Trash, don't pick it up

Mitt Romney, intimate & in person:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.

Romney went on: "[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

 ....

That's the part that's got people abuzz. What I found interesting was this:

They'll probably be looking at what the polls are saying. If it looks like I'm going to win, the markets will be happy. If it looks like the president's going to win, the markets should not be terribly happy. It depends of course which markets you're talking about, which types of commodities and so forth, but my own view is that if we win on November 6th, there will be a great deal of optimism about the future of this country. We'll see capital come back and we'll see—without actually doing anything—we'll actually get a boost in the economy. If the president gets reelected, I don't know what will happen. I can—I can never predict what the markets will do. Sometimes it does the exact opposite of what I would have expected. But my own view is that if we get a "Taxageddon," as they call it, January 1st, with this president, and with a Congress that can't work together, it's—it really is frightening.

Three things, reversed:

Third thing: Taxageddon, or the fiscal cliff,  the sequester, or whatever stupid term you want, is the result of GOP intransigence on taxes. They were bluffing that they would default on the debt, and Obama was willing to call their bluff. But they were also willing to play chicken with it in an absolutely unprecedented manner. The result was the sequester. An underlying theme of the Romney campaign, however, has been: give in to the blackmailers. Congress can't work with Obama, not because Obama has not reached out, been willing to cross pretty much every red line that any Democratic constituency has ever drawn (Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare... and even the insistence that deficit reduction have some taxes; the sequester had no tax increases, which was supposedly the red line for any budget deal--although in fairness, the expiration of the Bush tax cuts is a card in the Dems hand). No, Republicans in Congress have decided not to work with the President. Romney's argument is that this is frightening, and that accordingly, we should encourage this sort of reckless behavior.

Second thing: Gotta love me some magic. Given that the Romney forecast is for 12 million new jobs in his first term, which is the currently scheduled forecast, it strikes me that his plan is "no additional growth, no additional jobs, just additional tax and safety net cuts."

First thing: Markets are up in September, during which it's seemed as though Obama is pulling ahead. They went up considerably on the 6th, the day after Clinton's speech that so many apparently loved. And then they went up again in response to QE3, which Romney has criticized.

Are you fucking kidding me...

A worser sort of trash...

I am going to excerpt massively, because, well because I'd rather that no one followed the link.

Sally Quinn announces the end of power in Washington - The Washington Post

"It was telling that Vanity Fair had bought more tables at the dinner than most of the Washington news organizations.

On the way home (we skipped the after-parties), I suddenly realized that this grotesque event signaled the end of power as we have known it. That dinner —which seemed to have more celebrities, clients and advertisers than journalists and politicians —was the tipping point.

The grotesqueness was being stuck between Ms. Gingrich and Ms. Kardashian at the White House Correspondent's Dinner. Ms. Quinn has helpfully informed us that she was invited to the after-parties (obliquely/ostentatiously [depends on the reader I suppose] displaying her social credentials in passing is a strong point of Ms. Quinn's). She has suggested that she knows power, that the power she knows is the power we know, and she claims that this has passed. We shall see.

The decline of power has been happening for a while. In 1987, I wrote a piece for this magazine called “The Party’s Over.” In it, I chronicled the demise of the Washington hostess. That was 25 years ago, and people were complaining even then that Washington would never be the same.

I like the fact that she "suddenly realized" in 2012 what she had already chronicled in 1987. Frankly, I think that a piece titled "The Party's Over," in which the demise of the Washington hostess is the central narrative, would have been an episode of Murder, She Wrote. I wish it had been.

But power still trumped money in those days. Today, money trumps power. If Katharine Graham, the late publisher of The Washington Post, were having a party today, and politicians or statesmen received a conflicting invitation to a party put together by Sheldon Adelson (Gingrich’s super PAC guy), where do you think people would go? Adelson. No question.

If the late publisher of The Washington Post were having a party today, I suspect the only persons who would choose Adelson's event would be those whose fear of the undead was stronger than their morbid curiosity. While Kardashian and Adelson might not be The Right Sort of People for Ms. Quinn, I would prefer them to anyone so uninterested as to skip the dead hostess' party.

Now, at a party, if you find people staring over your shoulder to see who’s more important in the room, they’re usually looking at someone rich, rather than someone powerful. (Or perhaps they’re staring at themselves in a mirror, as I once observed.)

