Thoughts from
San Diego on Law, Politics, and Culture

 
If it can't run away, don't eat it
By Tom Smith

Until recently the American Meat Institute and their subsidiary, the US Department of Agriculture, held that there was no problem feeding us with beef from cattle too sick to walk. Pardon me, but I think I might throw up every hamburger I have ever eaten, and let me assure you, that is quite a few.

Thank goodness for the government. Now that it turns out that doing so might turn hundreds or thousands of us into stumbling vegetables with brocoli for brains, the Department of Agriculture has ruled, if Betsy can't make it on her own to the slaughterhouse, then she's not fit to be et. I would not have thought it necessary to ask before, but does the DOA have any position on roadkill? And what about the definition of "beef"? Does it include, say, rats? I think the time may have come to go organic, meat-wise.

To be more honest about it, I should probably admit there isn't a lot that I won't eat. I need the DOA to make sure there is nothing disgusting in my hamburgers, because even a big sign at Ralph's saying "Warning: You don't even want to think about what is in this stuff" wouldn't deter me much. One summer I worked on a ranch, and there was a beef critter with a large mass on its leg, a tumor perhaps. The ranch manager decided it had to be slaughtered and would be fed to us. As the new guy, I got the honor of dispatching the creature, for which I was given a none too sharp GI bayonette. I learned something profound from the experience, which is, if you have to kill something with a big knife, make sure it is sharp. Actually, I also learned that cows deserve respect, fear death, and look really sad right before you kill them. I would be a vegetarian myself, except that I really like to eat meat. Anyway, the point is that all of us ate up this sick steer. It was tough, but tastey. Ranchers know their human primates. They'll eat anything.

I'm into small government, but I think it's fine if the feds say -- Novel thought! Let's not grind up the brains of cows with a horrible, deadly disease and mix them into America's favorite food! Whaddiasay, guys!


posted by thomas at 12/31/2003 08:01:00 AM

 
Krauthammer
By Michael Rappaport

America's best columnist has another gem:

Yeah, sure. After 18 years of American sanctions, Moammar Gaddafi randomly picks Dec. 19, 2003, as the day for his surrender. By amazing coincidence, Gaddafi's first message to Britain -- principal U.S. war ally and conduit to White House war councils -- occurs just days before the invasion of Iraq. And his final capitulation to U.S.-British terms occurs just five days after Saddam Hussein is fished out of a rathole.

Sen. John Kerry was equally ridiculous in his explanation of the Libya deal: "An administration that scorns multilateralism and boasts about a rigid doctrine of military preemption has almost in spite of itself demonstrated the enormous potential for improving our national security through diplomacy."

The Democrats seem congenitally incapable of understanding that force has not just the effect of disarming the immediate enemy but a deterrent effect on others similarly situated. Iraq was not attacked randomly. It was attacked as part of a clearly enunciated policy -- now known as the Bush Doctrine -- of targeting, by preemptive war if necessary, hostile regimes engaged in terror and/or refusing to come clean on WMDs.

posted by Michael at 12/31/2003 01:17:00 AM

 
The Real Sharon Plan
By Michael Rappaport

A great column by Barry Rubin in the Jerusalem Post (link requires registration). Rubin begins:

It's astonishing to read interpretations of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's speech at the Interdisciplinary Center's Herzliya conference.

On one hand, it is being analyzed as a unilateral withdrawal bordering on surrender to terrorism; on the other hand, others are saying that the plan is a meaningless gesture or trick.

Rubin corrects these misinterpretations:

[Sharon's] approach is to ask which specific pieces of territory it is in Israel's interest to hold, with a view both to short-term security during the Interim Era and in some cases to obtain as a result of a peace agreement if and when that happens.

In some cases, this could mean pulling out of areas which Israel controlled at the end of the Oslo process in September 2000. Illegal outposts would be removed, which the government already agreed to do in the road map. Some small settlements which were judged to be of little value and big security problems would be dismantled.

By the same token, however, there might be other small, uninhabited areas under Palestinian control as of September 2000 where Israel might remain. And on top of this, Israel continues to insist on its right to enter any place in the West Bank or Gaza Strip if security needs require.

In short, combined with the completion of the security fence, this is a rational reevaluation of policy. It is not intended to prefigure a comprehensive peace treaty, but rather to govern Israeli behavior in the Interim Era.

posted by Michael at 12/31/2003 12:01:00 AM

 
What would we do without the Times
By Tom Smith

You would think that with a whole Sunday magazine devoted to people who died in 2003, the Times could have found room for at least one soldier or marine who died in Iraq or Afghanistan. But no. There is an endlessly admiring obit of Serigo Vieira de Mello, the UN special envoy killed by a truck bomb some weeks ago in Bahgdad. After his death, the UN promptly pulled out. Am I missing something here, or is there something fundamentally useless about an organization that 'fights' for peace right up until the moment somebody gets killed? As to the people who are dying and not running away, the Times has nothing to say.

In fairness, I should say this week's magazine is well worth reading, with several fascinating profiles of people I had never heard of, such as Kemmons Wilson, the founder of Holiday Inn. For all that the Times (especially the Book Review) seems to have a requirement that authors try (and usually fail) to make some profound observation or other, this piece actually makes a good point: that the taming of the road trip for the American middle class, by providing clean, reliable accomodations on the road, made it psychologically much easier for baby boomers' kids to leave home for school and career.

But it also would not be the Times if it did not manage to include something that was at once stupid, pretentious, somewhat offensive and at least a little goofy. And the grey lady does not fail us. Allow me to quote from the description of the late Paul Moore, episcopal bishop and patrician do-gooder. With his death, the Times laments, "America lost one of its last dashingly handsome, abundantly sexual WASP crusaders for social justice." Don't they have editors at the Times? What is this supposed to mean? Abundantly sexual? I guess if you're a salesman, you're just horny, but if you're a bishop, you're "abundantly sexual"? I like the use of the churchy "abundantly." You could, I suppose, be "bountifully sexual," or even "bountiously sexual," but perhaps that should be reserved for a female partician WASP saint with a great figure. Pardon me for asking, but just how abundantly sexual was he? Did he bless his flock with his abundant sexuality and crusade for social justice at the same time? That would be something.

Maybe it's a Catholic thing. We have trouble thinking of our saints as, well, hot. But I guess the idea is to suggest that Bishop Moore is so far above all that holy stuff. He was a saint, but not a saint, if you, nudge nudge wink wink, know what I mean. I understand from looking at Albion's Seed, a great book, that the Puritans were, contrary to popular opinion, quite into sex, but it just really, really had to be within marriage. Maybe there's some Episcopalian thing I'm missing about liking Bishops to be studly. But I doubt it. I think the Times is just being its usual toadying, simpering self when it comes to the long-gone WASP ascendancy.
Update: Here's an interesting piece on Paul Moore and the Episcopal Church in the US.
posted by thomas at 12/30/2003 03:29:00 PM

 
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative
By Maimon Schwarzschild

See "The Barbarian Invasions": a film from the French Canadian director Denys Arcand. It's about a dying man, a 60-ish and 60s-ish college teacher in Montreal. He is an old leftie, raffish and rather sad, who has lived for pleasure. His divorced wife and his estranged son -- a "risk management" capitalist -- bring some of the man's old friends and old mistresses together to be with him. It's funny, complicated, and very touching. The film has had good reviews: many reviewers are calling it the best film, or one of the best, of the year.

What none of the reviews mentions (at least none that I've seen) is that it's also, and on many levels, a deeply conservative movie. The serious side of the film -- about life and about family -- is as conservative as could be. And when the 60s-ish friends talk about politics and ideas in one long scene, they are rueful and pretty disillusioned about all of it: Marxism and Trotskyism, existentialism and anarchism, Quebec separatism, so on and so forth.

The satirical, funny side of the movie is just relentlessly conservative too. The Montreal hospital, under Canadian socialized medicine, is pictured like something out of Calcutta: a nightmare of crowded squalour and corruption. There are thuggish, gangster unions to be bribed. The hospital administrator, in her closely-guarded management suite with its big Quebec flag, spouts p.c. management-speak until she too accepts her bribe. There is a six-to-twelve month (-to forever) waiting period for a CAT scan, until the family go across the border to a private clinic in Vermont for immediate service. What makes the satire devastating (it would be over-the-top otherwise) is that it's delivered deadpan, as background just to be taken for granted.

It's a haunting movie in its way. Very funny too. (For Canadian history buffs, there is a scene -- extraneous to the plot, really, but effective nonetheless -- with a warehouse full of kitschy French Canadian church furniture: unsaleable, of course. The priest hoping to sell the stuff notes that Quebec stopped being Catholic from one month to the next in about 1966. Which in fact is essentially what happened...)

"The Barbarian Invasions" is evidence for Brian Anderson's observation that conservative ideas are appearing, more and more, in various media that were long a monopoly of the political and cultural left.

See the movie.

posted by maimon at 12/30/2003 01:21:00 PM

 
Tivo heaven
By Tom Smith

I can now record 140 hours of TV on my Tivo. Perfect for the James Bond marathon, every show about exotic, disgusting animals, incomprehensible Japanese cartoons for your children, the Lehrer news hour, K-1 fighting events to watch with your kids, cheesy Sci-Fi movie, ESPN classics from when football was football, and I could go on, and will. I was impressed by the prices at digitalrecorder.com. You give them money, and they send you the machine, just like they promise!

Speaking of disgusting animals, how about this? The male angler fish is about a hundredth of the size of the female. To mate, it attaches itself to the side of the female like a little leech. It is then literally absorbed into the body of the female until it is nothing more than a kind of wart with sperm in it. Somehow from there the female absorbs what it needs and reproduces. You can learn a lot from TV.
posted by thomas at 12/30/2003 12:45:00 PM

 
Stock up before it's too late
By Tom Smith

The feds are banning ephedra it seems. I'm not too ripped up about it (little gym joke there). Here's a dirty little secret of gym rat culture. A lot of those ripped guys and gals you see at the gym? How did they get that way? A lot of them did by taking stimulants such as ephedra. It's popular because it works. You're so buzzed up, you can't wait to get from the bench press to the squat rack. But, you might get a heart attack and die. No pain, no gain. I've never taken ephedra, but I've talked to plenty of people who have. Most of the other stimulants on the market now are just expensively packaged caffine. It's cheaper to go to Starbucks. And that works too! Lots of people use caffine to get them over the hump between the couch and the gym. Maybe it's wrong to invade a country just because they have oil. But I hope no one would suggest we couldn't invade South America if they ever threatened to cut off the coffee supply.
posted by thomas at 12/30/2003 12:32:00 PM

 
Sanchez on Rand
By Michael Rappaport

In my view, an accurate take from Julian Sanchez on how Ayn Rand often converts people to the right:

Jerome Tuccile wrote a history of the libertarian movement called "It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand"-- which is accurate enough, since at least when they're first getting interested in libertarian ideas, a lot of people come through Rand. And the funny part is, while she paints herself as this great champion of rationality and logic, the actual philosophy, stripped from the fictional and rhetorical context, is mostly a lot of sophomoric crap. She's not successful because her arguments were any good, but because she effectively gets across a "transvaluation of all values." She paints this portrait of the world going to hell because of political power lust. And, more importantly, she provides this kind of shock-therapy, in that she undoes, at least briefly, a lot of the emotional associations that get drummed into us, and that implicitly shape our political views. Government programs to help people are "generous," and if you want to be good and generous, you support those. Commercial activity is avaricious, and nice people want to constrain the sway of this sphere where greed is the prime engine.

Nozick once told me that as he was coming to hold classical liberal views, there was a point where he was convinced that capitalism was the best system, but that he must be a bad person to think so. I don't think I'd want to adopt her set of emotional associations wholesale, but for a lot of people she helps to loosen a sort of emotional-intellectual straightjacket that makes it impossible to consider classical liberal ideas without associating them automatically with base motivations, or the opposite ideas with noble ones.

posted by Michael at 12/30/2003 12:17:00 PM

 
Discontent on the Right
By Michael Rappaport

An interesting piece on discontent with President Bush on the right. Here are two small excerpts:

"Presidential political adviser Karl Rove estimates that as many as 4 million evangelical voters stayed home in 2000 because they were not sure whether Mr. Bush was "strong enough" on their issues."

"Pat Buchanan, whose challenge of President George Bush in 1992 is credited by some conservatives as leading to the Clinton presidency, says that if it weren't for the ongoing war the current president would be facing a primary challenge."

posted by Michael at 12/30/2003 11:53:00 AM

 
Tushnet Responds
By Michael Rappaport

Eve Tushnet responds to my post commenting on her column criticizing same sex marriage.
posted by Michael at 12/30/2003 11:21:00 AM

 
Quindlen on Liberty
By Michael Rappaport

Although the paragraph below comes from an essay that is a bit old, it is always worthwhile to mention something damning about Anna Quindlen. I do not read her column now, but I suffered for years when she was a New York Times columnist. Here is a short description of Quindlen's reaction to the liberation of Afghanistan:

"How depressing was it," asked Anna Quindlen in a December Newsweek column, "to see Afghan citizens celebrating the end of tyranny by buying consumer electronics?" Apparently, if you’re somebody like Quindlen -- who confessed in the same column that "I have everything I could want, and then some" -- the spectacle was pretty dispiriting. Liberty itself descends on the land, and the best thing its people can do is go shopping? It was just too vulgar.

posted by Michael at 12/30/2003 01:10:00 AM

 
Mad Cow Disease
By Michael Rappaport

Stephen Bainbridge has a series of interesting posts on issues relating to Mad Cow Disease.
posted by Michael at 12/29/2003 02:56:00 PM

 
Regulatory Failure: The ESA
By Michael Rappaport

Some powerful criticisms of the Endangered Species Act over at the Conspiracy.

Update: More at the Conspiracy on the ESA. Here is an excerpt:

A Washington Post editorial tries to claim the law is a success, but only succeeds in demonstrating how ESA myth overshadows environmental fact. For instance, the Post writes, "Thanks to the legislation, the American bald eagle, whose near-extinction had become a symbol for environmental degradation, is still flying." Not quite. The primary threat to the bald eagle was the pesticide DDT, which was linked to reproductive problems, specifically egg shell thinning, in several birds species. Yet DDT was banned in the United States in 1972, over twelve months before the ESA was enacted. Other federal laws, such as the Eagle Protection Act, also provided the bald eagle with specific protection against poachers and collectors. Thus it may be fair to credit the federal government with the bald eagle’s recovery, but the ESA was not the tool of this success. (Much the same can be said about the recovery of the peregrine falcon, which the AP celebrates here.) The Post is equally off-base in crediting the ESA with the recovery of species like the American Alligator, and it is simply perverse to credit the ESA for inspiring an international ban on trade in elephant products – a ban that has done more to imperil elephants, by diminishing the value of elephant herds and their habitat – than it has to save them.

posted by Michael at 12/29/2003 01:23:00 AM

 
Oakshott on Iraq
By Michael Rappaport

David Brooks has another interesting column – I like him better at the Times than I ever did at the Weekly Standard or the Wall Street Journal – on what Michael Oakshott’s attitude would have been towards the American reconstruction of Iraq.

The Oakshott of Rationalism in Politics is great, but I must admit that I have never digested much of the rest of his works. For Andrew Sullivan’s take, see here.

I still remember the first time I read Oakshott. It was in a course at the Yale Law School called The Conservative Tradition. It was taught by Anthony Kronman, and it covered a range of prudential conservative thinkers, including Burke, de Tocqueville, and Arendt. Kronman had a real talent for clear exposition. At the time I had already started to make the move from being a pure libertarian to a fusionist conservative-libertarian due to Hayek’s influence, but Kronman’s class helped to deepen and broaden my understanding of the conservative tradition. Interestingly, Kronman omitted Hayek from the reading list, which was probably a mistake in general, but was fine for me, since I was quite familiar with his views.

By the way, the students in the class were also first rate, including law professors Tom Smith, Akhil Amar, Dan Greenwood and Peter Swire. While the class was one of the best I ever had at Yale, it of course had nothing to do with “real law.”
posted by Michael at 12/28/2003 09:03:00 PM

 
Cool new space telescope
By Tom Smith

Check out the pics from the new Spitzer space telescope at the JPL website.
posted by thomas at 12/26/2003 12:11:00 PM

 
The Ford Foundation -- And The Carnival Of The NGOs
By Maimon Schwarzschild

The Ford Foundation may now receive some long-overdue scrutiny for its funding of Palestinian (and other Arab) extremist groups, as the Wall Street Journal reports today (registration required). Ford heavily supported the groups that turned the UN's "anti-racism" conference in Durban in 2001 into an anti-semitic hate rally, for example. (The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported on this in a fascinating series in October.)

