworkers out of the room with one of our multi-hour debates, shaking their heads and muttering darkly. There will be no recipes from me, unless you are interested in one of my many exciting variations on Kraft mac and cheese.* Maybe a bit of my thoughts on US foreign policy, language, and journalism. Let's see how it goes.

* (A can of those spicy tomatoes and green chilies can make a tuna-mac say "Arriba!" Make the mac. Add tuna, and then the tomatoes and chilies. You might have to heat it back up in the microwave after adding the cold ingredients. Garnish with nothing.)

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Public Service Announcement

No, I'm not turning this into a cooking blog. I've just been cooking a lot recently, and thought I'd share with y'all some of the recipes that have gotten raves from those I force-feed. There will be econ-blogging later.

However, I'm heading down to Maryland on vacation this week, and while I'm planning to continue blogging, I thought it would be nice to get a guest blogger in here to substitute. I hope y'all will give a hearty welcome to Contributor A (not his real name), a friend who has long frequented the comments section, and has his own dormant (yet nonetheless outstanding!) blog with former roommate Contributor B.

Incidentally, Contributor A can vouch for the superb eating quality of the Blueberry Buckle recipe in the previous post, for which I was made fun of. I'd like to see you laugh after you've tried some of that there coffee cake, I would.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Recipe of the Day: Blueberry Buckle

With New Jersey blueberries selling for 99 cents at my local A&P, I've been making Blueberry Buckle, aka coffee cake with blueberries in it. This is one of the easiest things in the world to make, and ever so good.

Preheat oven to 375 fahrenheit

For cake:

Mix together until smooth and creamy:

1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter, softened
3/4 cup sugar
1 egg

Stir in 1/2 cup milk

Sift together and add:

2 cups sifted¹ flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder

Stir in 2 cups washed blueberries (usually about one box) that have been picked over to remove unripe berries and stems

Put into a 9x9 greased square pan

Topping:

1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter
1/4 cup dark brown sugar
1/4 cup white sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinammon
1/3 cup flour

Mash it all together until it's a uniform consistency, and sprinkle over the top of the cake. Bake 45-55 minutes.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Best Pancake Recipe Ever

From Betty Crocker's 1950 Picture Cookbook:

Several hours/night before: Soften 3 tablespoons (a little less than half a stick) of unsalted butter¹

Start by separating 3 eggs (you can use something like this if you don't know how to separate eggs by passing the yolk back and forth between the two half shells. I have a little plastic one that cost $2 or so, which I bought at a kitchen store.)

In a mixing bowl, beat the yolks with a hand mixer or whisk.

Add 1 2/3 cup of buttermilk and 1 tsp baking soda

With a stand mixer or hand mixer, begin beating the egg whites until they are stiff and glossy

Sift together:

1 1/2 cups sifted² all purpose (not self-rising) flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 tsp salt

Add sifted dry ingredients to the liquid.

Check your eggs. If they're stiff and glossy, and a scoop stays on the spoon even when it's tilted vertical, they're done. Be careful not to overbeat, as they'll separate.

Don't add the egg whites yet. Instead, beat in the softened butter and 1/2 tsp vanilla.

Once all these ingredients have been harmoniously blended, you gently fold in your egg whites. Folding means you don't stir; you ever so delicately bring liquid from the bottom of the bowl and pull it over the egg whites, repeating until the egg whites have blended with the rest. The object is to keep the air beaten into the egg whites where it belongs: in your batter, making it light and fluffy. Air is something of an escape artist, but as long as you're gentle, you should be fine. (Even if you're not gentle, the pancakes will taste fine; they just won't be as fluffy.

Cook the way you would normally cook pancakes, but be aware that the batter is very thick, and the pancakes will surprise you with their height. Don't worry about this. The inside is light and fluffy, and soaks up an amazing amount of syrup. For best results, use a stainless steel or aluminum pan, which may require you fry them in butter, but will give you a crisper exterior than you can get with nonstick.

1. If you don't have unsalted butter, you may use salted butter, and omit the salt later in the recipe

2. i.e. you sift a couple of cups of flour, and then scoop 1 1/2 cups of flour into the sifter to sift together with the other dry ingredients

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Summer gadget fest

So a while back, I may have told you that I was going to get a Rowenta iron. My mother talked me out of it. I don't iron that much, she told me; for the little I did, it was just as well to get a $25 Sunbeam.