She could have just observed, rather than noxiously informing us that this is one of her little wits, the pearls that make her such a card in the social circuit. Is this why she is given space in the Post? Because she has made clever little remarks at parties? Has she done anything, at all, ever?

Power in Washington used to be centered on the White House, the Congress, the Cabinet, the diplomatic corps and the journalists. Today, all of those groups depend on money for their very existence. The real power lies with the lobbyists, the money-raisers, the super PACs, the bundlers, the corporations and rich people. The hottest ticket on the planet is not an invitation to the White House but an invitation to the World Economic Forum in Davos....

Well she has appealed to my class prejudice against the wealthy and in favor of the democratically representative. Let's see where she is going with this.

The Obamas have been roundly criticized for not being part of the Washington social scene. The question is, does it matter? Could Obama win or lose the presidency because he has dissed the Washington community? I suspect the answer is no. It doesn’t matter anymore....

Oh for fuck's sake. "Roundly criticized" might be the only part of this paragraph that bears any resemblance to reality, considering its suggestion of the organizing committee of the Washington social scene going round and each criticizing Obama in turn.

“Good luck and good timing are great, but ultimately, a Washington party rises and falls with its power quotient. This has always been the case.”
Ain’t no mo’....

I don't even know what she means by party anymore. Does she mean political party? Dinner party? "Ain't no mo'...." Is this a saying? Did she see this on The Wire?

There you have it. Money is power. The fundraiser has replaced the Washington dinner party....

Could it be that the Obamas, not knowing Washington, think that’s all there is to the social life here? Who wouldn’t want to stay away? On the other hand, he is the president of the United States and, whether he likes it or not, the leader of social as well as political Washington."

As much as I dislike the dominance of the rentiers and the monied, it is certainly better than the dinner party set. The only think less democratic (in that great old-time democracy meaning of the term) than the fundraiser is the dinner party.

This is The Age of Innocence, without any of Wharton's wit, callous disregard, and self-awareness. While it may have mattered for those who were in its embrace, the passing of this social world is as great a loss as the passing of a kidney stone: sucks to be the one affected, but better for all involved once it's gone.

But let's not pretend for a second that this has really passed away. Rather, Ms. Quinn is showing the contempt of the beta bourgeois for the alpha bourgeois, the disgust of the useless, dreary, and destitute nobility with the social parvenus and climbers. That is, she is showing the least interesting or ennobling manifestation of class envy that is supposedly such an un-American trait: the dreary complaints of an inner-track that they are not the innermost, totally uncoupled with a recognition that there might be tracks even further along the radius.

I would say I'm genuinely torn...

... but I don't think I am.

Chris LeBarton jumped at the chance to get in on Facebook’s initial public offering. The Potomac investor and a group of friends pooled $50,000 to purchase $35 pre-offering shares through a hedge fund connection.
He said he knew it was a gamble, but he never imagined he would get cheated. After Facebook’s stock closed almost break-even its first day of trading and then fell for a few days before recovering modestly, LeBarton and his friends are looking at a paper loss of 6 percent.
“I went into this not even thinking about that possibility,” he said. “The big guys made out, and it seems the little guys got burned.”

When you are doing anything through a "hedge fund connection," you should be a little skeptical. When one has an inner track on something, it is tough to be too upset that your inner track wasn't the innermost.

The worst sort of trash...

BY ROBERT RUBIN Congress's failure to reach a fiscal "grand bargain" last summer manifested the deep economic-policy divide separating Democrats and Republicans. Fortunately, the so-called fiscal cliff will soon create an extraordinary second opportunity for a breakthrough compromise.

Oh thank heavens for that. I've always disliked the millennialism of the elite centrist class. This is their wet dream equivalent of the Marxist's "heightening the contradictions," that a worsening situation--the brink, the abyss, the fiscal cliff--will cause a fracture in the fabric of regular politics, an eruption of the stupendous energy that has been locked in gridlock. Yes, I mean the achievement of a bipartisan political settlement that will finally put politics behind us, or at least will put it behind us on the one thing they insist they care about. And this time, I promise, this time the Republicans will not turn around next time they have office and say that the largest single threat to the nation is a surplus, and that this must all be given away in upward tax cuts. This time Lucy will hold the fucking football and Charlie will kick it into fiscal heaven.