There is a broader problem, though. There is now a very extensive network of "NGO"s -- non-governmental organizations -- involved in trying to influence international relations. The NGO world is almost all on the political left, much of it "hard left" by any measure. The NGOs have been given formal standing at the UN and in other international organiztions. Many NGOs, including some of the most zealously leftist of them, are quite lavishly funded: directly by the European Union in many cases, as well as indirectly with a boost from US tax law, as today's Wall Street Journal piece points out. The sheer number of organizations is impressive, if not breathtaking: there are now hundreds, probably thousands, of active NGOs on the international circuit.

When you talk to people involved in international issues, many of them mention quite matter-of-factly that NGOs are active in lobbying foreign governments, especially "third world" ones, and systematically urging these governments to take a "harder" left-wing and anti-American policy line on a wide array of issues, ranging from trade to the war in Iraq.

The NGO phenomenon has received very little scrutiny -- certainly very little critical scrutiny -- from scholars or journalists. (The JTA report on the Ford Foundation in Durban was highly exceptional, and therefore all the more important.) There are obvious legal questions, including whether American citizens on the staffs of NGOs are breaking American laws by lobbying foreign governments to oppose American foreign policy. (It is a criminal offence under the Logan Act for an American to lobby a foreign government "in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States".)

But mainly, who are these groups? How many are there? What is the range of their agendas, and is it true that they are tilted ideologically to the left or the far left? Which are the biggest and most influential? What are they up to? Where is their funding coming from? How much formal and informal interchange is there among them? And how successful are they at influencing international relations? There is a good book to be written about this -- preferably by someone sceptical but sober. The JTA report is a good start, and a good model.

posted by maimon at 12/26/2003 11:53:00 AM

 
Gift suggestion
By Tom Smith

Both Professor Rappaport and my lovely wife Jeanne would groove on this.
posted by thomas at 12/26/2003 10:41:00 AM

 
Cards with kids
By Tom Smith

This is a fun card game for the whole family. It is more sophisticated than it looks, with room for adult fun. For "ridiculous" for example, I chose "Eleanor Roosevelt," which would certainly have annoyed some players. Kids like it too. And, if you like, you could spice it up by playing for money. If you do this, I suggest you shuffle the cards before they are judged, to prevent various strategems. If you play it, you'll see what I mean.
posted by thomas at 12/26/2003 10:37:00 AM

 
Royal dog fight
By Tom Smith

One of the queen's corgis was mauled to death by her daughter's bull terrier. You can see how it could happen. Every time I see a corgi I sort of want to grab it in my teeth and shake it until it is dead, but maybe that's just me. Oh, alright, I'm just kidding. Any time someone loses a dog, it's a very sad thing. But you would think, with god knows how many lickspittles hanging about, the royals could manage to control their dogs. "James, take Dotty outside, and please don't let her kill anything." How hard is that? Anybody should be able to figure out that you don't let a bull terrier with a violent record play with an annoying little weiner dog with an attitude.
posted by thomas at 12/26/2003 09:31:00 AM

 
Tushnet on Same Sex Marriage
By Michael Rappaport

Eve Tushnet has an interesting piece arguing against same sex marriage and the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision holding that the state constitution requires that same sex marriage be recognized in the state. The logic of her argument against same sex marriage -- that marriage is about protecting children -- seems to suggest that it is problematic for gay couples to adopt or have children. This is a premise that is often omitted from social conservative arguments against same sex marriage, but would appear to be an important part of that argument.

Concerning the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision, Tushnet has this to say:

...The Massachusetts court is saying to citizens, "You all go ahead and vote for the laws. Then we'll tell you what you really voted for. Don't expect it to look much like what you thought you agreed to." The rule of law requires that laws be predictable and stable--that laws not be yanked out from under citizens like a carpet in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. The Massachusetts court (like the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade) has ignored this principle.

The funny thing is, this bait-and-switch approach to judging may be turned against the Goodridge decision itself in the future. As UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh (who supports same-sex marriage) has pointed out, the language the majority used in its decision gives no good reason to bar polygamy or adult incestuous marriages. If marriage is simply about commitment, well, obviously we can make commitments to more than one person. And we can make commitments to people who are already members of our families - for example, siblings. Why should these commitments not be recognized in law as marriages?

The point in her first paragraph seems undeniable. The point in her second paragraph, however, seems naively academic. If the judges were motivated by consistency, then Tushnet might be right. But they are not: they are motivated by the belief 1) that same sex marriage should be allowed and 2) it is discriminatory for such marriages not to be allowed. It may be discriminatory that polygamy is prohibited, but the judges do not think it should be allowed (nor is there a strong political movement in favor of it), and therefore one should have no worry that it will be protected.
posted by Michael at 12/25/2003 12:31:00 PM

 
Mad Bureaucrat Disease
By Michael Rappaport

An interesting article on Mad Cow Disease. While one certainly needs to be skeptical of New York Times's articles criticizing cabinet officials in the Bush Administration, somehow I do not find it hard to believe that the Department of Agriculture is both behind the times as to scientific understanding and overly protective, in a short-sighted way, of agricultural interests.
posted by Michael at 12/25/2003 01:17:00 AM

 
Ayn Rand on Christmas
By Michael Rappaport

Tim Sandefur has a quote from Ayn Rand expressing her unique and interesting perspective on Christmas.
posted by Michael at 12/24/2003 04:07:00 PM

 
Quotes from 2003
By Michael Rappaport

Tim Blair has a long list of his favorite quotes from the year. (Hap tip: Instapundit.) One that caught my eye:

"The last thing we expected was to be the first to publish anything about the [antiterrorism protests in Iraq]. It felt both good and awful at the same time. Good for scooping Reuters, AFP, AP, and other wire services and media stations. And awful for the people that depended on these services for their news. I'm telling you there were reporters from every station in the world at the demos that day and yet only a few mentioned them at all." -- Iraqi blogger Zeyad

(Emphasis added). I wonder why the reporters failed to mention the protests?
posted by Michael at 12/24/2003 02:33:00 PM

 
Father and Son
By Michael Rappaport

A cute conversation.
posted by Michael at 12/23/2003 09:10:00 PM

 
More on Marxian Tort Law
By Michael Rappaport

Ethan Leib writes to complain about my post on his Marxist Theory of Tort Law. He writes:

I wonder if intellectual integrity doesn't demand that we take seriously any idea--even Nazi tort law--if it provides a conceptual arsenal that can illuminate our own practices or provide a standpoint from which to view our own practices in a new light. . . . If you had taken the time to do more than glance at the paper, of course, you would have seen that I don't argue for a Marxist administration of tort.

I am glad to here that Mr. Leib does not endorse a “Marxist administration of tort.” (Of course, I had not thought so from glancing at his paper. That was not my objection.) I am also glad to hear that he is merely using Marxian theory to “illuminate our own practices.” I have no objection in principle to any such analysis, but I am highly skeptical in practice that Marxian theory will enlighten us – especially after a century in which some our brightest minds have plumbed the depths of it. For an earlier post on this subject, see here.

The problem is that given the obvious weaknesses of Marxian theory, it seems to me that most people who spend time on Marxian theory do so because they are still attracted to it. And I find this both intellectually and morally depraved.

If Mr. Leib is not attracted to the theory – a point which is at least not obvious on the face of his paper, but may very well be true – then I say great.
posted by Michael at 12/23/2003 04:06:00 PM

 
Brooks on the Democratic Party
By Michael Rappaport

This analysis from David Brooks seems right to me:

"Howard Dean has launched a comprehensive assault on his party's leaders. First, he attacked their character, charging that they didn't have the guts to stand up to George Bush. Then, he attacked their power base, building an alternative fund-raising and voter mobilization structure. Now he is attacking their ideas, dismissing the Clinton era as a period of mere damage control.

So how are the Democratic leaders defending themselves? They are responding as any establishment responds when it has lost confidence in itself, when it has lost faith in its ideas, when it has lost the will to fight."
posted by Michael at 12/23/2003 02:37:00 PM

 
Posner on Same Sex Marriage
By Michael Rappaport

Take a look at Richard Posner’s views on how the judiciary should rule as to same sex marriage. If all judges had Posner's attitudes and talents, I might favor a pragmatic theory of judging. But since they do not . . . .
posted by Michael at 12/23/2003 02:31:00 PM

 
US Funds Terrorist Organization
By Michael Rappaport

Although the United States has announced a strict policy against terrorism, somehow that policy is not applied to the Palestinians. Consider the following from Rachel Ehrenfeld in an opinion piece in the Washington Times (Hat tip: SFA).

This week, the International donor community has been gathered in Rome to approve another contribution of $1.2 billion to the Palestinian Authority for the 2004 budget. The United States, Japan, the European Union and Norway, are the biggest contributors, joined by the Arab League countries and the International Monetary Fund.

This money is provided despite “thousands of Palestinian documents captured by the IDF, demonstrating Mr. Arafat's and the PA's complicity in funding and encouraging terrorist attacks against Israel.”
posted by Michael at 12/23/2003 11:59:00 AM

 
Iraqi Freedom in the Wall Street Journal
By Michael Rappaport

A superb day at the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page. Two pieces that address the politics and economics of the future Iraqi state. First, Bernard Lewis has a great article on the possibility of democracy in Iraq. While the piece is not yet available to nonsubscribers, here is a brief excerpt:

The study of Islamic history and the vast and rich Islamic political literature encourages the belief that it may well be possible to develop democratic institutions – not necessarily in our Western definition of that much misused term, but in one deriving from their own history and culture, and ensuring, in their way, limited government under law, consultation and openness, in a civilized and humane society. There is enough in the traditional culture of Islam on the one hand and the modern experience of Muslim peoples on the other to provide the basis for an advance towards freedom in the true sense of the word.

Second, Vernon Smith explains his ingenious plan for privatizing oil and other public assets in Iraq. He argues that each Iraqi citizen should have an equal right in the public assets, which should be tradeable on international exchanges, and the assets should be auctioned to the highest bidder. Marginal Revolution has a long excerpt here. Here is one paragraph:

[Establishing this scheme] would launch the new Iraqi state as one based on individual human rights, and the rule of law, and anoint it with rock-hard credibility by giving every citizen a stake in that new regime of political and economic freedom. The objective is to undermine any citizen sense of disenfranchisement in the country's wealth, economic and political future, and to galvanize citizen support for a democratic regime. Now is the time to act, before post-war business-as-usual creates de facto foreign and domestic spoils-of-war property right claims, leaving out a citizenry brutalized enough by a totalitarian regime, and in sore need of empowerment in their own future.

With these two pieces, one begins to have a blueprint for freedom in the Arab world.
posted by Michael at 12/23/2003 01:00:00 AM

 
Deference to the Fox When He Guards the Hen House
By Michael Rappaport

Cass Sunstein has written an op ed in the Washington Post praising the Supreme Court’s opinion in the recent Campaign Finance case for giving deference to Congress’s factual findings. Sunstein argues that in other cases involving federalism the Court has mistakenly failed to defer to such findings. One aspect of Sunstein’s argument – that the Court gave no deference in the earlier federalism cases – is powerfully criticized by Larry Solum.

My concern is with another aspect of Sunstein’s argument – his praise for the Supreme Court’s conferral of deference in the Campaign Finance case. My question is simple: Aside from a preexisting desire to uphold the Campaign Finance law, why would anyone think it appropriate to defer to Congress in this case? The law at issue has often been described as an Incumbent Protection Act and therefore the incumbents that passed it had a serious conflict of interest.

The only argument I can see for the Court’s decision to defer to Congress is an argument based on rules. We should defer some of the time and it would be problematic for the Court to adjust its deference based on how much of a conflict of interest it perceived Congress to have. For an ideal world, this would be at least a plausible argument, although I think I would reject it. But for this Court – for Justice O’Connor – to make an argument based on rules is absurd.

Fortunately, perhaps the nation’s leading expert on whether Congress should be given deference concerning First Amendment issues is an active member of the Blogosphere – Stuart Benjamin of the Conspiracy. Perhaps Stuart will enlight us.

posted by Michael at 12/22/2003 04:53:00 PM

 
Marxist Tort Law
By Michael Rappaport

Larry Solum does a great job each week of listing a wealth of legal papers, but here is one that I plan not to study: “What Should a Marxist Legal Analysis of Torts Become?” written by Ethan Leib of Yale’s political science department. In much the same way that some people cannot resist staring at an automobile accident, I glanced at the paper to see if it really purported to be about what its title implied. The answer is yes. Consider this gem from the conclusion:

In a period of ever-expanding capitalism, the Marxist legal analysis of tort still may have a role even if the revolutionary movement to bring about communism is not yet ripe. As Desai very commonsensically reminds us, “since the ancient/classical, as well as the feudal, modes of production lasted a thousand years each, why did anyone think that a much more productive mode would disappear in a mere century or two.

Sorry. I feel about this one much as I would feel about an essay on the Nazi Theory of Tort Law. Marx may be dead in Moscow, but he appears to be alive in New Haven.
posted by Michael at 12/21/2003 08:55:00 PM

 
The Response to Sharon's Speech
By Michael Rappaport

The Administration is already modifying its response to Sharon's speech. My guess is that the Administration wants to keep its response, initially at least, positive but noncommittal. And that may be the reason for the change, since the White House remarks were interpreted by the press, at least, as too negative.
posted by Michael at 12/21/2003 12:56:00 AM

 
On the First Day of Kwanzaa, My True Love Tortured Me ...
By Gail Heriot

If you visit a card shop at your local shopping mall these days, chances are you will see Kwanzaa cards. It's big business. (Well, maybe it's just medium-sized business, but it is evidently lucrative enough for card companies to bother with.) And if you go to swanky private schools like the one attended by the children of my fellow Right Coaster Chris Wonnell, you may well receive instruction on this traditional African-American holiday. Taking Kwanzaa seriously is all part of the spirit of multiculturalism.

Except, of course, Kwanzaa isn't traditional at all. It was invented in the late 1960s by convicted felon Ron Everett, leader of a so-called black nationalist group called United Slaves. I use the word "so-called" because United Slaves' veneer of black nationalism was very thin; most of its members had been members of a South Central Los Angeles street gang called the Gladiators, just as the Southern California chapter of the Black Panthers had been members of the Slauson gang.

In the early 1960s, these gangs were mostly concerned with petty and not-so-petty crime in the Los Angeles area, including the ever-popular practice of hitting up local merchants for protection money. By the late 1960s, however, they discovered that if they cloaked their activities in rhetoric of black nationalism, they could hit up not just the local pizza parlor, but great institutions of higher learning as well, most notably UCLA. Everett re-named himself Maulana Ron Karenga ("Maulana" we are told is Swahili for "master teacher"), donned an African dashiki, and invented Kwanzaa. And the radical chic folks at UCLA went into paroxysms of appreciation.

In theory, Kwanzaa is a Pan-African harvest holiday, except that it is not set at harvest time. And in theory, it celebrates the ties of African Americans to African culture, except that it purports to celebrate those ties using the East African language of Swahili when nearly all African Americans are descended from West African peoples.

But those are just details. Many of the best-loved holidays in the Christian calendar have traditions connected to them that don't quite fit if you examine them too closely. But those rough edges have now been smoothed over by the long passage of time. No one really cares if the Christmas tree was once used to celebrate pagan holidays; many generations of credible Christians have earned the right to claim it as their own.

Kwanzaa is different. It has connections to still-living violent criminals. It is an insult to the African American community, very few of whom celebrate Kwanzaa and even fewer of whom would celebrate it if they knew the full story of its recent history, to suggest that it is an "African American holiday."

UCLA soon found that a bunch of street thugs calling themselves United Slaves can dress themselves up in colorful clothing, learn a few words of Swahili but they will still be ... well ... street thugs. The beginning of the end for United Slaves as an organization came with a gun battle fought on the UCLA campus against the Black Panthers over which group would control the new Afro-American Studies Center (and its generous budget). In the end, two Black Panther leaders--Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter and John Jerome Huggins--were dead. Two members of United Slaves were convicted of their murder. (Under UCLA's High-Potential Program, which admitted politically-active minority students during the late 1960s, often regardless of their academic credentials or even whether they had graduated from high school, many members of the Black Panthers and United Slaves were registered as students at UCLA.)

No, Maulana Ron Karenga was not among them. But not long after the incident, Karenga proved himself to be every bit as brutal as his followers when he was charged and convicted of two counts of felonious assault and one count of false imprisonment.