Ha! I might as well have been pushing a brick around my clothes, for all the good it did me. Then a friend bought some expensive new shirts, and wanted to iron them instead of sending them to the laundry--industrial washing machines are hell on shirts. So we broke down and got the Rowenta.

You want me to spend how much for an iron? I hear you cry. And indeed, if all you do is press a shirt every few years when you're invited to a wedding, it would be madness to invest in one of these.

But if you have nice things that you don't want to see destroyed before their time by the cleaners, and you can afford 1/2 hour a week or so to iron them yourself . . . or if you just want to be able to wear your khakis a few more days between washes . . . you must buy a Rowenta. I blush, for I am about to sound like a women's magazine, but this thing really does make ironing into a joy. Like all steam irons, it can leak (though I've never had that problem), so it's wise to empty the reservoir before you iron silk or synthetics--but you were doing that anyway, weren't you, because you would never steam silk ;-)

Second gadget I've told you about before, but I'm gonna tell you again, because I just got one for my kitchen, and it's indescribably awesome: the digital oven thermometer with probe. Yes, that's right, you can stick the probe in the meat, set the thing to beep you when it hits the right temperature, and toddle off to the deck with a Tom Collins. (If your deck is very big--or you are very flush--there's a wireless version. Also fantastic for making candy and perfect Vanilla ice cream. And it's a second oven timer. All for $15. It doesn't get any better than that.

Speaking of ice cream, as y'all may know, I love my Kitchenaid mixer with a passion seldom found in one so young. You can get great deals on them at those outlet malls, or with those 20% off Bed, Bath & Beyond coupons. I use it to make, like, the best pancakes ever (recipe at the bottom of this post--you don't actually need the Kitchenaid). Believe me, they're totally worth it. The only downside is that they last so long--my mother's had hers for over thirty years--that I have no hope of ever upgrading to the fabulous new six quart mixer, upon which I have been longingly casting my eye every time I pass a Kitchenaid display. I recommend getting at least a 5 quart bowl-lift kind--the power on the other ones is okay, but they're a little cramped for baking bread or big cakes, which, believe me, you will suddenly find yourself interested in doing once you have gotten your hands on this little machine. You can also get great deals on them on Ebay. You too can make souffles or key lime pie in minutes!

The reason I bring this up is that if you get a Kitchenaid, you can then get my new favourite toy, the ice cream maker attachment. Oh, you scoff, I know. I did too, until I got my hands on one of those aforementioned Bed, Bath & Beyond coupons, and said to myself, "Why the hell not?" Luckily, I have friends who like to eat ice cream, or I would now weight 180 pounds. Ice cream, it turns out, is not all that hard to make, and homemade ice cream is magically delicious--particularly if you substitute half-and-half for the milk in the recipes (coronary surgeons need to eat too, you know). I am making Blueberry ice cream tonight to take down to Maryland with me this weekend. Yes, you can travel with ice cream: just pack a cooler with 3 parts ice to 1 part rock salt or Kosher salt, put the ice cream container in a ziploc freezer bag, and away you go. I mean, I wouldn't drive cross country that way, but you can go for hours before it begins to melt.

Finally, next time you're in an outlet mall kitchen store, help yourself to a pineapple slicer. You know that fresh chunk pineapple you buy in the supermarket for $8 a pop? You can have twice as much pinapple, fresher and better, for $5 if you're willing to buy one and cut it up yourself--which is easy if you have a pineapple slicer. I was sceptical, since I have a small apartment with limited storeage--but I also have a pineapple tooth, so I picked this gadget up at a Williams Sonoma discount place. Highly worth it. Although it is distressingly easy to eat an entire pineapple in one sitting.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The Clements Leak, cont.

Obviously, leaking Judge Clement's name was a way to throw the activist groups off guard. Is having a good soundbite ready to go now some sort of a civil right, that journalists should risk their professional lives to assure for the various interest groups that are mad about this? No harm was done by this leak, except obviously to the trustworthyness of the source. Lead time doesn't seem like it would really have done People for the American Way et. al. much good; the best they could come up with on Clement was that she ruled that the Hobbes Act (which, as I understand it, says that crimes which disrupt interstate commerce may be tried in federal court) does not apply to someone who robbed four convenience stores. It doesn't take an ultra-libertarian to find this eminently sensible. Why assume that they would have done a better job with Roberts?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Hang 'em higher!