Washington's continued failure to get our fiscal house in order poses five basic risks. One, government borrowing risks crowding out private investment. Two, our unsustainable fiscal outlook undermines business confidence by creating uncertainty about future policy, economic conditions and our ability to govern, which in turn dampens investment and hiring.

Never you mind about the huge downside risks to actually living people who are already suffering and under severe economic stress. We have the risk of crowding out, of which there have been exactly zero indicators that it has arrived. Certainly if one continues to press on the accelerator, there comes a time when one goes faster than they can handle. Presumably, one starts to slow down when there are reliable indicators that they are indeed going too fast, and not just when one recognizes that one is speeding up. Crowding out is a real phenomenon. As such, it has real indicators of whether it is happening. It isn't. When investors are putting their money in government debt because of the prices it commands (currently costs them money to lend to the US government, and yet they continue to do so), and not because of the security it entails, that is the time to start worrying about crowding out.

Rubin, however, comes to a not terribly unreasonable position of a "10-to-12 year track of deficit reduction that stabilizes the ratio of debt to GDP and then begins to bring it down." That's not obviously problematic, although it was interesting to see the words "Health Care spending" mentioned not once, nor tagged with the clause (which should always follow) "... will devour private and public entities alike." By beef is with the tone, the "fortunately," and the total divorce of pearl-clutching concerns from reality.

Straw men to the left of me,

Yglesias might believe this. If he does, he has fallen into a fantasy world of straw men debates.

To an extent, the edu-left has been arguing that it's not reasonable to expect public schools to get good outcomes out of troubled kids and now Romney's arrived with a plan that will in fact give up on that aspiration.

One of the reasons I stopped reading Yglesias was not his neoliberalism, which I try generally to follow and at least keep abreast, but rather his tendency to debase the arguments of others. Left-inclined education policy thinkers tend to believe that (1) the primary determinant of education outcomes is the various non-education dimensions of the reproduction of poverty, and that (2) policies that might seem reasonable or even desirable in the abstract are in practices formulated and implemented in such a way that the public ends up distributing money upwards, to the wealthy and private interests. Which is Yglesias' point in this article.

Hence, they are reticent about charter schools, they would like state-wide funding, they are opposed to school choice not because of the choice, but because they are designed and implemented to suck money from the public coffers while not actually achieving meaningful school choice. These are the debates I hear among leftist education policy experts.

No one thinks it is unreasonable to expect schools to achieve improvements. But Yglesias postures that anyone who thinks that the possibility of gains is not linear, and that structural disadvantages make it increasingly difficult to achieve positive outcomes (the marginal effect of good education is greatest at the middle, it is smaller at the extremes... not very controversial), and who is conservative relative to on-the-table policy proposals is "arguing that it's not reasonable to expect public schools to get good outcomes out of troubled kids."

This is cheap, this is why I stopped reading Yglesias.

p.s. As good a time as any to link to Daniel Denvir's article on the battle over Philly schools.You will find lots of concern and conservatism relative to the proposed reforms, but you will find little in the way of suggestion that it is unreasonable to expect public schools to get good outcomes out of troubled kids.

Endebted prisoners

I have little to add to this piece by Tabarrok on debtor's prisons.

In Washington state unpaid legal debt accrues at an interest rate of 12%. As a result, the median person convicted in WA sees their criminal justice debt grow larger over time.
Many states are now even charging the accused to apply for and use a public defender! As a result, some defendants are discouraged from exercising their rights to an attorney.
Most outrageously, in some states public defender, pre-trial jail and other court fees can be assessed on individuals even when they are not convicted of any crime. Failure to pay criminal justice fees can result in revocation of an individual’s drivers license, arrest and imprisonment. Individuals with revoked licenses who drive (say to work to earn money to pay their fees) and are apprehended can be further fined and imprisoned. Unpaid criminal justice debt also results in damaged credit reports and reduced housing and employment prospects. Furthermore, failure to pay fees can mean a violation of probation and parole terms which makes an individual ineligible for Federal programs such as food stamps, Temporary Assistance to Needy Family funds and Social Security Income for the elderly and disabled.
It’s difficult to argue against criminal justice fees for those who can pay, but for those who cannot– and most criminal defendants are poor–such fees can be a personal and public policy disaster. Criminal justice debt drags people further away from reintegration with civil society. A person’s life can spiral out of their control when interest, late fees, revocation of a driver’s license and ineligibility for public assistance, mean that unpaid criminal justice debt snowballs. You can’t get blood from a stone but if you try, you can break the stone.
Optimal punishment is swift and sure but also has a defined endpoint. As with bankruptcy, punishment must end, leaving both hope and opportunity. We used to release criminals without a nickel or a nail but with an understanding that their debt to society had been paid. Today, we release criminals with a ball of debt and other restrictions that chains them to the criminal justice system and which can pull them back into prison long after their sentences have been served. Releasing people with little hope or opportunity for reintegration with civil society is good for neither the releasees nor society.

