Meet The New Boss

There's this cool classic rock song from The Who, Won't Get Fooled Again. It's used as the theme music for one of the CSI shows. I've always liked the interplay between the Hammond pipe organ and Pete Townsend tearing up the guitar chords through it. But these days, I can't get the lyrics out of my head as I follow political news.

The world looks just the same,
And history ain't changed.

Barack Obama has brought change and hope to Washington. Right? Let's take a look at what we've seen so far from the Obama Administration.

Today we saw the Senate pass its version of the stimulus bill. In that debate, we learned that criticism or dissent from the Administration's line is something that the American people "really don't care" about them:

Thanks for that reminder to toe the Administration's line, or else, Senator Schumer! But, we didn't really need it. After all, the President himself went out of his way to praise the "patriotism" of Republican Senators who crossed party lines to vote for the bill.

By extension, then, are we to assume that Republicans who voted against it or who offer alternative suggestions for ways to solve the problems the bill addresses are not patriotic? Ah, but I forget. We're in a post-partisan era now. An era in which, regardless of party or political alignment, everyone is supposed to agree with the President on all things or else risk being portrayed as un-American. So much, then, for dissent, particularly on the stimulus issue.

Now, bear in mind that while the House stimulus bill was for $820 billion, much of it spending, and the Senate bill was for $838 billion, with relatively more tax cuts incorporated into that total as compared to the House bill. So they're likely to compromise at something like $900 billion. Where is money is going to come from or how it's going to be paid back no one has yet explained. Until then, you can compare the competing versions of the stimulus bill here.

At the same time, we also learn that the "uniquely qualified" Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, he for whom we collectively chose to begin overlooking the non-payment of taxes, has no particular clue about what to do next with this money to fulfill his mission of pulling the economy out of the downward spiral in which he finds it. Oh, sure, Secretary Geithner's speech is professionally written, but it amounts to three policy items:

1. A "bad bank," which is what TARP was supposed to be when it was originally passed by Congress.
2. Government purchase of temporary equity in failing banks and other major financial and industrial institutions, which is what TARP became in the lame-duck period of the Bush Administration. (This after having already guaranteed to put all this public money in the hands of the people in whom we should have the lowest expectations of excellence.)
   
3. Expansion of the power of the Federal Reserve to participate in the market, within its own discretion.
   

Regarding this (amazingly familiar-sounding) plan, Secretary Geithner also promises to "seek input from market participants and the public as we design it." The sparse level of detail in the policy produced snorts of sarcasm and outright laughter during a Congressional policy briefing. In response to this early-morning announcement, the stock market lost nearly five percent of its value today. Good jorb, Mr. Secretary!

I'll smile and grin at the change all around me,
Pick up my guitar and play.
Just like yesterday.

Three Obama appointees got in trouble for not paying their taxes and two of them (Nancy Killefer and former Senator Tom Daschle) had to withdraw their nominations. Daschle's problem was particularly bad from a public relations perspective -- he didn't pay income taxes on free limousine service he received, graphically demonstrating that he is literally a limousine liberal who thinks that taxes are for other people to pay and the money thus generated for him to dispose of. Secretary Geithner was confirmed, although the degree of his tax problems appeared to be substantially the same (in kind although worse in amount) than Ms. Killefer's. The President's response: "I screwed up." But he still wanted these people.

Is this really so different from George W. Bush sticking by guys like Donald Rumsfeld, Mike Brown, Alberto Gonzales, and Doug Fieth?

And now our team on the left
Is now our team on the right

Still, President Obama is no shrinking violet, make no mistake about that! He plans to expand military activities in Afghanistan for the purpose of combating an insurgency there. It's not clear that we're on particularly good relations with the democratic government we erected in that state after we toppled the former government there, and it's also far from clear that we're wanted or liked.

Secretary of State Clinton calling Afghanistan a "narco-state" isn't helping things. But you can't say that I didn't warn you that Hillary Clinton was not temperamentally suited for the position of top diplomat, because I did.

And the delicate diplomatic situation there didn't stop Vice President Biden, on a state visit to Afghanistan's beleaguered Prime Minister Hamid Karzai, from serving up a deadly insult to the government there. Granted, Karzai dropped a whopper during dinner, claiming that there was "no corruption" in his government, but on the other hand, Diplomat Joe had pretty much brazenly accused Karzai of tolerating corruption. Nevertheless, dropping his spoon and storming out of the dinner was not the appropriate reaction even to such a baldfaced lie -- and I question whether, in Afghan etiquette, Karzai did the wrong thing. This is the sort of issue to address carefully and through diplomats trained in the gentle and subtle art of communicating that sort of thing.

To add to the point, let's take a look at the fulfillment of the promise of "openness" in the Obama Administration. In response to a lawsuit concerning extraordinary renditions, lawyers representing the government, taking orders from Attorney General Holder, made precisely the same argument about the state secrets doctrine not allowing courts to permit discovery into issues concerning that controversial alleged activity on the part of U.S. agents engaged in fighting terrorism.

To say this has profoundly disappointed the President's core group of supporters is something of an understatement.

I'll get all my papers and smile at the sky,
For I know that the hypnotized never lie.

Then, there's the matter of faith-based initiatives, now called faith-based neighborhood partnerships which is the same thing, only more of it. Not only has Obama maintained this unconstitutional division of the White House, whose only purpose in existence is to funnel government money to churches, he has expanded it. To be sure, his new "focus" for the office, combating poverty, is itself a laudable goal. But the mechanism for doing it is to subsidize and support religious groups engaged in charitable works, which incorporate and blend in their efforts to proselytize. Both by making the religious charity look good, and by giving it money to engage in the charitable work, the government is underwriting those groups, and thus paying for someone else's religion with my money.

