Speak, Punditry
Yesterday I was asked for my thoughts about a few current political questions. I publish them here, not so much because I think they're particularly profound or insightful, but because I have the hunch I'll want to check back in two years or so and see how close or far I came to getting 'em right. Questions are italicized; my responses are in CAPS.
What do you think about Russ Feingold?
ADMIRABLE GUY. PROBABLY CAN'T WIN. JEWISH, TOO LIBERAL, TWICE-DIVORCED. WISCONSIN IS A REALLY, REALLY INTERESTING STATE IN TERMS OF ITS POLITICS. THEY ELECT PEOPLE WHOM MANY WOULD DISMISS AS EXTREMIST WEIRDOS BECAUSE THEY APPRECIATE PERSONAL AUTHENTICITY MORE THAN IDEOLOGY. BOB LAFOLLETTE, JOE MCCARTHY, WILLIAM PROXMIRE, TOMMY THOMPSON... RUSS FEINGOLD. I LIKE HIM A LOT, I'D WORK HARD FOR HIM IF HE WERE NOMINATED. PROBABLY HIS STRATEGY IS TO BE THE IDEOLOGICALLY PURE CHAMPION OF THE ONLINE ACTIVISTS AND RAISE MONEY FROM HOLLYWOOD. THE PROBLEM WITH THAT IS THAT EDWARDS AND OTHERS WILL ALSO GO FOR THE ONLINE VOTE, AND THEY *ALL* RAISE MONEY FROM HOLLYWOOD.
Why doesn't he have more buzz? Too liberal? Too divorced? What's so great about Hillary?
HILLARY IS ALMOST LIKE A REPUBLICAN NOMINEE IN MOST [presidential election] CYCLES. HIERARCHICAL BY NATURE, THE REPUBLICANS TEND NOT SO MUCH TO CONTEST THEIR NOMINATIONS AS ANOINT A "CHOSEN ONE" TWO OR THREE YEARS OUT, CONDUCT A SEMI-FARCICAL SERIES OF PRIMARIES IN WHICH THE "CHOSEN ONE" USES HIS (IT'S ALWAYS A HE, OF COURSE) POWERS OF WEALTH AND ORGANIZATION TO CRUSH HIS RIVALS AND ASSERT DOMINANCE OVER THE HERD. YOU COULD MAKE AN ARGUMENT THAT THE LAST TRULY OPEN REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATION WAS IN 1964, OR MAYBE EVEN 1952. INTERESTINGLY, THEY HAVE NO CLEAR "CHOSEN ONE" FOR 2008; IT WOULD BE MCCAIN, BUT TOO MANY PEOPLE STILL HATE AND FEAR HIM.
THE DEMOCRATS ARE NOT AS HIERARCHICAL AND WILL OFFER SOME INSTITUTIONAL RESISTANCE TO THE ANOINTMENT OF HILLARY, BUT SHE WILL HAVE THE SAME ADVANTAGES OF MONEY AND ORGANIZATION AS A TYPICAL REPUBLICAN FAVORITE. SINCE I CAN'T STAND HER AND THINK SHE'D GET CRUSHED IN A GENERAL ELECTION, MY FEAR IS THAT SHE'LL GET 40 PERCENT OR SO IN PRIMARY AFTER PRIMARY, WHILE FIVE OTHER DEMOCRATS WILL SPLIT THE REMAINING 60 PERCENT; SHE'LL GET NOMINATED, BUT PEOPLE WON'T BE EXCITED ABOUT HER, AND THEN SHE'LL LOSE TO SOME CRYPTO-FASCIST IDIOT LIKE GEORGE ALLEN.
Also, do you think Bill Richardson will be the likely VP candidate no matter who's running for Prez?
IT WILL BE EITHER RICHARDSON, GOV. CATHERINE SEBELIUS (SP?) OF KANSAS, OR BARACK OBAMA. RICHARDSON WILL RUN FOR PRESIDENT, AND HE'S CHARISMATIC; ALSO AS A HALF-HISPANIC, HE'D HAVE AN ELECTORAL APPEAL THAT NO OTHER DEMOCRAT COULD BOAST. A RICHARDSON/OBAMA TICKET WOULD BE PRETTY ROCKIN'.
If the republicans look strong in the midterms and look to a conservative candidate, who will they go to? Gingrich? George Allen? There seems to be no non-terrible choice. What are the chances of a Biden/McCain ticket (Biden was the one to suggest Kerry/McCain in '04),or for that matter, a McCain/Hagel ticket as an Independent Party?
NO CHANCE ON EITHER. THAT TRAIN HAS SAILED, SO TO SPEAK, FOR MCCAIN. HAGEL--HIS STEM CELL VOTE THE OTHER DAY NOTWITHSTANDING--WOULD BE MY FIRST CHOICE AMONG THE REPUBLICANS, SO THERE'S LITTLE CHANCE HE COULD WIN. INDEPENDENT THINKING AND RESPECT FOR THE OTHER SIDE ARE NOT HOW YOU WIN AS A MODERN REPUBLICAN WITH PRESIDENTIAL ASPIRATIONS. THEY'LL STAY IN THE BUSH STRAITJACKET BECAUSE THEY'VE INVESTED TOO MUCH TO DEVIATE FOR 2008. (2012 AND BEYOND WILL THE ELECTIONS IN WHICH SOME SOUTHERN-FRIED KHRUSCHEV "DENOUNCES" BUSH'S LEGACY AS NIKITA DID STALIN'S; YOU CAN'T LIE TO HISTORY FOREVER, AND BUSH IS SCREWING US IN WAYS THAT WILL TAKE DECADES TO BOUNCE BACK FROM.)
I HAVE NO IDEA WHO THEY'LL NOMINATE. HOPEFULLY THEY'LL SPLIT, WITH MAINSTREAM-ISH REPUBLICANS NOMINATING ONE OF THE THREE FORNICATORS (MCCAIN, GIULIANI, GINGRICH--ALL ADULTERERS) AND THE SNAKE-HANDLING FREAKS LEAVING THE PARTY TO NOMINATE SAM BROWNSHIRT--I MEAN, BROWNBACK.
Saturday, July 22, 2006
Monday, July 17, 2006
Anti-Poverty in NYC: I Want to Believe
Because I don't get the print copy of the New York Times every day, sometimes I miss things I really, from a professional responsibility standpoint, should have read. So it was Monday with this article, which a colleague--my supervisor, actually--mentioned to me at the Yankee game that night. The piece had little actual news to it; a more descriptive title might have been "Group Continues to Meet and Deliberate." But its content does give me a little hope, for the first time, that Mayor Bloomberg's Commission on Economic Opportunity might accomplish something beyond briefly focusing the attention of a thin slice of the public on the seemingly intractable problems of the city's poor.
First a little background, for those who don't know. (And don't feel bad: the administration has imposed a virtual press blackout on this group since before its Commissioners were even announced, probably as a way of keeping expectations low and reducing outside pressures. Pretty shrewd.) Bloomberg won re-election last year despite a theme of criticism that NYC during his first term had been a much more congenial place for those with greater means than those with less. Indeed, the percentage of statistically poor New Yorkers (those in families earning under the federally set poverty standard--itself a horribly inadequate tool for measuring material want; a better one is the Self-Sufficiency Standard) grew during the last few years, while it shrank in many other large U.S. cities. The criticism never seriously imperiled Bloomberg's chances, partly because the fact of rising poverty didn't really stick to the mayor himself and partly because opponent Freddie Ferrer so clearly had no idea how to actually improve the situation, but it must have bothered the mayor--and the rumor I heard was that various parties extracted a promise for him to create this Commission as a response to the problem.
Bloomberg did so in a typically thoughtful way. His two co-chairs are Richard D. Parsons, chair of Time Warner and arguably the most successful African-American businessman in the country, and Geoff Canada, a street thug turned non-profit superhero whose Harlem Children's Zone is itself one of the most ambitious and comprehensive anti-poverty efforts ever launched. The 32 other Commissioners are, as the Times article says, "drawn from the upper echelons of New York City’s business, nonprofit, academic and social services sectors." The ones I know, or know of, are all exceptionally talented and dedicated. The mayor then put his newly minted Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services, a woman with near-universal respect in her orbit, in charge of staffing and administering the whole project, and made it clear to all city agencies that they had to be on board. I can't over-emphasize how important this last point is; turf instincts and bureaucratic foot-dragging can very easily scuttle something like this.
Finally, he put some constraints on the conversation: again quoting the article, "Mr. Bloomberg has charged the commission with finding ways to diminish or eradicate poverty without significantly increasing the size or cost of government." A lot of my friends and colleagues who have participated in the discussions (I was invited to attend two sessions last month, but couldn't go because of deadlines) found this caveat enormously constraining at first--but it was probably necessary to control for the regrettable liberal instinct to attack deep-seated social problems wallet-first. Sotto voce, it's been said that some new spending might happen, which further suggests to me that this was a deliberate framing choice.
So what did they come up with? Specific recommendations aren't due for awhile yet, but the conversation seems to be going in a direction I would have hoped for, but didn't expect:
Damn right. Unlike many of my colleagues, I've never really had a problem with the foundational premise of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which eliminated the entitlement to assistance. Work is a core value of our society; we should honor it, and it's fair that we hold it out as a condition of assistance. But we also have to reward it. I'm currently writing a piece for the Joyce Foundation on the tenth anniversary of welfare reform, and how it's played out in the Midwest (where Joyce does its grantmaking). The results are pretty unambiguous: welfare rolls went down everywhere, but a discouragingly small percentage of those who made the jump from welfare to work actually escaped poverty.
Why? Two main reasons, both of which the NYC Commission seems to appreciate. First, their jobs just didn't pay well. By and large, the public assistance population then--and even more so now--didn't have a lot of education or employable skill. Economists talk about a "reservation wage," what some people not working at any given time would have to make before they'd take a job. People tend to be rational about their economic choices; pre-1996, welfare was often literally a better deal for those people than working for $3.35 an hour or whatever the minimum was then--especially because they lost almost a dollar of welfare for every dollar they earned working, as well as eligibility for benefits like health care. (Back then, you lost Medicaid if you started working.)
After '96, the incentives were changed; you couldn't stay on welfare forever, and in most states you could keep drawing some assistance and your (and your kids') benefits while starting work. But the pay still sucked. The welfare reform law pushed millions of new, mostly unskilled jobseekers into the labor market just as the economy was increasingly rewarding education and training--but its provisions made relatively little allowance for participants to gain the credentials and knowledge that would provide them greater earning power. (I also think the glut of new entrants depressed wages for low-skill workers already in that labor market, but that's just a theory.) Most states adopted what was called a "Work First" approach, but a better name would have been "Work First, Last and Only." And this despite a lot of research showing that a "mixed model," featuring both work and skill attainment, was by far the most effective in reducing poverty.
The second reason is that even when former welfare recipients got jobs, other issues in their lives constantly imperiled their ability to keep those jobs. Childcare, physical and mental health, housing, transportation--all the sorts of things that middle-class and wealthy working families can deal with because of their greater resources--played havoc with the employment of these workers. Government programs exist to help people handle all these sets of issues--but many are too small to meet the need, and often low-income workers aren't aware of them or can't access them. The challenge is to bring all those resources to bear in hopes of giving these workers the tools to handle their problems.
In making notes for this Joyce project, the idea came to me that for the nation as a whole, welfare reform was a conservative success, because it so dramatically cut the rolls, but a liberal failure, because it didn't lift all that many people out of poverty. The problem of course is that there was no clear consensus on what it was supposed to do: no single goal was defined. The NYC Commission does have a clear goal: to reduce poverty. The strategy by which it evidently means to do this is work. And its members seem to grasp that you can only do this by connecting work to opportunity and offering it with a measure of security. There are still a million places where this can and maybe will fall to pieces--but just that they've gotten this far is pretty exciting.
Because I don't get the print copy of the New York Times every day, sometimes I miss things I really, from a professional responsibility standpoint, should have read. So it was Monday with this article, which a colleague--my supervisor, actually--mentioned to me at the Yankee game that night. The piece had little actual news to it; a more descriptive title might have been "Group Continues to Meet and Deliberate." But its content does give me a little hope, for the first time, that Mayor Bloomberg's Commission on Economic Opportunity might accomplish something beyond briefly focusing the attention of a thin slice of the public on the seemingly intractable problems of the city's poor.
First a little background, for those who don't know. (And don't feel bad: the administration has imposed a virtual press blackout on this group since before its Commissioners were even announced, probably as a way of keeping expectations low and reducing outside pressures. Pretty shrewd.) Bloomberg won re-election last year despite a theme of criticism that NYC during his first term had been a much more congenial place for those with greater means than those with less. Indeed, the percentage of statistically poor New Yorkers (those in families earning under the federally set poverty standard--itself a horribly inadequate tool for measuring material want; a better one is the Self-Sufficiency Standard) grew during the last few years, while it shrank in many other large U.S. cities. The criticism never seriously imperiled Bloomberg's chances, partly because the fact of rising poverty didn't really stick to the mayor himself and partly because opponent Freddie Ferrer so clearly had no idea how to actually improve the situation, but it must have bothered the mayor--and the rumor I heard was that various parties extracted a promise for him to create this Commission as a response to the problem.
Bloomberg did so in a typically thoughtful way. His two co-chairs are Richard D. Parsons, chair of Time Warner and arguably the most successful African-American businessman in the country, and Geoff Canada, a street thug turned non-profit superhero whose Harlem Children's Zone is itself one of the most ambitious and comprehensive anti-poverty efforts ever launched. The 32 other Commissioners are, as the Times article says, "drawn from the upper echelons of New York City’s business, nonprofit, academic and social services sectors." The ones I know, or know of, are all exceptionally talented and dedicated. The mayor then put his newly minted Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services, a woman with near-universal respect in her orbit, in charge of staffing and administering the whole project, and made it clear to all city agencies that they had to be on board. I can't over-emphasize how important this last point is; turf instincts and bureaucratic foot-dragging can very easily scuttle something like this.
