Sixteen Guesses For 2010

Renewing my tradition from last year, I boldly offer the following predictions for the next year.  I make no claim to psychic powers, clairvoyance, astral projection, divine or demonic information, or access to time machines.  These are SWAGs and nothing but.  As you can see from this morning's evaluation, my completion percentage is just over 50% so that's about what they're worth.

1. Jon Huntsman will resign as ambassador to China and begin to lay the groundwork for a Presidential bid in 2012.
2. Foolishly, Democrats will campaign in 2010 against George W. Bush.  This will fail and result in gains by Republicans, but more in the House than the Senate.  Congressional Republicans will realize a net gain of only two or three seats in the Senate, leaving the Democrats still firmly in control of that body and reviving talks of abolishing the filibuster.  But, net gains in the House of Representatives will be such that the Democrats' majority in the lower chamber will be roughly ten seats and Republicans will optimistically talk of re-taking the House in 2012.
3. A reconciled health care "reform" bill will not be passed out of Congress until March or maybe even early April.  Its effect will be to very moderately increase taxes on middle-class Americans, only negligibly affect their actual health care options, and substantially inflate both the governmental deficit and the profits of enterprise-level health care providers.
4. The net inflation rate of the United States for CY 2010 will be in excess of 4%.
5. President Obama will again increase the number of American troops deployed to Afghanistan.
6. Canada's government will collapse, for real this time, and new elections will result in a badly-fragmented Federal Parliament with the BQ playing the role of powerbroker.  However, the BQ will not be able to leverage this into actual autonomy.
7. An El Niño condition will manifest in the Pacific Ocean, relieving California's drought.
8. Despite the economic help of favorable (that is, "wet") weather, California will increase sales taxes to 10.5% or higher, resulting in the highest sales tax in the nation.  Despite this, functionally all incumbents in the Legislature eligible for re-election will be re-elected in November and the Democrat nominee (who right now looks like Jerry Brown) will win the Governorship.
9. A national newspaper of significant stature, I'm thinking the Boston Globe, will be liquidated.
10. 2010 will be a good year for the stock market.  The S&P 500 will realize a net gain of over 20% in CY 2010.  As of today, the S&P 500 is 1,124.57, so that means that to win this prediction, the S&P will need to be at least 1,349.48 on December 31, 2010.
11. Iron Man 2 will be the biggest box office hit of the summer.  But another much-anticipated sequel in the same general genre, Tron 2, will disappoint and lose money.  Wall Street 2 and Sex And The City 2 will both prove to be so unwatchably bad that we all would have been better off had they not been made at all.  Remakes of Clash of the Titans and Red Dawn will both prove to be convincingly entertaining.
12. In First Amendment news, the Supreme Court will decide for the government, 5-4, in the case of Salazar v. Buono, ruling that a large cross, originally built privately as a war memorial, later transferred to Federal land, then the subject of an Establishment Clause lawsuit, and then the subject of a law transferring the cross to the VFW.  The Court's decision will consider the longevity of the monument as a significant factor mitigating against the finding of an Establishment.  (I consider this a pessimistic prediction, for the record).  Justice Sonia Sotomayor will prove to be the decisive vote in favor of the government.
13. In Second Amendment news, the Supreme Court will decide, by at least 7 votes, that the individual right to own weapons articulated in District of Columbia v. Heller will be "incorporated" into the Fourteenth Amendment and thus apply to the several states as well as to the national government.  However, the Court will unanimously decline the opportunity to expand the "privileges and immunities" clause embodied in the arguments.  Watch for the decision in McDonald v. City of Chicago to be one of the last decisions announced in June.
14. Brett Favre will play his final year for the Minnesota Vikings, and then retire.  For real this time because he'll be 41 years old and in at least moderate pain almost all of the time.
15. Iran will successfully detonate a nuclear device.  This will cause much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth and many Americans and a significant number of Europeans will consider this to be an existential threat.  While all of this is going on, the Russians will hem and haw and whistle tunelessly while staring at the ceiling while trying to blend into the background and go unnoticed.  However, the Iranians will not use their newly-developed nuclear weapon against anyone, including Israel.
16. On December 31, 2010, the U.S. national unemployment rate will be somewhere between 7.5% and 8.5%.

I feel I have to renew my prediction that Britney Spears will find Jesus and become even more intensely annoying than she already is.  But I won't make that a numbered prediction anymore because I've been predicting this for four years straight and I'm beginning to wonder just when she will hit a personal bottom such that the Baby Jeebus will get called in.  She does have a very great height from which to fall and a substantial network of leeches personal supporters who will do what is in their power to keep her generating profit personally and professionally functional.  So that's not one I'm offering for credit, just consideration.

Also to be answered in the upcoming year: will TL break down and actually buy his own domain and migrate the blog to WordPress?  The magic eight-ball says...

Clarification

Yesterday, I wrote in celebratory tones that the human rights law in Canada that had been used by over-zealous prosecutors to suppress freedom of speech had been found unconstitutional by Canada's Supreme Court. This was inaccurate.

In fact, the decision was issued by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, which is a judicial body of national appellate jurisdiction. The appeals sent to the CHRT come directly from the Human Rights Commissions which have been the focus of criticism. The CHRT's decision is limited on its face to one dimension of the human rights law, although its reasoning would apply to other provisions with equal force, calling into question the whole tribunal system and the monetary punishments it can mete out to those convicted under it.

Most importantly, that same system has been found constitutional by other panels of the CHRT in the past, creating a conflict between this new decision and older ones. Apparently under Canada's legal procedures, this is good grounds for an appeal to the Federal Court of Canada, which is a trial court of national jurisdiction, and potentially from there to the Federal Court of Appeal and only from there could the decision proceed to the Supreme Court of Canada. An organizational chart of the Canadian judicial system, from the Canadian Department of Justice, appears to the left. The CHRT and Human Rights Commissions are classified as administrative tribunals, and organized at both the federal and provincial level.

Not A Potted Plant regrets the error.

Good News From Canada

The human rights hate speech law that has been used of late to investigate and punish people who say things that the commissars do not like has been found to violate that nation's Constitution. You'll recall a particular magazine publisher, Ezra Levant, was made to answer and potentially faced incarceration for reprinting the Mohammed cartoons. He earned this blog's Big Brass Ones Award for this exchange with his interrogator, in which he demonstrated, in the most forceful possible manner permissible by a society governed by laws, what freedom really is.