Other than once more taking the opportunity to remind people of the brilliance of Terry Gilliam's Brazil, in which credit lines for convicts to pay the cost of their imprisonment ensures their continued indebtedness.

Noted assholes

Noted asshole, Mark Leonard:

Europe's transformative power comes from its ability to reward reformers and withhold benefits from laggards.

How's that working out in the age of austerity? He is right in the sense that 'Europe' has certainly increased its institutional authority over Europe. And the talk of withdrawal seems to have receded since Greece defaulted and the world didn't end.  But to many Europeans this hardly looks like a recommending feature. Rather, the entire continent is now beholden to an institution that won't/can't do its job as the lender of last resort, and who have used this as leverage to make the working and middle classes suffer.

From a truly insufferable book: why europe will run the 21st century.

And for those who want more, from the jacket sleeve:

Europe only looks dead because it is seen through American eyes. But America's reach is shallow and narrow. It can bribe, bully, or impose its will anywhere in the world, but when its back is turned its potency wanes. Europe's reach is broad and deep, spreading its values from Albania to Zambia. It brings other countries into its orbit rather than defining itself against them, and once countries come under the influence of its laws and customs they are changed for ever.

Emphasis inexplicably in the original, although this is presumably more Fourth Estate, a division of HarperCollinsPublishers (emphasis also inexplicably in the original), than Leonard.

Thoughts that leap to mind:

1. Where the fuck is Albania? Oh I forgot: it's in Europe, not the incomparably more important 'Europe.'
2. "... rather than defining itself against them..." Does anyone else remember Turkey, and the delightful ugly that accompanied its fated efforts to join the club?
3. "...once countries come under the influence of its laws and customs they are changed for ever." No disagreement here. Or is he talking about 'Europe' again?

His new book is called What Does China Think? It is a "highly readable" 224 pages that YQ Magazine describes as a "detailed and investigative study on the Chinese psyche."

Labor, Civil, and Social Rights

Erik Loomis is doing wonderful things at Lawyers, Guns, and Money. This time, he is doing a wonderful thing by bringing to my attention what Jake Blumgart is doing.

It is for these reasons that Kahlenberg and Marvit argue that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act should be extended to cover labor organizing. In Why Labor Organizing Should be a Civil Right (available April 1), the authors claim it is time to change both the broken legal system that ineffectually “protects” American workers like Ballard, and the tactics of reformers who want to change it.

Kahlenberg and Marvit first argue the legal case. Title VII provides a powerful defense against discrimination based on race, sex, age, and religion (among others). Under the Civil Rights Act the employee can opt out of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission process (close to the civil rights equivalent of the NLRB) and take the case to a federal court, before a jury, where they are provided with the means to retain a lawyer if they do not have the necessary funds.

Such suits are not an easy win. The opponent is almost always a business with substantial legal and monetary resources. But the incentives are not one-sided: Employees stand to win much more than $5,000. As Kahlenberg and Marvit note, “a plaintiff may be awarded a variety of remedies, including back pay (with interest), reinstatement or front pay, equitable relief, compensatory damages, and punitive damages.” Lost overtime, health and pension benefits are included, as are “money damages to cover emotional pain, suffering, inconvenience, mental anguish.” These cases also make the right of “discovery” available, opening up internal documents and data to the court and the public—a prospect many companies dread. In short, firing workers would no longer be a painless way to stamp out a union organizing drive.

This goes back to my post earlier today on labor and contraception, and why I don't categorize issues along an economic/social divide, or an economic/civil rights divide. I see the fight instead as being to what extent do we want to embed the principle of autonomous control by individuals and self-organized communities over their decisions and actions into our institutions. It is not my position that maximizing this is always preferential, nor that there are not in fact tradeoffs and conflict between which individuals and communities are accorded preferential treatment in their capacity to have authority over their decisions: racist store-owners, most people would agree, should be denied a capacity to exclude people based on color (or class, but fewer people agree) from their establishments, and racist unions should be denied the capacity to organize their associations as they see fit if that involves the exclusion of persons from other social categories.