Finally, he put some constraints on the conversation: again quoting the article, "Mr. Bloomberg has charged the commission with finding ways to diminish or eradicate poverty without significantly increasing the size or cost of government." A lot of my friends and colleagues who have participated in the discussions (I was invited to attend two sessions last month, but couldn't go because of deadlines) found this caveat enormously constraining at first--but it was probably necessary to control for the regrettable liberal instinct to attack deep-seated social problems wallet-first. Sotto voce, it's been said that some new spending might happen, which further suggests to me that this was a deliberate framing choice.
So what did they come up with? Specific recommendations aren't due for awhile yet, but the conversation seems to be going in a direction I would have hoped for, but didn't expect:
[T]he thinking... has narrowed to a central notion: the solution to poverty is employment. But in a twist on the welfare-to-work policies of former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, the group has agreed that the government must use more of its resources to foster conditions that allow people to enter the work force and stay in it.
To achieve that goal, the commission has been looking at ways to increase access to child care so parents can hold on to their jobs. It has also been devising ways to use city resources to tailor training programs to an ever-changing job market, and to focus public schools on preparing students not only for college, but also for the workplace. The approach departs from the welfare-based strategies of previous generations, but emphasizes government’s role in making employment worthwhile for the poor.
“It’s not about pumping public benefits into households in order that they can have disposable income,” said Linda I. Gibbs, the deputy mayor for health and human services, who is overseeing the commission. Rather, she said, the focus is “what can we do to direct investments in poor households in a way that improves their earning capacity.”
Damn right. Unlike many of my colleagues, I've never really had a problem with the foundational premise of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which eliminated the entitlement to assistance. Work is a core value of our society; we should honor it, and it's fair that we hold it out as a condition of assistance. But we also have to reward it. I'm currently writing a piece for the Joyce Foundation on the tenth anniversary of welfare reform, and how it's played out in the Midwest (where Joyce does its grantmaking). The results are pretty unambiguous: welfare rolls went down everywhere, but a discouragingly small percentage of those who made the jump from welfare to work actually escaped poverty.
Why? Two main reasons, both of which the NYC Commission seems to appreciate. First, their jobs just didn't pay well. By and large, the public assistance population then--and even more so now--didn't have a lot of education or employable skill. Economists talk about a "reservation wage," what some people not working at any given time would have to make before they'd take a job. People tend to be rational about their economic choices; pre-1996, welfare was often literally a better deal for those people than working for $3.35 an hour or whatever the minimum was then--especially because they lost almost a dollar of welfare for every dollar they earned working, as well as eligibility for benefits like health care. (Back then, you lost Medicaid if you started working.)
After '96, the incentives were changed; you couldn't stay on welfare forever, and in most states you could keep drawing some assistance and your (and your kids') benefits while starting work. But the pay still sucked. The welfare reform law pushed millions of new, mostly unskilled jobseekers into the labor market just as the economy was increasingly rewarding education and training--but its provisions made relatively little allowance for participants to gain the credentials and knowledge that would provide them greater earning power. (I also think the glut of new entrants depressed wages for low-skill workers already in that labor market, but that's just a theory.) Most states adopted what was called a "Work First" approach, but a better name would have been "Work First, Last and Only." And this despite a lot of research showing that a "mixed model," featuring both work and skill attainment, was by far the most effective in reducing poverty.
The second reason is that even when former welfare recipients got jobs, other issues in their lives constantly imperiled their ability to keep those jobs. Childcare, physical and mental health, housing, transportation--all the sorts of things that middle-class and wealthy working families can deal with because of their greater resources--played havoc with the employment of these workers. Government programs exist to help people handle all these sets of issues--but many are too small to meet the need, and often low-income workers aren't aware of them or can't access them. The challenge is to bring all those resources to bear in hopes of giving these workers the tools to handle their problems.
In making notes for this Joyce project, the idea came to me that for the nation as a whole, welfare reform was a conservative success, because it so dramatically cut the rolls, but a liberal failure, because it didn't lift all that many people out of poverty. The problem of course is that there was no clear consensus on what it was supposed to do: no single goal was defined. The NYC Commission does have a clear goal: to reduce poverty. The strategy by which it evidently means to do this is work. And its members seem to grasp that you can only do this by connecting work to opportunity and offering it with a measure of security. There are still a million places where this can and maybe will fall to pieces--but just that they've gotten this far is pretty exciting.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
The Economy: it's Subjective, Stupid
Update, 7/17: I made a change in the second graf after the long quote to fix what had been an embarrassing calculation mistake; thanks to "Mathlete in Manhattan" for the tip. Also, did anyone else notice that Krugman wrote basically the same piece in Friday's NYT? I'm calling my attorney.
Interesting piece in the Times today about New York City's economic recovery--I'm tempted to use the Sarcasm Quotes, but won't--since 9/11. The story title, "Report Shows Quick Growth in New York Since 9/11," seems at odds with the substance of the article:
I know Jason Bram a little bit, and Jim Parrott a bit better. They're both good economists, extremely smart and very rigorous in terms of methodology. Maybe their discrepancy here has to do with their institutional affiliations; the Fed looks at aggregate numbers and makes normative judgments accordingly, while FPI focuses on the middle class and working class. (Full disclosure: FPI also shares office space with one of my freelance clients, the NYC Employment and Training Coalition.)
So maybe it's my own bias, but I think Jim is closer to the mark here. This reads to me (and I haven't seen Jason's report in itself) like the argument over the U.S. economy during the Bush years writ small. One side says, "Hey, we're growing! GDP is up, profits are up, everything's super-terrific!" The other says, "If one guy is making $100 more and five guys are making $19.99 less, that's growth in an aggregate sense, but more people are worse off." Locally and nationally, there's little doubt that the already well-off have done very, very well over the last few years. Everyone else, though, not so much. (Here's a look from FPI and Citizens for Tax Justice at the other side of the story, tax cuts and public debt obligations. This report from the Community Service Society of New York found that, while employment is indeed up, wages aren't: in constant dollars, workers at the 50th percentile of the income distribution were making about $12 less per week in 2005 than they did in 2000, a 2 percent drop. At the 75th percentile, workers earned about $5 more in constant dollars, for anemic 0.5 percent real wage growth.
Allow me to offer a non-academic view: that sucks, especially in a context of overall economic growth.
One of the few things I remember from college PoliSci was that tradtionally, any year in which Gross Domestic Product increases by more than four percent is a guaranteed political winner for the party in power. In the first quarter of 2006, the revised annual growth rate was 5.6 percent, which is spectacular in historic terms. But public opinion consistently gives President Bush and the congressional Republicans low grades on their economic stewardship. Why? For the same reason Jim Parrott disagrees with Jason Bram: because those not part of Bush's "base," or those you'd expect to be in that group based on their earnings, aren't feeling it. When a working family can't pay the bills or put something away or take a vacation, a chart showing robust aggregate growth doesn't much convince them that times are flush.
Update, 7/17: I made a change in the second graf after the long quote to fix what had been an embarrassing calculation mistake; thanks to "Mathlete in Manhattan" for the tip. Also, did anyone else notice that Krugman wrote basically the same piece in Friday's NYT? I'm calling my attorney.
Interesting piece in the Times today about New York City's economic recovery--I'm tempted to use the Sarcasm Quotes, but won't--since 9/11. The story title, "Report Shows Quick Growth in New York Since 9/11," seems at odds with the substance of the article:
New York City’s economy bounced back after Sept. 11 with surprising speed and is much healthier now than its slow-growing job market indicates, according to a report released yesterday by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Labor market data shows that there are 100,000 fewer private-sector jobs in the city than there were five years ago. But the report, which offers an analysis of the economic effects of 9/11 over the past five years, showed that the city has been recovering at least as fast as the nation by other measures. Most notably, average incomes have been rising faster for city residents than for other Americans, it states.
...
“People keep asking, why are we 100,000 short of this last peak?” said Jason Bram, a Fed economist and a co-author of the report. “What’s surprising is not how low it is now, but how high it was in 2001.”
Mr. Bram said that at the rate the city was creating jobs, it would take another 18 months to recover the rest of the 225,000 jobs lost between early 2001 and the second half of 2003. But he said his analysis showed that the job market was no weaker now than it would have been had the attacks never happened.
...
[But] James A. Parrott, chief economist at the Fiscal Policy Institute, a liberal watchdog group, said most of the income gains have gone to wealthier residents, and have not been shared by the typical city worker. He said that the average overall income increase masks the fact that hourly wages of most residents have been declining since 2002, when adjusted for inflation.
“If you look at family costs and energy costs and the cost of health care, I’d be hard-pressed to make the case that real living standards are rising for average New Yorkers,” Mr. Parrott said. “The polarization trend if anything is more pronounced in New York City than it is nationwide.”
...
Mr. Bram acknowledged that other economists and analysts “have this perception that all the growth is in the high end.” But he said he believed a lot of the job losses had been incurred in low-paying industries like apparel and other manufacturing and that much of the gains had come in the middle of the job spectrum, especially among the self-employed and small businesses.
I know Jason Bram a little bit, and Jim Parrott a bit better. They're both good economists, extremely smart and very rigorous in terms of methodology. Maybe their discrepancy here has to do with their institutional affiliations; the Fed looks at aggregate numbers and makes normative judgments accordingly, while FPI focuses on the middle class and working class. (Full disclosure: FPI also shares office space with one of my freelance clients, the NYC Employment and Training Coalition.)
So maybe it's my own bias, but I think Jim is closer to the mark here. This reads to me (and I haven't seen Jason's report in itself) like the argument over the U.S. economy during the Bush years writ small. One side says, "Hey, we're growing! GDP is up, profits are up, everything's super-terrific!" The other says, "If one guy is making $100 more and five guys are making $19.99 less, that's growth in an aggregate sense, but more people are worse off." Locally and nationally, there's little doubt that the already well-off have done very, very well over the last few years. Everyone else, though, not so much. (Here's a look from FPI and Citizens for Tax Justice at the other side of the story, tax cuts and public debt obligations. This report from the Community Service Society of New York found that, while employment is indeed up, wages aren't: in constant dollars, workers at the 50th percentile of the income distribution were making about $12 less per week in 2005 than they did in 2000, a 2 percent drop. At the 75th percentile, workers earned about $5 more in constant dollars, for anemic 0.5 percent real wage growth.
Allow me to offer a non-academic view: that sucks, especially in a context of overall economic growth.
One of the few things I remember from college PoliSci was that tradtionally, any year in which Gross Domestic Product increases by more than four percent is a guaranteed political winner for the party in power. In the first quarter of 2006, the revised annual growth rate was 5.6 percent, which is spectacular in historic terms. But public opinion consistently gives President Bush and the congressional Republicans low grades on their economic stewardship. Why? For the same reason Jim Parrott disagrees with Jason Bram: because those not part of Bush's "base," or those you'd expect to be in that group based on their earnings, aren't feeling it. When a working family can't pay the bills or put something away or take a vacation, a chart showing robust aggregate growth doesn't much convince them that times are flush.
Monday, July 10, 2006
Where is my Mind?
A couple salutary links while waiting for some of my more substantial post-seedlings to blossom...
While I think the Phillies blog I'm involved with does a pretty solid job of analysis--and this year, helping maintain it has given me a metaphorical taste of police forensic work; this is as close as I ever hope to get to determining cause of death--there is, after all, more to life, even more to baseball, than figuring out who should get traded, who should stay, and whether Bill Dancy's third-base coaching idiocy is innate or learned. So I have to commend my new favorite (maybe that isn't quite the word) Phillies blog: I Love Misery. It's acidic balm for the Phils phan soul.
Whatever your opinion of the '60s, psychedelic drugs, or the cultural trends of that time, you really need to check out this New Yorker review, a few weeks old now, of a recent biography on Timothy Leary. Louis Menand, a pretty damn fine writer himself, does what I imagine is a far better job of telling Leary's story than does the biographer. And what a story: this guy was, apparently, a first-class schmuck who was married more times than Rush Limbaugh, cheated on all of them, was an awful dad to his maladjusted kids (who came to tragic ends), and eventually sold out his friends and allies to save his own ass and pal around with William Buckley and G. Gordon Liddy.
Menand notes how the established Leary myth--of an educator and researcher who, Buddha-like, left the safe world of academia to pursue deeper knowledge and enlightenment--masks an uglier, but probably more interesting, truth. As a psychologist-turned-proselytizer for alternative lifestyles, Leary was always in one priesthood or another, but his sermonizing was strictly toward worldly ends:
Leary's genius was more Malcolm McLaren than Aldous Huxley: he was, at core, a self-interested self-promoter. That there was a dash of messianism mixed into his monumental self-regard really just contributed to a lot of destroyed lives among people he never met. As the 1960s recede further into the past and a clearer historical picture emerges of the time, I expect we'll see a more judicious sorting of the heroic from the moronic. This account doesn't leave much doubt where Leary sits in that judgment.
A couple salutary links while waiting for some of my more substantial post-seedlings to blossom...
Menand notes how the established Leary myth--of an educator and researcher who, Buddha-like, left the safe world of academia to pursue deeper knowledge and enlightenment--masks an uglier, but probably more interesting, truth. As a psychologist-turned-proselytizer for alternative lifestyles, Leary was always in one priesthood or another, but his sermonizing was strictly toward worldly ends:
Leary spent the first part of his career doing normative psychology, the work of assessment, measurement, and control; he spent the second as one of the leading proselytizers of alternative psychology, the pop psychology of consciousness expansion and nonconformity. But one enterprise was the flip side of the other, and Greenfield’s conclusion, somewhat sorrowfully reached, is that Leary was never serious about either. The only things Leary was serious about were pleasure and renown. He underwent no fundamental transformation when he left the academic world for the counterculture. He liked women, he liked being the center of attention, and he liked to get high. He simply changed the means of intoxication.
