The Lonely libertarian

More Cops Meet Dogs

2010-09-13T16:21:00.002-04:00

Reason's Radley Balko has a roundup of the latest cop shoots dog stories. I took particular note of the Lexington, Kentucky story, where a police officer pursued a fleeing suspect into a fenced in yard and proceeded to shoot the dog of the family whom the property belonged too. I find the comments particularly interesting in these sorts of circumstances and there's definitely a growing awareness that this isn't simply an isolated incident. Of course you have the typical reflexive defenders of law enforcement, but the commenters in Lexington do a good job of challenging such sentiments.

Of course, far too many commenters wade into the debate over the officers state of mind: Is he a vicious dog killer or was he just simply making the best of a bad situation? As I've pointed out before, judgments of individual police officers tend to be counter productive. Writing off unjustified shootings to lousy police work on an individual level merely perpetuates the very policies that are problematic in the first place. As Radley Balko has asked time and time again, why are police seemingly so ill-equip to handle these encounters with dogs? Why isn't there training? Why aren't there departmental guidelines?

The folks that get worked up over any criticism of law enforcement exhibit the same sort of epistemic closure we just saw from Matt Yglesias's commenters about barber licensing. It's a reactionary defense of the status quo with no actual thought given to the issue in a vacuum.

In terms of these dog shootings, the point isn't that a police officer shooting a dog is never justified, the point is that for all the cases you find across the country a police officer shooting a dog in the course of duty, you have difficulty finding a case where such a shooting was deemed unjustified. The larger, across-the-board problem isn't that this officer shot this dog, but that there are no mechanisms for taking these cases seriously and no mechanisms for ensuring our pets are safe should police come on to our property.

Quran Burning and Mosque Building

2010-09-12T10:09:00.002-04:00

I'm a day late and apparently Florida pastor Terry Jones did not go ahead with his plans to burn the Quran on the 9th anniversary of 9-11, but I did have a few comments I wanted to share while they're still relevant. A number of conservative commentators have weighed in over the last few weeks making the ridiculous comparison between Jones and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the man behind the Ground Zero mosque/community center. After all, both building the mosque and burning the Quran are perfectly legal- the outrage is all about the offensive nature of the action.

Of course, it should be a bit more obvious that there's a big difference between burning the religious text of a major religion and building a religious center. One act is clearly meant to be offensive and provocative, while the other is at worst, of ambiguous motivation. And herein lies the problem, that not every "offensive act" is of equal offense. No reasonable people are making the case that Terry Jones is anything other than a giant douche, but there are reasonable people on both sides of the mosque issue, with one side arguing quite specifically that it is not offensive to have a mosque near Ground Zero with the other side arguing that it is in fact offensive.

And I'll stand by my position even if the mosque is never built and the controversy goes away. Putting the mosque there, even if you question the motivations behind it, seems to me to be exactly why America is great. We're not an insidious monster because we keep other people out (like the segregated Muslim communities of many European countries), we're an insidious monster because we let everyone in and the melting pot of a growing American culture oozes to every corner of the globe. The truth is, even the most insular American communities are far more welcoming to outsiders than much of sophisticated Europe (Feel free to challenge me on this if you disagree, but it's more gut feeling than fact- a reflection on the nature of American versus European culture, not the result of any comprehensive survey). Just like those who are fervently anti-immigration, I think the mosque opposition is on the wrong side of history here, precisely because of American tradition

Our Bold Republican Future

2010-09-10T10:34:00.002-04:00

For whatever reason I tend to be on any number of odd political lists. I tend to get a lot of e-mails for a wide variety of causes I don't agree with or have no interest in, but I rarely receive anything in the mail. So it was quite a surprise when I opened my mail the other day to find an NRSC Republican strategy ballot (direct from Utah Senator Orrin Hatch no less!). I'm not a registered Republican and I've never given money too any politician, so I'm not sure how I got on this list, but nonetheless, I've got the ballot. I was going to respond, just for the hell of it, and submit some responses to push the Republican party in a more libertarian direction, but that wasn't in the cards. What's troubling was how virtually no space was devoted to limiting the nature of government and how divorced this Republican strategy ballot was from even the most basic of tea party rhetoric.

Before anyone accuses me of taking political mailings too seriously, let me just say that I don't take them all that seriously - maybe I'm a bit out of the loop with the day-to-day workings of the parties - But if this is what we have to look forward too if the Republicans take back Congress (and perhaps the Presidency in 2012) color me unimpressed. I understand that this is a "strategy ballot" but the wording of the ballot specifically asks for opinions that reflect my values. Here are the questions from the ballot:

#1 Which issue(s) do you believe Republicans should highlight in the final months of this year's election campaigns?
* Permanent Tax Relief
* Saving Social Security
* Judicial Nominees
* Marriage/Values
* Medicare Reform
* Border Security
* Homeland Security
* Military/Defense Spending

#2 Which of the Democrats' liberal policies do you oppose the most?
* Raising Taxes By Trillions of Dollars
* Cutting the U.S. Defense Budget
* Undermining Traditional Marriage
* No Reform to save social security
* Blocking U.S. Energy Independence
* U.N. Control of the War On Terrorism

#3 Senate Democrats think taxes should go up so that Barack Obama can "spread the wealth around." Senate Republicans support tax relief for working families, businesses and seniors. Whom do you support?
* Senate Republicans
* Senate Democrats
* Not Sure / Undecided

#4 Senate Republicans support responsible judges who will follow the U.S. Constitution and NOT legislate from the bench. Senate Democrats want to confirm "activist judges" who will use America's judicial system to promote liberal policies and strike down anti-terrorism efforts and law enforcement efforts they view as "too conservative." Whom do you support?
* Senate Republicans
* Senate Democrats
* Not Sure / Undecided

I'm not sure of the point of questions 3 and 4 if this is a "Republican strategy ballot," although perhaps it's a clumsy attempt to weed out the non-Republicans like myself. I'd like to think it's an effort to gauge how turned off people are by the language used, but I doubt it. Then there are the first few questions, which basically only mention taxes in terms of real libertarian concerns. (And as I've been blogging recently, discussing taxes absent a discussion on spending is downright negligent.) Is this what I'm supposed to think is the Republican agenda should they regain power? Opposing gay marriage? Building a fence around the border? Further intrusions into our lives by the national security state? Hell, I even have to wonder what saving social security means, when we're supposed to be upset at the Democrat oppositions to social security reform. And the laundry list of "liberal Democrat" policies sounds more like a Republican's bad dream than reality. I wish the Democrats were serious about gay marriage and cutting the defense budget and I have no idea what U.N. control of the war on terror even means, particularly given that the Obama administration has doubled down on all the Bush-era anti-terrorism tactics and has failed to fulfill the pre-election promise of closing down Gitmo.

This is everything that's wrong with politics and why libertarians have no political home. For everyone who would ever try and convince me to vote or lean Republican, this is precisely why I can't do it as a matter of general principle.

The conservative left, part II

2010-09-01T07:56:00.002-04:00

I had wanted to post something a few weeks ago in response to the glut of articles praising social security in lieu of the government program's 75th anniversary, but never got around to it. But after my last post about "the conservative left" it occurred to me that's there's no better example of this reactionary conservatism than the left's support for social security. This isn't just general support for a government run retirement system, but specific support for the American system, as it currently exists. Because social security has been such a rousing success, alternative methods of supporting the elderly need not be considered.

This adherence to tradition, albeit a government tradition in this case is the very nature of the conservative mind. For the forward thinking, the fact that the original social security program was designed at a time when many more workers would be working to support many few retirees should be reason enough to consider perhaps drastic changes to the mechanics of the program. But to those intent on preserving tradition, all the program needs is a few minor tweaks.

There's something to be said that a program may be in need of changing when it takes over 12&1/2 percent of the income of people like my wife and myself who are trying to start our own business. That's over 12&1/2 percent, before income taxes, going to support the elderly regardless of their wealth or their ability to support themselves. But social security proponents are so much in favor of the program as a program for all elderly that they'd consider raising the payroll tax cap (which I believe sits somewhere slightly above $100,000) well before cutting off benefits to the elderly who don't need them.

The traditional narrative is that the big government left wants to help the poor and down-trodden and the free market right wants to reduce government at all costs (including the well-being of the poor), but the nature of the debate doesn't fit that narrative precisely because of the left's conservative defense of social security.

Cycle of Stupidity, Part II

2010-08-31T20:31:00.002-04:00

Volokh Conspiracy blogger Todd Zywicki weighs in on the Jane-Mayer inspired Kock brothers kerfuffle. Surprisingly (given that we're talking about a generally conservative-libertarian site), a number of commenters weigh in with support for the Mayer piece. The general thrust of that support? That it's important for people to know these billionaires are supporting free market causes and that (gasp) free market causes may help their business interests. I'll leave it to Zywicki and others to point out the numerous cases where free market ideology works against the interests of big business. What I'm more interested is this notion that any of this matters, that disclosure matters in the idea business ... and that is what we're talking about, the idea business.

The implication by Mayer and everyone who's spoken favorably of her piece is that there's some sort of problem with people with money supporting limited government, free market ideas. It's sort of like saying that we ought to call into the motives of old people who support social security or poor people who support welfare. The larger government gets, the more people are likely to be impacted by it one way or another, and it's just ridiculous to disparage the motivation of people who claim to speak from an ideologically pure perspective based on nothing more than the fact such people could benefit from their favored policies. As I stated in the last post, why should money matter more than the quality of ideas? Why is knowing so much about where ideas might come from more important than the ideas themselves? Once you get into the source disparaging business, there's no turning back to the arena of honest intellectual debate.

Cycle of Stupidity

2010-08-29T19:52:00.004-04:00

Earlier this week, Reason's Matt Welch brought to my attention what he referred to as a "hit piece" by the New Yorker's Jane Mayer on the very libertarian, ultra wealthy Charles and David Koch and their "secret war on Obama." Read the New Yorker piece, take a look at the links, and read Welch's criticism, because I'll only lay out the basics here:

The New Yorker piece is a conspiracy-oriented, connect the dots, info dump on the Koch brothers and their long history of donating money to libertarian and limited government causes (including the Cato Institute, which they helped to found). Apparently, lower taxes and limited government is good for the bottom line of Koch Industries ... so ... connect the dots. As Matt Welch points out, Mayer refers to left-leaning think tanks as "non-partisan watch-dogs" while free-market think tanks are "part of some covert, nefarious plot." I could go on, but you probably get the idea.

Fast forward to the weekend, where Sunday's New York Times ranthis column by Frank Rich, about the "billionaires bankrolling the tea party." Rich points his readers in the direction of Mayer's New Yorker piece and worries that the "Koch agenda is morphing into the Republican agenda," thanks to the tea parties. (Reason's Matt Welch has an additional response to Rich's piece.)

So where does that leave us? Matt Welch was pretty concise in nailing the think tank double standard and then there's the obvious response that a more free-market, libertarian-leaning government doesn't always serve the interests of big business. But conspiracy theories about following the money and other nuttiness aside, what does all of this say about the debate over the nature of our democratic system of government? Ultimately, not much. However serious a tone Mayer's initial New Yorker piece tries to take, it's an inherently unserious topic. A real hit piece would point out that the policy wonks, economists, and scientists working for, say, the Cato Institute are falsifying data and research in their various endeavors. But because that would be a ridiculous accusation for any legitimate think tank of any political stripe, we instead get to read about the Koch brothers and their funding. This isn't to say there's no value in disclosure, but just as in political campaigns, this sort of intense focus on money only comes at the complete disregard for any discussion of actual ideas.

What we end up with is this, culled from the comments of Frank Rich's Times piece:

Hypothetical questions, and no, I am not naive, I'm just posing the questions.

What do these billionaire and multi-millionaire people want to happen in this country ?

What is their vision ? How do they view this country if everything they want actually takes place ?

Let's assume that all social programs are eliminated.

No more social security or medicare, resulting in millions of seniors becoming indigent. Where do they go ? LIve on the streets and then, when they cannot do that anymore because they're too sick from old age, to some kind of euthanasia program like the death panels that some of you invented to try to kill the healthcare legislation ?

No more welfare (AFDC), which is supposed to be only for children, even if the program has been significantly abused, and no more medicaid, resulting in millions of already lower-income people becoming totally broke and unable to get any health services. Where do they live ? On the street ? And, if they get sick are they turned away from the emergency rooms at the local hospitals ?

Let's assume that there is a change in power in Congress and the new Congress, including incumbent GOP members formerly deaf, dumb and blind about the deficit, and the new Congress absolutely refuses to add to the deficit and insists on balancing the budget.

An anti-deficit platform, at the same time that fighting wars and paying, in the aggregate, trillions of dollars for drones and fighter planes and bombs and cyber-security and every possible military "necessity."

No health care reform (just repeal it). No government regulation of financial institutions (just repeal it). No government regulation of business if it means any barriers to amassing wealth. Death of unionization. No restriction on ownership of handguns, hunting guns or assault weapons. No abortions, but no aid to families with dependent children. No federal funding for any states, for any reason. If social security must survive, then privatize it, so that millions of people can be forced to make investment decisions that they have no desire or capacity to handle, and the government forces them to invest in something, even a money market fund, benefitting Wall Street ?

That's what they want ? That's what will make their lives more wonderful and their bank accounts more bountiful ? That's what will make their vision of America come true ?

With all of their money, why don't they leave, instead of trying so hard to eliminate every single protection and support system that exists to maintain a system that has multiple economic classes ? Seriously. Just leave......go.......buy several islands or take over a small country that has no defenses and no working government and and build your own perfect society. Why not ? Why spend so much money trying to change an entire country when you can so easily go live elsewhere or build a country elsewhere that has the system you so desire ?

Just asking questions, you know? There's absolutely no recognition of the fact that agree or disagree with their conclusions, think tanks do actual work and have very specific policy proposals and recommendations for all aspects of national and local government policy. And there are liberal think tanks, conservative think tanks, and yes, free market libertarian think tanks. But the effect of the Mayer and Rich pieces on some is exactly what I said a real hit piece would be unable to prove: That the other side has no legitimate ideas.

In a way, it's no different from Rush Limbaugh going on the air to explain that Barack Obama hates America and doesn't want the economy to improve. It's part of a two-sided political meme, where the other side is specifically an enemy and not an intellectually equal rival. I could go on and on, but I'm sure my regular readers get the point. The entire point of this blog is to foster discussion and lead my readers in a more libertarian direction based on the strength of ideas. It doesn't matter whether George Bush is a Nazi or Barack Obama is a socialist, what matters, what should matter, are ideas and anyone going to the trouble of convincing you otherwise is not interested in being honest with you.

The conservative left

2010-08-22T19:14:00.002-04:00

I enjoy reading Matt Yglesias's blog for the same reason I enjoy reading Ezra Klein and any number of other young bloggers from this post-Clinton generation of liberal policy wonks: because they tend to take markets and libertarian arguments seriously. Even when I disagree with their conclusions, they tend to approach domestic policy issues from a reasonably analytical perspective. So it was with great interest as I watched the debate that unfolded on Yglesias's blog this weekend over occupational licensing. It started when Yglesias took the libertarian (or perhaps liberaltarian) position that barber licensing was unnecessary and had perhaps unintended costs that far outweighed the benefits. Ygelesias's leftish readers revolted, some wondering whether he was looking for a date with a Cato staffer, others calling him just plain wrong. It led to a string of posts over the weekend on a variety of licensing issues which are all worth a read:

Barack Obama, Barbering Deregulator
Licensing and Health Care (Which posed the very interesting question of why we can't pay to get our teeth cleaned without the presence of a dentist.)
A Free Market in Legal Services
And finally, Idealogical positioning

I lept into the commeting fray myself this past weekend and was amazed by the ferocity of people's insistence that the government really ought to regulate barbers. When I brought up the fact that local health and safety regulations would apply to any licensed or unlicensed barber, licensing was defended on the grounds that it provided another layer of consumer protection, presumably from lousy haircuts. When I questioned why we needed to license the dude that cuts my hair, but not the guy that makes my sandwich, I was mocked and got some answer about the licensing being for professionals.

A few minor points before I get to my larger one:

1- As a man, I could pay more for a sandwich than a haircut and it's possible that either service could come from a sole proprietor, one of a small number of employees of a sole proprietor, or a an employee of a larger business. And to cut my hair, you need a license, whether you work for the Hair Cuttery, whether you work for Jim's Barber shop, or whether you are Jim the Barber. Yet to handle my food, an activity with seemingly far more health and safety risks, you don't need a license.

2- In the health care licensing post, Yglesias remarked that the need for dentists to present for all teeth cleanings drives up the cost of health care and questioned whether a more free market in dental services would give us lower costs and better dental health. After all, if you could pay for the simple services of a dental hygienist, you could plan on getting your teeth cleaned three or four times a year and you could just see an actual dentist when you actually needed to. Yglesias's commenters balked at the idea: One said we needed to commission studies on the issue, while others worried about the inconvenience of having to go to a separate dentist appointment if the hygienist found a possible cavity. And my reaction was, really? The entire point of markets is to give people choices- if the thought of seeing an unaffiliated hygienist worries you, you could stick with your traditional arrangement. Not one supporter of the status quo could offer an example of how individuals could be harmed by getting a teeth cleaning from an unaffiliated dental hygienist. (And remember now, dental hygienists are licensed as medical professionals and I'm not making the ultra-libertarian argument that they shouldn't be licensed. We're simply asking the question of whether they should be able to do what they're licensed to do without having to work under a dentist.)

My larger point (that it looks like it took awhile to get to) is about the changing nature of political roles. Conservatives became associated with the ideology of free markets and small government because the conservatives of the the early-to-mid 20th century were seeking to conserve those classical liberal traditions. But since the time of FDR, the proponents of larger government have won time and time again, leaving us with the heavily regulated, heavily taxed world where we live today. And that leaves us in the rather interesting spot of free market perspectives as truly radical, while supporters of government are defenders of the status quo. I titled this post "the conservative left" because of the inherently conservative, reactionary nature of Yglesias's commenters. Yglesias titled his last post "ideological positioning," but I tend to see ideology as an intellectual framework that guides policy discussions, not a rigid enforcement of basic principles.

Intellectually speaking, I don't think the left wants to expand government just for the sake of expanding government, but for the sake of helping people and improving people's lives. But just like plenty of tea partiers and self-described conservatives have difficulty describing just what government they'd actually cut, there are far too many folks on the left who take the reverse tea party position of clinging to the existing structure of government no matter how pointless it is (and as Yglesias points out, no matter how many poor people are hurt by that structure.) Ultimately, both conservatism for it's own sake and progress for it's own sake are useless without context and further guiding principles. All other things being equal, maybe it's fair to say you lean towards preserving or altering the status quo, but all things are rarely equal.

What struck me about the defense of barber licensing was how similar it was to the defense we here of drug laws. My argument is always that you very specifically shouldn't decide on the necessity of an established law by considering the fact that the law already exists. This creates a self-perpetuating cycle where bad laws don't get overturned unless they're particularly egregious. The proper way to judge the necessity of a given law is to examine it in a vacuum, a sort of "if we were starting out from scratch" scenario. So the current legality of alcohol and illegality of marijuana is irrelevant in deciding what drug laws make sense, just as the prior existence of barber licensing should be irrelevant in deciding what professions require licensing.

In the vast majority of cases, there tends not to be a good defense of the status quo, precisely because we don't make laws in that sort of logical fashion. What we get are a hodgepodge of special interests and misguided responses to crises, mixed in with well-intentioned legislation. That the rules we wind up with don't always fit together logically isn't a surprise. In fact, given the extent of government regulation in this day and age, it would be shocking if the legislative process produced across the board regulation that fit together logically. The "conservative" reaction to defend government as it exists is misguided precisely because it reactionary and is not based upon any logical principles of how government should work.

I've blogged before about the debate over "epistemic closure" on the right and this may be the equivalent on the left. It's not just a failure to engage "the other side" but a failure to engage the intellectually curious on one's own side. It's obvious (as in the immigration debate) that the failure to engage can be at times a blatant disengagement of reality. But the sort of pernicious failure to engage by Yglesias's commenters is perhaps even worse, a rejection of logic with the facade of reasoned argument.

I tend to get worked up over these issues, no matter how small, where the empirical facts seem to dictate a logical choice. It's why (on much larger issues) I have problems with conservatives who claim to favor small government, but support a bloated, inefficient military and a byzantine immigration bureaucracy. It's why I have trouble with the inconsistency of alcohol being legal while marijuana is not, when marijuana is an equally dangerous if not less dangerous drug. And it's why I have trouble with the argument that my barber, who would have to be extremely negligent to harm me, requires government licensing, but my sandwich dude, who could get me sick by forgetting to wash his hands, does not.

If you want to take the position that drugs should be restricted based upon their relative level of danger, so be it, and we can debate that relative level of danger. Similarly, if you want want to set a relatively low bar for what fields should require government licenses, then let's debate what that bar should be, but you can't even have that debate when peoples position is to support the ad hoc system of licensing that currently exists.

Budgets, part I

2010-08-09T12:13:00.003-04:00

Reason's Matt Welch asks Can we at least have some elementary journalism in budget-cut scare stories? in regards to this New York Times article from the weekend. The Times piece tells us "Governments go to Extremes at the Downturn Wears On," highlighting Colorado Springs decision to cut costs by turning off street lights. Welch is clearly driven crazy by the same thing that drives me crazy. Can we have some numbers please:

All snickering about the NYT's slant aside, it strikes me as an elementary journalistic principle–whether we're talking about your local daily, a magazine of opinion, or certainly The Paper of Record–that if you're going to wrap even a heavily anecdotal feature around what is essentially a number (the total budget for various governmental units), you would find room within 2,350 words to, I dunno, INCLUDE THE GODDAMNED NUMBER.

This is what happens when you close school for 17 FridaysI mean, sure, we learn that Colorado Springs "shut off a third of its 24,512 streetlights this winter to save $1.2 million on electricity," and cut its police force from 687 to 643, but aside from that down-to-the-last-digit specificity we learn nothing about the city's (or even its police force's) budget, and how it compares to one, two, five, or 10 years ago. We read on three separate occasions that the state of Hawaii closed school down for 17 Fridays, but the only clue we have about either the state's or the education department's budget is the aforementioned $110 million in stimulus money. I really don't mean to sound like a dick when I say that this kind of basic numerical avoidance wouldn't have passed muster at my college newspaper.

More indestructible than Jason?Please note that I'm not asking for any journalistic outlet to agree with my POV on government spending here. In fact, it's quite possible that the inclusion of actual budget numbers in an article about the effect of budget cuts would rally readers in opposition to the kind of cold-hearted budget-slashing I prefer. But if you don't give readers even that much information to decide by themselves, how do you expect them to even begin to have an intelligent conversation about, say, which elements of state and local budgets have been swelling in recent years even while the quality of services has not swelled along for the ride?

Every single time a budget debate comes up in the context of local government, some politician will inevitably make a statement that unless some proposed tax increase passes, the municipality will be forced to make cuts to essential services. It never fails to amaze me that this tactic of putting essential services on the chopping block is not scrutinized.

I have a thought that left, right, and libertarian alike, the vast, vast majority of Americans don't know what their government does and more importantly, how their government pays for it. This is true for each and every level of government and it poses a severe handicap for anyone who claims to have an opinion on what the government should and shouldn't do. I doubt many supporters of more stimulus to help end the rescission (including most economists and policy wonks) have poured through the federal budget and decided that every federal currently being budgeted is too valuable to be reallocated for stimulus purposes. Nor have the vast majority of tea partiers and supporters of limited government bothered to pick out what specific aspects of government could be cut that would actually make a difference to our large budget deficits.

I don't particularly mean this as a criticism of anyone. The biggest problem is that the information revolution which has taken over our private lives has not had a parallel movement in government. And yes, this is a libertarian critique, because there's no reason that the very same information revolution which has enabled us to instantaneously search for every actor in every movie ever made would not enable the government to provide us with easy access to the details of what it does, what it spends, and how it spends it. My wife has access to Quickbooks online for our law practice - Why can't we, as taxpayers, have similar access to the most intimate budget decisions of government at every level? My libertarian critique is that government is a lumbering dinosaur which is years if not decades behind the rest of the country, but whether you're a libertarian, a conservative, or a liberal, I can't imagine anyone has a legitimate reason to oppose more openness in how our government actually works.

Until that point, we're all just dancing around the real issues. The left loves to list all the wonderful things we get for our tax dollars, but even if you love each and every little thing the government does, that doesn't mean we're getting our money's worth. And the big concern with the tea party movement is that for whatever political clout it has to oppose new spending, it has none to make any significant cuts to our current budget. The solution is for government to embrace the information age and become more accountable, but I'm not holding my breath.

What Does Gay Marriage Mean For You?

2010-08-05T11:50:00.003-04:00

As most of you know by now, a Federal Judge in California has ruled in favor of overturning the state's Proposition 8, which prohibited gay marriage, on Equal Protection grounds and social conservatives are quite obviously upset. Legally speaking, I don't think it's an easy case and I've probably blogged in the past about the weaknesses of the Equal Protection argument as applied to gay marriage. But Reason's Jacob Sullum had an excellent post about a month ago in regards to a a federal decision in Massachusetts about federal treatment of gay marriage and I just have to echo his sentiments. The post is titled "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Equal Protection Argument for Gay Marriage" and this bit below just nails it for me.

But you know what? Screw them. I am tired of defending the constitutional principles that social conservatives use to restrict liberty, because they so rarely return the favor by supporting those same principles when the effect is to expand liberty. When a supposedly principled originalist like Antonin Scalia can endorse a ridiculously broad reading of the Commerce Clause because the case happens to involve pot, why should I stick my neck out by arguing that the people who wrote and ratified the Fifth and 14th amendments never imagined they were guaranteeing equal treatment for homosexual couples? Of course they didn't, because the very notion of gay marriage would have been incomprehensible to them. But the 14th amendment says no state may "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws," and the Supreme Court has long read the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause as imposing a similar restriction on the federal government. Treating all married couples equally, without regard to their sexual preference, seems to me (and Ted Olson!) like a straightforward application of this principle to a new situation, one that the authors of these provisions could not have foreseen, just as they did not foresee television (which is nevertheless protected by the First Amendment) or wiretaps (which are nevertheless governed by the Fourth Amendment).

Is this a constitutional rationalization for my pre-existing policy preferences? Yes, but I think it's a pretty good one. I would much prefer that the government get out of the business of certifying marriage altogether. But as long as more than 1,000 provisions of federal law hinge on marital status, the government will have to decide which couples qualify, and basic fairness demands that sexual preference play no role in that determination. What legitimate government interest can possibly justify preventing the longtime spouse of a veteran from being buried alongside him, simply because both of them are men? This sort of thing really is shameful.

Some people say that down the road we'll look back on this era as no different as race relations in the 50's and 60's, but I wonder if it won't be quite so dramatic. Yes there are a lot of homophobes out there, but I'd wager that most gay marriage opponents are truly concerned with preserving tradition and are just resistant to change. I think the vast majority of us will look back at the debate over gay marriage and wonder what the big deal was.

What's really interesting to think about is what this decision (and the Arizona immigration law decision) mean for the future of the Tea Party movement. It's easy to stay on-point when health care, taxes, and spending are the big issues, but now gay marriage is being pushed to the forefront. I think the tea partiers truly are diverse, ideologically speaking. I'm sure there are those who want to crack down on illegal immigration and activist judges who support gay marriage, but I also imagine there are plenty of those who actually support gay marriage and more open immigration policy, along with those who just plain don't care.

I know what the Rush Limbaugh's and Sean Hannity's of the world are going to say, but I'm more curious to hear what self-appointed Tea Party leader Glenn Beck has to say. I'm on record calling Beck nuts and a conspiracy theorist, but his anti-government rhetoric makes him all the more interesting on a subject like this. It'd go a long way to defining what he really is, politically speaking.

What The Left Misses

2010-08-04T21:53:00.002-04:00

Ezra Klein ponders whether business owners hate taxes and regulation because they lean Republican or if they lean Republican because they hate taxes and regulation.

As you can see, business owners are the most Republican occupational group, while managers are hot on their heels. Workers trend more Democratic.

I don't want to explain that away too much. A lot of these folks are Republicans because they hate taxes and regulations, and they hate taxes and regulations because they believe them to be bad for their businesses. As you might expect, their Washington trade groups are even more conservative, and are single-minded in their determination to weaken regulations and cut taxes.

What gets difficult in all this is separating things that are actually hurting businesses from things that Republican-leaning business owners, for reasons of ideology or personal self-interest, simply don't like. And because there's virtually no data on this question, there's really no way to tell the two apart.

Unfortunately, there's no data on the subject, so I guess we'll never know. Or we could just use some common sense. My father's a small business owner and I've been involved in the business for over a decade. Technically, I'm a small business owner with my startup legal practice. And I can tell you from personal experience that every little tax and every regulation add to the costs and time of running a business. The idea that a business owner might be for higher taxes or more regulation if not for his or her political allegiances is just plain asinine. Business owners aren't casting ballots because of gay marriage, or because of wars in Iraq or Afganistan, or because of Barack Obama's birth certificate. Business owners care about their business because that's their livelihood and how they support their families. They lean republican because they're hoping for lower taxes and less regulation and you shouldn't need data to tell you that.

Ezra also asks the question of why businessmen are nervous about investing more in the current economic climate:

But the why of it is, well, complicated. Answers differ from one businessman to the next, and from one survey of businesses to the next. A lot of the answers are in tension with one another: They want to see the deficit brought down, and they also want the tax cuts extended. They need unemployment to come down, but they want to see Washington back off. They want health care to cost less, but they don't want government to touch it.

Ezra sees tension, but I see more common sense. Deficits and taxes could both be lowered through spending cuts, which, coincidentally, could all be accomplished through the dismantling of the regulatory state. And sure they want the economy to improve and health care costs to go down, but that doesn't mean they want Washington to do it. Even if you're of the mind that Washington could do something positive about unemployment and health care costs, that doesn't mean you'd be of the opinion that such fixes wouldn't impose additional costs on you as a business owner.

It doesn't take a genius to realize that massive regulatory expansions like the new health care bill have businesses terrified of expanding. Taxes are relatively straight forward things, but until regulations actually hit, it's difficult to near impossible to calculate the costs of compliance and this holds true for all taxes and regulation. And every business is different. That one business would find compliance relatively inexpensive does not mean that another business, even one in the same industry, would find compliance inexpensive. Government may have a top down approach, but businesses do things differently which is exactly why you get innovation in the free market system.

How Close Is Too Close

2010-08-04T12:03:00.002-04:00

I'd echo Will Wilkinson's response to the overblown reaction to the "Ground Zero mosque."