But labor rights are civil rights are association (labor organizing) rights are social (privacy) rights . Abortion restrictions, yellow-dog contracts, and the exclusion of workers from a say in the operation of their workplace are all instances of the same basic conflict: who should be accorded authority in a given place and a given area, and how far does this authority over persons extend.

Anti-Labor Philosophy and Birth Control

Santorum, from February's ginned up controversy on birth control:

"When government gives you rights, the government can tell you how to exercise those rights," Santorum said during his victory speech in St. Charles, Mo. "And we saw that just in the last week, with a group of people, a small group of people — just Catholics in the United States of America! — who were told you have a right to health care, but you will have the health care that we tell you you have to give your people, whether it is against the teachings of your church or not."

This is the language of subordinate control, of having a train of dependents whose lives are structured not by their own autonomous decisions and their own self-chosen values, but by yours. The "your people" Santorum is referring to, of course, are the employees at Catholic institutions, many of which serve public purposes, and who are themselves often not Catholic.

This is core of anti-labor philosophy: the belief that an employer's relatively legitimate authority (control over the means and ends of a discrete decision area) over employees in the workplace extends outward into the private and social life of the worker. The fight between the 'free labor' liberal and more radical labor philosophies was, in one sense, about the authority of the employer in the demarcated work space. It's good to know that we've so conceded the authority of the employer in the 'workplace' that we can once again make room for the fight over the employer's authority in the total life of the worker.

This, by the way, is why I am always reluctant to embrace the "fiscal liberal/social liberal" dichotomy.

Best news in a while...

Reform

For New York’s bankers and traders, the new math suddenly reordered their assumptions about their place in a post-crash city. “After tax, that’s like, what, $75,000?” an investment banker at a rival firm said as he contemplated Morgan Stanley’s decision. He ran the numbers, modeling the implications. “I’m not married and I take the subway and I watch what I spend very carefully. But my girlfriend likes to eat good food. It all adds up really quick. A taxi here, another taxi there. I just bought an apartment, so now I have a big old mortgage bill.” “If you’re a smart Ph.D. from MIT, you’d never go to Wall Street now,” says a hedge-fund executive. “You’d go to Silicon Valley. There’s at least a prospect for a huge gain. You’d have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. It looks like he has a lot more fun.”

To be clear, the $75,000 is the bonus, not the salary. Also, the national real median household income in the United States is $49,445, or 66% of this banker's estimated bonus. It does make one long for a non-existent past when our pampered elites were not so sophomoric, not such colossal whiners, so eager to shift the blame onto their girlfriend's eating habits and taxes, so eager to attribute credit for their inflated incomes to their intelligence and drive.

Maybe this is why Downton Abbey is having such success.

We knew Newt was toast, but...

...this makes it as close to official until a majority of delegates have been assigned.

Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino executive keeping Newt Gingrich’s presidential hopes alive, has relayed assurances to Mitt Romney that he will provide even more generous support to his candidacy if he becomes the Republican nominee, several associates said in interviews here.The signals from Mr. Adelson, whose politics are shaped in large part by his support for Israel, reflect what the associates said was his deep investment in defeating President Obama and his willingness to play a more prominent role in the Republican Party and conservative causes. The assurances have been conveyed in response to a highly delicate campaign by Mr. Romney and his top Jewish financial supporters to dissuade Mr. Adelson from adding to the $10 million that he and his wife have given to a pro-Gingrich “super PAC,” Winning Our Future, that has been tearing into Mr. Romney through television advertising.

Also, can anyone read this article and not come away with the impression of sustained coordination between the campaigns and the PACs? 

I've been under the impression since Newt's surge that this was really about Adelson flexing his muscles in the GOP. Newt was a pawn in Adelson's game; this is Adelson signaling to Romney what he wants in order to clear the field.

Civilization and its discontents...

I know this is tired and played, but man does it still get my goat.