To Our Friends Up North

Happy Canada Day to our friends from the Great White North, eh! On this day in 1867, Queen Victoria gave the colonies of Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia the right to form a confederation, which also split the colony of Canada into two provinces, Ontario and Quebec, and fixed Ottawa as the centre of government. Effectively, this spun Canada off as a nation independent from the United Kingdom.

Absolute political sovereignty did not come until 1982, however, with passage of the Constitution Act fully vesting political control of Canada in its own Parliament. The Queen remains the titular head of state since Canada remains a member of the British Commonwealth of Nations, but neither she nor the British Parliament exercise even a vestige of political power in Canada -- whatever political power remains in the hands of the Queen is exercised by Canada's Governor-General, who is selected by Parliament.

So enjoy your barbeques and baseball and day off work and school, Canucks. We'll be having the same sort of fun this weekend to celebrate our own independence later this week.

Set Phasers To "Maple Leaf"

Item: William Shatner announces his interest in being Prime Minister of Canada. RTFA -- that's "Prime Minister," as in the head of the government, not "Governor General," as in the ceremonial head of state.

Well, it seems like a joke, but 1) we in the U.S. had Ronald Reagan, and 2) could he really do worse than the guy in office right now, and 3) it seems the alternative to Shatner is picking the next PM on reality TV.

H/T to Hot Air.

Harper to Parliament: Go Home And Leave Me Alone

A follow-up to yesterday's post about Canada's constitutional crisis.

The Governor-General has, at the request of the Prime Minister, prorogued Canada's Parliament until January 26, 2009. PM Harper will govern without a Parliament and without any substantial claim to political legitimacy until that time, since it looks like he's running away from a no-confidence vote.

Which is what he's doing, of course. The whole thing gets explained quite concisely in this piece custom-written for the navel-gazing US Americans south of the forty-ninth parallel.

If this sort of thing had happened in, say, Angloa or Laos or Uruguay, no one would have been particularly surprised. Canada, though, I would have held to a higher standard. Canadians of all political beliefs have got to be pretty pissed off right now.

Canadian Constitutional Crisis

An online acquaintance from Canada has alerted me to the fact that, while we US Americans are all wringing our hands about our economic collapse and atwitter about the upcoming change in government, countries in the rest of the world are going on about their own political affairs and troubles, too. (Isn't that cute!) For instance, the U.S. economy's collapse has, unsurprisingly, contributed to a collapse in Canada's economy, too. As a result, Stephen Harper and the Tories (aka the Conservative Party), who hung on to power with a coalition government, are facing a no-confidence vote less than six weeks after winning a plurality in Parliament. Why? The Bloc Québécois bolted from the coalition government withdrew its support of the Tories after they failed to offer stimulus package in response to economic conditions, although the real reason may have to do with also withdrawing Federal subsidies for political activity and attempting to take away public employees' right to strike in labor disputes.

Although they're delaying the inevitable as long as they can, the Tories are likely to lose. This will mean that the Queen -- or, rather, the Queen's representative in Canada, Her Excellency the Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean, Governor General of Canada, acting in Her Majesty's name as representative of the Crown and technically the Viceroy of Her Majesty the Queen of Canada -- will actually get to do something of real political significance. When the Prime Minister fails to achieve a majority vote of confidence, the government of Canada dissolves. That is to say, the civil service type work continues, but the continued viability of Parliament and the political branches of the government falls into doubt.

It seems that come Monday afternoon, Her Excellency will have three choices. First, she can call for a new election. This seems silly, given that the last election ended only seven weeks ago.

Second, she can indicate the Crown's desire to continue with the results of the last election and invite the next-largest party to form a government. In this case, that would be the Liberal Party. That brings up a new problem -- the Liberal Party of Canada party lacks a leader. Current LP head Stéphane Dion is in the process of being ousted. So this would mean that Canada's head of government would be -- well, no one knows. Someone picked from out of the blue. And that person would have to lead a coalition government, something that apparently has never been done in Canada before.

Third, the Governor-General can use her Royal authority to prorogue Parliament, since it is only obligated to meet once a year. This would leave Prime Minister Harper governing with only his Cabinet, until Her Excellency calls Parliament into session again, which need not happen for up to an entire year. At some point, though, Harper would run out of money since Parliament would not be there to draft a new budget. If Canada uses the same fiscal years as the U.S., Harper would have until June 30 before running into serious trouble. This option also has the distinct disadvantage of being apparently contrary to the wishes of the democratically-elected Parliament. In a nation whose government is based on principles of democracy, it also would call into question the legitimacy of Harper's rule. Once Parliament votes "no confidence," however, this option is off the table, so if Her Excellency is to prorogue Parliament, she must do so this week.

Wow. Talk about a "no good options" situation.

Governor-General Jean is currently returning from a state visit to Europe. Typically, the Governor-General's intervention in political matters is ceremonial and she follows cues given to her by the Prime Minister, regardless of which party controls Parliament. But there is nothing written down anywhere that would stop the Governor-General from making her own decision about what is in Canada's best interests. Her second option -- inviting the Liberals to form a coalition government -- seems most likely to me, but who knows?

In college, I heard lots of talk about how a parliamentary system of government was better than the separately-elected President called for in the U.S. Constitution. I don't know about that. The President, having a separate electoral base, can claim a greater degree of legitimacy when making decisions or doing things while Congress is not in session than a Prime Minister of a parliamentary country can. And our system of government provides for relatively rigid timing of elections, and independent governance of the separate branches of government, which means that in the short run, Congress doesn't have to care about the President to get its job done, and vice versa. Those are actually pretty strong institutional advantages to the U.S. system of government, when you think about it.

A parliamentary system works fine as long as one party can keep a convincing majority of public support -- but when times are tough, consensus is difficult, and opinions are widely divided, that's exactly when you need to have the ability for a leader to step up, and that's exactly when a parliamentary government becomes paralyzed.

Good luck to our friends and trading partners in Canada.

It Came Out Of The Sky

Two videos from Canada, filmed last night:

This was, of course, a meteor. A spectacular one at that. Coolness.

To Where Will Right Winger Deserters Flee?

"Oh, man, if Bush gets re-elected, I'm going to Canada."