Kevin Drum thinks reporters should go on the warpath against the bad, bad man who called them and told them Edith Clement was the nominee:

I wasn't paying much attention to the news yesterday, but even to me it's obvious that a "confidential but persuasive source" systematically called a bunch of reporters and deliberately misled them about who George Bush was planning to nominate to the Supreme Court. In fact, the calls were so systematic and deliberate that it was obviously part of a White House plan. (A fairly clever and effective one, I might add.)

There are two options here: either (1) the source was honestly misled by the White House or else (2) the source was a knowing part of the misinformation plan. This means that every reporter who heard from this source should call back and give the source two choices: if it's (1), give up the White House informant. If it's (2), forfeit their anonymity.

Sources who risk their jobs to provide information to the press deserve every protection a reporter can give them. Even a source who spins deserves protection. But a source who lies ought to be unmasked by any honest reporter. Who will be the first to do it?

Call me crazy, but I just can't see why anyone except a rabid partisan would do more than yawn. Nor can I imagine an editor deciding that this was a story worth running. Leaving aside the practical consequences of outing your sources, how on earth could you justify wasting space on this when there are bombs going off in London, a gargantuan currency revaluation underway, and children starving in Africa? Even if George Bush personally called everyone and lied to them about who the nominee was going to be, who but the most rabid partisan would even bother to read such an item? On the scale of journalistic sins, this ranks somewhere between spelling somebody's name wrong, and relying on hazy memories of casualty numbers in penning a blistering column about Iraq. Moreover, it's addlepated for anyone who's worked as a journalist (as Kevin has) to suggest that they start threatening their sources with exposure . . . a move sure to deter honest leakers for fear that the journalist may later decide you have lied to them.

Democratic partisans believe they smell blood in the water, and their instinct is to swarm. This does not strike me as a good idea. We need only look back a few years to the late-1990s Republican party to see that a manic obsession with trivial transgressions harms only the maniac, not his putative target.

Update

One of Kevin's commenters points out that the Dems did the same last year in re the VP nominee. Were there Republicans silly enough to tell Rupert Murdoch to out his sources?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

London bombings

There have been small explosions on the London tube. No fatalities are reported, and the BBC is reporting that the police do not think these incidents are serious. I wonder if the recent bombing has spawned some copycats, like the NYC cop who was allegedly caught planting a bomb so he could be a hero and "save" everyone from it.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Should we give aid to Palestine?

From an economic perspective, probably not; Palestine is plagued by corruption and weak political institutions, not to mention that there is a risk that any new infrastructure you build will be blown up or bulldozed by the Israelis.

But from a political perspective, why, yes, we should. Palestine has a new president, Mahmoud Abbas, who seems genuinely interested in moderating the militancy that has helped to make a permanent peace accord impossible. He also commands little of the loyalty that Arafat got from Hamas and its ilk, which means he needs all the help he can get consolidating his power if there is to be any realistic hope of moderating the conflict. A big influx of cash would help a lot--plus, to the extent that it makes any difference in the misery of the Palestinians, it erodes support for terror among the population.

Oh, no no no no no, says The New Republic, making many of the points I outlined above: the PA is corrupt and aid networks are ineffective. But he kinda neglects to mention the whole Israel side of things, making it sound as if the PA is just a bunch of venal bumblers. For example:

There is reason to fear that future aid would be spent just as poorly. A massive RAND study released this year (and titled Building a Successful Palestinian State) recommends constructing a high-speed railroad linking the major population areas of Gaza and the West Bank. There is the minor problem that, as the authors note in passing, roads rather than rail would be used for most freight shipments, for emergency services, and for those who can afford cars--including tourists, dignitaries, and the growing middle class the study envisages. As former World Bank President James Wolfensohn has pointed out (second disclosure: I was previously an economist at the World Bank), a good road would connect the Palestinian urban areas at a much more modest cost than the billions the authors propose to pour into a railroad--which could quickly turn into one of the money-draining, inefficient public enterprises that plague many developing countries. All of which is to say that excessive aid money could well fund white elephant investments, saddling the P.A. with operating costs it can ill afford.

This would have been an excellent place to mention why the PA wants to build a railroad, which is that Israel won't let it build a road between the territories, fearing (quite reasonably) that militants will slip off it to launch terror attacks in Israel. Yet, somehow, the author didn't think that was important enough to include.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Clement supreme?

