Pleonasm

Early Years of Sarah Palin

2010-01-07T04:52:00.007-05:00

Going Rogue, Ch. 1 §

 1-7

Palin's writing is not as stilted as I expected it to be. There have been a few howlers along the way--ludicrous folksy dribble that has no place on the printed page--and the occasional informality that I would have asked her to take out if I had been her editor at Harper. But overall, it's not such a horrendous read. I certainly write more fluently than I speak, and the same could easily be true of Palin.

Palin's life is far less interesting than that of her father, Chuck Heath. She does a decent job of depicting the man as a hardworking, generous and upright person. By his daughter's account, Heath was a dedicated educator and coach as well as a highly talented athlete.

I'm from a blue-collar family, and I appreciate her stories about her parents' hard work and frugality. What bothers me is when Palin suggests that her small-town upbringing makes her morally superior to others. My parents have toiled away to provide for me, and they raised me to live responsibly and to make good decisions. They did this without instilling me with some sense that we are extraordinary or especially praiseworthy.

They also managed to turn me into a functional adult without a pervasive Christian faith. Palin's sanctimonious discussion of her attempt to fill the "God-shaped vaccuum" in her soul is the most difficult material to get through.

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Palin has a sister name Heather Heath. I hate people who give their children stupid names. Plenty more of that to come.

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"[Patriotism] stirred in me as my class read the Pledge of Allegiance. I felt proud and tall as we pledged on our hearts every morning." p. 15

The Pledge of Allegiance never gave me a warm feeling in my heart. It never seemed like anything other than a hollow exercise to me, and that was reinforced in 2002 when the state legislature tried to make it mandatory that all public school students say the Pledge every day. None of the kids in any of my classes--even in highly Republican central Pennsylvania--ever showed any enthusiasm for the words in the Pledge. The more history I learned, the more obvious it became to me that the words in the Pledge were hypocritical. It painted America as a country that didn't keep its promises.

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"I developed a love of reading and writing early on." p. 15

I was utterly astounded when I read this. I can't force myself to believe that the young Sarah Heath was a bibliophile. The idea that that women enjoys poetry or literature is totally baffling.

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"The downside [of the economic development spurred by the completion of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline] was the concurrent spike in social problems. Without the law enforcement resources to keep things in check, prostitution, gambling and illegal drugs proliferated in the growing population, especially in the pipeline towns like Fairbanks."  p. 21

Shouldn't someone who glorifies the frontier lifestyle be a little more accepting of prostitution, gambling and substance abuse? Those activities are hallmarks the American frontier. It is precisely because law enforcement has better things to do that these things are the last priority in frontier areas. Palin earlier complained about being pulled over on a snowmachine and wondering whether the officer involved didn't have better things to do. I think someone who rides a snowmachine where it doesn't belong is--depending on where exactly the incident happened, which Palin didn't specify--a much bigger threat to public safety than someone who gambles or buys a hooker.

I count Palin's complaint about being pulled over as her first indication that she thinks the rules don't apply to her. Everyone who gets pulled over sneers that the police have better things to do than enforce traffic regulations. But she doesn't seem to have any problem with state resources being used to police victimless activities like gambling and drug use.

Going Rogue

2010-01-05T13:55:00.006-05:00

At long last I have purchased and begun reading Sarah Palin's memoir Going Rogue. I will be blogging my thoughts about the tome as I work through it.

My inaugural comment about Palin's book is that I find it impossible to respect anyone who uses a ghostwriter. If you're smart enough to hold high office, you're smart enough to write your own book. Good writers and mediocre writers alike rely on editors. Only abysmally bad writers can't cobble together a draft to send to their editor without a coauthor holding their hand every step of the way.

Chapter 1, § I

The stilted writing hits you from the very start. Palin recounts on page 2 that a constituent at the 2008 Alaska State Fair told her:

"Price of energy's pretty high, Governor. When are they gonna ramp up drilling?"

I don't know how people talk in Alaska, but I honestly doubt that anyone said something substantially like that quote to then-Gov. Palin's face. That's a pretty transparent attempt to insert one of Palin's pet issues into what is ostensibly a biographical section of her book. She's trying to push the idea that, to folks in Alaska, it's just common sense to support drilling for oil. No doubt the breakdown among Alaskans on the issue of domestic oil drilling is different than it is in the rest of the country, but the way Palin drops that in there without comment is pretty self-serving.

Spreading the wealth around

2009-12-21T01:03:00.004-05:00

Why do global warming deniers complain about the redistribution of wealth? Opponents of responsible climate change policy often complain, as Rick Santorum did recently, about the supposed desire to redistribute wealth from developed countries to poor countries that supposedly underlies proposals designed to fight global warming.

To be intellectually honest, they should say that they are worried about arresting the redistribution of wealth from poor countries to rich countries. The international economy is well-designed to allow American and other Western corporations to exploit the cheap labor and natural resources of non-Western countries. That's the baseline we have to start from when we have this conversation.

What's more, Santorum and his school clearly don't understand climate policy the way I do. Strict limits on carbon emissions will impede the economic growth of poor countries and stanch the flow of trillions of dollars of wealth from rich oil importers to oil-producing countries. I don' t see that as some great scheme to tax advanced countries and hand money out to the global poor.

This debate is couched in Santorum's whining about evil dogmatic scientists suppressing all the evidence that contradicts evolution. This is as baseless as it always is. According to Santorum:

'[T]he scientific "community" claims there is no controversy, and that debate should be banned.'

That's a blatant straw man. Scientists will tell you there is no legitimate scientific dispute over the theory of evolution. There are controversies about details, and those details are debated frequently. But when scientists saw that it should not be legal to teach anti-scientific nonsense in sciences classes, this is not the same as trying to ban debate. Rick Santorum can have a debate about evolution any day of the year. What he would not be able to do, were he still a sitting legislator, is force science teachers to put his religious ideas into their curricula.

Turning to climate change, Santorum appeals to the ersatz 'climate-gate' scandal, which he says revealed 'gross misconduct' by climate scientists. Says Santorum:

'Yet we all know that the world has been both much hotter and much colder than it is today, and that temperatures have changed dramatically over the millennia for a multitude of reasons.'

But how does Santorum know that? Why is it that when climate scientists say there was an Ice Age 40,000 years ago, he never doubts them, but when they say with no less evidence that human activity is drastically changing the Earth's climate, they're part of a conspiracy? Furthermore, I'm surprised that Santorum even knows that the Earth is more than 6,000 years old. When geologists say that the Earth is billions of years old, Santorum takes their claim at face value. When they say that the fossil record displays an obvious development of complex organisms from less complex ancestors, they must be lying. Okay.

It's too late at night for me to address the slew of scientific howlers at the end of Santorum's column. Maybe I'll hit them in the morning.

Birther theory

2009-07-24T13:50:00.005-04:00

Just for my own amusement, I'm going to post a brief summary of the Birther conspiracy theory positing that President Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the United States. There are ample records showing that Obama's parents were both students at the University of Hawaii during the year before their marriage and his birth, that a birth certificate was issued in Hawaii for his birth, and that the Department of Health made birth announcements for the future president in two local Honolulu newspapers.

As I understand it, the story goes like this: A young Kenyan student named Barack Hussein Obama decided in the late 1950s that he wanted to destroy the United States from within. His plan was as follows: Earn a scholarship to study in the United States, go to the University of Hawaii and enroll as the first black student there. Set up contacts in the state's Department of Health in order to fabricate documents, then marry a white woman and have a child. Shortly before the child's birth, fly away to Kenya and deliver the baby there. Then get your contacts with the Department of Health to produce not only a false birth certificate, to establish your son (or daughter) as a natural born citizen and therefore elligible to be president, but also to publish a number false birth announcements in local papers. Pay off airline officials so that they ignore regulations barring newborns from flying on international flights, and return to the United States. Continue your studies at the university, but eventually abandon the child and rely on him or her to become the first African American president, and possibly also the first female president. Also rely on him or her, through no influence of your own, to become a radical Marxist who shares your goal of destroying the United States from within.

Projects

2009-06-05T15:01:00.006-04:00

I decided today to engage myself with two long-term projects. I plan to run the Philadelphia Marathon Nov. 22, which will take a lot of training over the next 24 weeks. Since no one reads this blog anyway, it doesn't matter, but I'm going to post occasionally on my progress as a form of motivation. Hopefully.

My other project is to read the Koran. I've read some of Sura 2 in the past, and I didn't enjoy it. But I'm starting over. Here goes.

Sura 1 is a short devotional statement known as Al-Fatiha. This sura is only seven verses long, and says some nice things about God:

"Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds, the Benificent, the Merciful, Thee alone we worship, Thee alone we ask for help." (1:3-5)

It finishes up by expressing the hope that those who recite the prayer will not be led astray. As we'll see in the next Sura, the Koran doesn't waste any time in condemning non-believers. This little doxology here doesn't mean much to me. I hope that I never become a Muslim just as strongly as any Muslim hopes not to someday become an apostate.

It should be noted that Bismillah is the first word of the Koran.

Mexico City on the Supreme Court?

2009-05-29T11:15:00.015-04:00

In the discussion of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Barack Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court, commentators have pointed out that there is no strong evidence on her stance on abortion, which is generally speaking the litmus test issue for Supreme Court nominees. People who are concerned about the ideological composition of the Court are primarily worried about the possibility that a change in the Court's lineup will result in the overturn of 1973's Roe v. Wade decision, which struck down abortion bans across the country.

Many people on the far left, people who are not fans of the Democratic Party, pointed out last year that Barack Obama would be likely to appoint very different Supreme Court justices than his opponent, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). McCain pledged to appoint judges in the mold of Chief Justice John Roberts or Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito, President George Bush's two appointees to the Court. It was clear at that time that this president would make at least two nominations to the Court, and the left wanted those justices to be pro-choice as much as the Republican base wanted additional pro-life justices sitting on the Court.

There is an unspoken premise here that the Court will treat abortion the same way the executive branch does. The model here is the Mexico City Policy, which was enunciated by Ronald Reagan in 1984. It has been upheld by Republican presidents and revoked by Democrats since that time. The policy barred federal agencies from giving funding to foreign organizations that advocate or fund abortions. Court-watchers usually assume that justices will treat abortion in the same way politicians do. As Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out in his dissenting opinion to the 1992 abortion case Planned Parenthood v. Casey (and no doubt on countless other occasions), the Supreme Court is not supposed to be motivated by policy preferences. The Court deals with matters of law, and is tasked with making rulings based on what the Constitution does or does not say.

We usually assume not only that presidents will enforce their preferences on abortion through their Supreme Court nominations, but that that is a desirable way for politics to operate. I find that troubling, and I won't endorse that as I make my point about Sotomayor and the effect she'll have on the issue.

The Court directly addressed the precedent of Roe in the aforementioned Casey decision. There have been four changes in the composition of the Court since that time.

Byron White, who voted to overturn Roe in 1992, was shortly replaced by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a supporter of abortion rights and presumably a justice who would vote to uphold Roe if it was challenged. Ginsburg voted to strike down laws against partial-birth abortion in 2000's Stenberg v. Carhart.
Harry Blackmun, the author of the Roe decision, was replaced by Steven Breyer. Breyer is consistently liberal and wrote for the majority in Carhart. This is presumably not a change in the Court's ideological composition.
The late Chief Justice William Rehnquist was replaced by John G. Roberts in 2005. Rehnquist voted to overturn Roe, and Roberts would likely do the same.
Sandra Day O'Connor, the author of the Casey decision, retired in 2005 and was replaced by Samuel A. Alito, who was promoted from the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Alito had been the dissenting vote on Casey at the appellate level, meaning that he voted to uphold the abortion restrictions eventually struck down by the Supreme Court. Alito would most likely vote to strike down Roe.
Scalia and Clarence Thomas, both of whom voted to overturn Roe, remain on the Court, as do Anthony Kennedy, John Paul Stevens and David Souter, who voted to uphold it.

Granting the assumptions listed above, the net impact of these changes would be that if the Court was to rule on Roe today, it would be a 5-4 decision to uphold, as it was 17 years ago. Clearly, though, there will be at least one change to the Court before a major abortion decision is rendered. Souter is retiring, and Sotomayor has been nominated to replace him. Ginsburg and Stevens are both aged, and Ginsburg is ill. It is exspected that both will retire soon. Kennedy and Scalia are also possible retirees. The only person on the Casey Court who is likely to remain for any length of time is Thomas, who was appointed in 1991 at the age of 43.

Since Obama is considered a strong supporter of abortion rights, and since conservatives decried Sotomayor as an activist even before it was known whom Obama would support, one would expect Sotomayor to be a stauch supporter of the Roe decision, but we have no evidence to support that as yet. There are a handful of cases dealing tangentially with abortion that have come before her on the 2nd Circuit Court, but none have dealt with the fundamental issues involved in Roe.

In a 2002 case, Center for Reproductive Law and Policy vs. Bush, the 2nd Circuit upheld the Mexico City Policy against a challenge from a pro-abortion right group. The group claimed the policy violated their rights to free speech, due process and equal protection. Sotomayor and the 2nd Circuit denied all three claims on various grounds and in keeping with a nearly identical case before the same court some years earlier.

When Sotomayor comes before the Senate for confirmation, no doubt this question will be watched carefully.

Richard Dawkins is wrong

2009-05-24T21:05:00.011-04:00

I've been reading Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, and I've come across a passage that betrays a very common misconception in microeconomics. Chapter 8, "Battle of the Generations," talks about the evolutionary pressures promoting kin altruism, or behaviors that lead animals to aid others that are likely to carry the same genes as they do (i.e. their kin.) Dawkins talks about favoritism, or a genetic tendency which leads an animal to favor one of its offspring over another. He has just pointed out that some animals neglect or kill runts in order to devote more resources to other members of a litter. There are situations in which sacrificing one offspring will ultimately lead to more surviving grandchildren, which is in a sense the ultimate goal of reproduction. After bringing up the case of runts, Dawkins continues:

"We can make some more general predictions about how a mother's tendency to invest in a child might be affected by his age. If she has a straight choice between saving the life of one child or saving the life of another, and if the one she does not save is bound to die, she should prefer the older one. This is because she stands to lose a higher proportion of her life's parental investment if he dies than if his little brother dies. Perhaps a better way to put this is that if she saves the little brother she will still have to invest some costly resources in him just to get him up to the age of the big brother." -- The Selfish Gene, p. 125

It should be noted that "Parental Investment" or P.I. is a hypothetical resource used in abstract discussions of of the behavior of parent animals. It refers to all the resources an animal has at its disposal to aid the survival of a member of it species, be it a child, another relative, or itself.