"If McCain gets elected over Obama, man, the fix is in. I'm outta here, I'll go to the Netherlands."

I've heard more of that kind of crap from left-wing kool-aid drinkers over the years than I care to remember. I guess it hearkens back to the glory days of Vietnam War protesters dodging the draft by fleeing to Canada or Switzerland or somewhere like that. As if that were somehow glamorous or righteous.

But now, that worm has turned around completely. Barack Hussein Obama has been elected President. Nancy Pelosi is Speaker of the House of Representatives with a commanding majority. The Democrats have tossed out Ted Stevens from the Senate, for Chrissake, and are a hairs' breath away from a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. There is nothing -- nothing -- to stop the party that harbors and encourages the sort of policies that many on the right once dared call "treason" from having their way with us.

Of course, our children will all now be taught to be gay in second grade, ownership of a firearm will be an imprisonable offense, and we will all need to learn Spanish in order to vote. George Washington's birthday will no longer be a holiday and Cesar Chavez will replace him on the $1.00 bill. Or, rather, the $1.00 coin because the Democrats are going to take our money away.

So it's natural to think that right-wing kool-aid drinkers are going to feel an impulse to leave. For instance, check out comment #5 on this post about a blogbuddy returning to the United States after a sojourn abroad:

Italy will be better off without you.You’re just like all the folks who come here and expect US to accommodate all their needs,speak their language, adjust to their culture. Welcome home…enjoy your success and your new leader and maybe you’ll not get taxed out of existence. I can’t wait to get the hell out of here. Not my America any more. -- cas

Oh, really, cas? So where, exactly, do you intend on going? Where is this right-wing fantasyland where men can be men and own huge arsenals of big, deadly guns and the government will tolerate it? Maybe you're thinking Iraq? No problem owning lots of guns there. But somehow I doubt that an Arabic-speaking country dominated by Muslims and still susceptible to urban terrorism is going to be terribly appealing to cas and others like him who prefer the red kool-aid to the blue, even with the decidedly permissive de facto rules about owning weapons there.

Maybe to that mecca of free-market capitalism, Japan. If he can somehow persuade the government of that famously xenophobic nation into giving a gaijin like him a residency visa. He may have to promise to shower four times a day. And forget about owning any land, even if he could afford it. So, I guess that's out.

Now, you can have some weapons in Russia -- hey, сказать привет моему другу мало! And, for the time being, the Russians are overtly capitalists. But you've pretty much got to have tons of dough if you want to live anywhere decent, like Moscow or Petersburg. And Putin is pretty much turning into the Enemy again, so cas probably isn't thinking real seriously about Russia.

Now, I'm going to hazard a guess here and suggest that cas and his fellow right-wingers are probably not super-fluent in non-English languages and can't be bothered to learn them. It's very likely that cas is an English-is-the-official-language sort of guy. That might be a stretch. But I don't feel like it's a big one. So that limits the choices to only a few options, countries where English is the primary language. Maybe he can go to India or Pakistan and teach English to successive generations of tech support specialists and learn to love ghat and curry.

Canada, of course, is not an option; they're a bunch of peacenik socialists and gun-grabbers, and they have the most open immigration policy of any nation on Earth so the whole place is a gigantic security risk. Of the remaining English-speaking countries, you need to be ultra-loaded to emigrate to the UK, and you can't have a gun there. Or in Ireland. Or in the urban parts of Australia or anywhere in New Zealand. Or (now) Hong Kong -- the PRC is in charge there now, not Her Majesty's Government, and they don't like people they don't know having weapons.

South Africa? English is a secondary language there -- so maybe cas could use his English to get started while he brushes up on his Afrikaans and Swahili. Of course, you've got racial tensions, a seriously declining economy, and restrictions on firearms again, but that's not so different from here, really. And the climate is a lot like Southern California, just upside-down.

Maybe cas is Jewish and can exercise Aliyah. Then, he could go to Israel. There is gun control, but he could have a military-grade weapon in his kibbutz as long as he was part of the IDF Reserves, which I bet cas would think was cool. English isn't the primary language there, but it would be enough to get him started, and if cas is Jewish he may know some Hebrew. Yeah, they're pretty much socialists there but there is private enterprise. So, if you're in the Tribe, cas, massel tov. But if you're not Jewish, I think you're pretty much looking at Jo-burg.

Nonsense, Bigotry, And Lies

INTRODUCTORY NOTE: Some of you may not be familiar with a long-lost literary convention called "sarcasm." This post makes extensive use of that technique. To help the humor-impaired, I have designated those areas of the post which are intended to be sarcastic through the use of a purple color for the text. All text appearing in that color should be considered "sarcastic." Thank you for your attention, and you may now proceed to enjoy today’s rant. -- TL

Months ago, Dennis Prager laid out the parade of horribles awaiting California if Proposition 8 fails to pass.

1. Girls might become lesbians. Oh, and boys might become gay, too, but mainly, the big danger is that girls might become lesbians.

Prager: “…young girls will be discouraged from imagining one day marrying their prince charming -- to do so would be declared ‘heterosexist,’ morally equivalent to racist. Rather, they will be told to imagine a prince or a princess. Schoolbooks will not be allowed to describe marriage in male-female ways alone. Little girls will be asked by other girls and by teachers if they want one day to marry a man or a woman.” “The sexual confusion that same-sex marriage will create among young people is not fully measurable. … Much of humanity -- especially females -- can enjoy homosexual sex. It is up to society to channel polymorphous human sexuality into an exclusively heterosexual direction.”

After all, no one was gay before May of this year. Certainly not in California. Now, of course, there’s a proliferation of gay people, which is all the fault of four unelected (oh wait, they are elected) judges in San Francisco decided to make themselves Dictators Of The Universe. And now that they’ve done this, the floodgates are open, birth rates are going to decline, and even those of you who think you still like the opposite sex will be required to provide photographic proof that you have recently performed sex acts with members of the same gender before getting your California Driver’s License renewed.

It's bizarre: Prager is really, really upset that a girl might have sex with another girl. But he does not seem nearly as disturbed by the idea that a boy might have sex with other boys. The idea of boys with boys seems to have less immediacy and moral gravity to him than girls with girls. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about what that means, because I'm still trying to figure it out myself.