The silly controversy over the downtown mosque is excellent evidence that the conservative movement has become obsessed to the point of derangement with a right-wing version of identity politics that sees everything through the lens of the assumption that American identity is under seige. The modus operandi of the populist right is patriotic semiotics gone wild. 9/11 was a Great Awakening and Ground Zero is a sacred scar representing the sacrifice of those thousands who died in fire in order to shake the rest of us into recognition of the great existential threat to the American Way of Life. To refuse to resist the placement of a mosque next to the grave of those martyred in the Great Awakening is to fail to have heard the call, to fail to understand the battle now underway, to complacently acquiesce to the forces slowly transforming America into something else, into something unAmerican, a place for some other kind of people, a place not worth fighting for. It is to, as they say, “let the terrorists win.”

I've been surprised at the extent to which otherwise reasonable conservatives have strained logic to justify the position that the Muslim cultural center near Ground Zero is "distasteful." One of the commenters from Wilkinson's piece cites the example of a Christian center near Auschwitz and the other example is that of an anti-government (perhaps a libertarian) museum going in next door to the site of the Oklahoma City bombing.

There are problems with both of those examples, but an even more pressing issue is this idea of space and just how far these "scared" areas should extend. Is a mile okay? How about half a mile? Or several blocks? No one is suggesting that a mosque be built at ground zero, so what we're talking about here is space adjacent to ground zero. If your argument is that x amount of space should be set aside as a memorial, so be it, whatever you want that memorial to be. But from what I understand, the space in question is an abandoned Burlington Coat Factory and the issue isn't about how much space to set aside for a memorial, but what's acceptable in this space near Ground Zero. What I have trouble with is the idea that a mosque is somehow offensive, but a Best Buy would be perfectly acceptable.

Virtually everyone agrees that Auschwitz should remain a solemn memorial, but that doesn't mean that a church built nearby the memorial would be any more offensive than a Starbucks. Something has to be there, at some point past the limits of the memorial and there'd be nothing wrong with a church, a mosque, a Best Buy, or a Starbucks. The Oklahoma City example is a bit more compelling, if only because it provides an interesting parallel between Timothy McVeigh's perversion of anti-government sentiment and the 9-11 attackers perversion of religion. As a libertarian, I'd probably have a problem if people complained that a museum celebrating the limited government legacy of say Thomas Jefferson, F.A. Hayek, and Milton Friedman was objectionable near the site of the Oklahoma City bombing. Because of the location, it does matter what the 9-11 mosque is all about. If it's a forward-looking mosque that preaches tolerance and works together with other religious groups in the city, I have trouble seeing what the objectionable aspect is without indulging in bigotry. If this was a mosque that preached anti-American rhetoric and expressed any sort of sympathy for radical Islam, well, then you've got a damn good reason for finding the plans offensive.

As we all learned in elementary school (or at least we did when I was in school), the very definition of prejudice means that your prejudging without having all the specifics at your finger tips. The worst part of this criticism is that it come based only on general impressions and not in regards to those individuals who are actually behind the project. I usually disagree with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (whom Wilkinson notes is supportive of the mosque) on just about everything, but he's always an adept politician and he's in the right here. I'd have trouble believing he'd be supportive of this plan if there were unsavory elements with questionable backgrounds involved.

And the Reviews Are In ...

2010-07-31T09:04:00.002-04:00

Powerline Blog has an interesting reaction to the injunction issued against the Arizona immigration law.

In the weighing of interests required before a preliminary injunction is issued, it would seem that Arizona's interest in coping with half a million or so illegal immigrants, and the havoc this influx is causing, outweighs the small burden the law may impose on a relatively small number of lawfully present, arrested aliens. In any event, I don't believe the contrary view has been established in advance of seeing how the law actually works.

They color the "small burden" as impacting a "small number of lawfully present, arrested aliens" but that's not what the law says. Forget about numbers for a moment, because we don't know how many non-illegal immigrants will wind up being impacted by the law and focus on the group being burdened. It's not just lawfully present, arrested aliens who are burdened, but anyone law enforcement suspects may be in the country illegally during any legal stop.

It just strikes me as odd that all of the Arizona law's supporters can't be bothered to address the concern that the law they support will result in the illegal detention of American citizens.

The Judge Agrees With Me

2010-07-29T21:14:00.003-04:00

The United States District Court in Arizona has issued a preliminary injunction against enforcement of Arizona SB1070, the new controversial immigration law. From the decision of District Court Judge Susan Bolton (footnotes omitted, the Id refers to Hines v. Davidowitz 312 U.S. 52 (1941)):

First, the United States argues that this provision “necessarily places lawfully present aliens (and even U.S. citizens) in continual jeopardy of having to demonstrate their lawful status to non-federal officials.” (Id. at 26.) The United States further asserts that there are numerous categories of lawfully-present aliens “who will not have readily available documentation to demonstrate that fact,” including foreign visitors from Visa Waiver Program countries,8 individuals who have applied for asylum but not yet received an adjudication, people with temporary protected status, U and T non-immigrant visa applicants, or people who have self-petitioned for relief under the Violence Against Women Act. (Id. at 26-27.)
Also, the United States points out that United States citizens are not required to carry identification, and some citizens might not have easy access to a form of identification that would satisfy the requirement of Section 2(B)

The United States contends that the impact on lawfully-present aliens of the requirement that law enforcement officials, where practicable, check the immigration status of a person lawfully stopped, detained, or arrested where there is reasonable suspicion that the person is an alien and is unlawfully present will be exacerbated by several factors. (Id. at 28-29.) First, the United States suggests that the impact on lawfully-present aliens is enhanced because this requirement applies to stops for even very minor, non-criminal violations of state law, including jaywalking, failing to have a dog on a leash, or riding a bicycle on the sidewalk. (Id. at 28.) Also, the United States argues that the impact will be increased because other provisions in S.B. 1070 put pressure on law enforcement agencies and officials to enforce the immigration laws vigorously. (Id. at 29.)

Hines cautions against imposing burdens on lawfully-present aliens such as those described above. See 312 U.S. at 73-74. Legal residents will certainly be swept up by this requirement, particularly when the impacts of the provisions pressuring law enforcement agencies to enforce immigration laws are considered.

Don't You Trust the Police?

2010-07-27T10:45:00.002-04:00

Regular readers will remember I love Red Eye, which airs weekly on Fox News at 3:00 AM, so it's been with extreme disappointment that I've had to watch the Arizona immigration law become a recurring topic for the usually humorous and insightful show. Red Eye's host, Greg Gutfeld could probably best be described as libertarian on economic and social issues, but he tends to come down more traditionally conservative when it comes to foreign policy, the military, and law enforcement. Hey, not everyone can be Penn and Teller. But as I mentioned before, immigration is a topic that just tweaks me the wrong way and the thrust of the discussion on Red Eye has been so dismissive of the concerns with the new Arizona law that I can't help but feel a bit shut out. Even the guests have been remarkably uniform in their lock-step support of Arizona, although interestingly enough, Fox News judicial analyst Andrew Napolitono, who has been highly critical of the law, has not been a guest recently (even though he's been on many times in the past).

On one point, the supporters of the Arizona law have been absolutely right: The bill itself forbids racial profiling. And taken strictly for what's written on the page, there's nothing all that concerning about a law that only purports to enforce existing federal law. But the problem with the Arizona law, as I've mentioned time and time again, is not what the law actually says, but how it is to be implemented, something the text of the law is remarkably short on. In questioning those of us who would criticize the law, Greg posed the question, "don't you trust the police?" which again, is exactly the wrong sort of question you need to be asking. This goes right back to the questions regarding the use of SWAT-teams and military-style tactics in serving warrants. It's not about questioning the judgments of individual police officers but about questioning a particular policy and in this case, the effects of that policy.

It's easy to say the Arizona law is perfectly acceptable given what little the law actually says. What's more difficult is to determine how the law will actually work, which, to my knowledge, no supporter has bothered to do.

Nowhere

2010-07-23T13:18:00.003-04:00

That is the answer that Reason's Brian Doherty comes up to the question of where libertarians belong. Via George Mason economist Bryan Caplan, Doherty gives some raw numbers which point in the disappointing direction we've been dancing around for awhile now. While Americans may lean libertarian on a very general level, they are actually less libertarian the more specific you require them to be:

As Bryan Caplan, the George Mason University economist (who wrote in Reason back in 2007 about the many prevalent biases about economics that lead voters to prefer anti-free-market policies), has found in his studies of public opinion research vis à vis libertarian policy conclusions, “the sad truth is that the status quo is quite popular, and even moderate libertarian reforms like abolishing the minimum wage are persistently abhorrent to the overwhelming majority of the population.”

At Caplan’s advice, I spent some time trolling through the highly respected “General Social Survey” (GSS) to check out what Americans thought about more stringent applications of libertarian principles regarding when and where it is appropriate to bring state power to bear. While the more abstractly phrased questions tended to produce some modestly libertarian results—for example, 75 percent of Americans favor or strongly favor government spending cuts in the abstract—when asked about any specific spending area, the public tended to want more spending.

Still, some encouraging signs do appear amongst the GSS data, especially in changes that have occurred over the past 10 years. For example, from 1996 to 2006, the number of those who believed in definitely allowing public meetings advocating revolution went up nearly 20 percentage points, while those who believed in definitely not allowing them went down 9 percentage points.

But around 50 percent of Americans apparently have no objection to government control of wages; only 28 percent believe racists should definitely be allowed to publish books; only 27 percent think it should definitely not be the government’s role to provide jobs for all; and over 60 percent think government should prevent imports to protect the domestic economy.

These sort of findings don't tell us people's relative level of knowledge, but they do tell us that there's a disconnect between the rhetoric people believe and the specific policy proposals they would support. Or in other words, people like low taxes and "small government" that provides lots of services.

I'd argue that this disconnect between people's perceptions and reality cuts across the aisle. It's precisely why we saw so much overheated rhetoric about George Bush and why we're now seeing just as much if not more about Barack Obama. For far too many people, politics is sport, with the other side a perpetual enemy. And if you think those who cover politics from an unbiased, unidealogical standpoint are improving on the discourse, think again. The traditional unbiased media can be the worst of the bunch, focusing on the horse races and the idealogical squabbles more than actual policy. Policy matters, it matters a great deal and policy always flows from some sort of idealogical position about the role of government. The problem is that the vast majority of the American people (including the majority who would claim an interest in politics) aren't all that interested in policy and they're certainly not interested where it comes from.

I believe I said it before (if not in the blog than in the comments) that libertarians are smarter and I mean it - I don't mean self-styled, reactionary libertarians of the Glenn Beck vein, but libertarians of the John Stossel variety who use libertarian principles as a tool for reaching their own conclusions. That's not to say there aren't smart conservatives and smart liberals out there, but to come back to Julian Sanchez's epistemic closure argument, liberals and conservatives, even the smart ones, don't spend all their time defending the policies that stem from their principled idealogical positions the way that libertarians are often forced too. It's why the best debates tend to involve libertarians debating conservatives and libertarians debating liberals, even though some conservatives would rather sweep more radical libertarian ideas like drug legalization and open borders under the table and some liberals are shocked to believe that there are people who have a principled and not a reactionary belief in limited government.

Brian Doherty says libertarians don't belong anywhere and maybe that's true, but that doesn't mean we don't have an important role to play and perhaps that role is to provide an alternative to the racial flame throwing that's become increasingly common on the right and left. Agree with us or disagree, maybe our job is to make people smarter or at least, work harder to defend their positions.

The Immigration Debate Heats Up

2010-07-23T13:14:00.000-04:00

John Stossel, who in the past has steered clear of these sorts of issues, tackles immigration this week. (For Stossel fans who haven't yet caught on, his weekly columns mirrors the subject matter of his weekly show on Fox Business.) Stossel comes down in favor of a more streamlined process to allow more people to come to the United States to live in work. It's not quite open borders, but it's close. As to be expected on a conservative site, the reaction to Stossel's piece in the comments has been overwhelmingly negative.

There are the usual accusations that illegals commit more crimes (rebutted in the article itself), the usual claims that this generation of immigrants is different from the last and won't assimilate, and the accusation that are illegals are felons (which is most definitely not true, as being in the country illegally is not a felony and perhaps more importantly, is only a crime because we say it's a crime, not because it's an inherently bad act.) What always strikes me about the immigration debate is not the number of ignorant complaints, but the number of reasonable ones which have seemingly natural libertarian solutions.

If your complaint about illegal immigration is about border security and our ability to track who comes into the country, the simplest solution is to let more people in legally. If your concern is illegals trespassing on private property to enter the country, the simplest solution is to allow more people in legally. If your concern is the rule of law, both in regards to employers and employees, the simplest solution is to allow more people in legally. Even if your concern is about the sheer number of Mexicans coming across the borders, a more open borders policy would make it easier for Mexicans to come to the United States to work and then to return home. With the borders so tight, many Mexicans who'd rather not come to the United States permanently, wind up staying here because it's so hard to cross the border to return home or come back to the United States.

That immigration opponents oppose these more free and open measures indicates to me that "border security" does have a racial, if not a distinctively "America first" connotation.

Also interesting is this remark, made by someone named Ray in the comments:

I usually agree with Stossel on most things but he's a little off on this one. We have always regulated the number, rate and type of person who has been allowed to legally immigrate to America. In some cases it was a very loose regulation because we needed people to do things like build railroads, highways, skyscrapers etc. With today's terrorist, drug cartels, kidnappers and other criminal elements the need to regulate is even more important. The need to know who is here and why is critical to our personal, economic and national security.

It's a nice point except for the fact that it's not true. Historically, the United States has not had restrictions on immigration. In fact, for the first hundred years or so of the nation's existence there were virtually no restrictions on who could come to the United States, despite several different periods of strong anti-immigrant fervor. The Page Act of 1875 restricted the entry of convicts and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was a racist restriction on the Chinese, but other than that there were no quotas or serious barriers to entry until 1921.

What's interesting is that the same conservatives who invoke fidelity to the founders and our nation's traditions tend to ignore the founders and those traditions when it comes to immigration. And of course, many of those same conservatives who will also pay lip service to big government never seem to be in favor of downsizing if not outright scrapping the immigration bureaucracy. Why national health care regulation is bad, but a byzantine system of regulation for immigration is good is beyond me.

I've mentioned it before, but the immigration issue is one that always lights a fire in me, in part because I'm a student of history and in part because the immigration backlash seems so downright reactionary. It's again one of those issues where ideas seem to take a backseat to overheated rhetoric. You don't need to be an open borders advocate to realize that a thoroughly militarized 1,000 mile border is a tremendously insane waste of money.

Is This What Public Debate Is Supposed To Look Like?

2010-07-22T09:21:00.002-04:00

If you follow the 24-hour news cycle, you've undoubtedly heard about Shirely Sherrod, the official at the Department of Agriculture who was forced out earlier this week in the wake of a scandal earlier this week, only to be rehired yesterday when it was determined the scandal was all a misunderstanding caused by a selectively edited video. Needless to say, it's been an odd couple of days. The selectively edited video was originally posted by Andrew Breitbart on the Big Government page of his conservative news empire, showing Sherrod (who is black) making seemingly racist statements about refusing to help white farmers. The media machine swung into action following the posting of the clips and in no less than 24 hours, Sherrod was condemned by the NAACP and her resignation was demanded by Department of Agriculture Agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack. Only problem was, the clips were part of a longer, anti-racist speech and the particular incident which was designed to sound racist through the selective editing was actually a turning point in Ms. Sherrod's life. She actually did help the white farmers who she had at first thought disparagingly of, and those same white farmers are still grateful to her today.

The weirdest part of this story was not the selectively edited clips would be taken out of context, nor that the government migth chose to react so quickly without knowing all the facts, but that the NAACP was so quick to condemn Sherrod, given that the speech in question had occurred at an NAACP event only a few months ago and that the they had the full video before any of the news broke.

There are all sorts of angles to take in regards to this bizarre story, but I think Glenn Greenwald is on the right track in condemning everyone involved. We're talking about powerful media figures, powerful organizations, and the all-powerful federal government, none of whom did the slightest bit of investigation before condemning a woman who is very arguably not any sort of public figure.

The other weird part of the story is Andrew Breitbart's continued defense of the decision to post the edited version of the speech (which, according to him, he did not know at the time). According to Breitbart, posting the clips was, in part, a response to the NAACP's call to the Tea Party to condemn the racist elements in it's mix. Clearly Andrew Breitbart does not want to be taken seriously as a journalist or anything closely resembling a journalist, or there'd be no reason to post an un-investigated story for the purpose of one-upping one's political enemies. But that doesn't bother me so much as the fact that Breitbart or those who rush to his defense are essentially saying that this is how political debate should work.

Obviously, a government official abusing his or her power is a noteworthy story, but it's also the sort of accusation that should be thoroughly investigated and not be made based solely on a video clip. But that wasn't the point in posting the video, the point was to counter the ridiculous accusations of Tea Party racism with more clips of blacks saying racist things about whites. It's the same reason those who watch Fox News have been inundated with clips of the New Black Panthers saying and doing ridiculous things. And what's mind-blowing is far as I'm concerned is this seemingly prevalent view that this is an appropriate form of public discourse.

Switch back to our discussions on the blog about liberaltarians and the future of libertarianism and remember that the whole debate is about ideas and the future of ideas. It's mud-slinging nonsense like this that has me convinced that libertarians really are smarter than everyone else out there. This whole sordid saga is not necessarily indicative of intellectual shallowness, but it is quite clearly a case of misplaced priorities. Rather than fighting Obamacare or any of the big government Democrat agenda through the power of ideas, Andrew Breitbart has instead chosen to play the "I'm not racist, you are" card. And so be it, if that's what he wants to do, but I don't see why thinking people should take him seriously.

More On Where Libertarians Belong

2010-07-19T19:34:00.003-04:00

The Volokh Conspiracy's Ilya Somin has an interesting back and forth with Tim Lee that's worth the read. (Somin's first post is here, followed by Lee's response and Somin's rejoinder.) If you don't get a chance to read it all through, Somin is a reluctant supporter of the traditional conservative-libertarian alliance, while Lee is more of the new breed. Here's Somin, rejecting much of the framework for liberal-libertarian cooperation:

The range of issues where libertarians and liberals genuinely agree is narrower than Lee assumes. Most liberals do not in fact agree with libertarians on civil liberties, the war on drugs, and gay rights. Certainly, both groups decry many conservative policies on these issues. But they don’t really agree on the alternatives to them. On civil liberties, for example, many liberals favor hate speech laws, restrictions on political speech by corporations, wide-ranging sexual harrassment laws that infringe on freedom of speech, and so forth. On gay rights, libertarians favor laissez-faire, while liberals tend to favor antidiscrimination laws that restrict the freedom of private organizations. On the War on Drugs, only a minority of liberals favor anything close to the full-blown legalization advocated by libertarians. Foreign policy, of course, is an issue that divides both liberals and libertarians among themselves.

The conservative-libertarian free market think tanks Lee points to succeed because the conservatives and libertarians there agree not only on rejecting liberal economic policies but also on an affirmative agenda of severely restricting government’s role in the economy. It would be much more difficult to run an economic policy think tank that brought together libertarians with “compassionate conservatives” who want to replace liberal economic interventions with conservative ones.

Lee responds:

As Somin acknowledges, there are lots of right-wingers, “compassionate conservatives” included, that aren’t interested in any part of the libertarian policy agenda. I can’t remember the last time the Family Research Council published something I agreed with, even on “economic issues.” I think Pat Buchanan’s views on “economic issues” are appalling.

Fusionist organizations deal with these elements of the conservative movement by mostly ignoring them. They don’t write about their work. They don’t hire their employees or publish their scholars’ work. And instead, they work with people in the more free-market-friendly corners of the conservative world. On the margin, this raises the prominence of the free-market parts of the conservative agenda relative to the non-free-market parts. And over time, conservatives have increasingly come to see the libertarian vision of economic policy as the conservative economic policy agenda.

The distribution of opinions on the liberal side is similar. Common Cause doesn’t see eye-to-eye with libertarians on First Amendment issues. The ACLU largely does. And so a liberaltarian organization would hire ACLU-style liberals rather than Common-Cause-style liberals to work on First Amendment issues. And on the margin, this would raise the prominence of ACLU-style First Amendment advocacy relative to Common-Cause-style First Amendment advocacy within the liberal movement. You can tell a similar story on gay rights, the drug war, immigration, and other issues. The liberal movement is not monolithic; on each of these issues you’ll find some parts of the liberal movement like what libertarians have to say and others where they don’t. A liberaltarian organization would build relationships with the libertarian-friendly parts of the liberal movement on each of these issues, thereby nudging the liberal movement in a more libertarian direction on these issues.

The only reason this seems more awkward on the left is that the project is much further along on the right. People who are “in the trenches” together tend to see their views converge over time. People who are used to glaring at each other across the barricades tend to have their views diverge over time. So after a half-century of fusionism, conservatives and libertarians are used to taking each others’ arguments seriously especially on “economic issues. In contrast, a half-century of thinking of each other as being on opposite ends of the political spectrum has accustomed liberals and libertarians to dismissing each others arguments out of hand, even on “social issues.” But that asymmetry is largely a result of the fusionist alliance, it’s not a deep fact about political philosophy. And although path-dependency is a powerful force, there’s no reason it needs to be a permanent feature of the American political landscape.

And again Somin:

There are two problems with this parallel. Libertarian-leaning liberals are a small minority on the left on most issues. As you can see from the liberal reaction to the Citizens United decision, the Common Cause view of the First Amendment has many more liberal adherents than the ACLU version. And even the ACLU has retreated from strong advocacy of free speech when it seems to clash with antidiscrimination law, as co-blogger David Bernstein documented in his book You Can’t Say That. By contrast, the FRC’s and Pat Buchanan’s views on economic issues are relatively marginal among conservatives; they are in fact a big part of the reason why most mainstream conservatives have broken with Buchanan and his followers. Support for free markets remains the dominant economic view among conservative intellectuals and activists, though some conservative politicians (notably George W. Bush) choose the big government approach when in power.

The other problem is perhaps more serious. Even those liberals who do take the libertarian view on one or two social issues rarely do so across the board. The ACLU is fairly libertarian when it comes to free speech, but not on a wide range of other social issues. Thus, it would be hard to find many liberals who are willing to ally with libertarians across a broad range of social policies, as opposed to single issues. That’s no problem if limited single-issue cooperation is all you seek. But it is a big obstacle if you want to establish a broader “liberaltarian movement,” as Lee does.

I think, once again, we have libertarians talking in circles. Whether we're talking about a "liberaltarian project" or "libertarian centrism" what we're really talking about is radically altering how we think about politics and how libertarian ideas are filtered into the mainstream. Everything Somin says is undoubtedly true, but that's precisely because he's talking about the status quo. That the prospects for shifting libertarian alliances are difficult given the current political framework is a given, but the odds of altering that framework are a bit more difficult to determine.

Tim Lee responds with one more post, making the point that conservatives and libertarians share a common way of talking about freedom, but don't share the same commitments to freedom.

Conservatives and Republicans like to invoke the Founding Fathers, talk about free markets and limited government, quote Hayek, and so forth. But political rhetoric is a lagging indicator of ideological commitments. A lot of fusionist slogans have become so shopworn that they’re what Orwell called dead metaphors. The fact that they’re often combined with calls to “keep your government hands off my Medicare”, promote “energy independence”, and build a police state along our Southern border suggests that these slogans are little more than empty rhetoric. When the typical Republican politiician says he cares about limited government, his purpose isn’t so much to express support for a specific policy agenda (most of the Republican policy agenda involves expanding government) so much as to signal membership in the fusionist political coalition.

Because libertarians and conservatives share a political vocabulary we find it relatively easy to communicate with each other. Liberals and libertarians obviously “agree on some basic philosophical principles”—that’s why many libertarians still call themselves classical liberals. But many libertarians talk about liberty in a right-wing way that most liberals find off-putting. And liberals, for their part, talk about liberty in a way that’s alien to most libertarians. This “language barrier” exaggerates the degree of disagreement between us. Without a shared vocabulary, it’s challenging for liberals and libertarians to recognize and build on areas of shared agreement.

I think Lee and I are mostly on the same page, but what's interesting is the reference to Republican politicians and Republican political agendas. Politicians always have an interest in government and an interest in their own power, so the disparity in what 90 something percent of Republicans say and do isn't all that interesting to me from an intellectual perspective. What's more interesting to consider is the extent of self-identified conservatives commitments to freedom, which delves into the nitty gritty of how people perceive the political world in the first place. Libertarians are a particularly astute political group, who've generally spent a great deal of time reaching their political positions, but we forget that far too many people who consider themselves liberals or conservatives are more interested in taking sides and cheerleading than in reaching meaningful intellectual conclusions. I'm purposely not throwing out any numbers because I don't no, nor would I have any idea of how to calculate these abstract ideas. Maybe it's 20%, maybe it's 80%, but there's some percentage of people to whom politics is more about the fight than it is about ideas.

The tea party movement, confuses the issue, because it is not an idealogical movement no matter how much it appears to be. That doesn't mean the tea party isn't real or useful, but it is limited in it's ability to be a lasting political movement. What the tea party has done is provide an outlet for those sick and tired of excessive government spending. What it has not done is provide a concrete road map as to where our political system should go from here. This is not to put down people who march in the street, but there's a major difference between the masses who take to the street and a think tank. There's a possibility that the tea party could be an effective engine at helping to politically alter the political landscape in a more libertarian direction, but I'm just not sure how many tea partiers would truly be in favor of following a Cato Institute roadmap.

This ties back to the liberaltarian debate in that I really don't know how many individual liberals would be equally willing to follow a libertarian roadmap if the terms of the discussion could be altered so that libertarians and liberals were actually able to communicate. The problem is exactly what I've danced around a few times now: That it's not just the two party system that's institutionalized, but the public perception of political ideology itself. Libertarianism is a losing cause as long as it remains solely associated with conservatives. The idea of pushing ino liberal circles, of pushing into the center, is to change the nature of the debate itself, to make it so that libertarianism (and individual rights over state power) is the normative position and the statist impulses of the left and right become political outliers.

More on Arizona

2010-07-14T12:37:00.003-04:00

The right is upset now that Attorney General Eric Holder- who famously had not read the new Arizona immigration law before he criticized it back in May- is now ready to sue Arizona for that very same law.

It's been a bit upsetting that critics of the law's critics (or I suppose we'd call them supporters) have been so dismissive. So that there's no confusion, what the law says is that law enforcement must make a reasonable attempt to assess a person's immigration status when reasonable suspicion exists that an individual subject to a legal stop is in the country illegally. That the text of the law claims it only seeks to enforce federal law, is really besides the point. What matters is how the law works in practice and how it alters existing law enforcement practices.

I'm working under the assumption that there's something in this law that gives law enforcement greater powers than what they had the past- otherwise, why pass the law in the first place if the practices specified were already legal? Under previously existing law, law enforcement was permitted to conduct immigration checks on anyone who had been placed under arrest or was being held in police custody. What the new law does is allow law enforcement to conduct immigration checks during lawful stops. The typical example is a traffic stop, but such lawful stops would also include stop and frisks on the street.

The law does not require individuals to prove their citizenship- such a law would b a flagrant violation of the Constitution and the right to due process. My problem is specifically with what the law doesn't say and what it implies. I can't imagine it's an easy process to determine the immigration status of an individual who has no ID. So in the real world, what are police supposed to do with individuals they suspect are in the country illegally. The text of the law doesn't say, but my concern is that this means the police can detain such individuals about whom they have suspicions in order to conduct and immigration check. Without the power to detain, the law is toothless and what have little or no real world effect.

It's that ability to detain- based on nothing more than an officer's suspicion that an individual is in the country illegally- that troubles me. I haven't delved too much into the racial implications of the law, but thy should be obvious. Supporters of the law says it doesn't allow for racial profiling, but I can't understand how it wouldn't in the real world. Aren't there going to be far greater numbers of Hispanics who have their immigration status checked by police then there will be black or white people? The law requires the reasonable suspicion of a police officer, but how could it possibly be reasonable to implement this law in a colorblind manner that doesn't take race and language into consideration? The only way that would be possible would be if police automatically conducted immigration checks on every individual stopped who didn't have valid identification. And the problem with that is it's a surreptitious I.D. requirement, exactly the sort of "papers please" policy that the laws supporters say the law isn't.

To return to the issue of racial profiling, the problem here is that this is profiling of the worst sort, involving the potential detention of American citizens for not carrying identification. This is not the airport, where people chose to abide by strict security measures, nor (as some supporters of the law claim) does the Arizona law apply solely to traffic stops and drivers. And the idea that no American citizens would ever be detained by this policy is preposterous. Unless the police have magic intuition which can flawlessly distinguish illegal immigrants from legal immigrants and citizens, how would some American citizens not be subject to detention for failing to carry their papers?

If someone can explain to me the ways in which this law isn't A) a severe example of racial profiling or B) a requirement that individuals carry ID at all times, I would love to hear it.

Where Do Libertarians Belong?

2010-07-14T10:17:00.004-04:00

Reason has launched an interesting debate over the question of where do libertarians belong, politically speaking. Brink Lindsey of the Cato Institute (who's previously been a proponent of a libertarian-liberal movement) argues now for a libertarian-centerism that can play off the limited government leanings of both the right and the left. Jonah Goldberg of National Review (a conservative) and Matt Kibbe of Freedomworks (a more libertarian-leaning conservative) both argue against Lindsey in favor of the more traditional libertarian alliance with the right. Reason has a roundup of some of the reactions around the interwebs here.

What's fascinating about Lindsey's position is that he explicitly rejects the Tea Parties as too reactionary. Meanwhile, some libertarians- Fox News analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano comes to mind- have been enthusiastic in their embrace of the tea party. (And check out the footage of Napolitano here, arguing on CSPAN's Book TV that George Bush and Dick Cheney should have been indicted for torturing, spying, and warrantless arrests.) I bring up Napolitano because intellectually speaking, he and Lindsey seem to share virtually all of the same values. Where they differ is who they chose to associate with- Lindsey would rather have nothing to do with Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, while Napolitano has filled in for Beck and had Palin as a guest on his own show- which is precisely what the Reason debate is all about.

Reason presents this in the context of political maneuvering, that is, which political alliances are best suited to reigning in government and promoting individual freedom. But there's a subtext here that's just as much about high school squabbles as it is pure politics. And I don't mean high school in a purely pejorative sense. Except for perhaps the most staunch individualist (of the sort who wouldn't be interested in politics in the first place), we all care about the people we associate with and with whom we share ideas. Many commentators would prefer to divide these associations along the traditional left/right divide, in part because it gives them the largest possible audience and in part because it makes for the simplest, most compelling narrative. Libertarians may be the biggest showcase where that dividing line just doesn't work, but it's a problem for those within movements as well.