The whole discussion relies on talk of what a mother "should" do, which is a shorthand for describing which behavior will lead to more of her genes living on in the bodies of her offspring. There is, of course, no moral judgment made anywhere in this discussion. It is merely a description of the mechanism of natural selection.

The problem with Dawkins's explanation lies within the last two sentences: "This is because she stands to lose a higher proportion of her life's parental investment if he dies than if his little brother dies. Perhaps a better way to put this is that if she saves the little brother she will still have to invest some costly resources in him just to get him up to the age of the big brother." These two statements are not equivalent, and the first one is flatly incorrect.

The amount of P.I. previously invested is what economists refer to as "sunk costs." There is nothing a mother animal can do to retrieve the calories, nutrients, time and other resources she has expended in raising her children up the day on which we find her. In making investment decisions, people often consider the investments they have already made in the past, which is irrational.

If you've already invested $100,000 in a factory, but no level of output from that factory will allow you to meet your break-even point, you are best served by shutting down the factory. You surely want to recoup your investment on the factory, but if you will lose money by producing things at there, then opening the factory is not the way to go about it. Dawkins is talking about genes, which are perfectly rational in the sense that they do not make conscious decisions. Genes exist in the population based on how their expression affected the reproduction of previous generations. Therefore past investment is not a factor in the "decision" made by the genes in his scenario. The tableau constructed in the quoted paragraph presents two "choices":

A.) Save the older child, leading to the death of the younger.
B.) Save the younger child, leading to the death of the older.

The prior levels of investment of P.I. have absolutely no bearing on whether a gene happens to promote option A or option B. Therefore past investment is not a consideration. To illustrate this further, let's instead assume that the older child is not the offspring of the animal in question but instead its sibling, which also shares 50 percent of its genes with the decision-maker. Let's assume, though, that that sibling has entailed zero previous investment by the decision-maker, but that it will be under the care of the decision-maker from now on. In this case, it is still the right choice, genetically speaking, to save the older child, for the reason Dawkins explained in the final sentence of the paragraph.

What matters is the future investment necessary to see the child pass on its genes, half of which are the same genes as those in the adult decision-maker's body. The decision that leads to that outcome with the least expenditure from the decision-maker going forward is the one which will be adaptive, all else equal.Under my scenario, saving your brother is more adaptive than saving one's son, if the brother is significantly older than the son.

UPDATE: Having read further in Dawkins, he points out precisely this fallacy in the next chapter. He continues to make statements about the waste of past investment, but he does say explicitly that, strictly speaking, past investment doesn't effect future decisions. In fact, he published a paper on this theme in response to the work by R.L. Trivers, who did the pioneering work on this subject and apparently made this mistake.

Back in the day...

2009-01-20T20:02:00.003-05:00

Before I record my thoughts on the presidential inauguration here, which I will do shortly, I want to express my appreciation for President John Q. Adams, the sixth man to hold that office. He chose not to be sworn in on a bible but instead on a federal law book. He was a devout Unitarian, a very rare bird in today's world. But he thought that it was inappropriate to use the bible when he took his oath because that would constitute a violation of the separation of church and state.

He was, after all, pledging to defend and uphold the Constitution and the laws of the land, not the bible. The episode also demonstrates that the early presidents did have an appreciation of the importance of a secular government. Obama mentions non-believers in his inaugural address today, and that might bode well for his treatment of church-state issues. Maybe not, though. I'll keep my eyes open.

Well, in that case...

2009-01-19T10:54:00.003-05:00

William Kristol's reliably horrible column in today's New York Times offers a retrospective of Bush's presidency and a reflection on what we can expect from Barack Obama. Besides praising Bush's unwavering support for Israel, Kristol insists that George Bush won the Iraq War for us, yet again declining to define victory. The most painful thing to read in the entire column is Kristol's commentary on the costs of our two recent wars. This is his attempt to feel for the humanity of George W.:

Last Wednesday afternoon, in the midst of all the other activities of the final week of an administration, Bush had 40 or so families of fallen soldiers to the White House. The staff had set aside up to two hours. Bush, a man who normally keeps to schedule, spent over four hours meeting in small groups with the family members of those who had fallen in battle.

Poor President Bush is so busy packing his bags to get the fuck out, but he still found the time to spend two extra hours with the grieving parents and widows of the Iraq War. Is this supposed to be some modicum of atonement for all the death and suffering caused in this unnecessary war? Is this visit supposed to convince us all that we're actually better off for having gone into Iraq? If so, it is woefully inadequate.

Kristol warns the incoming president about the burdens and costs incumbent on a war president, but he doesn't convey that all of those hardships befall Obama solely because of his predecessor's ineptitude. Despite the efforts of Kristol and a team of other revisionists, I can't imagine that history will be anything other than spectacularly harsh to President Bush.

We need a special prosecutor

2009-01-13T20:17:00.010-05:00

Barack Obama's cabinet choices have begun confirmation hearings before the Senate, and aside from their personal qualifications, there is a lot of well-deserved attention being paid to how they plan to solve the myriad problems they are poised to inherit from the current administration. The main cabinet official I'm concerned about is Attorney General-designate Eric Holder. I'm concerned about what happens at the State Department, the Treasury, the Pentagon, and so forth, but Justice in on top of my list. I take that position because the Justice Department has the greatest potential, in my mind, to demonstrate that the United States has repudiated the Bush administration and its criminal modus operandi. Tim Geithner, Obama's appointee for Treasury Secretary, is the protégé of President Clinton's highly business-friendly Treasury Secretaries; Hillary Clinton is more hawkish than I'd like our diplomats to be; Robert Gates is being kept of as Secretary of Defense from the Bush administration. All three of those appointees are somewhat disappointing insofar as they are less-than-total breaks from the current administration's methods. There's no question that Eric Holder will be a drastic departure from the John Ashcroft/Alberto Gonzalez scheme at Justice. What I am less sure about is whether Holder will be aggressive in pressing criminal charges against former Bush administration members. There has been discussion of an extensive examination of President Bush's signing statements, in which he explains how he will interpret and sometimes blatantly contradict laws passed by Congress, as well as the dubious legal theories practiced by the Gonzalez and Ashcroft Justice Departments. I get the sense that Obama's Justice Department will overturn many of the Bush/Ashcroft/Gonzalez abuses of power, but decline to press criminal charges against any of the officials involved in unlawful behavior.

Signing statements represent the most widespread dereliction of duty by the Bush administration, but there are some specific abuses that also merit investigation. No-bid contracts and other sweetheart deals for contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to a multi-billion-dollar swindle of American taxpayers' dollars. The most prominent war profiteers have been Halliburton and Bechtel; they and anyone else who have been involved in ripping off the public need to be reviewed for criminal liability.

More specific to the Bush administration, the Justice Department should examine Vice President Cheney's involvement in selling the Iraq War to the public. There have been numerous reports that Cheney exerted undue influence on intelligence agents to manufacture the case he wanted for going to war. Whether or not he can be prosecuted for this activity, it deserves to be brought to light and entered into official records. Additionally, Cheney admitted in an interview last month that he personally approved the waterboarding of Khalid Sheik Mohammad, a terrorist mastermind. Since waterboarding has long been prosecuted as a war crime, this admission seems to build a rock-solid case against Cheney. This cries out for prosecution.

President-elect Obama has downplayed the possibility of such prosecutions, telling ABC "my orientation’s going to be to move forward" rather than to focus on the past. There is no doubt that the new administration has a variety of crises to deal with, and Obama's attention will necessarily be divided between them. But I don't want Obama's time or energy to be devoted to prosecuting the previous administration. He is a partisan, and these prosecutions must be non-political. The politicization of Justice Department business is one of the more obviously criminal abuses of the Bush administration, in fact. But we need a special prosecutor, a non-political appointee who will conduct a legitimate criminal investigation rather than a partisan witch-hunt.

I'm looking forward here as well. I'm worried about the precedents we are setting for posterity. If no effort is made to hold the Bush administration accountable for its crimes, we will be subject to more lawless behavior in the future. A blatantly partisan investigation, even if it produced convictions, would only protect future wrongdoing by creating a negative perception of such prosecutions.

To my knowledge, such an effort is unprecedented. I have never read of any attempt by one administration to investigate crimes committed by an earlier administration. There have been contemporary investigations and impeachments by Congress, but I am fairly sure no president has ever done what I'm calling for here. I think it is incumbent upon us at this point to call for investigations because the level of criminal behavior under the Bush administration has been unprecedented. We need to show that we have a low tolerance for criminal behavior, preferably a lower tolerance than Americans in years past. We only get one chance to do this right, and we owe it to future Americans to try our hardest. That would be change we can believe in; anything less would be a betrayal of the spirit of Obama's campaign.

For Posterity

2009-01-10T10:56:00.003-05:00

One thing that has struck me about Thomas Paine's writing is how often he appeals to posterity. Frequently he argues that the descendants of his generation deserve better than the status quo would bequeath them. He muses about what future Americans will think of the Loyalist faction and the institution of slavery. One of Pain's primary arguments against monarchy is the idea that "virtue is not hereditary." Even if a king could make a convincing claim to be favored by God and ordained as ruler for life, Paine contends, there is no reason that man should be succeeded by his own son.

Paine saw the Revolution as an unprecedented opportunity, a chance to create something that had never existed in human history. He wanted his generation to stand up and assume self-governance. They had the chance to do so, he wrote, and they owed it to future generations to create a legacy they could be proud of. Creating an independent republic would be a monumental achievement in the course of human events, not merely politically but also in terms of the prosperity America might attain without the burden of British colonial control.

At this juncture, we ought to adopt Paine's stance toward the future. America is in a unique position in terms of its own history and in international politics. We have at least a few more years as the uncontested global superpower, and we should use those years to lead. By that I mean abandoning our atrocious adventure 'spreading democracy' around the world and taking initiative on environmental and social policy. The Bush administration has embarrassed us in a lot of ways, not least by sleeping on the job as the global economy collapsed. There's a long list of things the new administration has to fix, from ending torture to restoring oversight of the economy. Hopefully when they act, they will do so with the same sense of urgency and obligation to posterity that Paine had.

Change, and so forth

2009-01-01T11:03:00.004-05:00

Having finished The Conscience of a Liberal, about which, as it turns out, I didn't have a lot to say, I have started reading a collection of writings by Thomas Paine. This is a really interesting read, not least because the text preserves the irregular typography used in Paine's day. According to the book's introduction, Paine was the first vocal abolitionist in the United States. I know that later on he has some unfriendly comments about organized religion, which I look forward to. Currently I'm making my way through Common Sense, in which Paine makes some good points about the British system of government.

"I draw my idea of the form of government from a principle in nature which no art can overturn, viz. that the more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered; and with this maxim in view I offer a few remarks and the so much boasted constitution of England. That it was noble for the dark and slavish times in which it was erected, is granted. When the world was overrun with tyranny the least remove therefrom was a glorious rescue. But that it is imperfect, subject to convulsion, and incapable of producing what it seems to promise, is easily demonstrated."

You could say substantially the same thing about the U.S. Constitution today. It was a great improvement over the political system under which the founders had lived in colonial days, but after 220 years, there is room for substantial revision. After the appalling disregard for the Constitution on display during the George Bush's terms in office, now is as good a time as any to improve and modernize our system. The mantra in the election last year was 'change,' and though it's not clear what most people used to fill in that vague campaign slogan, to me it meant making the government more transparent and accountable.

I think we need not merely checks and balances but a strong and independent oversight mechanism in all areas of government. Paul Krugman cited the Works Progress Administration, which despite its reputation as a make-work boondoggle is known to historians as one of the least corrupt government initiatives in national history. If the Constitution had strict disclosure requirements and established ombudsmen in all three branches of government, it could restore public trust.

While we're modifying the Constitution, we should add an explicit protection of the right to privacy. The Supreme Court's jurisprudence on privacy issues is convoluted, in part because there is no language in the Constitution describing the extent of a citizen's right to privacy. The Court relies on the wording of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments and the notion of unenumerated rights protected in the Ninth Amendment to inform its understanding of privacy. We've waited too long in adding some definitive language to the Constitution. The men who wrote the Constitution put in an amendment mechanism for a reason, and we should take advantage of that.

Why I Hate Santa Claus, pt. 1

2008-12-24T00:11:00.003-05:00

Every year, as Christmas comes around, I start to wonder why we lie to our children with the Santa myth. What do we gain by perpetuating this story? Is it just a disciplinary tool, a crutch for parents who want to convince their children to be good on penalty of not receiving any toys? If so, that is another demonstration that most people don't live their lives as if they believe in God. If people honestly thought hell was a possibility, wouldn't they live strictly moral lives, as per the bible's morality?

If the metaphysical layout posited by Christianity was true, the Santa meme should be unnecessary. And yet the latter meme survives. It's fascinating that something that so closely mirrors the widespread conception of a personal god also survives in our meme pool. What about the Santa meme makes it fit?

Does it really enhance the experience of credulous youngsters? I don't remember exactly how old I was when my mom dropped the S bomb on me, but it was definitely before my fourth Christmas. But it definitely didn't ruin the holiday for me. I loved Christmas as much as the next kid for at least another decade. Most people seem to associate belief in Santa with the 'magic' of the holiday. Perhaps they perpetuate the Santa story because of that perception.

An important partner to the 'Santa exists' meme is the 'don't ruin the secret' meme. Maybe the second meme is the one I should be asking about. When I was a kid, I didn't tell all the other kids that the whole Santa thing was a lie. Most people carry the Santa meme without believing its truth value is positive, but almost everyone who knows of it but doesn't believe in it still thinks anyone who does believe it should be protected from the truth. This is what Dan Dennett refers to as 'the spell' in the title of his book Breaking the Spell. Our society, en masse, acquiesces to pretend that a big guy in a red suit comes down everybody's chimney on Christmas Eve and leaves them presents. It's embarrassing, really. Supposedly reputable news organizations all talk about Santa like he's real.

They have to. They'd lose all their advertisers and be inundated with hate mail if they broke the spell. It's happened before. And the same thing happens when someone points out that religious stories are not real. Believers get all offended when you compare their beliefs to the Santa meme, but that's primarily because the comparison is so apt. People who believe Jesus rose from the dead, walked on water, and rode dinosaurs take umbrage at the notion that their religion is akin to believing that Santa flies around the world in one night on a sleigh.

We all learn to respect the delusions of children with respect to Santa Claus, and we all learn to respect other people's delusions about Jesus. It's the same protective spell in both instances. I don't really know where it comes from, but I suspect it applied to Jesus long before Santa came on to the scene.