Leary's genius was more Malcolm McLaren than Aldous Huxley: he was, at core, a self-interested self-promoter. That there was a dash of messianism mixed into his monumental self-regard really just contributed to a lot of destroyed lives among people he never met. As the 1960s recede further into the past and a clearer historical picture emerges of the time, I expect we'll see a more judicious sorting of the heroic from the moronic. This account doesn't leave much doubt where Leary sits in that judgment.
Friday, June 30, 2006
Bloomberg for President? I Think So.
In the same week that New York City completed its budget with a record surplus and millions in new spending for vital social service programs like the Summer Youth Employment Program, a new set of rumors has bubbled up that Mayor Mike Bloomberg might be thinking about a 2008 presidential campaign.
First of all, Wolfson's a putz, and as a Village Elder of the Tribe of Hillary Consultants he's not exactly a neutral observer here (as Ben Smith should have pointed out at more length; maybe he did and the editor pulled it). But his comment about a Bloomberg candidacy potentially hurting the Democrat more than the Republican is very defensible. Indeed, the biggest reason I can see against a Bloomberg candidacy is that it might divide the left/center electorate and open the door for a crypto-fascist dimwit like George Felix Allen Jr. or Sam Brownshirt–-I mean, Brownback–-to win with 38 percent of the vote, or in the House of Representatives.
But unless the Democrats nominate someone really compelling--Obama, Clark, maybe Warner if he shows more charisma in the primaries, possibly Edwards--I think I'd be on board anyway. (And frankly, in such a situation I don't think Bloomberg would run; his whole thinking seems to be predicated on Hillary Clinton as the Dem nominee.) A Bloomberg presidency would be supremely good for this country. He's a fiscally responsible, socially progressive problem-solver without the baggage that any nominal Democrat would carry into the race: the degradation of the brand after thirty years of Ailes/Rove slimebaggery, and all the special-interest commitments that a Democratic presidential nominee must take on as the price of entry. The same factors, in other words, that have made Bloomberg a near-ideal, and almost universally admired, mayor of NYC.
That said, I have very serious doubts whether he could win. For one thing, he's Jewish, and he's unmarried (though his longtime girlfriend is a New York State banking official, so it's not like she'd be an embarrassment). For another, it seems like the guy has had a lot of sex--and, according to his 2001 mayoral opponent Mark Green, once told a partner who had gotten pregnant to "kill it." Beyond that, I think he's probably made a lot of uncouth remarks-–all stuff that our infantile "gotcha" press will seize upon.
But basically his candidacy would advance a message this country badly needs to hear: "Grow the fuck up."
In other words, stop worrying about whether you'd like to have a beer with the president, or whether he'd be comfortable in your church, or whether he agrees with you on a laundry list of issue positions. Pick someone who's competent and honest–-no more ideologues and charismatics.
Hey, a guy can dream.
In the same week that New York City completed its budget with a record surplus and millions in new spending for vital social service programs like the Summer Youth Employment Program, a new set of rumors has bubbled up that Mayor Mike Bloomberg might be thinking about a 2008 presidential campaign.
Mayor Bloomberg has privately said he has more than enough money to run for President - and now he may have a potential entry strategy.
Bloomberg's main political adviser, Kevin Sheekey, indicated that the mayor would be unlikely to challenge Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) - a friend who has been successful with the same category of independent voters to whom Bloomberg would appeal.
...
"If John McCain gets beaten to the right - which is possible in a conservative Republican primary - and if Democrats elect someone through a primary who Democrats generally view as unelectable, there's a large segment of the American electorate that is looking for something different," Sheekey said.
That disaffected segment could translate into "36% of the vote in enough states to give you an electoral win," he added.
...
The comment adds to the evidence that Bloomberg is seriously considering a run as 21st century version of Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire who briefly led polls for the presidency in 1992 and finished with almost 20% of the vote.
Democrats are starting to take Bloomberg's aspirations seriously - and view them warily. A Clinton adviser, Howard Wolfson, dismissed Bloomberg's presidential aspirations as "insane."
"He couldn't win," Wolfson said. "But unlike Perot, he would end up doing a lot more damage to a Democrat than a Republican."
Bloomberg has started to cast himself as an antidote to the nation's partisan divide.
"Both ends of the political spectrum share the blame" for the partisan paralysis, he said at the University of Chicago commencement this year. "And both seem unwilling to change."
First of all, Wolfson's a putz, and as a Village Elder of the Tribe of Hillary Consultants he's not exactly a neutral observer here (as Ben Smith should have pointed out at more length; maybe he did and the editor pulled it). But his comment about a Bloomberg candidacy potentially hurting the Democrat more than the Republican is very defensible. Indeed, the biggest reason I can see against a Bloomberg candidacy is that it might divide the left/center electorate and open the door for a crypto-fascist dimwit like George Felix Allen Jr. or Sam Brownshirt–-I mean, Brownback–-to win with 38 percent of the vote, or in the House of Representatives.
But unless the Democrats nominate someone really compelling--Obama, Clark, maybe Warner if he shows more charisma in the primaries, possibly Edwards--I think I'd be on board anyway. (And frankly, in such a situation I don't think Bloomberg would run; his whole thinking seems to be predicated on Hillary Clinton as the Dem nominee.) A Bloomberg presidency would be supremely good for this country. He's a fiscally responsible, socially progressive problem-solver without the baggage that any nominal Democrat would carry into the race: the degradation of the brand after thirty years of Ailes/Rove slimebaggery, and all the special-interest commitments that a Democratic presidential nominee must take on as the price of entry. The same factors, in other words, that have made Bloomberg a near-ideal, and almost universally admired, mayor of NYC.
That said, I have very serious doubts whether he could win. For one thing, he's Jewish, and he's unmarried (though his longtime girlfriend is a New York State banking official, so it's not like she'd be an embarrassment). For another, it seems like the guy has had a lot of sex--and, according to his 2001 mayoral opponent Mark Green, once told a partner who had gotten pregnant to "kill it." Beyond that, I think he's probably made a lot of uncouth remarks-–all stuff that our infantile "gotcha" press will seize upon.
But basically his candidacy would advance a message this country badly needs to hear: "Grow the fuck up."
In other words, stop worrying about whether you'd like to have a beer with the president, or whether he'd be comfortable in your church, or whether he agrees with you on a laundry list of issue positions. Pick someone who's competent and honest–-no more ideologues and charismatics.
Hey, a guy can dream.
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
No More "Good Things"
More than a decade after exploding out of the Pacific northwest, Sleater-Kinney is evidently calling it a career:
I'm not sure I've ever seen a band bondly as strongly with its fans as did these three women, probably because first and foremost they were music fans themselves. I probably saw them about eight times between 1997, opening for Guided by Voices at Summer Stage in Central Park, and 2005, at the Trocadero in Philly; the band's growth and change over that time was as remarkable as the music they made. Sleater-Kinney didn't play it safe; their last album, "The Woods," was a radical departure from form that often sounded more like early-'70s metal than the bratty Riot Grrl punk that served as the band's starting point in the mid-'90s.
I'm bummed because the final shows I could conceivably catch, in Philly on July 31 and NYC two days later, seem both to be sold out. Of course, that's also an indication of how much money the S-K'ers could have made were they inclined to simply cash in and no longer worry about their own satisfaction as artists. That they aren't going that way is another tribute to a band that joins the thin ranks of the Clash, Husker Du, and a handful of others as having Mattered.
(Thanks--I guess--to The Navigator for the tip.)
More than a decade after exploding out of the Pacific northwest, Sleater-Kinney is evidently calling it a career:
After eleven years as a band, Sleater-Kinney have decided to go on indefinite hiatus. The upcoming summer shows will be our last. As of now, there are no plans for future tours or recordings.
We feel lucky to have had the support of many wonderful people over the years. We want to thank everyone who has worked with us, written kind words about us, performed with us, and inspired us.
But mostly we want to extend our gratitude to our amazing fans. You have been a part of our story from the beginning. We could not have made our music without your enthusiasm, passion, and loyalty. It is you who have made the entire journey worthwhile.
I'm not sure I've ever seen a band bondly as strongly with its fans as did these three women, probably because first and foremost they were music fans themselves. I probably saw them about eight times between 1997, opening for Guided by Voices at Summer Stage in Central Park, and 2005, at the Trocadero in Philly; the band's growth and change over that time was as remarkable as the music they made. Sleater-Kinney didn't play it safe; their last album, "The Woods," was a radical departure from form that often sounded more like early-'70s metal than the bratty Riot Grrl punk that served as the band's starting point in the mid-'90s.
I'm bummed because the final shows I could conceivably catch, in Philly on July 31 and NYC two days later, seem both to be sold out. Of course, that's also an indication of how much money the S-K'ers could have made were they inclined to simply cash in and no longer worry about their own satisfaction as artists. That they aren't going that way is another tribute to a band that joins the thin ranks of the Clash, Husker Du, and a handful of others as having Mattered.
(Thanks--I guess--to The Navigator for the tip.)
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Good News in the Senate
Two pieces of news out of the Senate today showed both the extreme fragility and enduring strength of the institutions of governance that, for the most part, have served the United States so well for 217 years now: a constitutional amendment to limit free expression by giving Congress the power to outlaw flag burning failed by one vote, and Minority Leader Harry Reid announced that he and Senate Democrats would block the implementation of a previously approved congressional pay raise until the body votes to increase the minimum wage, which hasn't risen since 1997.
Let's do the proposed flag burning amendment, perhaps better known as the Idolatry Act, first. In the Washington Post today, Dana Millbank captured just how mind-bendingly stupid this whole "debate" has been:
Well, not so much. Take a look at any survey of what voters are concerned about. I defy you to find any sentiment about this "issue"--especially when one considers that, as Millbank notes, laws already on the books can punish most acts of flag desecration. (Not to mention that I doubt any jury out there would punish anyone who kicked the shit out of a flag-burner, presuming any of the three to four desecrations per year were witnessed.) While the case can be made that the country has entered an age of "post-material politics," I don't think we're at a point where we can afford to spend all the time and resources already wasted on this non-problem. Hell, we might be better off if the Senate scheduled days of debate on "Ultraviolet" vs. "Aeon Flux".
(Let the record note that I haven't seen either movie, nor read the comics or whatever they're based on. It's just that from the ads, they seemed kind of the same thing.)
As for the minimum wage/congressional pay raise gambit, it's theatrics--but so is the flag-burning nonsense, the gay marriage farce, and most everything else the congressional Republicans push, and at least a minimum wage increase would help people. A flag-burning law, in addition to the potential damage we would invite by writing limitations on free expression for the first time, would just put the U.S. into a dismal category with Iran, China and Cuba--the only three nations that have such laws on their books. (Current, that is; Saddam-era Iraq and Nazi Germany were also in that group.) I hope all Americans, regardless of their politics, would agree we're better than that.
Reid and the Senate Dems are offering a very clear choice about priorities, and doing it with the attention-getting flair they haven't shown since forcing the Senate into closed session last fall over Pat Roberts' endless toadying on the issue of pre-Iraq War intelligence. For the first time I can remember, the leadership seems to grasp that politics is about contrast and drama:
Which is, to put it briefly, crap: here in New York, where we've raised the wage in stages over the past two years, the most affected economic sectors have enjoyed faster job growth than the overall average. If the debate brings that point into the public awareness, we're doubly ahead.
Two pieces of news out of the Senate today showed both the extreme fragility and enduring strength of the institutions of governance that, for the most part, have served the United States so well for 217 years now: a constitutional amendment to limit free expression by giving Congress the power to outlaw flag burning failed by one vote, and Minority Leader Harry Reid announced that he and Senate Democrats would block the implementation of a previously approved congressional pay raise until the body votes to increase the minimum wage, which hasn't risen since 1997.
Let's do the proposed flag burning amendment, perhaps better known as the Idolatry Act, first. In the Washington Post today, Dana Millbank captured just how mind-bendingly stupid this whole "debate" has been:
The Citizens Flag Alliance, a group pushing for the Senate this week to pass a flag-burning amendment to the Constitution, just reported an alarming, 33 percent increase in the number of flag-desecration incidents this year.
The number has increased to four, from three.
...
"I think it's important to focus on the basic fact that the text of the First Amendment, the text of the Constitution, the text of the Bill of Rights is not involved," [PA Senator Arlen] Specter argued. The Judiciary Committee chairman did not explain how he could add 17 words to the Constitution without altering its text.
Fortunately, the Senate will have plenty of time to discuss that matter. The chamber has scheduled up to four days of debate on the flag-burning amendment this week. If that formula -- one day of Senate debate for each incident of flag burning this year -- were to be applied to other matters, the Senate would need to schedule 12 days of debate to contemplate the number of years before Medicare goes broke, 335 days of debate for each service member killed in Iraq this year and 11 million days of debate on the estimated number of illegal immigrants in the country.
Unfortunately, the Senate has only 49 days left on its legislative calendar for the year.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) saw the calculus somewhat differently.
"They say that flag burning is a rare occurrence; it is not that rare," he told the chamber. An aide hoisted a large blue poster detailing 17 incidents of flag desecration over three years. Hatch, citing "an ongoing offense against common decency," read them all. "That's just mentioning some that we know of; there's a lot more than that, I'm sure," he said.
Never mind that, in most cases, the perpetrators could be prosecuted for theft or vandalism. For Hatch, this was sufficient evidence of the need for an amendment. "Now, I have to tell you," he vouched, "the American people are aggrieved."
Well, not so much. Take a look at any survey of what voters are concerned about. I defy you to find any sentiment about this "issue"--especially when one considers that, as Millbank notes, laws already on the books can punish most acts of flag desecration. (Not to mention that I doubt any jury out there would punish anyone who kicked the shit out of a flag-burner, presuming any of the three to four desecrations per year were witnessed.) While the case can be made that the country has entered an age of "post-material politics," I don't think we're at a point where we can afford to spend all the time and resources already wasted on this non-problem. Hell, we might be better off if the Senate scheduled days of debate on "Ultraviolet" vs. "Aeon Flux".