2. Free speech will be curtailed.

Prager: “Any advocacy of man-woman marriage alone will be regarded morally as hate speech, and shortly thereafter it will be deemed so in law.” “Anyone who advocates marriage between a man and a woman will be morally regarded the same as racist. And soon it will be a hate crime.” “Companies that advertise engagement rings will have to show a man putting a ring on a man's finger -- if they show only women fingers, they will be boycotted just as a company having racist ads would be now.” “Films that only show man-woman married couples will be regarded as antisocial and as morally irresponsible as films that show people smoking have become.”

These have been serious problems up in Canada for the last five years. You’ll remember the tragic story of the riot that grew out of the gay-led protests in front of the offices of Canadian Engagement Rings, Inc. in Saskatoon in mid-2006, in which so many people were senselessly killed and hurt because the company didn’t run an ad with an image of two male fingers. Downtown Saskatoon is still struggling to recover. And it’s been well-documented that all the TV and movie stars from Canada are coming down here to find work because the writers, directors, and producers in Canada simply can’t abide by the repressive, restrictive atmosphere that forbids them from referring to heterosexual relationships in any sort of positive way.

3. Evil Atheists Will Win.

Prager: “Traditional Jews and Christians -- i.e. those who believe in a divine scripture -- will be marginalized.”

Help! Help! We religious folk are being oppressed! We only possess 85% of the electorate and our rights are being trampled upon by people who want something that we already have and costs us nothing to let them have, too!

4. Adoptions will become illegal.

Prager: “Catholic groups in Massachusetts have abandoned adoption work since they will only allow a child to be adopted by a married couple as the Bible defines it … .”

It’s a little-known but sadly profound fact that no child has been adopted in Massachusetts for the last four years. Because the only entity doing adoption work in the entire state of Massachusetts was the Catholic Church and unless the adoption agency places each and every child with a gay couple, it gets sued out of existence.

5. People will afford less significance to genders and gender roles.

Prager: “[T]he terms ‘male’ and ‘female,’ ‘man’ and ‘woman’ will gradually lose their significance.”

Which is going to make it that much more difficult to discriminate against women, and we certainly can’t have that!

6. Divorces involving children will be awkward.

Prager: “And what will happen after divorce -- which presumably will occur at the same rates as heterosexual divorce? A boy raised by two lesbian mothers who divorce and remarry will then have four mothers and no father.” Because divorces involving children go smoothly and have few deleterious psychological effects on the children involved now.

So obviously, Prager is upset that Prop. 8 might fail. (The latest polls have passage or failure within the margin of error.) Proposition 8, according to Prager, “will determine whether judges or society will decide on social-moral issues.” Because if Proposition 8 fails, the California Constitution will be suspended and Ronald George will, with the assistance of three gun-totin’ robe-wearin’ septagenarian judges, singlehandedly pull off a coup against the Schwarzenegger Administration, dissolve the Legislature, and cause California to secede from the United States. Act now to preserve your proximity to the Leader.

Prager claims that “every religious and secular society in recorded history has defined marriage -- as between men and women.” (He concedes, however, that the number of spouses does vary.) Barbaric and backwards places like the Netherlands, Canada, Spain, Norway, South Africa, Belgium, and Massachusetts don’t count.

Attorney General Jerry Brown, “a liberal Democrat,” is taken to task for changing the proposition’s wording, so as “to make the proposition appear as a denial of a basic human and civil right.” Dude, if the shoe fits…

Prager also makes the astonishing claim that “Marriage has never been regarded as a universal human or civil right.” Prager has decided that the United States Supreme Court does not count here, because to acknowledge the actions of that obscure and unimportant branch of government would disprove his thesis.

Now, Prager claims that he’s no homophobe and he recognizes that he’s arguing for an unfair position: “I readily acknowledge that it is unfair when an adult is not allowed to marry the love of his or her choice. But social policy cannot be made solely on the basis of eradicating all of life's unfairness.” Because the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has proven what a disaster enforcing social policy in the form of racial equality was. So sometimes, social policy must be advocated solely for the purpose of perpetuating some of life’s unfairnesses? If so, Proposition 8 is a fine example of that.

It’s nonsense and lies packed densely together. Prager admits that Prop. 8 is unfair. He admits that he just plain doesn’t like the idea of people becoming gay or thinking that gay people have moral equivalence to straight people. Yet he insists that he is not a bigot.

No safe harbor here.

You cannot say that it is bad for people to be gay without saying, in the same breath, that gay people are bad. Maybe it's possible to articulate a non-bigoted reason for opposing same-sex marriage. This, however, is not it. Your reasons for advocating Proposition 8 are rooted in bigotry, Dennis Prager, which despite all your protests to the contrary makes you a bigot.

You are also almost certainly a liar, Mr. Prager. Your columns demonstrate that you are an intelligent, educated man who keeps up on current events and the law. You knew all of these things before you wrote those columns. It is one thing to be ignorant, but it is something else entirely to say something that you know perfectly well is incorrect, for the purpose of encouraging others to rely upon the truth of your inaccurate statement. It is something else to, as I have done here, say something obviously incorrect in order to emphasize the opposite point; that is called sarcasm. The difference between an ignorant misstatement, a sarcastic remark, and a lie is found in the knowledge of the untruth of one’s remarks and one’s intent in knowingly making the incorrect statements.

Contrary to what you have said, marriage is a civil right, the Supreme Court said so in 1964. Contrary to what you have said, secular societies, in the industrialized western world, have had same-sex marriages for years. The California Supreme Court is a democratically-elected institution and democracy is alive and thriving in California, as the very existence of Proposition 8 proves. A man of your intelligence, interests, and resources could not possibly have been ignorant of all of this when you wrote those columns, Mr. Prager. Yet, you stated these things in great seriousness, passing them off as the truth. You did this with an explicit intent to encourage people to vote “Yes” on Proposition 8.

That makes those statements lies, which in turn makes you a liar.

If the only way to get people to vote for Proposition 8 is to promulgate nonsense, bigotry, and lies, then Proposition 8 does not deserve to pass and should not become law.

Election Day

You haven't noticed it. You haven't been paying attention. It doesn't really concern you. But federal elections took place today in Canada.