Why I Hate the Baby Jesus, pt. 3

2008-12-16T13:13:00.006-05:00

Some jerkoff stole the Baby Jesus from a Nativity display on Independence Mall. No, I didn't do it.

I argue that the real problem in this situation is that the Nativity scene is on public property at all. But if someone nicked JC from the display as a protest, I don't see what they think they're going to achieve. Insofar as there is an atheist "cause," that cause isn't being advanced by vandalizing other people's religious pageants.

Atheists, of course, aren't a group in the vein of the Ancient Order of Hibernians of the Knights of Columbus, the two organizations behind the creche display. There is a secular movement which opposes this kind of tableau, and their effort to end the practice is the closest thing to a unified atheist cause. That cause is not served by publicly disprespecting sacred religious imagery, no matter how gag-inducing a blond-haired, blue-eyed Baby Jesus is to any intelligent person. That only encourages Catholics and other Christians rally around their curiously Aryan-looking Savior. If we believe in the First Amendment, we have to give these people the respect they deserve.

That respect consists of allowing them to observe their holidays unmolested on private property. This Christ heist makes the issue seem personal, which can only turn public opinion against the small, secular minority. We look petty. We look mean. We don't look like a mature and rational group of people with the Constitution on our side.

All of that having been said, there is precisely zero evidence that this vandalism was perpetrated by an angry atheist. It might have been an enraged Protestant evangelical on some kind of anti-Catholic jag. It could have been a Jew, angry about being libeled for all those centuries. It might have been a Republican- they wander the streets at night looking for mischief, you know. It could have been a junkie looking for something to sell to support his drug habit. Hell, maybe it was a stoner who thought it would be awesome to have an Aryan Jesus in his room. We have no way of knowing.

None of those is particularly likely, but how many atheists are there, really? If we were the majority, things would already be set up our way, wouldn't they?

Here Comes Rock Bottom

2008-12-14T19:03:00.005-05:00

When the Federal Reserve Bank's board of governors meets starting tomorrow, they will discuss what to do to stanch America's months-long financial hemorrhage. Since the federal funds rate, their primary policy tool, is sitting at one percent, come the end of next month they may need to find another way to try to ease credit. Analysts are predicting a half-point drop when this week's meeting ends Tuesday. That would put us within an lolcat's length of the Zero Lower Bound, which is what economists call the minimum possible nominal interest rate.

There's nothing the Fed could do to set nominal interest rates below zero. Once they've set the rate that low, we're in what's called a liquidity trap and need to find some other way to stimulate the economy. The Fed's other two policy tools are the discount rate and the required reserve rate. The former is the rate at which banks borrow money from the Fed, usually kept somewhat higher than the Fed funds rate to encourage banks to borrow from each other before coming to the Fed. The discount rate is at 1.25 percent right now, which doesn't leave a prodigious amount of room for easing.

The required reserve ratio is the fraction of a bank's deposits which must remain in its vaults rather than being lent out. When a bank has financial obligations to meet, it draws from its reserves until they drop to the required minimum level and then borrows from other banks or the Fed. The lower the reserve requirement, the less money in vaults and the more circulating in the economy. Since all of these policies rely on banks to increase lending and thereby boost investment and consumer spending, I have to be skeptical of what monetary policy is going to achieve. U.S. banks have already been handed the better part of $700 billion, to little or no benefit.

I have a feeling that what Fed chief Ben Bernanke is going to end up doing is going to Capitol Hill and calling for a fiscal stimulus. In 2004, Bernanke published the definitive paper on the liquidity trap in Japan in the 1990s (it's an enlightening read, I can assure you). He and his colleagues concluded that the Bank of Japan was not vigorous enough in its attempts to overcome Japan's slumping economy, so that after a number of years, BOJ's policy options had been exhausted but the recession had not ended. The Fed has shown unprecedented aggression in combating the current recession, but conditions will likely continue to worsen even with nominal interest rates at zero.

Paul Krugman and Robert Reich have both been calling for a major stimulus package in the form of spending on infrastructure and aid to state and local governments. Krugman in particular has declared that "prudence is folly," that is, caution will only mean a deeper and longer recession. This is a good opportunity to do a long list of things we have been neglecting and will probably reduce future deficits. Really, what have we got to lose at this point?

Why I Hate the Baby Jesus, pt. 2

2008-12-09T12:33:00.005-05:00

Eager not to disappoint, the Christian right has graced us with more cries of discrimination against the majority. Michael Reagan (son of Saint Ronnie) published an article on Friday whining about how the Evil Atheist Conspiracy is intimidating the poor, sad Christians out of their sacred birthday celebration.

Christians, 90% of the country in his reckoning, are being strangled by a wicked minority of bigots and haters. How dare businesses refuse to pay obeisance to our beliefs, he fumes. We're the majority! Our freedom of speech is being trampled!

I'm baffled to think of where Reagan learned what freedom of speech is. It has nothing to do with what others tell you. It has nothing to do with courtesy, and it doesn't entail a right not to be offended. The notion that businesses owe Christians a mention of their holiday is warped. If you're a cashier at a retail store, your responsibility is to ring up the goods customers bring you. They decide what they want to buy, you take their payment and give them a receipt. "Merry Christmas" doesn't show up in there. No "Hare Krishna," no "Assalam Alaikum," no "May the Force be With You." It has nothing to do with the transaction. Again, I'm astounded at how weak and defensive these people are in their faith. They need constant validation otherwise they think there's some kind of conspiracy against them.

Reagan concludes by calling for Christians to do some intimidation of their own, as if the concept was alien to them. The Religious Right has done nothing but intimidate people for the last 40 years. These people are bullies, and like all bullies they are whiny and pitifully insecure. Is that what Christmas is about? Intimidation? Is that what Jesus would do?

Why I Hate the Baby Jesus, pt. 1

2008-12-08T09:29:00.006-05:00

It's that time again, folks. The calendar has rolled its way past Thanksgiving, that quintessentially American holiday, with the heaviest driving day of the year, a day of compulsory gluttony, and a rabid festival of consumerism coming one after the another, and on toward the happiest season of all: the War on Christmas.

There's a lot to be learned from how we as a country handle Thanksgiving, but for my money the supposed secularist effort to banish the Baby Jesus and the Christian reaction to same constitute the most insipid display in the tawdry pageant that is American public life. In recent years secularists have mounted efforts to remove references to God and other religious symbols from government property, and religious conservatives have reacted with cries of discrimination. The secularist argument is that setting up nativity scenes outside town halls, displaying the Ten Commandments in courthouses, and printing "In God We Trust" on our money all constitute endorsement of the Christian religion by the government in violation of the First Amendment. Conservatives assert that there is a strong tradition of public endorsement of religion in this country and that barring such displays violates their right to free speech.

That argument is incoherent. How does a lack of state endorsement impinge on a private citizen's freedom of belief? Does their brand of Christianity depend on affirmation from the state? Where is that in the bible? These folks can set up their creches on private property, no questions asked.

If these folks need Uncle Sam's stamp of approval on their beliefs, theirs is a very weak faith indeed. In part the First Amendment is intended to prevent churches from becoming dependent on the state. City hall doesn't force these people to wave the flag in their church or say the national anthem. They can't even force people to do those things in public, at least not since 1943. That's what it's all about: the state doesn't meddle with your beliefs, and it doesn't use its resources to promote your beliefs over anybody else's.

I have no problem with Christians doing their Christmas thing in their churches or their homes. More power to them. I don't even have a problem with public space being rented or otherwise reserved for Christmas-related functions. As long as any other group has the same opportunity to use the space for their purposes, public places are fair game. But we have to draw the line at the government itself setting up Christian imagery and overseeing specifically religious observances. That's just not what the government does.

Semester's Over (If You Want It)

2008-12-06T15:39:00.005-05:00

Since the semester is over, I'm going to have a bunch of time on my hands. So I'm going to start blogging again. Hooray.

Yesterday I borrowed Paul Krugman's latest book, The Conscience of a Liberal, from the library. I anticipate that the book is going to be pretty similar to Supercapitalism by Robert Reich. The thesis is that America's postwar consensus on political and economic issues was what made the last century the American Century and that the radical right must be stopped from dismantling the social safety net of the New Deal.

The book's title is a reference to Barry Goldwater's 1960 The Conscience of a Conservative, which galvanized movement conservatism in the United States. Krugman is taking aim primarily at that movement, so he wants his book to serve as a foil to Goldwater's.

Krugman spends the first two chapters laying out parallels between the last 40 years and the Gilded Age, which is by no means a novel comparison. I think it holds up well, though. Krugman points out that the groups that would later become FDR's New Deal coalition were divided along racial and geographical lines during the Gilded Age, and that conservatives are working to do the same thing today. Conscience was published before Sarah Palin came onto the scene and started throwing around the "real America" meme, but she was far from the first to latch onto that wedge rhetoric. It's been a favorite right-wing trope for years.

The author is a stalwart Keynesian, and he has recently been arguing that the government's response to the current economic slump should be an aggressive fiscal stimulus. I anticipate that the book will have lots of nice things about Roosevelt and the New Deal. Since I'm a huge nerd, I hope it gets pretty wonkish. Check back here for my take on the rest of the book.

2008-10-17T19:46:00.006-04:00

A few weeks ago I read a Rolling Stone article penned by Matt Taibbi explaining why Sarah Palin represents everything that is wrong with America. I agreed with most of what he said, and I always enjoy anyone taking shots at Palin, who is just about the worst thing that could possibly have happened to American politics. The most striking thing Taibbi said, though, was that he supports Barack Obama because of what he says about America.

It's more than just the fact that he would be the first black president. His various shortcomings notwithstanding, Obama is a thoughtful, intelligent, compassionate and open-minded person. He is no radical; we can't expect from him to bring about the socialist revolution the right keeps shouting about. There is no prospect of Obama overturning the political power structure in America; if Wall Street thought he was going to put the lid back on their honey pot, they would not have contributed so much to his early campaign during the early part of the primaries. But I think he is the best that we can expect that system to produce.

The divisive rhetoric of the right is only fully coherent if Obama is a dangerous outsider, so that is the narrative his opponents have constructed around him. It is a nebulous construct indeed; we have the word 'terrorists' thrown around without much attention to historical accuracy or grammatical number. The McCain campaign's official line is that Obama has a close friendship with '60s-era radical and domestic terrorist (singular) William Ayers. Never mind that their association was strictly professional, involved only charitable efforts with other leading Chicago citizens and a single fundraiser for Obama, and ended over three years ago. What matters is that voters hear the word 'terrorist'.

That word plays into two other (sometimes subliminal) memes pushed by the right. If Obama is a '60s-style leftist radical, is he also socialist or communist? Maybe he's a Muslim terrorist. Or maybe he's with the Nation of Islam- a violent black separatist and a different form of '60s radical.

Once these ideas get inside the soggy heads of so-called low-information voters, it all intermixes into a hazy, anti-American caricature. Both McCain and Sarah Palin are calling Obama a socialist; Palin and McCain adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer have made comments about certain areas being "not real" America and some being more patriotic and pro-America. It's clear from the remarks made by McCain surrogates that, contrary to what Taibbi's argument, they think of conservatives as the best Americans, the ones who embody what America really stands for.

The game here is in-group identification. It has been no secret that the Republicans' best chance to overcome Obama in a very Democratic year is to paint him as alien. Most of the bad things about Obama stem from the degree to which he has sold himself out, ingratiating himself to the political establishment in order to become a player in the presidential race. Hitting Obama on that count doesn't play well with thinking voters, since their major alternative is a 26-year Senator who has assiduously followed the incumbent president during his second term in office. The other reality-based criticism of Obama is his lack of experience, which also doesn't carry a lot of water with anyone lucid enough to understand the danger in putting Sarah Palin within a heart attack or metastatic melanoma of the presidency.

With the legitimate criticisms blunted by their own candidates' shortcomings, the right has had to resort to turning Obama into a scary, angry, communist black man. The people who respond to those kinds of tactics are not the ones I would put forward as exemplars of what is great about America. One of the major reasons why I support Obama's candidacy is that statement that his election would make about America. He would not merely be the first black president; he would be a president who won despite prolonged appeals to ignorance and bigotry by his opponents.

Does Philly really want Poe's body?

2008-09-11T22:54:00.014-04:00

Apparently there is a struggle between the literary circles in Philadelphia and in Baltimore, MD as to where Edgar Allan Poe ought to be buried. About a year ago, Poe scholar Edward Pettit published a cover article in City Paper explaining why we should collect the body of Poe from its place of repose in Maryland. Pettit's argument centers on the fact that most of Poe's early successes occurred in this city, and that much of his best work was done here. In fact, he says, no other author can boast such an impressive catalog produced in Philadelphia. Anyone who is familiar with Poe's biography understands why it is so hard to decide where he "should be" buried. He lived and worked in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, Brooklyn and Richmond, VA.

He moved around in part because of his tendency to make enemies, which impeded the advancement his literary career. Baltimore was his place of death and Boston his place of birth, though the latter doesn't much care what becomes of his body. Baltimore's major claim is that that is where he died and has been buried for near 160 years. To be honest, I'm satisfied with that. Is it really imperative that we exhume a corpse more than a century-an- a-half dead? What good would that really do us? It might bring attention to Poe's writing, but putting Poe's work into the public eye is not necessarily the same as encouraging people to read him.

The benefits we might derive from first convincing the authorities and concerned scholars in Baltimore to give up the body and then digging it up, moving it, and reburying it here are hardly worth the effort. Why bother? Pettit points out that the mystery genre was literally invented by Poe in Philadelphia. That's phenomenal. Does the proximity of his putrescent remains really commemorate that? The high level of violent crime in the city inspired Poe to write detective stories. I suggest that we try to reduce the violent crime rate here today. That seems like a fitting tribute, unless you happen to think that we're better of hoping to spawn another literary genius by dint of the gruesome risk of living here.

Really, while we're on the topic, I can think of a dozen other problems we might want to solve before worrying about who should or should not be buried here. Here's a good one: how many kids in our city school system can actually read "The Pit and the Pendulum"? Really, anything you want to point to in Poe could become metaphor for something that affects living people in Philadelphia. The narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" was dangerously insane- what is the state of our mental health care facilities? "The Fall of the House of Usher" - hey, we have a bunch of homeless people here, I bet they would like a place to sleep, while we're trying to accommodate Poe. You see where I"m gong with this- it's not that hard, folks. The last thing we should be worried about is Poe's place of burial. Most people have a thousand things they want to pay attention to that don't matter. Moving someone's body here is a ridiculous addition to that list.