(Let the record note that I haven't seen either movie, nor read the comics or whatever they're based on. It's just that from the ads, they seemed kind of the same thing.)
As for the minimum wage/congressional pay raise gambit, it's theatrics--but so is the flag-burning nonsense, the gay marriage farce, and most everything else the congressional Republicans push, and at least a minimum wage increase would help people. A flag-burning law, in addition to the potential damage we would invite by writing limitations on free expression for the first time, would just put the U.S. into a dismal category with Iran, China and Cuba--the only three nations that have such laws on their books. (Current, that is; Saddam-era Iraq and Nazi Germany were also in that group.) I hope all Americans, regardless of their politics, would agree we're better than that.
Reid and the Senate Dems are offering a very clear choice about priorities, and doing it with the attention-getting flair they haven't shown since forcing the Senate into closed session last fall over Pat Roberts' endless toadying on the issue of pre-Iraq War intelligence. For the first time I can remember, the leadership seems to grasp that politics is about contrast and drama:
"Congress is going to have earn its raise by putting American workers first: A raise for workers before a raise for Congress," said Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada.
...
Democrats in the House and Senate want the $5.15-per-hour federal minimum wage, in place since 1997, to rise in 70-cent increments to $7.25 by January 1, 2009.
In arguing for the minimum-wage increase, Democrats are emphasizing that salaries for members of Congress have risen $31,600 during the time the minimum wage has been frozen.
They complain that rising costs for gasoline, utilities, education and food have taken a chunk out of minimum-wage paychecks, which sometimes have to support entire families.
Republicans in Congress have blocked numerous attempts to raise the minimum wage, saying it would backfire by causing small businesses to hire fewer entry-level workers.
Which is, to put it briefly, crap: here in New York, where we've raised the wage in stages over the past two years, the most affected economic sectors have enjoyed faster job growth than the overall average. If the debate brings that point into the public awareness, we're doubly ahead.
Thursday, June 22, 2006
From Class War to Crackup
The 1950s weren't the Golden Age that so many Republicans and cultural conservatives seem to believe they were. The perpetual fear of the Cold War, McCarthyism and the stifling cultural conformity it helped perpetuate, and the concentrated racial injustice of pre-civil rights America all cast shadows over the decade.
Nonetheless, the decade stands out to us now as a time when America was figuratively on top of the world, by a greater margin than anytime before or since. Politics in particular was almost unimaginably less contentious than is the case today: for most of the decade a moderate Republican, Dwight Eisenhower, sat in the presidency while moderate Democrats, led by Lyndon Johnson in the Senate and Sam Rayburn in the House, controlled Congress. The result was relative consensus, as the county committed to an interstate highway system of tremendous value, moved to respond to the non-military aspect of the Soviet challenge by massive new investments in education, and even took the first baby steps toward internal reform through the Supreme Court school desegregation decision, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and other measures.
Why was it so much easier to find consensus and move forward 50 years ago than it is today? Paul Krugman has an answer, one that I've been thinking about for years: as more people found themselves in relatively similar economic situations, they also found much common ground in thinking about how America should act at home and in the world:
As if on cue, I turned on C-SPAN for a minute this morning to see Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) talking about the urgent need to repeal or limit the "death tax"--the federal levy on the estates of the rich that hits a vanishingly small--but politically powerful--percentage of Americans. (As of 2009, when the exemption rises to $3.5 million per individual or $7 million per couple, just 3 in every 1,000 Americans will pay any estate tax.) This is the same Congress that again shot down a proposed minimum wage increase in the Senate yesterday, days after voting themselves another pay raise. Given the country's mounting problems on fronts from debt and trade, to demographic transformation in the workforce and super-expensive entitlements, to foreign affairs and rising crime, I can't decide if this obsessive focus on further enriching the richest is more stupid or vicious.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not advocating a return to a top marginal tax rate of 91 percent, or suggesting that a program of massive income redistribution to get us back toward the "Great Compression" of the 1950s would be either feasible or successful. The country's economic hegemony of that decade was largely a function of having come through the war in vastly better shape than any of our notional global competitors, and the political factors--about a third of the private sector unionized in the aftermath of the Depression, some pressure to pursue equity as part of the ideological struggle against Communism--cannot be replicated. But what we have now is a government that looks at the issues of the country as if in a funhouse mirror. If the Republican Congress is to be believed, the most important concerns of the United States are amending the Constitution to ban gay marriage and flag-burning (of which one incident was reported in 2005), and ending a tax that the overwhelming majority of Americans would love to have to worry about.
The 1950s weren't the Golden Age that so many Republicans and cultural conservatives seem to believe they were. The perpetual fear of the Cold War, McCarthyism and the stifling cultural conformity it helped perpetuate, and the concentrated racial injustice of pre-civil rights America all cast shadows over the decade.
Nonetheless, the decade stands out to us now as a time when America was figuratively on top of the world, by a greater margin than anytime before or since. Politics in particular was almost unimaginably less contentious than is the case today: for most of the decade a moderate Republican, Dwight Eisenhower, sat in the presidency while moderate Democrats, led by Lyndon Johnson in the Senate and Sam Rayburn in the House, controlled Congress. The result was relative consensus, as the county committed to an interstate highway system of tremendous value, moved to respond to the non-military aspect of the Soviet challenge by massive new investments in education, and even took the first baby steps toward internal reform through the Supreme Court school desegregation decision, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and other measures.
Why was it so much easier to find consensus and move forward 50 years ago than it is today? Paul Krugman has an answer, one that I've been thinking about for years: as more people found themselves in relatively similar economic situations, they also found much common ground in thinking about how America should act at home and in the world:
[F]or the past century, political polarization and economic inequality have moved hand in hand. Politics during the Gilded Age, an era of huge income gaps, was a nasty business — as nasty as it is today. The era of bipartisanship, which lasted for roughly a generation after World War II, corresponded to the high tide of America's middle class. That high tide began receding in the late 1970's, as middle-class incomes grew slowly at best while incomes at the top soared; and as income gaps widened, a deep partisan divide re-emerged.
Both the decline of partisanship after World War II and its return in recent decades mainly reflected the changing position of the Republican Party on economic issues.
Before the 1940's, the Republican Party relied financially on the support of a wealthy elite, and most Republican politicians firmly defended that elite's privileges. But the rich became a lot poorer during and after World War II, while the middle class prospered. And many Republicans accommodated themselves to the new situation, accepting the legitimacy and desirability of institutions that helped limit economic inequality, such as a strongly progressive tax system. (The top rate during the Eisenhower years was 91 percent.)
When the elite once again pulled away from the middle class, however, Republicans turned their back on the legacy of Dwight Eisenhower and returned to a focus on the interests of the wealthy. Tax cuts at the top — including repeal of the estate tax — became the party's highest priority.
As if on cue, I turned on C-SPAN for a minute this morning to see Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) talking about the urgent need to repeal or limit the "death tax"--the federal levy on the estates of the rich that hits a vanishingly small--but politically powerful--percentage of Americans. (As of 2009, when the exemption rises to $3.5 million per individual or $7 million per couple, just 3 in every 1,000 Americans will pay any estate tax.) This is the same Congress that again shot down a proposed minimum wage increase in the Senate yesterday, days after voting themselves another pay raise. Given the country's mounting problems on fronts from debt and trade, to demographic transformation in the workforce and super-expensive entitlements, to foreign affairs and rising crime, I can't decide if this obsessive focus on further enriching the richest is more stupid or vicious.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not advocating a return to a top marginal tax rate of 91 percent, or suggesting that a program of massive income redistribution to get us back toward the "Great Compression" of the 1950s would be either feasible or successful. The country's economic hegemony of that decade was largely a function of having come through the war in vastly better shape than any of our notional global competitors, and the political factors--about a third of the private sector unionized in the aftermath of the Depression, some pressure to pursue equity as part of the ideological struggle against Communism--cannot be replicated. But what we have now is a government that looks at the issues of the country as if in a funhouse mirror. If the Republican Congress is to be believed, the most important concerns of the United States are amending the Constitution to ban gay marriage and flag-burning (of which one incident was reported in 2005), and ending a tax that the overwhelming majority of Americans would love to have to worry about.
Saturday, June 17, 2006
Useless Idiots
Scanning the Yahoo! headlines this evening, I saw the following:
Austria's Haider says Bush is a war criminal
Big deal, right? Lots of people think Bush is a war criminal. I don't, but that's more because I don't think that's really a phrase one can ever operationalize with a straight face than that I think his (administration's) conduct in Iraq was in any way justified. As the point was made so vividly in "The Fog of War," you never see a victorious leader tried as a war criminal; while I think the Nuremburg trials were appropriate and perhaps necessary to help Europe close the door on World War II, part of that was to let the German people off the hook and advance the politically useful fiction that a few evil men, rather than the majority of a relatively "advanced" nation, were to blame for the atrocities of the Nazi state.
The story was highly rated on Yahoo! I've seen this enough to get a sense of the trend: whenever something critical of Bush appears on that service, a lot of users give it five stars to ensure its visibility. At this moment, the story has a three-and-a-half star rating, and it's been on the top three stories list for at least eight hours or so. Here's the passage I suspect those anti-Bush surfers responded to:
What's the problem? The problem is that Joerg Haider is a fascist with Nazi antecedents and sympathies, who's been described as "the Austrian David Duke."
It's one thing to oppose, even to hate Bush. It's quite another to embrace someone who's far more hateful in doing so. By advancing a crypto-Nazi as a voice of anti-Bush sentiment, even in such a slight manner, those who oppose the president in this country risk playing into his hands yet again. Joerg Haider has no place in any serious debate, about any serious topic, and progressives should find him particularly abhorrent.
Scanning the Yahoo! headlines this evening, I saw the following:
Austria's Haider says Bush is a war criminal
Big deal, right? Lots of people think Bush is a war criminal. I don't, but that's more because I don't think that's really a phrase one can ever operationalize with a straight face than that I think his (administration's) conduct in Iraq was in any way justified. As the point was made so vividly in "The Fog of War," you never see a victorious leader tried as a war criminal; while I think the Nuremburg trials were appropriate and perhaps necessary to help Europe close the door on World War II, part of that was to let the German people off the hook and advance the politically useful fiction that a few evil men, rather than the majority of a relatively "advanced" nation, were to blame for the atrocities of the Nazi state.
The story was highly rated on Yahoo! I've seen this enough to get a sense of the trend: whenever something critical of Bush appears on that service, a lot of users give it five stars to ensure its visibility. At this moment, the story has a three-and-a-half star rating, and it's been on the top three stories list for at least eight hours or so. Here's the passage I suspect those anti-Bush surfers responded to:
Haider, whose group is part of Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel's government coalition, said Bush's meeting with his European peers on Wednesday was pointless as he did not expect the U.S. president to pay attention to what Europe had to tell him.
"He is a war criminal. He brought about the war against
Iraq deliberately, with lies and falsehoods," Haider said in an interview with Austrian daily newspaper Die Presse.
"The Iraqi population is suffering terribly. Bush took the risk of an enormous number of victims," said Haider.
What's the problem? The problem is that Joerg Haider is a fascist with Nazi antecedents and sympathies, who's been described as "the Austrian David Duke."
To his supporters, Haider is a breath of fresh air, promising job security, social benefits, and a new breed of politician who follows through on his election promises. The charismatic populist promises to eliminate corruption, curtail abuses of the welfare state, and protect Austria's national interests from being overrun by illegal immigrants and unchecked global markets.
To his opponents, Haider is a dangerous right-wing extremist who exploits Austria's disenchantment with the perennial ruling parties to advance his xenophobic, racist and intolerant policies. Throughout his public career, Haider has consistently parried accusations of anti-Semitism. His record, however, reveals numerous statements utilizing Holocaust terminology and legitimizing Nazi policy and activities.
...
Haider has a long public record of defending the policies of Nazi Germany and of justifying individual actions during those years. Haider has utilized terminology reminiscent of the Nazis, announcing, for example in October 1990 a "final solution to the farm question." Upon his election to the leadership of the Freedom Party, Haider rejected comparisons with the German Nazi Party, saying "The Freedom Party is not the descendant of the National Socialist Party. If it were, we would have an absolute majority."
It's one thing to oppose, even to hate Bush. It's quite another to embrace someone who's far more hateful in doing so. By advancing a crypto-Nazi as a voice of anti-Bush sentiment, even in such a slight manner, those who oppose the president in this country risk playing into his hands yet again. Joerg Haider has no place in any serious debate, about any serious topic, and progressives should find him particularly abhorrent.
Wherever
I'm at the Hampton Inn in Buffalo, having driven Rob here to participate in the North American Guitar Competition. Four hours in the car last night--we stopped somewhere called Cortland, a town where gas is much cheaper than Brooklyn but seemingly without all that much else to recommend it--and three more this morning and today. The actual event isn't until Monday night--Rob's birthday, if luck counts for anything--so I'm not sure exactly why we had to spend three days here. There was some meet-and-greet today, the competitors get to practice for an hour or so with the backing band tomorrow, and then the big dukaroo on the 19th. Nothing against Buffalo, but this is supposed to be, y'know, me time. And I've got the proverbial crapload of work.
After five hours or so in this hotel, though, I think my concerns were overstated. I spent two hours editing this afternoon, another hour in the hotel gym, came back here, got online, might listen to the Phils in a bit. Wherever we are now, same stuff--same resources, leisure options, cable TV. I'm hardly the first to make this point, and it's probably not even the first time I've made it. But maybe it's the convergence of virtual living (clunky phrase) this weekend that has me thinking about it: Annie's already e-mailed twice from Ireland, a friend of mine has gotten into a pretty hot relationship--phone, computer camera, hours a night, nudity and adult situations--with a girl who lives in Vancouver that he's yet to meet in person.
Aside from not being able to feed our cats, Asshole and Frau Poopenheimer, I'm not sure it really matters where I am this weekend, or pretty much any other time.