And he refuses to establish any kind of guidelines for determining the Constitutionality of either the office, its programs, or anything it does, preferring instead to decide these things on an ad hoc basis. (More making it up as he goes, which may be a theme for a while.) This despite the fact that the new nominee for Solicitor General of the United States, who would be the government's top lawyer before the Supreme Court, has herself written of the deep and apparently insoluble Constitutional problems inherent in the existence of such an organ of government.

I'll tip my hat to the new constitution,
Take a bow for the new revolution.

Moreover, three Cabinet-level officers in the Administration are at least debatably disqualified from service by the Constitution. That would be Secretary of State Clinton, Secretary of Commerce Judd Gregg, and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, all of whose most recent terms in Congressional service saw them vote raises for the offices that they now occupy. Granted, this is only a "technicality" in the Constitution and they all got the Saxbe fix to cut their pay by a few thousand dollars a year that they don't care about anyway. After all, the Framers didn't really mean what they wrote, did they?

But the point here is that the Constitution has been treated as an obstacle to Obama governing in the manner in which he pleases, rather than as a guideline for how he should govern. This is a foreboding and disappointing thing to see from the Administration of a man who once made his living as a Constitutional Law professor at one of America's most prestigious law schools.

There's nothing in the street
Looks any different to me
But the slogans were all replaced overnight.

Let's sum up. Here's what I've been hearing and seeing coming out of the White House over the past couple of weeks:

• We haven't a clue what to do about the economy. But while we're figuring that out, we're going to deficit-spend your children's money until we get tennis elbow from shoveling so many bricks of hundred-dollar bills onto the bonfire. Even if it's an abysmally bad idea (at least, according to the only guy on Wall Street who saw the recession coming) because frankly, we can't think of anything else to do.
  
• We're also going to subsidize religious activities and not concern ourselves with whether doing so is compliant with the Constitution.
• Please ignore the personal and professional shortcomings of our appointees. These are really the people we want and it's not really your place to criticize those choices. Even if your criticism is based in, you know, that pesky Constitution thingy we vaguely recall hearing about back in law school.
  
• We're expanding the war on terrorism in a far-off nation overseas where the people aren't particularly fond of us and where we've gone out of our way to ham-handedly insult the government that's supposed to be helping us.
• You, the American public, may not question or inquire into anything that we're doing about that terrorism or anything else we find particularly embarrassing, including torture or extraordinary renditions, which we're not saying that we're actually doing but even if we are we're certainly not going to tell you anything about it. Once again, don't you worry your little heads about the Constitution, just put your trust in us that we'll do right by you.
  
• Criticism of this agenda will be labeled as "unpatriotic" or words to that effect by the President and his minions.

If this all sounds wearyingly familiar, it should. These are, by most measures, the same sorts of things that had me and many others complaining about the Bush Administration for some time in various degrees, particularly in its waning days.

Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss

Well, don't say I didn't warn you that this was coming, because I did.

Empty The Prisons!

A special three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California* may have just handed Governor Schwarzenegger and the Legislature a key to solving the budget crisis -- release between 36,000 to 57,000 prisoners. Less strain on the prison housing budget, less demand for prison guards -- this could save a very substantial amount of money.

Of course, the down side to the choice is that 36,000 to 57,000 criminals will be returned to the streets of California over the next 2-3 years, with an anticipated recidivism rate of something on the order of 97%. According to the Governor's office, that's the equivalent of emptying and closing seven to ten entire prisons. But if you can get past the spike in crime, this is a great solution. And the court order may be needed, because the prison guard union is simply too powerful to allow the state to take any action of its own to trim any fat out of the system as it currently exists.

Which brings to mind the question of which prisoners to release. My initial instinct is to say, "nonviolent drug offenders." But thanks to Prop. 36, that's only (!) going to get us about 14,000 or 15,000 prisoners since a lot of the nonviolent drug possession types have already been released into alternative programs. So in a couple of years -- the state is appealing this decision, for sure, but given the fact that our prisons are quite obviously bulging at the seams, something is going to have to be done -- we're going to need some alternative to keeping people locked up.

What might that alternative be? Home confinement is one choice. Thanks to GPS bracelets, it's now possible to have monitoring systems set up to make sure that a prisoner's left foot is always where it's supposed to be. Of course, enforcing that will be somewhat difficult if we can't send the prisoner back to prison -- "Stay at home, or else we shall confine you to your home again!" (Seriously, this could be offered as an incentive to prisoners who show signs of possible reformation, and staying at home, with its relative lack of male rape, racial violence, and limited access to showers and phones, is a big improvement on prison.)

Another possibility, given that the problem is overcrowding in limited facilities, is the creation of a tent prison in the desert. We've got lots of desert. The prisoners themselves can be made to build some of the confinement mechanisms (read -- moat and palisade ring surrounding the prison) and we can space out the tents pretty much as far as we want them to go. Again, selection of prisoners for this treatment is a matter that will have to be done selectively, since the confinement technique is a little bit different than in a concrete and steel structure. But Joe Arpaio confines his prisoners in a tent city down in Maricopa County, Arizona. Maybe he or some of his aides can consult with us and tell us how they keep the prisoners where they're supposed to be and control violence.