More on Palin

2008-09-01T12:30:00.007-04:00

Sarah Palin is a major gambit. The ubiquitous sports metaphor among pundits has it that she is a Hail Mary pass, a last-ditch effort to bolster a desperate Republican campaign. The Alaska governor was a dark horse when Sen. John McCain announced her as his running mate Aug. 29. Her nomination seems carefully tailored to appeal to the electoral blocs in which Sen. Barack Obama is perceived as weak. Palin should play very well with the voters supposedly alienated by Obama's infamous gaffe two weeks before the Pennsylvania primary in April. Obama was speaking at a private fundraiser in San Francisco when he said that, in reaction to the indifference of the Powers That Be, rural voters in Pennsylvania "cling" to the Second Amendment, religion, and xenophobia. Apparently dwelling on Obama's five-month-old comment, McCain and his people chose the evangelical governor of a state with an even stronger gun culture than we have in Pennsylvania.

During her acceptance speech, Palin brought up Obama's comment, saying that Obama addresses working class voters with respect when he speaks in Scranton, Penn., but mocks them behind their backs in San Francisco. The problem with Obama's comment in April was not that it betrayed a lack of understanding of the working class; indeed, there is a great deal of bitterness among the working class in this state. Gun ownership and church attendance are high in rural areas of Pennsylvania. These are cultural pillars which remain constant in the lives of blue-collar voters buffeted by the sort of things Obama and Biden talk about in stump speeches. Obama was obnoxious in his delivery, but his observation was sound. In the days since the Republican Convention, he and his running mate have pointed out that Republicans said much about God and guns but nothing about the issues which face the working class. This response is smart. Palin can field-dress a moose. Fine, but what are she and McCain going to do to lower gas prices, expand access to health care, create jobs for the middle class?

We have heard from the Republicans for months that Obama is naught but a carefully contrived spectacle, devoid of substance. He has been derided as a celebrity and accused of relying on identity politics. All of these memes have been irrevocably undermined by McCain's choice of running mate. The only requirement imposed on the vice president by the Constitution is that he or she must be fit to assume the Presidency; it is for this duty that Republicans have endorsed Palin. It's laughable for them to continue to disparage Obama's thin resume.

So many of the issues raised by McCain and his surrogates regarding Obama's fitness to take up the staggering responsibility of the presidency apply equally to Palin. How can it be said that he is too green to serve as commander-in-chief, but she is not? The pinnacle of Palin's executive experience is the governorship of a state no larger than the Harrisburg metropolitan area. Has her short time in that post prepared her to manage the vast executive departments of the federal government? If Democrats are wrong to treat their candidate like a celebrity, should Republicans refer to Palin as a "rock star"?

On the day that McCain introduced her to the nation, Palin parroted Sen. Hillary Clinton's remark about the 18 million cracks the senator's supporters had made in the glass ceiling that is the American presidency. Attaching a female to the bottom of the ticket in hopes that women will vote their gender is as sexist as any remark made by Democrats about Palin neglecting her children to run for office. It is obvious that the Republicans think women voters are stupid and that they condone identity voting when it is to their benefit.

The forfeiture of so many prominent talking points is the price McCain has paid to energize the Republican base. The Religious Right and social conservatives adore the governor and don't care much about the contradictions her presence forces on the campaign.

McCain neuters major talking point with VP pick

2008-08-29T11:43:00.003-04:00

Awash in media coverage of the Democratic Convention, Sen. John McCain announced today that his running mate will be Republican Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska. Palin was a dark horse, and the fact that her selection remained a secret for so long might have been an impressive media coup had the announcement not been overwhelmed by Sen. Barack Obama's historic acceptance speech a mere 12 hours earlier.

The McCain campaign has not been exceedingly deft in its interaction with the media, though reporters have taken dives for McCain on one or two important occasions. If the timeline surrounding the selection had been different, this might have signaled a reversal for the campaign.

Much like Obama's pick, Palin sketches out a number of contrasts to the top of her ticket. She is 28 years McCain's junior, and has not held any office in Washington. Palin came into office as a reformer in a state teeming with corruption less than two years ago, so her rhetoric about Washington will probably approach that favored by Obama. She gave birth to a son with Down Syndrome in April; she and her husband decided not to abort the pregnancy when they learned of their unborn son's disability. Her vociferous opposition to abortion makes her a pleasing choice for the religious right. If she becomes the first female vice president, she will break the old-Protestant-white-guy mold on as many counts as Barack Obama.

The obvious problem with choosing a neophyte as nominee is that it undermines the McCain campaign's primary attack meme against Barack Obama. A vice president must be qualified for the presidency, and not merely because of the dictates of the Constitution. The Republican National Convention next week will endorse a woman with 21 months of experience in state government to be commander-in-chief. If Obama's resume is thin, Palin's is transparent.

The strategy behind Palin relies partially on her reputation as a reformer in her own party, which McCain hopes will reinforce his erstwhile claim to maverick-dom, and partially on the hopes that she will attract disaffected Clinton voters. But her primary advantage may be her appeal to the hard right. Palin is extremely Protestant, speaking out loudly against abortion rights and advocating Creationism in her state's school curricula. One consolation that came with McCain's primary victory was the elimination of three of his rivals who indicated in a debate that they do not believe in evolution. The choice of Palin may give unfortunate credence to the anti-reality crowd.

Fair and Balanced

2008-08-18T17:38:00.005-04:00

As The Onion has observed, a huge amount of print space has lately been devoted to the fact that newspapers are quickly becoming obsolete as a news medium. Circulation at most major newspapers has dropped continuously over the last decade as Internet news sources have drawn readers away. Most online news outlets do not require paid subscriptions; they provide articles in a torrent throughout the 24-hour news cycle; for what it's worth, they save all the resources used in printing and distributing newspapers, which is environmentally friendly and gives them a significant financial advantage.

One trend which others have considered troubling is the prominence of ideologically slanted news sources on the Internet. Personally, I rely on The Nation and alternet.org, and the only columnists I read regularly are the liberals at the New York Times. Reputable newspapers have stringent standards of fairness; journalists are expected to present both (or all) sides of any story with equal emphasis. Online news purveyors such as WorldNet Daily, alternet, and the entire blogosphere often have explicit biases. Consumers taking the path of least resistance to their information gravitate towards sources which tell them what they want to hear.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. Alternet carries articles on topics which few other sources (and likely no conservative sources) touch upon. All of their authors write from a leftward perspective, but only sometimes only liberals are concerned with certain political and economic issues. There aren't always two perspectives on issues like water shortages or human rights; conservative writers just make those things less of a priority.

In some cases, the existence of two "sides" on an issue is entirely fictitious. There are empirical matters in science and history which are not debatable. Evidence weighs insurmountably toward one conclusion. Anyone who claims that a thousand innocent people were rounded up in the Salem Witch Trials, for instance, is just wrong. He or she would not deserve equal time with those who correctly report that eighteen were hanged and one pressed to death with stones during that incident. An important example of a debate in which one "side" is given undue credence by the standards of balance in news reporting is the Creationism movement.

In reality, there is no question as to whether humans and other animals evolved from a common ancestor over millions of years. Evolutionary theory is the basis of modern biology; it is based on a massive body of archaeological, genetic, and anatomic evidence. There is little or no evidence to support the Creationist position, by contrast. That Creationism is so often given equal time with science is due partially to the extraordinary deference our culture gives to religious beliefs, but it is also a result of a misplaced priority on balance.

I hope there will be a revision of the current standard in journalistic ethics to account for this problem, but I do not know what, precisely, I would propose. I can predict that the methods which will prevail will be determined by the financial realities of the Internet. News sources which can generate more advertising revenue will survive in the competitive marketplace. If news consumers desire certain standards of accuracy and ethical behavior in their reporting, sources which meet those standards will thrive. If consumers prefer sensationalism and biased reporting to sobriety and objectivity (whatever that means), that is what they will get. The structure of news organizations in coming years may be derived from old newspaper practices, or it may be radically different. The outcome will not be determined by the preferences of ethical thinkers but by those of consumers.

Association, Implication, Accusation

2008-08-02T19:10:00.005-04:00

Yesterday, alternet.org published an article by Rory O'Connor discussing the culpability of right-wing talk radio in the July 28 shooting at a Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tenn. Rory is co-author of Shock Jocks: Hate Speech and Talk Radio, in which he and Aaron Cutler attack right-wing hatemongers like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage. I haven't read the book, but I am always wary of attempts by well-meaning liberals to deal with "hate speech." Hate should be rejected, rebutted, and remonstrated, but never censored. Acting as an agent of tolerance is incompatible with acting as a thoughtpoliceman. I will reserve judgment on the efforts and arguments of O'Connor and Cutler until such time as I have read them in context.

O'Connor's article first deals with accusations made against him by conservatives, comparing him the Nazis. These are fairly standard, not particularly adroit, and largely unworthy of attention. O'Connor dismisses them as such and derides the supposed 'conspiracy to kill talk radio' in which Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and all liberals are complicit, according to the angry, grandiose delusions of right-wing radio hosts. O'Connor mentions this conspiracy theory as a means to transition onto the topic of the 'actual conspiracy to kill,' in which he links the right-wing radio stalwarts Savage, Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Neal Boortz and Mark Levin to last week's church shooting. Jim Adkisson, the church gunman, had bought and read several of their books, it turns out. He also listened to them on the radio.

This thesis is guilt by association, and I don't see much to warrant the connection. How can O'Connor establish that listening to Limbaugh or Savage abetted or even inspired Adkisson's act of violence? Limbaugh is more insipid than violent, though as O'Connor points out, some weeks ago he expressed his hope the agents provocateurs would stage riots and the Democratic Convention in Denver. I don't see any impetus in Limbaugh's words or ideas for random acts of violence on people merely because their church affiliation identifies them as liberal.

Savage, by contrast, seems dangerously deranged. He is erudite but bipolar, shifting in seconds from dulcet Brooklyn-tinged rumination to bellicose paroxysms. Savage frequently describes his opponents as 'vermin' and warns against the dangerous erosion of white culture in the United States. I don't necessarily think that Savage is an improbable instigator of violence, but I do think O'Connor's association here is facile. His case is not assiduously made. Accessory to murder is not a trivial charge, and the burden is on O'Connor to support it.

Both of the above talkers foster the conceit that large conservative blocs act according to their daily commands over the airwaves. Limbaugh takes credit for 'Operation: Chaos,' in which conservatives purportedly registered to vote in Democratic primaries so as to keep Hillary Clinton's candidacy alive. His hopeful speculation about riots in Denver played into the same pretension. Savage actually considers himself a national hero, taking credit for the horrendously jingoistic diversion of the dreaded Dubai Ports deal and the disgusting intrusion of the government into the case of Terri Schiavo. O'Connor is reinforcing the suggestion that Americans act on the exhortations of these hate-peddlers. So far as I understand, that's the thesis of his book,

It is likely that there is some non-causative correlation between violent hatred for liberal people and institutions and interest in the works of the conservative shock jocks. In an open marketplace of ideas, if there are dollars available to support this kind of hate speech, the niches occupied by Savage et al. will inexorably be filled. People in America already espouse the antipathies exhibited by Adkisson, and they will inevitably be articulated in some corners of the intellectual discourse. The pundits in question are a symptom of a social phenomenon antecedent to their prominence as radio hosts. Assigning them culpability won't kill their ideas. Even banning them from the radio wouldn't keep them off the Internet. Linking them to criminal activity in an attempt to silene them is a losing battle.

Moreover, guilt by association is a vile, right-wing tactic. These very same shock jocks spout constant accusations that Barack Obama is untrustworthy because he associates with terrorists such as William Ayers and his racist (Christian) ex-pastor, Jeremiah Wright. We liberals (well, some of us) object when Marilyn Manson and the Grand Theft Auto games are blamed for violence by teenagers. I don't see any reasonable distinction between those and the question O'Connor is trying ask.

And O'Connor is, at base, asking a question about culpability. He flirts with standing up and pointing the finger at his adversaries, but always retreats into comfortable dubity. If he's going to make a case against Savage and Limbaugh, he should do so emphatically rather than by mere suggestion. Is there some passage in which Savage (for instance) demonized Unitarians in particular? Is there a connection somewhere in the voluminous screeds of Hannity or Limbaugh that touched particularly on a personal experience of Adkisson's life? While my presumption is against the association O'Connor is trying to make, I am not averse to evidence. O'Connor declines to provide any.

Freedom of Choice (of Breakfast Meats)

2008-07-20T10:22:00.008-04:00

This morning I heard an ad on the radio which struck me as a poignant commentary about the United States. It is increasingly obvious to me that our values and institutions are centered on commerce, and commercial interests dominate decisions which are supposed to be dictated by principle and concern for the "public good." While I have been aware of this state of affairs for upwards of a decade, recent developments have for some reason rekindled my interest in the questions of why America looks like it does, why we Americans act as we do, and how the public policies that determine these things are set.

I plan to research and write a series of posts dealing with these questions and how they relate to America's place in the world and particularly how they shape the presidential race. For now, I want to get back to the radio ad.

McDonald's recently introduced a breakfast sandwich called the Southern Style Chicken Biscuit, which true to its name consists of a fried chicken patty on a biscuit. It accompanies a number of other greasy, disgusting biscuit-based items which have reportedly been added to McDonald's menu in the years since I stopped eating there. Some consider the new sandwich remarkable in that it has moved chicken onto the breakfast menu, but as Joel Klein of TIME notes, this is not an unprecedented coup. Furthermore, there is no coherent reason why pork should be included in our morning meals while chicken is categorically proscribed. If there ever was some sanctity of breakfast, it was long ago defiled by the introduction of cereal shaped like waffles and sausage on a stick wrapped in pancakes, corndog style.

The radio ad for McDonald's new arterial calamity began by extolling the US's hallowed freedom of speech. How lucky we are to live in a nation where each person can express his ideas without fear of repression by his government! All manner of divergent opinions are tolerated in this nation of courage and integrity. No personal opinion or taste is grounds for ostracism, the ad continues. (Let us ignore the fact that you can't even see the truth from where you have to stand to be able to say that.)

What should we do with this precious freedom of expression? The radio told me that the proper course is to start eating chicken for breakfast, which was somehow not the first thing that came to my mind. I never had any inclination to include poultry on my breakfast menu, but then again, my tastes are so distant from where the ad industry would have them that I may qualify as a bad American on that count alone.