At the age of six, Polanski began a life of persecution, flight and the threat of incarceration – first from the Nazi invaders of Poland, then an oppressive communist regime, and finally the American criminal justice system after his newfound sense of freedom led him into transgression. The world must seem a prison, society a succession of traps, civilised values a deceptive veneer, life itself a battle against fate.

Good lord. Damnable civilized values, deceiving him into the trap of drugging and raping a child (sodomy, because he couldn't get assurances from her that she was on the pill).

The 20th century was brutal; many people, however, managed to enjoy their newfound sense of freedom without doing what Polanski did.

p.s: There is a complete effacement of agency here: exactly the type of effacement that conservatives accuse liberals of whenever liberals say "statistical correlates of crime include poverty" and that liberals enable when they respond by attack conservatives for saying "statistical correlates of crime include broken homes." The "newfound sense of freedom" is not some Pied Piper. I am as willing as anyone to efface agency, which is both excessively mystified and black boxed in a causal sense and exaggeratedly liberal. But even I have my limits.

The Wire: dumbest show to be considered smart, or fakest show to be considered real?

Reading up on Elijah Anderson, I found his thoughts on 'The Wire':

“I am struck by how dark the show is,” says Elijah Anderson, the Yale sociologist whose classic works Code of the Streets, Streetwise, and A Place on the Corner document black inner-city life with noted clarity and sympathy. Anderson would be the last person to gloss over the severe problems of the urban poor, but in The Wire he sees “a bottom-line cynicism” that is at odds with his own perception of real life. “The show is very good,” he says. “It resonates. It is powerful in its depiction of the codes of the streets, but it is an exaggeration. I get frustrated watching it, because it gives such a powerful appearance of reality, but it always seems to leave something important out. What they have left out are the decent people. Even in the worst drug-infested projects, there are many, many God-fearing, churchgoing, brave people who set themselves against the gangs and the addicts, often with remarkable heroism.”

Had he pretty much stopped at "what they have left out are the decent people," that would have been fine.[1] But of the four adjectives he gives to describe the 'decent people'--themselves apparently a discrete category--do two of them really need to be "God-fearing, churchgoing"? Not necessarily redundant, but nothing to do with decency either.

I believe I am the only person I know with similar interests who found the show to be ludicrously bad. It didn't resonate, nor was it at all powerful in its "depiction of the code of the streets." It was organizational theory (good) and 7th grade dialogue (terribly bad). The overall result was silly. What it got right--the geography of the drug trade[2], the ongoing and antagonistic relationship between individual cops and individual young men, the attention to political constituency service--is pretty much swamped by what it gets wrong, namely, everything else.

And a pet peeve: writers in love with their own damned words. Many people, myself included,  begin papers/book chapters with a quote from one of the principals that succinctly states the argument, the puzzle, or the basic problematic that the paper is going to worth through. Would you ever consider starting, or would you take seriously a paper that started with an indented quote from your own damned writing. And yet every episode, this is what the egos behind 'The Wire' would do. And especially obnoxious: these were never thematically tied to what was going to come. They were pretentious filler, which didn't even have the merit of remotely resembling the way anybody actually talks, ever, anywhere.

[1] He could also have said "what they left out are the decent actors" of "what they left out are the decent writers." The only few characters with any charisma or presence, the only ones you actually believed or at the very least liked to see on screen, were Omar, Stringer Bell, and... I don't know, maybe Avon, once in a while.
[2] But not the ludicrous volume. Pay attention to the amount of coming/going in the high rises and projects, and then on the corners, in the first and third season. More than half of Baltimore would have to be buying from these three places in order to get that level of foot traffic.

This is some bishop here.

But Anthony R. Picarello Jr., general counsel and associate general secretary of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, disagreed. “It’s true that the church doesn’t have a First Amendment right to have a government contract,” he said, “but it does have a First Amendment right not to be excluded from a contract based on its religious beliefs.”

True. Of course, it is not being excluded from a contract based on its religious beliefs, but because it won't perform the contracted services. One wouldn't hire a gardener who refused to garden, one should not contract out the right to manage adoptions to someone who refuses to undertake adoptions. 

Bah humbug

I hate Christmas. Have for years. See nothing in it but mandated joy, the time of the year when the full weight and firepower of the industrial-entertainment complex (and, let's face it, the gubmint) is lined up on the side of the awful people and their insistence on uniform pleasantness and shallow joy.