It does seem to me that the status quo of California's prisons is not acceptable. Simply cutting 60,000 prisoners loose, however, is about as far from the ideal solution as I can imagine. It could be that the prison guard union has backed the state into a corner and left no other alternative. But it could also be that we are simply suffering from a deficit of creative thought with regards to this issue.kl


* A panel which includes Ninth Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt, perhaps one of the most high-profile appellate judges in the entire Federal judiciary. If the name means nothing to you, then it means nothing to you, but if you recognize the name, chances are good you have an opinion of the man's work. Having argued cases before Judge Reinhardt, I will only add that whatever you think of his politics, I can attest to his keen, quick intelligence and an ability to quickly ascertain the implications of facts and arguments that are offered before him. The guy is scary smart. Evaluating what he does with those tools is something I leave to you.

Geography Game

It's not enough to know where a country is. You need to know where major cities are within the countries. You are tested on speed and accuracy. So far, I've managed to get 6,577 points with an average error of less than 250 clicks. You can do better.

There Are Very Few Problems Beer Cannot Fix

And that includes the problem of depleted fisheries. All hail the good people in Fort Collins, Colorado whose ingenuity will give us tasty fish to have with their tasty beers!

They've Learned Nothing

A little trip down memory lane, here. How did the financial crisis get started?

If you answered "By banks making high-risk loans to people who couldn't afford the homes they bought," you're (substantially) right.

With that in mind, here's a bit of "news analysis" from the Fish Wrapper which justifies why I call it that -- the headline and leaderline alone are revealing:

$15,000 tax credit won't help low-income home buyers, experts say
The Senate measure offers the credit to anyone buying a primary residence. But buyers must earn enough to have $7,500 in income taxes -- $81,900 per year for a family of four -- to get the full benefit.

It goes on from there to the effect that this particular tax cut is only for rich people and therefore we should all hate and reject it.

Point one. Call me a heartless bastard, becasue I'm about to tell you that, at least in Southern California, a family of four that makes less than $80,000 a year is probably a bad credit risk.

Traditionally, a bank wants no more than one-third of a family's take-home pay to go to the mortgage. That's one of the reasons there is a credit check and financial profile involved in writing home loans. Banks want to make sure that there is enough money so that the family can actually pay the mortgage. In California, a family of four that makes $81,900 a year can expect after-tax income of something like $5,000 a month. Now, after you add things like mortgage points, mortgage insurance, homeowner's and fire insurance, and property taxes, that not-quite-$82,000 a year income is going to translate into about $250,000 worth of loan. More than that, and you're entering risk-escalation territory, all other things being equal.

Now, let's say you were going to go house-shopping with a pre-qual letter for $250,000 in your pocket in Los Angeles County -- if you aren't looking in the Antelope Valley or in Compton, you are S.O.L. because even now, after the market has dropped through the basement, you're still not in a position to buy a single-family home at that price.

So that's point one. For the target audience of the Fish Wrapper, bemoaning a tax cut for the rich is silly because no one who reads the Fish Wrapper and who personally is in a position to benefit from the tax cut is anything but one of the "rich" people who will benefit from it. If you don't make at least that much money, you aren't supposed to be buying a house in Southern California anyway. Writing a home loan to such a person is what got the banks in trouble in the first place.

Point two. The headline is deceptive. It may be that a family that earns less than $81,900 a year will not reap the entire benefit of the tax cut. But that's the impression that the headline leaves. Let's say you have a family of four in Knoxville, Tennessee that is fortunate enough to have a gross income of $70,000 a year and they go out and buy a starter home for $100,000. Now, that's a good credit risk; the mortgage payment even after points, taxes, and insurance will still be less than $1,000 a month, which will be something like 25% of the take-home pay.

Now, this family, you might argue, does not particularly need the tax cut to buy a house in a place like Knoxville. This family will have already bought the house at that income level and in that market. Maybe, but the point is, who gets to take advantage of the tax cut? This family does. Maybe not all $7,500 spaced out over two years' worth. But they do get something on the order of $6,000 spread out over two years. That makes them much better off than they were before the tax cut.

Point three. Is the goal here to lower the financial bar for people to buy their own homes? This is a laudable goal, to be sure, but we're being asked to get behind this bill because we are told it will stimulate the economy out of recession. Consider that family in Knoxville who won't get to take advantage of the "whole" tax cut. Alas! They "only" get a $6,000 cut spread out over two years, while their wealthier counterparts in cities like Nashville and Atlanta get the whole $7,500.

For our hypothetical Knoxvillians, that still works out to $250 in extra take-home income each month, which can make a real difference in the way the family lives its life. At that level, it makes a difference in the sorts of things the family consumes, like how often it goes out to dinner or buys toys for the kids or books and jewelry from the mall -- things that stimulate the economy. Even if they use it to pay down their credit cards, that increases the principal recapture rate of financial institutions and that, too, is beneficial to the economy because the money stays there.

Certainly, they could in theory get more of a tax cut than this. But at this point, the cut is at a level appropriate to serve its stated legislative purpose of a short-term economic stimulus. This, then, is a stimulus-appropriate sort of tax cut, plausibly aimed at the sorts of people who can reasonably be foreseen to do the sorts of things that we are informed will stimulate generalized economic activity. And worst of all, they get to decide for themselves what to do with the money because the government doesn't take it and give it back to them with strings attached.

But left-wing populism about how awful tax cuts are because they help rich people along with poor people will not help get us out of the economic doldrums. So, "boo hiss" to the Fish Wrapper.

Job Well Done

No posts other than this today, because The Wife and I spent all day putting down the hardwood floor in the guest bedroom of Soffit House. We're both sore in places we forgot we had. There's finish work to do and we're both astonished at how far out of square the walls of that room turned out to be. Doing the job required borrowing my neighbor's table saw, and learning a bit about how to work with bamboo -- it splinters very easily. But the toughest part of the job is done.