The rumour around here is that Bush has settled on Edith Clement to replace Sandra Day O'Connor. Since Clement has said that Roe is "settled law", this will please the liberals, but enrage the conservative base.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Could this vacation get any worse?

So, you decided to go to Cancun for vacation. You're stuck in a shelter with thousands of other people. You are lying in your boxers and tee shirt trying to think of some other place and time. Why the tropics in hurrricane season? If you were in your hotel room, you could be getting intimate with the lady next to you. Instead, You've got 5 square feet of space to yourself, and you're surrounded by sweaty, snoring humanity. Could this vacation get any worse?

Well, an AP News photographer could snap you...er...adjusting your package. And your colleagues back at the office could find the picture because it was distributed on the front page of a newspaper free at public transportation stops all around the U.S.

BONUS: check the editorial on p. 9 of the NY edition. It compares President Bush to Alfred E. Neuman, Joe Camel, Papa Smurf, Mr.Magoo, Tony the Tiger and Duck Dodgers!

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Iraq and its consequences

John Quiggin's post on consequentialism and war seems to me to be pretty weak. It arrives at the conclusion that--quel surprise!--Iraq and similar wars are unjustified without even a symbolic nod at the potential weaknesses of such an argument. And when he veers too close to the logical extension of his beliefs to defensive wars--which, in a strict consequentialist view, would be unjustified if you had to kill too many enemy civilians to do it--he suddenly retreats into moralism:

These rights-based considerations are less of a problem in the case of a purely defensive war, since we are morally entitled to defend our own rights. In addition, since willingness to fight defensive wars discourages aggression, it gains support from a rule-consequentialist viewpoint. But this only strengthens the case against wars of choice, where the other side can plausibly present their fight (at least to the soldiers and civilians who are expected to bear the costs) as one of self-defence against an outside aggressor.

But I can make a similar "consequentialist" defense of invasive wars, if I'm allowed one moral principle: "Making the world safe for democracy", "Advancing liberty", "Beating back the godless communists" or, say, "Protecting Christendom". You might not agree with my moral principle, but hey, the invaders may not agree with your right to self defense, so there you are.

But more broadly speaking, most arguments for war are ultimately consequentialist. If fighting the invader results in the Mongol hordes sacking your city, killing everyone in it, and sowing the fields with salt so that

It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation: neither shall the Arabian pitch tent there; neither shall the shepherds make their fold there.

But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there.

And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces: and her time is near to come, and her days shall not be prolonged.

. . . then most people would probably be against it, no matter how invigorating it may be to fight for freedom. When it comes right down to it, consequentialist arguments are generally arguments about what the consequences are, and how the value of, say, getting rid of a loathesome dictator and his troglodyte descendants compares to the lives of innocents who inevitably die in such invasions. Surely, a good liberal would not argue that merely sustaining life is the only important value; are not freedom, prosperity, security almost as important?

Mind you, I don't say that on such an expanded scale, Iraq would be a good idea; we're doing pretty miserably on the "security" part, and freedom and prosperity look far from secured. But Mr Quiggin's post seems incredibly superficial, for something that purports to be reasoning from first principles, rather than to the pre-determined conclusion. Of course, there may be some deeper philosophical and/or semantic subtleties that I'm missing.

I also think that it is much too early to assess consequences of Iraq--though I freely admit that so far, the signs aren't particularly encouraging. Consider what one of Mr Quiggin's commenters says:

The allied invasions of France and Italy during WWII don’t come close to passing your test—is that what you intend? In 1943-44, the dictatorships (of Mussolini and of Petain) were not killing large numbers of their own citizens, but the invasions did kill enormous numbers of civilians. Certainly at this point in the war, the axis powers would have negotiated a peace treaty. Even the holocaust was largely over (and, in any case, that was not the motivating factor of the war effort). Think what could have been done with not only the money spent on those invasions but ALSO the mind-boggling sums spent rebuilding Europe after the war. The same is true of the island-to-island fighting in the Pacific. The Japanese would certainly have accepted terms long before the end of the war, and 100,000-150,000 civilians on Okinawa ALONE would not have perished.

But how does one attempt to put a value on the difference between a post-war world where diminished Nazi and Imperial Japanese governments remain in power vs one where they are expunged from the earth (but at great human and financial cost)?

It seems to me that the requirements that one must know, beforehand, that democracy can be established with minimal loss of life beyond a reasonable doubt establishes a standard that would allow interventions only in the smallest, most inconsequential situations (the U.S. invasion of Greneda, for example).