Cato's Julian Sanchez sparked a debate several months ago when he brought up the term epistemic closure in regards to the conservative movement's tendency to become far too inwardly focussed and disengaged from real intellectual debate with the other side. My post on "the coming intellectual crisis" was a variation on the same theme, the idea being the vast swath of ideas that adherents to a particular ideology are expected to hold and how those ideas are never given self-scrutiny over time. This happens on both the right and left, but in terms of the left, one only need to look and see the way that the left was honest in their attempt to sell health care reform as fiscally responsible to see how the left has put their ideas to the fire over the last several decades. Where the left fails to self-examine is where it prays to the Goddess of regulation. Liberals who question the need of the regulatory state tend to suffer the same fate as conservatives who would question the size of our military and the scope of it's mission.

To return to this idea of "people we chose to associate with," the point isn't that conservatives or liberals should abandon the more heterodox elements of their ideology, but that this heterodoxy is only a problem in the context of our two-sided debate. That this heterodoxy is imposed by either side is both anti-intellectual and anti-productive in terms of providing ideas for the political arena. Take for instance drug prohibition, a topic of which there is much dissent from the pro-prohibition position on both the right and the left. You won't be cast out by either side for questioning prohibition, but it's a non-starter in terms of the effecting of any changes. Perhaps there's a majority or a strong vocal minority of Americans opposed to the war on drugs, but that group, however big it might be, has no real voice or outlet in our current system.

And this is precisely where we come back to Brink Lindsey's idea for a libertarian centerism. It's not entirely unrealistic to think that small government could claim the political center, although I have no idea how one goes about combating the institutionalized ideology that already exists.

Personally, I still like the term "liberaltarian" because it highlights the work that libertarians still need to do with the left. The right (and the tea parties) tend to use the same buzz words- small government, individual rights, ect.- but there's still a great deal of hostility toward the idea of limited government on the left. Heterodox conservatives dismiss libertarians as well-intentioned folks going a bit too far, but the heterodox left can, at times, treat libertarians as potentially more evil than conservatives. Selling libertarianism to the left is at least a few steps behind it's sale to the right. But whether it's through a push to the center or through a fragmented group of coalitions for individual issues, I've got to agree with Lindsey that the future of libertarianism lies with neither the left or right. The left is utterly dismissive of any notion of economic freedom, while the divisions with the right over issues like national security and immigration seem too big to overcome.

Is John Stossel worse than Glenn Beck and more thoughts about all of those evil racists

2010-07-12T20:16:00.004-04:00

I've has a post on the subject kicking around since May, but it was this Alternet piece on John Stossel from a week ago that really got me going. The title of the piece is "Is John Stossel More Dangerous Than Glenn Beck?" an interesting question which implies that the utterly ridiculous Beck is somehow dangerous. The piece only touches on Stossel's repudiation of the public accommodations portion of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a comment Stossel had made in response to comments made by Kentucky Senate Republican candidate Rand Paul. Paul later repudiated the comments, but Stossel has stuck by what he said. It's a traditional sort of libertarian position, where the freedom of association trumps any government interest in forcing private entities not to discriminate.

Stossel defended his position, arguing that he wouldn't frequent a segregated establishment and he'd use his influence to engineer boycotts and the like. But it didn't matter much as he's been branded a racist many times over these past couple of months.

There was some interesting reaction in libertarian circles in the immediate aftermath of Rand Paul's statement, notably the criticism from some younger libertarians that didn't take that line in the sand, "government can't tell business what to do" position. The argument there is that measures were needed from the federal government to counter the influence of 100 years of Jim Crow. For instance, if motels and hotels throughout the south refused to cater to blacks in the 50's and 60's, how would blacks be able to travel? In a vacuum, we may not want the government to tell private businesses who they can and can't do business with, but government imposed institutionalized racism was a fact of life with a real impact on culture, society, and the market.

I'm inclined to agree that we needed these aspects of Civil Rights law in 1964 (in actuality we could have used them right after the Civil War), but the more interesting question, the one I'd like to think Rand Paul and John Stossel were getting at is whether we still need such laws today. Folks on the left would argue that of course we do, but their arguments are unpersuasive because they tend to focus on the "public" nature of businesses. That is, most folks are not arguing for a thought police that would tell people who they can and must associate with in their private lives. But business is supposed to be different, particularly when you're talking about a store or restaurant or something along those lines.

One of the problems is that we get so focused on race, we tend to ignore the fact that civil rights laws have been extended (some nationally, some locally) to include other protected classes. Some states protect the rights of gays and lesbians the same way they protect the rights of racial minorities, while others specifically do not. Sexual orientation is an interesting case study because although you don't have the same sort of history you have with racial discrimination, there is a history of discrimination and there's a case to be made that government policy has treated gay couples differently from straight couples. But the inverse of that point is a "businesses must accept all-comers policy" potentially blocks gay-friendly businesses. Can there be a gay bar or a gay club with a discriminating admissions policy? This highlights what I would say is the superiority of markets over government action. Government mandates one-size-fits-all solutions through the force of law. Markets allow individuals to pick and chose, to boycott and shame the businesses whose practice are found objectionable.

Ultimately, discrimination law should be about reversing the effects of state-sponsored discrimination and not about cultural engineering. It's far too easy to go in the direction we're headed and expand the outer boundaries of discrimination law until it's unrecognizable from it's original purpose. Each and everyone likes the fact that business are permitted to discriminate in one form or another. Can you imagine a world where the shirtless and shoeless have the right to waltz into fancy restaurants and "no shirt, no shoes, no service" signs were the legal equivalent of "No Irish Need Apply"?

Discrimination law should be about countering the policies of a discriminatory government, not about adjusting the passions and beliefs of some segment of the public.

Misreading Hayek and More on Health Care

2010-07-11T08:55:00.003-04:00

Writing in Ezra Klein's blog, Dylan Matthews has a maddening post which twists Hayek to imply support for Obamacare. The post is in part a response to this New York Times essay on Hayek which highlights some of the contradictions between the writings of the famed Austrian economist and those who might invoke his name today. The point- which I've made before- is that Hayek was not universally opposed to all forms of social welfare spending, particularly in wealthy countries. Matthews goes further than the Times piece to point out that Hayek had also wrote in support of government health care:

There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level of wealth ours has, the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom; that is: some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health. Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.

Matthews ends on this note:

Now, Hayek obviously isn't an idol of liberal economic policy folks for a whole batch of reasons, not least the central premise of Road to Serfdom that the sorts of social democratic policies being pursued in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe during and after World War II would open the door to totalitarianism. But it's more than a little jarring to hear him invoked in opposition to a health care bill that's, if anything, less ambitious than the sort of thing he's talking about here.

I'm no Hayek scholar by any means, but you don't need to be to understand that Hayek would be horrified by the centrally-planned, market-manipulating monstrosity that is Obamacare. There's a difference in the state guaranteeing basic quality of life measures (as Milton Friedman did in addition to Hayek, with his support of a negative income tax) and the state manipulating and controlling massive sectors of the economy. That such subtleties are lost is not surprising, given the nature of debate in this country. But it does the left little good to debate Hayekian straw men that exist in the mind of Glenn Beck. Our system of health care in America was already administered through incredibly skewed market mechanisms before the passage of Obamacare. Regulation distorts the functioning of markets and comprehensive regulation which impacts every aspect of an industry is even worse.

This plays right back into the "liberaltarian" arguments I've been making for months now. Support of the free market and opposition to the welfare state are not synonymous. Limited government and free market supporters do themselves no favors by attacking Obamacare as an expansion of the welfare state. Social welfare spending is a definable, controllable expense, but monkeying around with the market can have both disastrous and hard to measure consequences.

Updated 7/12/10 @ 8:00 PM : Will Wilkinson links to the same post, commenting, So Hayek basically had Ezra Klein's views on health care, right?

Different Objectives

2010-07-11T08:46:00.003-04:00

Reason's Peter Suderman has a great little post from the other day on why Obama care might not succeed in controlling costs. The problem, as many critics have pointed out, is that the law focuses first and foremost on expanding coverage. More Suderman, comparing federal law to Massachusetts, where health insurance premiums have skyrocketed under their smaller scale version of the national plan:

Yet payment-system reform of any kind still faces tremendous hurdles—the main reason being that while just about everyone pays lip service to the idea that we need to cut medical spending, no one wants their services or payments to be cut. Doctors, naturally, want to keep getting paid every time they do something, and patients, who typically don’t shell out directly for the bulk of their medical costs, want doctors to have the fee-for-service system's incentive to do more rather than less. At the same time, politicians don’t want to be seen as shorting doctors, or as passing payment plans that might reduce consumer choice.

That leaves insurers stuck in the middle. The increased costs of care and the increased costs of regulation lead insurers to increase premiums. But steadily increasing premiums, as well as a reputation for stinginess with reimbursements, tends to increase public antipathy toward the entire health insurance industry. That makes insurers political targets, which leads to moves like Gov. Deval Patrick's arbitrary rate caps. Along the way, the whole system begins to break down—and all the while, costs are still going up, and no one has figured out a way to hold them down. When it comes to rising costs, RomneyCare has certainly forced the issue—but only by making it worse. Expect the federal overhaul to do the same.

The annual case for drug legalization

2010-06-26T08:40:00.004-04:00

I believe it’s yet again time for a what must be at the very least an annual call to end the war on drugs and/or legalize drugs. I’ll use John Stossel's weekly column as a launching off point. I link to the version on the conservative Townhall.com site because there it’s generated a much more negative response than the version posted on the libertarian and libertine Reason. And I don’t mean to pick on the pro-drug war conservatives, but there's an inherent tension in conservatism between the ideology of limited government and the acceptance of traditional legal and social norms.

Rather than make the typical appeal that we own our own bodies and the drug war creates more social problems than it prevents, I thought I'd instead address the arguments of drug warriors and those opposed to legalization. What always gets me is the sheer ferocity of the responses to calls for drug legalization, as if the current state of drug prohibition was the natural order of things. Drug warriors never give a philosophical justification of why government should be allowed in this area of our lives, but not others. What we get are the sorts of arguments that would be thrown out in the most elementary philosophy classes, or, alternatively, a paranoia that legalized drug use will literally destroy America. What I've done here is provide responses to some of what seem to be typical responses to the calls for drug legalization.

If government can't protect us, why not legalize murder?

This is one of those inane comments that fails to differentiate between victimless crimes and crimes with victims. No one wants to eliminate crimes against persons or property because that's the most important reason we have government and law enforcement in the first place. The argument to legalize drugs is that ending the black market would help eliminate violent crime. No similar argument about reducing violence can be made in regards to legalized murder.

I don't want someone stoned out of their mind driving the bus!

Nor do I. I also don't want a drunk driving the bus either. Alcohol use and abuse is far more prevalent than other drug use, yet somehow, we manage to survive. Just because drugs are legal doesn't mean we want to let stoned people do things we don't let drunks do right now.

What about the drug users on the streets and in public parks!

Again, let's go back to alcohol. Drug legalization doesn't mean that communities would be required to turn their parks into drug dens. Communities don't have to allow shooting up in public any more than they have to allow open containers of alcohol.

Drug gangs won't just pack up and become upstanding citizens if drugs were legalized.

This is a better point and it's probably true to an extent. But one point should be obvious, based on simple economics. Drug gangs would not be better equipped to sell more drugs at lower prices than a giant retailer like Wal-Mart or a giant pharmacy chain like Walgreens or CVS. Drug gangs would be out of the drug business because they wouldn't be able to compete with corporate distribution networks and business models. Economics matters. Now yes, there would be a substantial number of former dealers out of a job so to speak. But how many drug dealers are violent criminals and how many are just poor kids taking a job that's slightly better and more prestigious than what they could do at McDonald's. (And how many are spoiled suburban kids who sell pot and pills?) Ultimately though, we want the police to round up violent criminals, whether they're part of the drug trade or not. Eliminating the drug trade eliminates the monetary incentive to violence.

What about the children and all the innocent victims of drug abuse?

I'll again return to the point about alcohol. Really though, your views of how we as a society protect children should be no different whether drugs are legal or illegal. Personally, I'm far more concerned about the non-drug user that beats his kids then the crack user who doesn't. The easiest way to protect children is to actually protect them, not

Drug abuse will get worse if drugs are legalized.

Maybe. Or maybe not. I'm not sure anyone knows for sure. What is certain is that the government's own data indicates that millions of Americans have tried the worst sorts of illegal drugs in their lifetimes, but only a small percentage of those who have tried are actually current users. More people would try illegal drugs for sure, if drugs were legalized, but to imply more drug abuse implies that there are millions of drug addicts being kept at bay through the fear of legal punishment and not for instance, the fear of destroying your life. I just find it hard to believe that people scared of jail would not be at least equally scared as scared of becoming a drug addict.

Drug legalization would create an atmosphere of approval.

This one drives me bonkers, as if the legality of a particular activity is the most important way we judge morality. Cheating on your spouse and cheating on a test are both morally wrong activities, but they are not criminal acts. Nor do I suspect anyone thinks that the legality of such activities make them morally acceptable.

Drugs would be more readily available to our kids!

Ask any high schooler familiar with the drug culture what's easier to get their hands on, marijuana, or alcohol. The answer you'd get, overwhelmingly, would be marijuana, precisely because it's illegal and unregulated. Your friends can grow pot. Your thirty year-old cousin from Vermont can grow pot and he's got no problem selling it to high schoolers because he's already breaking the law. But to get alcohol, high schoolers need to find someone over twenty-one who's not breaking the law by buying alcohol, but would be wiling to break the law to give it to high schoolers. Not that alcohol isn't readily available to kids, I'd just say illegal drugs are more so. This argument that legalization would make drugs more available to kids is just ridiculous because illegal drugs are already readily available to any teenagers who seek them out.

Alcohol can't kill you with one drink, but some drugs can kill you with one dose.

Pot can't. Or maybe it could, but alcohol probably could too if you made a bathtub gin strong enough. And that's precisely the reason to legalize, because legal products (with or without the force of the regulatory state) are simply safer than illegal products. You could sue the seller and maker of a legal drug that made a loved one drop dead, but you don't exactly have any legal recourses from illegal drug dealers.

What about the welfare state? Who will pay for the negative side effects of drug use?

This is a real concern, particularly with Obamacare on the horizon. But again, don't we as a society pay for the cost of illegal drug use already? There's a particularly dangerous slippery slope argument to make in regards to the welfare state and the ability of government to limit it's costs. If the point of keeping rug prohibition is to enforce criminal punishments against those who would cost system more money, why can't this logic be extended to any other activity that could cost taxpayers money? This is a good argument against public health care. It's not a good argument for drug prohibition.

Finally, I'd like to respond to those who would defend police militarization and the use of SWAT tactics on non-violent offenders, to those who accept the current state of the war on drugs and refer to sort of dog-killing raids I linked to last post as "isolated incidents."

One commenter in the Stossel column notes that one failure in thousands of raids should be seen as an effective program. But the problem is, we don't know how effective these tactics are because most communities, states, and the federal government don't keep records on their use and the information just isn't available to the public. For those of us who follow such things, what we do know is that botched raids of all sorts are more common than once in thousands. What we need is accountability for the sorts of tactics used by law enforcement, an idea that should hardly be controversial.

And a better question than the percentage of successful versus unsuccessful raids would be the number of these sorts of raids where no weapons are found versus the number of raids where weapons are found. Defending the status quo in this regard is to defend the right of police to have no accountability whatsoever, yet this is precisely what some drug warriors defend.

Cops and Dogs

2010-06-23T11:26:00.002-04:00

Take a moment to read Radley Balko's latest post on Reason, Cop vs. Dog and take the time to watch the Youtube clips.

Sort of like the drug warn in general, the more these stories come up, the fewer responses I see from "law and order" conservatives. Now, some of these "law and order" conservatives aren't really what I would call conservatives at all (I'm thinking in particular of Arizona's Maricopa County Sheriff, who for all his public statements never seems to make a point of stressing limited government), but there are conservatives out there who toe the limited government line, but remain reflexively pro-police and pro-military. This is not to go off into any sort of discussion about support for our troops (or support for law enforcement), but only to point out there's a logical gap between reflexive rejection of bureaucracy and big government and reflexive support of the actions of the police and the military. All of the reasons why big government fails should apply as equally to the police and military as it does to the EPA and the public schools.

The real mistake is to take questions about policy as attacks on individuals, and this is equally true when we're talking about cops, teachers, or environmental regulators. There are good ones and bad ones, but the good and bad individuals are besides the point when we're talking about policy. But just as many on the left tend to put on their blinders when it comes to the regulations we must obviously need, many folks on the right put on just as strong blinders in regards to the actions of police. Case-in-point the issue of cops shooting dogs, which goes hand-in-hand with the police militarization and misuse of SWAT-teams issue, both of which have been covered in great detail by Reason's Radley Balko. The response from the law and order types to these sorts of situations are almost universally either 1- tragic mistakes and 2-bad cops. And as I was getting at, these characterizations are completely missing the point. As Balco points out, why do postal workers have training on dealing with dogs in the course of their work, while police officers do not? This sort of question is not about villainizing the police as an institution or villainizing individual police officers. It's about the accountability we demand as citizens from our public servants, which is precisely what the police are.

The police as an institution have grown insular and immune from any outside criticisms and ideas precisely because they have been fetishized to an extent by some on the right. Cops shooting dogs unnecessarily is a problem and Balko has demonstrated time and time again that such incidents happen often enough to be considered more than isolated incidents. Again, the larger, libertarian point is that law enforcement should be as responsive to the public as any other facet of government if not more so.

A Bailout By Any Other Name

2010-06-09T17:37:00.004-04:00

Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein want us to rethink the use of the word "bailout" in public discourse, reserving the word for situations when the federal government bails out companies suffering from their own mismanagement and poor financial decisions. Here's Ezra:

Like Matt, I've heard pretty much every policy people don't like referred to as a bailout. Money to pay teachers is called a bailout. Monetary stimulus is called a bailout. Paying our IMF dues while the IMF makes a loan to Greece is called a bailout.

For one thing, we need a better definition of a bailout. I'd say it's something like "putting public money into a firm that's insolvent because of poor business decisions." Conversely, putting money into South Carolina's schools to blunt the cuts required by plummeting tax revenue caused by a financial-sector crisis isn't a bailout. You may think it's good or bad policy, but it's not a response to epic mismanagement on South Carolina's part.

He's right, to an extent. Stimulus isn't a bailout but a monstrosity of another variety. And paying IMF dues, is, well, paying IMF dues. But sending money to cash-strapped states to avoid teacher layoffs? In my book I'd call that a bailout. Whether or not South Carolina was mismanaged as badly as say, California, is besides the point. I'm opposed to bailouts because of the costs and the disincentives, not because I'm worried about rewarding people who did wrong. Given how the economy functions as an organic whole, I'm not sure how you judge who's in trouble due to mismanagement and who's just a victim of the lousy economy. And I certainly don't want to leave federal government in the position of bailout judge, giving "non-bailout cash" to states or companies judged to be not at fault, while denying bailouts to those guilty of mismanagement.

You can narrow the definition of bailout based upon the actions of those receiving federal money or you can craft a definition of bailout based simply upon the actions of the federal government. I'd go with the latter because it's simpler and just makes more sense. It should still be considered a bailout whether the administration is acting to help a crooked corporate buddy or save American jobs. And from a liberal perspective of the public good, we need our public school teachers regardless of why the state can't afford to pay them all.

The End (of Lost) part II

2010-06-09T11:01:00.000-04:00

In ending the way it did, Lost has left us with hundreds, probably thousands of unanswered questions, some more relevant than others. What I'd like to focus on here are questions relevant to the story: Plot or character threads that were never thoroughly explained and mysteries which relate to major plot points. There are plenty of stories we would have loved to get, but ultimately aren't all that important. For instance, remember that glass eye found at the Arrow where the Tailies were holing up? It would have been neat to find out where it came from, but chalk that up to creepiness and stories we just never got to.

What I've done is divide these leftover questions into two categories: Questions where we can infer answers and questions that, on further review, still leave us frustrated. Comments as always are appreciated, particularly any questions I may have forgotten.

Questions Where We Can Infer Answers

* Walt

I know a lot of people disagree with me on this one, but as much as I would have liked to see more, I think we did get all the essential elements of the Walt mystery. To put it simply, he had psychic powers and the Others were interested in him for precisely that reason. And even though they were interested in him, they were willing to let him go to get Ben back. The question of Walt's "specialness" leads into any number of unanswered questions about the Others, but in terms of Walt the character, I'm reasonably satisfied.

* Daniel Faraday crying

I bring this one up because I've mentioned it before. And while I was really hoping we'd see more about this, perhaps we can chalk it up quite simply to Daniel's time travel experiments. I'd always wondered whether he had some foreknowledge of the future that would explain the crying, but they chose not to do more with Faraday- including explaining what he was doing for three years at Dharma headquarters in Michigan- and I can live with it.

* Why can't babies be born on the island?

In listening to other reactions to the end of Lost, I'm reminded that some people forget the details. I've heard people confused as to how Jacob and MIB could have been born and people who think Aaron's birth on the island was special. But Juliet explained it all in season three. Something happens during pregnancy (in the second trimester I think?) to the babies of women who conceive on the island. Aaron was fine because Claire was 8 months or so pregnant when she got to the island. Sun's baby was specifically in danger because Sun conceived on the island. And season five had Juliet assisting in the birth of Horace and Amy's son, Ethan. The implication- I'm fairly sure- was that babies good in fact be born on the island in 1977, seeing as it's unlikely Horace and Amy were off the island for any significant time. My theory, one that we obviously can't confirm, is that the detonation of Jughead somehow caused the pregnancy problems on the island. It makes sense on the timeline and it makes sense as far as the story arc for Juliet: that she created the very circumstances that led her to the island in the first place. I would have liked to see some resolution, particularly for Juliet's sake, but I'm reasonably happy with the explanation I've outlined.

* How did Claire's mother get better?

This is one of those questions that came to me as I re-watched season 3 and saw the Claire episode where Claire's flashback involves her mother in a coma, years after a serious accident. The season 4 finale then introduces us again to Claire's mother, out of the coma and attending Christian's funeral after the return of the Oceanic 6. I got really worked up about this when I made the realization leading up to season six and was convinced that either 1- Jacob had healed her or 2- She was an impostor manipulating the Oceanic 6 to return to the island. Neither theory played out and I think we can rely on the character's explanation: that she was very ill and then she got better. I'm undecided as to whether or not this is lousy writing. On one hand, it's like they wrote the scene after the fact and had to lamely cover their asses, but on the other hand, it would be one of the other ironies of Lost if Claire's mother were to recover soon after her daughter disappears. But in either case, this is a prime example of how Lost worked, for better or for worse. Because of all the connections between characters, all of the mysteries with exciting answers, Lost fans struggled to connect the dots with every little bit of information we were given. In any other show you'd just leave it as is, chalking it up to either lousy writing or perhaps a focus on themes before plot, but with Lost we just couldn't leave these things alone.

* Who was trying to kill Sayid at the beginning of Season 5?

Remember the end of season four and beginning of season five when Sayid shot the man outside the mental hospital and killed three or four more assassin types who were seemingly out to get him and his Oceanic friends? There was so much that went on off-island that I had hoped we'd return to it, at least briefly. The biggest question of course, was why all those assassin types were after Sayid (and why that one in the hospital had Kate's address)? The simplest explanation here is probably our best bet: It was directly to related to all the killing Sayid had done for Ben, perhaps just direct retribution from some Widmore related group. There's more to this story in terms of Ben and Widmore, but as far as all the action we saw, I think we can chalk it up to Sayid having brought it upon himself.

* Sayid, Claire, Dogen, the Sickness, and Good and Evil

Hopefully you get the point with all the descriptors above. I was going to put this down below as an unhappy mystery, but as I hashed it out, it occurred to me that we may have actually gotten a lot more answers than it may have seemed on the surface. I had been very disappointed as to the nature of Sayid and Claire's journey over the final season, but my reaction has softened a bit, perhaps because their journeys play into the theme I've mentioned before where all our characters are acting on incomplete information and imbibing the unknowable mysteries of the island with their own values and interpretations. And this perhaps is why we get this very Eastern sort of explanation about good and evil from Dogen in regards to Claire and Sayid. In terms of Sayid, we get that it was expected that the temple spring would heal him. But what we don't get is any explanation of why the Others tried to drown Sayid after the water turned dirty nor there explanation of what actually happened to him. And in terms of Claire, I never get a good sense of why the Others say she's been infected with darkness, other than the fact that she's with Smokey.

I had been upset about the lack of context and the open-ended question of whether Sayid's redemption a matter of his overcoming something that had happened to him or his overcoming what he had done to himself. But in looking at this plot thread at a deeper level, I think Hurley may have provided that answer to us in the finale when he quite directly points out that Sayid needs to stop letting other people tell him just who he is. It's an unorthodox way to address the island plot, certainly, but it's effective in revealing the writers intentions. It's not neat and tidy, but I can certainly buy it: Sayid and Claire weren't sick and weren't infected, those explanations were just the Others way of providing some clarity to their circumstances.

As I go through these questions, I'm beginning to wonder how many of these unanswered questions actually have these ambiguous, more round about answers. That doesn't mean you have to be satisfied, but on some level it represents a conscious decision on the writers part rather than something that just fell by the wayside.

* What were the rules?

I was going to include this as a question I was unhappy with, but I think the scene with Jacob and MIB playing the game in Across the Sea was the writers way of answering the question about the rules. Rules are ultimately human constructs and they don't transcend our characters in any way, shape, or form. I was unsatisfied with Ben hasty dispatch of Widmore, but I think it was meant to show us that the rules supposedly keeping Ben from killing Widmore didn't literally keep Ben from physically killing Widmore. I understand this is not going to be satisfying for a lot of people: It leaves open the question of whether or not MIB was actually bound by these rules or whether he could have just killed Jacob and the candidates. But as far as plot goes, I think we can come up with the rules that were relevant and when they were and weren't followed. We don't get a deeper meaning or explanation, but that's just like a lot of the ambiguity in Lost.

Questions That Needed More

* Sawyer and company being chased and shot at during the outrigger chase in season five.

Ultimately not an important question, but I'm holding the writers to a higher standard when it comes to a moment so close to the end. Everything else during the time flashes paid off, so it's just odd they never returned to that chase either later in season five or in season six. I've read that Damon and Carlton planned to come back to the chase in season six, but it never really fit in to the story they were telling. I could live with that, except for the fact that half of the season was spent sitting around on the beach. It could have been worked in and I think even cheap would have been better than not at all.

* Did the Others know about the Swan and the button?

In season three there's a scene with Ben and Juliet at the Pearl station, watching Jack and company in the Swan hatch. Given that we know the Others occupied these old Dharma stations, the question arises, why did they allow Desmond (and Kelvin and Radsinky before him) to push the button in that hatch. It doesn't seem that they gave any importance to it- Ben certainly doesn't put any value on it while he's kept prisoner in the hatch- but if that was the case, why let Desmond stay there? I've got no good answers here and this plays into my other questions about the Swan hatch: How did the protocol get started and how did it continue after the purge? More on that in a bit.

* What's up with Eloise Hawking

In the finale, we finally get a hint as to the limits of Eloise's all-knowingness when she begs Desmond not to take Daniel with him. It seems to me like her conversation with Desmond represented either an unawareness of what the sideways was or an unwillingness to accept what it meant. Either way, as a women of science, neither she (or her so with the scientific mind) were ready to move on. But to return to the standard timeline, why was Eloise so all-knowing? The standard explanation since last season has been Daniel's diary, but that diary provides no context for her first appearance in season three, when she tells Desmond he doesn't buy Penny an engagement ring. How would she have so much knowledge at that point in time, about Desmond and his particular situation? And how would she know that a particular man with red shoes was destined to be killed and intervening would only lead to some form of course correction down the road? My theory had always been that Eloise was somehow exposed to the same electromagnetism that Desmond was exposed to and that she had somehow honed the same flashes of the future Desmond has experienced into a useful tool. But that's far too much supposition without any hint of an explanation.

* Christian Shephard ... What the fuck?

I've been bouncing back and forth on this one and ultimately, I'm not happy. Smokey told us that he was Christian, or at least the Christian who led Jack to the caves and to water early in the first season. Assuming that's the truth, I still don't buy Smokey as every other incarnation of Christian we've seen. He certainly was not the Christian on the boat, telling Michael he could go. I have trouble believing he was the Christian down the well, hundreds of years in the past, telling Locke to fix the donkey wheel, but unable to help him up. And I'm just not sure about the Christian we see in "Jacob's cabin." I can see the setup in which that Christian was supposed to be Smokey, but that just creates more questions about the whys. I can see why Smokey would want Locke to turn that wheel if he was the one that created it (maybe he thought it would get him off the island), but I can't figure out why he zombie marched Claire away from her baby and her friends. We know what Smokey's game was in season 5- to manipulate Ben into killing Jacob- but I can't really see how having Ben or Locke turn that wheel gets him to that point where Ben returns Locke's body back to the island. (And yes, that's what actually happened, but if Smokey had no power off the island and couldn't leave, it would be a rater ridiculous plan to send your pawns away in hopes they'd return at the right time.)

I don't mind a lot of the vague stuff with Christian- the fact that we saw his coffin empty on the island and empty yet again in the flash sideways is intriguing to say the least. But those events at the end of season four drove the final two seasons of the show and to not fully understand them leaves a big hole in the story. Forces drove our characters to take certain drastic actions and it would be nice to know why. If the Christian in Jacob's cabin was Smokey, I'd like to know what exactly he was scheming at that point and if that Christian wasn't Smokey, but was some sort of manifestation of the island, I'd be happy just knowing that this was in fact the island protecting itself and not our characters being manipulated for selfish reasons.

* In the same vein as above, what was the deal with Jacob's cabin?

We're given vague hints (by Ilana's group in the season five finale) that Jacob hadn't been there in a long time. The implication there was that Jacob was there once, but that Smokey had somehow been there since then. So why did Ben take Locke there if Ben thought he was just pulling one over on Locke? Who's voice did Locke hear? Who's eye did Hurley see and why did he see Christian in a rocking chair and then a creepy eye? Why did Horace "build" the cabin? And what was the deal with the ashes surrounding the cabin and the fact that Hurley may have broken that ash circle in season four. Ultimately none of it is all that important, but there's a lot there and it all leads up to that big season four finale moment. As I've always said, you don't need to explain everything about the island, but that's a lot to leave unanswered as far as the powers on the island we did get to know, Jacob and MIB. Mysteries are one thing, but to have our characters in such a fog as to what was MIB, what was Jacob, and what was something else is frustrating precisely because we did learn so much about Jacob and MIB. It's just too much of a jumbled mess for my liking and I can't come up with a coherent explanation for it all.

(And one more point, as I'm coming back to this after the fact. Remember Locke's dream of Horace cutting down the same tree, over and over again, to build the cabin. We see Locke wake up, so we know that was in fact a dream and not a vision of the MIB. Assuming these weird dreams relate to the island, that tells me that the island was pushing Locke toward the cabin. As I've been saying, there's still far too much ambiguity for such an important event.

* Why did Juliet, Miles, Charlotte, Daniel, and the rest of the Oceanic survivors flash through time, but Claire and all of the Others did not?