Isn't this appropriation of patriotic concepts and imagery in the name of selling a breakfast sandwich a form of sacrilege, to be decried and deplored by Americans from sea to shining sea? No. No, it isn't. What I find distressing about this ad is that there really isn't anything unusual about it. It's perfectly acceptable to use patriotism and America's purported ideals to implore consumers to buy your product. No one sees that as a debasement of what we stand for. This is a tacit acknowledgment of the fact that consumption is really what we're all about. What's the point getting upset about it? People who supposedly hold America dear to their hearts don't really want to impede commerce, so they never raise their voices in objection to this kind of thing.

This state of affairs reinforces my conclusion that most or all of the patriotic talk we put up with in American is entirely for show. Somehow, our politicians are excoriated for the mere omission of conspicuously patriotic (and Christian) rituals. Every lapel is adorned with a flag pin, every speech closed with "God bless America." Politicians never venture anywhere near vocally diluting or devaluing our shibboleths (which says nothing about what they do with their actions rather than their words). When a corporation suggests that the happy providence of the First Amendment should be utilized to eat chicken before 11:30am, that's business as usual.

Once again I find myself devoid of any obligation to participate in any of this- the patriotic pageantry, the consumerism, the greasy breakfast. I must be in the minority, though, or no one would pay to make those ads.

My dogma is bigger than yours

2008-07-11T16:08:00.004-04:00

In a footnote to chapter nine of Breaking the Spell, Dan Dennett alerts his readers to a piece written by Cristoph Cardinal Schörnborn in which he clarifies the views of the Catholic Church toward evolution. In 1996, Pope John Paul II gave an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences entitled "Truth Cannot Contradict Truth," in which he spoke about evolution. His main point was that the emergence of the human spirit (for my money, "spirit" is the Fergie of meaningless buzz-words, being both the most despicable and the most ubiquitous) could not be located on an evolutionary timeline and therefore weighed toward divine intervention. Let's just elide over the fact that the soul has never been scientifically demonstrated in the first place. John Paul and Schörnborn don't worry much about that, so neither will we.

In "Finding Design in Nature," Schörnborn attempted to remedy false notions about Church doctrine which had cropped in the nine years since the papal address. John Paul mentioned evolution but did not condemn it as false, so it's perfectly reasonable for any reader to assume that he accepted the fact that evolution is a real process. The important distinction, for Schörnborn, is that Christian teachings are fundamentally incompatible with "Neo-Darwinian doctrine," which he criticized as ideological rather than scientific. Neo-Darwinism denies the supposedly abundant evidence of design in the universe.

With formidable indignation, he quoted a1985 writing by John Paul in which he touted the "finality" of life on earth. So far as I know, finality is not a scientific concept. How would one test an organism to determine whether it is "final"? Does it have something to do with cell structure, anatomy, observed mutations? Is there a finality gene? Presumably John Paul's address was given in Italian; the Italian finalità may have some connotation or scientific application of which I am unaware. More likely, though, it's just jargon made up by JPII to make a case for something that just isn't so.

The late Pople continued: "To speak of chance for a universe which presents such a complex organization in its elements and such marvelous finality in its life would be equivalent to giving up the search for an explanation of the world as it appears to us." This is a baffling role reversal. The merest thought reveals that divine intervention is the bankrupt explanation in this discussion- what Dennett would call a "skyhook," a device which purports to do the work of a crane absent any actual superstructure to support it. Claiming that God is responsible for any observed phenomenon is intellectually lazy. Scientists have studied processes of differential replication for 149 years and have learned much about how random, stepwise processes can carry a system from simplicity to complexity. Positing divine intervention does not require any tests or observations, or even any thought. Pointing your finger at someone else and saying, "No, you're the one who refuses to use your brain," is worth 0 points. Sorry.

Schörnborn goes on to defend the new pope, Benedict XVI, from the scurrilous neo-Darwinists who would warp and corrupt his pronouncements for their own wicked ends. He doesn't cite any of these nefarious materialist rogues, so I have to doubt their existence. Who would make such a claim? I wouldn't go out of my way to get Benny on my side of the Beatles vs. Stones controversy, much less something meaningful like the origin of life. Furthermore, who believes that the pope doesn't think God had anything to do with the development of life on Earth? XVI is just as wrong as I expect him to be.

The Cardinal concludes by reiterating that design is plainly visible in all of nature. Again, no scientific work is cited to support this claim. It is a bare assertion. It's not that I expect Schörnborn to publish articles in a biology journal. He has better things to do; if he's anything like American bishops, that includes protecting child molestors. In any event, there is a sizable catalogue of supposed scientific work in support of the design theory. That body of work is rejected in toto by respectable scientists, but if the Cardinal is going to try to use science to support his Stone Age ideas, the least he could do is bring some science into it.

Imperialist and Reagan ally dies on the Fourth of July

2008-07-07T17:52:00.008-04:00

The National Review has decided to host a circle-jerk in memory of the late Sen. Jesse Helms, a staunch conservative from North Carolina who died Friday (The Nation speculated, I hope facetiously, that he planned to die on Independence Day). This kind of hero worship bothers me no matter the alignment of the idol; I was far from pleased when The Nation and MoveOn.org uncritically extolled the virtues of Sen. Barack Obama a few months ago, notwithstanding the fact that he somehow became the standard-bearer for the progressive movement in this country. I won't be happy when The Nation holds a sad symposium reflecting on the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy, either. I know they're not going to be honest about it.

Does anyone really need talking heads from their own little ideological buddy list telling them how great some politician is (or was)? Can't said politician just put an ad on TV talking about how great they are? Why waste energy and print space on that kind of redundant applause? We rather need to know what's wrong with our politicians. Remember, these folks are trying to screw us.

Once you get past the fact that the entire post-mortem exercise is worth about the same as tailpipe exhaust, you have to start thinking about who Jesse Helms actually was. For one thing, he was a friend and political associate of Ronald Reagan, possibly my least favorite person in all of history. Helms was a stalwart opponent of civil rights, a virulent homophobe, and a prominent defender of the Reagan administration when it was caught funding Nicaraguan death squads. Helms is praised in NR for standing up to various presidents when he disagreed with them. But when it was discovered that a friend's cronies had armed terrorists in the Middle East and used the proceeds to fund terrorism in South America, he stood by his man. So what the hell good was he?

The folks at NR pour accolades on the late senator for his incessant crusade against the liberal elites of Washington. He filibustered to block their unqualified judicial appointments (!?!). He wanted to reform the United Nations (really glad he pushed that one through, huh?) and the somehow inherently anti-American State Department. He fought to reform anti-AIDS programs so that they would actually prevent the spread of the disease. It's not clear where the NR yackos got that last one. Helms was opposed to any funding for those programs, and he made no bones about why: homosexuals deserved to die for having ebil, ebil buttsekcs.

Helms also hated modern art and was a nemesis of the National Endowment for the Arts. Some egghead wants to give Keith Haring a grant so he can do his doodles on the walls of subway tunnels? That guy should be out on his ass. Caspar Weinberger sold M-16s to the Ayatollah? Well, that's so important, I can't see why it's illegal. He needs a pardon. See where Helms was coming from?

There is only one underwhelming mention of Helms's racial prejudice in the crop of eulogies, and it is phrased as follows: "I don’t know that he was completely innocent on race." The crowning element of this exuberant echo chamber is good, old exceptionalist nationalism. Helms knew what America was all about, so his support for our brutal and anti-democratic foreign policy was justified. After repeating that suggestion, David Rouzer closes the symposium with a masterful amalgamation of insipid supersition and saccharine patriotism: "It is only fitting that he joins two other great patriots, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, in exiting this world on the Fourth of July — and not by coincidence."

George Carlin, 1937-2008

2008-06-23T12:05:00.005-04:00

I was saddened to read this morning that comedian George Carlin has died. In my opinion, the greatest thing about Carlin was his appreciation for language and his Orwellian understanding of its distortion. His comedy was vulgar and irreverent, but it was always tinged with erudition. He was pretty much uneducated, but he had a far greater understanding of the world than most Americans.

Carlin was acerbically critical of the American political system and religion ("Three out of four people now believe in angels. What're you, fuckin' stupid?"). His assessment was insightful, and his explanation of how language is used to manipulate public opinion was as eloquent as that of George Orwell. He dismissed religion as mind control and had a similar view of the consumerism so pervasive in this country. Any form of orthodoxy or attempt to craft a "received reality" was suspect. Carlin ridiculed politically-correct euphemisms as ruthlessly as he attacked the owning class in America. He was a free-thinker and one hilarious motherfucker.

Some responsible YouTuber posted a piece from his most recent stage show about death:

What if you're wrong about the Great Juju at the bottom of the sea?

2008-06-21T12:40:00.004-04:00

I love this video of Richard Dawkins owning a theist:

This speaks to one of the early questions that drove me away from Christianity. How can I know that my religion, I asked myself, is true, when there is just as much evidence for all the other religions (that is, none)? This is a very important question that religious people need to ask themselves if they are at all concerned about being intellectually honest.

Why I am not fundamentalist

2008-06-02T18:01:00.007-04:00

Over the past week I have witnessed a series of flame wars in the Religion and Theology forum at Democratic Underground, where I wasted an exceptional amount of time last month. For five or six successive days, people who don't know each other traded insults and fallacious arguments, diagnosed each other with various neuroses, and squabbled over who was the bigger crybaby. The protracted flamefest started over the suggestion, not unknown in those parts and rarely well-received, that atheism is a religion. Two posters, both themselves atheists, spent days antagonizing other atheists while proclaiming their good intentions. In all, it was an effective demonstration of one of the strongest criticisms of atheism (which nonetheless falls victim to the fallacy of suggesting that atheism is a unified movement, but I will address that shortly): many atheists have a vicious contrarian streak and need to feel superior to others. If there are no believers around, other atheists will do. I have gone through this stage at least once, so I am acutely aware of it in others.

I didn't see much to gain from getting involved, so abstained from the argument for the most part. One intercession that I made was to observe that there were three definitions of "fundamentalist atheism" at work. Generally speaking, a fundamentalist is a person who adheres to a strictly literal interpretation of a religious scripture. Since atheism is not itself a philosophy but merely the condition of lacking belief in a god or gods, there are no central tenets for atheists to adhere to. The term is generally applied to vocal atheists how don't feel obligated to show respect for the supernatural beliefs of others. Beyond that common thread, the term is amorphous and serves different users in different ways, shifting as necessary to apply to many thinkers and positions.

The variation of the definitions I encountered intrigued me. I delineated the them as follows:

1). A fundamentalist atheist is one who will not acknowledge that atheists such as Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot committed atrocities. Also,they dogmatically refuse to acknowledge that fundamentalist atheism exists.

I think the person who advanced this definition meant to say that fundamentalist atheists refuse to admit that Stalin et al. were motivated by their atheism in their atrocities, which is the usual construction of that particular meme. I don't think anyone, at least at DU, had ever claimed that Stalin's purges or the Cultural Revolution didn't happen, but I checked carefully, and that was indeed the accusation made by the poster in question.

I also like the catch-22 couched in the second half of this definition. All you have to do to be a fundie is claim that you are not a fundie. It's artful, if pedantry is considered an art (as it is on some Internet boards). The gist of this person's concept of fundamentalist atheists is that they refuse to accept any criticism of atheism and form a quasi-religious clique to reinforce their delusion. It is convenient for use against anyone who defends atheism against attack, because they seem to tacitly acknowledge that they are part of a larger movement.

2). A fundamentalist atheist stubbornly asserts that no benefit has come from religion and that religion must be eliminated, usually be violent means.

As Carl Sagan once said, "Also pretty vague, but, also pretty different." While there is some commonality between this definition and (1), namely the tendency to ignore evidence, the distinction here is that (2) treats atheism as a philosophy with a set doctrine about the destructive nature of religion, whereas (1) treats atheists as a cohesive group that defends its own members.

A major problem with (2) is that many of the people labeled "fundamentalist atheists," including Dawkins, et al., don't actually make that claim. In particular many of the atheists labeled as part of the "clique" on DU do not agree with this position. I read the claim many times that most of the atheists on that discussion board advocate putting the religious in mental institutions, but it was always unsubstantiated. One user posted a thread in that forum explaining how most atheists enjoy religious music, holidays, cathedral architecture, and so forth; the main advocate of (2) was shocked, shocked at the fact that most of the atheists on the board had positive things to say about religious culture. I'm not sure whether the incident changed his conception of "fundamentalist atheism."

There are people who can accurately be named "anti-theists," but I'm not sure Dawkins and his colleagues ascribe to that label. I would place the four so-called New Atheists on a continuum, starting with Christopher Hitchens, the most vituperative critic of religion, followed by Sam Harris, Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett, the most objective and scholarly. Both Hitchens and Harris are apologists for neoconservative foreign policy, arguing that Muslim fanatics are a unique threat to Western civilization which can only be eliminated by force. Their position is perhaps the origin of the misconception that many atheists advocate violence against the religious. Dennett and Dawkins are strongly critical of American imperialism and violent coercion of any kind. Not even all of these four consider violence justified; to impute that position to a majority of atheists is an egregious exaggeration.

3). Fundamentalist atheists are those who insist that the only proper reading of a religious text is a literal reading and that all believers must adhere to such an interpretation.

This definition cemented in my mind the notion that the three posters who provided the definitions were merely drawing them around grudges and appealing to past experiences on the board to provide content for the chimera that is fundamentalist atheism. (3) happily eschews the common factor between the two preceding definitions, effectively depriving all three of any credibility. The practice of denying counter-evidence is tellingly absent from this definition; if there was any legitimate basis for the term I would expect that to be a universal component.

I understand the argument which gives rise to this definition. It was in fact instrumental in my own transition away from belief in God. When I was a child I believed everything in the bible was the literal truth, but the Cosmo Kramer that is reality inevitably imposed itself on my little bubble. The stories of the Flood and the Creation are simply contrary to fact, and when I abandoned them I couldn't settle on a liberal interpretation of Christianity. The New Testament, with all its miracles, is no less fantastic than the Old Testament. Without the story
of the Fall, the Resurrection narrative doesn't make any sense. Once the Old Testament myths are suspect, the New Testament miracles must fall under the same scrutiny. If the miracles are discounted, what is the rational distinction that can be made to assert that some parts of the New Testament are historical, while others are mythical or allegorical? Any standard that might be applied to distinguish between the two is, as far as I can see, completely arbitrary. The only cohesive readings of the bible are a literalist view (which must contend with a mountain of evidence against its veracity) and an allegorical view.