And there is also a risk of moral hazard—namely that the more that a rogue regime is prepared to indiscriminately kill its own people as a form of “resistance” during or after an invasion, the less justified the war is by your logic. In fact, unless we can be certain beyond a reasonable doubt that the regime will NOT go to ground and engage in a terror campaign against it own countrymen (and how could we ever be certain?) no invasion could be justified.

In 1944, on a strict mortality accounting, suing for peace probably looked pretty good. It's only from the safe vantage point of later decades that we can see a consequentialist argument for kicking Nazi butt. So unless you can come up with an account that allows for the vigorous prosecution of World War II by Britain and America (or admits, a la Pat Buchanan, that you'd prefer a world with Nazism to a world with lots of dead Germans, Americans, and European civilians of various nationalities), then Mr Quiggins' argument simply won't do.

Interestingly, much of the recent debate over consequences has focused on anti-war types complaining that we're creating more terrorists, while conservatives tout the success of our "flypaper strategy", in which Iraq becomes a death-trap for the mayhem-minded. I've tenatively assumed that a) we're creating more terrorists and b) they're going to Iraq, with net result unclear. But this Daniel Drezner post suggests that, in fact, Iraq may be bringing us some success in the War on Terror, by undercutting support for suicide bombing in the Muslim world:

Support for suicide bombings has dropped significantly in several predominantly Muslim nations, a worldwide public-opinion survey has found — a positive note at a time concerns have been heightened by terrorist attacks in London, Iraq and Israel.

The report by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, released Thursday, also found substantial concern about Islamic extremism not only among Westerners but also in Muslim nations. Three-quarters of those in Morocco and roughly half of those in Pakistan, Turkey and Indonesia said Islamic extremism posed a threat to their countries.

. . .
On the one hand, the numbers are trending in the right direction, and the comparison between the July 2002 numbers and July 2005 numbers in most countries suggests that Iraq hasn't generated the negative externalities greater sympathy for Al Qaeda and its aims that some Bush critics have predicted. It remains possible that the invasion of Iraq had a negative effect on Muslim attitudes, but these figures suggest that at a minimum this effect was dwarfed by more powerful counter-trends. Indeed, the trend suggests staying the course with the current set of anti-terrorism policies.

On the other hand, the numbers for Jordan are not trending in the desired direction at all. This could be due to Iraq, although if that was the case one would have expected a similar trend in Turkey and that hasn't happened. Still, it should disturb policy analysts across the policy spectrum that the one Arab country simultaneously possessing a free trade agreement with the United States and a peace treaty with Israel has a population that is growing more comfortable with radical Islam.

Food for thought.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Why haven't I been posting?

I was in hurricane country for a friend's wedding. Luckily, we got out just in time; if we'd waited for our regularly scheduled flight, at 3:00 Sunday, we would have ended up sweltering in a tin-roofed gym with other tourists. Even so, the airport was a madhouse. Every available flight on every airline had been booked solid by the time we got there, and the line for American, which we flew on, stretched literally from one end of the airport to another. Some other people in the wedding party arrived an hour and a half early for their flight, only to be told that their seats had been given away.

Nonetheless, a good time was had by all. We had to miss the reception in order to drive to the airport, but we did see the beautiful seaside wedding, which was moved up to 11 am so people could fly out Saturday afternoon. (And I have the sunburn to prove it.)

Now I'm back to work, and back to blogging, a little tired, but none the worse for wear. More later, hopefully.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Should we give more aid to Africa?

The G8 summit last week concluded with a promise to double aid to the developing world. The total amount of extra aid will be $50 billion, of which about half is estimated to go to Africa.

Is this a good idea? Africa contains the most intense concentration of human suffering on the planet. Almost half the people in the world live on less than $2 a day . . . which means inadequate food, shelter, and medical care, slaving away at physically demanding jobs from sunrise to sunset. It means intense physical suffering unimaginable to most Americans, from diseases that haven't been found here for a hundred years. It means babies dying, hungry and sick and cold.

But the sad fact about aid to Africa, and many other places, is that most of it is wasted. Of course, one could easily argue that given how rich we are, in comparison to the third world, we should give them the $50 billion anyway, if we can produce some small measure of relief.

