disconnect

Specter's Spine?

From Talking Points Memo comes a startling finding: Evidence of what appears to be some sort of proto-cartilage forming along the center of the back of the Senate Judiciary Committee, perhaps a precursor to vertebrae and eventually a fully-formed backbone.

6/7/06 Letter from Arlen Specter to Dick Cheney

Gasoline Politics

A good press release from the editors of The Oil Drum about the various nonsensical things being done by both parties in Washington in response to $3/gal gas. In short, blaming oil companies and temporarily rescinding gasoline taxes isn't going to get you $1.50 gas again.

Ideas

There are plenty of people out there who will tell you that while they might not like what the Republicans are doing, at least they have ideas and some sense of what they want to do, unlike the Democrats who have no real reason for being other than a hatred of George W. Bush. Setting aside the interesting debate of whether or not no ideas are worse than bad ideas, I wanted to draw attention to one source of good ideas coming from the Democratic party, or at least from a group reasonably affiliated with them: The Hamilton Project.

Rather than try to summarize their strategy, which would require that I read about 25 pages behind that link and be capable of summarizing it in an intelligent manner, just check out their site, or read this account of an editorial comment by the Financial Times on the project.

Speaking of liberals with good ideas, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the promise that Barack Obama shows in this area, as he spoke at the launch of the Hamilton Project last Wednesday. Since his remarks were brief and are hidden in a PDF on their site, I will reprint them in full below (they should appear automagically when you click on the link).

Obama's comments to the Hamilton Project launch:

SEN. OBAMA: Thank you. Thank you very much.
I would love just to sit here with these folks and listen because you have on this panel and in this room some of the most innovative, thoughtful policymakers, people who have both ideas but also ways of implementing them into action. Our country owes a great debt to a number of people who are in this room because they helped put us on a pathway of prosperity that we are still enjoying, despite the best efforts of some.
(Laughter)
SEN. OBAMA: I want to thank Bob and Roger and Peter for inviting me to be here today. I wish I could be here longer. I am going to have to run after a few minutes because we do have an important issue relating to U.S.-India relations.
But when Roger originally called to invite me, not only to this forum but to invite me to engage in this project, I couldn’t help but think that this was the sort of breath of fresh air that I think this town needs.
We have all known for some time that the forces of globalization have changed the rules of the game—how we work, how we prosper, how we compete with the rest of the word. We all know that the coming baby boomers’ retirement will only add to the challenges that we face in this new era. Unfortunately, while the world has changed around us, Washington has been remarkably slow to adapt twenty-first century solutions for a twenty-first century economy. As so many of us have seen, both sides of the political spectrum have tended to cling to outdated policies and tired ideologies instead of coalescing around what actually works.
For those on the left, and I include myself in that category, too many of us have been interested in defending programs the way they were written in 1938, believing that if we admit the need to modernize these programs to fit changing times, then the other side will use those acknowledgements to destroy them altogether. On the right, there is a tendency to push for massive tax cuts, as Peter indicated from my speech at Knox College, no matter what the cost or who the target is, a view that stems from the belief that there is no role for government whatsoever in the challenges we face. Of course, neither of these approaches really works.
Before we came here, somebody was asking me, how do I maintain my idealism? I do because I think the American people know that neither of these approaches works. I think there is a broad consensus out there in the Country that we should be looking for common sense, practical solutions to the problems that we face. I think that there is a market. I think that there is a demand for solutions that are practical, that are based on facts, that are tested, and that require us to think in new ways.
A lot of the people who are here today have done that in the administration. Not only have they succeeded on many of their policies, but almost just as importantly, they have failed occasionally and have acknowledged those failures and adjusted their views. I think that is the kind of experimentation and attitude that all our policymaking has to pursue.
One thing that we all know is that when you invest in people, people will prosper. When you invest in education and health care and benefits for working Americans, it pays dividends throughout every level of our economy. When you keep the deficit low and our debt out of the hands of foreign nations, then we can all win.
Now, the economic statistics of the nineties that we are all so familiar with speak for themselves—income growth across the board, 22 million new jobs, the lowest poverty rate in three decades, the lowest unemployment in years, and record surpluses. None of this, I would argue, happened by itself. It happened because the leadership we had, including many in this room, was willing to take on entrenched interests and experiment with policies that weren’t necessarily partisan or ideological.
That is what I hope we will see from The Hamilton Project in the months and years to come. You have already drawn some of the brightest minds from academia and policy circles, many of them I have stolen ideas from liberally, people ranging from Robert Gordon to Austan Goolsbee; Jon Gruber; my dear friend, Jim Wallis here, who can inform what are sometimes dry policy debates with a prophetic voice. So I know that there are going to be wonderful ideas that are generated as a consequence of this project.
Not every idea will I embrace, and I hope that one of the roles that I can play, as a participant in this process, is to not only encourage the work but occasionally challenge it. I will give one simple example. I think that if you polled many of the people in this room, most of us are strong free traders and most of us believe in markets. Bob and I have had a running debate now for about a year about how do we, in fact, deal with the losers in a globalized economy. There has been a tendency in the past for us to say, well, look, we have got to grow the pie, and we will retrain those who need retraining. But, in fact, we have never taken that side of the equation as seriously as we need to take it. So, hopefully, this is not just going to be all of us preaching to the choir. Hopefully, part of what we are going to be doing is challenging our own conventional wisdom and pushing out the boundaries and testing these ideas in a vigorous and aggressive way.
But I can’t think of a better start, given the people who are participating today. I am glad that Brookings has been willing to provide a home for this wonderful effort.
Just remember, as we move forward, that there are real consequences to the work that is being done here. There are people in places like Decatur, Illinois, or Galesburg, Illinois, who have seen their jobs eliminated. They have lost their health care. They have lost their retirement security. They don’t have a clear sense of how their children will succeed in the same way that they succeeded. They believe that this may be the first generation in which their children do worse than they do. Some of that, then, will end up manifesting itself in the sort of nativist sentiment, protectionism, and anti-immigration sentiment that we are debating here in Washington. So there are real consequences to the work that is being done here. This is not a bloodless process.
I think that as long as all of us retain that sense of passion about the ultimate outcome that we want, which is a stronger, more prosperous America than we are passing on to our children, then I think we will do well in this process. I am glad to be a part of it.
Thank you very much.