I remember last season I was hoping there'd be an explanation as to why Sun stayed in 2007, while Jack, Kate, Hurley, and Sayid all flashed back to 1977. The explanation we got was an unexpected side effect of the failure to recreate Oceanic 815. In reality, that little bit of plot was mostly about keeping Sun and Jin apart, but I bought it. What I don't buy is the lack of real explanations as to why some characters flashed through time while others did not when Ben first turned the wheel. We see Locke, supposedly the new leader of the Others, flash away right in front of Richard and the other Others who remain in 2004. Juliet, the former Other, flashes away with the Losties on the beach. And Claire, off in Christian's cabin, remains in 2004. I don't have a problem with the idea that some characters would flash and others would not, but it's a bit too convenient for there to be no explanation.

* Why did the Dharma food drops continue and what happened with Dharma after the purge?

In season two, a pallet of food and supplies is dropped from the sky in the middle of the night as Locke and Ben experience a lockdown in the Swan hatch. The implication is that the lockdown occurred to keep the Swan residents oblivious to the supplies being dropped. But the question remains as to who was dropping the supplies so long after the end of Dharma? One very good idea I just heard today was that Dharma had contracted with some mysterious company to make and deliver those supplies and that company had continued to fufill it's end of the agreement long after Dharma was gone. The other theory, possibly related, was that Ben and some of the Others (Mikhail at the Flame maybe) had maintained the illusion that Dharma remained on the island.

The truth is, we lose track of the Dharma story after 1977. With the evacuation that went on prior to the Incident, perhaps families never returned to the island and the Dharma Initiative of the 1980's was a shadow of it's former self. But the point is we don't know. We don't know how and when Kelvin was recruited to the Swan station. We don't know how Eloise Hawking came to reside in the Lampost station in Los Angeles. Ultimately, a lot of this is tangential to our story, but Dharma was such a big part of this story. We get the Black Rock but we don't get all of this?

* Why does Richard tell Sun "I watched them all die" in regards to all the 1970's Losties?

In the season five episode "Follow the Leader" Richard tells Sun that he watched her husband and all the other Losties in the 1970's die. It was a neat little moment, but like the outrigger shoot out, it was a piece of dramatic tension that was never followed up on. I had a really simple theory that Richard was there for the Incident, perhaps observing from a distance and he saw our Losties disappear in the midst of Jughead's explosion. It fits perfectly well, but to not return to it at all is a bit of a cheat. It's one thing for plot points to be left vague, but another for a key dramatic moment to never be resolved.

* Why did Bram (Ilana's "shadow of the statue" companion) try and recruit Miles? And who the hell were they in the first place?

I'm noticing a theme here as I go through these questions. Some of the more major questions I thought were troublesome have answers and resolutions embedded within the story, while most of these questions I'm ultimately unhappy with don't have good answers because the events that raised the question in the first place were typically pure plot. Take this little one here. I'm never clear on why Miles needed to be recruited, when none of our other characters were ever approached. And why was Miles being recruited in 2004 when the Shadow of the Statue folks didn't go to the island until 2007. Maybe not a big deal, but who were these off-island Jacob disciples and how were they connected with the on-island Others. It's an answer we neevr had the chance to get when the dynamite blew up Ilana, but it's just sort of depressing that you had all these characters waiting for years to go to the island and serve Jacob only to be killed by Smokey days after they arrived.

* Where did Anthony Cooper come from?

This one bugs me, I think because of all Ben's talk about the magic box. Yes, I know the magic box was supposed to be a metaphor, but bring up the mystical makes me wonder how Anthony Cooper got to the island, especially since he tells Locke the last thing he remembers is getting into a terrible car accident. I suppose the obvious answer is that Ben arranged to bring Cooper to the island, but I just feel like that one was teased too much the other way for there to be no specific resolution.

* The temple Others versus Ben's Others

One frustrating aspect of the end of Lost was that manner in which the Otehrs were wiped out by Smokey in order to make room for the Jacob/MIB story. Suddenly, the Others who's existence was about serving Jacob were rendered peripheral. It doesn't matter to most of our major characters, except for the fact that Ben, Richard, and Juliet were all Others, and Dogen was this big funky mystery who was killed off before he could be explained. There's a huge difference between explaining a mystery unique to the island and the mysteries to a group of people that played such an integral role of so many of our characters lives. I've complained about Dharma above, but ultimately, we learned a lot more about Dharma then we did about the Others.

There's a line in season five's Jughead when Richard tells Locke that the Others have a very specific process for selecting their leadership. Yet that's never explained and we're left with only the vague hints relating to patricide we see in season three. Additionally, how did Ben's (and before him Widmore, and Eloise) role as leader actually work? I have trouble imagining Dogen as a character who would take orders from Ben, so what was the relationship between the temple Others and the Others living in Dharmaville?

I do think we get a lot from the Richard back story: these are the islands defenders serving Jacob, but how is it that so many of the Others were so fanatical in their beliefs? How is it that Cindy and the kids were kidnapped from the tail section and became such obedient Others? Some of it- like how did Jacob recruit Mikhail to come to the island- is pure curiosity, but there are far too many unanswered questions directly related to the story and our characters.

How did Ben know about the donkey wheel?

This relates to the last unanswered question and represents the other side of the theme that I do find satisfying. I like the idea that each and every character, Jacob and MIB included, don't know any more about the secrets of the island than the rest of us. I liked how in season six, Ben and Richard, who had been such all-knowing characters were basically cut down to size. The other side of this coin is that we never actually get their entire stories. Yes we understand where they come from as characters, but we don't see where they come from as far as driving the plot. Ben has the line in the penultimate episode where he realizes that perhaps the smoke monster had been summoning him, rather than the other way around. It's a neat wrap up for his character but it doesn't explain how and what Ben actually knew as leader of the Others. What did he think the smoke monster was and how did he discover all those passageways below Dharmaville? How did he learn about the wheel and how did he know it would move the island? Why did he say it was dangerous and a measure of last resort?

If you notice a theme here, it's that I loved the season four finale and really think it was a high point of the show, but I'm disappointed that no explanations are given for all the events that set the stage for the final two seasons. If Ben is supposed to be our character, we shouldn't be left with all these unanswered questions about his actions.

* Charles Widmore

I mentioned above that I was coming to terms with Widmore's shocking and sudden death, but that doesn't mean I'm happy with his story. Widmore's line that he came to the island on Jacob's behalf after Jacob convinced him of the error of his ways is a convenient explanation for his actions in season six, but it doesn't explain what he was doing in season four with the mercenaries on the freighter and what his role was in season five when he helps out Locke. My impression was that whatever Widmore was trying to do season four did involve his taking the island for his own selfish reasons, but it's disappointing to never see that hashed out. And it plays right into Ben's actions in the season four finale: Was Ben really saving the island from Widmore? I really like to think yes, but the lack of a complete story on Widmore's part leaves that up in the air.

Five Years And A Brief Question

2010-06-08T10:47:00.002-04:00

I meant to get this up yesterday, but ran out of time as the day got away from me. But yesterday, June 8th, was the five year anniversary of this blog. I started up at the end of my first year of law school and five years is longer than I've done just about anything in my life.

It's interesting to see the changes in tone and the evolution of my political philosophy over these past five years. Most of my positions have remained similar, but my focus has become more and more about individuals and the effect of the law on individuals, for better or for worse. I've gotten away from much of my post 9-11 reactionary foreign policy blogging because none of it seems cut and dry and I'm not sure what to think any more. I was a strong supporter of the war in Iraq and I haven't backtracked from my viewpoint that the war was morally justifiable, but I've spent much of the last four years questioning the cost and the necessity. But much as it's difficult to assess the working of big government on the domestic front, it's even more difficult to make sweeping judgments in the area of foreign policy and I've basically just stopped trying.

It's much easier to look to people, to look to individuals, which is why I've leaned more and more libertarian on the civil libertarian front and perhaps why I've grown more and more liberaltarian on the social welfare front. Which brings me to my question: If libertarians are all selfish, what would that make a libertarian who believes in social welfare and support for the poor, but also in reducing the size of government and scrapping the regulatory state?

Since I've started this blog, I've seen more and more of these sort of viewpoints being expressed and I've yet to see anyone other than libertarian purists denounce this line of thought. In the health care debate I saw this line of reasoning from some libertarians and conservatives, basically making the point that we could help the poor and needy without a massive government controlled health care system. And again, it's an argument that's never taken seriously by the left. What's interesting is the ways in which the health care debate (and some of these other discussions as to the role of government) has placed many on the left in the position of first and foremost defending the role of government and not as an advocate for the poor and the oppressed.

The problem is, opposition to any concept of a social safety net has been part of the rhetoric of libertarian circles and the free market right for decades now and looking back, it may represent the movement's biggest mistake. One need only look to the Clinton-era welfare reforms to see the popularity of anti-welfare rhetoric. So while there was some successes in battling the expansion of the welfare state, the regulatory state grew and grew and grew, giving us the unsustainable government we have today. Changing popular opinion in a more liberaltarian direction is possible, but it does involve changing attitudes, about the poor and about government in general. But the biggest argument to move in such a direction is the ridiculousness of the debate over welfare spending, which amounts to such a small percentage of government budgets at all levels. It takes more than a few undeserved welfare recipients to equal out the salary of an undeserved six-figure federal employee (and how many of those are there?) But ultimately, if our concern is the size and scope of government we should worry more and more about what government does before worrying about money going to the poor.

Just A Little Bit On Health Care

2010-06-07T15:37:00.004-04:00

I've got the other half of my end of Lost post kicking around, along with a couple of other "big" topics, but while I finish those up I wanted to send me readers in the direction of Reason's Peter Suderman, who's done a wonderful job of covering many of the effects of Obamacare for Reason's Hit and Run. Today's first post hits on the administration's plans for keeping down health insurance costs in private markets: Sending nasty letters to insurance companies, strongly encouraging them to keep prices low and service levels high in the face of escalating health care costs. Today's second post relays the story of a Virginia "consumer-driven" health insurance start-up, put out of business by the regulatory uncertainties of Obamacare.

Just a few points:

1- Regulation of any sort always drives up the cost of doing business and regulatory uncertainty all but ensures that no new competition can enter the market place.

2- If you've paid any attention to the spiraling out of control health care costs in Massachusetts, you've got to see this is where we're headed as a nation. We're headed toward health insurance as a quasi-public utility and that's not good news for consumers. In a way, what we've got is sort of the inverse of what liberals point out as the folly of privatization and deregulation. Markets are wonderfully dynamic things, but putting a private company in charge of a public good does not a market make. Lousy and/or corrupt privatization plans only create the inefficiency of government while taxpayer money goes into someone's pocket. And the more government involvement we get in the health insurance industry, the more you have to wonder what purpose it serves to have private industry making any sort of a profit simply by putting government mandates into effect. If that sounds like an argument for universal health care or a government run system, it is, in a way. And I'm talking off the cuff here, but the problem is that there becomes a point when a heavily regulated industry (or public utility operated as a for-profit business) becomes even less efficient than government. Why? Because at some point, these industries become virtually institutionalized, nearly as protected by law as the government, but less accountable, and retaining a commitment to making a profit.

I know some folks out there think that this was this was the Obama plan all along, to surreptitiously pass universal health care as this supposed private-public partnership failed, but I don't buy such conspiracy theories and would point to a far simpler explanation. It's precisely the same fallacy of central planners that Hayek, Freidman, and countless other economists have been criticizing for decades. Each generation thinks they've learned the mistakes of the past and they can be smarter than the marketplace, but it never works out and you always wind up with the sort of impending disasters we're seeing today.

Student Loans

2010-06-01T11:04:00.000-04:00

This weekend's New York Times had a fascinating and personally relatable piece on burgeoning college student loan debt. I say relatable, because my wife and I can relate to six-figure student loan debt. And it's nice to see student loan debt painted in such stark terms. Yes, significant student loan debt can impoverish those with modest salaries and yes, there's no escaping the specter of debt that can not be discharged through bankruptcy. But while the Times piece focuses on minor solutions to this student loan debt crises- mainly more counseling and financial advising- the Times neglects the two biggest problems which have led us down this road: The exploding costs of a college education and social norms that value a college degree at all costs.

Anecdotally, I can say with certainty that the cost of college has gone up drastically. When I graduated high school in 1998, the "expensive" schools were in that $30,000 a year range. Today, the expensive schools are in the $50,000 a year range, which far outpaces the rate of inflation. And at some point you have to wonder how much is too much. Why should the cost of a four year college education be more than the purchase of a starter home? Other than the same bureaucratic over run that's plagued both health care and government spending, I don't have any good ideas as to why college costs have increased so dramatically. But unlike health care and government spending, college students are direct consumers of the product they're buying and they do have all the information at their fingertips to make financially sound decisions. But like Ms. Munna, who's featured in the Times story, young people in America are not making sound decisions in regards to their financial futures.

So why this collective madness? I blame a culture that has elevated college education to a degree that far outweighs and tangible and monetary benefit. High school students are specifically told to dream high and the entire college process is designed to help students attend the most prestigious university possible, not the schools most suited to their particular financial situation. If you think about it, it's a uniquely American situation. We have an egalitarian mindset when it comes to college in general, but our system of funding is anything but egalitarian.

The value of a college education is two-fold, but we tend to fold those ideas right into one another. There's the monetary value of a college education itself and the earning potential one gains from a college education and then there's the intrinsic value of education. One is difficult to calculate and the other is downright impossible, yet we constantly seem to get these two very separate concepts muddled together. Take Ms. Munna, the subject of the Times piece. Generally speaking, there is a lot of value in the prestige of an NYU degree and in the right field, it may be possible to capitalize on that value. But Ms. Munna majored in religious and womens studies, not exactly the springboard to a lucrative career. For folks with money, the intrinsic value of that education might well be worth it. But for someone faced with a lifetime of debt, you've got to ask whether such a person would have been better off studying the same thing at a less expensive state school.

Our system of college education is not egalitarian, but elite universities have a vested interest in maintaining that egalitarian image. Why? Because without it, elite universities wouldn't be elite. They'd have to drastically reduce their size or start letting in rich dummies to make up for the loss of bright middle class students. And remember, it's elitism and success that drives our higher education system. Competition between schools isn't about who can offer the best value, but about who can attract the highest caliber of students. The "value" offered by state universities is really only a result of the flow of state tax dollars and any other schools which try to advertise their value are generally seen as somehow substandard.

The point is there needs to be more encouragement for young people to make sound financial decisions. And of course it's unfair that plenty of poor and middle class students would be unable to attend particular universities, but that's life. You simply can't maintain a system of private universities if student tuition is fully subsidized by the state and there's something inherently wrong with our current system that saddles students with massive student loan debt for the rest of their adult lives. The truth of the Ivy leagues and similarly elite schools is that they've maintained their status through the influx of the non-rich. Whatever images we may have of elite universities as the province of the rich would simply not be true if all the bright poor and middle class students chose to go somewhere else. And that's why we need to change attitudes and perceptions. The more successful students that chose inexpensive alternatives, the more elite schools will need to cut costs in order to retain talent and remain elite.

The End (of Lost) part I

2010-05-30T09:00:00.000-04:00

After much thought, I've decided to divide this post into two parts. The second part, which is still a work in progress, will focus on the various questions that weren't answered and just how much those unanswered questions take away from the Lost experience. But I first want to focus on the end, as in "The End" the finale and the end of Lost in general. A good number of critics and fans took the position early this year that they were waiting for the show to end before commenting to deeply on what they thought of it. It was a smart decision because the real purpose of the flash sideways wasn't revealed until the finale and trying to make sense of season six without that understanding would be like trying to make sense of the early seasons without knowing that the flashbacks were actually events that already happened.

I've seen comments from numerous Lost fans who feel let down and wonder if they've wasted countless hours of their lives on questions with no answers and rabbit holes with no bottoms. But personally, I'm finding myself more and more fulfilled by the end of Lost. Yes, I've got my complaints (and I'll get to them below), but as a whole, the story paid off thematically and paid off as far as our characters go. Lost was unique in television history, where the search for meaning amongst the characters mirrored the experience of the audience. It's no surprise that John Locke was such a fan favorite, seeing as he was just as desperate to unravel the mysteries of the island as the viewers at home were. For fans, Lost often meant spending more hours on the show away from the television than in front of it. In a way, Lost was sort of an inverse Star Trek, where instead of pushing meaning well beyond the show borders, fans searched for meaning within the show's four walls. If you really think about it, it makes the ending to Lost a near impossibility. Lost fans can be a bit crazy, so if someone can come up with a better ending I'd love to see it, but I'm just not sure there's a better ending out there. Getting wrapped up in the mystery we sometimes forget that Lost is entertainment ... it's a story. And wishing we had more answers (or better answers) is one thing, but writing them into a cohesive and compelling storyline that fits the confines of network television is another matter entirely.

My initial reaction to the finale was good, followed by some doubts on Monday, but the cacophony of complaints I've heard sent me deeper down the rabbit hole and I like what I've discovered: The flash sideways were a brilliant storytelling device and the more I think about it, the more brilliant it seems. Again, let's return to Lost as entertainment. Damon and Carlton have mentioned in any number of interviews that they conceived of the flash forwards sometime during season two when it seemed obvious the flashbacks had run their course (none of course more obvious than season 3's Stranger in a Strange Land, where we learn how Jack get's his tattoos). Not having heard any differently, it makes me think they conceived of these flash sideways rather early on too, around the time they began to chart the end of the series. I make this point because it certainly seems as though this was the way they wanted to end the series and that these flash sideways were not some haphazard last minute idea when they couldn't figure out what to do after Jughead went off. As viewers (even the fans who saw Lost as a first and foremost a character drama) we tend to think most about mystery and plot, but Lost has always relied on these non-linear storytelling devices and for the writers, I can imagine those storytelling devices were part of the beginning of the creative process. If you're one of those fans who think the flash sideways were a waste of time, then what's your better idea? And does anyone want to make the argument that the flash sideways were "more of a waste of time" then the vast majority of the flashbacks? I'm all for nitpicking and we'll get tom plenty of that, but at some point you've got to appreciate the structure of the show for what it was.

If you really want to get down to it, the flash sideways was really the only way to end Lost's final season. It was a means of further exploring our characters and a means of returning to the off-island connections that tantalized us for the first several years of the show. And at a very basic level, it was the only way to end the show that would allow us to say goodbye to the characters we'd grown to love so much. Purgatory is the word that's being used to describe the sideways, but the sideways reality was much more than that. Yes, it was a place for our characters to meet before moving on, but my interpretation was that it was also a fully realized universe, albeit one where our characters retained buried memories of the previous life they'd lived. One of the more interesting ideas I've heard is that Hurley somehow created the sideways reality as part of his work as the new Jacob. But however it came to be, my interpretation is there was objective reality in the sideways. The notable absence of certain characters not in the church- Ben, Faraday, Eloise Hawking- tell us that the sideways reality was to continue after all our main characters moved on. The David character, Jack's son who didn't exist in the on-island storyline, represents the objective reality of the sideways, as does the image from the start of the season of the island sunk below the ocean. David in particular, is the son not just of Jack, but Juliet. So yes, from a storytelling perspective he represents Jack's resolution of his daddy issues, but the idea that Juliet would spend a decade and a half raising a son is also significant. Add in the fact that you have a baby Aaron "moving on" and it's a good bet that this is a fully realized independent universe and not one that exists solely for our characters.

Now, discussion of the sideways obviously devolves quickly into a philosophical death spiral, but these threads such as the island, and baby Aaron, and David's existence are not simply unresolvable loose ends, but launching off points for the discussion as to the nature of the sideways. What happened to all our characters was an awakening of their old consciousness and the recall of their old lives. But what does that mean for their sideways selves, some of whom led very different existences. The idea that Jack and Juliet's son would mean nothing is sort of nihilistic. It takes away some of the power of our characters meeting if this world where they experienced full lives literally had no meaning. The walking talking Christian from the end of the finale shows us that our sideways characters have already taken a step towards moving to their final destination. Perhaps in moving on, their island souls separated from their sideways souls, or better yet, the characters moving into the light are permitted the benefit of the experience of all their lives, while their sideways selves continue on. Either of those interpretations are preferable to the idea that the sideways somehow continues without our characters and a not yet ready cop named Ana Lucia has to investigate the mysterious disappearance of all those Oceanic 815 passengers.

Of course there is the question of why our characters experience their flashes of realization when they do and I have a theory on that. The island reality didn't start to bleed through until the moment of that crash, when they flew over the sunken island in LA X and up until that point our characters were stuck living their new lives. But after that point, we begin to see the literal bleed through, in terms of the wounds on Jack's neck and our characters are finally able to re-discover their former lives. Now as we see, our characters become truly ready at different times. I suspect Rose and Bernard made their discovery rather early on, which would explain Bernard's odd behavior when Jack goes to see him earlier in the season to ask about Locke's file. Jack on the other hand, takes awhile to give into faith in something beyond him, just as he did in our island story. And some, like Ana Lucia, are still not ready at our conclusion, perhaps because they still need to atone or perhaps because they have more of a spiritual journey to make.

In terms of our characters and the story, the real purpose of the flash sideways to explore the concept of fate and the role of Jacob and the island in our characters lives. Some things in life are fate and some things in life are coincidence. For example, Locke was always fated to be in that wheel chair, but he was not fated to have a lousy relationship with his father. Sawyer was always supposed to play by his own rules, but his career path (con man versus cop) was never supposed to lead one way or another. Ben always was supposed to be involved with Alex, but he was never fated to be a power hungry killer. And Sayid was never supposed to be with Nadia, which is why I had no problem with his reuniting with Shannon in the sideways (unlike some people, who really hated that particular reunion.) This is obviously a fairly superficial reading of the similarities and differences, but you could delve as deeply as you'd like.

To move on past the sideways, I have to say that upon further review, I'm even less happy with the on-island story this last season. On one level, almost nothing happened. We had weeks with our characters at the temple and weeks with our characters at the beach, before the plot finally got into gear toward the end of the season. And while most of Lost has involved our characters essentially being stuck on the beach, that was because that was where our characters made our home for the first four years of the show. I think this season and the latter half of last season proved difficult for the writers in terms of what to do with the multitude of characters who suddenly didn't have the same goals and the same home on the beach to return to. I'll go out on a limb here and say that the story became unwieldy at the point when the Oceanic Six returned to the island, as from that point forward most of what our characters did was a contrivance or a cheat of one sort or another. Season five managed to wrap itself up rather well, mostly because of the sheer strength of Jack's resolve, but I never quite understood why Miles or Jin were more than ready to detonate a nuclear bomb.

In season six, we did see any number of characters- Jin, Kate, Sawyer- go off on their own, but we wound up with all our characters in either Jack or Locke's camp, no matter how little sense it made for Kate or Jin to follow Locke around. But beyond the character contrivances, as I mentioned, very little actually happened. The on-island story of season six could be summed up as simply as this: Our characters go to the temple, Locke attacks the temple, our characters go to the beach, Widmore comes to the island, Jack meets Locke, Locke blows up sub, and Jack and Locke finally have it out. We did get a few neat moments early in the season- Sawyer finding the cave and Jack finding the lighthouse- but by the end of the season we just had Desmond being dragged around as a piece in motion for half a season in the manner that was typically reserved for the episode before the finale. Contrast season six with season three, which had the added hurdle of spending it's first six weeks in polar bear cages. We had Jack's relationship with Juliet and his operation on Ben, Sawyer and Kate's escape from Hydra island, Locke's quest into the jungle, blowing up Dharma stations and subs, the discovery of Dharmaville, Juliet leaving the Others and being a double agent, Locke joining up with the Others and challenging Ben, Naomi coming to the island and all the other events leading up to the showdown on the beach and in the Looking Glass.

And that's not to mention we had Mr. Eko's death, Desmond's time flashes and visions of Charlie's death, Hurley finding Roger and the Dharma van, Sawyer killing Anthony Cooper, and Sun's pregnancy. I suppose what I'm really getting at are those wonderful intersections of plot and character which Lost used to be so good at. Even when "nothing" was happening, most seasons of Lost had so much going on, but this last season seemed to be a lot of pieces being moved around on a chess board.

Even though they abandoned the concept of the beach as home, season five worked in some ways that season six did not because you had two groups of characters, one off the island trying (or not-trying) to get back and one on the island just struggling to survive the time flashes. But this last season just struggled to tell compelling on-island stories. We had a few stellar moments, but far less than most other seasons of Lost. On one level, this is a problem unique to the end of a story, the end of this story. I'm not sure how else you could have utilized all the characters in this storyline and I don't think I really have a better idea as to how the on-island story could have been constructed differently.

Similarly to how I feel about the endings for our characters, I think Lost managed to do justice to it's many thematic elements in it's final season and final episode. Many fans hated Across the Sea, the Jacob and Man in Black back story, but I thought it was Lost storytelling at it's finest, basically giving these two God-like characters the Lost treatment and elevating the mysteries of the island as beyond even the two of them. If Lost has been about anything for six years it's been about the search for meaning, the search for answers, in our lives and the world around us. As viewers we were literally as Lost as our characters were, both in terms of the "why are we here?" and the "what is this place." it's no wonder that John Locke, the man most interested in the secrets of the island and the man most invested in the search for the meaning of it all became such a fan favorite.

To return again for a moment to "Across the Sea," what we learned in our mythological flashback was that Jacob and MIB were just as lost about the meaning of it all as we were. Jacob has faith in what Mother told him, but the ultimate explanations he's given us about the island are no more clear than MIB's assertions earlier this season (as Locke) that the island is just an island and nothing more. Protecting the island is a value judgment made by our characters, or in this case, Jack, and later Hurley. And protecting the island has been the rationale for all the conflict and drama on the island, from Ben turning that wheel, to the purge of Dharma.

Since the very beginning Lost has been about making these value judgments, about this search for meaning. You could be a man of science or a man of faith, but ultimately there were never any real answered to be had about the island, just as there are no answers to be had about our universe. Whether it's a magic light that needs protection or electromagnetism, we're just giving meaning to forces that we just can't understand. Lost works and the end of Lost works precisely because so much of the mythology of the island was cloaked in the same search for meaning that paralleled the journey of our characters.

There's plenty more to say, particularly in regards to the journeys of our characters, but seeing how unwieldy this post is already, we'll call it a day.

Immigration Redux

2010-05-28T14:24:00.003-04:00

For those of you who care about such thing, I am working on several Lost related posts and I should have at least one of them up at some point this weekend. But in the mean time I just wanted to return to this issue of immigration and the relative merits of Arizona's new law. Two points:

1- The argument that the Arizona law is only an attempt to clean up the mess left by the federal government is a decent argument, but I have trouble seeing how it differs from the reasoning given by many so-called progressive cities in their creation of I.D. cards and other mechanisms to bring illegals into the mainstream. In both cases you have localities dealing with the non-enforcement of federal immigration laws, albeit in very different ways and I have trouble seeing how one is a proper use of local authority in regards to immigration while the other is not.

It's important to keep in mind that the federal response to this "crises" could be, at any moment, to grant amnesty to all illegals currently in the United States and to open up the borders to all comers. Obviously, that's an extremely unlikely scenario, but that scenario or some watered down version of it, is always a possibility. The point is, solutions to the illegal immigration problem are diverse, with not-so-fringe voices arguing for polar opposite solutions. In that sort of environment are any strong state solutions really appropriate?

And 2- The defenders of this law have argued, simultaneously, that the law quite specifically does not permit racial profiling and that critics of the law are somehow removed from the everyday reality of illegal immigration in Arizona. But I'd flip both of those points around and ask supporters of the Arizona law how they think it's actually going to work. And no we're not talking about over-zealous cops who may be pulling people over for no reason. How is this law going to work when people are pulled over?

Say you have two cars full of older teenagers, one car of white teenagers, another car of Hispanic teenagers. If both cars are pulled over, who gets ID'd and who doesn't (Other than the drivers, obviously)? How are police supposed to exercise their discretion in those two situations in a manner that doesn't involve racial profiling? And if anyone, white or Hispanic, has left home and is riding around as a passenger without identification, what's the criteria for detaining that person to conduct an investigation into their immigration status?

This is why I make the point that this is an end-run national I.D. requirement. I just can't see, practically speaking, how this law could actually be enforced without the illegal and unconstitutional detention of American citizens, unless of course the police can magically detect which people without their papers are illegal and which people without their papers are not. I'm unclear on the detention aspects of the law, but without the ability to detain, the law has little effect. And as long as the law threatens the liberty of American citizens and works as an end run around federal law and the Constitution, I remain opposed to it.

Crazy In Arizona

2010-05-16T07:55:00.002-04:00

I've had this post kicking around for over a week now, but just haven't had the time to post anything. I'm not going to link or get into any long explanations because unless you've been living in a news-less cave, you're well aware of the controversy over Arizona's new immigration law, requiring police officers to determine the immigration status, during lawful stops, of anyone whom there is reasonable suspicion about their immigration status.

Much of the reaction has been the expected. Many on the left and most civil libertarians have denounced the law, while anti-immigration folks of all stripes have rushed to it's defense. Surprising, perhaps, is the reaction from some segments of the right that don't typically tread into the messy area of immigration; That the Arizona law is perfectly acceptable because it mirrors federal law and because illegal immigrants, are, you know, illegal. I'll delve more into general theories of immigration law in a minute, but first allow me to address to really big, no questions about it problem with Arizona's new law: It is a defacto national ID requirement, circumventing Congressional authority in regards to immigration and threatening the Constitutional liberty of American citizens who travel without proof of citizenship.

Most of the laws defenders have focused on the laws impact on illegal immigrants, but let's talk about the effects on honest-to-goodness American citizens. If you are an American citizen, this law permits the police to detain you to conduct an immigration check. Most of the examples I've heard have been in regards to traffic stops, where, of course you should be carrying a drivers license that proves your citizenship. But carrying a drivers license is a requirement for driving a car, not for simply leaving your home. There is no national ID card and there is no law, federal, state, or local, that requires you to carry ID with you anytime you leave the house. What this law does is surreptitiously creates such an ID requirement. Can any of this laws defenders honestly say that American citizens of Latino descent in Arizona don't face illegal and unconstitutional detention if they fail to carry ID with them?

There's a larger issue here and that's about immigration policy in general. I've heard some reluctant defenders of the law make the point that this may force Congress to address immigration issues. I certainly have my doubts there, but the controversy surrounding this law illustrates some of the serious problems in regards to immigration issues. First off, why on earth should we spend precious law enforcement time and taxpayer dollars on illegal immigration. Yes, illegal immigration is illegal, but so is marijuana and plenty of other things that we don't make law enforcement priorities. Argument that illegal immigrants come and commit crimes or come and take advantage of American services are sort of besides the point. Illegally taking advantage of services not available to non-citizens is fraud and should be handled as fraud and I would hope law enforcement spends most of it's resources focusing on violent crime committed by both American citizens and illegals.