Unfortunately, aid can make things worse, by entrenching the incompetent or corrupt governments and institutions that keep people poor. The world community has tried to tie aid to good governance committments, but these rarely pan out in practice. The aid community has the same problem as the financial community: it is in the business of giving out money. When there are no good opportunities available, the tempation is to start piling into the bad ones, rather than give the money back and look for a job selling shoes.

Tenatively, I'd say that putting out benchmarks like doubling aid is a bad idea. A better idea would be to get an aid line of credit, like the one Bush recently created, promising money that could be disbursed only when and if there are good projects.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Flying the flag

The British flag was raised in front of the state department yesterday, the first time a foriegn flag has been flown there.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Are y'all okay?

If you're in London, and you know me, how about dropping me an email, or posting right here in the comments section, to let me know you're okay, okay?

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

To Londoners and all Britons

I interrupt the blogging-at-work ban simply to say to my family, friends and everyone in the U.K.

"Whither thou goest I will go, and whither thou lodgest I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Even to the end."

From the desk of Jane Galt:

More terror abroad

There has been a terrorist attack on the London Underground and three London busses. There are no good estimates of casualties yet, but we can assume they will be high. This is a terrible tragedy for London, and it is no doubt in partial response to their support of us, in the War on Terror and the war in Iraq.

I work for a London company, and they're a little shell-shocked, but still putting out the news.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

No Roe, no GOP?

William Saletan repeats a belief I've heard often from my compadres on the pro-choice side:

Everyone knows a Gonzales appointment would tick off the right. It's hard to see Bush doing that, given his reliance on the Republican base. But it's even harder when you do the math. The Supreme Court is one vote shy of upholding some very popular abortion restrictions. It's two votes shy�three, if you count replacing Chief Justice Rehnquist�of overturning Roe and blowing up the GOP. The perfect sequence is to give the pro-lifers O'Connor's and Rehnquist's seats and then�when Justice Stevens steps down and Roe really is on the line�give the rest of the country Gonzales. Timing is everything.

I'm afraid I don't buy it. Oh, I'm sure that striking down Roe would cause a temporary electoral backlash. But I think it'd be pretty temporary. By two years after the decision, pretty much all the states where the people live who want abortion to be legal, would have legal abortion. A handful would make abortion illegal. And eventually, all but the hard-core pro-choice activists would contentedly settle into the new status quo.

C'mon, you say. Two thirds of the country supports Roe. Er . . . two thirds of the country supports legal first term abortions. And by my count, a little over two thirds of the country would still have access to them. And the fact of activist politics is that most people just don't care if it's not their own ox being gored. Women in New York, Ohio, California and Illinois who can still get abortions are not going to write checks, protest, or vote to ensure that women in Utah and the Deep South can terminate their pregnancies locally--any more than they write checks, protest or vote to ensure that women in Ireland and Iran can terminate their pregnancies locally. Most people just don't care that much about people they don't know.

Moreover, I think that they're vastly overestimating the importance that people in the mushy middle place on abortion. Look at me: pro-choice woman, early thirties, socially liberal. But I just don't care that much about abortion. The only people who do care that much are political activists, some health care workers, and the fairly small percentage of the population which is regularly having sex with people they don't want to bear children with. I'm not even sure that I'd vote on the issue if it were coming up for legalisation in my state; there are a lot more pressing economic issues on my mind. Two thirds of Americans may say they support Roe, but for a large number of them the question is academic, and, frankly, not that interesting.

Thus, the argument that Republicans don't dare touch Roe strikes me as so much wishful thinking. If pro-lifers can get an anti-Roe court, at the expense of a couple of years of electoral setbacks, I bet they take that deal in a New York minute.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Oh, the good old days

Louis Uichetelle has a story comparing Tom Rath from Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a 1950's novel about climbing the corporate ladder, with the fate of a middle class couple today Tom Rath, Uichetelle concludes, had continually rising expectations, unlike the modern couple.

Now, as it happens, I'm very fond of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and highly recommend it to anyone who enjoyes mid-century fiction. But there's a big difference between Tom Rath and the modern couple, which is that Mr Rath is in his early thirties, and the modern couple is in their early fifties. In both the 1950s and today, thirty-year-olds have higher expectations of future earnings increases than fifty-year-olds. The difference in life-stages is large enough to make the rest of the comparison meaningless.

If Mr Uichetelle read the novel, he can't have read it very closely. Not only does the age gap elude him, but he says:

But Tom, like most Americans in the first three decades after World War II, took a rising standard of living for granted. When he needed more income to make ends meet, he simply landed a better-paying job. Indeed, at parties throughout suburbia, Mr. Wilson wrote, "the public celebration of increases in salary was common." And Tom didn't fret about medical bills, job security or the quality of public schools for his three children.