A friend in Quebec reported to me that the big issue was the environment, but that was before the financial meltdown south of the border. I have to think that had ramifications, at least in the major urban centers near the U.S. But then again, my friend also was at some pains to point out that Quebec is not like the Rest Of Canada, which he cheerfully called the "ROC," and much of the dialogue in and around Montreal was about the Bloc Quebecois:

Non-BQ politician: You BQ guys are irrelevant and useless!
BQ politician: Non! N'est vrai!

And so it goes. Anyway, the CBC is predicting that the conservative party (which is not very conservative by U.S. standards) will lead a minority government, meaning it will have to team up with another party to capture a majority of seats in Parliament -- and Stephen Harper will remain Canada's Prime Minister.

Remember that, American Readers -- the Prime Minister of Canada is named Stephen Harper. You'll win a bar bet armed with that bit of trivia.

You Don't Own Anything After You're Dead

Another good idea from our friends up in Canada. If this law passes, there would be no more organ donor lists in Ontario. Instead there would be a "not a donor" list. You would have to opt out of rendering your body subject to organ harvesting, unlike the present system (like the one that prevails here in all 50 states) that you have to opt in to being harvested.

Personally, I think everyone should be an organ donor. If you're dead, why shouldn't your body parts be used to save the lives of people who might benefit from them? You're not going to be using those body parts anymore because you're going to be dead.

Organ harvesting creeps people out. People want to think they won't ever die. People want to think that if they die, they're going to come back and need those organs again. They think that doctors will be anxious to kill them to take their livers and adrenal glands. They think that they'll be pronounced dead too quickly and wake up on the coroner's table. Some people have religious objections to organ harvesting or autopsies; their cultural or religious traditions think of that sort of thing as a desecration of a corpse.

So fine. The proposed law has an opt-out provision; you fill out a form, and your body will not be harvested after you die. As I see it, there are three alternative states of existence: 1) you really want your organs to be harvested after you die; 2) you really don't want your organs to be harvested after you die; 3) you don't care enough about the issue one way or the other to bother filling out a form or some other document to let the people who survive you know what your wishes were. This law only affects people in the third category. And it only affects them after they're dead.

Then there's the actually much more valid objection that you own your own body, and it is not the property of the government. I agree with that. The government can't take your body from you while you're alive. But dead people don't have rights. They don't own anything. That's why the government can create laws about things like the proper disposal of human remains -- the dead person no longer owns anything, including her own body, so someone has to do something with it and that is the job of the government.

And again, the law is really already there anyway. You can create a will or a trust while you're alive saying what you want to have happen while you die. And the law will honor those wishes even after you're dead, in order to vindicate and honor the exercise of property rights you made while you were still alive. But if you don't bother to exercise those rights, there has to be a default provision for what happens to your property when you go. That's why there are laws in every jurisdiction, everywhere, for intestate succession of property.

Now, in the U.S., we have a law against the sale of one's own organs, either now or in the future. The idea is that a poor person will sell her kidney for a song and thus be "exploited." Query if that is truly "exploitation" in the same sense that, say, a predatory mortgage loan or a Ponzi scheme is true exploitation. Maybe yes, maybe not. There are also worries that the owner of a right to harvest an organ might do something untoward, like say, kill the donor to harvest the organ early. I can certainly see regulating a market for organs, particularly so the donor and the purchaser do not know each other and the transaction is truly conducted at arms-length. This would require a third party (possibly a government agency) to serve as a broker. There are surely other logistical and legal kinds of issues that would need to get worked out. But I can't think of a moral objection sufficient to justify an absolute ban on truly voluntary, informed organ sales -- particularly organ futures, where you sell the right to harvest the organ after you die of other causes. I can think of logistical hurdles to making that happen, but if I sat down to really think it through, I'd probably also be able to think of ways to overcome those hurdles.

This law is a modification of the law of intestate succession of a particular item of one's property, mainly one's own body. Nothing more. If it's not what you want to happen to your body when you die, you can still control that outcome. Particularly given that we have created a legal scheme in which one cannot sell one's own organs and therefore they must either be given away, burned up, or put in the ground to rot, I think that making the "default" provision that of donation rather than against donation is a great idea.

Canadian Statistical Extrapolation -- An Armchair Exercise In Demographic Assumptions

One of my previous posts led me down an interesting mental rabbit hole. How many gay people are there, compared to straight people? It seems to me that the answer may be smaller than I'd ever thought. Particularly because some gay people are closeted, getting good statistical data about them is something of a challenge. I've heard estimates that 3% of all people are gay. This does not jibe with my own experience; the number seems on the high side.

My SWAG would be about one-third of that. So let's go in search of data to support my predetermined conclusion, shall we? As you shall see, my search is unsuccessful. But I won't pretend this is science just because I've disproved a proposition; there is a difference between a guess and a hypothesis.

Of all the nations on Earth, Canada is the most culturally similar to the United States. Similar English legal and political heritage, same tradition of self-reliant individualism, a generally similar spread and mix of religions and racial groups, analagous tensions about immigration and civil liberties. Certainly there are some cultural differences between the U.S. and Canada but all the same, Canadians are pretty much like Americans. Hell, Canadians even look just like us, it's sometimes deceptively hard to tell us apart. (Kidding!)

One statistic that we can be confident in because it comes straight from the Canadian census is that only .075% of Canadian marriages -- that's 75 marriages in 100,000 -- are same-sex. So for every 200,000 married people, 150 of them are in same-sex marriages. It seems fair to assume that all of those same-sex marriages are between gay people. We also see from the Canadian experience that Canada has a marriage rate of functionally the same rate as that of Americans -- nearly exactly 50% of all Canadians are married. So that means, for every 400,000 Canadians, 150 of them are in same-sex marriages, 199,850 are in opposite-sex marriages, and 200,000 are unmarried.

Now, people find themselves unmarried for a wide variety of reasons. Some are minors. Some are mentally retarded developmentally disabled and therefore unable to form the consent necessary to marry. Some are widowed. Some were married and are now divorced. Some aren't married out of choice or because they haven't found a suitable spouse.