The details of the crime as reported in the Los Angeles Times (and quoted last year by Paul Mulshine in an article for FrontPage magazine) are horrific. The paranoid Karenga began to suspect that the members of his organization were trying to poison him by placing "crystals" in his food and around the house. According to the Los Angeles Times:

"Deborah Jones, who once was given the Swahili title of an African queen, said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothes. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis' mouth and placed against Miss Davis' face and that one of her own big toes was tightened in a vise. Karenga, head of US, also put detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said."

The Los Angeles Times went on the state that "Karenga allegedly told the women that 'Vietnamese torture is nothing compared to what I know.' "

Karenga spent time in prison for the act. But if you are worried are what has become of him, you needn't be. He served only a few years. When he got out, he somehow convinced Cal State Long Beach to make him head of the African Studies Department. Happy Kwanzaa.
posted by Gail at 12/20/2003 03:14:00 PM

 
The Sharon Speech: Part II – Analysis
By Michael Rappaport

Having summarized Prime Minister Arial Sharon’s speech proposing a new disengagement policy, I will now analyze it. In my view, Sharon’s disengagement proposal is a significant improvement over previous strategies pursued by Israel. In the past, Israel has either placed its hope on an agreement with the Palestinians (Oslo, Camp David II) or attempted to forcibly constrain Palestinian terror in the West Bank and Gaza. Neither strategy has been terribly successful.

The disengagement strategy has the potential to be far superior. First, the new strategy will improve Israeli security against Palestinian terror. By building the security fence and withdrawing from difficult to defend settlements, Israel will make it much harder for Palestinians from the West Bank to attack Israel or its settlements.

Second, the new strategy gives the Palestinians a much greater incentive to make a peace deal. The incentives are of both the carrot and stick variety. The carrots involve an Israeli offer to make a peace deal and the removal of certain settlements. The peace offer is not really new, but Sharon’s speech does make explicit that a Palestinian West Bank would be contiguous (a feature that the Palestinians claim was not at least initially offered by Barak). The removal of settlements before the Palestinians crack down on terror is both new and significant.

The sticks, however, are even more important. If Israel pursues a disengagement policy, the Palestinians’ most significant weapon for fighting Israel, suicide bombers, will be significantly weakened. Moreover, Israel will no longer be forced to pursue a strategy of waiting for a peace deal for security: It can pull back behind its fence and attempt to protect itself. Further, Israel will retain control of much larger portions of the West Bank than they would keep under a peace deal.

Obviously a fence is not a panacea, and the Palestinians may figure out other ways to attack Israel. But it seems likely that Palestinian terror will be reduced. The key is that Sharon appears to have figured out a way to give the Palestinians some incentive to make peace now – a point I have emphasized – while at the same improving its security until any deal is reached.

Nonetheless, as I said in the first post on this blog, Israel is not simply fighting against Palestinian terror. A second constraint, if not opponent, is world opinion, including the opinion of the United States. In addressing this constraint, the question is whether the disengagement plan will provoke vigorous responses from the Arab Middle East and Europe, which might then cause the United States to strongly oppose the plan.

There are some hopeful possibilities on this front. First, the incentives created by the disengagement plan may lead to a peace deal before any disengagement occurs. Second, the disengagement plan will provide the Palestinians with some kind of control, or perhaps even a state, in the limited portions of the West Bank and Gaza, which may cause the Palestinians to oppose the plan less vigorously than one might otherwise have expected. Third, the plan is tied to the actions of the Palestinians. It does not permanently occupy the land; it says, “we will withdraw as part of a peace deal.” The world may therefore see that responsibility for failing to negotiate mainly lies with the Palestinians.

Still, it is to be expected that the Arab Middle East and much of Europe will oppose the disengagement plan, if for no other reason than it is an effective strategy for Israel and would weaken the Palestinian’s ability to wage war. But the real question is whether there would be enough support, from moderate people and nations, to allow the United States to back, or at least not strongly oppose, the Plan. If so, Sharon might just be able to pull it off.

That said, there are many dangers lurking in the Plan. Dismantling settlements will definitely provoke significant opposition from Sharon’s base. Even more importantly, Sharon must not dismantle the settlements without being allowed to complete the security fence. Thus, he must be careful only to dismantle the settlements as he gains support for the plan.

Despite these dangers, the disengagement plan is a major step forward. Today, I believe that Israel is a bit safer and terrorism is a bit weaker than each was yesterday.
posted by Michael at 12/19/2003 12:21:00 PM

 
The Padilla case
By Tom Smith

Good post on this on Volokh, including link to PDF file of opinions.

It seems to me Eugene Volokh, and John Yoo (last night on Lerher news hour), get it right on the Second Circuit opinion. It is hard to see why the Congressional resolution authorizing military force did not include the power of military detention. On the other hand, given that it is such a potentially dangerous power when exercised against US citizens on US soil, it seems prudent at least that citizens should have the right to contest their status as enemy combatants before a judge and while represented by counsel. At least until things get much worse, and they might, it is hard to see how this would be inconsistent with national security. Such hearings could be in camera if they involved classified material. E.g., we know Johnny Jihad is part of this plot to release weaponized smallpox at the annual ACLU convention because of the following NSA intercepts . . .

As to the 9th circuit opinion on Gitmo detainees being entitled to lawyers, personal trainers, first run movies, and individual de-lousing kits, I know only what I read in the New York Times and saw on TV, but I can at least share my attitudes. Apparently the decision rests on the base being a U.S. territory, and individuals being entitled to certain rights on U.S. territories. All I know of the law of U.S. territories is that it is very complicated, not at all intuitive and understood by perhaps a half dozen people in the country, one of whom is my friend Gary Lawson at Boston U law school. Perhaps Gary would hazard an opinion? However, the 9th Circuit's opinion on such a question has exactly the same odds of being correct as you have of guessing which way the stock market is going to move. The 9th Circuit could be right. Anything can happen. But it would be a pretty silly result if enemy combatants captured in the field of battle had rights to counsel while the conflict was still going on and while they were being held on a military base not in the U.S. It's possible. If it's true, it's dumb, and Congress should change the law. But the Ninth Circuit saying it is the law, increases the probability of its being so by zero, or perhaps even a negative amount.

A final thought for civil libertarians. I actually do worry about federal agents pounding on my door in the middle of the night and hauling me away under some nebulous authority. Oh, OK, not really very much. But it is easy to imagine this power getting out of hand, especially if there is another big terrorist attack. People who care about liberty should think about what is really necessary to prevent something like a dirty bomb, or my favorite nightmare, a biological attack. If say 50 or 100 thousand people were killed in such an attack, our liberties would be far more threatened than by John Padilla not getting a lawyer. Sometimes the choice is not between a slippery slope and the high ground, but a slippery slope and ground that could give way beneath you at any moment. A dose of Richard Posner's pragmatism is needed here.
posted by thomas at 12/19/2003 09:09:00 AM

 
The Sharon Speech: Part I – Summary
By Michael Rappaport

Arial Sharon, the Prime Minister of Israel, has given a major policy address. It may turn out to be one of the most important speeches in Israel’s history. In my view, it is a bold address that holds the promise of effecting a real improvement in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. This post summarizes the address; my next provides analysis. (The italics are supplied by me.)

First, Sharon reiterated his acceptance of the roadmap:

The Roadmap is the only political plan accepted by Israel, the Palestinians, the Americans and a majority of the international community. We are willing to proceed toward its implementation: two states – Israel and a Palestinian State – living side by side in tranquility, security and peace. The Roadmap is a clear and reasonable plan, and it is therefore possible and imperative to implement it. The concept behind this plan is that only security will lead to peace. And in that sequence. . . . The opposite perception, according to which the very signing of a peace agreement will produce security out of thin air, has already been tried in the past and failed miserably.

He also announced that Israel would take actions to improve conditions for the Palestinians:

“Israel will remove closures and curfews and reduce the number of roadblocks; we will improve freedom of movement for the Palestinian population, including the passage of people and goods;

Israel will fulfil the commitments taken upon itself. I have committed to the President of the United States that Israel will dismantle unauthorized outposts. It is my intention to implement this commitment. The unauthorized outposts will be dismantled. Period.”

Sharon appealed to the Palestinians to make a peace deal, and suggested some of the terms:

It is not in our interest to govern you. We would like you to govern yourselves in your own country. A democratic Palestinian state with territorial contiguity in Judea and Samaria and economic viability, which would conduct normal relations of tranquility, security and peace with Israel. Abandon the path of terror and let us together stop the bloodshed. Let us move forward together towards peace.

But having offered a deal, Sharon then explained what would occur if the Palestinians did not pursue peace. It is here where Sharon has taken a new path and where many of his action in past months have been, in my view, leading:

We are interested in conducting direct negotiations, but do not intend to hold Israeli society hostage in the hands of the Palestinians. I have already said – we will not wait for them indefinitely.

If the Palestinians do not make a deal, Israel will unilaterally pursue an Disengagement Plan. The Plan

will draw provisional security lines and the IDF will be deployed along them. Security will be provided by IDF deployment, the security fence and other physical obstacles. The "Disengagement Plan" does not prevent the implementation of the Roadmap. Rather, it is a step Israel will take in the absence of any other option, in order to improve its security. The "Disengagement Plan" will be realized only in the event that the Palestinians continue to drag their feet and postpone implementation of the Roadmap.

The Disengagement plan will allow Israel to improve its security while waiting for the Palestinians to make a deal. The Plan, however, has an incentive for the Palestinians:

Obviously, through the "Disengagement Plan" the Palestinians will receive much less than they would have received through direct negotiations as set out in the Roadmap.

posted by Michael at 12/18/2003 09:22:00 PM

 
A little political humor from my 12 year old son Luke, who is not allowed to watch this kind of thing
By Tom Smith

I wonder how little what's-his-name is doing these days. Not as well as Janet Reno I bet.
posted by thomas at 12/18/2003 06:16:00 PM

 
Jesus the Movie
By Tom Smith

Controversy over Mel Gibson's forthcoming movie about the Passion of Jesus.

I agree with most of what Medved says. However, I don't think you can really separate telling the story from the effect of the story. If Spielberg decided to do an historically accurate and graphic movie about the Inquisition and its effects on the Jews of Spain, for example, it would make the Church look very bad, and I would suspect Spielberg of Christophobia. The analogy isn't perfect, because the Crucifixion is at the core of Christian dogma and faith, so for Christians it's a story that must be told. On the other hand, you can't really expect Jews to shut up already about being persecuted.

This makes me think of the essential weirdness and oddity of Christianity. It is a religion that centers around a guy who was tortured to death in a way intended to be extremely humiliating and painful to even think about. I remembering reading that in Japan, Catholics used to carry around little crucifixes in boxes, where the crucifix was behind a curtain, because the image was considered so shocking and horrible it should not be displayed openly. Gibson clearly gets this, as he says his intent is to make everyone who watches the movie, not just Jews, uncomfortable. The thing for Christians to remember is that every Jew who died in a concentration camp, or was killed by a Christian in a pogrom was as much a victim, and a victim to the same things, as Jesus was. As some wise thinker said, the dividing line between good and evil runs not between Christians and Jews, but down the middle of every human heart.
posted by thomas at 12/18/2003 10:28:00 AM

 
You can't make this stuff up
By Tom Smith

Did the Butcher of Bahgdad retain his sense of style to the end? Christopher Hawthorne in the Design Notebook in today's New York Times contemplates this profoundly trivial question. It's hard for we Americans to really understand what it's like for a perpetrator of crimes against humanity, but one with some taste, to try to make a spider hole a home. Did you notice that Sadam had with him moisturizing shampoo? That desert air plays havoc with your locks. And last I saw him, I would definitely say he was having a bad hair day.

For Christopher's sake, I want to assure him that I at least really am aware that Sadam must have really had his feelings hurt to see the soles of the boots of the Army special forces men who captured him. I really do feel that in his culture, this is deeply insulting. And right now I'm going to cry about it. Boo hoo hoo hoo hoo. There, I hope you feel better now, Christopher. I know I do.

We need more aritlces like this. What should a terrorist wear before he slaughters innocent people? The whole jeans and white T-shirt thing is just so generic.

This one definitely is a contender for the most idiotic and pretentious New York Times missive of the year, and that's saying something.
posted by thomas at 12/18/2003 09:32:00 AM

 
Mercury Emissions
By Michael Rappaport

An interesting post on the mercury issue. It captures in a short space why many conservatives and libertarians are often hostile to the claims of environmentalists, even when environmentalists claim to be concerned about behavior that will seriously harm the public. The reason is that the environmentalist claims are often based on faulty inferences and junk science. Sadly, the precautionary approach that is written into certain environmental laws often appears to condone, if not require, such inferences. Here is an excerpt:

How was the EPA's safe-level arrived at? There are three major studies of mercury and neurological impairment in children due to consumption of contaminated fish. One study found no effect, one was ambiguous, the last found some mild impairment (You would never notice the impairment on an individual level and can detect it only in a large sample. Not to be ignored if it exists, but we are not talking about Downs children). To be on the safe side, the EPA focused on the one study that found an effect. Within that one study there was some uncertainty about how much mercury caused a problem so the EPA took that study's lower bound (the lower bound of the 95 confidence interval for the statisticians in the audience.) Finally, to really be on the safe side, they divided the lower bound by ten!

Moreover, the Bush Administration does not want to ignore these concerns. It simply wants to reduce the possibly harmful emissions more slowly than does the NRDC to greatly reduce the cost.
posted by Michael at 12/18/2003 08:52:00 AM

 
Sad but True
By Michael Rappaport

If you are a professor, at least.
posted by Michael at 12/18/2003 07:52:00 AM

 
Acting and Politics
By Michael Rappaport

There are times when I think that acting might injure the part of a person’s brain that discerns correct political principles. Or is it that people who lack this ability in the first place happen to be good at acting? Nature or nurture – it is always hard to say. Although the evidence for at least one of these conclusions is overwhelming, there are exceptions. Consider this courageous statement of political wisdom by John Rhys-Davis, the actor who plays Gimli the dwarf in the Lord of the Rings movies (Hat tip and organization of the quote from Andrew Sullivan):

I'm burying my career so substantially in these interviews that it's painful. But I think that there are some questions that demand honest answers. I think that Tolkien says that some generations will be challenged. And if they do not rise to meet that challenge, they will lose their civilization. That does have a real resonance with me... What is unconscionable is that too many of your fellow journalists do not understand how precarious Western civilization is and what a jewel it is.

How did we get the sort of real democracy, how did we get the level of tolerance that allows me to propound something that may be completely alien to you around this table, and yet you will take it and you will think about it and you’ll say no you're wrong because of this and this and this. And I'll listen and I'll say, "Well, actually, maybe I am wrong because of this and this.

[He points at a female reporter and adopts an authoritarian voice, to play a militant-Islam character:] ‘You should not be in this room. Because your husband or your father is not here to guide you. You could only be here in this room with these strange men for immoral purposes.'

I mean ... the abolition of slavery comes from Western democracy. True Democracy comes from our Greco-Judeo-Christian-Western experience. If we lose these things, then this is a catastrophe for the world.