The above reasoning is either misinterpreted by a believer or misapplied by a disbeliever to create the negative interactions of the kind which lead to (3). This seems a rather personalized definition of "fundamentalist atheism," but then, all three definitions seem highly personalized. Regardless of the definition, though, I only ever see the term used as a pejorative. It is applied as a catch-all for anyone who steps out of line and expresses their ideas about religion. There is only one fundamental of atheism: not believing in God. You don't even have to make the claim that God doesn't exist; all you have to do is refrain from making the claim that He does. There is no central atheist authority, and no foundational creed to subscribe to. Out of such a non-contiguous group, the "fundamentalist" label tends to fall upon anyone whose behavior is judged impertinent.

Moving the goalposts

2008-05-31T15:44:00.003-04:00

Today the Rules and Bylaws Committee of the Democratic National Committee is meeting to determine the status of primary election delegates from the states of Florida and Michigan. Those two states were stripped of their delegates after their state Democratic Parties went back on their agreement to hold primaries no earlier than February 5.

All of the presidential candidates agreed not to campaign in the two states, and the voters in those states were told that no delegates would be seated. Before Michigan held its primary January 15, four of the candidates removed their names from the ballot, leaving only Hillary Clinton, who declined to do so, Chris Dodd, who did not have the resources to withdraw his name, and Dennis Kucinich, who presumably thought he would have received the same number of votes either way. There was relatively low turnout compared to the number of Democrats who voted in other primaries, which is understandable considering that everyone knew at the time that it wouldn't mean anything. DailyKos urged Democrats to vote in the Republican primary and rejuvenate the floundering campaign of Mitt Romney to disrupt Republican campaign. The contributors to that blog were not happy when Republicans did the same to the Democrats in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. At any rate, 56% of the Michiganders voted for Clinton, while 31% marked "uncommitted."

Florida held it primary on January 29. Hillary Clinton won 50% of the vote, Barack Obama garnered 33%, and John Edwards barely missed winning a delegate with 14%. It was accepted by all parties that the primaries would not count because they violated the schedule set by the DNC. The Clinton campaign did not care, for the most part, because they believed that they would have a lock on the nomination by Super Tuesday. Unfortunately for them, Obama performed well that day and won a series of 12 victories thereafter because Clinton had no campaign infrastructure in any of the subsequent states. Clinton began to push to have the primaries from Florida and Michigan legitimized.

The RBC has a number of options before it after it hears testimony from the Obama and Clinton campaigns. It could refuse to seat any delegates, seat all of the delegates from both states but allow each only half a vote at the convention, or seat half the delegates from each state. The Committee does not have the authority to grant either state more than half its votes at the convention. It might split Michigan's 108 delegates evenly or it might assign 69 to Clinton and 56 to Obama, giving him the uncommitted delegates.

If the DNC has any integrity, it will not seat any delegates from either state. Everyone was explicitly notified in January that the votes would not count. The Clinton campaign has no respect for the rules, and the Obama campaign doesn't have much to gain by standing up for them, so they are pushing for a compromise. This fiasco is a major blow to the credibility of the Democratic Party, if that party can be said to have any credibility to begin with. Not only is their selection process arcane and antidemocratic, allowing high-level party officials to weigh against a candidate with popular support in their role as superdelegates; the DNC also tolerates relocation of its goalposts at the very end of the primary game.

None of the proposed solutions provide any remedy for the people in both states who sat out the vote because they were told it would not count. Clinton loyalist Howard Ickes insists that Obama should not receive any delegates from Michigan, essentially punishing Obama for following the rules. This is the level of hypocrisy that I have come to expect from her and band of inept crooks. Michigan was completely expendable to them until Obama pulled ahead of them. Now they are pushing to change the rules in hopes of surviving.

As a registered Democrat, I feel slighted by the attempt to count invalid votes. My vote in the Pennsylvania primary was valid, as far as I know, and now it will likely be debased by the inclusion of votes from a pair of sham elections. This is precisely the kind of behavior that made me resist registering with this party in the first place. If democracy mattered to these people, they would have pushed for another set of primaries so that every Democrat's vote could be counted. Instead they are left with a bitter and divisive episode which will necessarily disenfranchise someone.

The RBC will likely seat at least some of the delegates from the two states, placating the bitter supporters of the losing candidate. The best possible outcome for Clinton still leaves her
chances very slim, so this abrogation of the party's rules will have little meaningful effect. Come to think of it, many of her supporters will still refuse to vote for Obama once he wins the nomination, regardless of what concessions are made to them.

The notable exception might be Clinton's installation on the bottom half of the Democratic ticket. This would unite the party, but it would lose my vote. Obama's political brand, built upon the notion that he is separate from the Washinton politics that have flourished under Bush and Clinton, already strains my suspension of disbelief. Taking Clinton, whom he has decried as an exemplar of that kind of politics, under his wing would dramatically undermine that image. Almost nothing could persuade me to vote for Clinton in any capacity.

No historical understanding necessary

2008-05-28T11:29:00.007-04:00

I like this cartoon by Pulitzer Prize winner Mike Ramirez. In particular, I like the way it casually eviscerates its own point. The bust of Lincoln is included to demonstrate that far more qualified presidents would be baffled that someone so inexperienced as Barack Obama could hold the highest office in the land.

While Lincoln is indubitably one of the greatest presidents in American history, his example is inapt because he had about as much government experience when he was elected president as Obama does today. Lincoln served eight years as a member of the state legislature in Illinois, equal to Obama's time there. Lincoln taught himself law during his early years in the legislature and eventually became a distinguished attorney. He was elected to a single term in the House of Representatives, where he was a vocal advocate against the Mexican War, but was not a prominent or successful legislator. In 1858 he ran unsuccessfully against Stephen A. Douglas for the Senate seat now held by Richard Durbin. Douglas and Lincoln ran for president two years later; the Electoral College was split among them and two other candidates, but Lincoln had a commanding plurality in the popular vote and a solid bloc of victories in Northern states.

Anyone who follows presidential politics is familiar with Obama's résumé. He graduated from Columbia University, worked briefly for a publishing company, then moved to Chicago to become a community organizer. After graduating from Harvard Law school in 1991, he worked as an attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. He served eight years as a legislator before defeating carpetbagger and all-around embarrassment Alan Keyes in what was essentially a bye election for the Senate in 2004. He has served for three years and, while not a star legislator, I submit that he has been more successful than Lincoln.

Obama's is far from the most impressive curriculum vitae to show up in this year's crop of presidential candidates, but the parallels between him and Lincoln should be enough to demolish the "lack of experience" meme. While there is little to indicate that an Obama presidency would be as historic and Lincoln's, a lack of executive experience should not automatically disqualify a presidential candidate.

It is surprising that Ramirez chose Lincoln as the president who, presumably, would be most offended by an Obama presidency. He might have chosen Ronald Reagan, who remains a conservative icon to this day and had served two terms as governor of California before ascending to the Oval Office. That might neuter the right's criticism of Obama's fanatical supporters, who are no less enthusiastic than the Cult of the Deified Ronald. At least a Reagan bust would have allowed the cartoonist to avoid decapitating his own argument, though. Critiquing the Obama brand could be the work of other cartoons, so the contradiction would be less obvious.

The aesthetics of science

2008-05-20T02:05:00.010-04:00

I wanted to respond to a comment that Maddie left on my second Templeton post, but I couldn't fit in all I wanted to say, so I'll use this post to cover all the ground I couldn't in my response.

Maddie wrote about the standards of evidence that would be necessary to justifiably believe in a god. The only thing even approaching positive evidence would be a demonstration of some phenomenon that cannot be explained by any natural cause. Even then, attributing any specific characteristics to this hypothetical supernatural force is completely baseless. The human race has learned enough to graduate beyond that level of thinking.

When I was a child, I struggled to reconcile the stories in the bible with things that I knew to be fact- stories like the creation (I didn't realize at the time that there were two mutually exclusive stories in Genesis), the Noachian Flood, the sun standing still in the sky so Joshua could complete his genocide against the Amorites, etc. The more I thought about those stories, the clearer it became that they could not have happened. I was pulled in both directions, but I had always found the science more compelling than the myths. Everything I learned about science made sense. To borrow a phrase from physicist Brian Greene, the universe is elegant. The stories in the bible, with all of their contradictions are other various absurdities, never came together in the same way.

That is an aesthetic judgment, I guess. Based on that judgment, though, I can't figure out the appeal of pseudoscience. It isn't enough that we, a horribly limited species in an insignificant little corner of space, have found a way to reach out across the universe and determine with a very high level of precision how it works? We also need to look at the planets moving through the sky and come up with a way that they supposedly affect our daily lives? Science is so much more proactive, using our own faculties to reach out into the cold beauty of the universe and snatch a little piece of it for ourselves. The notion that our personalities and the details of our lives are dictated by some hazy astrological mechanism is so much less life-affirming.

I see the same glaring discrepancy in homeopathy. The growth of our medical knowledge is perhaps more astounding than our progress in astrophysics- it roughly doubles every two years. The exponential gains of medical science are not merely an inspiring display of the human capacity for discovery- they mean advances in the human condition on a daily basis. The fundamental changes that medicine promises in the coming decades are startling in their scope and brilliance. Medicine is a branch of science that should generate awe in every human being. And yet some are not impressed- they insist on buying into homeopathy, which operates on the principle that water 'remembers' the properties of past solutes, so that medicine diluted to absurdly low concentrations retains its beneficial effect. This seems to me an obscene abdication of reason.

Are we somehow not packaging the truth properly? Surely, the comforting appeal of homeopathy and other myths must pale in comparison to the inherent beauty of the truths that human endeavor has revealed. Reality should need no marketing campaign. And yet people look askance at you if you say you don't believe in these myths. Granted, most who believe the Christian mythology wouldn't link their historical 'get out of reality free' card to the 'get out of reality free' cards others use for astronomy and medicine and so forth, but I challenge anyone to point out a substantive distinction.

What am I going on about? If all those good folks in the heartland think the world is only 6,000 years old, well, shucks, they just can't be wrong.

Superstition v. progress

2008-05-19T10:05:00.009-04:00

The British House of Commons is currently dealing with a series of bills laying down guidelines for embryology in the UK. There are provisions dealing with abortion regulation and in virto fertilization, but the main provision at issue would allow government researchers to work with hybrid embryos, which are animal cells implanted with the nuclei of human cells and used to produce human tissue. Essentially, they are synthetic human stem cells used to make up for a shortage of human embryos available for research.

Predictably, the main opponents of the research are Catholic MPs, clergy and laypeople. They argue that the research is an affront to "human dignity," a frustratingly nebulous term used by opponents to make the case against a broad range of biomedical research. Similarly, the admixture of human and animal tissue is labeled "obscene." These are subjective distinctions which have no place in a scientific debate. Why should the sensibilities of a few Tory MPs be enshrined in law? Why would their view of dignity or obscenity be privileged over that of other Brits?

There is a parallel debate going on in this country, highlighted by Human Dignity and Bioethics, a collection of essays recently submitted to the president by his Council on Bioethics. The essays are fraught throughout with biblical references, which is not surprising given the proclivities of the current administration. The Council was assembled by the president's main adviser on bioethics, Dr. Leon Kass. Kass is the man behind the ban on federal funding for stem cell research. In his essay, he cites Genesis 9:6 as the basis for preventing murder. "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man."

He uses his view of the inviolate human form to justify his opposition to any drastic changes by biomedicine- even those that would lengthen the human lifespan or alleviate suffering. For Kass, the problem with using embryos in research is not merely that the microscopic clusters of human tissue are destroyed in the process- though he is assuredly offended by that- the problem is with the results of successful research. For Kass, genetic disorders are an essential part of the human condition and efforts to cure them are an abomination. I don't know which of those I find more ridiculous. The perverse fetish on human suffering is more offensive, though.

Kass retains a very biblical understanding of human life. He wrote in 1994 that all involuntary bodily functions are shameful, bestial, and indecent. Yawning, coughing, sneezing, and especially blushing reveal a subhuman susceptibility to one's impulses. All should hidden from public view. (I shudder to think how Kass would react if someone farted in his presence.) Add to that antiquated but harmless list of taboos the assertion that women exist for one teleological purpose: to procreate. There is simply no justification for allowing this man's views to be imposed on a modern, secular society. The dietary and social proscriptions of the Hebrews in the Pentateuch are of no use to us 2,800 years later. We are not the same culture. The Hebrews in the later books of the Old Testament didn't even retain the same Mosaic outlook. Imposing Leviticus and Numbers on modern America is just irrational.

Impeding stem cell research is not merely irrational but criminal. It would seem onerous to find a greater affront to human dignity than the material status granted to women in the OT, but I think allowing others to die of Alzheimer's disease fits the bill. We have a profound moral responsibility to advance medical treatments for Alzheimer's and other genetic disorders. There is simply no comparison between the interest of inanimate nucleic compounds in not being manipulated by lab equipment and the interest of human beings in living lives free of unnecessary, painful and disruptive ailments like Parkinson's and cystic fibrosis. As long as the prospect of developing successful treatments justifies the cost of the research, there should be no question whether or not it goes forward. The argument against it is superstition.

Dr. Steven Pinker argues that the meaningful standard in bioethics ought to be autonomy. Human beings should be allowed to decide for themselves whether they undergo pain for some later benefit and whether they live or die. Embryos can't feel pain, so their informed consent is irrelevant. The very idea is nonsensical. "Dignity" is far too subjective a concept to define by legislation. In my view, for instance, there is no greater expression of human dignity, no more eloquent demonstration of our ascension beyond an animal level of existence, than the ability of our species to extract from nature the means to better our own condition. It is an assault on that dignity to block human progress with primitive and superstitious mores. A book of myths written nearly three millennia ago should not dictate who lives or dies today.

Templeton Conversation, pt. 2: Christoph Cardinal Schönborn

2008-05-17T12:54:00.001-04:00

Whenever I hear someone talk about God, except in the Einsteinian sense, I am reminded of the stunning vastness and elegance of the universe. The Old Testament God, which Steven Pinker dealt a few posts ago, is simply incompatible with reality as we know it today. Even ignoring the bible's cosmology and all of its problems, the character depicted as the world's author in the OT is far too small and petty to account for all the astounding things we have learned in the intervening centuries.

Christoph Cardinal Schönborn discusses the process by which Western society has advanced beyond a superstitious understanding of God and His creation. While this is partially accurate, I have to take issue with his characterization of the evolution of Western thought on several counts. First, this de-mythologization has not been uniform. Many people in the United States unfortunately maintain a very superstitious understanding of God and the universe. I would appeal to the poll I cited a while back; results are also available from the same poll a year later which are slightly more encouraging, with only 51% percent of Americans flatly denying the staggering preponderance of evidence supporting evolution. A compilation of similar polls is collected here. I submit that all of these people who ascribe to young-earth creationism are clinging to the eleventh-century-BCE concept of God.