Interesting anecdote: when talking with the neighbor, I was still wearing my kneepads. He looked at them and said, "Wow, those are some kneepads you've got there."

"Yeah, well, times are tough. You've gotta keep your job any way you can."

History Repeats Itself -- We Hope

Vodkapundit is way cool. I don't know where else to go, other maybe Sideways Mencken, to get such an effective mix of Battlestar Galactica references with a blend of political analysis and history.

Dropping A Litter Backfires

Apparently, we're supposed to feel sorry for Nadya Suleman, the mother of the octuplets. When the babies were born, I noted it as a remarkable feat of modern medicine and questioned the medical ethics involved in the process. Well, since I first saw the squib on the AP Wire, we've learned a lot more about this remarkable situation.

• We've learned that Ms. Suleman is a single mom. We've learned that she's a graduate student and has no job. She has had jobs intermittently in the past, but quit her most recent job while she was pregnant.
  
• We've learned that she had six children, including a set of twins, before giving birth (by Caesarian section) to these eight. One of them is autistic.
  
• The suggestion has been made that she was depressed after her previous birth, and became pregnant to cure her depression. All of her fourteen children have the same sperm donor father (who is not her ex-husband). Her mother says that she was "obsessed" with the idea of having children since she was a young girl.
  
• During her pregnancy, she was told that she had eight viable fetuses, and was then offered the opportunity to abort some of them, and refused to do so.
  
• She's filed for bankruptcy and is the recipient of ample welfare payments. (I'm not entirely sure how we've learned that, since it's not the sort of thing that I think is subject to public scrutiny, but that's what's circulating around the Intertubes.) Her folks have also filed for bankruptcy. Now, I'm not going to fault anyone for filing bankruptcy, because sometimes people get in over their heads or are confronted with overwhelming situations. I would, however, fault someone for making colossaly bad economic choices after having to go through that process. You're supposed to use bankruptcy as a last resort and ideally, you won't be a repeat customer of the bankruptcy courts.
  
• We've learned that she leans heavily on her parents for support, and live in her parents' home, a 3+2 in Bellflower, a small suburban city southeast of the city of Los Angeles. Her parents are planning on moving back to their native Iraq to earn money to support this geometrically-expanding family. Try to imagine what it would be like for three adults, six children, and eight infants to live in a 3+2.
  
• She's hired media agents and publicists. According to the Fish Wrapper, the publicist was referred by Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, where the C-section took place and the babies are still being kept in an incubator. Again according to the Fish Wrapper, the tab for the medical bills so far is in excess of $300,000. (Bear in mind that the kids are at the moment one week old.) (!!!!) Her publicists are trying to offer the spin that if economic times were better, we'd all be happy for her.
  
• She's hoping for two million bucks to sell her story and wants to start a career as a television child care expert. She does have an M.A. from Cal State Fullerton in child and adolescent counseling, and was working as a psychiatric technician but quit during her pregnancy.
• She says she plans to breast-feed them all. (Her teats are going to be limper than a used-up pastry piping bag if she goes through with that plan.)
  

Count me among the number of people who are stunned with outrage over the situation. (Example here.) A single mom who already has six children and then consciously decides to have eight more all at once is making a choice that seems irresponsible on a galactic scale to me. But, as I've said many times, freedom means tolerating it when other people make choices with which you disagree.

For me, the issue is that I, as a taxpayer, am being asked forced to pay for and support this decision. It's one thing when I have to sit back and tolerate someone else doing something I wouldn't have done. When that thing doesn't really hurt me or cost me anything, I can exercise my tolerance and say, "Well, that was a poor decision, but what can you do? It's a free country." And I think that, for instance, China's population control laws are morally repugnant. It ought not to be for the government to tell anyone how many kids they can or cannot have.

But at the same time, Suleman has quite obviously crossed a line. She is very, very clearly not up to the task and demands of providing for these kids. It's questionable if she will be able to sell her story and publicists are questioning the ethics of pimping the kids out for money as it is.

From the Fish Wrapper:

Judith Regan, the controversial agent behind O.J. Simpson's "If I Did It" book, said she does not believe there's a market for Suleman because "she seems so selfish and irresponsible."

When O.J. Simpson's publicist says you're being selfish and irresponsible, you're being too selfish and irresponsible.

But actually, I don't question that she will be able to sell her story for a substantial amount of money. I've a nearly infinite well of cynicism about how many people will buy tabloids with shit like this in them. I do question, however, whether she has the financial skills necessary to navigate the world of big publicity, press agents, entertainment lawyers, and the like -- all of these people work on contingency -- and manage the money she will get before we all forget about her and stop buying stuff or watching programs about her, such that she will be able to provide for her kids.

And then there's the other issue about public money. Until and unless she starts getting Big Tabloid Bucks, there is no means of support for a woman trying to raise fourteen children -- at least one of which has special needs -- on her own, with no job and insubstantial health insurance. How did she pay for the fertility treatments in the first place, with no job? Easy -- she skimmed money from the AFDC payments she was getting for her first six kids. That money -- yours and mine -- was supposed to feed, clothe, and house the six kids she had already popped out. Instead, it was used to make eight new siblings for them.

Meanwhile, the State of California is furloughing non-essential government services one day every other week because the state is so completely out of money.

Then there's the issue of the doctors who helped this woman get in the situation in the first place. There is no review process for this, and while many other doctors are tut-tutting what they are calling a lapse of medical ethics, there is a rather difficult question of what can be done to prevent this? Ask any lawyer -- there are doctors out there who are simply whores, will do anything for money. I'm not picking on doctors here, there's lots of lawyers like that, too. But in this case, some doctor's ethical lapse enabled this to happen.