The focus on the illegal aspect of illegal immigration also ignores the problem of just what legal immigration is. Folks on the right have no problem critiquing the massively inefficient federal bureaucracy when it comes to say the EPA, or the Department of Education, but nary a word is said about the thousands upon thousands of immigration related regulations and a process that takes years to complete. Yes, most of my ancestors immigrated here legally, but they didn't need a lawyer and a small fortune to do it.

As I've pointed out in this blog since I first started five years ago, it's just plain dishonest to play the "I support legal immigration" card while not voicing any opinion on how the process actually works. It's like saying I support nuclear power while supporting regulations that make the creation of new nuclear power plants nearly impossible. Generally, folks on the right don't play those word games when it comes to nuclear power and they shouldn't when it comes to immigration. Our problem in this country isn't the individuals who want to come here to make a better life for themselves, our problem is government bureaucracy, bad laws, and over-regulation.

Capitalism ... Some Sort Of Something

2010-05-07T10:27:00.002-04:00

So I realize I'm a year or so late to the party, but last night, my wife and I finally sat down and watched Michael Moore's latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story. The obvious way to review the film (or any Michael Moore film for that matter), is along partisan lines. If you're on the left, you probably enjoyed it and if you're somewhere in the area of the free market right, you're thoughts probably echoed the Wall Street trader who's advice to Moore outside the New York stock exchange was to stop making movies.

Personally, I think Michael Moore is a doof, but you've got to admit, he's a fun doof. And he tells compelling stories, or at least, he throws out an awful lot of images and ideas into a relatively brief film. In terms of Moore's documentaries, I've always enjoyed Roger and Me and I thought his follow up, The Big One, was rather underrated. I never watched Fahrenheit 9-11 and refused to watch Sick-O because Moore could have made the exact same movie from the opposite perspective and have been just as equally unconvincing. Going into Capitalism, I expected to be thoroughly agitated by Moore's confusion about just what capitalism was, but despite the expected confusion, I found the film entertaining and even thought provoking. Like my favorite Moore film, Bowling for Columbine, Capitalism is awash with a number of great images, full of statistics, numbers, and history, and touches on any number of facets of America that I'm not even sure Moore knew he was getting at. Like Columbine, Capitalism is more than the sum of it's parts and is certainly more than hodge podge narrative Moore has stitched together. Ultimately though, it's not that Moore is wrong about what the meta-narrative of his film should be, it's that there is no meta-narrative that encompasses the sum total of our political system, our economic system, and our culture.

Michael Moore's Flint Michigan roots always have intrigued me because his Michigan focus seems much more conservative than progressive, longing for an idealized world from the past that neevr actually existed. dd in the religious element- Moore includes interviews with a number of Catholic priests who are highly critical of America's economic system- and you've got the makings on an interesting story that contradict some of the simplistic ideas we have about politics.

At the end of Capitalism, Moore brings up FDR's proposal for a second bill of rights, guaranteeing basic economic "freedoms" to all Americans. Other than in the minds of some academics, FDR's second bill of rights was never implemented in any legal or practical sense. But Moore spends a portion of the early part of the film lamenting the Flint Michigan of the 50's, where a union-working father could earn enough to buy a new house and new car for his family, and where the rich were taxed at rates of 90%. Yes, there were high tax rates, but this was still a world without that second bill of rights. And more importantly, as Moore himself points out in the film, the post war economy of the United States only boomed for such a long period of time because the rest of the industrial world was so wrecked by World War II. It's fascinating because, as Moore tells us at the end of the film, the point is to find a new economic system. Yet the only picture Moore gives us of what that might look like is an idealized view of a world that was an accident of history.

Various portions of Capitalism weaved in stories of foreclosures, meant to highlight the heartlessness of capitalism. And yes, a system where people are thrown out of their homes certainly appears heartless. But as my wife pointed out throughout the film, we were given no context as to why these people lost their homes. And even more importantly, Moore gives no indication of what sort of system we should have. Interestingly enough, the night after watching Capitalism, I caught a news story about Nicholas Cage and how he's faced foreclosure on a number of his homes because of his extreme mismanagement of money. Forget for a moment the practical consequences of "no more foreclosures" and you've got to ask yourself, where would we draw the line even if we had a no foreclosure rule? Should Nicholas Cage get to keep all his mansions that he can't pay for? Should the middle class family that can't afford the half-million dollar home they overpaid for during the housing bubble get to stay in their home they can't pay for. And of course, the obvious, practical problem of no foreclosures would be only the very rich would be able to buy property- after all, what bank is going to loan hundreds of thousands of dollars when they have no recourse when the lendee doesn't pay.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Moore's film is it's focus on politicians and government. We see the stock exchange, but the villains of the film are the various members of the Fed and the Treasury Department and their ties to Wall Street. That Moore's critique is really the ties between big business and government, or crony capitalism, has been made by many free market reviewers. But more interesting to me is the intensity of Moore's beliefs. Moore wants an end (or a change) to capitalism because this is how he sees capitalism. In a way, the free marketers defense of capitalism echoes the leftist defense of socialism and Marxism. Just as the United States is not an example of a true free market, the Soviet Union was not an example of true communism. Each side sees their ideal as a possibility, while the system they oppose is simply impractical. Libertarians and those on the right can't see the possibility of a communist state not bing oppressive and leftists don't see the possibility of a free market where big business isn't in bed with the government.

Where Moore offers hope to those of us who believe in free markets is not his nonsensical meta-narrative of an attack on capitalism, but in the bits and pieces. What do foreclosures say about our economic system, our culture? Why is Wall Street such a big mystery to the extent that it promotes conspiracy theorizing? Moore's brief look at the robotics company and the bakery organized as cooperatives were fascinating, but incomplete. Why do those business models work in some ways and not in others.

But perhaps the most telling statement of the entire film was from the striking worker at the window and door plant in Illinois (and I'm paraphrasing here): "We'd like to open up the plant and run it ourselves, but we just don't have the money." Thank God there are capitalists who do have money. When it's convenient to his story, Moore loves to talk about the individual little people. Yet Moore is quite specifically not a technocrat- the latter half of the film is an attack on the supposed experts who attempt to run the economy from Washington. Maybe Moore just wants "the right people" running things, but he never comes out and specifically says so. It's really the only hope free marketers have- That folks on the left can realize that markets work for them, the ability of government to do good is limited and that capitalism really is a love story that provides the most hope for the most people.

Brief TV Power Rankings

2010-05-04T09:06:00.003-04:00

I'm way behind, but there's just too much good stuff on right now to resist.

1. The Pacific (Currently two episodes behind)

It's just really, really good. I can't remember a war story that's been so broad in it's focus as to the consequences of war. The fighting has been terrifying, but the human cost has been even scarier and provided such depth to a genre than can, at times, be too focused on the immediacy of combat.

2. Breaking Bad (Currently caught up)

Bryan Cranston is really, really good. And so is Aaron Paul (Jesse) and Dean Norris (Hank). Sunday night's conclusion was shocking and all the more visually gripping because of the abrupt change from the 40 minutes of drama that had proceeded it. The Mexican cousins remind me a bit of the bad dude from No Country For Old Men, but Larissa had a better take: They're creepy-scary killing machines like the alien bounty hunter from the X-Files.

3. Lost (Do you really have to ask?)

I'm all in, obviously. Lost is the most ambitious television project ever, the likes of which we'll probably never see again on network television. Yes, I'm overflowing with critiques and nitpicks in the show's final season, but just keep in mind, that's only because the show's set up has been so good. I'm not sure about what will or what won't get answered, but I think we're headed for a tremendous final five hours.

4. Treme (Currently two episodes behind)

Don't take Treme's ranking as somehow indicative of it being at all lacking. I love that the show is real, a real place, populated with real people, and all sorts of real music. Yes, it's a bit slow, but it's a character piece and that's sort of the point. Just sit back and appreciate the intricate tapestry that David Simon is weaving.

5. South Park (All caught up and done for the spring)

Last week's finale was a mixed bag, but overall, this has been a great run this spring. It occurred to me the other day that South Park at this point has surpassed the Simpsons in terms of numbers of quality seasons. The Simpsons fizzled out after a decade, but South Park is still going strong.

6. Parks and Rec (All caught up)

NBC's little comedy that could, the most unappreciated of it's Thursday night offerings that just keeps getting better. While the Office continues to flounder with poor writing choices and a lack of characters with any depth, arks and Rec continues to prove that you can add layers while still keeping things funny.

7. 30 Rock (All caught up)

Will Forte's performance of Jenna's Muffin Top song was hilarious.

8. Community (All caught up)

They did an entire episode centered round chicken fingers. Nuff said.

9. Fringe (Currently three episodes behind)

The continued development and improvement of Fringe is why I've stuck with other sci-fi shows like Flash Forward. If there's any doubt that writing is what makes or breaks television shows, just look at how Fringe has been transformed from a midling sci-fi procedural to a much broader drama. I've heard some good things about the episodes over the last few weeks, but the last one I saw, the story about Peter and Walter, was just amazing.

10. Flash Forward (Currently three episodes behind)

I'm only just now catching up, but I continue to be impressed by Flash Forward since it's return from hiatus. It's a lot of little things, but the writing is just plain better. The mystery and intrigue seem a bit more organic and the dramatic tension between characters seems a lot less forced. I was on the verge of dropping Flash Forward, but I'm certainly all in now.

The Coming Intellectual Crisis

2010-04-30T14:11:00.005-04:00

As regular readers know, I'm a big fan of Fox News's Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld, which airs weeknights at 3:00 AM. In the past, I've compared Red Eye to the Daily Show and made the argument that Red Eye was a funnier and superior program. Now Red Eye is an unabashedly conservative program, but I've always enjoyed it for it's humor, it's libertarian leanings, and the equal forums given to all sides of most issues ... until recently. Just the other night, Red Eye opened with two segments that troubled me. One was host's Greg Gutfeld's Greg-A-Logue in support of Arizona's new draconian immigration restrictions and the other was a critical segment on British hip-hop artist MIA's just recently banned from YouTube video which featured the American military rounding up and executing ginger kids.

It's the sort of stuff I'd expect from knee-jerk Republicans, but not what I've come to expect from Red Eye. Not that Red Eye is typically nuanced, but I've usually found it to be comfortable in the nether regions between nuance and knee-jerkism. Now, before I get any further, I've got to point out that Red Eye is very much reflective of it's host, Greg Gutfeld. The guest panelists on the show are there to react and respond, while the other two regulars, Bill Schultz and TV's Andy Levy, are joke-first, politics distant second personalities. And what troubles me is that Greg's politics, his brand of conservatism (which seems to epitomize the conservatism I see among young people), is more based upon reaction and rejection than it is rooted in any sort of intellectual ideaology.

What I mean by that is that some of the positions Greg takes seem to stem not out any particular view about the role of government and it's relationship with individuals, but from a reaction to the left. If leftists have a problem with Arizona's draconian new immigration bill, than by golly, we better be for it. This sort of thinking seems to be laid out most clearly in the areas of war, foreign policy, and law enforcement issues. How else do you explain a conservatism that reacts with skepticism to bureaucrats and politicians, but defers to military and law enforcement? There's an argument to be made that the roots of some of those positions could be found in the ideas of the leaders of the early conservative movement. But that ignores the fact that the world is different now and more importantly, young conservatives have no real connection with that intellectual tradition.

Reflecting upon my own experiences, I have to say this theory accurately reflects my own experiences. The conservatives I knew in college were far more anti-liberal than anything else. (To be fair, I think many of the leftists I've known found their politics as a reaction to a conservatism that doesn't even really exist- but that's neither here nor there.) While it's not the same thing, I think this concept of reaction rather than organic intellectual development plays a part in the tea party movement. Now, the tea party movement is obviously somewhat older than the younger conservatives I've been discussing, but this idea of reaction is somewhat the same. It's why the tea parties have been so successful at demonstrating opposition to Obama and the Democrats, but have not been a fertile ground for any ideas about what our government should be doing.

The focus here has been the right, but obviously, as I hinted at above, you find some of the same reactionary sort of thoughts on the left, even amongst the intellectual left. Just look at the standard leftist response to school choice, or social security privatization- these ideas are rejected because they come from the right and from free market think tanks. Never mind that school choice and government-enforced private retirement plans are common throughout most of "socialist" Europe.

But the real problem here, as I suppose it always is, is that politics risks becoming a team sport with two sides, where no one actually engages in debate. When your political views are only reactions to what someone else is doing, the sum total of your politics is in danger of becoming stale and intellectually stifled. Real political thought needs to come from the ground up and real policy proposals need to stem from the world as it is, not the world we'd like it to be. Conservatives lost the health care debate (in terms of the fact that Obamacare was actually passed) because far too many public spokespeople for the conservative movement refused to engage in any sort of real debate. It would have been nice to hear just one conservative voice say, "yes, we want to do more to provide health care for those who don't currently have health insurance, but the Democrats are going about it the wrong way." There were plenty of ideas kicking around out there in the intellectual world of think tanks that could have provided coverage to more individuals, yet tilted power away from government and back towards markets.

Anyone who reads many of the young liberal columnists and bloggers out there (Ezra Klein comes to mind), knows that this younger generation of leftists arose by intellectually addressing many of the arguments conservatives have been making for decades. Economics matter, or at least it does now. Costs used to not matter to the left, but they do now, which is why there was so much financial acrobatics that went on (and is still going on) in the debate over Obamacare. The rightness or wrongness of those sorts of argument aside, the point is, the opposing side was taken seriously and addressed seriously. And I fear we're seeing less and less of that on the right.

Campaign Finance Restrictions Are About Entrenching Incumbents and The Existing Two-Party Structure. Period.

2010-04-30T11:39:00.002-04:00

Just have to get to this, from Reason's blog yesterday. Politico apparently has the details of the Democratic response to Citizens United, designed to blunt the effects of the Supreme Court's ruling several months ago. It's nothing all that surprising and as far as suppressing speech goes, there's nothing as horrible as what was in place before Citizen's United. But this is what got my attention.

Sec. 104. POLITICAL PARTY COMMUNICATIONS

• The legislation provides that any payment by a political party committee for the direct costs of an ad or other communication made on behalf of a candidate affiliated with the party is treated as a contribution to the candidate only if the communication is directed or controlled by the candidate.

• Party-paid communications that are not directed or controlled by the candidate are not subject to limits on the party’s contributions or expenditures.

In essence, it puts the speech of political parties on equal footing with the speech of corporations, unions, ect. But think about it for a minute ... it's one thing to ban coordination between candidates and unaffiliated speakers. The interest of corporations, unions, individuals- the interest of all independent Americans are electing the specific politicians that they think will legislate in their own best interests and the best interests of the nation. But what interests do political parties have, other than the election of more members of their party? Is there any meaning in a distinction between party-funded advertising and candidate funded advertising?

Here's the problem: For all the complaints about money in politics, Congress has never made a single move to restrict the "independent expenditures" of the parties. They fight tooth and nail to restrict the speech of those outside the Washington establishment, but nothing is done to combat the entrenchment of the two major political parties and their impact our electoral system.

That's not to say that I have a particular problem with any of the specific language I noted above. It's just important to note how thoroughly the parties look out for their own interests while continuing to scrutinize the speech of everyone outside of the two major parties.

The One Super Best Friend Who Shall Remain Nameless

2010-04-23T12:48:00.004-04:00

For those of you who are unaware, South Park celebrated it's 200th (and 201st) episode with a two-parter mocking the idea of the right not to be offended. It was a tremendous 40 some-odd minutes, full of call backs to nearly a decade and a half worth of South Park, but most of the subject matter of the episode has fallen to the wayside in the wake of a controversy surrounding the return of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. (And it's a shame, really. We could be talking about Tom Cruise working as a fudge packer, or having the Super Best Friend Seaman on his back.)

The crazy thing, as most South Park fans know, is that Muhammad appeared way back in the show's fifth season (before 9-11), as a member of the Super Best Friends. South Park's version of Muhammad worked with Jesus, Joseph Smith, Buddha, Krishna, Lao Tzu Seaman, and a Tron-like, dradel-shaped Moses to help defeat the evil David Blaine and his giant stone Abraham Lincoln. South Park's second attempt to show Muhammad was met with censorship in a 2007 episode that had political wheels spinning much as they have been over the past week. Then came the latest controversy, as a radical Islamic website made thinly veiled threats against South Park masterminds Trey Parker and Matt Stone in response to the first half of the two part 200th episode celebration that threatened to unveil Muhammad. Comedy Central responded by taking the cut Parker and Stone had delivered, and censoring every reference to Muhammad. His name was bleeped and Kyle's speech at the end (presumably about Muhammad) was bleeped as well.

I'm of two minds about this whole Muhammad kerfuffle. There's the part of me that falls right in line with the critics who've condemned Comedy Central for not standing up for free speech, but there's another part of me that can understand where the network was coming from. As a large media entity, they did have to think about their employees in the face of a death threat, regardless of how serious that threat may have actually been. It's one thing to stand bravely as an artist in defense of your work, but the world we live in today is just more complicated than that.

That all being said, the censoring of the name Muhammad was a bit much, to say nothing of the censoring of the moral of the episode. At that point, it becomes a sleazy little way to avoid the controversy of actually pulling the show without running much of a risk of actually offending anyone (except of course, Tom Cruise, celebrities, and gingers). Personally, I don't worry too much about what networks should and shouldn't do as far as censoring content (because whatever your views are, networks do have to make decisions about content and what they use to sell their brand), nor do I worry that Islam is being held to a different standard. But I do worry when violence and then the threat of violence becomes the reason for those content decisions- not from the perspective of Comedy Central, but in regards to society as a whole. When a small group of people can use the threat of violence to compel others to their will, that's the very definition of terrorism. We worry so much about 9-11 style attacks, but the real threat of terrorism is it's impact on our way of life. Whether it's threatening our cartoons or strengthening our national security state at the expense of our freedom, the real power (and danger) of terrorism lies in fear.

Health Costs

2010-04-22T11:49:00.002-04:00

We're not done yet because the battle over the future of health care has only just begun. If Republicans really meant what they said in the pre-Obamacare debate, then it's possible that we could see wholesale changes in the law. I certainly wouldn't be opposed to repeal, but the politics of it all is troublesome- the thought of future Democratic and Republican Congresses doing and undoing would be problematic for both consumers and businesses.

But now that Obamacare is in the pipeline, I've seen most of the intelligent discussion over the future health care resolve around costs - And it's an issue I wish we had spent more time on before. So much of the discussion leading up to the passage of Obamacare revolved around the cost to taxpayers in terms of tax dollars, with little attention paid to the costs to taxpayers as consumers. From some voices on the left I've heard that the new legislation will help to reduce costs, but other voices (I'm thinking specifically of a podcast I listened to from the Economist) think that the cost cutting measures truly needed in the United States have only been delayed.

As I've been thinking about the issue of health care costs over the last couple of days it occurred to me that the entire premise of this debate is wrong .. or at least, misguided. After all, why is it so important that we reduce health care costs? From an individual perspective, we should pay for as much health care coverage that we as individuals find valuable. And even taking the point of view of society as a whole, the value of this nebulous concept of health is potentially limitless. After all, would 17% of GDP (or 30% or 40%) sound like too much money if all that money covered cures for cancer and a significantly better quality of life for all Americans? As I said, I'm just not sure we can put a cap on the value of health.

But even if your goal is to reduce health care costs, I can't possibly see how those costs are going to be reduced through bureaucratic top-down regulation. There are two ways I see to reduce costs, and those are 1- literally ration care from the top down or 2- make individuals responsible for their own health care decisions and health care spending. A true market-based systems allows individuals to make decisions about their own health care spending. A single payer system leaves those decisions to the government to make for society as a whole. But the system we have in the United States hides costs in layers upon layers of bureaucracy, hiding costs from consumers and the new legislation only entrenches the third party payer system and serves to further hides costs. For those who doubt the idea that government is moe powerful than private industry, consider this: It would be relatively easy for the government to mandate lower costs from health care providers. If they did, the system would have to adapt. But private insurers don't have this power. There's enough competition between insurance companies to ensure that no one insurer can mandate health care providers lower costs. So what am I saying? God help me, but I wonder if single payer (or better yet some sort of public option-private hybrid) would have been preferable to what we're saddled with.

Lost Questions That Need Answering

2010-04-17T13:10:00.005-04:00

Last week we got the whispers and with only six hours of Lost left, I think it's appropriate to pose the major questions of the show that still need answering. Personally I came in to the season with mysteries like the whispers and the smoke monster rather low on my list, but the decision to address those mysteries through personification rather than exposition was probably a wise move. I had thought some of the major plot and story points would be addressed earlier on, while the mysteries of the island would have waited until the end, but creatively, I think the writers approach has worked.

So here are my top ten remaining mysteries I feel need to be answered. I'm not including the obvious ones about the Man in Black, Desmond and the flash sideways world, along with any other mysteries that seem likely to be resolved as part of the natural progression of the story from where we are now.

1- Walt

Much of the first two seasons of the show focused on Walt's specialness, but his importance seemed to vanish along with his importance after the season two finale. Let's be clear. I don't need Walt's "powers" explained, any more than I need Miles's or Hurley's powers explained. What I do need is a little more about his connection to the island and why the Others took him and subsequently let him go.

2- Why can't babies be born on the island?

Some Lost fans get very confused about this whole idea, but I thought the season 3 Juliet episodes were pretty clear. Women who conceive on the island die during pregnancy. As we saw with Claire, babies conceived off the island could be born on-island and as we saw with Sun, babies conceived on island, along with their mothers, are fine if they leave the island early in a pregnancy. And as we saw in season 5, there were no issues with babies being conceived and born on the island in 1977. So what happened?

3- Adam and Eve

It's an obvious one and I imagine they must be planning on answering it (otherwise, why bring it up earlier in the season?) But how it fits into the plot is beyond me.

4- The Dharma Supply Drops

Remember in season two, when a mysterious Dharma supply drop occured in the middle of the night? If I'm remembering correctly, it had something to do with the lockdown in the Swan hatch, seemingly designed to prevent the Swan's inhabitants from seeing who was dropping the supplies. So who was dropping those supplies? It's extremely relevant because it represents the rest of the Dharma story. We know the purge occurred in 1991, but we also know that Swan hatch continued to be staffed by Dharma (Radzinsky and Kelvin) throughout the 90's.

5- The rest of the story about the Others

What was the deal with that spring in the temple? Why did some Others live in the temple and other Others live in the Dharma barracks and follow Ben around? How did the Others chose their leaders? And what are the rules that kept Ben and Widmore from actually killing one another?

6- Intrigue Off The Island

Larissa wants to know how Ben and Widmore got all their money, but given that the Others were able to come to and from the island, I figure they both made use of their power and connections to create these networks around the world. What I do want to know about is about this off-island war between Ben and Widmore? More importantly, who did Ben have Sayid killing off? We know Sayid didn't kill off all of Widmore's people, because we see Abaddon (and a quite unworried Widmore) after Sayid stops killing. And, who were all those nutty assassins after Sayid at the end of season five and what did they want with him? I'd chalk it up to revenge on Sayid, except they were also watching Hurley and had Kate's address.

[Side note here - Remember during Miles episode last season, where he was recruited by Bram (the big dude from Ilana's group)? What was the deal with Ilana and the rest of her now deceased group? Neither Ben or Widmore seemed to know about them and I remember Bram telling Miles that in joining Widmore's freighter group, he was joining the wrong side. And actually, we've gotten all this talk about Jacob not telling people what to do, but didn't he ask Ilana to help him?]

7- The Sickness

We've gotta get this answered right? I mean we can't just leave things with unfeeling Sayid, the zombie killing machine exactly as he is now. So what's it all about? And is Claire infected? And was Rousseau infected? And while we're talking about infection, is there any connection between this infection and the quarantine on the Swan hatch doors and the injections Desmond had to give himself?

8- Daniel Faraday Crying

I keep coming back to this because we saw Faraday inexplicably crying as he watched the footage of the faked Oceanic 815 in both seasons four and five. Is there a connection here with the sideways universe? We'll see.

9- Why did some people flash through time and not Others?

This was entirely too convenient to be mere coincidence. At the end of season 4 (beginning of season 5), we see Locke flash away, while Richard and the rest of the Others with them stay in the present. On the beach, all our Losties flash away through time, along with Juliet, a former Other. And Claire, in "Jacob's cabin" with "Christian", doesn't flash away either. So what's the deal?

10- And finally, what's the deal with Christian?

A favorite theory of some has been that Christian was always the smoke monster, but as I've written before, there are far too many holes in that theory. Christian appears to Michael on the freighter and tells him he can leave. Christian appears to Locke down in the well, hundreds or thousands of years in the past. Christian appears to Sun and tells her about Jin being stuck in the past. And Christian takes steps to take Claire with him and separates Claire from Aaron. My theory has been that Christian is some manifestation of the island itself, but as with everything else, we shall see.

Health Care

2010-04-09T14:57:00.003-04:00

We just gotta do health care, don't we?

My principled opposition to this version of health care reform has never wavered in no small part because the further into the process we delved, the worse the outcome. What we've wound up is, in some ways, the worst of all the available options. The American people have been sold a bill of goods where they've been promised more and better care that won't cost us a dime. It is, on it's face, preposterous, but it's emblematic of all of American politics where we've headed into the chasm of massive budget deficits on the assumption that we can get more and more from government without paying for it.

Now, unlike some, I don't think Obamacare signals the end of freedom and prosperity, but I don't see how it won't exasperate many of the existing cost problems with health care. That more people will be covered is undoubtedly a good thing, but the entire debate has been conducted as if the bill we got (or some version of it) was the only way to achieve coverage for those people. There's been no debate about the costs of other proposals, whether they come from the left (universal coverage or a public option) or from free marketers. No matter how you slice it, you can't keep the structure of our current system, provide greater subsidies for the poor, and mandate coverage of all pre-existing conditions and expect this to not increase health care spending.

My biggest worry is what I've heard termed the insurance death spiral- that the individual mandate won't be effective because the penalties are far less than what it costs to actually purchase insurance and they'll be no incentive for the young and healthy to purchase insurance because it would simply make more sense to pay the fine and just obtain insurance when they actually need it. And insurance companies would not be able to deny them because of the pre-existing condition requirements. So what you could wind up with is an increasingly higher percentage of sick people making up the pool of the insured and higher and higher premiums to cover that increasing percentage of sick people.

Not that this is entirely relevant, but one thing that's killed me in this entire debate is this perception of health insurance companies as evil incarnate- I mean they are evil, to an extent, any third party payer of medical costs, be it a private company or government, is going to make some evil decisions. But to blame insurance companies for the massive increases in health care spending in this country is asinine and defies simple logic. If insurance companies were driving up health care costs in order to enrich themselves and make more profits, we'd see a spike in the profits of these companies. But from what I understand (and anyone is free to use numbers to prove differently), the profit margins for health insurers have remained relatively modest over the past several decades as health costs have soared. Now sure, there could be some blame for soaring costs to be placed on mismanagement in administration, but it's nonsensical that either 1- the government could step in and drastically reduce administrative costs or 2- that this is even a significant problem. After all, if there was billions of dollars to be saved in the better administration of health insurance, surely someone would have put that into effect to, you know, make billions of dollars.

So where does this leave us? In a way, the future of health care is even more volatile then before, as most of the Obamacare provisions don't take effect until 2012 and some don't take effect until after a potential second term is over. Perhaps the most positive thing to be got from the debate over health care is that it's becoming harder and harder to pull a fast one on the American people. People from every corner of the political spectrum demand specific and demand answers and are not content to let politicians just figure it out amongst themselves.

Corporations and Terrorists, They Both Have Rights

2010-02-15T14:56:00.001-05:00

I've been kicking around a post on corporate rights for about a week now as a follow up to all the Citizens United reactions, but a thought occurred to me the other day as I read through some of blogger Glenn Greenwald's coverage of civil liberties in the war on terror: Symbolically speaking, corporations serve the same villainous role on the left that terrorists do on the right. And that's not to say that anyone on the left is making an argument of moral equivalency, it's merely an observation from my vantage point about the focus of political energies.

What's fascinating is how the proposed solutions to these problems tend to be equally unconcerned with Constitutional rights. This is, in part, a statement on the relative importance of these issues for the concerned parties, but it's also very telling as to the understanding and respect each side has for the rule of law.

The important thing to understand about Constitutional rights is that they are very specifically not granted by government; they are our naturally occurring rights by our very existence as human beings and government may only act to restrict those rights in the most narrow of circumstances. And this isn't some wacky, limited government libertarian philosophy, this is, or should be the point of view of all folks who don't beleive government has the ultimate authority over individuals.

Terrorists have rights, not because some goofy liberal judge said so, but because all individuals have rights. You can debate the merits of the criminal justice system versus military tribunals all day long, but that debate doesn't change the simple truth that 1- terrorists have a right to challenge their detention in some fashion and 2- each and everyone of us has the right to know the procedures and guidelines for determining just who is a terrorist, something we didn't know under George Bush and still don't know under Barack Obama.

And similarly speaking, the rights of corporations can't be stripped away simply because they are organizations or because their form of organization is derived from statutory law. As I've blogged about before, either corporations have rights, or they don't. That a corporation can't be thrown in jail is irrelevant. Individuals commit crimes, therefore individuals can be thrown in jail. When organizations commit crimes, the burden of proof is on the government to prove the complicity of each and every individual involved in that crime. It's difficult to put corporate CEO's and financial officers in jail for crimes in the same way it's difficult to put mob bosses away. The problem is that the criminal justice protections in the Constitution are designed to protect individuals.

And what does that criminal discussion have to do with speech? The point of that was that the criminal protections of the Constitution are simply irrelevant to organizations because of the requirements of individual protection. But outside the realm of criminal law, corporations, along with every single other form of organization you can think of, are treated in the same manner as individuals. Corporations couldn't do business if they couldn't write checks, sign contracts, or be sued in court. Non-profits couldn't raise money or speak out on important issues if they couldn't be legally treated as individuals. And no organization could exist if they weren't protected by due process rights and the Fourth Amendment protections againast illegal searches and seizures. The biggest myth on the left is that corporate personhood is some sort of plot to grant corporations unnatural powers, when in reality, it's just a legal fiction that make corporations functional in the civil side of our justice system.

Either the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights in particular, is a meanigful document that limits the government's ability to restrict our freedom or it's just a piece of paper that doesn't limit the majority from doing whatever it wants to baddies it doesn't like.

New TV Power Rankings

2010-02-11T15:34:00.006-05:00

Just a brief set, but I've got to get something up on this blog. Perhaps over the next few weeks, with any number of these shows being off for the Olympics, I'll be more inclined to return to a better blogging schedule. For now, enjoy, and as always, comments and complaints are welcome.

1. Lost (A tremendous opener followed up by a solid effort with this week's "What Kate Does." There's never been another show this popular that's managed to consistently defy and redefine viewer expectations. Some fans don't like the flash sideways and some are apprehensive about the new characters, but I'm just along for the ride and I'm loving it.)