And some, but not all, people are gay. Here's where the difference is -- in Canada, being gay has not been an impediment to getting married (to a same-sex partner, if that's your choice) since 2003. So one would expect that if someone is gay and not married, it's by choice. Now, there are probably at least some married Canadians who are also gay -- think Brokeback Mountain or Ted Haggard, with a secretly gay spouse sneaking out to cheat on their spouses; or maybe these gay people married to opposite-sex spouses deny themselves the license to engage in gay sex for religious reasons; or maybe they have "open" relationships in which their spouse is not concerned if they fool around. Who knows how many such people there are or what kind of arrangements they have -- but we can't assume that all people in opposite-sex marriages are necessarily heterosexual. (However, it's probably safe to assume that an overwhelmingly large percentage of people in opposite-sex marriages are heterosexuals.)

But the real question is, of the gay people in Canada, how many who are able to marry their lovers have chosen not to? Do gay people have a lower propensity for marriage than straight people? I'd like to say, "No, of course not," but that may not neccesarily be true just because I want it to be.

To delve into this cultural issue, I could research a variety of gay authors' blogs or writings; I could do that but I'm not going to.

I suspect that after filtering out all of the Facebook crap I would find two categories of gay writers -- the very thoughtful, and the very radical. Neither may be particularly representative.

A thoughtful gay writer -- famously in the blogosphere, Andrew Sullivan is a good example of this sort of person -- is likely to have spent some time and mental energy considering the benefits and burdens of marriage before tying the knot (or not). Such writers may also have considered "gay culture" and found it a difficult thing to define. Sullivan admits that there is a strain of gay culture that glorifies promiscuity. These are the guys who parade around in S&M gear on Gay Pride Day.

If I find the blog or other writings of these sorts of people, I suspect that would also be unrepresentative. Promiscuous people, whether gay or straight, will likely not consider marriage to be a particularly good thing since it must eschewed, or at least significantly modified, to sustain promiscuity. (For a heterosexual example of this, consider George Clooney -- he doesn't want to get married because he enjoys having a string of girlfriends too much.) And, as I explain below, I rather doubt that gays are all that much more promiscuous than straights.

But the fact is, I don't really want to wade through a bunch of this and even if I did, I'd wind up only with anecdotal information and probably some pretty colorful spam and tracking cookies on my computer. For now, I'd much rather play the parlor game of making reckless assumptions and spurious use of statistics, the way an economist does. But that's going to get me in trouble, or at least not wind up meshing with my initial guess. But here we go:

Assume that Canada is similar enough to the United States that we can safely extrapolate Canadians' experiences to ourselves. Canada's ratio of gay people to straight people will be pretty much the same as in the U.S. Assume further that pretty much all of the gay people in Canada who want to get married have figured out that they can and will have done so by now, so if you are gay, Canadian, and single, the reason that you are single has nothing to do with being gay anymore. The ratio of gays seeking marriage to straights seeking marriage in Canada is about 6:8000. We know that the overall rate of married people to people in general is about 1:2. So if gay people get married at the same rate as straight people, then that means that fifteen in 10,000 (that's .15%) of all people are gay.

Three in one hundred seems too high. But fifteen in ten thousand seems too low.

So maybe gay people are less attracted to marriage than straight people. If a gay person, given the opportunity to marry, is only half as likely to do so as opposed to his straight counterpart, then we'd infer that .3% of all people -- three in a thousand -- are gay. That still seems low.

But in order for the 3% figure I've heard thrown about to be justifiable, my theoretical construct would mean that they would have to be twenty times less likely to marry as straight people, once they are afforded the opportunity. Like the 3% figure itself, this still just doesn't feel right.

I might be able to buy the idea that (particularly young) homosexuals are less interested in marriage because they a) have very little cultural tradition of marrying their lovers, b) may have had the "moral prejudice" against homosexuallity pounded into their heads from the pulpit and are ashamed of what they are, and/or c) may find a single and promiscuous lifestyle to be enjoyable to the point that they would forego marriage for longer than straight people (on average; there are some pretty promiscuous straights out there). But twenty times as much?

Sure, having lots of sex with lots of partners is fun. But gays, like straights, must figure out at some point in their lives that they need to settle down and stop catting around after a while; at some point, one matures and starts to want a more constant companion and pursuing all that random sex starts to be more work than pleasure. I can't imagine how it would be substantialy different for gays than straights.

So, my armchair exercise in statistical extrapolation must have a flaw somewhere -- an incorrect assumption, a bad analogy, a mistake in my math. But I can't see what it is on my own. Or, maybe I'm right, and gays really are twenty times less likely to marry than us hetero folks are, even given the opportunity to do so.

Criticize The Content Itself, Not The Hypocrite Who Spouts It

To call someone a “hypocrite” is usually a pretty bad thing. No one enjoys being called that and it seems to be a fairly stinging sort of insult. For instance, Senators Larry Craig and David Vitter are both “family values” Republicans who got elected to their high offices, in no small part, based on their aggressive appeals to social conservatives. I suggest here that although these men may be fairly called "hypocrites," their poor position to make certain statements is not nearly as important as what they have to say.

hyp·o·crite (n) 1 : a person who puts on a false appearance of virtue or religion 2 : a person who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs or feelings.

Senator Craig, as you will recall, was rather publicly humiliated by being arrested for lewd conduct in a men’s room in the airport in Minneapolis. Specifically, he rubbed his foot on the foot of an undercover vice cop sitting in the next stall, which the cop said was a common way that gay men cruise for anonymous sex. The implication being, of course, that Senator Craig was cruising for a gay quickie in the men’s room while on the way back home from work in Washington. He pled guilty to a reduced charge of disorderly conduct, so he has formally and legally admitted he did something wrong after being accused of this. Craig denies being gay, but no one believes him. Senator Vitter, as you will recall, was rather publicly humiliated by being named as a client in the black book of the late “D.C. Madam” Jeane Palfrey. The firestorm surrounding the prosecution of Ms. Palfrey grew so intense that Ms. Palfrey apparently committed suicide rather than deal with it. His no-doubt humiliated wife stood by his side at the press conference when Senator Vitter admitted patronizing Ms. Palfrey’s services while serving in Congress.

So when Senators Craig and Vitter co-sponsor a resolution to adopt something called the “Marriage Protection Amendment,” which would render every same-sex marriage in the United States invalid, it is easy to call them hypocrites because they have treated their own marriages casually. But their attempt at lawmaking may well be a genuine expression of their ideals, even if their personal conduct falls short of realizing those ideals. They are only human, after all, despite the lofty atmosphere of power, privilege, and pretense in which they function. If we exclude from the category of people who can dispense moral guidance everyone who has fallen short of their moral ideals, there would be no one at all who could expound on issues of morality. So to some extent, we are all hypocrites, and yet we must nevertheless move forward as best we can with our moral lives.