Freedom may mean tolerating other people making bad decisions, but it doesn't mean paying for them, too. Clearly, there has not been enough policing for AFDC abuse if she was able to pay for fertility treatments with AFDC money. Tighter auditing of welfare is obviously needed, because here is a spectacular demonstration of the system being abused. When you take public money, you have to take the strings that go along with it. And maybe there aren't enough strings attached to social welfare programs like this; as they are written, it seems as though we are paying for people to create babies they can't possibly support.

I can't make myself feel sorry for a welfare cheat. I can't make myself feel sorry for someone who has gone out of the way to make herself a massive burden on the rest of society. And I certainly can't make myself feel sorry for someone who has gone so far out of her way to make such a spectacularly bad decision.

Two Atheist Videos

Atheism nicely expressed (and she's cute too):

A failed attempt at street conversion of an atheist:

Weather And History

We Americans tend not to think much about the weather. Southern Californians think even less about it. But we often lose sight of how critically important the weather is. Consider:

• About 70,000 years ago, there was a massive volcanic explosion in Indonesia that almost wiped out the entire human race.
• In the early days of the American Revolution, rain and wind on August 27, 1776, and thick fog combined with an unusual northeasterly breeze in the Hudson River channel on the night of August 28-29, 1776 delayed the ability of the British navy to coordinate an attack on the fledgling Continental Army with the redcoats. Had the fog lifted only a few hours earlier, the numerically superior and far better-trained British would surely have stormed Washington's camp, overwhelmed the patriots, and nipped the American Revolution in the bud; America might still be an east-of-the Appalachian province of the British Empire, and George Washington would be mentioned by Her Majesty's subjects with the same tone of voice reserved for Guy Fawkes.
• In 1788, France was struck with two massive hailstorms. Those storms wiped out most of the wheat crop. The result? Mass starvation on top of an already-bankrupt state, which could not buy food to make up for the shortfall. Without those hailstorms, this guy might today be His Most Christian Majesty, King Louis XX of France.
• A drought in 1665 led directly to the Great Fire of London in 1666. Perversely, this was probably good for England because it allowed the city's emerging scientific leaders, men like Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, and
• The repeated wind storms and prolonged drought in the southern Midwest of the 1930's created dust storms so vast they blocked out visibility in places like New York and Boston, devastated the agricultural industry of nearly the entire country, likely prolonged the Great Depression by ten years, and spurred on a massive intra-national migration from places like Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri to California.
• In the middle of the thirteenth century, Kublai Khan, a successor and descendent of Genghis Khan, would have invaded and likely conquered the islands of Japan had his fleet not been grounded by two successive monsoons.
• The British beat the French at two critical battles -- Agincourt and Waterloo -- because the night before both battles, there were heavy rains that bogged down the heavy French military. At Agincourt, the armored knights were rendered vulnerable to longbow bombardment by thick mud. At Waterloo, Napoleon was delayed in moving his artillery into position by several hours because he had to solve the problem of moving them through the mud, which allowed Wellington time to rendezvous with a Prussian force, giving him a significant numerical advantage that proved decisive.
• The Persian invasion of Greece in 480 BCE would likely have succeeded in conquering everything from Thessalonica to Sparta had the Persian army been able to rendezvous with the navy. As it was, a storm delayed the navy, which got wiped out later by the Athenians, while a Spartan-led coalition fought a delaying action and war of attrition to force the land forces to turn around and go home.
• If Hurricane Katrina hadn't wiped out New Orleans in 2005, who knows? Maybe a significant portion of the American electorate wouldn't have got the idea that the Bush Administration was horribly incompetent and John McCain would be President today.

Why do I mention these interesting historical tidbits about weather? Because California is still in a drought. Everyone is hurting right now, I know. But there are two places in the United States that have been hit particularly hard by the recession. One is Michigan, because it is so heavily dependent on the auto industry. The other in California, because so much paper wealth has evaporated from our real estate.

If we had thriving industries, we might be able to make up for that, but we are in our third consecutive drought year, which disables the single largest industry in the state, which is agriculture -- and which diminishes the value of residential real estate because it threatens to making providing water to all of the homes in California that much more difficult. The agricultural industry is one that can rebound pretty easily -- people have got to eat -- if it gets enough raw material, water in this case, to make its products.

As I learned today, water that falls in the form of rain on the floors of valleys and basins generally is not usable later, so that water is wasted. But rain and especially snow in our mountains is the key to recharging our ground water, our rivers, and our lakes. Without enough rain, we continue our drought conditions, and produce less food and our farmers and agribusinesses make much less money than they would with bountiful harvests.

I'm told that we're in for about two weeks of rain. If that rain turns in to snow in the mountains -- both the San Gabriels and the Santa Susannas down here around Los Angeles and more importantly, along the west face of the Sierra Nevadas -- we might just break the drought and have a normal snowpack. This will water our lawns, mitigate the decline of real estate prices, and reinvigorate our farms. If California can snap out of its recession, this will have a significant bouying effect on the rest of the country -- hell, we Californians might even start buying GM's and Fords again (and start manufacturing some of the parts used to build them again) if we stop losing so many jobs because the agricultural industry starts ramping up and creating wealth once more.

So consider for a moment that all of the talk of stimulus packages and governmental budgets, ajustment to tax rates, and the effect of a new leader on the country and the world, all of that -- it might all be of minute significance as compared with the question of whether the Sierra Nevada Mountains get a good coat of late-winter snow over the next two weeks or whether 2009 will be another drought year for America's largest agricultural production region.

Think snow.

