Chamber of Commerce Republicans

I wrote yesterday about the elements in the GOP that want to encourage social conformity. These are closely allied with “morals” Republicans, because for them, universally good moral behavior necessarily produces a uniform social environment – such that they often appear to have confused the difference between social conformity and ethical behavior. But there are other kinds of republicans, too – the coalition consists of promoters of business and their ideological allies the libertarians, as well as defense and security hawks.

Thinking about the Chamber of Commerce wing of the party, they are most flatteringly described as "advocates for American employers." (By which they mean not so much "workers" as they mean just "businesses".) Most disparagingly, these are "Hoover Republicans," people who believe, in the pithy words of Calvin Coolidge, that the business of America is business. America is about making money and the government's job is to facilitate that all-important activity.

The desires of this wing of the party are immediately obvious: they want low taxes, low regulatory barriers to doing business, minimal oversight into commercial activity, a healthy infrastructure, law and order, and plenty of opportunities to peddle their wares for the most profit they can get. They would prefer but do not insist upon a balanced budget; a budget deficit is undesirable only to the extent that additional taxes are necessary to finance that debt. Nothing wrong with this, right?

Not in the abstract. In my youth, I'd have counted myself among this number and to a significant extent, I still do. I've tempered those views somewhat to the point that I realize that certain levels and kinds of regulation are necessary for a variety of reasons -- like preservation of resources that will not regenerate; healthy levels of non-monopolized commercial activity; public health and safety; and adherence to at least minimal standards of morality. I break with ideologicaly purist libertarians in that I do not believe the market will provide these things if left to its own devices, and I am not willing to dispense with them.

All the same, as a general proposition and within pretty broad limits, the freer a market is, the better. This is the core tenet of the business/libertarian wing of the GOP. This is the anti-tax wing; a consequence of desiring low taxes and lower regulation is desiring, in the simplest of terms, less government. Not necessarily no government or a minimal state, but less than what we've got now.

Importantly, this wing of the party harbors a significant strain towards avoiding international conflicts, particularly military ones. Sure, the military-industrial complex is great, but actually spending money on a war is wasteful for the most part; better to not risk the loss of lives and assets. War is a risk and capitalists generally prefer to maximize control over risks as much as possible. The libertarian purists in cahoots with the monied men, moreover, have their own ideological reasons to keep our nose out of other countries' affairs.

It is when these folks lose this suspicion of military activity abroad that Chamber of Commerce Republicans become "neoconservatives." The military first becomes a means of promoting business interests and down that path lies the seductive siren call of using government to accomplish a goal -- which leads to the adoption of the idea of using government at all, which means that suddenly there is taxation, regulation, debt, and all the veneer of fiscal conservatism gets washed aside and next thing you know, we're spending billions of dollars a day in Iraq and a Republican President signs into law the biggest expansion in nondiscretionary entitlements since Social Security was created.

If I seem sneering and dismissive of these kinds of things as Republican achievements, it's because I don't think they are particularly conservative and I don't see how this kind of neoconservatism fits into a strategy for good public policy and political success. If I seem critical, it's because I care.

California Court Asks For Semantics

Today, the California Supreme Court requested supplemental briefing in the Marriage Cases, asking counsel to set forth differences between California’s domestic partnership and marriage.  Another issue that will be addressed is, if a domestic partnership has the same legal effect as a marriage, at least as far as the state’s law goes, whether the word “marriage” contains any inherent value or significance.  This is the argument that really interests me.  It will be a while until the Ron and the Supremes give us a decision, but it’s interesting to see that the attorneys on both sides of the case have not addressed these issues so far.  (It’s also an excellent palaver to see Jerry Brown forced to defend the state’s existing marriage laws.)

We Fear The Wrong Things

I read in Freakonomics that more children are killed every year drowning in swimming pools than are shot with guns. But no one fears swimming pools and lots of parents freak out when they find out that there is a gun in a house that their children are going to play in.