A Helpful Guide To Holiday Offense

Before the sound of Bill O'Reilly's head exploding alerts you to it... St. Paul City Office Boots Easter Bunny:

A toy rabbit, pastel-colored eggs and a sign with the words "Happy Easter" were removed from the lobby of the City Council offices, because of concerns they might offend non-Christians.

A council secretary had put up the decorations. They were not bought with city money.

St. Paul's human rights director, Tyrone Terrill, asked that the decorations be removed, saying they could be offensive to non-Christians.

I find this especially amusing because I had previously assumed that pastel-colored eggs were offensive to Christians: Pope Condemns Easter

I thought I might solve this problem going forward by compiling a list of U.S. holidays along with the people that that holiday might offend. If members of these groups are present in your office or municipality, you may want to think twice before bringing any holiday cheer.

New Year's Day - Offends the Chinese
Martin Luther King Jr. Day - Offends white people
Groundhog Day - Offends Bill Murray
Presidents Day - Offends John Kerry, Al Gore, and Democrats in general
Valentine's Day - Offends singles, non-Christians, and prohibition-era bootleggers
St. Patrick's Day - Offends non-Christians, temperance advocates, and people rejected from Notre Dame University
Easter - (see above)
Earth Day - Offends Dick Cheney and Marvin the Martian
Mothers' Day - Offends infertile women
Flag Day - Offends Kid Rock
Independence Day - Offends the British and extraterrestrial invaders
Labor Day - Offends the unemployed
Columbus Day - Offends Native Americans and fans of The Sopranos
Halloween - Offends Christians
Veterans Day - Offends Dick Cheney
Thanksgiving - Offends turkeys and fans of the Detroit Lions
Christmas - Offends non-Christians and Bill Murray
Hanukkah - Offends Muslims and Antiochus IV
Kwanzaa - Offends white people and people who don't like made-up holidays

Spinster Sodomites

Certain elements of the right wing in America aren't too pleased with Harriet Miers's nomination today...