These Senators may well be hypocrites for trying to “protect” your marriage and mine, after having trashed their own marriages. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that their own personal failings should be used to measure the merits of their proposal.

Consider a doctor who smokes. She will tell you not to smoke, that it causes cancer, that you’ll be healthier if you don’t smoke, and that the sooner you quit, the better it will be for you. She’s right. The fact of her own smoking habit does not make her advice about smoking in any way incorrect. Her behavior may render her advice a little less persuasive than it might otherwise be, but objectively, she’s right.

So I don’t think it’s right to attack the “Marriage Protection Amendment” because some of its legislative sponsors have less than perfect personal records for protecting their own marriages.

I think it’s right to attack the “Marriage Protection Amendment,” because it’s not gong to “Protect” anyone’s marriage at all. Remember – no one’s heterosexual marriage has been invalidated or diminished in any way by the adoption of same-sex marriage. Straight couples (like The Wife and me) are just as married now as we were before the Marriage Cases decision was announced. The only thing this proposed Constitutional amendment would do is take away someone else’s marriage.

That does not sound like “Protection” to me. No one has ever been able to explain to me how my marriage is in any way endangered by gay people marrying one another.

And think about the magnitude. We’re talking about a phenomenally small number of people who are actually taking advantage of this law. Since same-sex marriage licenses were made legal in Los Angeles County, it looks like about 2,000 licenses have been issued. Assuming proportionally similar numbers around California, that’s a total of about 7,000 same-sex marriages in the state. That’s 14,000 people in same-sex marriages out of 36.5 million – .038% (that’s thirty-eight out of every hundred thousand people).

Canada has roughly the same population as California. Same-sex marriages were first recognized in Ontario on June 10, 2003 and nationally in 2005. A total of 12,438 licenses were used as of October 31, 2006 in the entire nation of Canada, which had a national population of 32,987,532 that year. That means that after more than a year of same-sex marriage being legal in Canada, .075% of its population is in a same-sex marriage; that is to say Canada’s rate of same-sex marriage is about double California’s -- although California has had same-sex marriage for 11 days now, and Canada has had it for more than five years. So if California’s experience is anything like Canada’s, we can anticipate the number of same-sex marriages not quite doubling over the next five years, until something like 30,000 or so Californians are in same-sex marriages. Meanwhile, the national average is that very close to half of all Americans are currently married, and with a miniscule exception from Massachusetts, they are all in opposite-sex marriages.

If you were to expand this projected experience to the entire nation, that would work out to under 113,000 same-sex marriages, total, for the whole country. That would make the proportion of same-sex marriages to opposite-sex marriages 674 to 1. For this you want to amend the Constitution, Senator Vitter? This is a threat to “traditional” marriage in a nation that has 76 million opposite-sex marriages, Senator Craig? To foreclose upon even the possibility that less than a quarter million people might do something that does not affect their fellow citizens at all?

Senators, do you really hate gay people that much, that you would use the great power and dignity that has been given to you, to go to that much effort to hurt so few of them? Shame on you both!

This is treating the Constitution like a plaything. That this is motivated by bigotry makes even more offensive. So don’t be mad at Senators Vitter and Craig because they’re hypocrites. Be mad at them because they are poor custodians of our fundamental national law.

Hillary's Canadian Problem

Remember that whole thing with Obama and his aide talking to the Canadians, then not talking to them, then he did again, and then he admitted Obama was pandering for votes and then he didn't say anything of the sort and then he kind of did again except he didn't really?

Well, it's happening again. This time with Hillary Clinton. Now, no less a source than Prime Minister Harper's chief of staff says he got a "take it with a grain of salt" call from one of Clinton's advisors. And the Clinton campaign says, "No way. Didn't happen."

Important? Sure. Pennsylvania, the next big primary on April 22, has economics not dissimilar to Ohio.

You Filthy Liars, He Didn't Make That Call

After a lot of investigation, the WaPo pronounces that Obama “parsed” his denial of the call to Canada and awards him two Pinocchios. Turns out that senior Obama advisor Austen Goolsbee “informally” met with (but did not phone) Georges Rioux, the Canadian consul-general in Chicago, and Goolsbee did indeed convey a message significantly downplaying Obama’s anti-NAFTA campaign rhetoric. Since the initial rumor was that Goolsbee made a phone call to someone in the consulate, the denial of such a phone call taking place was technically correct – but not the portion of the denial that everyone was focusing on. While not the same as a CQ Pants on Fire condemnation, the double Pinocchio indicates a substantial obfuscation of the truth.

Can you imagine it? “ABSOLUTELY NOT! You filthy liars, I did NOT call the Canadian government to say that my candidate was pandering for votes in Ohio! NO, NO a thousand times NO!!!” (pause, murmurs) “I said that to them in person.”

Two questions unanswered still: First, Obama has never been an advocate of free trade, so why the Clintonesque obfuscation? Second, why did the Canadians get all coy about this?

Phantom Phone Call

Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have unleashed anti-NAFTA rhetoric in their battle for votes in Ohio. Apparently, union workers in Ohio still feel threatened by NAFTA and this is a good way to rally those voters to your banner -- in a way that is not as effective in other states.

Now, for the past two days or so, there have been rumors circulating that Obama's campaign has made quiet calls to the Canadian government assuring officials there that Obama is simply engaging in campaign rhetoric and that an Obama administration would not seek to withdraw or substantially alter NAFTA or the close free trade relationship between the U.S. and Canada. The Obama campaign tepidly dismissed the rumors as "inaccurate."

One apparent source of the rumors, Talking Points Memo, responded to the campaign's dismissal by revealing its sources. It seems the call was made by senior Obama economic advisor Austan Goolsbee, who now denies making the call completely and has clammed up. Canada TV, however, is standing by its claim that Goolsbee did make the call, but has not identified who within the Canadian consulate in Chicago it was that Goolsbee spoke to -- and even says that it got confirmation of the call by sources at "the highest levels of Canadian government". Which is weird; "highest levels" sounds like the Prime Minister's office, and would hardly be the consulate in Chicago, which is where the call was allegedly made. But now, more appropriate Canadian government sources are denying this as well.