Start With The Correct Diagnosis

Still got my hands full with stuff, so not a lot of time to blog and write on my own. But I'll add this absolutely wonderful piece that I came across in today's Fish Wrapper. It's the best of the several very good pieces I've read yesterday and today. Coincidentally, it comes from a recently-used Quote of the Moment author, Niall Ferguson. Quick and dirty summary:

1. The present economic crisis was not generated by insufficient government or consumer spending. Rather, it is a crisis of too much debt. Attempting to distinguish between "good debt" and "bad debt" is useless. Creating more debt to solve a problem of too much debt is asinine.
2. The "multiplier effect" theorized by Keynes works, if at all, only in a closed system, so spending in a globalized economy is akin to pissing in the wind.
3. Because the financial problem is global, and the economy has been globalized, we cannot solve the financial credit crunch by devaluing or inflating the currency,* or by defaulting on the underlying debts.
4. Therefore, financial losses need to be absorbed and accepted, and the banks must be restructured as a prophylatic against further risks and losses of the scale we've seen in the past year.
5. Mortgages and other loans that have survived to this point will sooner or later need to be restructured to realistic and stabilized interest rates, and the balances crammed down to something resembling market values. This has to apply to both 'high risk' and 'low risk' securitized loans. While in the short run this gives it to the banks straight up the ass, in the long run, enduring such a financial enema will create a stronger and more stable economy.

Okay, I might be rephrasing rather loosely on point five, although I think that is fundamentally the point Prof. Ferguson is making.


* I'll add here that devaluing a particular currency will, in a globalized market, seriously harm the nation whose currency is thus devalued.

Best Wishes To Justice Ginsburg

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had surgery for pancreatic cancer yesterday. Whether you love her or you disagree with everything she writes and every vote she casts while on the bench, bear in mind that pancreatic cancer is one of the most painful things a human being can experience, and she is not a young woman. Get well soon, Your Honor.

Some Really Good Writing This Morning

All you need are links. Read, enjoy, and think.

Obama Guarantees That Bailout Money Will Be Handled Incompetently

The True Meaning Of Sarah Palin

Obama's Dream Team Management Style -- this is just a squib commenting on this article, but Schuler is 100% right. Someone has to be in charge.

Debunking Transportation Myths About Los Angeles

Why Have Debates If You Aren't Going To Change Anyone's Mind?

The Inevitable Demise Of Post-Partisanship And Triumph Of Bipolar Wingnuttery

Ad Hominem As Moral Corrective

I am often nicely challenged by posts from Alonzo Fyfe, the Atheist Ethicist. Tonight, he has done something that makes me really sit back and think. He asks himself the question -- what is "the greatest moral failing of the modern world – the top of the list of evils that deserves our greatest condemnation"? He excludes some really bad things like murder, rape, genocide, or torture. Understand, he's not endorsing those behaviors. He's just saying there's something worse than them. So what could that possibly be?

Here it is: "...the lack of condemnation given to those who use poor arguments in defense of beliefs that threaten the well-being of others." Note that Fyfe has chosen his words here very carefully. Simplified to the point that the argument loses its nuances, it can be understood with a syllogism.

1. There are people in this world who do awful, terrible things because of their beliefs.
2. Those awful things, and the beliefs which are used to provide a moral gloss on them, cannot be defended by propositions which are objectively or logically correct (that is to say, good arguments). This leaves only bad arguments to justify the bad behavior.
3. If people are not condemned for making these bad arguments, the bad arguments will seem good and therefore encourage more bad behavior in the future.
4. Therefore, a failure to condemn not only these bad arguments, but also the people who make them, is a moral failing of inactivity on the part of those who would condemn the bad acts.

The leap here is from condemning a bad argument to condemning the person who makes it. Fyfe points out that while we punish people for engaging in bad activities, we are still punishing people for doing it. We do not punish the act of drunk driving, for instance, we punish the person who drove drunk. I see that logic.

Where I depart from him is that in a world of argumentation, a world in which words and ideas are only combatted with other words and ideas, there is a difference between violations of the criminal law and condemnation of intellectually and morally unsound arguments. In a world of ideas, a condemnation of the person who offers an idea is an ad hominem attack, one that itself lacks intellectual weight:

Adolf Hitler was an advocate of making trains run on time. Hitler was one of the worst and most evil people in human history. Therefore, his ideas about trains running on time should be condemned, and so should Hitler.

Obviously there's nothing wrong with having trains run on time, whether Hitler was an advocate of that or not. Good people want the trains to run on time, too. But:

Adolf Hitler was an advocate of murdering every Jew in Europe. Hitler was one of the worst and most evil people in human history. Therefore, his ideas about killing Jews should be condemned, and so should Hitler.

This is a little more difficult to parse out, because now we're talking about genocide, not efficiency in freight transport. The difference here is that the idea dovetails into the characterization of its author. We are here going to the source of the characterization of Hitler as an evil man. But, this is still an ad hominem attack, which is proven by rephrasing it to be someone other than Hitler:

Mohandas Gandhi was an advocate of murdering every Jew in Europe. Gandhi was one of the worst and most evil people in human history. Therefore, his ideas about killing Jews should be condemned, and so should Gandhi.

Here, Gandhi becomes evil and worthy of condemnation. If Gandhi did advocate exterminating Jews, we would rightly condemn him. The statement is ridiculous, of course, because we know perfectly well that Gandhi never adovcated any such thing, so the premise of the statement is false.

Now, in the world of politics, ad hominem attacks are often quite effective. They are good diversions, they create the illusion of moral equivalency, and in that sense diffuse legitimate attacks. But in the cold, hard light of intellect and critical thought, they are not good arguments at all.