True and beautiful. And he can act.
posted by Michael at 12/18/2003 07:00:00 AM

 
Habermas on eugenics, and life issues
By Tom Smith

When smart Germans talk about the dangers of eugenics and other 'life' issues, its a good idea to listen.
posted by thomas at 12/17/2003 04:41:00 PM

 
Utilitarian Democrats
By Michael Rappaport

The Evangelical Output discusses the results on the ethics test of various bloggers. After accurately listing me as a utilitarian, he says of utilitarians: "Make Good Democrats." For a blogger who is so focused on morality, he sure knows how to hurt a guy. I guess I will just have to lick my wounds and re-read those "Democrats" Richard Epstein and David Friedman.
posted by MichaelTom at 12/17/2003 12:13:00 PM

 
Exam Postponement Excuses
By Michael Rappaport

Since the exam in my Administrative Law class is being given today, this interesting post on excuses for postponing and cancelling exams seemed appropriate.
posted by Michael at 12/17/2003 08:08:00 AM

 
Steyn on Dean
By Michael Rappaport

An insightful and funny piece (although not as funny as Tom's post) on Dean and the other Democrat presidential candidates. The main point: Dean cares about bike paths more than national security. Here is an excerpt regarding the response of the Democrats to the capture of Saddam:

It's odd that when something big happens, as on Sunday, the Democratic candidates seem irrelevant to the story, like asking a lacrosse expert what he thinks of the Super Bowl. They get interviewed and they trot out their lame clichés, about the need to "internationalize" Iraq, by which they mean not Tony Blair, John Howard, the Poles and Italians, but Kofi Annan, The Hague, the French, the Guinean foreign minister, all the folks who proved unwilling and unable to deal with Iraq before the liberation and who have given no indication of being likely to do any better after. The Democrats' indestructible retreat to this dreary line gives them the air of a gormless twit in a drawing-room comedy coming in through the French windows every 10 minutes and saying, "Anyone for tennis?" You can't help feeling that, on the big questions roiling around America's national security, the Dems don't really have speaking parts: if this was Broadway, they'd have been written out in New Haven.

posted by Michael at 12/17/2003 06:01:00 AM

 
Just say we ain't payin'
By Tom Smith

Jack Kemp gets it right:

It is my hope that Baker presents America's position to
Saddam's debtors this way: Much, perhaps an overwhelming
amount, of Iraq's debt falls under the category of "odious
debt" - debt contracted not for the needs and benefit of the
people but to strengthen and support a despotic regime.
Bankruptcy is a fundamental concept of capitalism that wipes
the contractual slate clean. There is a political analogy to
bankruptcy - today it's called "regime change" - in which the
country begins de novo. It occurred in Nazi Germany,
imperial Japan, Soviet Russia and Warsaw Pact Europe. It
has now occurred in Iraq. Tabula rasa: The slate has been
wiped clean; things begin de novo. Thus, rather than going to
France, Germany and Russia hat in hand asking for debt
"forgiveness," I hope Baker presents them with the stark
reality that a free and sovereign Iraq will be perfectly
justified in repudiating much, if not the overwhelming
majority, of the debt contracted by Saddam. Better for those
countries to step up to the plate on their own now than play
the role of Shylock later.
posted by thomas at 12/16/2003 05:30:00 PM

 
Yale Law School annual letter arrives. Life is complete.
By Tom Smith

The annual holiday (it would be wrong to say Christmas) dean's letter has arrived from the Yale Law School. It is always good for a few laughs. For example, on Jan Deutsch's retirement:

"To say that Jan Deutsch approaches constitutional and corporate law from an original point of view is--as all Jan's former students can attest-- a wild understatement . . . Well, you can say that again. An insane point of view would be more accurate . . . of the utterly fresh contribution he has made, during his 38 years on the faculty, to their understanding of these subjects. "Fresh" is good. I would be surprised if Deutsch was aware of any corporate law case after Perlman v. Feldman or indeed that Learned Hand had in fact, died, and therefore was no longer shaping corporate law. But I have an ax to grind. I was actually ejected from Professor Deutsch's class after disagreeing with him about the Holocaust. He said after the US Army took Germany, all the Nazis should have been summarily executed. I said, no, there could be cases of mistaken identity, false denunciations and so forth, so there would have to be some kind of procedure to figure out who the Nazis really were, then they could be executed. Professor Deutsch told me to get a drop slip and he would sign it. He wasn't kidding. He had, as far as I could tell, absolutely no sense of humor. Jan has helped his students see the unexpected in the familiar and the mysterious in the known. Such as how a person with a flagrant mental illness is allowed to continue teaching for 38 years. I like tenure as much as the next guy, but sheesh, give the kids a break. In Jan's discerning eye, a single case becomes the proverbial grain of sand in which the whole universe of law may be glimpsed . . . it's called obsessive-compulsive disorder and it responds well to SSRI's but hey, who's complaining and those who have walked the path of the law with this extraordinary guide can never forget the depths he has shown them. Oh, puhleeeese. More like, left the path of the law and fallen into the depths of a very strange man's extremely personal obsessions. This insanity was enabled by a slavish band of groupies Deutsch managed to surround himself with every year, many of whom were a few fries short of a happy meal themselves.

Abe Goldstein is also retiring. He was a good teacher and a nice man. Unpretentious in a place where that was, let us say, an uncommon virtue. He gave me my only 'low pass' and it was richly deserved. I knew practically nothing about criminal procedure and he crafted a deadly exam about grand jury intricacies, I remember. He probably was just too nice to fail me. I'm a corporate law person. All I know about criminals is I don't like 'em.

There is now a David Boies Professorship at Yale. Well, OK. I'd rather have that than Al Gore as President. Could we have a Sidney Blumenthal professorship maybe? A William Jefferson Clinton Internship?

Burke Marshall died, we are reminded. He was a brave man, and what really took courage was walking into his office if you were a member of the Federalist Society.

Yochai Benkler has joined the faculty at Yale, an event, I judge from the letter, roughly equivalent to the Second Coming. The importance of his scholarship, apparently, "cannot be overestimated." I'm sure it's swell scholarship, it's not my area and I've never heard of him, but is it really impossible to overestimate its importance? Haven't you just done so? Is he as great a legal mind as, say, Sandra Day O'Connor? Jan Deutsch?

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad I went to Yale. I would have been lost in the crowd at Harvard, eaten alive at Chicago, and spent all my time skiing and playing outdoors had I gone to Stanford. It was nice to be able to get Honors without going to class, which was a relief, since sometime in my first year my butt-kissing gene just poof! turned off, just like that. In many places, like graduate school, that would have been the end. Fortunately, at Yale, as long as you did not attempt to talk to the professors, with some exceptions, they would not hold this against you. I liked a few of my professors, but I'll only mention Bob Bork, a brilliant and extremely kind man who was abused by his colleagues at Yale. It was a great irony that this former Marine who wouldn't hurt a fly was savaged by these people who never run out of nice things to say when they're talking about themselves. The we're-so-wonderful-we-can-barely-stand-it tone of these letters, going back over more than a decade, is always a bit hard to take.
posted by thomas at 12/16/2003 04:33:00 PM

 
You can have my copy of Red Dawn when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers
By Tom Smith

Sasha Volokh is implying that Red Dawn lacks artistic merit, I think, and I won't stand for it. He seems to admit he has not seen it in awhile. Well, I own my own copy and watched it fairly recently thankyouverymuch. I can report it makes a pretty good treadmill movie. How can you beat the scene where the Cuban colonel tells his goons to go to the gun store and get the federal government forms revealing where the gun owners are, who end up in Commie concentration camps of course. We told you so. And how about the scene where the Wolverines execute the rat in their midst who was captured by the commies and made to swallow a radio homing device. That's what I call drama. And when the red soldier actually does pry a handgun from the cold, dead fingers of a dead Murican with just such a bumper sticker on his pickup truck. Chatterbox misses the point. If you are an elite Special Ops guy in your twenties, you have probably watched Red Dawn a hundred times. You would get a kick out of being called Wolverines. Moreover, doesn't anybody here remember 1984? It was the era of Sting singing "I hope the Russians love their children too," and nuclear freeze and we better surrender before its too late. And it turned out to be too late, too, but for a different reason. I guess that theory of history still has a few bugs in it. By the way, the DVD of Red Dawn has some interesting background material on the making of this classic film, the difficulties getting it made and released (imagine that!) and how it became a cult classic. Test your knowledge of the movie: The answer is "Shoot straight for once, you Army pukes."
posted by thomas at 12/16/2003 11:39:00 AM

 
Moneyball
By Tom Smith

I don't even like baseball. I was never any good at it as a kid, and my dad made me play it anyway. It has generally been mysterious to me how people can seem to enjoy it so much. But even with that, I am finding Michael Lewis's new book, Moneyball, extremely interesting. It is tempting me to actually watch baseball, look at pitchers' stats, and batters. Is there perhaps out there an undiscovered statistic that would predict, at least better than what most people use, the outcome of a game? The spread on a game? Better than the sports books on line? No, no, no. The way lies madness. I must remind myself. I am the guy who bought cubes when the NASDAQ was at 4700. But if you like baseball, markets or both, you will surely love this book. It is also full of very funny baseball lines, great stories of undiscovered geniuses, etc.

I wonder if the Padres could play some moneyball? Do some sophisticated hiring? Win?

Could this approach be applied to football? Nah. It's probably just too complex a game.
posted by thomas at 12/16/2003 08:46:00 AM

 
The Evil of the Communist Party
By Michael Rappaport

This column by Dennis Prager makes a good point about how liberals have never taken the moral evil of people who supported the Communist Party seriously. Prager discusses the Orwellian obituary of Sylvia Bernstein, who is described as a civil rights activist but not as a Communist Party member. As Prager puts it, for the mainstream media:

the fact that a person was a member of the American Communist Party when it obeyed Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party is as irrelevant to a moral assessment of that person as if she had been a member of a stamp club. In fact, the only time her membership was even mentioned in the AP obituary printed in the New York Times, the Washington Post and elsewhere, was to invoke Mrs. Bernstein's victimhood.

For me, these points by Prager almost seem like old hat. Yet the mainstream media is still oblivious. And, of course, they would regard their position as morally superior.
posted by Michael at 12/16/2003 07:00:00 AM

 
Regulation: the more you do, the more you need to do
By Tom Smith

The new medicare drug benefits probably forebodes price regulation of drugs in the future. There are many things I like about Bush, but he's no Ronald Reagan on the economy. Tax cuts, good. Spending like a maniac, bad. Steel tariffs, very bad. I'm glad Yurp said, du can play that game. Biggest bingo game in history for seniors (drug benefit giveaway)-- very expensive way to buy reelection. It's called compassionate conservativism. It would really hurt the conservatives' feelings for Bush not to win.
posted by thomas at 12/15/2003 09:38:00 AM

 
France and Germany have done enough harm already
By Tom Smith

I am really tired of conservative journalists criticizing the Pentagon's decision to exclude non-coalition members from bidding on Pentagon contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq. First, David Brooks on the Lehrer News Hour, now George Will. If they weren't trying so hard all the time to strike the "I'm conservative, but I'm reasonable" pose, they would be wrong less often.

It is only because pundits spend so little time in the real world that they don't understand that there really are national security considerations to who gets these contracts. I think the story was in the news, but I heard directly from a high-ranking Marine officer deeply involved the planning of the Corp's brilliant advance on Baghdad, that the French satellite phone manufacturer whose phones many journalists were using, really did give the codes to the Iraq army that allowed them to track the Marines and Army movements. This was flat out sabotage by a French contractor. Many, many infrastructure projects that need to be completed in Iraq are sensitive to terrorism. Not just phones, but power, water, roads, and on and on. Why on earth should we give those contracts to firms that we know have worked closely with the Baathists in the past? How stupid are we supposed to be? We don't want to find out that all those bio-chem weapons are not a myth by finding 10,000 dead Iraqis some morning in Baghdad after M. de Grotesque has given the keys to the water supply to some al Queda operative in exchange for a case of champagne and a night with his sister. The French and German governments have proven that they are unwilling or unable to stop their firms from doing business with terrorists. The missiles shot at Secretary Wolfowitz were French and brand new -- so why on earth should those companies get the key ring for the systems that will be a big part of Iraqi security? I don't want the French in charge of air traffic control over New York, either. If the French want to prove they are capable of sensitive projects bearing on civilian security, they can show it by protecting the Jews of Paris.
posted by thomas at 12/15/2003 09:26:00 AM

 
"Human Rights Watch" Watch
By Maimon Schwarzschild

Steven Den Beste posts a critique -- a pretty devastating one -- of last week's Human Rights Watch report on the situation (pre-capture, of course) in Iraq. The report is essentially a brief against the coalition: an exercise in partiality; and a dishonest, even internally self-contradictory one. Den Beste is driven to wonder about Human Rights Watch's motives: he doesn't discount the possibility that "deep down they hate us".

For what it's worth, I've met one senior Human Rights Watch officer at several symposia in New York over the past few months, and I was genuinely taken aback at her visceral hatred not only for George Bush (that's to be taken for granted in these circles) but for the US more generally. Over the course of several hours of discussions, touching on a variety of events over many decades, she made it extremely clear that a "human rights problem" (past or present) exists for her only if America can be blamed for it. Quite simply, she has no interest in it if she can't blame America for it -- whether plausibly or, in many cases, utterly implausibly. She blames America first, last, and always. (Not exclusively though. She also loathes the state of Israel, and expressed disgust at the existence of a Jewish state -- in any borders.) As for Iraq, she is not, to put it mildly, rooting for the success of the coalition.

I don't know how typical of her colleagues she is, although she is certainly in a senior and responsible job at Human Rights Watch. But on the evidence of last week's report -- and others like it -- there is reason to think she is very typical.

These are the people who are now issuing a "warning" that Saddam Hussein should not be tried by Iraqis . Instead, according to the solemn Human Rights Watch announcement -- issued within hours of his capture -- Saddam should be handed over to "international experts". (Who do you suppose they have in mind?) Any judicial proceedings, they go on to instruct, must be "partnered" with the United Nations. (The UN's virtue is evident in the fact that it couldn't or wouldn't lift a finger against the tyrant.) Read the whole thing, as the saying goes: if only for the unintentional comedy of the ex cathedra tone.

One knows in the abstract that many "NGOs", especially "human rights organizations", have now been mentally absorbed into the hard and enraged left. It's a worrying thing, given the influence many of these organizations have at the UN and elsewhere. Their influence, in many cases, draws on their past reputations -- deserved or otherwise -- for fairness or at least for being somewhat serious and sane. But many of these groups, Human Rights Watch unfortunately included, are increasingly far from being fair, or serious, or even sane. I would like to think that the grim, almost unhinged zealotry of my Human Rights Watch acquaintance is not the norm in these circles. Then again, I would like to think all sorts of things that, unfortunately, aren't so.
posted by maimon at 12/15/2003 12:04:00 AM

 
Ethical Selector
By Michael Rappaport

Larry Solum suggests taking the ethical selector test. I guess I am addicted to these tests, especially if they are short. My score: John Stuart Mill -- 100 percent. Not exactly a surprise. More on utilitarianism later this week.
posted by Michael at 12/15/2003 12:01:00 AM

 
More on Hitchens
By Michael Rappaport

I took Tom Smith's suggestion to read the Hitchens interview. It was quite interesting. Here is his explanation as to why 9/11 made him leave the Left:

As to the “Left” I’ll say briefly why this was the finish for me. Here is American society, attacked under open skies in broad daylight by the most reactionary and vicious force in the contemporary world, a force which treats Afghans and Algerians and Egyptians far worse than it has yet been able to treat us. The vaunted CIA and FBI are asleep, at best. The working-class heroes move, without orders and at risk to their lives, to fill the moral and political vacuum. The moral idiots, meanwhile, like Falwell and Robertson and Rabbi Lapin, announce that this clerical aggression is a punishment for our secularism. And the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, hitherto considered allies on our “national security” calculus, prove to be the most friendly to the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Here was a time for the Left to demand a top-to-bottom house-cleaning of the state and of our covert alliances, a full inquiry into the origins of the defeat, and a resolute declaration in favor of a fight to the end for secular and humanist values: a fight which would make friends of the democratic and secular forces in the Muslim world. And instead, the near-majority of “Left” intellectuals started sounding like Falwell, and bleating that the main problem was Bush’s legitimacy. So I don’t even muster a hollow laugh when this pathetic faction says that I, and not they, are in bed with the forces of reaction.

Hitchens's breadth of knowledge and his unusual opinions make him an extremely interesting person to read.

Update: The Hitchens interview has two parts. I much preferred the first part. The second part is devoted to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. While Hitchens has an interesting perspective, he sadly retains the Left’s blinders as to the nature of the Palestinian fight against Israel. He views Israel as simply having dispossessed the Palestinians of their land and shows no recognition that Israel would be willing to establish a two state solution if the Palestinians would give up their terror.
posted by Michael at 12/14/2003 04:47:00 PM

 
Journey of a man of the left
By Tom Smith

This interview of Christopher Hitchens is interesting. I stopped being a leftist beginning with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. I'm glad I never really knew much about the anti-Soviet left, or I might never reached my current state of reason and enlightenment. Anyway, Hitchens is an interesting, if annoyingly self-congratulatory and pompous guy. At least if he becomes a neo-con, he won't have to get a new personality.
posted by thomas at 12/14/2003 10:02:00 AM

 
American Presidential Candidate Selector
By Michael Rappaport

Stephen Bainbridge pointed me to this site. Based on 17 questions about your political views, it tells you which presidential candidate you are closest to. My favorite candidate was George Bush (64 percent). My second favorite was the Libertarian candidate (60 percent). That seems right: I am somewhere between Bush and the Libertarian Party. Strangely Gephardt came next (43 percent); and then Lieberman (37 percent), my favorite Democrat. Perhaps I should listen more closely to Gephardt to see if he is closer to my views than I think.