I'm at the Hampton Inn in Buffalo, having driven Rob here to participate in the North American Guitar Competition. Four hours in the car last night--we stopped somewhere called Cortland, a town where gas is much cheaper than Brooklyn but seemingly without all that much else to recommend it--and three more this morning and today. The actual event isn't until Monday night--Rob's birthday, if luck counts for anything--so I'm not sure exactly why we had to spend three days here. There was some meet-and-greet today, the competitors get to practice for an hour or so with the backing band tomorrow, and then the big dukaroo on the 19th. Nothing against Buffalo, but this is supposed to be, y'know, me time. And I've got the proverbial crapload of work.
After five hours or so in this hotel, though, I think my concerns were overstated. I spent two hours editing this afternoon, another hour in the hotel gym, came back here, got online, might listen to the Phils in a bit. Wherever we are now, same stuff--same resources, leisure options, cable TV. I'm hardly the first to make this point, and it's probably not even the first time I've made it. But maybe it's the convergence of virtual living (clunky phrase) this weekend that has me thinking about it: Annie's already e-mailed twice from Ireland, a friend of mine has gotten into a pretty hot relationship--phone, computer camera, hours a night, nudity and adult situations--with a girl who lives in Vancouver that he's yet to meet in person.
Aside from not being able to feed our cats, Asshole and Frau Poopenheimer, I'm not sure it really matters where I am this weekend, or pretty much any other time.
Monday, June 12, 2006
Some Choice This Is
I haven't given money to Democrats this campaign cycle, I haven't volunteered for anyone, I mostly delete the half-dozen e-mails I get every day from candidates and groups after money, time, signatures on virtual petitions, and whatever else.
Then I read something like this and I almost want to get more involved:
That's the Republican Party. You see it in Ann Coulter's latest pile of vomit; you see it when Grover Norquist runs primary challenges against moderates; you see it when Karl Rove makes speeches about how Democrats don't care about defending the country. Divide and conquer; keep people angry and keep that anger focused at The Other (gays, Muslims, immigrants, liberals); better to win dishonestly than lose with honor. We are seeing the results.
I think the Democrats would be slightly better, but as I said to someone recently, mostly just in the sense that the rate at which things get worse would slow down somewhat. They're venal, stupid, and self-dealing too. If you don't believe me, check this out.
Moran will win re-election; if William Jefferson, the crooked Democrat from Louisiana, runs again, he might win too. (Remember Jim Traficant; he served nine terms, and was a crook before he ever took office.)
Our democracy doesn't work because too many people, from Tom DeLay, to the members of the Congressional Black Caucus who want to go to the mattresses for Jefferson, to the rabid right-wing loser who sometimes trolls here, to the thousands of liberal bloggers who are just coming back from Las Vegas, put party ahead of country, self-dealing ahead of the common good, and righteous, angry purism ahead of consensus and compromise.
I do think the Republicans are mostly to blame for creating this climate of unprecedented polarization--when your top thinker makes statements like "bipartisanship is another name for date rape," it's hard to draw any other conclusion--in which big and little scumbags and ideologues flourish. But I don't know how the Democrats, or more moderate and principled conservatives, would change that. Or if they'd want to.
I haven't given money to Democrats this campaign cycle, I haven't volunteered for anyone, I mostly delete the half-dozen e-mails I get every day from candidates and groups after money, time, signatures on virtual petitions, and whatever else.
Then I read something like this and I almost want to get more involved:
For nearly a decade, Allen Raymond stood at the top ranks of Republican Party power.
He served as chief of staff to a cochairman of the Republican National Committee, supervised Republican contests in mid-Atlantic states for the RNC, and was a top official in publisher Steve Forbes's presidential campaign. He went on to earn $350,000 a year running a Republican policy group as well as a GOP phone-bank business.
But most recently, Raymond has been in prison. And for that, he blames himself, but also says he was part of a Republican political culture that emphasizes hardball tactics and polarizing voters.
Raymond, 39, has just finished serving a three-month sentence for jamming Democratic phone lines in New Hampshire during the 2002 US Senate race. The incident led to one of the biggest political scandals in the state's history, the convictions of Raymond and two top Republican officials, and a Democratic lawsuit that seeks to determine whether the White House played any role. The race was won by Senator John E. Sununu , the Republican.
...
[H]e said the scheme reflects a broader culture in the Republican Party that is focused on dividing voters to win primaries and general elections. He said examples range from some recent efforts to use border-security concerns to foster anger toward immigrants to his own role arranging phone calls designed to polarize primary voters over abortion in a 2002 New Jersey Senate race.
``A lot of people look at politics and see it as the guy who wins is the guy who unifies the most people," he said. ``I would disagree. I would say the candidate who wins is the candidate who polarizes the right bloc of voters. You always want to polarize somebody."
Raymond stressed that he was making no excuses for his role in the New Hampshire case; he pleaded guilty and told the judge he had done a ``bad thing." But he said he got caught up in an ultra-aggressive atmosphere in which he initially thought the decision to jam the phones ``pushed the envelope" but was legal. He also said he had been reluctant to turn down a prominent official of the RNC, fearing that would cost him future opportunities from an organization that was becoming increasingly ruthless.
``Republicans have treated campaigns and politics as a business, and now are treating public policy as a business, looking for the types of returns that you get in business, passing legislation that has huge ramifications for business," he said. ``It is very much being monetized, and the federal government is being monetized under Republican majorities."
That's the Republican Party. You see it in Ann Coulter's latest pile of vomit; you see it when Grover Norquist runs primary challenges against moderates; you see it when Karl Rove makes speeches about how Democrats don't care about defending the country. Divide and conquer; keep people angry and keep that anger focused at The Other (gays, Muslims, immigrants, liberals); better to win dishonestly than lose with honor. We are seeing the results.
I think the Democrats would be slightly better, but as I said to someone recently, mostly just in the sense that the rate at which things get worse would slow down somewhat. They're venal, stupid, and self-dealing too. If you don't believe me, check this out.
Moran will win re-election; if William Jefferson, the crooked Democrat from Louisiana, runs again, he might win too. (Remember Jim Traficant; he served nine terms, and was a crook before he ever took office.)
Our democracy doesn't work because too many people, from Tom DeLay, to the members of the Congressional Black Caucus who want to go to the mattresses for Jefferson, to the rabid right-wing loser who sometimes trolls here, to the thousands of liberal bloggers who are just coming back from Las Vegas, put party ahead of country, self-dealing ahead of the common good, and righteous, angry purism ahead of consensus and compromise.
I do think the Republicans are mostly to blame for creating this climate of unprecedented polarization--when your top thinker makes statements like "bipartisanship is another name for date rape," it's hard to draw any other conclusion--in which big and little scumbags and ideologues flourish. But I don't know how the Democrats, or more moderate and principled conservatives, would change that. Or if they'd want to.
Thursday, June 08, 2006
Have Sex, Deserve Death
Some good news today from Washington: Cervical Cancer Vaccine Is Approved
Unfortunately, the news isn't all good. The vaccine isn't cheap: according to the article, Merck plans to charge $120 for each of the three shots necessary for innoculation. Some children insured under federal health programs will get the shots; others, covered by less generous state programs, will not because of budget limitations--a dilemma that one doctor quoted in the piece characterizes as "a Sophie's Choice."
And of course, there are the--what's the technical term?--murderous pseudo-Christian psychopaths who'd prefer that nobody get innoculated, because then they could have dirty, dirty sex with impunity and immunity from cervical cancer, and apparently the Baby Jesus doesn't cry as much when slutty hellbound girls suffer and die as a result of their unauthorized fucking.
Think I'm being hyperbolic? Just read the quote:
The thought process--I won't say "logic"--is pretty straightforward: these champions of family values don't want to innoculate children because doing so evidently would increase the odds that they'd "commit" pre-marital sex. The risk of cervical cancer, then, might decrease said odds. Presumably, the chance that one or two impressionable Carrie White types might be deterred from dirty dirty touching is worth however many dozens or hundreds who fail to tread God's Chosen Path of pre-marital celibacy.
Don't get me wrong: if parents don't want their child vaccinated in accordance with this worldview, I think that's a morally hideous choice... but one that's within their rights to make. What's not in any way defensible is these "Christians" deigning to make this decision for families of all beliefs and perspectives.
These people should be marginalized, scorned, and placed side by side in the public view with the Islamic theocrats whose repressive worldview they essentially mirror.
Some good news today from Washington: Cervical Cancer Vaccine Is Approved
WASHINGTON, June 8 — Federal drug officials today announced the approval of a vaccine against cervical cancer that could eventually save thousands of lives in the United States and hundreds of thousands in the rest of the world each year.
Called Gardasil, the vaccine is the culmination of a 15-year scientific effort that began at the National Cancer Institute and a research center in Australia, and it may one day be seen as one of the great health advances of the early 21st Century.
Cervical cancer is the second-leading cause of death in women across the globe, affecting an estimated 500,000 women and killing 300,000 each year.
Widespread use of Pap smears in the developing world has reduced its toll there. In the United States, about 10,000 women contract cervical cancer each year, and some 3,700 die from it.
Unfortunately, the news isn't all good. The vaccine isn't cheap: according to the article, Merck plans to charge $120 for each of the three shots necessary for innoculation. Some children insured under federal health programs will get the shots; others, covered by less generous state programs, will not because of budget limitations--a dilemma that one doctor quoted in the piece characterizes as "a Sophie's Choice."
And of course, there are the--what's the technical term?--murderous pseudo-Christian psychopaths who'd prefer that nobody get innoculated, because then they could have dirty, dirty sex with impunity and immunity from cervical cancer, and apparently the Baby Jesus doesn't cry as much when slutty hellbound girls suffer and die as a result of their unauthorized fucking.
Think I'm being hyperbolic? Just read the quote:
Religious groups have expressed opposition to proposals to require vaccinations with Gardacil because cervical cancer is caused by a sexually transmitted virus.
"We can prevent it by the best public health method, and that's not having sex before marriage," said Linda Klepacki of Focus on the Family, a Christian advocacy organization based in Colorado Springs, Colo.
The thought process--I won't say "logic"--is pretty straightforward: these champions of family values don't want to innoculate children because doing so evidently would increase the odds that they'd "commit" pre-marital sex. The risk of cervical cancer, then, might decrease said odds. Presumably, the chance that one or two impressionable Carrie White types might be deterred from dirty dirty touching is worth however many dozens or hundreds who fail to tread God's Chosen Path of pre-marital celibacy.
Don't get me wrong: if parents don't want their child vaccinated in accordance with this worldview, I think that's a morally hideous choice... but one that's within their rights to make. What's not in any way defensible is these "Christians" deigning to make this decision for families of all beliefs and perspectives.
These people should be marginalized, scorned, and placed side by side in the public view with the Islamic theocrats whose repressive worldview they essentially mirror.
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Last Words?
If you're reading this, the world hasn't ended. Yet.
While some of us might find today significant for the possible bellweather special congressional election out in California's 50th district, the return of Phillies phenom Cole Hamels to action tonight in Arizona, or simply the natal anniversary of a friend, a few folks out there think that the whole show might conclude today, that the date of 06/06/06 signals The End.
To my disappointment, this group evidently does not include the proprietors of the Rapture Index, who last updated their site yesterday--are these guys in Hawaii, or do they just profoundly lack any sense of occasion?--to put the Index at 157. Site guidelines note that whenever it's above 145, it's time to "Fasten your seat belts" because the Holy Shit could go down at any time, so that's something... but already this year, the Index has been as high as 159. If 6/6/06 can't even top the yearly high to-date, let alone approach the all-time high of 181 (9/24/01), then what are we all getting worked up about? The site does note that "The occurrence of the 06/06/06 date has increased interest in
numerical date speculation"... yawn.
On a more serious note, today's date does offer an opportunity to point out some of the sillier aspects of this brand of hysterical Christianity. (And you thought only the gay marriage Constitutional amendment sham debate now current in the Senate did so--but I'd argue that, given everything else going on, the gay-hate measure is more tragedy than comedy.) Here's one piece in today's Philadelphia Daily News that explicates one of the problems: is this scary number even the right one?
Still, there's no reason not to be careful. If Francine Busby really does win Duke Cunningham's old Congressional seat, how long will it take for Preacher Pat Robertson to credit Satanic intervention? If Cole Hamels no-hits the D'backs tonight, will it be his killer change-up or forces from below that post the zeroes? And if you're set to give birth today... well, at least for that one, the Landover Baptist Church has got you covered.
If you're reading this, the world hasn't ended. Yet.
While some of us might find today significant for the possible bellweather special congressional election out in California's 50th district, the return of Phillies phenom Cole Hamels to action tonight in Arizona, or simply the natal anniversary of a friend, a few folks out there think that the whole show might conclude today, that the date of 06/06/06 signals The End.
To my disappointment, this group evidently does not include the proprietors of the Rapture Index, who last updated their site yesterday--are these guys in Hawaii, or do they just profoundly lack any sense of occasion?--to put the Index at 157. Site guidelines note that whenever it's above 145, it's time to "Fasten your seat belts" because the Holy Shit could go down at any time, so that's something... but already this year, the Index has been as high as 159. If 6/6/06 can't even top the yearly high to-date, let alone approach the all-time high of 181 (9/24/01), then what are we all getting worked up about? The site does note that "The occurrence of the 06/06/06 date has increased interest in
numerical date speculation"... yawn.
On a more serious note, today's date does offer an opportunity to point out some of the sillier aspects of this brand of hysterical Christianity. (And you thought only the gay marriage Constitutional amendment sham debate now current in the Senate did so--but I'd argue that, given everything else going on, the gay-hate measure is more tragedy than comedy.) Here's one piece in today's Philadelphia Daily News that explicates one of the problems: is this scary number even the right one?
Some say it's the "Devil's number," or the "most enduring prophecy of evil in all of the Western world," mentioned in the Book of Revelation of the Bible.
Of course, you must decide which of the estimated 11 versions of the Bible currently in use here you intend to use. These Bible publishers can't even decide how to write the number: is it 666, or six hundred and sixty-six, or six hundred, threescore and six? All three are mentioned.