Now, we learn that sand holes at the beach are more lethal than sharks. No one is trying to ban shovels, but people are irrationally afraid of sharks. That's not to say that sharks are fun to run into when you're casually swimming, but it is to say that the risk of a shark attack is, in most cases, negligible.

Something like 3,500 Americans have died in Iraq since combat operations began in 2003. More than that number of Americans die each month in auto accidents. Based on the way people drove on the highways today as I went to and from Stinking Bakersfield (yes, I'm going there a lot these days) I can understand why. That's not to say that those 3,500 Americans should have died in Iraq and it does not mean that there aren't other problems that are resulting because of the war. The war is serious business. But it's not nearly as bloody a business as driving to work.

We should have more nuclear power plants. But people fear meltdowns and radiation leaks. Never mind that oil refineries and coal mines do much more ecological damage than nuclear waste.

Your cell phone is not going to light you on fire at a gas station.

What we fear, and what we should fear, are often very different things. But fear is so powerful, and so easily-manipulated, that we often simply fear what we are told to fear rather than what is really dangerous.

What Does "KC" Stand For?

While reading comments about a rumored replacement for the SR-71, I came across a story of Captain Kim Campbell. I was impressed by her story.

Back in 2003, we (meaning the United States and the British, and some Spaniards and Italians, a token force from Imperial Tonga, a handful of Mongolians who remembered that they hadn't conquered Mesopotamia for more than seven hundred hundred years)* were doing a little thing called Operation Iraqi Freedom.

You may recall, Loyal Reader, that while that phase of the war was fast, it was not instantaneous and it took several days of air war to soften up the enemy before the city of Baghdad could be taken. During that phase of the operations, Capt. Campbell's mission was to provide support and cover for ground operations in and around the city. Her A-10 Warthog was hit with heavy Iraqi anti-aircraft fire while maneuvering between support runs. The result was this:


Suddenly, Captain Campbell was piloting a very unhappy airplane. She lost hydraulic control and had to land the plane without operational brakes and with her ability to steer the plane laterally severely limited. She had to decide whether or not her chances for survival were better if she ejected, which of course would mean abandoning the aircraft.

She opted instead to switch to manual control (meaning she would have to push and pull the flaps and other navigational controls by hand, with her own physical strength) and flew the plane back to base. Without brakes and with very little ability to steer, she landed the plane safely and under control, and walked away without a scratch. Not every pilot or soldier has been as fortunate as she, of course. But having come across the story recently, I think we can all be proud that Captain Campbell is a reminder of the kind of stuff that people serving in the military are made of.

* Oops, I forgot Poland.

Intellectual Balkanization

What you put into your brain determines what your brain puts out. So it’s important to have a well-balanced intellectual diet, but a lot of people consume nothing but mental junk food.

Now, I know that people have the right to go to churches and read the newspapers and watch the kinds of television programs they like and send their children to religious schools if they like. I understand all of that and I think it’s an important part of our society that individuals be given that kind of choice and liberty. The freedom of speech also implies the freedom to listen, or not, as one chooses. But it’s decidedly off-putting to see people deliberately isolating their exposure to the outside world to only that which is comfortable, familiar, and agreeable.

This happens on both sides of the political spectrum – on the left, there are a substantial number of progressives who distrust CNN for its “pro-corporate” and “conservative” bias, for instance. But it seems to happen more noticeably on the right, with social conservatives and in particular with religious conservatives. “I only watch Fox News, because it’s the only place I get an unbiased picture of the world” is something I’ve heard more than once. The people who say this sort of thing say it with a tinge of pride and superiority, as if they were condescending to telling poor confused moderates the truth and they almost expect gratitude for it.

A popular left-leaning blog called the The Reality-Based Community has the wonderful slogan “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. That is a sentiment I absolutely agree with, even when I question what the primary author of that blog has to say about current events.

Particularly as cultural conservatives point out, it’s important that people share a common culture, have some common facts and topics to discuss. They usually mean things like everyone should speak English or be part of some variant of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, but they don’t usually seem to mean that we should all read the same newspapers.