It's not surprising that Schönborn neglects to mention the views of what must be at least a dominant plurality of Americans. As clergy members and other theists often point out in debates about God, no educated person believes those things. Pointing out that people who believe the Earth is less than 10,000 years old are ignorant does not diminish their number; it does not render a description of their beliefs a straw man; it does not prevent them from constituting a voting majority in U.S. elections. Their ignorance has very real implications for the most powerful country in the world.

evolved in Greece and Israel over a period known as the Axial Age, spanning 800-200 BCE. While it is true that many thinkers in those two areas shifted toward a more naturalistic understanding of the world, they were not involved in a cohesive movement. The Hebrews came to question the vengeful, intercessory God of their oral tradition after an extended period of suffering and misfortune; it was not at all apparent that the deity who made a covenant with Abraham was interested in coming down and fighting battles on behalf of His Chosen People. The Greeks moved away from their earlier ontology in which melodramatic, anthropomorphic gods were responsible for what went on in the world at about the same time, but their transition was the result of a relatively comfortable lifestyle that became available to their upper classes, making the "contemplative life" possible. Their worldview changed as a result of rational contemplation rather than empirical experiences. While the Hebrews and the Greeks made this advance roughly simultaneously, it's inaccurate to describe them as part of a single movement.

Those two points really don't have that much to do with the rest of the essay, but obviously they meant a lot to me. In any event, moves on to explain why the discovery of a rational, ordered world "fully vindicate[s]" the theistic worldview. He describes the world as a "teleological hierarchy," meaning that it is arranged in levels and that a group of subordinate levels exists for the benefit of a primary level, on which humans exist. This is a common view among theists. It demonstrates what I like to refer to as the "anthropocentric conceit."

Humans generally believe that the universe exists, in one sense or another, for their benefit. Early Mesopotamian cultures believed that the world did not extend far beyond the Tigris and Euphrates valleys in which they lived (once again, there's that Old Testament cosmology that I won't shut up about). Later thinkers such as Augustine knew more about geography but still assumed that the Southern Hemisphere was uninhabitable and that only the North had been created for human beings to inhabit. The anthropocentric worldview has gradually yielded more ground as it has been contradicted by new facts about the world around us. When Edwin Hubble showed that our galaxy is one of a vast number and that the universe has no discernible physical center, anthropocentrism retreated into the notion that humans are the ontological center of the universe. I see no reason to assume that, as we investigate further into the fundamental nature of the universe, we will not discover new details which make Schönborn criticizes "scientism," the notion that the quantitative and reductive methods of scientific thought are sufficient to explain everything. Scientism is not universal throughout modern society, he says; instead, most Westerners live in an amorphous philosophical zone with no solid justifications for the things they believe about the parts of existence that cannot be scientifically accounted for. Increased leisure has bred a materialistic and hedonistic society, he says; almost no one lives life as if they really believe in God. So far he hasn't really made a case for believing in God. I agree about the hedonism of modern society, but I don't how he is any closer to proving that God is relevant. Science doesn't have to prove a damned thing for the God hypothesis to be wrong, so appealing to the squishy hole in head of Joe Sixpack isn't getting us anywhere.

In his final paragraph, Schönborn talks about the human longing for purpose and a universal recognition that, essentially, something is missing from life. In principle there must be something out there, some higher meaning which a naturalistic worldview misses out on. This is a pursuit which cannot be made obsolete, he asserts. This is an old argument: the body needs food, and air, and water; we see that these things exist to meet our needs. The soul needs purpose, the argument goes, and such purpose must exist a priori. There must be some higher formative principle behind the universe, and hey presto, there's God! We found Him, guys. Good work.

In fact, our psychological need for purpose is as much a result of our evolutionary origins as any of our biological needs. There is a competitive advantage in an animal that assigns agency to everything it observes. The animal may be wrong when it assumes that a noise was made by a potential predator, but if it reacts accordingly it remains better off than one that has assumed a noise made by a predator is actually innocuous. The human sensory array is exquisitely efficient in recognizing patterns and searching for meaning. That tendency is inherent in our intelligence. An attempt to extrapolate God from that is fallacious.

Science has its limitations, no doubt. Schönborn is right in his description of the scientific method as reductive and qualitative, and in saying that mere scientific investigation cannot answer all of the "Big Questions" we have to ask ourselves. It can help us to judge whether or not our world resembles one designed by an intelligent entity, and it has increasingly revealed that that is not the case. The poverty of the scientific method does not imply that the God hypothesis is anything more than bankrupt. There's nothing here that indicates that belief in a personal God remains relevant.

The vile hypocrisy of George W. Bush

2008-05-16T07:42:00.005-04:00

I consider myself a rational guy who approaches politics with critical thinking and a due understanding that there are few binary moral judgments involved. The Iran/Contra scandal has long been a topic which sends me into a Carrollian fantasy land of spite and unreason, but I'm going to try to talk about it and related matters for a little while without switching into that mode.

In one of the most galling displays I have witnessed in my years of political awareness, President Bush used a speech commemorating the 60th anniversary of Israel's founding to call out Barack Obama. It was not the uncouth timing of the attack that offends me; I couldn't care any less about such propriety. It was the incomprehensible stupidity of the remark that set me off. Speaking before the Israeli legislature, Bush drew a parallel between Iran and Nazi Germany.

"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is - the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

The remark was intended as a swipe at Obama, who has taken fire for his suggestion that the United States should open diplomatic relations with governments that it does not approve of, such as Syria and Iran. The president's obvious dearth of understanding of how diplomacy works was effectively critiqued by Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) on MSNBC's Hardball last night. Bush's elision of the distinction between communicating with another power and making concessions to that power is not what primarily concerns me. Biden is right to point out that the Bush administration has communicated with Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya and Kim Jong-Il of North Korea, and that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates advocates opening diplomatic relations with Iran. But Bush's hypocrisy is deeper and more disturbing than that.

The history of the president's family makes his Godwinning of his opponents particularly hapless. Bush's grandfather Prescott, the patriarch of the Bush political dynasty and generator of much of the family fortune, was a Nazi supporter and a financier of German militarization until 1942. Documents released from the National Archives in 2004 confirmed that Harriman Bank, a company under the direction of Prescott Bush, financed the German steel company Thyssen, an essential cog in the Nazi war machine. The company's owner fled Germany after turned against the Nazi regime, but Bush did not have a similar change of heart. He continued to finance the nationalized German steel operation until his assets were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act on October 20, 1942. The records of the incident were sealed in the National Archives and Bush later went on to be elected to the U.S. Senate from Connecticut. George W. Bush should be one of the last people who would want to elicit images of Nazi tanks rolling across Europe.

On a similar note, there was long speculation about Prescott Bush's involvement in the so-called Business Plot, an attempt by Wall Street leaders to stage a military coup against President Franklin Roosevelt in 1934. Those rumors were also confirmed by documents released in 2007 from the National Archives. A group known as the American Liberty League planned to overthrow Roosevelt and approached Marine Gen. Smedley Butler to do the job. Butler had done a series of similar numbers in Latin America under President Woodrow Wilson, but those experiences had only made him a staunch critic of military/industrial juntas. He told Congress, and after a congressional committee conducted an investigation and confirmed the involvement of a number of America's leading corporate figures, the evidence was sealed in the National Archives. No one was prosecuted for treason.

Given the record of his own grandfather, the current President Bush would be well advised not to raise the charge of facilitating Nazi conquest. He still enjoys the wealth accumulated by Prescott Bush and owes his presidency to the dynasty that man established. It's astounding that, in the gelatinous mold of guilt-by-association that is American politics, more is not made of this connection. Besides Harper's Magazine the the BBC program Document, the only people who ever mention the elder Bush's financing of Nazi steelmakers are simple-minded Web denizens who insist that Bush is a modern-day reincarnation of Hitler. Plainly, George W. is not culpable for what his grandfather did in the decade before he was born, but the unbroken lineage from the Nazi financier to current president renders W.'s ostentation of moral superiority disgusting. I don't expect of him enough maturity to frankly discuss the source of the wealth and influence that made his ascension possible, but the least he could do is abstain from accusing others of moral equivalence with Nazi appeasement.

All of this says nothing of the Iran/Contra affair, which I mentioned above. The connection here is more direct: a number of George Herbert Walker Bush's colleagues in the Reagan administration were convicted of lying about weapons deals with the Iranian government (the same regime that Bush yesterday labeled the "world's leading state sponsor of terror") and used the funds to train right-wing death squads (the Contras) in Nicaragua. Apparently it was acceptable to negotiate with the Iranian regime 22 years ago, because W.'s father pardoned six of the I/C convicts when he succeeded Reagan as president. The weapons deal was justified, he wrote in part, because it had stabilized the political situation in the Middle East. This is true only in the sense that it helped Iran to balance the power of Saddam Hussein, then a U.S. ally (this shit gets crazier the farther down the rabbit hole you go, and it's all true). Many recurring Bush allies are close associates of the I/C pardon beneficiaries. Anyone familiar with the history of the neoconservative movement must recognize the hypocrisy of their cherry-picking moral indignation.

The preceding barrage of more-depressing-than-fiction shenanigans reveals the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of Bush and his clique. And yet the most damning thing you'll find the media in the wake of the Bush speech is Biden's explanation of why diplomacy is a good idea. It is with rapt anticipation that I await the termination of Bush's tenure in office.

Down the McMemory Hole

2008-05-13T00:58:00.009-04:00

John McCain made an embarrassing mistake during the speech that I just posted about. When I read the transcript of the speech at his Web site, I noted a conspicuous omission: he did not refer to Kelo v. City of New London (2005), a rallying point for self-proclaimed strict constructionists. In a surprisingly pro-corporate decision, the liberal justices, as well as Anthony Kennedy, ruled that the state of Connecticut could use eminent domain to seize private property and sell it to a developer who would pay more in taxes than the original owner.

It turns out, however, that McCain did mention the case, but displayed an unfortunate misunderstanding of the Fifth Amendment, which led his campaign to edit the comment from the video on his Web site and scrub it from the transcript. He claimed that "Not only just compensation" is required during the exercise of eminent domain, "but also, private property may not be taken for public use."

One wonders what McCain's version of eminent domain actually entails. Eminent domain is the purchase of private property for public use, with or without the consent of the owner but always with due compensation. Since the Supreme Court has always been a strong defender of property rights, the definition of acceptable public use was narrow until the Kelo decision. I have no idea how McCain and his speechwriters thought eminent domain worked. I imagine that this was something of a Freudian slip, in which he imposed his own views on the text of the Constitution. If this is so (and I certainly could be wrong), it only serves to heap more suspicion on his
loud complaints about original intent. I certainly hope the next president knows more about the Constitution than this man.

Defending the McConstitution

2008-05-13T00:57:00.000-04:00

In an attempt to gain some media attention on the day of two large Democratic primaries, Sen. John McCain delivered a speech May 6 at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC. After pontificating on the art of compensating for poor grades and inexplicably showcasing former Sen. and GOP primary failure Fred Thompson of Tenn., he moved on to talk about his respect for the Constitution.

All the powers of the American presidency must serve the Constitution, and thereby protect the people and their liberties. For the chief executive or any other constitutional officer, the duties and boundaries of the Constitution are not just a set of helpful suggestions. They are not just guidelines, to be observed when it's convenient and loosely interpreted when it isn't. The clear powers defined by our Constitution, and the clear limits of power, lose nothing of their relevance with time, because the dangers they guard against are found in every time.

To the naïve, it would seem with such an introduction McCain is preparing for a major break with the Bush administration. The Bush Department of Justice has logged seven years of extraordinary disrespect for the checks and balances of the Constitution. The senator seems to be laying the groundwork for a precipitous shift from the Bush approach, with its warrantless wiretaps and suspenison of habeas corpus. Sadly, after all that he decided that Tessio should stay on with the family but Clemenza needed to die. The crux of our constitutional crisis, the asserted, is "the common and systematic abuse of our federal courts." That's right, folks. The malfunction in Washington is all the fault of the courts. The big threat to our democracy is unaccountable judges who don't care about public opinion.

This is the same man who in February voted to extend revisions to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which give law enforcement the ability to spy on Americans without warrants. FISA, as it was originally passed 30 years ago, provided law enforcement the ability to conduct wiretaps of phone conversations between a phone in America and one in a foreign country and seek retroactive court permission within 72 hours. This was a compromise between the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures and the necessities of intelligence work. In order to preserve the constitutional protection, the Supreme Court's precedent is that, given probable cause, a federal agent should seek a warrant if at all possible. This is a fundamental protection installed in the Constitution to prevent overextension of executive power.

In 2005, McCain took a principled stand against torture by the U.S. armed forces, attaching Amendment 1977 to the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005. The amendment prohibited military interrogators from using "cruel, inhumane, or degrading" treatment to extract information from prisoners, including those at Guantanamo Bay. McCain had long cultivated a reputation as a strong opponent of torture, often appealing to his own brutal treatment as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. This position was subject to a reversal when the Military Commissions Act of 2006 came to a vote. This Act allowed the government to deny habeas corpus to U.S. citizens accused of terrorism and gave the CIA permission to use techniques barred to the armed services under the DTA.

At first, it may seem that the use of torture is not a constitutional issue; indeed some conservatives, such as Antonin Scalia, argue that the Constitution does not prohibit cruel interrogative techniques because interrogation is not a form of punishment. That's a specious distinction which relies on a pedantic and overly literal reading of the Eighth Amendment. American jurisprudence does not apply the same strict reading to other amendments, notably I, II, and IV. To suggest that the men who wrote the Eighth Amendment and the legislatures that ratified it wished merely to prevent gruesome treatment after conviction is facially ridiculous. If anything, a prisoner who has not yet enjoyed due process of law has more protection under the Constitution than a convict.

All of this says nothing about the suspension of habeas corpus, which is expressly prohibited by Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution. Even if we were to concede that the Constitution has nothing to say about torture, it is obvious that the MCA is an expansion of the executive's law enforcement powers beyond those envisioned in the Constitution. Far from the overweening judiciary that McCain and other conservatives complain about, the real constitutional crisis in this country is President Bush's belief in the unitary executive.