We are left with concluding that it is the idea itself that is worthy of condemnation, regardless of the author. The question is, do we condemn the person who advances the idea as well as the idea itself? I think the answer is, not always.

Some people's minds can be changed, but attacking them personally, instead of the ideas they expound, will close their minds and foreclose the possibility of making them understand the error of their ways.

Other people are more fanatic. One of the hallmarks of a fanatic is an inability to distinguish between their ideas and themselves. If I am a fanatic, I will hear you attack my ideas and take that attack very personally; I will consider myself to be under attack.

In both cases, an attack that is actually personal -- "You're a bad person for advocating that idea" -- will be an exercise in futility with respect to the object of the attack, and a demonstration to disinterested observers that the attacker has chosen to attack the person and not the idea, causing the good argument being offered by the attacker to lose some of its credibility. Better, I say, to advance the strongest possible argument against the bad idea itself, and wait for the reaction from its proponent.

This does not, however, get at the problem that Fyfe wants to address -- using an irrational argument or an unreasonable belief as a justification for a morally bad act. That needs to be addressed by morally, and not just intellectually, condemning the act of offering an irrational argument to justify a bad act. This can be done without necessarily attacking the person who does it. I think this is important because quite often, the person who advances a bad argument may simply not have thought things through themselves, and they will react to the sting of being accused of having done something morally bad. But I think it is important to give someone a chance to reflect and revise her position before attacking her personally -- and, when condemning her, to be clear about why you are doing it.

And, frankly, I think that actually doing the bad thing is, at least sometimes, morally worse than rationalizing some kind of a justification for it.

Now You Don't Need To Do This

You've always wanted to do this. Well, these guys have done it for you -- played with food and a microwave oven in bad ways. Microwaving soap for three minutes produces a particularly disgusting result, as it turns out, and the tomato is a close second.

Some results will surprise you. Others turn out exactly as you would have predicted. But don't skip the Christmas lights. That was an inspired choice.

Much Ado About Nothing

It seems that Olympic hero Michael Phelps smoked some pot out of a bong. And then had the bad judgment to allow a photograph of this event to be taken. Next to the Fall Of Tom Daschle, this is the biggest thing on the Internets.

Uh-huh. Here's the hurdle you're going to need to overcome: "So what?"

Seriously, why should I care that Michael Phelps took a hit off of a bong? Because I don't. Really, this hasn't affected my life in any way at all. If I'd have never known it happened, my life would be for all functional purposes exactly the same as it is now. Other than I get to give this bit of advice to an Olympic athlete:

Don't drink the water afterwards, dude. That's some foul stuff down there. Just pour it out.

A Haiku About Caesar For President Obama

The dwarf cups his hand,
Whispers, "You are but a man."
Does the crowd still cheer?

Smoot Hawley II -- The Stimulus Boogaloo

The stimulus bill recently passed by the House, and its counterpart under consideration in the Senate, both contain "buy American" provisions -- meaning that when purchases of materiel are made with money appropriated under that law, the materiel must come from American manufacturers rather than being imported from overseas.

Certainly, I understand the impulse. The idea is to stimulate the American economy, so keeping the money at home will be an effective way of doing that. It's also politically popular.

Thing is, it may well be illegal. Under our system of government, the highest law of our land is the Constitution. The second-highest laws are treaties we have made with foreign nations. Like, say, GATT, the General Agreement on Trades and Tariffs.

This fact has not escaped the notice of our allies and trading partners overseas. They are politely indicating that they are "concerned" that we are violating our free trade agreements. And they may take us to task for it if these provisions remain in the law. Just another example of how rushing a bill through Congress with little or no debate and little or no time in place to think about it can sometimes have bad consequences.

While it's easy to see how "buy American" might be a fine idea in the short run, alienating our trading partners and shutting off foreign trade will hurt us a lot more in the long run than the temporary benefit we gain from keeping our deficit-spent stimulus money purely at home. The economic crisis is global, not just local, and it will ultimately require a global restructuring of banking practices and a period of time for the global economy to recover from the shock it sustained last year.

I have no objecting to our considering our own advantage when contemplating the full scale of the issue. But I do think that we are now sufficiently interdependent with other nations that their economic well-being is in our own interest, and we should act accordingly. And we should also consider that protectionism in trade has ripple effects in diplomacy; one of the big reasons we elected Barack Obama was to regain political capital with other nations, and this is kind of squandering that goodwill right out of the starting gate.

Smoot-Hawley didn't work during the Hoover Administration. It won't work now, either.

A Downside To Dramatically Higher Mileage Standards

With Federal approval coming from the President himself, California is going to enact new, tougher mileage standards for cars in the state, on the theory that more fuel-efficient cars will produce fewer carbon emissions and therefore benefit the environment. Mostly, I think this is a good thing. But there are prices to be paid for that decision.

Vehicle selection will alter; vehicles will become more expensive. Passenger cars will become smaller and provide less utility in terms of moving people and stuff around. But these issues pale in comparison with the hidden costs of dramatically more efficient passenger cars. For instance, more people are going to die. There will be more traffic. Tax revenues will decrease. Urban sprawl will increase. Why? Because fuel-efficient cars will make driving cheaper unless the increase in efficiency is met with a significant increase in gas prices (think a return to last summer's $4.25 a gallon levels).

Oh, and thanks to increased traffic, while each vehicle on the road will produce less carbon monoxide and other carbon-based pollutants, there will be more cars on the road, and they will be there for longer. So it's questionable whether there will be a net decrease in pollution at all.