Last Jan. 15, Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia site, was vandalized changing 666 to an alternate number, 616, related to an argument historians have waged for centuries.
The number, 666, was first written in Greek, though some say Hebrew. Historians debate whether the original number was 666, or 616, because of the alternate spellings of Greek words, or perhaps because it was just miscopied. Regardless, 666 (or in some cases, 616) has the proverbial 666 meanings, inasmuch as it's a hotly debated topic around the world. And to make matters more confusing, Revelations says the same number refers to both beast and man.
...
More recently, scientists weighed in, pointing out that all organic life comes from carbon 12, composed of six protons, six neutrons and six electrons, or 666, an implication suggesting that trees, beasts and man share the same nature. An evil tree?
Conspiracy theorists suggests that people will be imprinted with the Universal Bar Code, which they claim has a 666 in it, but that theory has been debunked. Just in case, however, Thomas Heeter, obtained a U.S. Patent in the event that humans will be tattooed with the barcode for e-commerce purposes.
Historically, the 666-tattoo could only be placed on the right hand or the forehead. If placed elsewhere, it would not hold its magical powers. And that, in turn, debunks the theory of a microchip implant planted in everyone's head: the mark must be seen, not invisible.
Still, there's no reason not to be careful. If Francine Busby really does win Duke Cunningham's old Congressional seat, how long will it take for Preacher Pat Robertson to credit Satanic intervention? If Cole Hamels no-hits the D'backs tonight, will it be his killer change-up or forces from below that post the zeroes? And if you're set to give birth today... well, at least for that one, the Landover Baptist Church has got you covered.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
72 Virtual Virgins?
Five or six years ago, on a Friday night with little else to do, a few friends and I rented "Left Behind: the Movie," a filmic adaptation of the best-selling series about the Rapture and subsequent struggle for control of the world between the remaining Christians and the Anti-Christ, who comes to prominence as the Secretary-General of the United Nations. It was, in a word, awful--not even really enjoyable as kitsch, and kind of troubling in the moral absolutes it flourished.
But then, that series of books did sell 60 million copies, despite probably having less literary value than Saddam's romance novels and about as much redeeming social quality as any of Ann Coulter's prose defecations. So I guess there's an audience for this.
The question I have now might be whether that audience plays XBox:
At the Carpetbagger, where I read about this yesterday, some readers have suggested alternate titles to follow up on the success of "Left Behind: Eternity Force." (He also references the wonderful Simpsons episode in which Rod and Tod Flanders, grieving for their late mother, play "Billy Graham's Bible Blaster!" with Bart, in which you have to shoot the heathens to convert them; a non-direct hit makes them Unitarians.) One is "Inquisition"; another is "Kill the Jews." I'm guessing that "Inquisition" is more of a strategy/role-player, where "Kill" is more of a first-person shooter title.
Others noted the parallels between the righteous Christian violence of this game and the deplorable Muslim violence we see all too often in the real world. But they don't develop the concept; that's why I'm here today. If only there were a viable videogame market in the Arab world; suicide bombings and terrorist attacks also have those vital elements of "action and conflict."
Just imagine a whole series of these games: starting with "Jihad: Resistance!," you train in the Afghan base camp, master small arms, explosives and basic insurgency techniques, and then attack the infidel occupiers. Then in "Jihad: Martyr!" you run suicide bombing missions: first the Israeli schoolbus, then the nightclub in Amman, and finally the U.S. Army barracks. Finally, in "Jihad: Sheikh!" you get to *play* bin Laden, directing your finances from sympathizers in oil ministries throughout the middle east and elsewhere, recruit planners and operatives, and finally draw up and carry out spectacular attacks that kill thousands and set the stage for that battle of civilizations you've been aching for.
Hey, it's the cosmic struggle of good vs. evil. What's a little violence thrown in?
Five or six years ago, on a Friday night with little else to do, a few friends and I rented "Left Behind: the Movie," a filmic adaptation of the best-selling series about the Rapture and subsequent struggle for control of the world between the remaining Christians and the Anti-Christ, who comes to prominence as the Secretary-General of the United Nations. It was, in a word, awful--not even really enjoyable as kitsch, and kind of troubling in the moral absolutes it flourished.
But then, that series of books did sell 60 million copies, despite probably having less literary value than Saddam's romance novels and about as much redeeming social quality as any of Ann Coulter's prose defecations. So I guess there's an audience for this.
The question I have now might be whether that audience plays XBox:
Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.
As the video game industry gathers at the Los Angeles Convention Center this week for the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo, a devout group of publishers is praying for a direct strike on their elusive target: the eternal souls of game players.
One game, "Left Behind: Eternal Forces," which debuts today at the expo, features plenty of biblical smiting, albeit with high-tech weaponry as players battle the forces of the Antichrist in a smoldering world approaching Armageddon.
...
" 'Left Behind' has the Antichrist, the end of the world, the apocalypse," said co-creator Jeffrey S. Frichner. "It's got all the Christian stuff, and it's still got all the cool stuff."
That's why industry watchers predict that titles like "Eternal Forces" will find a broader audience in the same way Christian houses of worship like Pastor Rick Warren's Saddleback Church in Lake Forest have attracted followers — in part by not being overly doctrinaire.
"The reason that I think this game has a chance is that it's not particularly preachy," said Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities. "I will say some of the dialogue is pretty lame — people saying, 'Praise the Lord' after they blow away the bad guys. I think they're overdoing it a bit. But the message is OK."
The game is based on the best-selling series of "Left Behind" books, which offer an account of the end times as predicted in the biblical book of Revelation. One of the series' authors, Tim LaHaye, said the game had the potential to communicate ideas such as salvation to people who might not think of themselves as particularly interested.
"We hope teenagers like the game," LaHaye said. "Our real goal is to have no one left behind."
...
The 14 "Left Behind" books, which LaHaye wrote with Jerry B. Jenkins, have sold about 65 million copies. Lyndon and Frichner recognized that the series had all the elements of a successful game — namely, action and conflict.
It took 18 months to raise enough money to secure the license from Tyndale House, the Christian publisher of "Left Behind," in 2001. They financed the early game development themselves, with Lyndon mortgaging his home twice and Frichner selling his house to raise cash. Some programming is done in Kiev, Ukraine, to limit costs. After the commercial success of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," the two were able to raise the money to finish the project.
"There's an audience here," said A. Larry Ross, president of a Dallas-based Christian public relations firm that helped to market Gibson's "Passion" and three movie adaptations of the "Left Behind" books.
"In addition to the youth audience — that's the primary target — there are parents who are concerned about what their children are exposed to and are encouraged by products that are biblically based," Ross said. "I would assume, if there is violence, it's the cosmic struggle of good versus evil, not gratuitous violence."
At the Carpetbagger, where I read about this yesterday, some readers have suggested alternate titles to follow up on the success of "Left Behind: Eternity Force." (He also references the wonderful Simpsons episode in which Rod and Tod Flanders, grieving for their late mother, play "Billy Graham's Bible Blaster!" with Bart, in which you have to shoot the heathens to convert them; a non-direct hit makes them Unitarians.) One is "Inquisition"; another is "Kill the Jews." I'm guessing that "Inquisition" is more of a strategy/role-player, where "Kill" is more of a first-person shooter title.
Others noted the parallels between the righteous Christian violence of this game and the deplorable Muslim violence we see all too often in the real world. But they don't develop the concept; that's why I'm here today. If only there were a viable videogame market in the Arab world; suicide bombings and terrorist attacks also have those vital elements of "action and conflict."
Just imagine a whole series of these games: starting with "Jihad: Resistance!," you train in the Afghan base camp, master small arms, explosives and basic insurgency techniques, and then attack the infidel occupiers. Then in "Jihad: Martyr!" you run suicide bombing missions: first the Israeli schoolbus, then the nightclub in Amman, and finally the U.S. Army barracks. Finally, in "Jihad: Sheikh!" you get to *play* bin Laden, directing your finances from sympathizers in oil ministries throughout the middle east and elsewhere, recruit planners and operatives, and finally draw up and carry out spectacular attacks that kill thousands and set the stage for that battle of civilizations you've been aching for.
Hey, it's the cosmic struggle of good vs. evil. What's a little violence thrown in?
Saturday, May 27, 2006
The Democrats' Paradox
update, 6/1/06: The article I discuss below is, in fact, online, and you can read it here.
Putting aside the issue of whether it will be enough, in 2006, for Democrats to return to power in Congress solely on the strength of Republican venality and ineptitude, here's my take on the central dilemma the party faces:
To achieve partisan ends, they must eschew partisan means.
In other words, if they ever hope to again have a sustainable majority, the Democrats have to stop acting like Democrats. I'm not referring to the usual MSM-regurgitated critiques: the lack of a single voice, the muddled message, the schizophrenia (as if any major party at any time could avoid that). I mean the interest-group stridency below *and* the reflexive trimming and self-preservation above. Most of all, if they want to lead, prominent Democrats must stop being afraid of getting out in front of public opinion--and if we hope that others not online or intensely engaged in politics will follow, we need to stop being so damn condescending to our countrymen and -women.
What brings all this up? A piece in the current New Yorker, which details the ongoing struggle between the moderates and the true believers. (The article isn't online, but here is a Q&A with the author.) The story begins with a lot of the usual disingenuous arguments that annoy progressives about media portrayals of Democrats: shots at the Kerry campaign, an unsubstantiated jab at Howard Dean, etc. In that sense, it's annoying to read. But toward the end of the piece, the author makes two points that I found very disturbing--as, I think, should any progressive who hopes to see Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008.
The first, which has been talked to death everywhere else so I won't delve too deeply into it here, was the author's perception--one that, sadly, strikes me as accurate--that progressive activists just aren't very interested in issues of national security and particularly the struggle against Islamofascism.
These people--maybe it's a New York City thing--should be burning with outrage that we haven't caught bin Laden, that we haven't cracked down on financing for terror networks among our "allies" (and creditors, which probably explains things) in the region. They should be asking why we haven't even tried (to my knowledge) to create means of cultural outreach to the Arab world, to show them that America represents more than military power, to replicate the idealism of the Peace Corps and related efforts that helped win hearts, hearths and minds in the Third World, to really get smart about how we try to spread our ideas and ideals in that world rather than just giving it to Karen Hughes and Madison Avenue types with ties to Republican donors.
They should be asking why the president never called on his country to get personally involved in the effort, whether through writing letters to soldiers or setting up pen-pal programs with Iraqi schoolchildren, or even for some kind of new GI Bill for returning troops. If this is a "Long War," we'd better be trying to win it with more than military power.
The second was his description of the abortion debate, specifically the back and forth at one recent Democratic event:
This is political tone-deafness--not to mentin stupidity and self-sabotage--of the highest order. As I think I've written on AIS before, I'm a big fan of the Prevention First Act as both good public policy and a political masterstroke. Laser (great name; think of Dr. Evil chatting her up) gets this; we can make the conversation about the rank hypocrisy at the core of the Dobson/Robertson position on abortion, which is that they're perfectly happy to keep the number of abortions at current levels if the alternative is fewer pregnancies through greater access to contraception and sex education. Most Americans aren't ideologues or theocrats; they'd like to see fewer unwanted pregnancies and fewer terminated pregnancies. Don't the Democrats?
Some are saying that 2006 is a "competence, not ideology" election. Fair enough, and successful progressive governance will move more Americans toward our worldview. But we have to change our elitist habits, and we can't just insist on our superior morality and rectitude. The first step to changing someone's mind would seem to be acknowledging that s/he has one.
update, 6/1/06: The article I discuss below is, in fact, online, and you can read it here.
Putting aside the issue of whether it will be enough, in 2006, for Democrats to return to power in Congress solely on the strength of Republican venality and ineptitude, here's my take on the central dilemma the party faces:
To achieve partisan ends, they must eschew partisan means.
In other words, if they ever hope to again have a sustainable majority, the Democrats have to stop acting like Democrats. I'm not referring to the usual MSM-regurgitated critiques: the lack of a single voice, the muddled message, the schizophrenia (as if any major party at any time could avoid that). I mean the interest-group stridency below *and* the reflexive trimming and self-preservation above. Most of all, if they want to lead, prominent Democrats must stop being afraid of getting out in front of public opinion--and if we hope that others not online or intensely engaged in politics will follow, we need to stop being so damn condescending to our countrymen and -women.
What brings all this up? A piece in the current New Yorker, which details the ongoing struggle between the moderates and the true believers. (The article isn't online, but here is a Q&A with the author.) The story begins with a lot of the usual disingenuous arguments that annoy progressives about media portrayals of Democrats: shots at the Kerry campaign, an unsubstantiated jab at Howard Dean, etc. In that sense, it's annoying to read. But toward the end of the piece, the author makes two points that I found very disturbing--as, I think, should any progressive who hopes to see Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008.
The first, which has been talked to death everywhere else so I won't delve too deeply into it here, was the author's perception--one that, sadly, strikes me as accurate--that progressive activists just aren't very interested in issues of national security and particularly the struggle against Islamofascism.
These people--maybe it's a New York City thing--should be burning with outrage that we haven't caught bin Laden, that we haven't cracked down on financing for terror networks among our "allies" (and creditors, which probably explains things) in the region. They should be asking why we haven't even tried (to my knowledge) to create means of cultural outreach to the Arab world, to show them that America represents more than military power, to replicate the idealism of the Peace Corps and related efforts that helped win hearts, hearths and minds in the Third World, to really get smart about how we try to spread our ideas and ideals in that world rather than just giving it to Karen Hughes and Madison Avenue types with ties to Republican donors.
They should be asking why the president never called on his country to get personally involved in the effort, whether through writing letters to soldiers or setting up pen-pal programs with Iraqi schoolchildren, or even for some kind of new GI Bill for returning troops. If this is a "Long War," we'd better be trying to win it with more than military power.