The last time I took this type of test, the Political Compass Test, my results were very close to Bainbridge’s. This time we were once again similar in our support for Bush (Bainbridge 67, me 64) but my support was considerably greater for the libertarian candidate (Bainbridge 46 percent ranking him 5th, me 60 percent ranking him 2nd).

Take the test. Its fun, shorter than the Political Compass Test, and gives more intuitive results.

posted by Michael at 12/14/2003 01:23:00 AM

 
Christmas guy toys -- Part I: Coffee
By Tom Smith

My favorite things I often buy for myself. But here is an update on various toys, many fitness related, that might make a good holiday gift, or you can just buy for that techno-nerd fitness geek on your shopping list, i.e. yourself. (I-am-not-a-sexist disclaimer: I use 'guy' to mean male and female guys.)

First things first. Caffine. You wake up but you don't want to get up. At all. Then your mind moves to that first cup of java. You find you have gotten out of bed. Life may not be good yet, but there is hope. What works? The best coffee, short of the little coffee bar on the corner up from your pensione in Sienna or even the occassional Starbucks, comes from a French press. This is cheap, effective technology. Here's one at a great price.

But sometimes you want to make a big pot of the stuff at home, like every morning. What to do? I think the dirt cheap brewers you can get at Target for $20 can do a pretty good job. But if you want something more reliable and longer lasting, or just want to indulge your coffee fetish, here is a dandy machine. The milk frothing device really works, but don't expect to be as good as your local espresso bar. If you are really a nut with money to burn, buy this and invite me over to try it. I'll even set it up for you!

Another promising type of device is this thing. I've never tried it, but some people swear by the vacuum method. It looks like a bit of a hassle to me. If I had time to do this, I would just use the French press instead.

If you are sick enough, you may want to buy a conical burr grinder. I don't have one, but it's the next step.

Where should you buy coffee? I know lots of bean-heads turn their noses up at Starbuck's, but I don't think they are that bad. If you want something better, you can buy it at Peet's. Or look around locally. There may be a coffee roaster in your area that does a good job. Look for beans that look really oily, almost like they've been dipped in olive oil. That oil is where the flavor comes from, or most of it. That's why a french press is better than a gold filter, and gold better than paper--it lets more oil through.


posted by thomas at 12/13/2003 10:25:00 AM

 
Texas A & M Asserts its Independence
By Gail Heriot

God bless Texas A&M University President Robert Gates. The Supreme Court told him that he could racially discriminate all he wants; all he has to do is refrain from using a mathematical formula. But he doesn't want to engage in race discrimination. "My concern," he said, "is that I want every student at Texas A&M to be able to look at every other student and know they all got in on the same basis, on the basis of personal merit and achievement."

For the past several years, like other Texas public colleges and universities, Texas A&M has been working under the Fifth Circuit's Hopwood decision, which prohibited racial double standards in admissions. When the Supreme Court's twin decisions in Grutter and Gratz overruled Hopwood, other Texas schools announced that they would be returning to race-based admissions standards. But not the Aggies. Gates has announced that A&M will continue to combine aggressive outreach with universally-applicable admissions standards. Diversity is indeed a worthy goal in the view of President Gates, but he isn't willing to sell the soul of his university to get it.

Gates is already facing opposition. State Senator Royce West (D-Dallas) said, "This policy sends the wrong message to young ethnic minorities .... Race must be a factor in getting the results we need in the state of Texas." And West is willing to go to threaten adverse consequences if A&M does not show significant improvement in its ethnic diversity by Fall of next year.

This in itself is nothing new. Such threats have been made in other states as well. California Legislators, particularly members of the Hispanic Caucus, have been anything but subtle in demanding that the University of California increase its Hispanic enrollment or face budget cuts. But perhaps West has one-upped his California counterparts. He is threatening to seek legislation mandating that race be considered in the admissions policies of all Texas public institutions of higher learning.

Good luck to President Gates. He is swimming upstream in the academic world. It won't be easy.
posted by Gail at 12/12/2003 08:12:00 PM

 
Guardian of our liberties does it again
By Tom Smith

I have not read the Campaign Finance Case Opinions and do not plan to. If I can spare the time to read 60,000 words by (largely the law clerks to) second class minds struggling with a mess made by Congress, I think I'd rather spend the time reading, oh, gosh, I don't know, maybe this excellent biography of Vince Lombardi. Reading the New York Times on the decision was bad enough. They noted the swing vote was cast by our favorite cowgirl, Sandra Day O'Connor, the only justice, the Times smugly noted, who has ever served in elected office. I think she was posse leader back in Cowbone, Arizona or something. Those doggies know a thing or two about money and politics, I can tell you. Would somebody please tell her it is time to retire and start boring the hell out of students at the U of A?

I am not an expert on campaign law. It is one of those areas, like employment discrimination, I prefer just not to think about. From reading the daily prints, however, I take it the geniuses on the high court have concluded that, for example, if a bunch of private citizens put together a group called "Don't Vote for Congressman Bob; He's Corrupt, Inc." and then buy an ad that says "Don't Vote for Congressman Bob; He's Corrupt!" anytime close enough to the election to make a difference, it will be illegal. Why? Because allowing that would, yes, you guessed it, promote corruption!

If BCRA, as the monstrosity is known, was really intended to reduce corruption in politics, it raises the following intriguing puzzle: Why on earth did Congress pass it? Aren't they for corruption? Don't they like it? Profit from it? Do it for a living? I have seen the fat men from the plains chasing their aides around the tables at Bullfeathers as their horrified (hopefully soon to be former) wives looked on in horror. I have seen the Great Manatee of Hyannis Port rise up on his hind flippers to denounce immorality. I know of corruption. Children, here, as nearly as I can make it out, is the deal. BCRA makes it harder for challengers to say harsh things about those fine gentlemen and ladies who occupy their spots in the great domed playground where the people get governed. To my innocent eyes, this is what the bill seems designed to do. We should be grateful things designed by Congress rarely work.

What I can't understand is how the Supreme Court could possibly reach this decision. After all, they are not stupid people. Well alright, O'Connor may be stupid. And Kennedy. Stevens, well, no rocket scientist he. But there's David Souter. Is he smart? I don't know. Every time I try to read something he has written, I fall asleep. I still get traumatized thinking about Virginia Bankshares.

But, boy, I am sure glad that devil Bob Bork is not on the Court! He thought the first amendment applied only to political speech! Sure dodged a bullet there! I guess when we weren't looking, the mainstream took a turn through Cowbone, Arizona, and it turns out the first amendment does not apply to things like saying Congressman Bob is Corrupt, at least before an election! Good to get that learnt. I am just embarrassed about how confused I was about that. It's not my area, as I said. I had this whole "free-speech--politics--say-what-you-want-about-the-government,-it's-America-after-all" thing going on in my head. That mainstream is a tricky, deceptive thing. Now I will be free to look at my fake images of 11 year old girls being raped, free from government interference, as long as I don't mess with Bob's job.

William Buckley used to say he would rather be governed by the first 500 people in the Boston phonebook than the faculty of Harvard. How about any 9 lawyers, or any 9 people who can read "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech"?
posted by thomas at 12/12/2003 11:36:00 AM

 
The Right -- Make that Privilege -- to Criticize Government
By Michael Rappaport

Although I have not yet read any of the Campaign Finance Case opinions, this quote from Justice Scalia's dissent captures my attitude toward the decision (Hat tip: Best of the Web):

Who could have imagined that the same Court which, within the past four years, has sternly disapproved of restrictions upon such inconsequential forms of expression as virtual child pornography, tobacco advertising, dissemination of illegally intercepted communications, and sexually explicit cable programming, would smile with favor upon a law that cut to the heart of what the First Amendment is meant to protect: the right to criticize the government.

posted by Michael at 12/12/2003 07:25:00 AM

 
Troubling questions above 8000 meters
By Tom Smith

You don't normally see mountaineering stories on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. (subscription required.) But Wednesday morning, I was taken aback to see a drawing of Reinhold Messner's hairy face staring at me from the cover of the Journal, along with this headline: "High Drama: 30-year-old mystery roils climbing world."

Reinhold Messner, most climbers, including wannabe's such as myself, would agree, is the greatest mountaineer who ever lived. First to climb Everest without oxygen, first to climb all the peaks over 8000 meters, all in alpine style and without oxygen, numberless epic first ascents, as well as articulate (sort of) spokesman for the freedom of the hills. O yes, and the first to cross Antarctica without machines or dogs. Authour of many books.

The crux of the controversy is this. In 1970, Rheinhold and his brother Guthner were climbing Nanga Parbat, one the world's highest and most difficult peaks (far, far more difficult than the normal route up Everest, for example). They became the first to ascend the Rupal face, the biggest and highest mountain face on the planet. Any man who really appreciates what is involved in a feat of this sort, well, will for a while find that his jockey shorts are too big. Reinhold and Guthner made climbing history by reaching the top. The question is, what happened next?

For certain we know that Guthner did not return alive, nor was his body found. Reinhold says when they reached the top, Guthner was seriously ill with altitude sickness, and said he was unable to descend down the face, the way they had come. Instead, Reinhold says, Guthner begged him to descend instead down the western Diamir Flank of the mountain. During this descent, Reinhold says, Guthner was swept away in an avalanche and lost.

The story is problematic. For one thing, Reinhold and Guthner has ascended without tent or sleeping bags, intending to return to their camp. It is not clear how Reinhold thought he could save his brother by descending down a route where there was no shelter or help waiting. On the other hand, the ascent route may have been very sketchy. Perhaps descending the Diamir flank really was more practical. Or perhaps they were both so brain addled by hypoxia that they did not know what they were doing, and Reinhold cannot now distinguish what he remembers from what he imagined or hoped.

The plot thickens. By descending down the Diamir Flank, having come up the Rapul face, Messner had completed a traverse of Nanga, having already scaled its previously unclimbed, enormous wall. In moutaineering terms this elevated the feat from the historic to the legendary, equal to Herman Buhl's first legendary, and controversial ascent of the mountain, chronicled in one of the classics of mountain literature. (Among other things, Buhl reached the summit far too late to get back down before dark and so stood all night on a ledge a few inches wide until he had enough light to move again.) It was the first traverse of an 8000 meter peak, as well as the first ascent of the Rupal wall. Several of the climbers who were on the expedition with Messner claim (though they were not with him on the summit) that they suspect Messner abandoned his dying brother on the summit in order to secure the glory of this amazing traverse of Nanga Parbat. One of the accusers, however, is a much reduced German baron who was on the expedition, and whose wife Reinhold took away after she nursed him back to health as he recovered from serious frostbite (he lost six digits) back in Germany. The baron obviously has an ice ax to grind. Messner succeeded in getting an injunction against the sale of the baron's book in which he made these accusations, and there have been other suits and counter-suits as well.

I hope Messner's reputation survives intact. No one accomplishes what he has without being driven to the point of near madness. But I don't believe he left his brother, who was his climbing partner of many years, on the summit of Nanga to die. But perhaps he and Guthner agreed the sick climber would make his own way down the face, so Reinhold could complete the traverse--though this would also be an almost indefensible decision. More than likely, this will remain one of the unsolved mysteries of high altitude mountaineering.


posted by thomas at 12/11/2003 04:21:00 PM

 
Robert Bartley, R.I.P.
By Michael Rappaport

I was very sad to hear that Robert Bartley, until recently the editor of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page, had died. The Journal Editorial page that he ran taught me a great deal about real world public policy. I discovered that page in 1983 during law school. At that time, I was a theoretical libertarian. I believed strongly in the abstract arguments for individual freedom and free markets in Friedman, Hayek and Nozick, but had little awareness for how those arguments should be applied to the issues of the day. That was what the Wall Street Journal editorial page provided. I still remember the thrill – yes thrill – of reading those discussions in those early years.

Part of the value of the Journal was its uniqueness. In those days, there were few if any places to see these right wing ideas discussed intelligently on a daily basis. For me, the Journal was a safe harbor, or to shift metaphors, an island of sanity in a sea of insanity. Some years ago, I mentioned to a colleague how enjoyable and relaxing it was to read the Journal editorial page after dinner. My colleague was amazed: no one she knew felt calmed by the Journal. Of course, the people she knew probably felt about the Journal the way I feel about the New York Times.

It was Robert Bartley who was responsible for those editorial pages. While his book, the Seven Fat Years, was a strong brief for the Reagan Economic Revolution, his true masterpiece was the editorial page, which taught many of my generation to appreciate the real world effects of that revolution.
posted by Michael at 12/11/2003 10:06:00 AM

 
Campaign Finance Lineup
By Michael Rappaport

Stuart Buck posts the lineup of votes for the campaign finance case and challenges us to make sense of it. Here is one interesting fact: Only two justices were in the majority on every issue. One is obvious, O’Connor. The other a little less so -- Souter.

posted by Michael at 12/11/2003 12:01:00 AM

 
Some People are More Equal than Others
By Michael Rappaport

David Bernstein quotes this unintentionally funny bio of philosopher Larry Tempkin. My guess is that there are a lot of academics who will have no clue as to why this is funny.
posted by Michael at 12/10/2003 11:36:00 PM

 
Beautiful American actress marries scruffy British rock star of dubious talent
By Tom Smith

I guess she just looks smart. Oh well.
posted by thomas at 12/10/2003 04:43:00 PM

 
Just Say No To Gerrymandering
By Maimon Schwarzschild

The Governor of California (someone new, if I recall) could do his state, and the country, an important good turn by turning his political guns on the gerrymandering of US Congressional seats by the California legislature. California is deeply egregious when it comes to gerrymandering, but the Golden State is by no means alone. In fact, out of 435 seats in Congress, only about 40 across the whole country are now thought to be competitive. All the rest are "safe seats", with re-election more or less a sure thing for the incumbents.

The political legacy of Elbridge Gerry -- the strategic drawing of district lines -- is what works this magic. It has a long history. Gerry, a Massachusetts politician, masterminded the first American gerrymander in 1811. In California, Representative Philip Burton famously orchestrated a brilliant gerrymander after the 1980 census which transformed the Democratic edge in the California congressional delegation from 22 - 21 to 27 - 18. Today, Democrats hold 33 of California's 53 House seats -- a much higher proportion than their share of the overall Congressional vote in the state. And the California district lines are carefully drawn to protect incumbents: in 2002, out of fifty contested House races in California, not a single challenger got even as much as 40 % of the vote in any Congressional district in the state.

Gerrymandering may have a long history, but only in the past ten or fifteen years has it become a truly dominant factor in American politics. Two new developments help to explain what has happened. The first is technological: powerful computers, and new computer programs which make political map-drawing an exact science. (It's a cliche, but it's true: your laptop is more powerful than a mainframe from twenty years ago.) Gerrymandering now is highly reliable, and in fact essentially unbeatable, in the hands of any party with the votes in the legislature to draw the lines.

The second is the confluence of political gerrymandering with racial gerrymandering. The federal courts (and the US Department of Justice) have interpreted the federal Voting Rights Act to require "minority-majority" districts: that is, states must create Congressional districts where Blacks or hispanics will be an actual majority of registered voters. This is meant to ensure the election of Black and hispanic members of Congress. But of course it also concentrates, or isolates, Blacks and hispanics -- who vote heavily Democratic -- in ethnic "minority" districts. Democratic Congressmen from these districts need not try to appeal to Republican voters or, as a practical matter, to conservative or moderate ones. At the same time, nearby non-"minority" districts are drained of minority (and hence of many Democratic) voters, so that Republican Congressmen from such districts have less need to reach out to liberals, or even to moderates.

The political party drawing the lines ideally wants two things: safe Congressional seats, and the maximum number of seats. Today you can have both. Skilful, computer-aided political gerrymandering -- plus the isolation of many Blacks and hispanics through racial gerrymandering -- makes it possible. In fact, this is now the prevailing pattern across the country.

Safe seats obviously mean non-competitive elections and unbeatable incumbents. (Remember that only about 40 Congressional seats nationwide are competitive.) Safe seats also mean polticial polarization, even radicalization. It's fairly easy to see why. In a competitive district, a candidate has to reach out to "swing voters": independents, moderates, even members of the opposite party who might be won over. But increasingly, there are no competitive districts. Zealot candidates (especially incumbents) need not moderate their zealotry to win the general election. The general election is not in doubt. On the contrary: moderates risk alienating the "activist base". (I almost wrote "the base activists"...) The only real competition in these districts is for nomination. And it is the "base" who vote disproportionately in primaries and who dominate the selection process.