I was in the laundromat the other day, and Anne Murray was playing. Anne fucking Murray. I'm not even in Canada, let alone in 1988. I was on hold with the bank--yuletide joy--and they were playing a sultry jazz version of Winter Wonderland. Slowing the song down doesn't make it better, just longer.

It's not that I hate joy, pleasantness, or good tidings. Rather, I suffer a visceral rejection of insistence. Christ, what's wrong with subtlety?

Which brings me to my point. I spent the last few weeks in France and England. And lord knows the English should be truly insufferable over Christmas: few people take more satisfaction in conformity and enforced communion in pleasantness (through provincial gossip and badgering where available, through the State's 'soft hand' where needed). True fact: the song The World Turned Upside Down, apparently played when the British surrendered at Yorktown, was written about the suppression of good ole English Christmas traditions by Cromwell. Possibly the Lord Protector's only redeeming act.

And Paris is the capital of the haute bourgeoisie and their particularly centralized consumption: Galeries Lafayette, Le Bon Marché, and the trashier BHV.[1] France is the we-don't-care-about-christ-just-consumption Christian nation par excellence. Surely they must make Christmas unbearable, right?

Wrong! In both, it was much more enjoyable. Still about consuming, which isn't really the problem for me. But, oddly, less insistent. Subtler. You can be in their world, not of their world, and they won't try to force a change. Maybe I'm just not as used to their Christmas songs, so they don't grate. But I think it went deeper.

Christmas in America has to mean something. It has to bring the family together. Has to make us all feel in harmony. Or something. There is a desperation about it. In England and France, they didn't seem to care that it mean anything, and it meant more as a result.[2]

Blah.... Here is a song appropriately forlorn for the season.

Also, same, but different:



[1] trashier? This year the theme was Noël Québecois.
[2] Counter: England is the land that brought us Do they know it's Christmas, amongst the most offensive and condescending songs ever recorded.

Powerpoints to peace.

There are fragments that perfectly capture the problem. Here is one:

The problem, of course, being the incoherent but surprising success (at shaping policy) of anti-Muslim ideology. Which rogue organization, funded by dirty money certainly, do you think is responsible for this graph? Follow the link to find out. Also, while the graph may be perfect in one sense (as a fragment to be read), Andrew Gelman lists a number of reasons why it is a truly terrible graph apart from its unabashed chauvinism: the incoherence of the x-axis, the absurdity of the linear slope, the beginning point of 1400 BC. I don't know why there is a big star on the right. Certainly don't know why it dominates visually over the crescents. 

They will be praised...

....it has come to this.

The administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, in a blunt acknowledgment that thousands of young black and Latino men are cut off from New York’s civic, educational and economic life, plans to spend nearly $130 million on far-reaching measures to improve their circumstances. 
The program, the most ambitious policy push of Mr. Bloomberg’s third term, would overhaul how the government interacts with a population of about 315,000 New Yorkers who are disproportionately undereducated, incarcerated and unemployed.
To pay for the endeavor in a time of fiscal austerity, the city is relying on an unusual source: Mr. Bloomberg himself, who intends to use his personal fortune to cover about a quarter of the cost, city officials said. A $30 million contribution from Mr. Bloomberg’s foundation would be matched by that of a fellow billionaire, George Soros, a hedge fund manager, with the remainder being paid for by the city.

It was once believed that the provision of assistance services was, rightfully, a charity, an opportunity for those who provided rather than a right for those who received [1].

I blame Jesus.

" 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the Devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.' They will also answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick in prison and did not help you?'. He will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me' "
Matthew 25:41-45

There are those who consider the need and misery of others as opportunities to be righteous. Charity serves this impulse. Social welfare rights do not care one lick about the opportunity for the taxpayer, or the gratitude of the receiver. As rights, they insist upon the dignity of the recipient, not the redemption of the provider. It is probably unfair to blame Jesus: the passage is pretty clear that the hungry, naked, imprisoned, stranger is not to be treated as a means but as an end. But Christianity is like Fichtian metaphysics. When what matters is your soul, everything comes to be about you.

So, when Bloomberg and Soros are being praised, let us remember who is not [2].

[1] Also, it was once considered the responsibility of the noble and the well-heeled gentle to step up their spending in times of hardship, to compensate for the loss of business and markets experienced during a downturn. Noblesse oblige and all that. Glad to see that that's back as well.
[2] To be clear.