So, some have pounced on the story as "proof" that Obama is just another double-talking politician, one who says one thing and will govern in a different way if elected. And part of that is based on the widespread knowledge that it would be extraordinarily difficult and costly for any President to really seek to revise NAFTA, probably to the point that it wouldn't be worth actually pursuing that policy. So it would make sense in a way that Obama might not want to spike his international relations with Canada for a very short-term political advantage.

But wait a minute. Obama has never been an advocate of free trade. He's very much a "fair trader," and has been for most of his political career. In my investigation of Obama's policy platform, I found that he was generally opposed to free trade proposals:

Strongly opposed to CAFTA. Critical of farm subsidies for large corporations but not for "family farmers." Recent rhetoric ("People don't want a cheaper T-shirt if they're losing a job in the process") suggests a strong protectionist streak, and insists that Doha Round of GATT negotiations must produce "tangible benefits" for U.S. workers, but also claims loyalty to existing trade agreements. Would amend NAFTA to allow for labor agreements, and would advocate for greater human rights and opening of trade in China -- but shrinks from a trade war with the PRC.

I gave Obama only one in five available points on this issue, because my take on the issue is that regardless of local or industry-specific shakeouts, international trade is to the overall economic benefit of the U.S. in direct proportion to the freeness of that trade. I disapprove of the crypto-protectionism Obama has been preaching recently. Nevertheless, Obama has hardly changed his political position in Ohio -- if there was double-talk going on, it would have been in the phantom phone call to the Canadian government by Obama's aide.

The Canadian government is neither stupid, ignorant, nor selfless. It will look to its own advantage in responding to this. The Canadians have denied, in a big way that seems to go all the way to the PM's office, that such a call took place. That's a pretty hard line. What, then, is the advantage to the Canadian government in doing that? Prime Minister Harper's Conservative party is the only one of the four major parties in Canada to be publicly pro-NAFTA.* Harper would seem, then, to want to reassure his own constituency that he is protecting Canada's position within NAFTA by actually having this phone call with the likely new President of the U.S. Denying that the phone call took place is saying to Canadian voters that Harper's people are not having these kinds of conversations with American leaders; presumably, Canadian Tories would want that conversation to have taken place, unless they are more ambivalent about NAFTA than I am giving them credit for being.

So I've become skeptical of the report rather than of the denials of the phone call. Obama is sticking to his guns in being critical of free trade agreements. In Texas, a generally more pro-NAFTA state than Ohio, Obama has been sidestepping the issue. He's been consistent. If the phone call was made by this advisor (a guy who would be looking at a high-level economic position in the Obama Administration, like Secretary of Treasury or Director of the OMB), it would have been significantly out of step with the candidate's basic ideas about the issue (however futile they might be in practice). It wouldn't make sense for the call to have been made in the first place, and it wouldn't make sense for the Canadians to deny that it took place after it did.

What I can't figure out is why the denial would have to come from so high a source in the Canadian government. The whole incident doesn't strike me as particularly important enough to have even merited the attention of the Prime Minister (or, more realistically, his top aides within his office). The call was allegedly made to the Chicago consulate, which isn't even the primary embassy in the U.S. Why would someone in Ottawa have even bothered with this sort of thing?


* I don't claim to be fluent in Canadian politics. It's fairly easy to point out that Harper's Conservative Party has a thin plurality in Parliament and seems to have formed a coalition government with the Bloc Québécois. A quick scan of Canadian news sources suggests to me that of the four major parties in Canada, the Tories are the most pro-NAFTA and the opposition Liberal and New Democrat Parties who are generally anti-NAFTA. I have not been able to get any kind of a read at all about what the Bloc Québécois thinks of NAFTA, but if the BQ is the junior partner in the government, it must have found a way to reconcile its own ideology with that of the Tories. Canadians, please comment and tell me if I'm wrong about any of this.

It's My Bloody Right To Do So

My new hero, Ezra Levant, gives the Alberta Human Rights Commission what for:

More -- much more -- at his website.

The Alberta Human Rights Commission was investigating his publication, in a now-defunct print newspaper published in Calgary, the famous Mohammed cartoons from Denmark.

Notably, Canada has a very broad statement in its fundamental laws about freedom of speech, restated in 1982: "2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms: a) freedom of conscience and religion; b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication." This is a stronger statement than the U.S. equivalent in the First Amendment -- the First Amendment limits the power of the government to restrict free speech; it is a negative right. Canada phrases its statement of freedom of speech in an affirmative, not a negative, manner -- meaning that it is a personal, individual right that must be honored despite other principles or factors that are at stake.

Good luck to Mr. Levant in his administrative proceeding; should he lose, I hope he is able to challenge that ruling in a real court. Shame on Canada for trying to squelch free speech. And Canada, the nation in the world most similar to the United States, should be a bellweather for us here in the States for what can happen here. This doesn't mean it's okay to actually go out and offend people and make fun of them for their religion or otherwise mock them undeservedly -- but it means that the sanction for such misbehavior should be social, not legal. That's as true in Canada as it is in the U.S.A.

Congratulations to Mr. Levant, whose videos of his interrogation by the Human Rights Commission have become the fifth-most popular video on YouTube, and which may have done more than anything else in the past five years to demonstrate how precarious our freedoms are.

Taking Back Some Of What I've Said...

...about Canada, that is. Sure, I know they look like us, they talk like us (kind of) and they're right next door, so you can't really trust them. It's awfully suspicious that they've infiltrated our entertainment industry to such an extent. And they engage in media protectionism within their own borders.

But not only do Canadians have the good sense to adopt same-sex marriage democratically, but you've got to read this.

Oh, I hear you scoff now: "An industrialized country, eliminating all of its debt? Pish! Debt is a necessary tool for running a sophisticated government, particularly one as paternalistic as Canada's." I'd have no come-back to an objection like, "Canada's multi-party system is inherently unstable and when a new coalition or party takes power, this plan will go right into the loo." But, the province of Alberta has already figured out a way to not only eliminate its deficit spending but it paid off all of its debt last year. And even if Canada's leaders can't pull off eliminating Canada's national debt in fifteen years, at least that's what people in Ottawa are talking about doing.

So, the real question is, why aren't U.S. politicians trying to do something similar? Why isn't this on either party's agenda?