The second was his description of the abortion debate, specifically the back and forth at one recent Democratic event:
Recently, at a meeting held at the Center for American Progress... an abortion-rights activist named Rachel Laser... was impatient with the refusal of others to view abortion as a moral issue as well as a personal one. "I said at this session that there are 1.3 million abortions in this cuontry and that's too many, and it's too many for the majority of Americans," Laser... recalled. "Polls show that a majority of Americans think that abortion is morally wrong some or all of the time, and we have to address that."
After Laser spoke, the moderator asked the audience "by a show of hands, how many people here think that 1.3 million abortions is too many abortions?" As Laser remembers the moment, "It was only me and maybe one other who raised our hands. I definitely touched a nerve. The fact is that the majority of Americans are pro-choice, but the majority of Americans also sees something sad in what this procedure does."
This is political tone-deafness--not to mentin stupidity and self-sabotage--of the highest order. As I think I've written on AIS before, I'm a big fan of the Prevention First Act as both good public policy and a political masterstroke. Laser (great name; think of Dr. Evil chatting her up) gets this; we can make the conversation about the rank hypocrisy at the core of the Dobson/Robertson position on abortion, which is that they're perfectly happy to keep the number of abortions at current levels if the alternative is fewer pregnancies through greater access to contraception and sex education. Most Americans aren't ideologues or theocrats; they'd like to see fewer unwanted pregnancies and fewer terminated pregnancies. Don't the Democrats?
Some are saying that 2006 is a "competence, not ideology" election. Fair enough, and successful progressive governance will move more Americans toward our worldview. But we have to change our elitist habits, and we can't just insist on our superior morality and rectitude. The first step to changing someone's mind would seem to be acknowledging that s/he has one.
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Colbert's Greatest Coup
Even while on vacation this week and next, Stephen Colbert keeps leading the pack in American journalism. Now it seems his groundbreaking work has gotten the attention of one of Colbert's heroes, the man whose departure from Congress dropped the Colbert Report's "Better Know a District" feature to 433 parts... the one, the only Tom DeLay.
The Bugman cites Colbert's parodic interview with lefty documentary-maker Robert Greenwald as fuel to discredit Greenwald's new film "The Big Buy: Tom DeLay's Stolen Congress." The clip is at the top of the "Defend DeLay" website. I swear to freakin' God. I read about it at the link above, and figured it would be gone by now (11:30 Wednesday night), but it's not.
I know it's probably too much to believe that DeLay, or any of his thuggish associates, have much of a sense of humor... but damn, don't they read those papers they link to, just down the page? The NYT has repeatedly written about Colbert's White House Correspondents' Dinner performance, here and here for starters. I'm assuming that the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Houston Chronicle, Washington Post, and other broadsheets linked from this page have done so as well. Tone-deafness is one thing, but this goes far beyond.
Even while on vacation this week and next, Stephen Colbert keeps leading the pack in American journalism. Now it seems his groundbreaking work has gotten the attention of one of Colbert's heroes, the man whose departure from Congress dropped the Colbert Report's "Better Know a District" feature to 433 parts... the one, the only Tom DeLay.
The Bugman cites Colbert's parodic interview with lefty documentary-maker Robert Greenwald as fuel to discredit Greenwald's new film "The Big Buy: Tom DeLay's Stolen Congress." The clip is at the top of the "Defend DeLay" website. I swear to freakin' God. I read about it at the link above, and figured it would be gone by now (11:30 Wednesday night), but it's not.
I know it's probably too much to believe that DeLay, or any of his thuggish associates, have much of a sense of humor... but damn, don't they read those papers they link to, just down the page? The NYT has repeatedly written about Colbert's White House Correspondents' Dinner performance, here and here for starters. I'm assuming that the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Houston Chronicle, Washington Post, and other broadsheets linked from this page have done so as well. Tone-deafness is one thing, but this goes far beyond.
Monday, May 15, 2006
Leadership vs. Showmanship
For I think the second time ever, I'm feeling a bit sorry for George W. Bush today.
(The first time was after reading a New Yorker story a year or two ago that included an anecdote about Bush visiting a wounded soldier at Walter Reed Hospital in DC. When he asked the young man what he could do for the troops, the soldier responded, "Make sure there's enough water." Bush ordered water sent to the man's unit by the hundreds of gallons--a small gesture, but one that suggested to me that in the face of war, the president must be as helpless and anxious as anyone else... not to mention much more potentially stricken with guilt.)
As you're probably aware, the president is scheduled to go on national TV tonight to announce his decision to send National Guard troops to patrol the U.S.-Mexican border. Attentive followers of politics saw this coming at least two weeks ago, when new White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten's plan to preserve Republican congressional majorities leaked out. Tonight's installment of Karl Rove's stagecraft-as-statecraft is the first item on the list:
Of course, there are problems with this plan. First, it's making Mexico, an increasingly important trade partner, very nervous--and it could help Mexican presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (a potential ally of the leftist Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, and likely no great friend of the U.S.) in his close race against Vicente Fox's chosen successor, Felipe Calderón. Second, as Republicans like Chuck Hagel and Arnold Schwarzenegger have noted, the move puts further strain on a National Guard already depleted by the demands of the Splendid Little War. Finally, of course, there's the question of how we'll pay for this new action.
All this gets me to why I feel a bit of sympathy for Bush. As I understand it, what he'd really like to do on immigration--combine stronger enforcement of current law with a fairly generous program to put millions of those who entered the country illegally but are working and otherwise contributing on a path toward citizenship--sounds pretty logical. It's impossible to argue otherwise than that immigration has been a great, maybe the greatest, historical strength of the country--even though at every step of the way, from the anti-Irish Know-Nothings of the 1850s, to the anti-Semitic strain within the Populist Party 50 years later and down to the Minutemen today, small-minded bigots have raised hell at the specter of newcomers. Naturally, their heirs and champions in the DeLaystertner Republican Congress have passed an enforcement-only measure.
The demographics of the country--particularly the prospect of 76 million Baby Boomers retiring over the next 25 or so years--make it more important than ever that we bring in younger workers and take steps to integrate them into the national community. (For this reason, I'm ambivalent about the various measures to make English the official language... though I could probably get behind them 100 percent if such laws came with an ironclad commitment to fully fund English-language instruction for everyone who wanted it.) More immediate are the concerns of major Republican donors in the service sector of the economy--fast food restaurants, department stores--whose profit margins are partially dependent upon their ability to hire illegals (and government willingness not to enforce related laws). So Bush is caught between the fear and loathing of his Fox News-watching base, and the greed of his biggest corporate benefactors.
The irony is that his preferred approach, if sold well, not only might placate both groups, but is likely the best course of action. And here's where my sympathy ends.
In Team of Rivals, her wonderful book about Abraham Lincoln's Cabinet, Doris Kearns Goodwin makes a profound observation about the art of political leadership: public figures must simultaneously be responsive to public opinion and seek to lead and shape it. Her example, of course, is Lincoln's approach to the question of slavery and the war. Historians might argue forever about Lincoln's true intentions on ending slavery, but Goodwin makes the point that the great political accomplishment of the first 18 months of the Civil War was to lay the groundwork for the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. A measure that, if promulgated a year or even six months earlier, might have short-circuited Northern support for the war and torpedoed Lincoln's presidency, instead helped the North win by reinvigorating abolitionist fervor and preserving the neutrality of the European powers. On issue after issue, Lincoln repeated this sublime balancing act, always mindful of how far the country would go while seeking to lead it in his preferred direction.
In the hands of a Reagan or a Clinton, much less a Lincoln, Bush's immigration policy might be a huge political winner. But when a president has so thoroughly committed himself to theatrics--and so completely undermined his own credibility even with many presumed allies--the leadership option is taken off the table.
For I think the second time ever, I'm feeling a bit sorry for George W. Bush today.
(The first time was after reading a New Yorker story a year or two ago that included an anecdote about Bush visiting a wounded soldier at Walter Reed Hospital in DC. When he asked the young man what he could do for the troops, the soldier responded, "Make sure there's enough water." Bush ordered water sent to the man's unit by the hundreds of gallons--a small gesture, but one that suggested to me that in the face of war, the president must be as helpless and anxious as anyone else... not to mention much more potentially stricken with guilt.)
As you're probably aware, the president is scheduled to go on national TV tonight to announce his decision to send National Guard troops to patrol the U.S.-Mexican border. Attentive followers of politics saw this coming at least two weeks ago, when new White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten's plan to preserve Republican congressional majorities leaked out. Tonight's installment of Karl Rove's stagecraft-as-statecraft is the first item on the list:
1 DEPLOY GUNS AND BADGES. This is an unabashed play to members of the conservative base who are worried about illegal immigration. Under the banner of homeland security, the White House plans to seek more funding for an extremely visible enforcement crackdown at the Mexican border, including a beefed-up force of agents patrolling on all-terrain vehicles (ATVs). "It'll be more guys with guns and badges," said a proponent of the plan. "Think of the visuals. The President can go down and meet with the new recruits. He can go down to the border and meet with a bunch of guys and go ride around on an ATV." Bush has long insisted he wants a guest-worker program paired with stricter border enforcement, but House Republicans have balked at temporary legalization for immigrants, so the President's ambition of using the issue to make the party more welcoming to Hispanics may have to wait.
Of course, there are problems with this plan. First, it's making Mexico, an increasingly important trade partner, very nervous--and it could help Mexican presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (a potential ally of the leftist Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, and likely no great friend of the U.S.) in his close race against Vicente Fox's chosen successor, Felipe Calderón. Second, as Republicans like Chuck Hagel and Arnold Schwarzenegger have noted, the move puts further strain on a National Guard already depleted by the demands of the Splendid Little War. Finally, of course, there's the question of how we'll pay for this new action.
All this gets me to why I feel a bit of sympathy for Bush. As I understand it, what he'd really like to do on immigration--combine stronger enforcement of current law with a fairly generous program to put millions of those who entered the country illegally but are working and otherwise contributing on a path toward citizenship--sounds pretty logical. It's impossible to argue otherwise than that immigration has been a great, maybe the greatest, historical strength of the country--even though at every step of the way, from the anti-Irish Know-Nothings of the 1850s, to the anti-Semitic strain within the Populist Party 50 years later and down to the Minutemen today, small-minded bigots have raised hell at the specter of newcomers. Naturally, their heirs and champions in the DeLaystertner Republican Congress have passed an enforcement-only measure.
The demographics of the country--particularly the prospect of 76 million Baby Boomers retiring over the next 25 or so years--make it more important than ever that we bring in younger workers and take steps to integrate them into the national community. (For this reason, I'm ambivalent about the various measures to make English the official language... though I could probably get behind them 100 percent if such laws came with an ironclad commitment to fully fund English-language instruction for everyone who wanted it.) More immediate are the concerns of major Republican donors in the service sector of the economy--fast food restaurants, department stores--whose profit margins are partially dependent upon their ability to hire illegals (and government willingness not to enforce related laws). So Bush is caught between the fear and loathing of his Fox News-watching base, and the greed of his biggest corporate benefactors.
The irony is that his preferred approach, if sold well, not only might placate both groups, but is likely the best course of action. And here's where my sympathy ends.
In Team of Rivals, her wonderful book about Abraham Lincoln's Cabinet, Doris Kearns Goodwin makes a profound observation about the art of political leadership: public figures must simultaneously be responsive to public opinion and seek to lead and shape it. Her example, of course, is Lincoln's approach to the question of slavery and the war. Historians might argue forever about Lincoln's true intentions on ending slavery, but Goodwin makes the point that the great political accomplishment of the first 18 months of the Civil War was to lay the groundwork for the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. A measure that, if promulgated a year or even six months earlier, might have short-circuited Northern support for the war and torpedoed Lincoln's presidency, instead helped the North win by reinvigorating abolitionist fervor and preserving the neutrality of the European powers. On issue after issue, Lincoln repeated this sublime balancing act, always mindful of how far the country would go while seeking to lead it in his preferred direction.
In the hands of a Reagan or a Clinton, much less a Lincoln, Bush's immigration policy might be a huge political winner. But when a president has so thoroughly committed himself to theatrics--and so completely undermined his own credibility even with many presumed allies--the leadership option is taken off the table.
Thursday, May 11, 2006
Republican Endgame: Lower Taxes, Higher Spending
Having pretty much comprehensively failed to govern the country in a relevant, let alone competent, fashion, the Republican majority in Congress is going back to the tax-cut well one more time. For the sake of the nation's finances, pray it will be the last time:
In a minute, I'll get to why I'd characterize the size of the irresponsibility as Value rather than Bite. But let's just stay with the politics for a moment. The DLC brief goes on to note that the new tax cut package "is intended to remind privileged GOP constituencies they have a tangible stake in helping Republicans hang on to power, while offering a withered booby prize to dispirited conservative "base voters" agitated by the aimless drift of their party and its leaders." That's true, as far as it goes, but it's only half, or maybe a third, of what the mutant-strain Republicans plan to do in pursuit of their political self-perpetuation. Their main complementary strategy is the other half of what we might call the Thomas Frank Two-Step: angry up the blood with a raft of proposals that have no chance of passage, but might stoke the fires of librul-hate.
The third leg of the right-wing stool (a word I use advisedly) is what Newsweek's Howard Fineman describes as Karl Rove's "Nightmare" strategy: switch the focus from endemic Republican failures by demonizing heretofore-obscure Democrats like John Conyers, Charlie Rangel and Henry Waxman, who might be in line for committee chairmanships should Democrats reclaim a majority. The pushback against this assault will tell us how far the Democrats have--or haven't--come since Rove won the 2004 election with one of the great political accomplishments ever: turning the election into a referendum on John Kerry's character (or rather, Rove's caricature of same) rather than on George W. Bush's first-term job performance.