And we shouldn’t read all the same newspapers, but we should all be getting the same information. Either the war in Iraq is going well (Fox News has been reporting that we’ve had the insurgents on the run for three years now and are enjoying the quiet support of a grateful Iraqi nation) or it is not (I read on CNN last night that there were 1,000 acts of terrorism a day in Iraq) or maybe it’s both, or maybe it’s neither. If you only watch Fox News, you’d be wondering what all the consternation about the war is about; if you only watch CNN, you’d be wondering why we’re still staying there when everything we do just makes things worse. Reality lies somewhere in between the two extremes and it is often a challenge to figure out which end of the spectrum it is closer to. But just because it’s a challenge does not mean that it should not be done. And limiting your brain’s diet to only the facts that you find pleasing creates a dangerous world view, because the world is not always pleasant.

Today, seeing this article about a socially conservative alternative to wikipedia indicates to me that there are at least two levels of intellectual laziness going on with that kind of mental tribalism – first, the reliance on open-source and malleable “references” in place of actually learning and retaining knowledge oneself, and second, the need to limit one’s exposure to knowledge to that which has been screened for conformity to a predetermined world view. Whether on the left or on the right, this is really letting other people do your thinking for you. Abdicating one’s own duty to engage in critical thought is something that ought to be shameful.

This ties in to my ideas about the Republicans rebooting themselves. Some of the movers and shakers in the party are people who seem to isolate themselves from information that they dislike. Dick Cheney, for instance, has very specific instructions for when he travels, including that his hotel room is to have the TV turned on and tuned to Fox News. Many of the leaders of the cultural conservative movement, your James Dobsons and your Gary Bauers, have never seen or read the books and movies that they criticize and urge other people not to see them despite not having any firsthand knowledge of what they’re about. I would like to see this sort of thing minimized – your criticism of a book should lack credibility unless you’ve actually read it yourself.

So some of these leaders in the party are perfectly happy to control the intellectual diet of the rank and file membership. These are people who want to promote the idea of social conformity, standardizing the culture of America into their vision of an ideal society. That society is very much an idyllic, Midwestern/Southern vision of a society of small towns, with individuals’ daily lives focused on their nuclear families, churches, and places of employment. The vision is social and sexual, more than anything else; and institutions of both the government and religion are used to promote orthodoxy in the outward behavior of individuals. The inward attitude of these people is not of particular importance. There is some charm and attraction to this vision of the world; it offers safety and certainty and little opportunity for gross misbehavior. But there is a high standard of uniformity, and to maintain that uniformity, ideas, knowledge, and information must be tightly controlled. The elites of society are charged with the duty of deciding what ideas are worthy of circulation – for them, censorship is a tool that can be used for good or evil, and they wish to use it for good. These are the leaders of the social conservative movement who see themselves as stepping into the role of the guardians of this kind of benevolent masters of society’s information.

Putting such people in charge of the party is all well and good for the kinds of people who are willing to let these leaders decide for them what goes into their brains. But for those of us who are a little bit more heterodox in our thinking, this kind of Balkanization of the mind is equivalent to wearing a straightjacket of information. Again, I don’t intend to imply that this sort of thing is limited to Republicans or conservatives, because it very much is not. But I do mean to state that people should do what they can to see the world for what it really is, and this is a bigger challenge than it might appear at first glance.

It Looks Like This

When you leave an unopened can of soda in a sealed car, in the desert, in the middle of June, for hours at a time, and then don't attend to it until late in the day, this is what happens:


The part that amazes me is the complete separation of the steel top from the aluminum can because it looks like the aluminum squeezed in, and the steel just popped right off.

It gets hot here.

Privilege, Contempt, and Mistakes

The trial of Phil Spector for the murder of Lana Clarkson is going on right now. Today, one of the defendant’s former attorneys was held in contempt for refusing to testify against her former client. My initial response was, “Right on, you go, counselor!” because an attorney is supposed to safeguard her client’s confidentiality no matter what the risk to herself. But, I know that Big Media is not well-equipped to report on something as complex and subtle as the law. So glancing at a headline is not a substitute for the all-important task of RTFA.