2. Caprica (The reviews I had read were mixed, particularly in regards to the first few episodes following the two hour pilot. So I'm pleasantly surprised to say I'm really enjoying what I've seen so far. The thematic elements of the show are simplistically laid out, but the characters are layered enough to make the rather slowly unfolding plot acceptable. And it has to be a first for a sci-fi show to so prominently feature teenage girls in very non-stereotypical roles. )

3. Fringe (Fringe just keeps humming along and it's a shame to have had so few episodes before the show takes another hiatus. Olivia's discovery of Peter's true identity was a long time in coming and provides the promise of future drama between the characters.)

4. Big Love (I'm still undecided on this new season, which is nowhere near as good as last year's incredible run. Obviously, from the opening onward, it's a very different show. But while I like the symbolic falling and drifting of our characters, there's almost too much going on at this point- an odd complaint for a show that had relatively little happening for it's first two seasons.

5. Parks and Rec (It's made the jump over 30 Rock, mostly because there are more characters I'm really getting a kick out off, none of whom are ever really given the short stick. Please, please, please, give me more Ron Swanson.

6. 30 Rock (Still great, and probably should be higher. One question, where the hell has Tracey been in recent weeks?)

7. Community (One of the best things about about Community is it's self-awareness of it's use of cliched plot elements. It sort of matches Joel McHale's layered sense of humor, where it's possible to laugh at something and appreciate what it is at the same time.)

8. Archer (I started recording this one based on a few good words and a brief preview that snuck it's way into a Sunny recording this past fall. It's lousy animation, but there's plenty of good voice talent and lots of laugh out loud moments for the latest and greatest bumbling spy.)

9. House (Loved the Cuddy episode, the exact sort of thing House should do more of. Yes it's nice to see more characters, but it's even better to see the show get away from the medical plots that every viewer already knows by heart.)

Not Ranked: 24 (Ugh. Nearly every moment without Jack is wasted air time and it seems to be getting worse as this season goes on.)

The Office (Plenty of great moments with the Sabre merger, but I'm still getting that feeling that nearly everything on the Office has simply been played out. The one-note nature of the characters inevitably leads to Ryan and Dwight plotting against Jim, the exact sort of plot we've seen numerous times before.)

Please Don't Let There Be Any Midi-Chlorians : A Semi-Obsessive Lost Fan's Preview To Season Six

2010-01-31T08:35:00.010-05:00

When George Lucas finally had the chance to craft the science fiction epic he really wanted to make, what we got were the abominations that were Star Wars Episodes I, II, and III, movies that would have never been made if not for the "Star" and "Wars" attached to them. Not content to fandom contemplate and enjoy the mysteries of the force, Lucas decided a more complete and scientific explanation was needed for the source of Jedi powers. So, as the first movie told us when we met the young Anakin Skywalker (who has to become Darth Vader), the force could be scientifically explained by midi-chlorians, microscopic lifeforms existing in all living organisms. Midi-chlorian concentrations were very high in Jedi, which allowed the Jedi to manipulate the natural world around them. In one fell swoop, Lucas had simultaneously ruined the mystery of the force and set his new trilogy on a trajectory toward all-around terribleness.

Midi-chlorians are worth bringing up in regards to Lost because as the hit ABC show enters it's sixth and final season, the writers face a balancing act in answering enough questions to satisfy fans, yet leaving enough mystery to preserve the show's legacy. The good news is, Lost honchos Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have no plans to go all midi-chlorian on us, as was noted by the New York Times in their preview of the upcoming season:

“To sort of demystify that by trying to literally explain everything down to the last little sort of midi-chlorian of it all would be a mistake in our view,” he added. (In “Star Wars,” midi-chlorians were life forms existing inside all living things; that the “Lost” creators might explain the real-world implications of their fantasy world by referring to another fantasy world is perhaps part of the reason that the series has lost viewers.)

So what will be answered this final season? It's a question I've had running through my head over the last several months as my wife and I endeavored to re-watch the entire series, from the pilot episode through season five's "The Incident." And the closer we get to the season six premier (which is Feb. 2nd), the more it becomes clear to me what needs to be answered (character mysteries and motivations) and what does not need to be answered (every mystery about the island). There's always been a bit of a debate amongst Lost fans as to whether it's the characters or the mythology that drive the show and with all due respect to the mythology nuts, it's the characters. The mythology and the mystery is vital to the story, but it's merely the backdrop on which the story's been told.

That's not to say there isn't more about the mythology and the mysteries of the island we need to find out. But to put it simply, it's not that we need to know what the smoke monster actually is, it's that we need to know what it's role is and why the smoke monster has done the things it's done. Lost is a long story, not an archeological expedition. Of course, some folks explain the character elements in such a douchey manner they may as well be talking about Grey's Anatomy. Take the aforementioned Times article:

As with the Harry Potter series, another fantasy that the creators often cite as inspiration, the end is likely to have more to do with character resolution than with the solving of mysteries like what exactly the island is. Does Kate, the sexy fugitive, for example, end up with Sawyer or Jack, the reluctant leader of the band of survivors? Is John Locke dead or alive? Will Hurley ever lose weight?

Before season five, I wanted Sawyer to wind up with Kate, but now, my hope is- and my guess is- that neither will wind up with Freckles. But come on ... And will Hurley lose weight? Wouldn't we rather learn more about why he speaks with his dead friends? And what's in that guitar case that Jacob gave him? I'm assuming we're going to get plenty of those sorts of answers, particularly in regards to our main characters. But the real interesting questions, the ones I figured it'd be the most fun to bring up here in the blog, are about our secondary characters and the pieces of their stories that remain unanswered. Here's a sampling of what I'm talking about:

# What's the rest of Faraday's story? We've twice seen the scene of Faraday crying as the footage of the fake Oceanic 815 being discovered plays on the tv, unable to remember why he's crying. We also know that Faraday somehow scrambled his brain in the years before he went to the island. So what I want to know is if there's more to his story. And how did he know so much about the Incident when he came back to the island in 1977?

# Why did Faraday's mother, Eloise, leave the island some time very soon after the events of the season five finale? I'm assuming there's plenty of back story about the complicated relationship between Eloise and Charles Widmore still to be revealed, but there certainly seems to be a lot more to Eloise's story.

# And to expand on that last bit, I've got to know if Eloise knows all she knows about the future from finding Daniel's diary in 1977 or if she has another source for her knowledge. (And in regards to that diary, it was Sayid, not Eloise who had it in 1977 when we last left our Losties.)

# I'm also curious to know if there's more to the Desmond-Widmore relationship. I always liked the idea that Widmore was so hostile to Desmond's relationship with Penny because he knew something about Desmond's connection to the island. Does Widmore know what Eloise knows? And that being said, what are his motivations -- and what are Eloise's?

# What's the deal with Christian and Claire and is there some greater connection between the Shepard family and the island? Was there a reason they introduced Jack's grandad last season?

# What do Jacob and the Man in black know? How much knowledge do they have of the future? And, obviously, why did Jacob make the connections with all our characters that we saw in "The Incident."

# What's the deal with Desmond being special and why don't the rules apply to him? Why in 2007 did he suddenly remember Faraday's visit to the hatch and what are the consequences of this manipulation of the time line?

# What about Jacob and choice? Jacob gives Hurley the choice to return to the island and gives Ben the choice of killing him?

# I've heard that amongst many other dead characters, Mikhail is supposed to make some sort of return this season. I'd love to find out how he joined up with the Others and why he (and many of the other Others) are so ruthlessly passionate in service of Jacob and the island.

Obviously this could go on, but rather than pose more questions to which I have no good answers, I thought it would be fun to end with some guesses, my own theories as to some of the mysteries to be revealed this season. If you're not into that sort of thing or you'd rather not spend time theorizing about new episode titles (really, just the premier), then you best stop here, but there are no spoilers here.

# The season premier is titled "LA X" an obvious reference to the destination of Oceanic 815, where Jack and company hoped to be landing safely should their plan in "The Incident" succeed ... or is it? The moment I heard that title, I knew something had to be up. Because either Jack's plan to change the timeline worked or it didn't and if it did work, the one direction the writers can't take is pressing the reset button. You simply can't take away our characters experiences and change the past (or future?) so that they never met. what if Juliet setting off the bomb really does make it so the plane never crashed, only, it doesn't change the current circumstances of our characters. So our characters who were still alive when the bomb went off flash off the plane- ten of them, making them the Los Angeles Ten, who mysteriously disappeared in midair. That group would have to include Sawyer, Jack, Kate, Jin, Sun, Hurley, Claire ... and maybe Sayid (does he survive his gun shot wound?), maybe Rose & Bernard, and maybe Michael & Walt (the only two other than the Oceanic 6 to make it off the island). I like this theory because it's one way that we could get all the supposedly dead characters who are supposed to be returning this season.

# I liked this last theory until a few days ago when I considered the Comic Con news (which supposedly featured video clips of some of our characters lives had the crash never occurred) and another interview with Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse where they once again confirmed that on Lost, dead is dead. Lindelof and Cuse have also stated that they're done with flashbacks and flashforwards as narrative devices. My worry is that we may get a series of "what would have happened" type narratives, but that seemingly goes against this other little bit from that same New York Times story:

If the creators are not saying, they do promise one other thing. While the ending of the series will almost certainly provoke some debate, it will not be of the type created by, say, the black screen that ended “The Sopranos” or the “It was all a dream” or “It all took place in someone’s imagination” endings of “Newhart” or “St. Elsewhere.” And like David Chase, the “Sopranos” creator, they do not plan to answer questions after the finale.

Yeah, we're not exactly talking about the ending here but Lost has never been one to highlight moments not specifically relevant to the plot and our character's development.

# My brief Richard Alpert theory is as follows. My assumption had always been that Alpert's perennial long life was some sort of gift. But going through "The Incident" the second time, Alpert's comment that he's the way he is "because of Jacob" struck a different nerve with me. What if Alpert's long life is not a gift, but a punishment. Just as it goes with most tales of unending life, the truth is usually darker than our desires. And then there's Alpert's status as advise- however wise he may be, he can seemingly never be the leader. Hardly the position of one who's been given a gift.

# A minor theory on the rules that seem to prevent some of our characters from killing one another. We know that Ben and Widmore can't seem to kill each other. Ditto Jacob and the man in black. A podcast I enjoy had a listener point out that maybe Jack and Locke can't kill each other either. In season three, Locke couldn't shoot Jack to prevent him from calling the freighter. And soon afterward, early in season four, Jack actually does try to shoot Locke, only to have his gun malfunction. The real interesting theory is what if the relationship between all three of these opposing characters is basically the same, with each character representing opposite ends of the same coin, or the black and the white, if you will. It plays nicely into this idea that we really don't have good and evil at play here, but forces like Jack and Locke in opposition.

Will Wilkinson on the Citizens United Reaction

2010-01-29T11:56:00.006-05:00

I know, I know .. but you know how there are some issues where you can agree to disagree and other issues where there's just right and wrong? This is one of those issues where I can't escape the conclusion that either 1- many progressives are just willing to censor speech or 2- that many progressives are just working with flawed logic. Expect a few more posts. Meanwhile, Will Wilkinson had a very good comment on the subject in his blog :

The anguished cries of left-leaning folk over the Citizens United ruling seem to me to be emanating from an alternate universe, so bizarre are they. This was a case about whether the state can suppress the distribution of an unflattering documentary about a powerful political candidate produced by a small group of private citizens. The crazy thing to me is that anyone ever thought that such a rule was not in blatant violation of the First Amendment. The extra-crazy thing is that four Supreme Court justices evidently think this kind of state censorship of political speech is hunky dory. I’m going to chalk up some of the freakout to this week’s spectacular pileup of disasters for progressives. Sorry guys. I know it’s been rough. But I have to say I was taken aback by the vehemence with which people I like and admire have insisted that the state must selectively silence political speech. I didn’t realize that this was such a profound point of disagreement. As I see it, these regulations have accomplished very little other than to protect the interests of powerful, entrenched incumbent politicians against public criticism.

Wilkinson's follow up is also worth the read, as are the comments of both posts.

And Then Some Folks On The Left Are Just Big, Bad, Nasty Censors

2010-01-27T13:29:00.006-05:00

I've been trying to be as unbiased and as nice as possible in analyzing the reactions to the Citizens United campaign finance/free speech decision, but this here , which I received in my e-mail from the activist group CREDO Action, has me convinced that some folks really are just interested in squashing the speech they don't like. I don't know much about the group, nor do I remember why I'm receiving e-mail from them, but their petition expresses support for a number of House bills sponsored by Representative Alan Grayson:

These include:

1. The Business Should Mind Its Own Business Act (H.R. 4431): Implements a 500% excise tax on corporate contributions to political committees, and on corporate expenditures on political advocacy campaigns.

2. The Public Company Responsibility Act (H.R. 4435): Prevents companies making political contributions and expenditures from trading their stock on national exchanges.

3. The End Political Kickbacks Act (H.R. 4434): Prevents for-profit corporations that receive government money from making political contributions, and limits the amount that employees of those companies can contribute.

4. The Corporate Propaganda Sunshine Act (H.R. 4432): Requires publicly traded companies to disclose in SEC filings money used for the purpose of influencing public opinion, rather than for promoting their products and services.

5. The Ending Corporate Collusion Act (H.R. 4433): Applies antitrust law to industry PACs.

6. The End the Hijacking of Shareholder Funds Act (H.R. 4487): This bill requires the approval of a majority of a public company's shareholders for any expenditure by that company to influence public opinion on matters not related to the company's products or services.

The scary thing about nearly all these proposals is the interchangeable use of the terms "political contributions" and "political expenditures" and it's either stupid or downright dishonest for those terms to be lumped together as part of a response to Citizens United. As I've detailed from day one, nothing in the recent Supreme Court decision has any impact whatsoever on the existing restrictions on political contributions. Citizens United was about political expenditures, which as you may recall can more simply be described as "speech." And any way you slice it, a 500% surtax on political speech, so that every dollar spent would cost you five dollars in taxes, certainly smacks of censorship to me.

What's also interesting are the various proposals that would place restrictions on what corporations can do outside the sphere of promoting their products and services, requiring specific SEC filings and the approval of majority of shareholders. It's interesting because this extends speech regulations beyond the electoral realm all the way into the field of charity. If these bills were to pass, and a company wanted to do some sort of promotion with the Red Cross, there would be these additional hoops to jump through. I don't know if these ultimately amount to restrictions on speech, but the it's sort of crazy that you'd want to make it harder for corporations to be involved in charity.

Money, Speech, and Corporations

2010-01-27T13:27:00.001-05:00

I'm coming back to this back to this because it's an important debate, the outcome of which underlies our understanding of freedom, democracy, and natural rights. As I mentioned in the last post, those on the left are furious that, 1- corporations have rights, and 2- that speech is money. On the surface, these are very persuasive complaints, but it doesn't take much digging to show that there's not much of a logical, strong philosophical basis to ground those arguments. My last post on the subject linked to Glenn Greenwald's various hypothetical on the subject and what I've got here is one more all-inclusive hypothetical involving abortion rights (based on Eugene Volokh's discussion on the Volokh Conspiracy) along with some other major points.

First abortion. Eugene Volokh points out that sure money isn't speech, but money isn't abortion either. Money is necessarily tied up with almost everything we do because that's the nature of the world we live in. Saying you can't spend any money on speech or you can't spend any money on abortion has the same practical effect of banning the right in question. We can apply the same logic to corporations. If corporations have no rights, than what would be a problem of a ban on all abortions performed with corporate resources?

In terms of corporate rights, the fact of the matter is that corporations are organizations of people and not simply inanimate objects. The idea that corporations have no rights is facially absurd and I would just invoke the 5th and 14th amendments here. If corporations have no rights, than they are not entitled to the Constitutional guarantees of due process and could have their property and assets seized by the government at any time and have absolutely no legal recourse.

What many on the left would like is for the rights of corporations to be limited by the government, but there is no Constitutional basis for distinguishing corporations from other groups of individuals. I suppose one could argue that the logical basis for making a distinction would be that corporations are profit-seeking organizations, but this wasn't a distinction in the campaign finance laws which applied to both for-profits and non-profits. Furthermore, if the basis for such a distinction is the profit motive, than such logic could be extended to individuals as well. It makes little sense that groups of individuals engaged in a profit seeking enterprise could have their speech rights limited, while individuals acting alone would be free to speak in furtherance of their profit seeking activities. The slippery slope here is that any speech in furtherance of one's own economic interest could logically be restricted under this argument.

I've been trying to come up with a reason some progressives are as upset and frustrated about the decision as they are and I finally have some ideas. The problem is that many folks on the left, including perhaps the dissenters on the Court, have mistakenly entangled Constitutional notions of equality with the Constitutional protections of free speech, primarily because the speech were dealing with is directly related to the election of our government officials. This notion of one man, one vote has been extended in to the realm of electoral speech, where large expenditures on electoral speech are truly feared by the left.

Ultimately though, free speech has zero connection with voting rights or any Constitutional protections of equality. Put aside the question of money for a moment and consider that each and every one of us have various capacities of persuasion. The power of speech of a mentally impaired person is not the same as that power for Barack Obama or a writer for the New York Times. And just as obviously, each and everyone of us have different financial resources and different standing from which to disseminate our speech. Speech is inherently unequal and nothing- not laws or Fairness doctrines can ever gives individuals equal powers of persuasion.

So yes, some people are more convincing than others, people have access to different sorts of soap boxes to disseminate their speech, and financial capacities to disseminate speech are drastically different. And there's nothing wrong with this. To return to it's classical liberal roots, free speech theory developed because of the ability of rational people to discern the best speech in a free market place of ideas. Given the opportunity, good ideas would win out over volume and the danger of bad ideas drowning out good was not a real concern. But even if it were a concern, the real problem is that there's no fair way to restrict the volume of speech. It's easy to place restrictions on those who want to buy tv ad time, but what about the newspapers and media outlets that already have access to millions of ears?

And it's all fine and dandy to separate the press from other large corporations (as Justice Stevens apparently did in his dissent), but there's no Constitutional basis for that distinction. There's a major problem with laws that say to Wal-Mart "you can't spend any money on political advertising which supports or opposes candidates for office" but then allow the New York Times and Fox News to make endorsements to millions of readers and viewers seven days a week. Freedom of the press is mentioned in the First Amendment, for sure, but there's not a single Supreme Court precedent that bestows on an institutional press special rights that don't apply to other groups or individuals.

The big point is this: There's no right to any sort of equality in regards to speech and it's not just that it's not in the Constitution or that it's a bad idea, it just plain doesn't work. We can pinpoint equality in the democratic electoral process with one man, one vote and you could even see how income inequality could be achievable by counting dollars. But as we've seen with these pernicious aspects of campaign finance reform, attempts to equalize speech invariably lead to censorship.

New TV Power Rankings

2010-01-24T16:09:00.003-05:00

These will be brief, but I did want to get going as shows have started up after the Christmas break. These rankings are through Jan. 24, 2010:

1. Fringe (At some point this season Fringe has eased into it's comfort zone as a show that's part X-Files, part Star Trek, and part JJ Abrams thriller. They've buckled down and focussed more on the characters and the creepiness factor to great success. Last week's episode, with the small town of people with hidden deformities was really classic sci-fi stuff.)

2. Battlestar Galactica: The Plan (I didn't expect too, but I really enjoyed the Plan, perhaps because it answered many of the questions left unanswered in the series. That being said, it also lays it out pretty clearly that unlike the Cylons, the Battlestar writers didn't really have a coherent plan- either that, or they did a terrible job of plotting it and foreshadowing in the first few seasons. Further expanding upon the revelations from the Battlestar finale, the Cylon Cavil's manipulative role in all of the Battlestar events is revealed. In some ways, it's not much different than Lost, where we've seen various layers peeled back and new motivations revealed years into the series. But the difference is, Lost always promised us mysteries, while Battlestar specifically told us that the Cylons had a plan, not that one evil Cylon had plan. Given the twists and turns the show took, it's always felt like a bit of a bait and switch that justified the somewhat sympathetic portrayal of the other Cylons. But for all the structural problems of Battlestar, scene-by-scene, the Plan is still a marvelous piece of work.)

3. Big Love (The season opener had me very worried that Big Love was getting ready to jump the shark (Ben's band and Roman's frozen body being hauled all over the place), but the last two episodes have been much better. Many fans hate the new Mad-Men like title sequence, but the drifting and falling we see from our main characters in that sequence has mirrored what we've seen in the story. Last episode we saw Roman in a dream sequence and, unfortunately, when Joey dug his body. Dreams and visions are good, dead bodies, bad. Got that writers?)

4. 24 (I really thought getting through this season would be a chore, so I was pleasantly surprised when the 4 hour opener was written well enough to keep up suspense. Plenty of interesting elements are in play, but it wouldn't take much for it to go downhill. We'll see, but for now, I'm rooting for this new Jack like never before.)

5. 30 Rock (It's not that 30 Rock isn't good, but I was tempted to put it behind Parks and Rec and Community. I can't really place it, but this season just hasn't been as good as the last.)

6. Parks and Rec (Parks and Rec may be in the process of exceeding the best of the Office, which is no small achievement. Last week's episode with Leslie's dinner party was a perfect combination of plotting, character development, and clever jokes. The only thing missing are characters with Jim and Pam like charisma, but maybe that's a good thing.)

7. Community (Just keeps getting better and better as the characters are fleshed out. And Joel McHale just is really charming, isn't he?)

8. Law and Order SVU (The one episode since the break featured a very different appearance from Lost's Naveen Andrews.)

9. House (I said back in December that we needed more Wilson and we've gotten more Wilson. If only the writers could just change up the pace on the medical mysteries and we'd really be rolling.)

Not Ranked:

The Office (A clip show? Really? The worst part was, placed in a row, the clips really undercut a show that had tried to ground itself in the real world. While Parks and Rec has shined by keeping things simple, the highlighting of every ridiculous incident in the Office only had me wondering how such an Office could possibly still be in existence.)

Caprica (Just haven't sat down and watched it yet and I'm hoping to get the wife along for the ride.)

More on Citizens United

2010-01-22T16:19:00.007-05:00

While libertarians, some conservatives, and free speech absolutists have celebrated the Supreme Court's Citizen's United decision, the reaction from Democrats, many progressives, and President Obama has been outrage and frustration at the presumed giveway to large corporations at the expense of the rights of ordinary Americans. Of course, as Reason's Matt Welch points out, it was ordinary Americans who were restricted by the previously existing campaign finance restrictions.

The plight of "ordinary citizens" is precisely the reason why non-Republicans like me (let alone many conservatives who refused to support John McCain) opposed the campaign finance laws struck down yesterday. When a law requires any group of two or more people who raise $5,000 for the purposes of making a political statement to adhere to a blizzard of federal regulations subject to fines, that law by definition chokes off the "voices of everyday Americans" that President Barack Obama, in his ridiculous reaction to the decision yesterday, expressed outrage on behalf of. Free-speech campaign-finance enthusiasts are willing to censor or chill those small voices for the greater purpose of attempting (and largely failing) to blunt the political activity of hated Corporations (or "Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests," in the words of a president who has been bailing out Wall Street banks and crafting legislative deals with health insurance companies and other powerful interests for a year now). What campaign-finance supporters are not willing to do, at least most of the time, is admit that they're making any tradeoff on political expression at all.

Most of the outrage from self-styled progressives has focused on two major points: 1- That corporations have free speech rights and 2- That money is speech. Liberal constitutionalist and civil libertarian Glenn Greenwald responds to those points here, pointing out that neither of those points were directly addressed by either the majority or the dissent. (Greenwald's initial post, which provoked an intense negative reaction from his readership, can be found here.) Greenwald also poses a series of hypotheticals to those who claim money spent to spread speech is not protected by the First Amendment:

Anyone who believes that would have to say that there's no First Amendment problem with any law that restricts the spending of money for political purposes, such as:

"It shall be illegal for anyone to spend money to criticize laws enacted by the Congress; all citizens shall still be free to express their views on such laws, provided no money is spent;" or

"It shall be illegal for anyone to spend money advocating Constitutional rights for accused terrorists; all citizens shall still be free to express their views on such matters, provided no money is spent"; or

"It shall be illegal for anyone to spend money promoting a candidate not registered with either the Democratic or Republican Party; all citizens shall still be free to advocate for such candidates, provided no money is spent."

Anyone who actually believes that "money is not speech" would have to believe that such laws are necessarily permitted by the First Amendment (since they merely restrict the expenditure of money, which is not speech).

Do you actually believe that? I don't even find that argument sufficiently coherent to warrant much discussion.

It would be like saying: "No person shall be permitted to use a megaphone or television outlet to advocate liberal views -- there's no First Amendment problem: megaphones and television outlets are just 'property, not speech'."

And a similar list of hypotheticals to those who would claim corporations have no Constitutional right to free speech

Do you believe the FBI has the right to enter and search the offices of the ACLU without probable cause or warrants, and seize whatever they want?

Do they have the right to do that to the offices of labor unions?

How about your local business on the corner which is incorporated?

The only thing stopping them from doing this is the Fourth Amendment. If you believe that corporations have no constitutional rights because they're not persons, what possible objections could you voice if Congress empowered the FBI to do these things?

Can they seize the property (the buildings and cars and bank accounts) of those entities without due process or just compensation? If you believe that corporations have no Constitutional rights, what possible constitutional objections could you have to such laws and actions?

Could Congress pass a law tomorrow providing that any corporation - including non-profit advocacy groups -- which criticize American wars shall be fined $100,000 for each criticism? What possible constitutional objection could you have to that?

In some ways, the response on the left to calls for free speech rights for corporations mirrors the response on the right to calls for due process rights for terror suspects. People on all ends of the political spectrum tend to get hung up on law as an abstract concept, forgetting the logical formulations from which law flows. Even if you vehemently disagree with the Citizens United decision, you still need to come up with a cogent and logical system for the protection of rights. You can't completely separate speech from money because money is what enables all but the most basic forms of verbal communication. And you can't completely separate corporate rights from individual rights because at it's most basic, the corporate form is an organization of individuals.

Freedom on the Roll

2010-01-22T11:59:00.004-05:00

My political blogging since the fall has been light- in part because of my increasingly busy schedule and in part because of the political dead end that seemed to be approaching in regards to liberty. As the autumn progressed into winter, health care reform seemed all but inevitable and the vote before Christmas time seemed to cement our commitment to some form of legislative monstrosity in the health care sector.

But with the new year has come new blessings of liberty, slight changes in direction that have moved our nation once again in the direction of freedom. It started innocuously enough with Republican Scott Brown's unexpected and somewhat ironic victory in the Massachusetts special election for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat. The victory restored the Republican's power to filibuster and by all accounts has signaled the end of this wave of health care reform as there would be no way to reconcile the House and Senate bills without getting it through the Senate once again.

And there was more good news this week as well, as the Supreme Court finally announced it's decision in Citizens United, overturning restrictive aspects of McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation on free speech grounds. I'm not linking to anything yet because the story is currently plastered all over every newspaper and news site and I haven't had a chance to read the opinion yet, which is supposedly 180 some odd pages. I'd like to be able to provide some legal reaction in the blog, but again, that will have to wait until I read the full opinion. What I'm most interested in at this point is the reaction to the decision from the left, which has been a mix of confusion and apocalyptic prophecies of corporate control of the political process.

I do plan on a number of follow up posts on the issue, but I did want to take a moment to briefly address these reactions to the decision. What the case was about, specifically, was Hillary the Movie, a anti-Hillary Clinton documentary put together by a conservative non-profit. The FEC blocked the release of the movie on theater screens and through cable on-demand services, leading to the litigation which eventually reached the Supreme Court. The threatening regulation was an aspect of McCain-Feingold that prohibited corporations (including non-profits) from electioneering communications within 60 days of an election. The Supreme Court decision with based on the simple notion that speech is speech and that this sort of political speech is precisely what the First Amendment was written to protect. Taking a different tact, the dissent questioned this protection of "corporate speech" and questioned where in the Constitution that such corporate rights were protected.

As I said, the negative reaction has fallen mostly into two camps, one of which is made of those who never really understood the issue in the first place. To those folks I have only this to say: This decision leaves limits on direct campaign contributions intact. Individuals are still limited in what they can give to candidates and corporations are still barred from donating to political campaigns. The issue before the Court was about speech made independent of particular candidates, or "uncoordinated expenditures" in the vernacular of campaign finance reform. What was at issue was the ability of corporations- and in reality, any organizations to speak out on candidates and campaign issues.

That second camp of negative reaction has focussed mostly on the corporate right of speech. And I'll have more to say on this in coming days, but as a practical matter, I think this focus distorts the broad scope of the law in question.

Take a typical election where two candidates from the major parties are vying for one elected office. Say one party's candidate is the incumbent who has managed to raise double, triple, or even quadruple the amount of his amount. In the months leading up to the election, the big money candidate is able to bombard the tv and radio airwaves with campaign commercials, while his opponent is limited by a more restrictive budget. The supporters of the small money candidate, both corporate interests and individuals, would be severely restricted in terms of what they could do in terms of supporting their candidates under the old laws because of the restrictive nature of McCain-Feingold's ban on electioneering. Non-profits may have a vested interest in the support or opposition of various candidates, but under the old law, they were forbidden from weighing in publicly in the same forum as candidates. Take for example non-profits that support abortion rights, or alternatively the right to life. Such non-profits could have a strong interest in the outcome of an election, but under the old law, they were legally prevented from speaking out.

To this line of reasoning, some folks may answer, "ah ha, so why not just ban corporate spending and allow other, non-corporate groups their right to free speech?" The problem is, that's not a practical solution. If non-profits were allowed to to speak out and corporations were not, corporations could simply funnel money into non-profits for the purpose of speaking out on campaign issues, destroying any rationale for such a distinction in the first place. However you try to work it, you can't limit what corporations spend in speaking out on elections without necessarily limiting the ability of non-corporate groups to speak.

24 and the War On Terror

2010-01-13T14:50:00.001-05:00

While 24 spent much of it's last season confusing it's terror drenched fantasy with the real world, there seems to be an unrelenting persistence of fear from those in the real world whose perceptions of terror seem to stem straight from the television set.

I don't intend for this post to be long, but there's a lot that needs to be said, both about 24, which failed to make my top ten list for the decade, and about the real world reaction to terrorism. What's blown my mind is the sheer volume of fear I've heard the past few weeks over the radio, tv, and internet. My initial reaction when I heard of the botched attack was, 1- yet another incompetent terrorist, 2- yet another example of government incompetence, and 3- yet another example of individual's acting courageously. At no point did I feel as though I should be more concerned or more worried than I'd been.