Gerrymandering, in short, makes for a more polarized Congress: more right wing Republicans, more left wing Democrats. And the ethos of the Congressional parties trickles (down? or up?) into the politics of the country generally. No doubt there are other reasons -- cultural or generational -- for the polarization of American politics; and the increasing bitterness, at least among politically-active and politically-conscious Americans. But gerrymandering is a powerful polarizing and radicalizing force.

For decades, gerrymandering suited Democrats across the country, and they voiced no objections to it. But since 1992, Republicans have clawed their way into majority party status. They control more governorships, more state legislatures, than Democrats now do. And they are beginning to use their majority power to seat more Republicans in Congress.

In short, Republicans are now in a position to gerrymander in their own favour. Democrats are awakening to this new reality, and condemnations of gerrymandering ("I am shocked; shocked...") are suddenly appearing under Democratic bylines. Jeffrey Toobin, for instance -- hyper-partisan author of a book-length tract against the "vast right-wing conspiracy" that was widely mocked even by Democrats during the Lewinsky affair -- now weighs in with a New Yorker article against gerrymandering. Toobin blames Republicans, of course. (He manages only a glancing acknowledgement of the legendary Congressman Burton.) But actually the Toobin article is a pretty good exposition of how gerrymandering works and why it is a bad thing.

Meanwhile, unhappy Democrats (and the ACLU in several states) are resorting to litigation. There are anti-gerrymandering lawsuits in Colorado and Pennsylvania; there will probably soon be litigation in Texas.

Litigation is almost certainly not the way to sort out redistricting and gerrymandering. (See next post.) But the Governor of California is in an ideal position to take a "reform" stance on this. There have been initiative efforts in California over the years to reform redistricting. Democrats (mostly) opposed the initiatives, and the initiatives failed (or never even reached the ballot). But as the recall election suggests, there is now an appetite for change in California. With support from the Governor, and especially if he takes the lead and makes the issue his own, an initiative might have very good prospects for success.

The obvious model for reform is Iowa, where the Congressional district lines are drawn by an independent non-partisan commission. Not so surprisingly, four of Iowa's five Congressional seats are considered "competitive". In other words, with one percent of the seats in Congress, Iowa has fully ten percent of all "competitive" Congressional seats nationwide.

Iowa, it is true, is not California. (Never say you don't learn anything new at TheRightCoast blog.) An independent commission would be under different, and more intense, pressures in California. But that doesn't mean such a commission couldn't work. In fact, it wouldn't be hard to draw the district lines more fairly in California than has been done by Congressman Burton -- and his heirs and assigns -- over the past several decades.

Gerrymandering is increasingly poisonous to democratic politics across America. It is not good for democracy for most House races to be "non-competitive" (a polite word for "fixed") and for incumbents to be unbeatable. Polarized and radicalized politics are not good for democracy either. Democrats are waking up to this, or so they say, as they find themselves on the losing end in many states. California is not one of those states: if there is reform in California, it can only help Republicans. But the Governor might win kudos even with Democrats, nationally if not locally, by supporting reform. Successful reform in California might have a lot of influence nationally. Either way -- it would be the right thing to do.

By the way: I speak with special authority on this subject. I spent five years of my childhood in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Home of... Elbridge Gerry.
posted by maimon at 12/10/2003 12:14:00 AM

 
But Say No To (Further) Judicial Politicization Too
By Maimon Schwarzschild

Gerrymandering is a Bad Thing. But asking judges and courts to make the maps, or to second-guess the people who do, may not be so good either.

As Democrats discover that they too can be on the wrong end of gerrymanders, lawsuits have begun in various states to throw out the maps drawn by the GOP. A suit against redistricting in Pennsylvania is on its way to the US Supreme Court. And last week the Colorado Supreme Court struck down a (Republican-drawn) redistricting map as a violation of the Colorado state constitution.

The objection to the Colorado redistricting was that it happened at a time other than the publication of the decennial census. Democrats are making the same objection in Texas, where Governor Ann Richards pushed through a heavily pro-Democrat gerrymander in 1990. (In 2000, the Democrats in the Texas legislature deadlocked an effort to redistrict, hoping that a federal appeals court controlled by Clinton appointees would let the Democrats keep their advantage. It did.)

The indignation about mid-decade redistricting is selective, and deeply synthetic. Few if any state constitutions explicitly restrict redistricting to once-a-decade. The once-a-decade interval used to be customary, but a degree of restraint about other gerrymandering tactics used to be customary too, or at least the techniques did not exist in the past to gerrymander as blatantly and as lopsidedly as has recently become common. Democrats did not object to "creative" gerrymandering when it favoured them. The objections (only when Republicans do it) have an air of some mediaeval Monty Python character just back from a jolly massacre now objecting to the cross-bow when it's used against him.

The trouble with taking redistricting to the courts is that the courts themselves are at least as likely to be "political" about it (or to appear to be) as to be impartial. It is very difficult to be truly impartial about redistricting. Wherever you draw the line on the map, it will help one party and hurt the other. And there is no "right way" to draw the map: no principle to tell you to put the boundary here and not there.

Independent commissions, a la Iowa, might actually be a better bet than courts for this. For one thing commissions cannot cloak themselves in spurious judicial dignity. If their decisions are unfair, they can be called on it, without incurring charges of lese-majeste ("besmirching the authority of our independent judiciary...").

And commissions could develop some real expertise in drawing fair (or as-fair-as-possible) lines. Judges, on the other hand, have a lot of other business to attend to.

In a pinch, commissions could even experiment with ideas like letting each political party submit a proposed map, with the commission undertaking to choose one or the other of them -- whichever is fairest -- without further tinkering. It is an old arbitrator's trick. It gives each side a real incentive not to overreach (since whoever overreaches more loses). Courts traditionally don't work this way, of course; and they would be unlikely to break with tradition just becuse they are dealing with redistricting.

If courts try to take over redistricting -- and set themselves up as super-gerrymanderers -- the politics of judging and of judicial appointment will become even more bitter than they already are. Larry Solum has lately been writing very worryingly about a "downward spiral of judicial politicization". Putting the Florida Supreme Court or the Ninth Circus (or pick a Republican court if you are a Democrat) in charge of deciding who might control Congress -- it is not a pretty picture. Redistricting, aka gerrymandering, would be a very good business for the courts to stay out of.

Which makes it all the more attractive for the Governor of California to take the lead for a political solution. Perhaps an initiative for an independent redistricting commission in California? Over to you, Governator.
posted by maimon at 12/10/2003 12:12:00 AM

 
Brooks on Dean
By Michael Rappaport

David Brooks has an interesting column attacking Howard Dean. It starts:

My moment of illumination about Howard Dean came one day in Iowa when I saw him lean into a crowd and begin a sentence with, "Us rural people. . . ."

Dean grew up on Park Avenue and in East Hampton. If he's a rural person, I'm the Queen of Sheba. Yet he said it with conviction. He said it uninhibited by any fear that someone might laugh at or contradict him.

Later, Brooks writes:

The old Dean was a free trader. The new Dean is not. The old Dean was open to Medicare reform. The new Dean says Medicare is off the table. The old Dean courted the N.R.A.; the new Dean has swung in favor of gun control. The old Dean was a pro-business fiscal moderate; the new Dean, sounding like Ralph Nader, declares, "We've allowed our lives to become slaves to the bottom line of multinational corporations all over the world."

posted by Michael at 12/09/2003 09:45:00 AM

 
Leiter and Chomsky on Anti-Semitism
By Michael Rappaport

Brian Leiter has written a shocking post. He reports the following from an interview with Noam Chomsky:

Question: Is anti-Semitism on the increase?
Answer: In the West, fortunately, it scarcely exists now, though it did in the past.

While many bloggers have strongly criticized this statement, Brian defends Chomsky. I think this is outrageous and I ask Brian to reconsider.

Brian defends Chomsky with the following two arguments. First, Brian argues that Chomsky did not mean there was no anti-Semitism, but merely that its institutional manifestations have been eliminated. Second, Brian quotes an earlier statement by Chomsky explaining how anti-Semitism used to be worse 30-50 years ago and citing a case when he was advised not to move into certain suburbs that did not welcome Jews.

These arguments are plainly inadequate. In response to the question whether anti-Semitism is on the increase, one would expect some discussion of the evidence. But Brian does not do that. His first move is to reinterpret the question as referring to institutional manifestations. But this is entirely unjustified. The question did not say that and anti-Semitism is not usually restricted to institutional manifestations. If someone asked whether there was racism in the United States, acts such as the use of racial epithets and occasional violence against blacks would clearly be relevant, whether or not there was employment discrimination.

Brian’s second argument is a non sequitur. Merely because anti-Semitism was worse in the United States in 1950 does not say much if anything about the existence of anti-Semitism in the West today. In my view, anti-Semitism is not a serious problem today in the United States, being mainly limited to some on the far left and far right. But to make the jump from the United States to Europe is an unwarranted move. Sadly, there is an abundance of evidence of European anti-Semitism today.

I shall not attempt to document that evidence here. Just read a web site like Little Green Footballs for a while. Instead, I will only mention three bits of evidence.

First, consider this recent story from the New York Times about a Paris suburb:

“The boys hide their skullcaps under baseball caps. The girls tuck their Star of David necklaces under their sweaters. Their school in this middle-class suburb east of Paris has been scorched by fire and fear, and those are the off-campus rules.

Early one Saturday in November, unidentified vandals set fire to the new two-story wing of the Merkaz Hatorah School for Orthodox Jews that was set to open as an elementary school in January.”

A little worse than not being able to buy a house in the suburbs, I would say.

Second, consider this letter to Andrew Sullivan, which I posted on October 26.

"At Cambridge University, where I attended law school in England, the Jews exist in a state of perpetual vigilance and, often, fear of personal harm. As an American Jew I was used to wearing a kipa (yarmulke, beanie, skullcap, bowl-o'-soup, whatever) walking around town. . . . But in Cambridge it was like I had a bullseye on my head. Not a week went by that something didn't happen - curses from a group of Middle-Eastern looking "blokes" on the street, laughing references about the "cross you have to bear" from other students, white hot abuse about being a "Zionist Nazi" from a middle-aged white woman boycotting Sainsbury's. Once, memorably, I got hit with a piece of raw potato and turned just in time to hear the sniggers of "shalom!" as the window of a restaurant kitchen banged shut. . . . When I discussed this with my friends in the Jewish Society (JSOC), they were completely nonchalant. I was stunned to hear that every single one had, at one time or another in their youth, been chased, threatened or beaten for being Jewish in the towns where they grew up. In one memorable case, a kid had been stabbed with a butcher knife, when he was 15 years old, by a man on a bus in Manchester."

And finally consider these conclusions reached by a report conducted by the European Union but not officially released:

"Reports and our own investigations show that in spring 2002 many EU member states experienced a wave of anti-Semitic incidents. They were tied to public discussion on the dividing line between legitimate criticism of Israeli government policy and anti-Semitic argumentation. This wave of anti-Semitism started with the "Al-Aksa intifada" in October 2000 and was fuelled by the conflict in the Middle East and the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September, 2001, which triggered off a fierce debate on the causes of radical Islamic terrorism.

The incidents include:

Desecration of synagogues, cemeteries, swastika graffiti, threatening and insulting mail as well as the denial of the Holocaust as a theme, particularly on the Internet. These are the forms of action to be primarily assigned to the far-right.

Physical attacks on Jews and the desecration and destruction of synagogues were acts often committed by young Muslim perpetrators in the monitoring period. Many of these attacks occurred either during or after pro-Palestinian demonstrations, which were also used by radical Islamists for hurling verbal abuse. In addition, radical Islamist circles were responsible for placing anti-Semitic propaganda on the Internet and in Arab-language media.

Anti-Semitism on the streets also appears to be expressed by young people without any specific anti-Semitic prejudices, so that 'many incidents are committed just for fun.' Other cases where young people were the perpetrators could be classified as 'thrill hate crimes,' a well-known type of xenophobic attack.

One can argue about how much anti-Semitism there is in Europe today. No one, however, can reasonably argue that “its scarcely exists.”
posted by Michael at 12/09/2003 09:12:00 AM

 
Pakistan is . . . on the brink
By Saikrishna Prakash

Sunday's New York Times Magazine has an excellent (and long) article about the jehadi problems plaguing Pakistan. Barry Bearak says that Pakistan "frightens" him because if it had a"meltdown," it would be "a nuclear power with too many combustibles in the national mix."

More than the middle east, more than Korea, more than Iraq, the Taliban-Pakistan combination is the most dangerous threat in the war on terrorism. The Palestineans don't have the bomb. The North Korean leadership is not interested in sacrificing themselves in order to destroy America. And Saddam Hussein's regime is no more. In contast, the jehadis are willing to be martyred for the sake of destroying the West and the East. They welcome death so long as their enemies die as well. If these terrorists get a hold of one or more of Pakistan's nuclear bombs (say from their benefactors in the Pakistani government), they will not hesitate to wreak havoc on the Great Satan. How America deals with Pakistan will determine, more than anything else, how the war on terrorism will fare.
posted by Saikrishna at 12/08/2003 12:37:00 PM

 
High Heels and Breast Implants
By Michael Rappaport

An interesting article in the New York Times about women who have dangerous surgery on their feet so that they can continue to wear high heels. What is especially interesting about the piece is how it skirts the issue of responsibility. If this story were about women having possibly dangerous breast implants, it would typically place some blame on men and society for creating a world where women feel the need to enhance their breasts. But with designer shoes and high heels, the attitude is different. The reason is that men do not generally care that much about women’s shoes. While some men may like stiletto shoes on occasion, most men simply do not pay that much attention to women’s shoes. But women pay attention to women’s shoes – to other women’s shoes and to their own. So the article does not really address the question of blame in a direct way.

Women’s attitudes towards shoes, however, are not unrelated to their attitudes towards breast implants. If women are competitive about their shoes and not necessarily because they are competing for men, then this raises the possibility that their desire for breast implants, at least in part, derives from the same source: a desire to look good for an audience of other women. While competition for men is certainly part of the story concerning breast implants, it is not the whole story.

posted by Michael at 12/08/2003 11:01:00 AM

 
How Convenient!
By Michael Rappaport

Mathew Yglesias argues in favor of following judicial precedents that contradict the constitutional text:

Better, I think, to just give up, and take the texts of precedential decisions seriously. Current legal doctrine about the 14th amendment bears almost no resemblance to what I would have said had I been a justice in 1875 or whatever, but there's a ton of doctrine there and the best thing for justices to do is act as if the amendment said whatever current precedent says it said. Now if you have a new amendment (or statute) you ought to take its text seriously, but where text has already been superceded by decisions past, it's time to forget about text and take precedent seriously.

While the question of what precedents to follow is complicated, this argument is awfully convenient. After 60 years of liberal justices ignoring precedent, now that conservatives have some measure of control over the Court, it is time to respect precedent. After the New Deal Court eviscerated the judicial precedents that imposed limitations on the economic powers of the government on grounds of judicial restraint, and after the Warren Court eviscerated precedents to erect new rights in the social arena based on a judicially activist agenda, it is now suddenly the time to discover the importance of precedent.
posted by Michael at 12/08/2003 08:44:00 AM

 
Hillary in 2008
By Michael Rappaport

William Safire discusses Hillary Clinton’s hawkish views on the war on terror, but to my mind misses the central point: Hillary is a hawk because she is not running for the presidency in 2004, but instead in 2008. She knows that the biggest problem that Democrats face is that voters do not believe they are serious about the war on terror. Especially if Dean gets trounced by Bush, Hillary will be well placed to say in 2008 that she has been tough on terror from the beginning. Moreover, this should not really create much of a problem for her with her party’s liberals, since after all they all know that Hillary is one of them. This strategy sounds similar to the kind of strategy that Bill Clinton pursued in the 1990s. I am not worried about 2004, but I am worried about 2008.
posted by Michael at 12/08/2003 12:01:00 AM

 
Medicare Inefficiency
By Michael Rappaport

The New York Times on Friday had a story discussing how Medicare gives hospitals an incentive not to provide the best care. (Hat tip: Marginal Revolution).

By better educating doctors about the most effective pneumonia treatments, Intermountain Health Care, a network of 21 hospitals in Utah and Idaho, says it saves at least 70 lives a year. By giving the right drugs at discharge time to more people with congestive heart failure, Intermountain saves another 300 lives annually and prevents almost 600 additional hospital stays. But under Medicare, none of these good deeds go unpunished.