The real issue is found at the very end of the Fish Wrapper’s summary: the attorney “…was originally called as a defense witness, so even if the privilege claim were valid, it had been waived.” Oops. That’s a whole different story – if Spector (though his trial counsel) called her as his own witness, that may very well waive the privilege. It’s a substantial issue and I think that the attorney still did the right thing by refusing to testify against her client. But she should never have allowed herself to have been named as a defense witness in the first place.

High On The List Of Things I'll Never Worry About

Our friends had a baby several months ago, and he’s growing up fast. I only had just heard through them, though, that there is apparently a raging controversy about circumcision and the surgery is becoming unfashionable. Back when I was born, it wasn’t much of a choice – parents had to go out of their way to not have their baby boys be circumcised, and as the linked article suggests, it still seems to be something that upper-class Americans do as a matter of course. Of the many decisions that The Wife and I will be making over our lifetimes, this will not be one of them, but I do think it’s interesting to note the dispute.

Disgraced

Mike Nifong was the district attorney in North Carolina who prosecuted the three Duke University students accused of raping a woman. It turns out that he had exculpatory evidence and lied to the judge about it, and of course failed to disclose the existence of that evidence to the defense attorneys.

Today, he was disbarred for his conduct. Here's an interesting quote, though: "After the hearing, attorneys for the exonerated lacrosse players said they would push for criminal charges against Nifong. 'I don't think that any of us are done with Mr. Nifong yet,' said [one.]"

Well, here's a couple thoughts for you considering all that has happened. First, consider the power of a disbarment on an attorney's psyche.

I've heard that while suicide rates among the professions are highest among dentists (despite their best efforts not to, the fact of the matter is that they inflict pain for a living and constantly have to intrude on their patients' personal space, and do not enjoy either substantial monetary or social rewards for their work like medical doctors do), the rate spikes up even higher when you consider professionals who lose their licenses to practice their profession. Among that subset of professionals, disbarred attorneys have the highest rate of both attempted and successful suicide. Somewhere a while back I read that one in three disbarred attorneys attempts suicide within five years after losing their licenses.

Second, all of these young men came from families able to afford strong legal representation and to conduct a very thorough investigation of the facts underlying the criminal charges. They were fortunate to have that kind of financial power at their disposal, and strong family units that were not only able but also willing to stand behind them and provide them with the resources they needed to fight this over-zealous and politically-ambitious prosecutor. Their attorneys did an excellent job of demonstrating not only that the prosecution did not have a case, but that these men were actually innocent of any wrongdoing greater than exhibiting poor social graces at a college party.

If they had not been at least upper-middle class and, let's face it, white, and had not been able to mobilize those resources in their own defense, would we now be thinking about Mike Nifong as the next governor of North Carolina, after having successfully prosecuted a high-profile rape case and solidifying his law-and-order credentials? As it is, he's not an attorney anymore and he has been publicly disgraced in a very graphic fashion. His name is mud in North Carolina and I don't think there is much political recovery from such a disgrace.

He cast the legal system and in particular the subset of that system that includes public prosecutors' offices into significant disrepute, and I think the disbarment is appropriate as a result. So he's had his future and his livelihood taken from him, forever. He basically has to start his life over. He's at very serious risk for falling into a depression deep enough that there's a one in three chance he'll try to check himself out.

Is that enough punishment for him?

There Is Water At The Bottom Of The Ocean

I'm not a huge Talking Heads fan; they were very creative, and occasionally produced some good songs. But I don't take out the Stop Making Sense CD very often.

Still, I heard "Once In A Lifetime" on the radio yesterday and it made me very happy and appreciative:

And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile,
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife,
And you may ask yourself: "Well...how did I get here?"