The terrorists of 24 are truly frightening. In season 4, a group of radical Islamic terrorists blew up a train, kidnapped the secretary of defense, hijacked the internet, melted down nuclear power plants, shot down Air Force One, and nearly succeeded at firing a nuclear missile at Los Angeles ... all in one day. In season 6, there were terrorist attacks in numerous American cities and a nuclear bomb was set off in Valencia California. And in season 7, a small armed group of African war criminals invades the White House and holds the President hostage. Seasons 6 and 7 also featured a ridiculous debate over civil rights, torture, and anti-terrorism tactics. It was a debate relevant to our reality in dealing with terrorism, but seemed almost trite in a world where so many monstrous things had happened. The amazing thing about 24-world wasn't that it took so long for Jack Bauer to face a Congressional inquest, but that democratic institutions and civil liberties had survived at all.

And it's this world of fantasy that many supporters of drastic action in regards to terrorism actually reside. I've pointed out before that plot-wide, many of the latter seasons of 24 faced the problem of "terrorists with unlimited funds." The amount of money required to carry out all the attacks of season 4 in particular would have been astronomical. If real world terrorists had access to such fortunes- and if they actually had the ability maneuver such funds through worldwide financial institutions- then they might begin to approach the level of 24-world terrorists. But in the real world, the lack of attacks on American soil and the failed attacks on air lines should be seen as an indication of the reach and power of Al-Queda and similar organizations. As devastating as 9-11 was, it was not an attack that required particularly large sums of money or a very intricate coordination. The fact of the matter is that terrorism by it's very nature is a sort of last refuge and what we see is low budget, decentralized, and limited. Television may have given us the gift of fear about sleeper cells, but the utter lack of any attacks on American soil since 9-11 is indicative of just how few terrorists there are in our midst.

As I mentioned in posting on the Fort Hood attack, terrorism is relatively easy to accomplish. Just as there are limits in our ability to stop some sick kid from shooting up his school, there are limits in our abilities to stop some maniac from blowing up a bus station. If there were tons of real, honest-to-God terrorists amongst us, they would have blown something up by now.

This is not to say that our intelligence community shouldn't keep working- They should, and I can't think of a better use of intelligence and law enforcement than in prevention of terrorism and preparedness in terror response. The larger point is about privacy and security- what do we want and what rights shouldn't be given away and about our political leaders who insist that this is the most serious threat our nation faces. I don't doubt the evil that's out there, I just have a problem with the fear, particularly when it seems to me as though the threat isn't all that different from school shooters, similar sorts of mass murderers, and serial killers.

Which brings us to my final point. The failed Christmas day bomber, Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, is to be tried in civilian court, fanning the typical flames of outrage. And I'll be honest, I can see the pros and cons of both utilizing the criminal justice system and in treating the failed bomber as a war criminal. The real issue- and the real problem that remains- is unchecked power of the executive branch to define the issue. So maybe Mutallab would have been a war criminal for George W. Bush, but for Barack Obama, he's a criminal defendant. For those who care the least bit about the rule of law this should be deeply troubling. There's nothing wrong with the terrorist, war criminal label so long as there's some sort of articulated legal basis for the label. What we have now and what we've had for nearly a decade is a situation where the President has unlimited authority in naming terrorists who don't deserve the protections of the Constitution and the criminal justice system. I've been making this point since 2004 and it's one liberals, conservatives, and libertarians of all stripes have failed to address. Terrorism doesn't fit in traditional legal rubrics, but a decade later we still have nothing new to work with.

The Top Television Programs of the Decade

2010-01-03T21:08:00.001-05:00

I've written in this blog before about the golden age of television and as the decade comes to a close, it's become more than apparent that television has surpassed film in terms of cultural relevance. The tv shows you're watching (or what you're catching up on) has become more of a conversation starter than what films you've seen. It's not that movies don't matter anymore, but it's hard to deny their cultural prestige has declined. With the increased freedom given to creators in television, there's simply far more that can be done with the 10-14 hours a television show may have for a single season than with the 2 to 3 hours you get in a film.

For the record, my top two films of the last two years are Pixar "kids" movies, Wall-E and Up, both of which were far more imaginative and compelling than virtually anything else I've seen in the later half of this decade. But I'll have no top ten film list for the simple reason that I haven't seen enough movies. Part of my problem is that the great films never seem as great as they're supposed to be, but that's a story for another time. For now, here is my top ten list of the television shows of the decade. Now, for television connoisseurs, you'll notice some big names are missing, most notably the Sopranos. It's simply because I haven't sat down and watched the entire series yet and what I haven't watched isn't on the list. That being said, I've seen a fair share of the Sopranos and I'd have trouble believing it's a better show than the Wire or Mad Men, no matter what other critics might say.

So without further ado, here is my top ten list, with some of the tough cuts listed below.

1. The Wire: The Wire isn't just the best show of the decade, it's the best television show ever and a work of fiction that is already a modern American classic. With a vast cast of characters, the Wire was a five year critique of the drug war, but more than that, it was a long form tragedy about the failure of institutions at all levels and the tragic impact of those failures on individuals. Far too many "dark" television programs make the mistake of equating bad behavior with tragedy, but for Wire creator David Simon, the tragedy starts with society. Individuals make plenty of bad choices along the way, but the creative setup leaves the audience's sympathies with the characters, with the drug dealers, the cops, and everyone in between.

2. Mad Men: Perhaps even better then the Wire in terms of pure construction, Mad Men is number two solely because it lacks the sheer scope of our number one. Mad Men is the story of Don Draper, creative director for New York based ad agency Sterling Cooper, but from the start it's been so much more. Don's entire life, from his marriage, to his persona, to his name, was as intricately constructed as any advertisement and for three years, Mad Men has given us the parallel stories of the disintegration of the life Don had created for himself and the disintegration of the 50's era cultural consensus. The tumult of the 60's was supposed to be as inevitable as Don's personal crises. Oh, and ... Mad Men manages to be an incredible tv show without guns, murder, violence, and fist fights.

3. Arrested Development: Arrested completes the "holy trinity" of the television shows of the last decade that were near perfect. The storyline of Arrested's three seasons would be compelling without the humor and other than the early years of the Simpsons, I don't think there's ever been a show quite as layered where joke after joke after joke is revealed through future viewings. As opposed to program's like Family Guy or other sitcoms where many of the jokes are simply throwaway lines, Arrested never wasted a bit of dialogue, always building on either plot or character. Plenty of shows have done selfish, but Arrested took it to a new level: 90% of the conversations between characters were not really conversations but the characters talking past each other, stuck in their own little worlds. This helped maintain the characters likability because when they did connect with one another, it actually seemed real. And maybe most importantly, Arrested gave us chicken dances, Gob's Final Countdown magic performances, the airport staircar, and the most timely treatment of the war in Iraq.

4. Lost: Let me just clarify something. Lost is my favorite show of the decade, perhaps my favorite show of all time, but unlike the top three, it is not flawless. There are some moments where the dialogue leans toward cliche and places (like parts of season 3 and 5) where the storyline is just plain clunky. But taken as a whole, Lost is a tremendous achievement, replete with compelling characters and more imagination than perhaps any other major series on network television. What other show could leave it's fans so in the dark about the direction of the show's final season, yet remain a popular phenomenon? In fact, Lost has managed to do something no other series has ever done: Creatively redefine itself while incorporating new characters at the start of each no season, building upon the characters and plot threads of previous seasons.

5. South Park: I wasn't going to rank South Park this high, if even at all, but then I watched ManBearPig the other night, the 2006 episode which skewered Al Gore and his global warming obsession, and I was reminded of the show's brilliance and timeliness. ManBearPig was first shown in spring of '06, right when an Inconvenient Truth first came out, but before it became a real buzzworthy topic. ManBearPig is symbolic of South Park's timeliness and cleverness, and how sometimes the show was so timely and so clever that it took a few years for the rest of us to catch on. And while South Park has had it's share of misses over the course of the decade, perhaps that's a testament to more of a credit to Trey Parker and Matt Stone than we realize. They don't do safe and they don't do easy and the television landscape is all the better for it.

6. Big Love: I've enjoyed Big Love for three years, since my wife and I first watched it during it's first season when we had a free HBO trial, but prior to last year, I probably wouldn't have placed it in the top ten. Last year however, the numerous plot threads of the first few years collided in a veritable dramatic perfect storm, making me comfortable placing the polygamist drama in the top ten. Like Mad Men, Big Love is just so different from everything else on the air- no cops, no lawyers, no doctors, and unique for HBO, no swearing. Despite the connotations of polygamy, Big Love also boasts the strongest cast of female characters on tv, providing support for the axiom that behind every great man, there's one or maybe several great women.

7. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: I've heard Sunny described as Seinfeld for the next generation and that description, while apt, may not really do the show justice. While the Seinfeld characters were notoriously selfish and self-interested, the Sunny cast took these qualities to a new level. But more importantly, each member of the Sunny cast showcased an unprecedented complete lack of self awareness. But as opposed to a show like Curb, where the conflict often seems forced, Sunny stories always tend to evolve organically. The season three episode, "Sweet Dee is Dating a Retarded Person," remains the funniest half hour of the decade.

8. Freaks & Geeks: Technically, half of the show's brief run was in the fall of 1999, but if we're talking about cultural significance, Freaks and Geeks was a fortuitous program, ushering in a new style of humor and storytelling and launching the careers of Judd Apatow and his young stars. So yes, it was a trailblazer, but no, that's not the reason why it's in the top ten. The run was brief, but the show was awesome, perhaps the best depiction of adolescence we've seen on the small screen. It was funny and relatable, with the 1980 setting serving to preserve the show's shelf life rather than date it.

9. Battlestar Galactica: Perhaps no science fiction show has ever been so polarizing, as there are those who loved Battlestar from start to finish and those whose criticisms grew as the show's run continued. But as to why Battlestar belongs in this top ten I have only this to say: For all the haters out there, Battlestar was compelling television, compelling enough that the haters (which included me at times) stuck with it to the end, just to see what was going to happen next.

10. Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld: I know everyone will disagree with this pick, but it's my list and I've decided this number ten spot should go to something different. I've seen several other "best of" lists that feature the Daily Show or the Colbert Report, but Red Eye took that blurry distinction between news and entertainment to a new level. Not only is it on Fox News, but it has all the trappings of the typical news and opinion type programs: The host has a monologue, there's a roundtable discussion, and they actually cover real news events. But unlike the scripted news shows on Comedy Central, Red Eye is mostly off the cuff and it's left to the audience to determine what comments are serious and what comments are jokes. There's justnot another show on tv that can claim to have really given a voice to musicians, comedians, authors, and politicians and can claim to be home to regular appearances to both sitting Congressmen and fully costumed member of the sci-fi metal band Gwar, Oderus Urungus.

The Tough Cuts:

Carnivale: Simply put, the mystical depression-era HBO series was brought to an end before it's time. The set up the first season was compelling, but the ending was rushed, leaving far too many questions unanswered.

Six Feet Under: It'd be difficult to say that HBO's second big hit (after the Sopranos) wasn't well done, but for however well done it was, it was, at times, equally as difficult to watch. Six Feet was ultimately darker than Battlestar Galactica in terms of the self-destructive nature of it's characters and the plotting tended to reflect the characters bad decisions. It was worth watching, but I'm not sure I'd want to do it again.

Pushing Daisies: It only lasted 22 episodes, but it was worthy of consideration. So unique, so charming, so clever, but the first season was shortened by the writers strike and the show never got a real shake.

Malcolm In the Middle: The most underrated show of the decade, perhaps the most underrated comedy ever. If you appreciate comedy without a laugh track, you owe Malcolm a debt of gratitude.

Dexter: I love it, but Dexter has it's flaws. The writers are very manipulative with some of the thematic elements (such as this season when baby Harrison's cries or silence would signify Dexter's alternating frustration or harmony with his new family. And while some of the minor characters (like Deb) are stellar, others remain underdeveloped.

24: If this was a list of the most influential shows of the decade, 24 would make the list, but other than the first season, I'd have trouble calling any other season great. Seasons two and three were pretty good, but from season four on, the plotting has been utterly unbelievable. Sure, the first few seasons had their rough patches (Terri's amnesia season one, everything with Kim season two), but none of the last four seasons has even managed to tell a cohesive story.

Firefly: I'd love to include the cult favorite, but Firefly didn't last long enough to reach it's full potential. Even including the episodes on the DVD set which never actually aired, the characters never had the opportunity to be fully fleshed out.

Curb Your Enthusiasm: There are plenty of critics to whom Curb would be a no-brainer top ten pick, the logical follow-up to the previous decade that had been dominated by all things Seinfeld. But while I've always enjoyed Curb and the episodes tend to be well constructed, but what is this world where everyone else is as much as an argumentative ass as Larry David?

The Office: My wife made quite a case for the Office, based on the high quality of it's first few seasons and it's trailblazing presence in the comedy field. But the decline over the past few seasons has been too noticeable and the characters have seemingly suffered "Simpsons syndrome" in their inability to evolve.

30 Rock: Oh so close, but this past season has begun to make me think that the show still doesn't quite have a handle on it's brilliance. It can be laugh out loud funny, but I fear that it sometimes sacrifices plots and character for jokes.

Terror In The Skies

2009-12-30T10:07:00.002-05:00

I'm frightened. Not of incompetent terrorists, but of incompetent and overreaching bureaucrats who have responded to the latest terrorist attack with calls for more restrictions on travel that have seemingly little connection with safety. Is it really any surprise that it wasn't the bold TSA or the even bolder intelligence community that prevented the latest terrorist attack, but the simple courageous acts of individual passengers.

I don't intend for this to be a long post, just a continuation of my questions from last month about terrorism. If the point of terrorism is to cause "terror" then haven't the terrorists won already? We're supposed to treat terrorism as so dire that we'd suspend our usual qualms about the government (in the form of the TSA) getting all up in our business, yet statistically speaking, we're far more likely to die in a car accident on the way to the airport than we are to die in a terrorist attack. There's just got to be a point where we recognize that the piles upon piles of new laws, rules, and regulations that are supposed to protect us from terrorism don't hold a candle to simple concept of common sense. In the wake of 9-11, we've seen two positive developments in air travel: 1) locked cockpit doors, a simple solution to prevent terrorists from crashing a plane and 2) simple passenger awareness of what a barely armed terrorist is capable of. Other than that, have we really made any useful changes in terms of travel? I can't think of any.

That's not to say that we shouldn't continue some forms of safety searches- We don't want a maniac, terrorist or not, bringing weapons on an airplane. But when will Washington learn to use common sense to address a problem?

There's No Such Thing As Equality

2009-12-29T11:30:00.002-05:00

The concept of equality gets thrown around quite a bit during the health care debate (amongst other topics) and a thought occurred to me as my wife and I planned on the latest assortment of student loans which have come due. In a complicated world, is there ever really such a thing as equality? Folks on the left will throw around concepts like income inequality, but what does that even mean? The truth is that a $50,000 a year salary for one person is not the same as it for another person. Circumstances matter. Given that health benefits aren't taxed, there's a big difference between someone making $50,000 a year with their health care paid by their employer and someone making $50,000 a year but paying their health care expenses out of their own pocket. Someone making $50,000 a year with no student debt is in a vastly different position than someone making $50,000 a year with $100,000 of student debt. And someone making $50,000 a year in Manhattan is different from someone making $50,000 a year in Mississippi. Truth be told, a renter in the same town or city could technically be up a few thousand dollars over the course of the year on someone else with the same income who didn't find quite as good a deal on their rent.

That's not to say there aren't answers to some of these complications. For instance, eliminating the tax break for employer provided health care would put everyone on a level playing field as far as health care expenses go. But just think about it for a minute. Any system that provides some form of assistance to those who can't afford health care themselves bases that assistance upon income and none of those assessments on income take any of these other life circumstances into account. This is why the idea of a health insurance mandate is so maddening. My wife and I are fortunate to have health insurance, but if we didn't and health reform passes, we would be in the position where we wouldn't be eligible for assistance, but would be required to purchase health insurance out of pocket. The problem is, with so much student loan debt, the added burden of out-of-pocket health insurance would potentially push us to poverty levels.

Let me be clear, I'm not suggesting that we should start taking into account student loan debt in regards to poverty and need determinations. Whether we're talking about student loans, credit card debt, or living circumstances, we're talking about individual choices and we don't want a system where individuals are relieved of the responsibility for their own choices. My point here is two-fold, that 1- herein lies the problem with government mandates, because it's one thing for people to deal with their circumstances, but it's another to burden people with something they can't afford, and 2- more importantly, that equality becomes an impossibility when the multitude of choices we face is factored into the picture.

Too Little, Too Late

2009-12-22T16:03:00.002-05:00

If I haven't been blunt in my posting, allow me to be blunt now: The health reform legislation before Congress is bad, bad, bad news.

To my liberal friends out there, let me sketch out what me, the heartless libertarian would be happier with: A single-payer system for those who want one, the only caveat being that folks who make enough money would have to pay for such a system, directly. Give medicare to all for the folks who want it and give everyone the option to buy in. Then, let the rest of us utilize the market- eliminate tax subsidies for employer provided health care and deregulate the insurance market so those of us who want it can have free choice. Yeah, I basically am offering the public option, but I'd rather there be a public option where private markets are still allowed to operate than have the complete evisceration of real private markets, which is what we may see under this legislation.

There is one bright spot to this legislation and that's the fact that if it's passed, it will be purely along party lines. Never before in our nations history has such an expensive piece of legislation been passed without any support from the opposition party. So ultimately, the workings of this legislation will be placed at the feet of Democrats and there may be the political will on the part of the Republicans to scale back a massive entitlement and regulatory boondoggle, something else that's never really been done before in our nation's history. And if we could get to that point, well, that would be a tremendously positive step for the future of limited government. Obviously a lot of speculation, but what more do we have at this point?

Health Care, Here We Come

2009-12-22T12:05:00.003-05:00

Unless you've been living in a cave, or some other sort of news-free environment, you should be well aware that the health care bill has the sixty votes needed to begin the process of plowing it's way through the Senate. As the Times notes today, there are still a number of significant hurdles in merging the Senate version with the House version. For the uninitiated or uninformed that means this: Though a health reform bill has passed in the House and is on it's way to passing in the Senate, those bills are different and do not become law until the same version can be approved by both the House and the Senate, at which time it can be submitted to the President.

Megan McArdle has a nice piece covering the many issues of process involved in passing health care reform and the concerning language in the bill which would attempt to make certain provisions unrepealable by future Congresses. Many of the complaints about the passage of this bill, from both right and left, has been the downright icky and open way in which key votes were obtained. It was announced late Sunday that conservative Democratic Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska would support the bill in exchange for Medicare concessions for his home state of Nebraska, meaning that federal tax dollars would help Nebraska pay for a share of Medicare expenses that other states have to shoulder themselves. Some folks have complained that this amounts to outright bribery at the public expense, and they're right, to an extent, but Megan quite correctly points out that this is how politics worked and how it's worked for hundreds of years.

But putting aside the existence of bribes/pork as part of the making of political sausage, there's an interesting side issue here that's all about how we structure government and utilize tax revenues. Nebraska's Medicare concessions are symptomatic of a complaint I've had for a long time, where tax money is siphoned from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Left or right, it's an inefficient use of tax money, plain and simple. We pay taxes to the federal government, but the federal government winds up sending some percentage of that money to individual states- states which we also pay taxes too. At the state level, a certain percentage of revenues from taxes and federal funds are then redistributed to cities, municipalities, and counties. If there's a logic behind this sort of trickle down taxation I'd love to hear it, but the end result is a redistribution of wealth to jurisdictions where the complex web of money distances individuals from the political process. And I'd raise the same questions about this sort of redistribution as I would about redistribution on the non-governmental level. Why for instance, in Connecticut to the citizens of wealthy towns pay high federal and state income taxes, only to have money siphoned back to their towns in the form of property tax relief?

I know this is a bit of a tangent, but it's yet another patently inefficient and structurally deficient problem with our current system that's been laid bear by the current debate. And to relate this post to my last, there's a question I'd pose to everyone, but primarily to liberals and supporters of "big government." Why don't we simplify things? Why does health care legislation need to be thousands of pages long and why do we siphon money through multiple layers of government? Giving money directly to the people that need it would be a far more effective way of dealing with a problem like the uninsured than the incomprehensible legislation before us. So why not? Why not the simple solution?

Where Libertarians And Liberals Can Agree

2009-12-20T14:00:00.002-05:00

Glenn Greenwald, in a post on the progressive divide in the health care debate comments on the similarities of outrage from the right and left:

But the objections over the mandate are largely identical -- it's a coerced gift to the private health insurance industry that underwrites the Democratic Party. The same was true over opposition to the bailout, objections to lobbying influence over Washington, and most of all, the growing anger that Washington serves the interests of financial elites at the expense of the working class.

Whether you call it "a government takeover of the private sector" or a "private sector takeover of government," it's the same thing: a merger of government power and corporate interests which benefits both of the merged entities (the party in power and the corporations) at everyone else's expense. Growing anger over that is rooted far more in an insider/outsider dichotomy over who controls Washington than it is in the standard conservative/liberal ideological splits from the 1990s.

And from earlier in the same piece, Greenwald on corporatism:

The health care bill is one of the most flagrant advancements of this corporatism yet, as it bizarrely forces millions of people to buy extremely inadequate products from the private health insurance industry -- regardless of whether they want it or, worse, whether they can afford it (even with some subsidies). In other words, it uses the power of government, the force of law, to give the greatest gift imaginable to this industry -- tens of millions of coerced customers, many of whom will be truly burdened by having to turn their money over to these corporations -- and is thus a truly extreme advancement of this corporatist model.

Greenwald, the liberal, can sound just positively libertarian at times, can't he? The debate between progressives boils down to those who accept corporate power to further progressive goals and those who who do not. Once again, allow me to present the idea of liberaltarianism. Libertarian and market-based proposals could improve competition and lower prices. Combine this was a voucher program that gives options to the millions who are currently uninsured and you have a market meets social welfare solution that forces the entirety of the health industry to meet the needs of consumers rather the corporate health interests as they exist today.

Of course, one of the biggest problems of health reform, whether you're a free marketer or a single payer supporter, is the general resistance of the public to change. For all our systems problems, millions upon millions of Americans are happy with their health insurance- They're happy that it's provided by their employers at seemingly no cost (or little cost) and they're happy they don't have to worry about medical bills. In a way, you could say that for many Americans the system we have is a form of corporate socialism, where employees are shielded from costs but avoid the specter of government rationing. The idea that individuals should be shielded from health care costs rather than make these financial decisions for ourselves is ingrained in our pysche, cutting across the political spectrum. It's why it's difficult to argue with the notion held by many on the left that it's morally wrong for individuals to be responsible for their own health care costs. Seeing as it's the system we have now, you're got an uphill battle if you're asking people to imagine the world so differently.

But just listen to the unhappiness that's coming from some segments of the left. As Greenwald says, whether you call it a government takeover of the private sector, or a private sector takeover of the government, you're really talking about the same thing.

This Is Just Priceless

2009-12-16T23:10:00.002-05:00

From the local WFSB news, apparently Michael Moore has threatened to boycott Connecticut if Senator Joe Lieberman is not recalled.

In his Tweet, Moore said, "People of Connecticut: What have u done 2 this country? We hold u responsible. Start recall of Lieberman 2day or we'll boycott your state."

Does that mean Michael Moore would refuse to come to Connecticut, even for a Ned Lamont rally? Would it mean Michael Moore would give up his Aetna Health Insurance? I'm not really sure what it means, but the even more interesting part of this story involves Connecticut representative Rosa DeLauro:

Politico reported Tuesday that Rep. Rosa DeLauro called for the recall of Lieberman.

DeLauro said, "No one should hold health care hostage, including Joe Lieberman, and I'll say it flat out, I think he ought to be recalled. I know that may not even be an option in Connecticut, but 45,000 people die every year because they don't have health care. We don't have the luxury to hold up a bill that could make a difference in people's lives. This is what we were sent here to do."

The state has no recall law for officials, according to the Secretary of State's Office.

You've just got to love the concise way these news websites can bring you a story. Forget about Michael Moore for a second and we've got a sitting member of the House accusing a sitting Senator of a willingness to let thousands die, calling for that same Senators recall when Connecticut has no mechanism for recall. As I said, just priceless.

Lieberman's been hit hard this week for his health care stances and you've got to wonder how long politicians and policy wonks can get away with such hyperbole. I mean isn't this just what the left accused Bush of doing, time and time again: Calling for drastic action with no time for honest intellectual debate, because, damn it, lives are at stake. You could be the biggest lefty on the planet and that doesn't mean you'd think that Congress needs to pass the hundreds upon hundreds of pages of health legislation right now, with no questions asked. I can even understand the urgency that people feel in regards to the need to cover those without health insurance, but if there are hundreds of different ideas about how to do just that, shouldn't we want the best possible one?

Health Reform Shows The Real Need For Liberaltarianism

2009-12-16T10:26:00.002-05:00

I've done plenty in this blog on health care and on the liberaltarian project (the attempted meeting of the minds between liberals and libertarians) and as major health care reform grows seemingly closer and closer, I can't help but think that a real opportunity has been missed to further an ideological relationship or at the very least, further a more open dialog between liberals and libertarians.

I recently read a comment on a libertarian blog that liberals don't understand that libertarians do in fact care about the poor and downtrodden, but simply don't believe in using government as a mechanism for charity. That statement is true to an extent, but in some ways, such a draw-a-line-the-sand type arguments have the negative effect of of leaving free markets and individual choice on the sidelines. Libertarian purists can argue over the outer limits of the role of government, but the fact of the matter is that a majority of Americans accept the social welfare role of government in some form or another. To be influential in a major policy debate like the one on health care you can't be in the business of openly advocating the abolition of the social safety net.

What does this mean for health care? Most importantly, it means coming up with market-based approaches to deal with the litany of complaints about our health care system. Reducing health care costs? That's an easy one for those of us advocating market oriented reforms. The simplest way to reduce costs is cut out the middle men, something none of the reforms on the table actually do. Coverage for the uninsured? Let's cover them, but let's do it in a fair and economical way. Why not health care vouchers, where people are able to make their own choices about costs. This is essentially what we have with the food stamp program, so why not do the same for health care?

Mandates, public options, and buy-ins are all bad ideas, but they're particularly bad in that they don't directly address the real concerns that have been raised. Republicans and prominent members of the conservative opposition haven't addressed this, choosing instead to focus solely on opposition. It's a mistake, because 1- Our health care system is a mess already, in a large part because of government and 2- Even if you can quibble about the numbers of uninsured, it does suck that there are people out there who are priced out of an already bloated health care system.

As refreshing as some aspects of the tea party movement have been, the truth is that it's fallen short in the practical idea department. Saying no to more lousy big government is all well and good, but what can we do about the lousy big government we've already got? That's the tough question and that's where this whole notion of liberaltarianism comes in to play. Make the focus on markets, on individuals, and on lessening regulatory burdens and the shrinking of government will follow.

Your Water Is Not Safe ... If You're An Idiot

2009-12-07T20:20:00.001-05:00

We did this once before and now it's time for the second round. Tuesday's New York Times led with this article by Charles Duhigg, claiming 20% of the nation's water treatment systems have violated key provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act.

I'll stop Mr. Duhigg right there as the term "water treatment system" is extremely misleading. EPA data (and drinking water regulations) refer to public water systems, not water treatment systems. The difference is in the details, as water treatment systems bring to mind large scale operations that provide water to hundreds of thousands of people. The truth is, the vast majority of public water systems are not the large facilities which that language brings to mind. According to the EPA's data, which dates back to the year 2000, there are 154,879 public water systems in the United States. Of those, nearly 90% (89.96% or 139,325) are water systems of varying classifications that serve fewer than 3,300 people. Many of these systems are literally groundwater wells, as any non residential wells serving the public are considered to be public water systems.

The thrust of the rest of the article is how little or nothing is done about public water systems which violate health standards. The evidence for this is the relatively few number of water systems which have been fined or punished by regulators, as if fines or punishment is the primary method of ensuring drinking water safety. I'll take a minute here to step back from my libertarian roots and give some credit to drinking water regulators for not being completely overzealous assholes. When regulators do show concern for health violations, they generally tend to be concerned with helping the affected water system bring it's drinking water into compliance and not with socking it to them. When public systems have health issues that remain unresolved, it's usually because there are no simple solutions. The Times article mentions arsenic and uranium, both of which can be naturally found in groundwater. If the bedrock in a given area with numerous groundwater sources of drinking water contains levels of elements that the EPA considers to be unacceptable, solutions can be costly if not downright impossible. The idea that fines and penalties for these systems would make people safer is just plain asinine.

I mentioned this in my post from a few months ago, but this is just shoddy, irresponsible journalism and the Times ought to be ashamed of itself. Once again there's been absolutely no effort to grasp the real meaning of these numbers, nor is there any effort to really investigate if and where Americans are actually drinking bad water. What we've got is simply data with no context, data that fails to address the causes and the possible solutions of contaminated drinking water. There's no questioning of the health limits set by the EPA and there's no recognition of the fact that these limits are bureaucratic and political, not particularly scientific. It's a scare story, pure and simple, and yet another indication that the passive acceptance of the regulatory state has made us all stupid.

You may tell yourself, this is not my brilliant coach. And you may tell yourself, this is not my Hall of Fame quarterback.

2009-12-07T12:56:00.006-05:00

Have we Pats fans been under the illusion that our Super Bowl run in the first half of the decade was really something more than "Once in a lifetime?"

Maybe, maybe not, but I find myself telling myself that these are not my New England Patriots. In the five real road games they have played this season, the Patriots have failed to earn a victory and perhaps more frighteningly, have completely disappeared in the second half of those games. In total, the Pats have been outscored 74-24 in the second half of those games. Worse yet are Tom Brady's numbers: 46 of 87 (a lousy 52.9%) for 523 yards, 2 TD's and 4 Int's. Seemingly everything that once made the Patriots such a force to be reckoned with has disappeared, both the clutch play of Brady and the defense.

I heard Cris Carter on Mike and Mike talk about how it's hurt the Patriots to have lost so many playmakers. But while it's true that no one seems to have stepped forward into that playmaker role, it's also true that not one defensive player not named Asante Samuel was a playmaking, game changing force in crunch time since the last Super Bowl run in 2004. And the lack of playmakers on defense says nothing for the offense, which has just as many healthy playmakers as ever. Hell, in the past few weeks we've even seem special teamer Sam Aiken become more of a weapon, scoring on an amazing play in Miami yesterday. We've got Moss, Welker, Kevin Faulk and of course, Brady, but this team is just plain not getting it done in big spots. It's depressing and I've got no real answers, other than that this may be karma turning to smack us Pats fans square in the face, for the years of luck during our Super Bowl runs and for our running up scores in 2007.

The I-President

2009-12-03T16:53:00.004-05:00

From Obama's Afganistan speech the other night:

This review is now complete. And as commander in chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home. These are the resources that we need to seize the initiative, while building the Afghan capacity that can allow for a responsible transition of our forces out of Afghanistan.