Intermountain says its initiatives have cost it millions of dollars in lost hospital admissions and lower Medicare reimbursements. In the mid-90's, for example, it made an average profit of 9 percent treating pneumonia patients; now, delivering better care, it loses an average of several hundred dollars on each case.

By contrast:

Outside of Medicare, Intermountain often benefits from its quality initiatives, executives said, because it gets to pocket much of the savings they produce. For example, Intermountain has generated about $2 million annually in savings by reducing the number of deliveries that women choose to induce before 39 weeks of pregnancy — and thereby reducing the risk of complications to the mother or baby.

Tyler Cowen writes that the recent Medicare law “does not make any serious attempt to address problems like this.” More and more, it seems the only good thing in the Medicare law was the medical savings accounts, and I can only hope that there is not some fine print in the law that makes that less effective than it should be.

posted by Michael at 12/07/2003 12:01:00 AM

 
The Browns and the Greens
By Tom Smith

From Mark Strauss's "Antiglobalism's Jewish Problem" in the important journal Foreign Policy:


History is repeating itself. As in the 19th century, the far right is plagiarizing left-wing dogma and imbuing it with racist overtones, transforming the campaign against the capitalist “New World Order” into a struggle against the “Jew World Order.” The antiglobalization movement is, however, somewhat culpable. It isn’t inherently anti-Semitic, yet it helps enable anti-Semitism by peddling conspiracy theories. In its eyes, globalization is less a process than a plot hatched behind closed doors by a handful of unaccountable bureaucrats and corporations. Underlying the movement’s humanistic goals of universal social justice is a current of fear mongering—the IMF, the WTO, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) are portrayed not just as exploiters of the developing world, but as supranational instruments to undermine our sovereignty. Pick up a copy of the 1998 book MAI and the Threat to American Freedom (wrapped in a patriotic red, white, and blue cover), written by antiglobalization activists Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke, and you’ll read how “Over the past twenty-five years, corporations and the state seem to have forged a new political alliance that allows corporations to gain more and more control over governance. This new ‘corporate rule’ poses a fundamental threat to the rights and democratic freedoms of all people.” At an even more extreme end of the spectrum, the Web site of the Canadian-based Centre for Research on Globalization sells books and videos that “expose” how the September 11 terrorist attacks were “most likely a special covert action” to “further the goals of corporate globalization.”

Unfortunately, conspiracy theories must always have a conspirator, and all too often, the conspirators are perceived to be Jews. It takes but a small step to cross the line dividing the two worldviews. “If I told you I thought the world was controlled by a handful of capitalists and corporate bosses, you would say I was a left-winger,” an anarchist demonstrator told the online Russian publication Pravda. “But if I told you who I thought the capitalists and corporate bosses were, you’d say I was far right.”

The browns and greens are not simply plagiarizing one another’s ideas. They’re frequently reading from the same page.

posted by thomas at 12/06/2003 06:22:00 PM

 
Radical Islam and the Snipers
By Michael Rappaport

Lee Malvo, the alleged accomplice of John Allen Muhammad in the D.C. Area sniper killings, appears to have been motivated by a desire to engage in jihad against America. Malvo is also an admirer of Osama bin Laden. These conclusions are based in part on evidence, submitted by Malvo’s own attorneys, of writings and drawings made by him in his jail cell.

The sniper killings have been largely treated as the work of mere criminals, without much connection to Radical Islam. Yet, the connection has been there from the beginning. Malvo’s drawings are only the most recent piece of evidence.

While these two individuals may not be members of Al Qaeda, that does not mean their actions are not the result of the poison of Radical Islam.

Sadly, the public does not appear to appreciate the nature of sniper killers’ motivations. Radical Islam is not just responsible for the mass murders of 9/11, but also for the serial murders by the D.C. snipers.

posted by Michael at 12/06/2003 02:41:00 PM

 
More on gay marriage
By Tom Smith

Catholic bishops on gay marriage.

I find myself moving to the position that gay civil unions may be OK, but not marriage. As much as anything, I object to the idea that marriage is just an exercise in self-realization. It may or may not be that. On a deeper level, I object to the anti-realist underpinnings of institutional revisionism, that it's all about what we feel, what our perspective is, etc., etc. If gays are going to form permanent unions, secure certain legal advantages, create a stable environment for raising children, and so forth, it would be a new thing, and it should be housed in a new institution. An ancient institution should not be "reformed" willy-nilly to accommodate the new thing, on the mere hope this would cause more good than harm. As I argued before, assuming a civil union statute could be drafted to secure legal benefits for gay unions, and it's hard to see why one could not be, the insistence that gays be allowed to marry is just an attempt to secure the prestige, the valorization of the ancient institution for relationships that ithat nstitution decidedly excluded. I also am cynical enough to think that well-meaning softie conservatives such as David Brooks underestimate the strand within the gay left that really would like to undermine marriage as such, which really is about hatred of most of the existing social order and would love to see one of its pillars knocked down.

[Update] If marriage is just a matter of self-realization, and not recognition of or dependant on underlying biological reality, then by strict analogy, should a biologically "male" person be able to identify himself legally as a female? Shouldn't you be able to claim the right to be female in the eyes of the law, whatever your biological sex, because you thought you could self-realize better as a female. Shouldn't you a fortiori be able to do the same with race? I might be biologically white, but want to identify and self-realize as a black. Shouldn't the state have to recognize this posture of mine, by the same reasoning they have to recognize gay marriage?
posted by thomas at 12/06/2003 09:46:00 AM

 
Wireless heaven
By Tom Smith

I finally have a wireless network in my house. I'm in wireless heaven. And I did it all by myself. OK. I didn't. My computer savvy nephew was in town for the baptism of our latest procreative effort, now a thoroughly clean milk bottle (pre Vatican II Catholic joke), and he, my nephew, helped. However, it was so easy I think I could have done it.

The thing to do, I think, is use Linksys products. Get a Wireless-B broadband router, the kind with four ports on the front and two little antennae. Then get Wireless B or G notebook adaptors for your notebooks, and that's it! The installation is a snap, at least with Windows XP, and then it screams, as they say.

Perhaps I should note I got the stuff at Staples, which carries a good selection of Linsys components in the Business Networking section. Their computer people were really helpful and gave me advice that was enthusiastic and completely inaccurate. They were, it turns out nearly entirely clueless, but they did a very good imitation of people who knew how to set up a network.

It's a wonder of technology. I even asked my lovely wife, Jeanne, if it wasn't amazing. She said, "yes, it's amazing." Now I can blog at the dinner table. You can imagine how thrilled everyone is.
posted by thomas at 12/06/2003 08:46:00 AM

 
Dinner Table Chit Chat in the un-PC household
By Tom Smith

Actual conversation from dinner, my house, 12/04/2003

Dad: These reports about anti-Semitism in Britain are really disturbing.
Patrick [age 10]: What's anti-Semitism?
Dad: Hating Jews.
Patrick: That's ridiculous! What did the Jews ever do to anybody? They're just sitting around, minding their own business . . .
Mom: . . . reading the Torah . . .
Luke [age 12]: Yeah. If you're going to pick a religion to hate, why don't you pick the one that hates everybody else? I mean, I don't mean to offend anyone, but you don't see any Jews flying airplanes into buildings!
Dad: Well, some people think the Israelis are oppressing the Palestinians . . .
Luke: No, it's the Palestinians who are trying to oppress the Israelis. They just suck at their job.
Dad: Don't say "suck."
posted by thomas at 12/05/2003 03:15:00 PM

 
The future of Christianity?
By Tom Smith

Evangelical Christianity is growing fast. Makes lazy old Catholics like me nervous.
posted by thomas at 12/05/2003 02:21:00 PM

 
More than one way to win a case
By Tom Smith

You probably saw this on volokh, but what a story. Influencing the make-up of the 6th Circuit so as to affect the outcome of the Michigan affirmative action case. Goodness.
posted by thomas at 12/05/2003 02:02:00 PM

 
A big deal
By Tom Smith

When a federal prosecutor is rubbed out, it is a very big deal. The Feds had better come down like a ton of bricks on this case, in which a young AUSA from Baltimore was murdered in what appears to be a gang execution connected to a drug ring prosecution. Gangsters need to know that federal prosecutors are untouchable. I hope Ashcroft and the White House are taking an interest in this matter. [Update: personal motive suspected]
posted by thomas at 12/05/2003 01:30:00 PM

 
Krauthammer on the Geneva Accords
By Michael Rappaport

It is now a couple of days old, but Charles Krauthammer's column on the so called Geneva Accords is, as usual, excellent. Suppose that Dennis Kucinich were to have travelled to Iraq in January, 2003 and signed a mock agreement with Saddam Hussein making peace. Would the US not be outraged if other countries paid attention to the agreement? Of course. In fact, the action would probably violate federal law in the form of the Logan Act. Yet, Secretary of State Powell is planning to meet with the Israeli and Palestinian representatives who have negotiated an "agreement", despite the strong opposition of the Israeli government.
posted by Michael at 12/05/2003 07:01:00 AM

 
No moral judgments please, we're British
By Tom Smith

You may think eating people is wrong. But it's just a taboo. (Hat tip to relasped catholic. Not for the squeamish.) Relasped catholic also points to this article on why it would be nice if Islam were more like Catholicism (my gloss).
posted by thomas at 12/04/2003 10:35:00 PM

 
Is this weird enough for you?
By Tom Smith

By understanding black holes, we see we might be living in a two dimensional universe that only seems three dimensional. Or maybe not.
posted by thomas at 12/04/2003 06:01:00 PM

 
More on "Leiter on Marx"
By Michael Rappaport

After many making Marxian statements in his blog and elsewhere, Brian Leiter now attempts to explain his affinity for Marx. He does so by distinguishing between Marxian claims that he regards as no longer tenable and claims that he believes are of continuing interest. I have no complaints about the matters placed on the no longer tenable list. My questions relate to the matters on the continuing interest list. Consider Brian’s discussion:

But what is equally striking is the accuracy of many of Marx’s best-known qualitative predictions about the tendencies of capitalist development: capitalism continues to conquer the globe; its effect is the gradual erasure of cultural and regional identities; growing economic inequality is the norm in the advanced capitalist societies; where capitalism triumphs, market norms gradually dominate all spheres of life, public and private; class position continues to be the defining determinant of political outlook; the dominant class dominates the political process which, in turn, does its bidding; and so on.

My reaction to this list is that it raises interesting questions, but our analysis of these issues is better pursued from a non-Marxian framework. Let me give a couple of examples of what I mean. Consider first the “growing inequality” point. I have my doubts about whether inequality is really growing and whether that is the norm, but lets assume that both of these claims are correct. Two of the more important causes of inequality are changes in the role of women and increasing returns from education. First, when two partners at a successful law firm marry, this creates an enormous family income and more inequality. Second, education and intelligence have become relatively more important means to attaining income, so that the uneducated and unintelligent are doing relatively worse. Thus, there are many causes of income inequality, they are not produced by a single mechanism, and they appear to be related to other trends (such as equal rights for women) that progressives embrace. This inequality does not derive from some force unfolding in the capitalist system that harms workers. So what is to be gained from viewing this in Marxian terms?

Consider also the issue of whether a dominant class controls politics. Class appears to be a useful concept for studying modern society and Marx certainly deserves credit for the idea. But it seems best to thank Marx for the idea and to quickly dispense with the rest of the Marxian analysis. For example, the role of the new class – of the knowledge workers – and of its conflict with the more traditional business class is interesting and worthy of study. But in order to study it, we probably need to abandon the idea of a single “dominant class.” Rather, what is going on is that these two classes are competing for power and our politics in part reflects that conflict. Thus, the assumption of a dominant class is problematic.

Even assuming there was a dominant class, it certainly does not control political discussion. Neo-Marxists sometimes speak as if the New York Times, rather than Forbes, was a capitalist tool. This simply won’t do. The policies promoted by the New York Times are quite different than those promoted by Forbes Magazine. To suggest that there is no difference, because the New York Times is not as far left as, say the Nation, is to view the issue through a distorting lens that places undue emphasis on the views of the (far) Left. There are real differences in American politics (not to mention European politics) and they reflect a host of varied considerations, including the desire of the new class and of traditional business people for status and power as well as the desire of the elderly for more transfers from the younger generations. Thus, Marxian concepts like class, even when useful, need to be carefully separated from the remainder of Marxian theory.
posted by Michael at 12/04/2003 12:18:00 PM

 
And I'm glad
By Tom Smith

Athletes who cheat with drugs should be kicked out of the sport, and the governing body of track and field in the US agrees.
posted by thomas at 12/04/2003 10:35:00 AM

 
Marx dead or alive
Tom Smith

Brian Leiter has an interesting post on Marx. Here's an excerpt:

But what is equally striking is the accuracy of many of Marx's best-known qualitative predictions about the tendencies of capitalist development: capitalism continues to conquer the globe; its effect is the gradual erasure of cultural and regional identities; growing economic inequality is the norm in the advanced capitalist societies; where capitalism triumphs, market norms gradually dominate all spheres of life, public and private; class position continues to be the defining determinant of political outlook; the dominant class dominates the political process which, in turn, does its bidding; and so on. (The article, above, includes citations to supporting evidence.)

Much of the most embarrassing Marxian claims, I take it, many scholars of Marx are willing to jettison: declining profits, teleological history, etc. What strikes me about the above list is its relative plausibility, at least compared to where Marx was way off base.

Capitalism conquering the globe seems true enough, as does its gradual erasure of at least many cultural differences. Growing economic inequality? This I am not so sure about, in part because it is so difficult to measure inequality. But if it is true, I suspect it is because of the enormous wealth-creating power of capitalism, which enriches managers of assets to a degree scarcely imaginable in former eras. Absolute wealth of workers in the US is far above that of the rich in past eras. Yet the relatively poor still feel deprived.

It may be that in capitalist societies the ideology of property and freedom, let's call it, dominates discussion. But it does not follow that this ideology is not in the interests of the less well off, at least if free markets create the wealth that makes better lives for them possible, at least in absolute terms. It may also be there just isn't any very good alternative, if socialism is as impractical as recent failures of it as a governing theory suggest. So, it may be that market ideology dominates in capitalism because it seems to rational persons as the best available system, even if it is one that condemns them to relative deprivation. I mean this in contrast to some theory about class somehow shaping consciousness so that for example, a worker incorrectly thinks capitalism is better than socialism. A worker could think that capitalism was best, and be right, and still he would be adopting the view (albeit perhaps resentfully, wishing there was something better) that the managerial elite adopts much more gleefully.

As far as powerful economic interests dominating the political process, the only issue there is whether Marx should really get credit for what seems so obviously true. However, I'm also not sure how well these interests align with class, which I always took to be an essential part of the Marxist view. I suspect we are witnessing in the prescription drug benefit just passed, for example, one of the great give-aways in the history of government. Old people can spend unlimited money staving off death, and drug companies make a fortune helping them. The big winners are old people and shareholders of drug companies, a diverse group. The average income of the shareholders in the institutions that are the biggest shareholders is $30,000 -- In the US, workers do own the big corporations, at least most of them. Yet working taxpayers probably lose the most. Hard to see how this how all this maps on to class. How is this consistent with the tenets of Marx?

Finally, I wonder whether Marx really has a plausible causal account of why the things he may have foreseen, are happening, to the extent they are. Normatively, I am not convinced the average low wage American worker is happier than a hunter-gatherer, in fact, I doubt it. But she has got to be happier than the average subsistence farmer, which really does seem to be a miserable life. Even with increased inequality and increased intensity of labor (something Brian might want to add to his list of prescient predictions), most people seem to be better off under capitalism than any plausible alternative, something neither Marx nor modern Marxists seem to believe.
posted by thomas at 12/03/2003 08:48:00 PM

 
Thank you Maimon
By Tom Smith

You can imagine how I was at proof reading documents. But how do you know my mistake was not deliberate and fraught with meaning? Good lord, it is "fraught," isn't it?
posted by thomas at 12/03/2003 04:52:00 PM

 
Tenets, Anyone?
By Maimon Schwarzschild

"Tenets"; not "tenents". (With "tenents" you still have to watch out for rent-seeking.)