I feel like that sometimes. I've got a wonderful wife, good friends, a loving and supportive family, good health, some free time to enjoy it all, and enough money to not want for anything important. All the things in my life that I could have ever really wanted. I wonder if it's merely a function of my being very lucky, if it's because of work and effort or something else I did, or what?

Under the rocks and stones,
There is water underground.
Same as it ever was...same as it ever was...same as it ever was...

I take that to mean that good things are always there if you just open your eyes and look for them. But that doesn't mean you can take any of your good circumstances for granted -- they could all vanish in the blink of an eye. So I try to enjoy these things whenever I can. And to let them all know that I'm grateful and happy because of them.

Pre-Electric Coffee

The removable parts of our coffee maker were all in the dishwasher this morning, awaiting a thorough washing this evening. But The Wife and I want coffee for our breakfast. This is especially complex because we only have whole beans, and the coffee maker integrates the grinder into the unit. (It also grinds the beans too fine for my absolute preference, although for convenience's sake it really can't be beat.) So, no coffee grinder, no coffee maker? No probalo! Here's how you make coffee without using electricity:

1. Put the desired amount of coffee beans in a ceramic mortar and pestle. Grind them up, about 4 tablespoons at a time. For two big American-style coffee mugs, you'll use 8 tablespoons total. Don't worry about it if the grind you get with the mortar and pestle is coarse.

2. In the meantime, boil some water in a teakettle. Take the water off heat just as the teakettle starts to make any noise at all -- you want the water to be just at boiling temperature but not actually bubbling. If you've got a roaring (or in this case, whistling) boil, the next step becomes somewhat dangerous because you run a risk of shattering glass and spilling boiling water all over the place, and we all know the dangers of spilling hot coffee.

3. Put coffee beans and scalding-hot water in a French press. Stir with something that isn't metal, like a plastic soda straw or a clean chopstick (the heated glass will shatter easily with a metal spoon). Let the mixture brew for several minutes before pressing.

Enjoy! Yes, it's more work than usual in that grinding the beans takes a modicum of exertion. Not a problem, though, for anyone of average strength who does not suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome. Now, I too would normally use the convenience of modern, electric-powered coffee makers. Unless you're a huge coffee snob, the resulting product is pretty much the same. But it show that coffee can be made without use of that modern convenience without a tremendous amount of work.

The Desert Landscape

A few days ago I noticed, for the first time, that there were plans in place to build a new city by Quail Lake. So here is a shot I took today of Quail Lake while driving back from a court appearance in Stinking Bakersfield, to place that in context:


This is what everything to the east of the lake looks like right now:


You can see why the prospect of simply building a city out of so much raw sagebrush and the occasional onion field seems so daunting. And while I was downloading pictures from my cell phone, this is a shot I took on my last trip up to Stinking Bakersfield, of the Tehachipi wind farm that I can see on clear days:


So for those of you Loyal Readers who don't know from the Antelope Valley (surprisingly few of you as it turns out), that's what it looks like up here.

Massachusetts Marriage Update

Just about half an hour before this post, the Massachusetts Legislature voted down an initiative to change the state’s constitution to prohibit same-sex marriages.  The margin of defeat for the initiative (and therefore the margin of victory for same-sex marriage advocates) was five votes.  I have to think there will come a day when people will shake their heads in patronizing wonder at all the furor and angst over the idea that gay people might want to get married, too – much like today, we shake our heads over the raging arguments over slavery that dotted the first half of the nineteenth century in American public debate.  But it appears that the cutting-edge state has put this issue to rest once and for all.  There will be no Constitutional amendment; the legal and political processes have been exhausted with the result that people who want to get married, can do so, at least in Massachusetts.

MacArthur Was Right

I’m becoming quite an admirer of Professor Ilya Somin.  Today, in commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Falkland Islands War, he writes quite convincingly that this relatively small conflict demonstrates that, in politics, there is nothing quite like a decisive victory.  And, he also writes, quite convincingly, that Argentina benefited from having lost so decisively, too – because its fascist military junta lost popular support after having its ass thoroughly waxed by the UK, resulting in democratic reforms and improving economic conditions.