Tom doesn't take "a rising standard of living for granted"--the book opens with his despair over the crackerbox house that he can't afford to move out of. He didn't just "simply land a better job"--he gets it fortuitously, through a personal connection. And half the book consists of Tom "worrying about job security"--he is constantly afraid that he is going to be fired from his cushy new job, and won't be able to get his old one back. A good portion of the other half consists of him worrying about his children's inadequate schools. This passage reflects Mr Uichetelle's (highly idealised) idea of what work like in the fifties--not how that work was described in the book. I don't know where Mr Uichetelle got his Cliff's Notes, but he should ask for a refund.

Update Actually, maybe I do know where he got his Cliff's Notes--he watched the movie instead of reading the book. Didn't Mr Uichetelle learn in high school that no good can come of this?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Why don't Americans take more vacations?

Apparently, Tom Friedman asserted that one of the reasons that Europe is stagnating is that Europeans don't work hard enough. Apparently, a lot of liberals take issue with this. European quality of life, they say, is just as good as ours; it's just that they consume more of their income as leisure, rather than cash or goods.

Possibly, this is true. Having just spent three months in London, and working as I do for a European company, I surmised that my thoughts on the subject must be useful. One hears a lot from Europeans who come to America and chafe under our working hours--this is appalling! Inhuman! Chattel slavery!--but rarely from Americans who have gone the other way.

Undoubtedly, it is nice to have more vacation. I have an amount that makes my friends scream with envy, to be frank. But there are real costs to that, on both sides of the employer-employee relationship. The amount of vacation that Brits take (and they're pikers compared to the continentals), makes it harder to get things done if you work on a team, particularly in the summer, because someone's always away. You can compensate by spreading tasks between more than one person, or having backups fill in, but then you lose the productivity benefits that specialisation incurs. So companies lose, not merely the extra value of the hours worked, but substantial productivity during the hours people are working, as the co-ordination problems mount. In most fields, I would think that a reduction in working hours would be a more effective way to provide extra leisure than extra vacation.

On the employee side, of course, extra vacation comes at the expense of wages. That means that one often has no place to go. Europeans often end up using vacation days to paint, clean their house, and other things that Americans in similar jobs would pay someone to do. If a surgeon takes a week off to re-tile his bathroom, this is not a net benefit to either the surgeon, or society, unless he is one of those rare folks who really enjoys grouting.

The economic question is, of course, "if more leisure is so great, why do people have to be forced to take it?" Is it because there are co-ordination problems (my American colleagues and I, especially the ones who are part of couples, often end up with a lot of unused vacation, because we have no one to travel with)? Is it because of the signalling problem--companies (erroneously) identify employees who value leisure over money as slackers--and if so, how do you force more vacation on American go-getters, who often forgoe the vacation they already have? Is it the co-ordination problem I identified earlier (but if so, that's a legitimate reason not to enforce longer vacations). Or is it because a politically powerful group that values leisure is using the government to force its preferences on everyone else? All the Europeans I know certainly seem to value their vacation highly--but on the other hand, few of them have ever been offered cold, hard cash for their unused days.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Is 2006 the Democrat's year?

Among the more crack-brained schemes that I have heard from Democrats in re the upcoming Supreme Court battles is the wistful hope that 2006 will bring Democratic domination of the Senate.

These are people who have not perused the list of current senators. By my count, there are 45 Democrats (including Jeffords) and 55 Republicans in the Senate. In order to reclaim the Senate by even a slim margin, the Democrats need to pick up eight seats. But these are the members of Class I (the third of the senate up for re-election in November 2006:

Daniel Akaka (D-HI) (Kerry)
Allen, George- (R - VA) (Bush)
Bingaman, Jeff- (D - NM) (Bush)
Burns, Conrad- (R - MT) (Bush)
Byrd, Robert- (D - WV) (Bush)
Cantwell, Maria- (D - WA) (Kerry)
Carper, Thomas- (D - DE) (Kerry)
Chafee, Lincoln- (R - RI) (Kerry)
Clinton, Hillary- (D - NY) (Kerry)
Conrad, Kent- (D - ND) (Bush)
Corzine, Jon- (D - NJ) (Kerry)
Dayton, Mark- (D - MN) (Kerry)
DeWine, Mike- (R - OH) (Bush)
Ensign, John- (R - NV) (Bush)
Feinstein, Dianne- (D - CA) (Kerry)
Frist, Bill- (R - TN) (Bush)
Hatch, Orrin- (R - UT) (Bush)
Hutchison, Kay- (R - TX) (Bush)
Jeffords, James- (I - VT) (Kerry)
Kennedy, Edward- (D - MA) (Kerry)
Kohl, Herb- (D - WI) (Kerry)
Kyl, Jon- (R - AZ) (Bush)
Lieberman, Joseph- (D - CT) (Kerry)
Lott, Trent- (R - MS) (Bush)
Lugar, Richard- (R - IN) (Bush)
Nelson, Bill- (D - FL) (Bush)
Nelson, Ben- (D - NE) (Bush)
Santorum, Rick- (R - PA) (Kerry)
Sarbanes, Paul- (D - MD) (Kerry)
Snowe, Olympia- (R - ME) (Kerry)
Stabenow, Debbie- (D - MI) (Kerry)
Talent, James- (R - MO) (Bush)
Thomas, Craig- (R - WY) (Bush)

Even before we consider incumbent advantage, it is safe to say that Wyoming, Mississipi, Montana, Virginia, Texas and Utah are not going to send Democrats to the United States Senate. That leaves the seats occupied by Chafee, DeWine, Ensign, Frist, Kyl, Lugar, Santorum, Snowe, and Talent. The Democrats would have to pick up all but two of these seats in order to turn the tables. Given the huge advantage enjoyed by incumbets, and the fact that most of these folks are pretty popular in their home states, this is mathematically less likely than the prospect of Republicans pickup up four out of Bingaman, Cantwell, Conrad, Corzine, Dayton, Nelson, and Nelson. Especially since ousting Snowe and Chafee--the Republicans in the most heavily Democratic states--gains you almost nothing, politically speaking.

No, Virginia, you are not going to get the opportunity to vote down Mr Bush's nominees.

Update: A reader reminds me that I initially did the math wrong (the above has been corrected). But the basic contention stands: the Dems need to pick up seven seats--although that includes Jeffords, whose replacement is somewhat complicated, because Socialist Bernie Sanders will be running for his seat, and the Dems may sit hte election out in order to avoid splitting the left vote--in order to vote down the President's nominees fair and square.

The electoral math just isn't there. Most of those Senators are pretty popular in their home states, though Santorum may face a bruising re-election battle. The advantages of incumbency are pretty overwhelming. And a quick glance at the list shows that though there are more Republicans in arguable swing states, there are five Democrats whose state went against their political party in the last election, and only three Republicans that happened to (though Robert Byrd is a special case; his seat will turn, but only after he retires). If Republicans manage to turn the other four states and, say, Minnesota, which seems to be trending Republican (though admittedly from a very left starting position), they've got a filibuster-proof majority. I don't say that I think this is likely; inded, I think it pretty unlikely. But I think it more likely than the possibility of the Democrats retaking the Senate in 2006, or even 2008. Even if their recent steady losses turn around, it will be years before they get back to par.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Henry Clarke Wright, proto-blogger?

Read Caleb McDaniel's article Blogging in the Early Republic.

Indeed, blogging demonstrates the persistence of a key truth in the history of reading, an insight as obvious to Tocqueville as it should be to most bloggers today. The insight is that readers, in a culture of abundant reading material, regularly seek out other readers, either by becoming writers themselves or by sharing their records of reading with others. That process, of course, requires cultural conditions that value democratic rather than deferential ideals of authority. But to explain how new habits of reading and writing develop, those cultural conditions matter as much—perhaps more—than economic or technological innovations. As Tocqueville knew, the explosion of newspapers in America was not just a result of their cheapness or their means of production, any more than the explosion of blogging is just a result of the fact that free and user-friendly software like Blogger is available. Perhaps, instead, blogging is the literate person’s new outlet for an old need. In Wright’s words, it is the need "to see more of what is going on around me." And in print cultures where there is more to see, it takes reading, writing, and association in order to see more.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Let the games begin!

Sandra Day O'Connor is retiring. The battle for control of the courts between Democrats who think they have a right to a pro-Roe judge, and Republicans who are salivating to get an originalist on the court, will now commence.

Some of my earlier thoughts on judicial battles can be found here , here, and here.