If you understood what Maimonides really meant (but didn't say), you wouldn't make these mistakes.
posted by maimon at 12/03/2003 03:49:00 PM

 
Admission to the world at large
By Tom Smith

As Hugh Hewitt says, when you make a mistake, you should admit it to everybody. I actually think he is wrong about that, but perhaps that is one mistake he will not admit. In any event, a somewhat testy reader points out that I wrote 'tenants' when I obviously meant 'tenents' as in beliefs or is it beleifs, no it's beliefs, in my attack on the Straussians. My spelling, she points out, makes it hard to take me seriously as an intellectual. Unfortunately, there are many better reasons not to take me seriously, such as my somewhat splenetic (sp?) temperment. But, at least I am not a KGB spy, as some extremely serious intellectuals have been. As to how smart I am, I can think of no better person to answer that question than the inimitable Brian Leiter, who would probably be happy to rank me somewhere or other, and you know it won't be out of sympathy with my politics. (Brian, do you worst! But please don't hurt my feelings!)

But, really, how smart do you have to be? Here is this view, that says, roughly speaking of course, that there are a few really, really smart people, and they can figure out that everyone from Plato to Aquinas didn't mean what they apparently said (Aquinas? An atheist!), and they, when they are not too busy doing that ancient Greek symposium thing (you know what I mean), should run the world from the shadows by manipulating stupid but brave aristocrats and placating the animalistic masses, into which everybody is declining because it's the end of history, you see. Hegel and that French KGB spy said so. Because Stalin is the world historical whateveryoucallit. Oh, no, it turns out it's Bush. How smart do you have to be to say, Hooooooohkay; would the next candidate for a philosophy of government please come forward?
posted by thomas at 12/03/2003 12:35:00 PM

 
There goes 'the biggest gravy train in green history'
By Tom Smith

And there is the National Post on Russia's rejection of Kyoto.
posted by thomas at 12/03/2003 11:47:00 AM

 
Environmentalist Excesses
By Michael Rappaport

In honor of Russia’s apparent decision not to sign the Kyoto Treaty, I thought I would write about my favorite song decrying the excesses of environmentalism. (Is there more than one?) My favorite is “(Nothing But) Flowers,” a Talking Heads song, that captures the extremeness and misguidedness – the adolescent quality – of radical environmentalism. Such environmentalism seeks to dispense with the necessities and conveniences of modern life to promote a goal that some perceive as attractive in theory but would be disastrous in practice. You can read the lyrics here. You can listen to 30 seconds of the song here.

Here is the first stanza:

Here we stand
Like an Adam and an Eve
Waterfalls
The Garden of Eden
Two fools in love
So beautiful and strong
The birds in the trees
Are smiling upon them
From the age of the dinosaurs
Cars have run on gasoline
Where, where have they gone?
Now, it's nothing but flowers

There was a factory
Now there are mountains and rivers
you got it, you got it

We caught a rattlesnake
Now we got something for dinner
we got it, we got it

There was a shopping mall
Now it's all covered with flowers
you've got it, you've got it

If this is paradise
I wish I had a lawnmower
you've got it, you've got it

And a couple of additional lines:

I miss the honky tonks,
Dairy Queens, and 7-Elevens
you got it, you got it

And as things fell apart
Nobody paid much attention
you got it, you got it

The song ends with:

Don't leave me stranded here
I can't get used to this lifestyle

posted by Michael at 12/03/2003 08:20:00 AM

 
Feedback
By Tom Smith

Unless I misunderstand what my computer is trying to tell me, I have been sent a virus by a neo-con. Well, I guess all is fair in love and war. I admit, I was not very nice in my post below, implying, inter alia, that neo-cons had trouble getting girlfriends, or to be more politically correct about it, friends of persons of romantic interest. Some disclosure might be in order. When I was at Cornell in the late 1970's, it was a hotbed of Straussianism. I lived at Telluride House, where Alan Bloom had lived for a while. Paul Wolfowitz and Frances Fukuyama were also Telluride Scholars in their day, and dropped by the House a few times while I was there. Werner Danhauser, a student of Leo Strauss's, was in the Government department, and I took ancient history and got memorably drunk with Paul Rahe, who was in the history department at that time. One simply could not avoid getting a big dose of Straussianism in such an environment.

I thought and still think Paul Rahe was a great teacher and a brilliant mind, and I'm not sure he really counts as a Straussian, though perhaps he was. But over time I came to the view that whatever else one might say, anyone who loved liberty would be crazy to trust with power anyone who really believed the Staussian tenants. Here is an unsympathetic, but as far as I can tell, largely accurate summary of those views, with a response here. I don't want to enter the perhaps stale by now cyber-debate on whether Paul Wolfowitz was engaged in Straussian noble lying when he claimed there were WMD's in Iraq. We're never likely to know without a spy inside the club (too bad Kojeve isn't available for the job). There are many other, good reasons for believing Iraq had WMD's besides taking Wolfowitz's word for it, which in any event would be unwise, in my view.

Ironically, those neo-cons who are Straussians (and it's far from all, I suppose) are not neo-conservatives at all. They seemingly reject modernity in toto, with all of its baggage of free individuals, rationality, tolerance, free markets, the whole classical liberal kit and kaboodle. To me, it's all very ferrin'. More Plato, Machiavelli, Neitzche and Heidegger than Aristotle, Kant, Hume, Smith, Locke and Reagan (hee-hee!)

Here's an imperfect metaphor. For many years liberal democrats played coalition politics with the far left in this country, many of whom, it turns out, really were Stalinist stooges. I think the Straussians are rather like the communists of the right. It is a creepy, conspiratorial ideology that may be temporarily useful for the cause of liberty, but it is a dangerous game to be playing. Give me a bible-thumping, foot-washing, snake-handling redneck cracker hymn singing fundamentalist any day. Remember! The friends of liberty have always been few!
posted by thomas at 12/02/2003 02:51:00 PM

 
I just don't get it about the Jews
By Tom Smith

Maimon's post below and its links to columns in the UK press is very much worth reading, including the links. I have not been to Europe in 20 years, Philistine that I am. I read this stuff, and frankly, find it hard to believe. But then, probably so did many Americans when they read about what was going on in Germany in the 1930's.

I grew up as a Roman Catholic in Boise, Idaho in the 1960's and '70's. I never met a Jew until my junior year in high school, unless you count the Jew who came to my comparative religions class and told us about such things as keeping kosher.

Then I went to Cornell, where most of my friends were Jews. Maybe if I had been excluded, or beaten up by Jews I could understand what is going through the heads of anti-Semites in the UK, but that was not my experience. (Not that that happens in the UK--quite the opposite apparently.) For many years in my life, not only were some of my best friends were Jews. My only friends were Jews.

It's not that I am so anxious to understand how an anti-Semite thinks. But it is uncomfortable to find unfolding events so mystifying. It is like that recent (pretty darn scary) movie 28 Days Later, in which normal people are infected by a virus that turns them into bloodthirsty zombies. It is as if anti-Semitism is a disease that inexplicably turns people insane and spreads according to some horrifying logic of its own. Communism you can understand as an intellectual delusion, prompted by resentment of the rich, exploitation by your boss, and misunderstanding of economics, which isn't that intuitive to begin with. It's evil, but it's comprehensible. But hatred of the Jews? It gives me a genuine shiver of American isolationism. It makes me think unhealthy things grow in the dark cracks of Europe that I want no part of.

posted by thomas at 12/02/2003 09:37:00 AM

 
Two Letters From England
By Maimon Schwarzschild

Here are two thoughtful, sharply written views of the recent surge in anti-semitism in Britain. One is by Barbara Amiel, the other by Julie Burchill.

Barbara Amiel writes for the conservative Daily Telegraph; but she may not be doing so much longer. She is married to Conrad Black, the Canadian entrepreneur who has just resigned as Chairman of the Telegraph. (He is leaving in unhappy circumstances, amid allegations of "financial improprieties", as the phrase goes.) Barbara Amiel is a courageous writer, and a very good one. It will be a real loss if Conrad Black's troubles redound against her as a journalist.

Julie Burchill writes for the left-wing Guardian; but she has resigned from the Guardian and will soon be writing for the Times of London, which is politically eclectic (under Rupert Murdoch's ownership). Burchill is a leftist, but an iconoclastic one: something of a Christopher Hitchens character, at least in print. Like Hitchens, she has no time for Islamo-fascism, or for leftist fellow-travelling with it. She is leaving the Guardian in part as a protest against the anti-semitic upsurge on the British left.

Read the whole thing(s).
posted by maimon at 12/02/2003 08:05:00 AM

 
WFB and JFK
By Maimon Schwarzschild

Bill Buckley has it right on all counts about JFK, I think. Buckley's parenthetical -- that Kennedy came to the cause of civil rights "(sooner than I did)" -- is honourable and endearing.

Buckley's final, personal words about Kennedy -- that JFK's legacy is wrapped up in his "sheer beauty" -- apply, oddly but inescapably, to Buckley himself. Unlike Kennedy, whose lasting influence on public policy was surprisingly slight, Buckley's own influence on public life has been both "singular and enduring". WFB helped lay the intellectual and moral groundwork for Ronald Reagan's election and for the conservative revival generally in this country. But the personal parallel with Kennedy is striking. There is an enormously beguiling human quality about Buckley. WFB has that mischievous joy; a laugh you can read by; and a transparent personal kindness. He gives intense pleasure -- by no means only to conservatives -- just by being here.

Two very different men, both born at about the same time; both (not to lay it on too thick) "splendid to look at"; both with an element of "sheer beauty" about their lives and work -- or so a great many people feel. Can you name a third in American public life, in their generation or later?
posted by maimon at 12/02/2003 08:04:00 AM

 
Big Government Conservatism without the Conservatism
By Tom Smith

Just a little comment on Professor Rappaport's interesting post below on neo-cons versus economic conservatives: It helps to think of the neo-cons as not being either neo or conservatives. They are capable of being right on foreign policy, but not necessarily consistently. On domestic policy, they really believe in a big nanny state, they just want nanny to have a firm, upright, moral character. And I agree, if you have a nanny. Personally, I would not let a neo-con take care of my dog. This is because he would spend all his time on the phone or e-mail, trying to line up his next inside the beltway sinecure, while my beloved Biscuit's stomach grumbled. Thus they illustrate what the framers understood, that human nature is such that no one, not even a neo-conservative weenie, can be trusted with much power, which is why limited government is such a good idea. However, I would be willing to let them start a charter school somewhere in the country where they could wear kneesocks, cane each other to their heart's content and give speeches about how deep they are. As to "act like the governing party." Allow me to translate. This means, "I have a PhD in Government from Harvard and no prospect of an academic job. I do not want to go to law school, and 'I should have power because I'm smarter and better than you' doesn't cut it in the private sector. Hence, I need to govern, as my reading of the Republic tells me I should. To govern, I must spend heaps of other people's money buying votes for my guy, who happens to be Bush. I tell all my liberal friends in Cambridge that Bush is a rube so they will like me and maybe someday I will have a girlfriend. There is a profound philosophical justification for all of this you could not hope to understand. Now please take your dog as I have an important call to make." A neo-conservative is a liberal democrat who doesn't care about equality and likes a strong military, because he likes power. Appealing, no?
posted by thomas at 12/01/2003 11:00:00 AM

 
Mixed Metaphor of the Week Award
By Tom Smith

Goes to Tom McClintock, who is not governor of California. He notes in his true but insipidly written piece in the Wall Street Journal today:

These are the two roads diverging in the budget woods and the choice that is made in coming weeks may well determine whether California has the fresh financial start it deserves, or whether the ghost of Mr. Davis' excesses stalks a generation to come.

OK, so the ghost of budget excess is in the woods, but can only follow Arnie down one path and not the other? But going down one of the paths is a fresh start, even though it's the middle of the woods? And the "budget woods"? As in "The budget woods are lovely, dark and deep/ But I have miles to go before a bill emerges from Conference . . . " Ugh and yuk. Maybe the Journal is having sneaky fun at McClintock's expense by letting him publish without heavy editing.
posted by thomas at 12/01/2003 10:45:00 AM

 
Robert George on same sex marriage
By Tom Smith

Princeton professor of jurisprudence Robert George had an interesting piece on same sex marriage and the Massachusetts decision in Friday's Wall Street Journal.

George argues, too pessimisticly in my view, that the US Supreme Court will ultimately decide that all states must recognize the validity of same sex unions blessed by the Oyster State (or whatever they call Massachusetts). George says that this will force conservatives to seek a national constitutional amendment. He thinks the chances of such an amendment succeeding are pretty good.

For various reasons, the politics of homosexual marriage has been much on my mind lately. I am coming to think that this issue may be a large rock upon which social liberals wreck themselves. In all but a few very liberal states, I think the opposition to gay marriage is strong and unyielding, and likely to remain so. If the Supreme Court did attempt to impose it on all 50 states, it would encounter profound opposition.

The Court may have no principled reason for not enforcing universal gay marriage after Lawrence, as George observes, but having no principled reason only inhibits the Court sometimes, such as when it is highly convenient. Unless the Court's composition changes to a strong liberal majority, I can't see them not taking the sensible and easy way out of allowing different strokes to different federal folks. Even the Supreme Court is not stupid enough to decide a second and even more inflammatory Roe v. Wade, even if individual justices certainly are. However, I concede I am on shaky ground: Any sentence that begins "Even the Supreme Court is not stupid enough" has a good chance of being wrong. You might think any given justice might get, just randomly, the thought "Maybe we shouldn't force the American people to choose between the institution of the Supreme Court and the institution of marriage?" the way Steve Martin's medieval barber wondered "Maybe we should have a Renaissance?" But we know what happened there. The barber concluded "Nahhhhhh!"
posted by thomas at 12/01/2003 10:18:00 AM

 
The Great Debate
By Michael Rappaport

A debate is currently taking place for the soul of the conservative movement (or perhaps merely the Republican party). On one side are the economic conservatives, represented by the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page, which views the high spending by the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress as excessive and a violation of conservative principles. On the other side are the neoconservatives, represented by the Weekly Standard, who believe that such spending, even if a sacrifice of principle, is the way that a majority party governs. The most recent contribution is by Weekly Standard writer (and ironically former WSJ editorial editor) David Brooks in his New York Times column.

While I share many beliefs with the neoconservatives in foreign policy – I suppose I am a neo-neocon – my strong sympathies concerning domestic spending lie with the economic conservatives. The neocons don’t really seem to understand that wasteful spending is genuinely harmful to the country. It is not just not an ideological indulgence of economic conservatives. Runaway spending on Medicare and other programs will leave the country weaker, not just economically, but politically and even morally. The depravity on exhibit in much of Europe is not exactly unrelated to excessive domestic spending.

Yet, the neoconservatives do have a point. They claim that the Republicans must behave like a governing party. They must enact programs that the public demands – or else lose their power – and enacting those programs means making compromises to your principles. While I was a big supporter of Newt Gingrich’s agenda, I must admit that the Republicans did not, under his leadership, behave like a majority party. In short, the neocons are saying to the eco-cons: Grow up.

The problem is that I am not persuaded that the compromises the Bush Administration has made have been wise or necessary. It seems like the Bush Administration could have achieved better results. While it is always hard to know what could have been accomplished had the negotiators behaved differently, I would have far more confidence in the Administration’s actions had I believed that the Administration or the neoconservatives actually valued small government in the economic sphere. But their words and actions suggest otherwise. The neoconservatives defend big government conservatism (and regularly attack small government conservatives and libertarians); and the Bush Administration has shown little inclination towards making government small (other than their cutting taxes, which is explainable on other grounds). Thus, my impression is that the Bush Administration and the neocons are not sacrificing strongly held values for the greater purpose of governing, but instead their disdain towards small government (or at least their indifference toward it) is masquerading as political maturity.

Part of leadership – not just unrealistic, fairy-tale leadership, but real world leadership – consists in pursuing the right principles. It means articulating those principles, making proposals that would further those principles, and threatening to veto bills that violate them – and then, at the last minute, if it is necessary to make a deal, being willing to make compromises to get the bill passed. Compromises, not capitulations. Once again, the conservative model here is Ronald Reagan, who accomplished wonders by pursuing this strategy. One cannot accuse Ronald Reagan of not knowing how to govern. He left the Republicans with the ability to win a landslide in 1988, one that the first Bush frittered away, in large part by capitulating on economic principles concerning taxes.

President Bush’s undistinguished performance in the economic sphere is to be contrasted with his excellent performance in foreign affairs. In the latter area, the President has understood both the proper principles and the need not to compromise them away. His father, by contrast, regularly made such pernicious compromises (in both the domestic and foreign arenas) and his National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft, pretty clearly suggested how the first Bush would have acted with respect to Iraq. In the end, then, it was only President Reagan who consistently understood the need to vigorously but realistically pursue principle. The first President Bush never understood it, and his son, apparently appreciates the point only in foreign affairs.
posted by Michael at 12/01/2003 08:21:00 AM