So much for politics; back to the interesting stuff. The June Atlantic Monthly describes a recent analysis conducted by economist William Niskanen, chair of the libertarian and fiercely anti-tax Cato Institute, on the relationship between tax cuts and spending. Niskanen's findings strongly suggest that a basic premise of Republican governance over the past quarter-century--that tax cuts constrain the growth of government by limited resources--is 100 percent wrong. Far from "starving the beast," the most cherished dream of Grover Norquist and the generation of right-wing activists now in power, it seems that cutting taxes actually encourages higher government spending:
As the author notes, these findings--particularly coming from the leader of a cornerstone institution of the conservative movement--are "in a sense tragic" for true believers on the right. They signal an unanswerable disconnect between favorite means (tax cuts) and cherished ends (smaller government). If tax cuts lead to bigger government, then the right has abetted what by its own lights is a great evil, and now faces a Hobson's choice of either turning away from further cuts--indeed, embracing higher taxes--or driving the economy right over the cliff. The latest Republican tax package indicates that we'd all best keep our seatbelts buckled.
Grover Norquist has come to national prominence as "the Lenin of the Right." Of course, Lenin's USSR eventually fell under the weight of its internal contradictions and wrong assumptions. Norquist's movement might be poised to suffer the same fate.
Having pretty much comprehensively failed to govern the country in a relevant, let alone competent, fashion, the Republican majority in Congress is going back to the tax-cut well one more time. For the sake of the nation's finances, pray it will be the last time:
Congress is poised to extend a number of tax cuts on dividends and capital gains, along with a very temporary "fix" of the alternative minimum tax and a deceptive new retirement savings break. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who's worried he will become Minority Leader this November, called it a "day of celebration for the American people."
We don't hear much celebrating. According to the Brookings-Urban Institute Tax Policy Center, 80 percent of this bill's benefits would go to the top 10 percent of taxpayers, with almost 20 percent going to the top one-tenth of one percent of taxpayers. And the cost of this highly concentrated bonanza is being disguised by (a) making it a "temporary" extension, even though the Bush administration and its GOP allies fervently want to make these tax cuts permanent, which would expand the cost 15-fold; and (b) treating a new Roth IRA rollover provision as a revenue raiser, when it's clear the long-term impact would be quite negative.
This certainly continues the Bush Era GOP pattern of cynically hiding the cost to the public of tax cuts by making them temporary, and then extending them to "avoid tax increases" (hence the name of this legislation: the Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act). But this particular exercise in chicanery is even more cynical: The administration and the Republican congressional leadership have made it clear they will come back with another tax cut bill between now and the November elections, creating, no doubt, another "day of celebration." Slicing up the tax cuts not only enables them to squeeze legislation into the special rules that prevent a Senate filibuster; it also helps distract attention from the continuing imbalance between serial tax cuts that balloon the budget deficit and the small spending cuts (mainly affecting low-income Americans and those relying on student loans) they've enacted.
To put it another way, this strategy represents deficit financing on the installment plan, and fiscal irresponsibility in bite-sized nuggets.
In a minute, I'll get to why I'd characterize the size of the irresponsibility as Value rather than Bite. But let's just stay with the politics for a moment. The DLC brief goes on to note that the new tax cut package "is intended to remind privileged GOP constituencies they have a tangible stake in helping Republicans hang on to power, while offering a withered booby prize to dispirited conservative "base voters" agitated by the aimless drift of their party and its leaders." That's true, as far as it goes, but it's only half, or maybe a third, of what the mutant-strain Republicans plan to do in pursuit of their political self-perpetuation. Their main complementary strategy is the other half of what we might call the Thomas Frank Two-Step: angry up the blood with a raft of proposals that have no chance of passage, but might stoke the fires of librul-hate.
The House and Senate agendas are packed with bills that, even supporters concede, have no chance of passing but that social and fiscal conservatives clamor for, like constitutional amendments banning flag-burning and gay marriage. By bringing them up, Republicans hope to inspire a constituency that has fractured in its support for President Bush and the party. They also hope to cast Democrats as obstructionists by drawing their plentiful ''no" votes.
But some GOP moderates fear the strategy risks alienating moderate voters, whom vulnerable Republicans need at the polls in November.
The strategy is on display during what Senate majority leader Bill Frist dubbed ''health week" in the Senate. On Monday, the Republican-controlled Senate considered two bills that would limit medical malpractice judgments, even though the Democrats were expected to stop the measures with a filibuster, and did.
Still, Republicans used the Senate debate to blast Democrats for their ties to trial lawyers and to accuse them of blocking progress. Meanwhile, the GOP leadership has tabled bolder but more controversial healthcare proposals, such as expanding stem cell research and allowing US citizens to import prescription drugs from Canada.
''What a waste of time," said Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the Senate's number-two Democrat. ''Republican leadership has given up on doing anything that is substantial and necessary. All they're dealing with now are bumper-sticker issues."
The efforts to feed red meat to their base come as opinion polls indicate that Bush and GOP congressional leaders' approval ratings are sinking near record lows.
The third leg of the right-wing stool (a word I use advisedly) is what Newsweek's Howard Fineman describes as Karl Rove's "Nightmare" strategy: switch the focus from endemic Republican failures by demonizing heretofore-obscure Democrats like John Conyers, Charlie Rangel and Henry Waxman, who might be in line for committee chairmanships should Democrats reclaim a majority. The pushback against this assault will tell us how far the Democrats have--or haven't--come since Rove won the 2004 election with one of the great political accomplishments ever: turning the election into a referendum on John Kerry's character (or rather, Rove's caricature of same) rather than on George W. Bush's first-term job performance.
So much for politics; back to the interesting stuff. The June Atlantic Monthly describes a recent analysis conducted by economist William Niskanen, chair of the libertarian and fiercely anti-tax Cato Institute, on the relationship between tax cuts and spending. Niskanen's findings strongly suggest that a basic premise of Republican governance over the past quarter-century--that tax cuts constrain the growth of government by limited resources--is 100 percent wrong. Far from "starving the beast," the most cherished dream of Grover Norquist and the generation of right-wing activists now in power, it seems that cutting taxes actually encourages higher government spending:
To the naked eye, Starve the Beast looks suspiciously counterproductive. After all, spending (as a share of the gross domestic product, the standard way to measure it) went up, not down, after Reagan cut taxes in the early 1980s; it went down, not up, after the first President Bush and President Clinton raised taxes in the early 1990s; and it went up, not down, following the Bush tax cuts early in this decade.
Niskanen recently analyzed data from 1981 to 2005 and found his hunch strongly confirmed. When he performed a statistical regression that controlled for unemployment (which independently influences spending and taxes), he found, he says, “no sign that deficits have ever acted as a constraint on spending.” To the contrary: judging by the last twenty-five years (plenty of time for a fair test), a tax cut of 1 percent of the GDP increases the rate of spending growth by about 0.15 percent of the GDP a year. A comparable tax hike reduces spending growth by the same amount.
Again looking at 1981 to 2005, Niskanen then asked at what level taxes neither increase nor decrease spending. The answer: about 19 percent of the GDP. In other words, taxation above that level shrinks government, and taxation below it makes government grow. Thanks to the Bush tax cuts, revenues have been well below 19 percent since 2002 (17.8 percent last year). Perhaps not surprisingly, government spending has risen under Bush.
As the author notes, these findings--particularly coming from the leader of a cornerstone institution of the conservative movement--are "in a sense tragic" for true believers on the right. They signal an unanswerable disconnect between favorite means (tax cuts) and cherished ends (smaller government). If tax cuts lead to bigger government, then the right has abetted what by its own lights is a great evil, and now faces a Hobson's choice of either turning away from further cuts--indeed, embracing higher taxes--or driving the economy right over the cliff. The latest Republican tax package indicates that we'd all best keep our seatbelts buckled.
Grover Norquist has come to national prominence as "the Lenin of the Right." Of course, Lenin's USSR eventually fell under the weight of its internal contradictions and wrong assumptions. Norquist's movement might be poised to suffer the same fate.
Monday, May 08, 2006
"Why Did You Resign?"
That's the question everyone is asking Porter Goss, the now-former head of the Central Intelligence Agency. Goss himself isn't telling; his best response, as Dick Polman reports, is that it's "just one of those mysteries"--a more interesting rejoinder, at least, than "to spend more time with my family." One run-down of possible explanations is here; they include dissatisfaction with Goss by his immediate supervisor, John Negroponte, and his ultimate (at least nominal) boss, President Bush, as well as various speculations as to involvement with Hookergate. Nobody seems to think that Goss himself frolicked with prostitutes, but it seems like some of his higher underlings did, and when it all comes out, the shame will flow upward.
Of course, there's only one really good response to the question Goss refuses to answer:
That's the question everyone is asking Porter Goss, the now-former head of the Central Intelligence Agency. Goss himself isn't telling; his best response, as Dick Polman reports, is that it's "just one of those mysteries"--a more interesting rejoinder, at least, than "to spend more time with my family." One run-down of possible explanations is here; they include dissatisfaction with Goss by his immediate supervisor, John Negroponte, and his ultimate (at least nominal) boss, President Bush, as well as various speculations as to involvement with Hookergate. Nobody seems to think that Goss himself frolicked with prostitutes, but it seems like some of his higher underlings did, and when it all comes out, the shame will flow upward.
Of course, there's only one really good response to the question Goss refuses to answer:
I will not make any deals with you. I've resigned.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered.
My life is my own.
Saturday, May 06, 2006
Tom DeLay: Original Gangsta
One of the sweeter moments in my life came one afternoon in 1999 or 2000, during my second year in grad school. For some reason, GPPI had invited Charles Murray, the right-wing writer who emerges every few years with another racist manifesto thinly veiled in pseudo-intellectual theorizing, to speak. Blathering on about whatever piece of garbage he was hawking at the time, Murray drew a sharp distinction between the moral conduct and core values of "the underclass" and those the rest of us hold and live by. Of course, he made particular mention of the "disgusting" sentiments expressed in hip-hop and rap, where stealing, screwing and every other form of self-gratification was celebrated.
When it came time for Q&A, I got the microphone and asked him whether, given the corporate transgressions and large living we remembered from the 1980s, the ongoing sexual misconduct of political leaders from both sides of the aisle, and the conspicuous consumption of people like Donald Trump, it might not be the case that, rather than repudiating the values expressed by the most prominent and visible people in American life, these supposed deviants might not instead be showing them the highest possible regard. The room erupted in a roar as Murray sputtered at my "very immature question."
This pleasant memory bubbled up today when I read about Tom DeLay's latest little problem:
Golf at St. Andrews, fine scotch and steak, and theatre. It might not exactly match up to cruisin' in the Benz stretch limo with the Cristal flowin', but then again Jay-Z, 50 Cent and their peers don't fling the bling on anybody's dime but their own.
And if I might get a little old-school, the emerging Hookergate scandal really suggests that for more than a few DC Republicans, life ain't nothin but bitches and money. DeLay, who was once known as Hot Tub Tom, must be proud.
One of the sweeter moments in my life came one afternoon in 1999 or 2000, during my second year in grad school. For some reason, GPPI had invited Charles Murray, the right-wing writer who emerges every few years with another racist manifesto thinly veiled in pseudo-intellectual theorizing, to speak. Blathering on about whatever piece of garbage he was hawking at the time, Murray drew a sharp distinction between the moral conduct and core values of "the underclass" and those the rest of us hold and live by. Of course, he made particular mention of the "disgusting" sentiments expressed in hip-hop and rap, where stealing, screwing and every other form of self-gratification was celebrated.
When it came time for Q&A, I got the microphone and asked him whether, given the corporate transgressions and large living we remembered from the 1980s, the ongoing sexual misconduct of political leaders from both sides of the aisle, and the conspicuous consumption of people like Donald Trump, it might not be the case that, rather than repudiating the values expressed by the most prominent and visible people in American life, these supposed deviants might not instead be showing them the highest possible regard. The room erupted in a roar as Murray sputtered at my "very immature question."
This pleasant memory bubbled up today when I read about Tom DeLay's latest little problem:
Prosecutors have e-mails showing Rep. Tom DeLay's office knew lobbyist Jack Abramoff had arranged the financing for the GOP leader's controversial European golfing trip in 2000 and was concerned "if someone starts asking questions."
House ethics rules bar lawmakers from accepting free trips from lobbyists. DeLay, R-Texas, reported to Congress that a Republican advocacy group had paid for the spring 2000 trip that DeLay, his wife and top aides took to Scotland and England.
The e-mails obtained by The Associated Press show DeLay's staff asked Abramoff — not the advocacy group — to account for the costs that had to be legally disclosed on congressional travel forms. DeLay's office was worried the group being cited as paying the costs might not even know about them, the e-mails state.
...
Abramoff's credit card bills show the lobbyist initially charged tens of thousands of dollars in air fare for DeLay's trip to his American Express card. Cullen said he believes the lobbyist consulted with an ethics expert before making the payments.
The trip, which included golf at the famous St. Andrew's professional course, and others like it have become symbols of Abramoff's largesse to lawmakers and a focal point of the criminal investigation into influence peddling on Capitol Hill.
DeLay has steadfastly maintained he believed that the center paid for the trip as he reported.
The e-mails show that when DeLay's office began preparing the required disclosure reports for the free trip, his aides asked Abramoff's lobbying firm for the cost figures instead of the GOP group.
"Our financial disclosure forms from the England/Scotland trip are due tomorrow afternoon. ... I would appreciate if you would send me your information," a DeLay aide wrote Abramoff's firm.
The e-mails show Abramoff's team provided then-DeLay chief of staff Susan Hirschmann a final cost figure of $75,600 for the weeklong European trip taken by DeLay; his wife, Christine; Hirschmann; Hirschmann's husband; and Rudy.
Golf at St. Andrews, fine scotch and steak, and theatre. It might not exactly match up to cruisin' in the Benz stretch limo with the Cristal flowin', but then again Jay-Z, 50 Cent and their peers don't fling the bling on anybody's dime but their own.
And if I might get a little old-school, the emerging Hookergate scandal really suggests that for more than a few DC Republicans, life ain't nothin but bitches and money. DeLay, who was once known as Hot Tub Tom, must be proud.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)