A better idea, if you ask me, would be to require upgrades to very low-efficiency vehicles, rather than insist on globally higher efficiency standards. The amount of gas not burned by upgrading a vehicle from 12 MPG to 14 MPG -- only a 16.67% improvement -- is significantly greater than upgrading an already-efficient vehicle to become even more stupendously efficient. If you took a 30 MPG vehicle and made it 40% more efficient, as the new California standard will require, it will get 42 MPG at the end of the process. Assuming a vehicle lifetime of 100,000 miles, the upgrade from the inefficient vehicle to being slightly less inefficient is 238 more gallons of unburned gas than making the already-efficient vehicle really, really efficient. (This was not my idea originally; it came from the sadly-defunct bobvis blog.)

Certainly, adding 40% to the 12 MPG vehicle would be even better than that. But the point is, it's the low-mileage vehicles that we need to be concerned with. They tend to be heavier, they tend to be older, they tend to be owned by people with less economic means to replace or upgrade them, and because of the way California's vehicle registration system works, they cost next to nothing to have their tags renewed (while you pay through the nose for a new car). This is not the right tax incentive to increase efficiency.

What's more, the kinds of vehicles we are talking about are, with the exception of SUV's used as passenger cars, the kinds for which use demand is relatively inflexible because these are mostly utility and working vehicles. If you had to spend less money on gas, you would be more inclined to take recreational trips. But if you're a long-distance cargo hauler, your arrival points and destinations are set for you by your customers, not by your personal desires, and so the savings in fuel cost will become reduced overhead and higher profits. (Which maybe you spend on recreational trips in a less cumbersome vehicle to drive up to the mountains for a picnic, but maybe you buy a big-screen TV instead.)

Which brings me to the subject of big-rig trucks. Moving freight on tractor-trailer rigs is the whole reason we have interstate highways to begin with and trucks are the only way to get cargo from distribution centers to their ultimate destinations. They are horribly inefficient -- maybe five and a half miles to the gallon of diesel. Consider, then, what a 3% improvement in efficiency would do -- over the course of that same 100,000 miles (maybe one year's worth of long-haul trucking) that's 530 gallons of diesel fuel saved. How much carbon not put into the atmosphere is that?

So the point of all this is -- it's easiest for car manufacturers to make small, light cars more fuel-efficient. But that's not where the work needs to get done, and there are hidden costs we have to pay for hyper-efficient small passenger cars. If we really want to have an impact on our collective carbon footprint, mandating, say, a 5% increase in efficiency for heavy- and medium-duty trucks and a 10% increase in efficiency for light-duty trucks and SUV's, and leave passenger cars that get over 20 MPG alone completely, we'd be much better off than a 40% increase in efficiency for all vehicles.

Like I said above, this is better than doing nothing. I don't want to let the perfect become the enemy of the good. But at the same time, it makes a lot of sense to point out how the policy can be improved.

Once Is Happenstance. Twice Is Coincidence. The Third Time It's Enemy Action.

Happenstance: Tim Geithner didn't pay his taxes. He got egg on his face, but managed to get confirmed as Secretary of the Treasury. Which is kind of ironic, considering that he now exercises oversight of the Internal Revenue Service, the premier tax-collection agency of the government.

Coincidence: Former Senator Tom Daschle is now facing criticism over failure to pay taxes. There have been calls for him to withdraw his nomination to be Secretary of Health and Human Services. I'm not entirely sure I agree with that idea, at least in a vacuum -- he should pay his taxes, pay the penalties, and that should be the end of the story.

Enemy Action: But now, I see that President Obama's nominee for the Federal government's Chief Performance Officer has actually withdrawn her nomination for failure to pay taxes. Seeing as this is a less high-profile job than a full Cabinet post, and it is an actual withdrawal of the nomination, I'm reading between the lines and seeing something kind of egregious here. So, is there some sort of a secret Republican conspiracy to derail the Obama Cabinet at work here? Are all the GOP accountants staying up late at night going to Stonecutters meetings to guess who might be nominated to a future Democratic administration and trick them into not paying all of their taxes?

Look, obviously most Democrats do pay their taxes. But what is it with all these high-powered Democrats being nominated to the Obama Administration that they don't think the rules apply to them, too? I get it that they're financially well-off and probably have people managing their money for them -- at least in Daschle's case, a lot of his money was probably in a blind trust during his service in the Senate. So in his case, I can maybe see how having a hands-off money-management strategy may have contributed to his prediciament, which is why I'm willing to say let the man write a check and be done with it.

While Republicans certainly had other kinds of problems, I can't recall all that many who failed to actually pay their taxes.* And I seem to recall that this was an issue when Bill Clinton was nominating his Cabinet, too. This doesn't mean that President Obama shouldn't get the Cabinet he wants -- but it does mean that this is happening enough to become something of a trend, and I think it's something he ought to look out for in the future.

We don't ask a lot of people in this country. Oh, sure, we tell you to no kill people and steal their stuff and things like that -- but that's more on the lines of things we ask you not to do. In terms of things that we make you get off your butt and affirmatively do, your duties as a citizen are 1) if you're male, registering for the Selective Service, 2) service on a jury, if summoned and no more than once a year, and 3) paying your taxes. If you can't manage to do those things, and you have the apparent ability to do them, it does suggest a certain imperiousness that ill befits a public servant.


* I'm also reasonably confident that there are some dyed-in-the-wool Democrats who, after reading this, will make it their angry and righteous mission in life to provide me with as many examples as possible of Bush Cabinet nominees who were discovered to have had tax payment problems as well. If you are that person, by all means, please do inform me; I'm interested in that sort of thing. But even if you prove that "Republicans did it too," that still won't make it right.