Nothing But Carrots And Onions

Apparently, I'm the last man in the Antelope Valley to have heard that from 2008 to 2028, the Tejon Ranch Corporation wants to build a 70,000 resident city to the east and north of Quail Lake. Tejon Ranch is currently the owner of the largest contiguous plot of land that is privately owned in California and this would be on the (relatively) small portion of that land that is in Los Angeles County. The community would be about equidistant from Santa Clarita, Lancaster, and Stinking Bakersfield, at the western apex of the geographic "triangle" formed by the San Gabriel and Tehachapi Mountain ranges that is the Antelope Valley.

Yes, there are apparently a large number of environmental activist groups that want to stop this from happening. While I welcome the idea of 70,000 new clients in the area to service, I also hope that they preserve the absolutely gorgeous Tejon Pass and the prettier natural areas of that part of their holdings. But it seems like everyone in the area has heard of this before I finally got around to reading about it in California Lawyer magazine today.

Right now, there's nothing but carrot and onion farms, a gravel quarry, and pumping stations for the California Aqueduct out there. But in twenty years, there will be an entire city of Centennial, California and my remarks here will sound as antiquated as the old-timers who say that they can remember when Anaheim used to be nothing but orange groves and Irvine was a bunch of bean fields.

Conservatives for Freedom

Now, this is quite interesting. These guys are saying things I have been saying for a long time – that we as a nation are yet rich and powerful enough to have both liberty and security, and that real conservatives and people worthy of positions of political leadership can find a way to prosecute our efforts to eradicate our enemies without violating the Constitution in the process. Apparently Mitt Romney refused to sign their pledge and was rewarding with an excoriating press release condemning him as ignorant of conservative principles.



My strong suspicion is that Rudy Giuliani will be the focus of the group’s attention next. They picked Romney first because they thought he'd want to sign the pledge to beef up his credibility with conservatives; Giuliani seems like a likely next target. I'll be watching with great interest to see how Hizzoner reacts to this.

Second-Guessing the Sopranos

On the subject of the end of The Sopranos, one expert has said: "You can’t second-guess the artist." Well, of course you can. He's saying that you shouldn't. Different words, different meanings.

Get it right!

Cheese Kills

Your reaction to the latest story about deadly discount drugs will no doubt be anger and frustration. What you think we as a society should do about the situation will probably be no different than what you think we should do about other kinds of illegal street drugs – if you think we should decriminalize them like the Dutch, give them away like the Swiss, educate until we’re blue in the face like the Brits, allocate more resources to interdiction like the Thais, or increase penalties for possession and use to draconian levels like the Malaysians, this will simply reinforce the need for whatever policy you prefer to be enacted.

Republican Reboot (Part I)

I’m sure to return to this idea soon. But the spectacle of seeing the leader of the Republican party swimming against the tide of his own partisans on immigration and the substantial dissatisfaction that social conservatives have with the GOP’s Presidential candidates, I have to wonder if the Republican Party in 2008 is not going through some serious reimagining. More thoughts later on the various factions jostling for position and what I think the ultimate outcome will be.

Battered Husband Syndrome

I know it’s not fair, but news stories about battered husbands seem somehow more ambiguous than stories about battered wives. After all, men are supposed to be tough and strong and they are generally more physically strong than women and so should be able to defend themselves well. Of course, they can’t do that when they’re asleep, and weapons like knives make great equalizers. I do find that both kinds of stories leave many of us not in the situation wondering, “Why do you stay? Why don’t you leave?” This seems especially true when the subjects are people of some financial means, like, say, professional golfers. But of course, it must seem very different to the people involved; as in the linked story, the victim still professes love for the attacker. For the record, I don’t believe for a second that people fake these kinds of injuries on themselves, as the wife claims John Daly did in this case. Maybe in “smart thief” or “elaborate con job” movies, they do, but not in real life. I hope that things work out for the Dalys and that they are able to go their separate ways without further violence, of course, but the whole thing just makes me sad that such things happen.