McCain takes offense at the lengthy opinion in an obscure case from 2005, Deck v. Missouri, ridiculing the "penumbra," a legal concept used to protect rights not expressly named in the Constitution and a favorite target of those who style themselves strict constructionists. The minute extension of additional protections to capital defendants in the Missouri case is apparently more troubling to McCain than the signing statements that Bush has routinely used to ignore the law. McCain disapproves of the practice, but not as much as he disapproves of the Court's deciding what is acceptable treatment of a prisoner under the Constitution.

After running through a litany of issues on which he disagreed with the rulings of the courts, McCain accused Democrats in Congress of voting against judicial appointees based on personal disagreements rather than qualifications. But why should judicial philosophy not be a qualification for judicial office? The complaints against John Roberts and Samuel Alito, Bush's two (successful) Supreme Court nominations, were grounded at least in part on their view of the proper role of the courts. The Democrats who voted against their confirmation appealed to their actions as federal judges. Roberts, for instance, repeatedly voted to narrow the protections given to various minorities by the courts. This is an abdication of the courts' duty, upholding and encouraging the expansions of executive power by the Bush administration.

Inexplicably, McCain pointed out, with righteous indignity, that he voted to approve Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg when they were appointed by President Bill Clinton. He did not let his differences with them determine his vote, he said. Why he would approve of two justices he now criticizes as subverting the Constitution and showing contempt for democracy is unclear. Both served as federal judges prior to their appointments; their understanding of the role of the judiciary should have been obvious. And yet it seems that before he needed to shore up support with the Republican Party's base, he was not concerned about judicial activism.

McCain's entire speech reeks of hypocrisy. He plainly advocates for judges that adhere to the party line of the GOP. Roberts and Alito support broader federal power on issues important to conservatives and a narrower reading on liberal concerns (like equal protection). The next president will appoint activists amenable to his political views. Republican talking points notwithstanding, almost all federal judges are now pragmatists. Conservatives are not any more consistent in their obedience to the Constitution's original intent than liberals.

Stupid tax policy? Count me in!

2008-05-08T23:00:00.005-04:00

The New York Times published a piece by Bryan Caplan supporting the Clinton/McCain gas tax holiday. He concedes that the savings will be realized by oil companies rather than drivers; in fact that is his main reason for advocating it. The holiday will placate the ignorant voting public, he writes. For only $9 billion, the government can get Joe Sixpack off their backs and not do any real harm.

The government's response to the '70s gas crisis was counterproductive, says Caplan, so we should be happy with a policy that doesn't really do any good (or harm) but appeases the misguided public. This kind of cynical public policy really shows how stupid Washington thinks the public is. While I'm increasingly convinced that the average American really is that poorly informed, my inclination is to try to remedy that ignorance (silly liberal that I am). Caplan seems positively excited about wasting billions of dollars accommodating the public's ignorance.

Caplan then moves on to the most disturbing part of his argument: we owe the oil companies big time for what we did to them in the last gas crisis. I shit you not. Caplan says that the obvious solution is to let Big Oil invest those profits in expanding capacity. The free market got us into this mess, and it will get us out, he says. Unfortunately, there is no reason to expect that oil companies are going to expand their capacity to produce gasoline. Big Oil posted record profits throughout 2007 and continues to enjoy generous federal subsidies, but still has not seen fit to build more refineries. In fact, numerous government studies have found that gas companies have worked to restrict supply and maximize profits since the 1970s. Large companies have used their market power to drive smaller companies out of business, further restricting supply.

There is no impetus under the free market to expand refining capacity. Yet again we see how ridiculous it is to talk about the free market as if it's Winston Wolf coming in to dispose of the blood-stained Cadillac of a gas crisis. The long-term solution is to invest in alternative energy sources; we could expand our refinery capacity in the middle term, but that will not account for the rising price of crude oil. The sooner we kick the oil habit, the better. Handing Big Oil another tax cut isn't benefiting anyone but Big Oil.

Templeton conversation: Does science make belief in God obsolete?

2008-05-07T09:56:00.004-04:00

If you are familiar with the Templeton Foundation, you know that they are in the business of addressing the "big questions" through scientific investigation. This usually boils down to the Foundation giving a million dollars every year to a scientist who "finds God." This morning I found a collection of essays on the Foundation's Web site about whether scientific advances have made belief in God unnecessary. While there's not really any chance of any of these essays changing my mind, I find the topic endlessly interesting, so I'm going to read all of the essays and comment on them here.

The first is by Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist. He argues that, defining science broadly as a process of empirical investigation, it has answered many of the questions once accounted for by belief in God. Pinker writes that, while science cannot directly explain what is right or wrong, the notion that theism has anything useful to say on the matter is fallacious. The origin of morality is a really intriguing question, and I enjoy Pinker's take on it:

It's not just that the traditional Judeo-Christian God endorsed genocide, slavery, rape, and the death penalty for trivial insults. It's that morality cannot be grounded in divine decree, not even in principle. Why did God deem some acts moral and others immoral? If he had no reason but divine whim, why should we take his commandments seriously? If he did have reasons, then why not appeal to those reasons directly?

The fact is that even people who believe in God exercise some individual judgment over what they think is moral. Almost no one purports to believe every moral dictum in the bible, not least because it contradicts itself in several places. When one resolves one of those contradictions (i.e. rationalizes which one God really meant), one appeals to some standard other than the word of God. If theists are allowed to do that, why not atheists? If it's acceptable on some questions, why not all?

I look forward to reading the rest of these essays, and some of the comments on the left side of the page are worth a look as well.

Clinton claims effervescent victory

2008-05-07T00:08:00.004-04:00

As things stand right now, Hillary Clinton has claimed victory in the Indiana primary, though the New York Times considers the race too close to call. Her lead is less than 2% with 91% of the precincts reporting their results.

I expressed hope in my last post that Clinton would give up and go home after tonight, but her untimely declaration of victory seems to preclude that possibility. I could dig through some amateur number-crunching right now if I wanted to, but I'd rather wait until the professionals make their rounds in the morning. Suffice it to say that Clinton has very little chance of pulling off this nomination. As long as Obama's name is on the ballot in the remaining primaries, he's virtually guaranteed 15% of the pledged delegates. That puts him within striking distance of the 2,025 he needs to lock up the nod; it looks to me that Clinton can only win if the infamous superdelegates decide she deserves to be the Democrats' horse in the 2008 race. And even that seems less likely by the day.

BBC Radio is putting an interesting spin on tonight's primaries. Barack Obama has "claimed victory" in North Carolina, they say, while Hillary Clinton "says she won" Indiana. That really doesn't convey the difference between Obama's 14-point lead in the final results in NC and Clinton's 1.8-percent lead in IN, which is not yet final. I guess she has the power of suggestion working for her.

Menendez disses economists

2008-05-06T22:48:00.002-04:00

It seems that everyone from the Clinton campaign and all of their surrogates now disavow the field of economics. Defending the campaign's embarrassing gas tax proposal, Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey expressed his newfound disdain for anyone who understands how taxes work. Asked by an anchor on CNBC this morning to name one economist who supports the proposal, Menendez replied, "Thank God that we don't have economists, necessarily, making public policy." Never mind that a lot of economists do make public policy.

I want to point out one more time that the opposition to the tax holiday is not motivated by contempt for the poor. It is motivated by the fact that the scheme won't work. It isn't going to do anything to help poor people; the potential savings under the plan are minuscule, and the harm it would do is considerable. Clinton and her retinue are smart enough to know how this works. The whole proposal is predicated on the assumption that the public is too dumb to understand what's going on.

I have no problem voting for someone who thinks highly of their own intelligence; in fact an intellectual president is precisely what this country needs. But Clinton and her camp have demonstrated the height of anti-intellectualism. With any luck, Clinton will be forced out of the race soon and the left in this country can start dealing with facts again.

Clinton disses economists

2008-05-05T12:19:00.010-04:00

In an interview yesterday with George Stephanopoulos, Sen. Hillary Clinton defended her proposal to suspend the federal gas tax this summer by dismissing the opinions of economists, who universally agree that the idea is bogus. You can see the video here- she says at 3:55, "I'm not going to throw my lot in with economists,"as though they were some cult that would ruin her electability if she were associated with them. She insists that her policy will work if we just do it right. Barack Obama knows better; he voted for a gas tax holiday when he was in the Illinois State Senate. It was a dumb idea then as now; it didn't work and, like an adult, Obama admits his mistake.

Obama derides the tax holiday as a measure which will save the average consumer $30, or the price of half a tank of gas. Even that is generous. The price of gasoline is at a national average of $3.60 a gallon because that is what the market will bear right now. If we lifted the 18.4-cent federal gas tax, companies could sell the same volume at the same price and pocket the extra $9 billion which the tax is projected to collect this summer. If Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) knows what he's talking about, oil refineries in America are operating at 85% capacity right now. To me, that says that oil companies have projected what amount of gasoline is going to maximize their profits, and that's the amount they're going to put on the market. Lifting the federal tax is no incentive for them to lower prices and forgo a larger potential profit.

So far as I have heard, the unanimous opinion of economists is that there is no chance the tax holiday will work. Faced with the opposition of people who know what they are talking about, Clinton went into full-blown W-style denial. In her interview with Stephanopoulos, Clinton justified her flat-earthism by complaining about the Bush administration's pro-corporate elitism. She is disturbed by their disdain for the average person, but she embraces their disdain for facts. She contends that our government has relied on "elite opinion" which cares nothing about the little guy. I have to wonder whether or not the elites she is talking about include the economists who have long agreed that "trickle-down economics" does nothing to help the poor or the scientists who have warned with increasing urgency about the danger global warming poses for the world's poor. She can talk all she wants about helping the less fortunate, but if she plans on continuing the White House aversion to facts, she's not going to do anyone any good.

What really surprised my about this whole episode was how quickly Clinton threw Paul Krugman under the bus. Krugman, a New York Times columnist, Clinton supporter, and economist, argued last week that the tax holiday is a ludicrous proposal, though he focused more on Sen. John McCain's support for it and soft-pedaled his criticism of Clinton. When Stephanopoulos pointed out Krugman's dissent, it elicited a wickedly supercilious dismissal.

Clinton's no-facts-necessary style is most disappointing in view of the larger themes of her campaign, which bear a stultifying resemblance to the imagery and tactics employed by Republicans in recent years. It's dangerous for Clinton to cast Obama as an elitist who is out of touch with working-class voters and as weak on national security. Along with the lack-of-experience argument, these are the lines McCain would advance against her in the general election if she won the nomination. As things stand, she's making his case for him. Obama may not be great, but at least he will be somewhat different from the disaster we have now. And at least he has some grounding in reality.

Just how racist is this state?

2008-05-04T22:53:00.006-04:00

On April 30, embattled State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo (D-Philadelphia) won some more attention for himself by impugning his fellow state legislators. In a hearing held by the Appropriations Committee, Fumo was questioning Gilbert Coleman, Jr., a Philadelphia pastor who was testifying in favor of a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage in the state. In order make the point that no constitution should deprive a minority of certain rights, Fumo said that, given the chance, the PA General Assembly would vote to reinstate slavery.

Those who understood the nature of his remarks were offended at the suggestion that Pennsylvania is a racist state. Surely, no one in our proud commonwealth harbors that kind of primitive racial antipathy. Unfortunately, an exit poll conducted after this state’s primary April 22 showed the 13% of white voters admit that race was a determining factor in their vote. Of those voters, 75% voted for Clinton. The only possible conclusion is that 9.75% of the voters in PA admit that they voted against Obama because he is black. And those are just the voters who admit to it; it’s impossible to say how many persuaded themselves that they were voting against Obama because he went to Harvard or because he doesn’t wear a flag pin on his lapel every day.

A trip through rural Pennsylvania reveals more Confederate flags than one would ever expect to see north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Pennsylvania is home to Neo-Nazi groups, Skinheads, and at least two Ku Klux Klan chapters. These all sound like people who would like to reinstate slavery. The question is not really whether or not there are white supremacists in this state; it is what percentage of the population harbors that kind of sentiment. Those who were offended by Fumo’s comment really seem to have trouble with the very idea that that level of racism exists here.

Those are the people who understood what the senator was trying to say. There is another group, unsettlingly large, which completely fails to apprehend what he said. Many have insisted on saying he came out in support of slavery. Fumo used slavery as an example of injustice visited upon a disfavored group by the majority. Taken in context, his comment could only be interpreted as a condemnation of slavery.

Fumo admits that he was exaggerating. When I first heard his remark, I thought it was hyperbolic, so I’m not surprised at that. It didn’t strike me at first just how insulting the remark was to his colleagues in the Senate chamber. I wouldn’t begrudge the other senators if they asked for an apology. I have no doubt that some of the men and women voted into office by Pennsylvanians are closet racists, but I have a hard time believing that racists constitute a voting majority. Fumo has been in the Senate for a long time (he would have to be to rack up 139 federal criminal charges) and must be a fairly accurate judge of his colleagues, but I can’t see 26 of the 50 senators making that vote.

From an economic standpoint, slavery doesn’t make sense in today’s society. After World War I and especially World War II, the American economy has depended on the ravenous consumption of an increasingly affluent population. Rolling back the property rights of a chunk of our society wouldn’t shore up the system. I might be giving too much credit to the type who would actually consider bringing back chattel slavery, but there is no rational reason to go that route. After all, capitalists are the ones who make rational decisions for their own benefit; racists know only illogic and destructive impulses. The whole issue is moot, though. The ignorant and bigoted in our society currently have their attention directed elsewhere.

Well, I finally started a blog

2008-05-04T16:50:00.000-04:00

People have been telling me for a long time that I should have a blog, and now that I am out of classes and don't have a job, I have time to write one, so here it is. I don't expect anyone to read this, but I frequently find myself wanting to write something, and now I have someplace to publish stuff. I know I'm excited. Are you?

I guess I'll take this opportunity to explain where I got the title for this blog, my user name, and the url. "Pleonasm" is an obscure word referring to a redundant phrase or an unnecessary word; examples include "true fact," "PIN number," and "depressing news." I like the name because it is a pretentious display of vocabulary, and I think it applies, because in truth I'm probably not going to say anything here that no one else has said.

The word "appanage" in the url is just a cool word I came across. It refers to a privilege or birthright. I used it because "pleonasm" was taken. Nothing has been posted there in four and a half years, but I still can't have the domain name. Oh, well.

My signature, H. Lewis Allways, was one of four pseudonyms considered by author Eric A. Blair and his publisher before they decided upon George Orwell. I love Orwell and suggest everyone read as much of him as possible. Keith Olbermann doesn't like the name, but I do.

Well, I guess that about wraps up my first post. If anybody reads this, check back often. I'll update this frequently, at least throughout the summer. Or don't come back, and I honestly won't be that offended.