Oh great--now Souter will have another homo to keep him company on SCOTUS. Unmarried at 60? Ummm...sounds like a lesbo! I mean, when the wingnut New York Times speaks in gay code about her "she took part in law firm softball games" (it is Known that softball is a big lesbian sport) and she likes to play tennis (Billies Jean King played tennis too) and she likes to watch football (watches FOOTBALL and has no husband, ummm...you do the math) This chick is a Lesbo! Big time. In the name of Our Lord and Saviour the Christ Jesus, what is up with the Bushes (41 & 43) and their penchant for promoting old spinster Sodomites to lifetime appointments where they can impose their homosexual lifestyle on our children? Weren't Katrina and Rita really signals that God is Displeased and His Judgement shall "regin"" upon us?

Ten bucks says this guy's ancestors were burning witches 300 years ago. Hey, I played softball when I was 9 - did that make me a lesbian?

Actually, the more I thought about this, the funnier it gets. You hear this "God caused the hurricanes because he's mad at us" thing a lot and usually I dismiss it as usual wingnut kookery, but tonight I thought about what it would mean if it were true. For starters, the last real big hurricane to hit the U.S. was Hurricane Andrew in 1992, when Bush's dad was President. You also had the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake during Bush I's tenure that hit near San Francisco. Then Clinton came into office and we had an unusually calm period of hurricane activity, along with few other major natural disasters and general peace and prosperity. Finally, George W. Bush was elected in 2000 and we had 9/11, hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and the tsunami last year. So I guess what I'm saying is, if God's causing these disasters, isn't he trying to tell us that he enjoyed Bill Clinton and he's really pissed at the Bush family?

Mission Accomplished

From Officials Fear Chaos if Iraqis Vote Down the Constitution:

Officials say that if the constitution is defeated, insurgents will most likely believe that they have won a significant victory and be encouraged to fight on. Conversely, it is said, the insurgency will grow stronger if the voters approve the constitution, because that will anger Sunnis who opposed it and empower Sunni insurgents who can claim that their views were ignored.

So if the constitution is defeated, the terrorists win. But if the constitution is approved... the terrorists win.

Aren't you glad we got in this mess?

Sabotage

I'm going to paste this post by Matthew Yglesias here in its entirety, because it's the best summary I've read yet that explains why the Bush administration is unable to implement policies that any sane person would say are necessary.

The LA Times has a nice report on how the Bush administration is looking at effective ways to help the poor people displaced by Katrina, then rejecting those methods in favor of less effective ones. The reason for deliberately choosing ineffective measures is that the White House fears that implementing effective measures would make it politically easier in the future to get the government to do stuff to help poor people. And the crazy thing about it is that they're not really crazy!

This is the basic dilemma the right faces. It's committed to the view that the government shouldn't help poor people. But things happen from time to time that make it politically imperative to do something to help poor people. And if the government responded to those circumstances in ways that were efficient and effective, that would generate more political momentum for further poor-helping measures. Thus, the right finds itself forced to implement policies it knows to be ineffective. The Section 8 housing vouchers discussed in the article are a case in point. This was an idea that came into vogue with Ronald Reagan as his free-market advisers noted that poor people didn't lack houses (implying a need for the government to build some) but rather money for rent (implying a need for the government to give them some) and that by taking option number two you could avoid the catastrophic poverty-sinks of public housing.

Flash forward to today, and liberals (who care about poor people) have learned to love Section 8. Well-meaning right-wing economists still like them because, well, they're good. But Republicans hate them. Public housing disasters make the case against big government, housing vouchers make the case for ... more housing vouchers. The EITC has made a similar ideological journey, beginning on the right as a suggestion that anti-poverty spending could be put to better use and now opposed by the right precisely because the idea is too good. The purely ideological case against helping poor people is grossly unpopular, so conservatives need to rely on the pragmatic case which, in turn, relies on deliberately rejecting good ideas in favor of bad ones in order to "prove" that government programs don't work.

I would say that this same mindset applies to things like fuel efficiency in automobiles. It happens that better fuel efficiency requirements would be helpful for many reasons, like reducing global warming, becoming more energy independent and generally reducing the amount of money Americans spend on gas. But tightening efficiency requirements goes against the basic right-wing principle that government should never be telling businesses what to do. And so a policy which has almost no downside (unlike a higher gas tax, which would accomplish basically the same thing but would be politically much more problematic) is DOA because it violates the ideological purity of the Bush administration.