On the take...

On Monday I had a wise-crack, in response to a comment from Atrios.

It's been said a million times, but for the millionth+1 time, the problems we have are solvable. Our elites are evil and/or stupid, depending on your take...

 I believe a more appropriate sentence construction would be "depending on their take."

God I can be insufferable. Well, as it turns out, one person's smart-ass-wise-crack is another person's well-founded suspicion.

And the other Republicans on the commission knew how bogus Wallison’s stuff was. They even worried that Ed Pinto, who was responsible for the data, might have been on the take:

Maybe this email is reaching you too late but I think wmt [William M. Thomas] is going to push to find out if pinto is being paid by anyone.

Good Stuff. Now there is no evidence that Pinto was on the take; nor, really, does his being paid or not paid really determine whether he was on the take/not take, or whether he just likes to play with numbers until he achieves an outcome that massages his priors. But there is a level of willful dishonesty (as opposed to my more noble reluctant dishonesty?) in knowing a report to be false, in coordinating the release of this report so as to strengthen your political coalition's operatives, all the while having a slight anxiety not that the person generating the report might be receiving outside funds to produce a false report but that the Vice-Chairman of the committee, W. M Thomas, might inquire into the matter. From Rortybomb:

Two days later, Mr. Brill followed up with another e-mail to the Vice Chairman’s special assistant relaying a conversation in which Vice Chairman Thomas expressed concern that Mr. Pinto might be receiving outside funds for his efforts to influence the Commission...

Wallison’s argument is the argument for the conservative right on the crisis, echoing through their networks.  Yet behind closed door the Republicans on the FCIC are in damage control mode.  They can’t find a way to deal with Wallison and this argument and they are actively working to play him and his research partner against each other.  They are even so confused as how someone could buy the entirety of this argument that they are worried that it was planted by a paid interest and that their fellow member is a “parrot” for those interests.

Bastille, Guthrie, Republic

I think it is pleasantly appropriate that Woody Guthrie's birthday is also Bastille Day. We watch the dismantling of la république sociale, and the tradition of democratic-republicanism in the United States is an ashen memory.

Take your pick from the Ludlow Massacre and I ain't got no home, but the above link to una boluda en brooklyn really has the video you want, live footage of Guthrie.

Family Structure and Political Ambition

Via the Monkey Cage, a new paper by Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox:

Based on data from the 2011 Citizen Political Ambition Study – a new, national survey of nearly 4,000 “potential candidates” for all levels of office – we provide the first thorough analysis of the manner in which traditional family arrangements affect the initial decision to run for office. Despite a substantial gender gap in political ambition, and the persistence of traditional family structures and gender roles among potential candidates, our findings culminate to provide clear evidence that traditional family dynamics do not account for the gender gap in potential candidates‟ interest in running for office. Neither marital and parental status, nor the division of labor pertaining to household tasks and childcare, predict interest in pursuing elective office, taking steps typically associated with a campaign, or actually declaring a candidacy. Further, family arrangements do not influence patterns of political recruitment or potential candidates‟ self-evaluations of their qualifications to run for office, which serve as two leading predictors of political ambition. This is not to downplay the fact that the gender gap in political ambition remains substantial and unchanging. But it is to suggest that family arrangements are not a contributing factor.

They conclude by suggesting that structural and psychological barriers--namely political recruitment and  self-perceived qualification--are the major barriers to more women running for office.

One thing that surprised me was the lack of a question about child care workers. I have moved in the nanny circuit, and there was a presumption among the class of families (women and men in law, business, education, and political activism) sampled here that a child needs a nanny, or more accurately, that a mother needs a nanny [1]. The father's business (and for many of the father, 'business' is a very generous description of what they do or the time burdens imposed upon them) was, supposedly, far too consuming for them to take on a greater share of parental responsibilities. More often than not, these fathers also believed that the burden was shared relatively equally, although most would concede that their wives bore a slight disproportion. They figured, well shit, the kids exhaust me... there is no way she could be doing much more than I am. The mother knows better, and they get a nanny. I wouldn't expect this to have much of an effect, and certainly I agree that the structural impediment of candidate recruitment is the more important cause. But it was an odd omission.

[1] This is a biased sample of anecdotes on my part: I knew these people through nannies, and so of course they had normalized the belief that all families with members pursuing professional careers needed nannies.