I do not make this decision lightly. I opposed the war in Iraq precisely because I believe that we must exercise restraint in the use of military force and always consider the long-term consequences of our actions. We have been at war for eight years, at enormous cost in lives and resources. Years of debate over Iraq and terrorism have left our unity on national security issues in tatters and created a highly polarized and partisan backdrop for this effort. And having just experienced the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the American people are understandably focused on rebuilding our economy and putting people to work here at home.

Most of all, I know that this decision asks even more of you — a military that, along with your families, has already borne the heaviest of all burdens. As president, I have signed a letter of condolence to the family of each American who gives their life in these wars. I have read the letters from the parents and spouses of those who deployed. I have visited our courageous wounded warriors at Walter Reed. I have traveled to Dover to meet the flag-draped caskets of 18 Americans returning home to their final resting place. I see firsthand the terrible wages of war. If I did not think that the security of the United States and the safety of the American people were at stake in Afghanistan, I would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow.

So no — I do not make this decision lightly. I make this decision because I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of the violent extremism practiced by al-Qaida. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak. This is no idle danger, no hypothetical threat. In the last few months alone, we have apprehended extremists within our borders who were sent here from the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan to commit new acts of terror. This danger will only grow if the region slides backwards and al-Qaida can operate with impunity. We must keep the pressure on al-Qaida, and to do that, we must increase the stability and capacity of our partners in the region.

I'm posting solely because of what struck me as I read about the speech on the day after: President Obama's use of the word "I." It strikes me as the inevitable continuation of President Bush's insistence that he was "the decider," a somewhat troubling allusion to thoughts on executive power. Both parties and both sides, left and right, never seem to care much for executive power when they're out of power, but both parties really grab hold tight when they're in the oval office, all the time making the President and the executive branch more powerful and more influential over aspect of government.

Too much from a lot of "I's?" Maybe so and I'm certainly not actually comparing Obama's speech to any made by Presidents in the past. But the way in which the speeches are put together nowadays I can't imagine this is some coincidence or some case of middle school-level writer overusing a pronoun. For my money, the point is clear: I, Barack Obama did this ... I, Barack Obama made these decisions. I just wonder if there's a politician out there other than Ron Paul who'd be willing to accept a less active, less powerful, less arrogant role for the President.

TV Power Rankings: Final Fall Edition

2009-12-03T16:51:00.000-05:00

Given the plan with these rankings, I thought this list would be more appropriate as a sort of fall summary rather than an up-to-the moment list. So Mad Men will obviously retain it's top ranking and read ahead to see where everyone else falls into place.

1. Mad Men (So I guess Mad Men gets another stay at the top, which is just fine for what's probably the best show on tv right now. I'd love to compare season three with season's one and two, but I'm not sure I can do that without watching the series again.)

2. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (The best comedy of the fall will follow the best drama. This may be Sunny's best season yet even though none of the individual episodes may match the brilliant stretch near the end of season three. What's particularly intriguing is the show's somewhat subtle recognition of the years that have gone by since the show began and the characters acceptance and embrace of their roles (Other than Dee of course, who continues to delude themselves). Because these are seemingly decisions the characters are aware of- as we saw in "The D.E.N.N.I.S. System"- it has the feel of character development rather than a slide into caricature.)

3. Dexter (I've wavered back and forth on just how good Dexter is and I'm still not quite sure. The plotting and some of the secondary characters are purely average television, probably not much better than the Law and Order's, CSI's, and NCIS's of the world. But Dexter himself and some of the other secondary characters- Deborah and the recently deceased Frank Lundy among others- are really top notch television characters. Dexter's inner-monologue never ceases to be fascinating, particularly since Dexter's inner self doesn't always seem to match what we see and hear on the screen. Deep down, Dexter is a fascinating study in self conceptualization and judgments about right and wrong, good and evil. That we have to put up with Quinn is disappointing, but not a deal breaker.)

4. Fringe (Fringe gets this spot for it's unyielding commitment to the bizarre. This season has been a mixed bag, but the bald observers, the body changers, and all the bizarre ways in which these folks communicate never fail to keep my interest. Olivia's developed into a much more interesting character and the dark secrets about Walter and Peter continue to be compelling.)

5. Californication (It gets the spot ahead of 30 Rock because I think it's been making me laugh more this season. The most underrated, can't-beleive-my-friends-aren't-watching-this comedy on the air.)

6. 30 Rock (It probably would not be this high if not for it's stellar reputation. I've enjoyed the season thus far, but it doesn't seem to be matching the quality of past seasons. I've had my complaints throughout these rankings, but bottom line is that little things about Jack and Liz seem off. Can't put my finger on it, but something ain't right.)

7. South Park (I was worried about the season early on, but the string of episodes including the Whale Wars parody, the fag episode, and the Glenn Beck/Avatar spoof saved the season from mediocrity.)

8. Parks and Rec (Very underrated and as I've said before, doing the Office thing better than the Office. As opposed to the Office, which has become increasingly insular and incestuous in it's relationships, Parks and Recs has done a halfway decent job of maintaining that illusion of the outside world. The Office was an interesting character show until the characters became mostly one note jokes- Here's to hoping Parks and Rec keeps developing it's characters and continues to mix in the measured levels of wacky.)

9. The Prisoner (I've got a separate post coming solely devoted to a review of AMC's remake of the Prisoner, but suffice it to say, my ultimate reaction is disappointment. In some ways, the remake is actually more existential than the original, but this somehow has also led the remake down the thematic path to meaninglessness. The new version is supposed to be more about the characters, but other than Ian McKellen's Number Two, none of the characters are all that appealing. The original had humor and political substance, both of which are disappointingly missing from the remake.)

10. Flash Forward (Started off with promise, troubled me in episodes two through five and settled itself rather nicely over the past month or so. After not dealing with the thematic consequences of the flash forwards for most of the season, they were dealt with, shockingly, in the episode where Gough committed suicide. The real interesting questions still lie smoldering beneath the surface: In the future can be changed, how relevant are these flash forwards? Or can the future really be changed? I'm hoping to see more of Charlie- I mean Simon- in upcoming weeks.)

11. Community (Finally caught up with the weeks and weeks of Community on my DVR and the results are in: It's a very funny comedy. Like Arrested Development and 30 Rock, Community succeeds in taking expectations and flipping them on us with comedic result, case-in-point being the not so wonderful do-gooder Brita. I was worried in the early episodes that the supporting cast wasn't all that interesting, but they've grown more interesting and the series has expanded from it's seemingly insular premise.)

12. Curb Your Enthusiasm (Ehhhh ... I know lots of folks liked the finale but I was less than thrilled with it. To be honest, I'm a bit tired of Larry's antics, or at least, of the typical Larry gets in a ridiculous fight with a stranger material. Jerry Seinfeld was actually a breath of fresh air this year, playing a great straight man to Larry's off-the-wall behavior. What we needed this year was more Jerry, more Funkhauser, and more Leon.)

13. V (It's really a bit hokey, but you've got to admit, it's really well done hokey. There's something compelling about the idea of a priest fighting alien invaders, making the mid-season cliff hanger ending all the more intriguing. Like I said it's hokey, but the first four episodes gave us a lot of mystery, some decent character development and the promise that in the spring we'll see Elizabeth Mitchell's son playing a big role with the V's.)

14. The League (Interestingly enough, the League has proven to be better as a comedy and male-bonding type show than it has been as a show about football and fantasy football. The special guest appearances- Terry Bradshaw and Antonio Gates- have been incredably forced and much of the fantasy related humor- trading for Plaxico Burress for instance- has been downright stupid. The thing about fantasy football is, the more seriously guys take a league, the fewer stupid trades there are and the less interested they'd be to talk to Terry Bradshaw. It's why Taco's comment early in the show's run- "Can you beleive we have to make a lineup every week"- was actually funny, because most fantasy footballers are familiar with the oddball who doesn't know and doesn't care about the rules but lucks into success.)

15. Law and Order: SVU (One of my guilty pleasures that makes this big list. SVU differs from the other Law and Order installments in that it really allows itself to focus on the characters, mostly it's two leads, Elliot Stabler and Olivia Benson. Week in and week out they have quality guest stars and two episodes from this past fall strike me as particularly good, above and beyond the typical police procedural: When Olivia was nearly framed for murder by manufactured DNA evidence and the episode where Elliot put himself into solitary confinement.)

16. Lie To Me (In some ways it's been better than House has this year, which is why I've ranked it ahead of it's similar Fox companion. But the supporting cast on Lie to Me never seems to click to me and the plots are your run-of-the-mill Law and Order type stuff with some truth detection thrown in. The stuff with Lightman's daughter has been interesting, but ultimately, Lie to Me would probably benefit from the advice I give to House just below.)

17. House (House is struggling through what may be it's worst season yet, but it's not for lack of effort. The Chase kills African dictator plot was a mistake, if only because that sort of guilt just doesn't make for good tv. Ultimately though, House has grown dull because of the formula, which needs to be shaken up if the show hopes to survive. The opening two-hour episode was so interesting because it was so different and because it gave us a chance to enjoy and appreciate Dr. House without the inevitable patient in trauma cut away to commercials. It's not that the medical mystery aspect of the show is no longer interesting, just that the way it's presented is. House could learn from a show like the X-Files, which was widely creative within a semi-procedural format, or better yet, from a show like Dexter, where the crime drama is secondary to the characters.)

18. The Office (I happened to catch reruns of the first couple episodes of the Office the other night and it gave me perhaps the best explanation of where the show is now. What was so interesting about those first few episodes were the number of awkward moments, pauses, and ummms and ahhhs by the characters. Maybe the Office is really supposed to be brilliant in that the characters who were nervous around the camera back in season one are now just playing to the camera, day-in and day-out ... But I just don't buy it. The British Office was so brilliant because it was so short and because the reunion show featured Ricky Gervais's David Brent (who Michael Scott was based on) returning to the literal office for a Christmas party after a failed attempt at capitalizing on the celebrity of appearing on a reality show by releasing a terrible album. It was a recognition that the mockumentary nature of the show had meaning, something that the American Office has failed to do. The characters act as though the cameras have meaning, but five years in, we've yet to see any consequences to that meaning. The Office still makes me laugh and it's better than plenty of the other crap on tv, but it's just not very special anymore.)

Patriot Fatigue

2009-12-01T09:42:00.005-05:00

After the Colts loss a few weeks ago, I took issue with ESPN columnist and Boston "Sports Guy" Bill Simmons's claim that the loss was one of the Belichick-era Pats five worst ever. That list of worst losses included the Super Bowl loss to the Giants, playoff losses to the Broncos and Colts in '05 and '06 and the regular season loss to the Colts in '08. The list made little sense, mostly because of the inclusion of a Brady-less loss in Matt Cassel's sixth start last year and the absence of regular season losses to the Colts in '05 or '06. My larger point was that this year's Colts loss wasn't so bad. And hopefully, that point should resonate even more to Pats fans after that awful, awful Monday night loss to the Saints.

Monday night's loss to the Saint's was dynasty devastating, the sort of disheartening loss that makes you wonder just when the other shoe is going to drop. It wasn't like the aforementioned '05 playoff loss to the Broncos, where big mistakes by key Patriots were the difference in the game. It was just a flat out beating, the sort we've rarely seen since Belichick came to town and never seen in a big game. This wasn't Peyton Manning making great plays or the defense looking old and slow, this was Saints receivers running all over the field, apparently uncoverable and the Patriots looking completely and 100% lost. I'm not saying that the Belichick-era Patriot dynasty actually is over. But I am worried.

Forget about the loss to the Saints for a minute and the worst part may be the Pats unimpressive 7-4 record and I say unimpressive because 7-4 is exactly where the team stood last year at this point in the season with Matt Cassel. And at least last season the Cassel-led Patriots had me excited, coming off Cassel's second straight 400-yard game in a win over the Dolphins at this point of the season. And maybe that's the difference. I wrote a post before the start of the 2008 season saying how Pats fans had to set themselves up for disappointment, as the only real redemption for the Super Bowl loss to the Giants would be another 18-0 run with a Super Bowl win to cap it off. Things changed with Matt Cassel at quarterback, but with Brady back under center, we're once again in the realm of high expectations. A bar was set in 2007 that can't possibly be reached, yet Pats fans won't truly be happy unless that bar is reached. In truth, another Super Bowl ring would be satisfying however it was accomplished, but the loss to the Saints leaves such an accomplishment feeling a bit out of reach.

The worst part of this season for me personally has been Tom Brady just not getting things done. Of course he's still a great quarterback, but he's come up lacking in each and every big game this season, all of which- including this Saints game- could have been won with big time performances. Ultimately though, Brady this year has matched Belichick, as both the coach and quarterback have not fared so well under pressure. Ultimately these Patriots just lack spark, which falls on the shoulders of both Brady and Belichick. They've beaten up on lesser competition, but otherwise, this entire season has been ... rather uninspired. Just for fun, here's where the Pats stood at this point of the season in each of the other Belichick seasons since 2001:

2001: 6-5 (finished regular season 5-0, won Super Bowl)
2002: 6-5 (finished regular season 3-2, missed playoffs)
2003: 9-2 (finished regular season 5-0, won Super Bowl)
2004: 10-1 (finished regular season 4-1, won Super Bowl)
2005: 6-5 (finished regular season 4-1, lost to Broncos in playoffs)
2006: 8-3 (finished regular season 4-1, lost to Colts in AFC Championship Game)
2007: 11-0 (finished regular season 5-0, lost to Giants in Super Bowl)
2008: 7-4 (finished regular season 4-1, missed playoffs)
2009: 7-4 (?)

This 2009 team doesn't have the look of the plucky underdog that the '01 or '08 team had. They don't have that dominant, yet under appreciated feel of the '03 or the '06 team. They don't have the elite pedigree of the '04 or the '07 team. And unlike the '02 and '05 teams, where high expectations were lost early in the season, this 2009 team has only just seen their high expectations crushed in week twelve. Of course I want them to succeed, but I won't be feeling confident the rest of the season.

Yes my libertarian friends, there is hope ...

2009-11-25T21:13:00.002-05:00

This Alternet piece on food safety had me smiling, thinking that maybe there is still hope for limited government. The author's beef is with the new food safety regs and the unprecedented power they would give to the FDA. Much of the piece covers the complete lack of statistical evidence that we are in the midst of some sort of food safety crisis, but the money quote comes near the end:

But there’s another factor at work here as well: a drive to broadly expand the powers of the FDA. As one example, it will have the power under the House legislation recently passed to require highly detailed written food plans from all food producers, including the smallest makers of artisan cheese and meats. The owner of a two-person California maker of specialty cheeses, fruits, and nuts, told me that creating such a plan would require about 100 hours of upfront work, and then two hours a day to be kept up to date. Failure to comply could result in a fine of $10,000 per infraction per day, this for a business doing less than $100,000 of annual revenues.

I've covered it before, but there's a segment of the left that gets all in a huff when government bureaucrats threaten their access to raw milk and this is a reaction born of that same mindset, highlighting a universal truth about regulation in all it's forms. The article doesn't mention the big boys of "big food" and that's because big business is never opposed to regulation of this sort. They have the resources to deal with it and it only puts smaller competitors at a disadvantage. Big food can comply with whatever regulatory garbage it's thrown it's way. It's the little guys- raw milk producers and small time operations selling artisan meats and cheeses- who get screwed.

That there's a segment amongst the left that's coming to realize this is heartening to say the least. The implication is, hopefully, that yes there is a tipping point. The more folks who come to resent government intrusion into their livelihood, the greater the chances there are of real changes being made to our political system.

SNL and Health Care

2009-11-24T11:19:00.003-05:00

I caught an SNL my wife was watching on-demand this past Sunday and saw a part of yet another sketch about health care reform. I remember back in early October SNL did a "Hall and Oates" sketch where fake Hall and Oates sung about the benefits and drawbacks of health care reform. The October sketch highlighted only a desire not to hurt the insurance companies as a reason to oppose health care reform. And this sketch I caught this weekend (which must have been from the past few months), presented the Republican opposition to healthcare as being motivated only by opposition to President Obama. When pushed, Republican Senator Mitch McConnell (played by Will Forte) responds to an angry Barack Obama (played by the Rock, having transformed from Fred Armisen) by saying that Republicans would be for health care reform if Obama was against it.

It's a relatively fair jab at the Republicans, given the behavior of the Republican party over the past ten years, but it's not a particularly fair portrayal of health care reform. To be fair to SNL, they've gone after Obama this year and should no way be seen as any sort of Democratic mouthpiece. (And on a side note, I've got to say, I absolutely love Jason Sudeikis's portrayal of Vice-President Biden, a perfect showcase of politics meets stupid.) But ultimately, the problem is that policy makes for bad sketch comedy and complex policy is even worse. It's hard to do jokes about health care when 90 some percent of the American public, including I think many of the SNL writers, don't fully understand all the issues themselves. So instead what we get are very lame jokes where the only conclusion I can see is that health care reform is supposed to be a good thing and there is no good reason to oppose it.

But as I said, my advice to SNL would be this: stick to what works and point out the ridiculous side of politics and politicians that everyone can see. Don't turn into Jon Stewart and slyly wink at your audience about how anyone opposing this particular set of health care reforms is either stupid or evil.

Some Light NFL Blogging

2009-11-24T10:13:00.002-05:00

Remember 2007, when the football world was nuts over the New England Patriots? Love 'em or hate 'em, football fans were glued to each and every Patriots game to see whether or not they could do the impossible and complete a 16-0 season. This year, with only six games left in the season we've got two 10-0 teams, both of whom have decent chances of running the table, yet the discussion is not just muted, it's practically nonexistent.

The Saints have put up 369 points through their first ten games, 42 less than where the Patriots were in 2007, but technically on pace to surpass the Patriots record of 589 points by a single point. The Saints have failed to generate excitement because, at least in part, they were down in each of their previous three games before this last one to mediocre opposition. They ended up with victories against the Dolphins, Falcons, and Panthers, but I think the struggles in consecutive weeks, along with the team's seemingly growing defensive problems, put a few question marks in the heads of football fandom.

The Colts meanwhile have just continued to win, winning close game after close game . Whereas the '07 Pats manhandled opponents and ran up scores, the Colts of '09 have won six of their ten games by less than a touchdown.

The thing is, however you want to judge the Saints and Colts for their performances thus far (and I would say they are not amongst the most impressive 10-0 teams we've ever seen), they both do have achievable paths to 16-0 seasons. The Colts have a few tough division matchups left, starting this week in Houston. If they can get through Houston, they've got a revived Tennessee team at home, Denver at home, a trip to Jacksonville, and finally, games against the Jets and Bills to finish the season.

The Saints and Patriots play this Monday night in a huge game, but if the Saints can beat the Pats, their last five games are at Washington, at Atlanta, home against Dallas, home against Tampa, and at Carolina. Like the Colts, the divisional matchups will be tough, but it's not an impossible schedule. And in some ways, the lack of attention on the undefeated seasons may play to the Saints and Colt advantage. In 2007, after their 10-0 start, the Pats faced a murderous stretch of teams out for blood, barely getting out of Philly and Baltimore with wins in prime time games. Do I actually think the Saints and Colts will go undefeated? No to the Saints because I think their schedule is just a bit too tough and no to the Colts because I think that they could lose a meaningless game at the end of the year if they follow their MO of resting players. But it would be fun if we had a little more focus on these teams.

In other news, the Jacksonville Jaguars would be a playoff team if the NFL season ended today, to the disgust of football fans everywhere. With apologies to Maurice Jones-Drew, the Jaguars are not a good football team and have only the quirks of the NFL schedule to thank for their record. Of their six wins this year, five have been by a touchdown or less, including close games against the Rams, Chiefs, Jets, and Bills. After losing their opening two games, they've lost only twice in their past eight, but those losses were to the Titans, 30-13 and to the Seahawks, 41-0. I don't think they'll wind up in the playoffs, but they've got to be one of the worst 6-4 teams I can ever remember.

And finally, I'd just like to take a moment to appreciate the show put on by the Browns and Lions this weekend. Obviously there were defensive breakdowns throughout the game by both teams, but breakdowns aside, both teams put together not just their best offensive games of the year, but their best offensive games of the last two years. I fully expected this to be some sort of a 10-6 game, not because it was going to be a defensive struggle, but because I fully expected neither team to be able to take advantage of the others mistakes. But they did and this highlighted why offensive football is so much more appealing than defensive football. It's not just that offense is more fun to watch, it's that when we see touchdown passes flying through the air, we know that someone on the field is doing something right. When you watch a 6-3 game, it's always a bit harder to tell just what your watching. I remember in 1997, the Patriots and Steelers played a tense 7-6 playoff game that was all about good defense. But more often than not, those low scoring games are a result of pure ineptitude on both sides of the ball. It's why games between bad teams tend to be low scoring and why everyone was so shocked by this Lions-Browns game. SO take a moment to appreciate the Lions and Browns and give them credit for putting on one of the best shows of the weekend.

More Palin

2009-11-22T11:38:00.005-05:00

Writing in Foreign Policy, Annie Lowrey asks, Is There a Palin Doctrine? Based on Palin's just releases memoirs, the answer is no, or at least it is according to Lowrey.

The political world has been astir with the release of Palin's book, a sign that one year later, she may be an even more divisive figure than she was during the '08 election. The back and forth on Palin tends to go something like this: Liberals criticize her for being an unserious political candidate if not down right stupid, while conservatives rush to defend her against attacks from the liberal elite. In many ways, Sarah Palin represents a microcosm of political debate today, where style and what side you're on means more than substance. It's why I appreciated the short piece in Foreign Policy, which confirms my suspicions about the Palin book: that it's more concerned with gossip and score settling than it is with serious ideology or policy. Not that there's anything wrong with that per se, but it reinforces the idea that Palin's appeal is based solely on personality and the fact that liberals hate her.

And it may seem trite to be talking about her, but the fact remains that she remains a popular figure in many conservative and libertarian circles.

My dissatisfaction with Palin was summed up with her responses the Katie Couric interview last fall. You can complain all you want that it was a hit job, but her inability to answer questions on important Supreme Court decisions and what news she reads sticks with me. What it means was either 1- She had no answers to give, which does make me question her knowledge base, or 2- She had answers, but she didn't know which answers made the most political sense. So either she really is dumb, she's simply a political creature with no strong principles, or her beliefs don't have a strong intellectual or ideological grounding.

For my money, the Palin phenomenon represents the worst of the right, an anti-elitism where, as I said above, style triumphs over substance. Palin is loved by the right even though she's never expressed a coherent ideology of her own. And that's what scares me most of all.

More On 4th and 2

2009-11-19T12:08:00.002-05:00

It just won't end. In ESPN's NFL Power Rankings this Tuesday, John Clayton made the comment that the road to the Super Bowl goes through Indy, thanks to Bill Belichick's decision. And in a piece today on ESPN Boston, Howard Bryant tries to tell us that Belichick panicked, went against logic, the percentages and all that is holy in football. Strangely enough (or maybe not so strangely), Greg Easterbrook, also known as TMQ (Tuesday Morning Quaterback), agreed with the views expressed here and in the comments that Belichick made the right call.

What's crazy is this notion of Belichick costing his team a chance at victory with this call. For those interested, the numbers, the pure percentages, are out there that this was in fact an appropriate decision. I haven't seen the critics come up with any numbers, only old-timey football logic. And it's not as though we should treat Belichick as a God or ignore any and all criticism. My problem is the nature of the criticism and this notion that electing a fourth down conversion is the coach costing his team while punting the ball away was giving his team the chance to win.

The thing is, there's strategy and then there's a complete lack of strategy. I'll refer you to the recently fired Dick Jauron of the Buffalo Bills and two particular incidents that come to mind of poor coaching indicative of lack of strategy. First I'll refer you to earlier this season and a game between the Bills and the Jets. The Bills actually won the game, 16-13 in overtime, but it was no thanks to Jauron's coaching. With 3:55, a 27 yard punt return by Fred Jackson gave the Bills the ball at the Jets 49. Plenty of time to run down the clock and get into position for a game winning field goal, right? The Bills ran three plays, two runs and pass, to get down to the Jets 29 at the 2 minute warning. After a second and two run failed to gain a first down, the Bills ran the lock down to 1:19, understandable in the case they didn't convert the upcoming third and 1. What didn't make a lot of sense was the timeout that was burned as the clock ran down leading up to that third and one play and what made even less sense was the one and only play that was run after the Bills converted the third and one. After the first down they lost two yards on a first down run and let the clock run down to 4 seconds before taking their final timeout. In slightly under 4 minutes the Bills managed to run only 4 plays and purposely let the clock run down rather than attempting to gain more yardage for an easier field goal attempt. As I fully expected at the time, Rian Lindell's 46 yard attempt was no good and the game went to overtime. The Bills ended up winning, so this never became big news, but as I watched the game unfold I knew I was watching an example of horrible coaching. There's a big difference between placing faith in your Hall of Fame quarterback to convert a fourth and two and settling for a 46 yard field goal in the Meadowlands rather than trust your offense to run a couple of plays.

Scenario number two with Jauron dates back to last season's finale, a wind-strewn affair between the Bills and the Patriots. Right before halftime, with the Patriots holding a 3-0 lead, and the offenses of both teams essentially stymied by heavy wins, the Bills drove deep into Patriots territory right before halftime. Burning timeouts as they went, the Bills took their final timeout with 28 seconds left, facing a 2nd and 8 at the Patriots 15 yard line. The play selection? A pass to the flat for 3 yards, stopping the clock with 22 seconds left, and then, on 3rd and 5, a run up the middle for 3 yards. As the play ended, there was confusion amongst the Bills as members of the field goal unit ran onto the field and members of the Bills offense stood around looking confused. Now, the wind was tricky that day, and the Pats had just missed a short field goal, so electing against a field goal try was a reasonable choice to make. But the confusion on the field and the selection of a run up the middle is evidence of coaching incompetence.

I point these out because bad coaching is bad coaching regardless of end results. The Bills wound up losing that game to the Patriots 13-0, so, like the game against the Jets they wound up winning, the bad coaching was never a big story. The easy out of any armchair quarterback is to point out geniuses and idiots based solely on outcome. As I mentioned last time, one wonders if Belichick would have been called a genius if they had lost the famous safety game to the Broncos back in 2003, particularly if, say, the Patriots hadn't scored a winning touchdown, but kicked a tying field goal and eventually lost in over time. The reason coaches are paid the big bucks is because they're supposed to put their players in the best position possible to win a game. Now obviously, there's no such thing as a brilliant strategist as every coach has a laundry list of poor play calls they wish they could have back. And some issues, like clock management, just have definitive rights and wrongs. But other decisions, like those about punts and field goals, going for it on fourth down, and two-point conversions, exist in this gray area where percentages meet assessments of talent meet gut calls about your team at a certain point in time.

My real problem with the critics isn't that they're stupid for criticizing Belichick, but that they're stupid for how they're going about it.

No TV Power Rankings This Week

2009-11-19T11:54:00.002-05:00

I've been incredibly busy with work this week so there will be no TV Power rankings. Not so busy that I haven't been able to blog, but busy in the evenings so I haven't been able to watch much tv. Throw the Sunday night patriots game into the mix and I'm just way, way behind. What I'd like to do is one more post-Mad Men edition of TV power rankings before Thanksgiving, maybe do a December edition, take the holidays off and come back weekly once Lost, 24, and Big Love return in January.

In terms of a brief preview for next week: I've only seen the first hour of the six hour Prisoner mini-series re-make, but it's really fucking good. Don't be surprised if it's number one for it's one and only appearance in the power rankings.

Why Not?

2009-11-17T12:49:00.003-05:00

One of my biggest problems with health care reform is the all-or-nothing mentality behind any effort at reform. But why can't we have a two-tiered system of reform? Why can't there be a government system for those who would chose coverage under a government system and a deregulated private market for the rest of us? The public option gives the illusion of this sort of dichotomy, but the reality is that the health care reform options currently before the Senate create one massive government system. It doesn't just create a government option, it also increases regulation on the private sector and creates a mandate that individuals purchase coverage. You can avoid the public option if you wish, but you can't avoid the long arm of the government.

So why not two real choices? Why not set up one system for those who prefer government care and another system for the rest of us who don't want the government involved in our health care? And there's no reason you can't make such a system fair: Make the government system self-sustaining through the premiums of those who can afford to pay for coverage and provide vouchers for those who can't afford coverage. To put everyone on a level playing field the tax deduction for employer provided health insurance should be eliminated, but that's always a big bugaboo when it comes to reform. But why not something simple?

In Belichick I Trust

2009-11-16T17:49:00.002-05:00

I didn't want to, but I've just got to address last night's epic Pats-Colts game. I wasn't going to write anything and I heard some mixed talk on the radio today, but I'm listening to Bill Simmons (a Patriots fan) podcast with Cousin Sal and it has me simmering. I was upset with the loss last night, but it wasn't the toughest loss I've ever had to deal with as a Patriots fan. There weren't any bad calls from the officials and there were a relatively equal number of "we should of had those" type moments from each team. What we had last night were two teams at the top of their game, two of the greatest quarterbacks ever in the prime of their careers, playing a great game. The margin of victory was one point and that was probably the difference between the teams. Brady didn't make a play at the end of the game and Manning did, end of story.

I feel bad for Bill Belichick and all the crap he's getting today, but I think I might feel worse for Peyton Manning who did the improbable to bring the Colts back and has become a second page story to Bill Belichick being a supposed idiot.

Let's be 100% completely clear for all the armchair Monday morning quarterbacks out there who haven't won three Super Bowls and six division titles: Going for it on that fourth down was not a bad call. Remember, these Pats and these Colts had top rated offenses and top rated defenses going in, but if there was any doubt, however good the two defenses might be, these are elite offensive teams that were operating at a high level last night. The Colts had scored touchdowns on two of their previous three fourth quarter drives, scoring on drives of 2:04 and 1:49. The sole drive they didn't score was a one play drive that ended in an interception after a miscommunication between Manning and Reggie Wayne. Best case scenario, a Patriots punt on that fourth down would have put the Colts at somewhere around their own 35, with just under 2 minutes to go and 1 timeout. Worst case scenario, the Colts are starting at their own 40 or 45 and still get the 2 minute warning in addition to their timeout. Regardless, it was plenty of time for that Colts offense to score. Going for it was a calculated risk, for sure, but there was nothing stupid about it. The choice was, leave the game up to Tom Brady or Peyton Manning. Punting it puts the game in Manning's hands and going for it gave Brady one last shot. Again, how about some respect for Peyton Manning? As I watched last night, I had no problem with the call because I was terrified of Peyton. My hope at the time was that a missed fourth down conversion gave the Pats a better chance than a punt, because a punt would considerably dimmed the chances of Brady even getting the ball back. It turns out the Colts milked the clock just enough for Brady only to get nine seconds.

The most puzzling criticism of Belichick today has been the criticism of his clock management. Yes the Patriots left themselves without timeouts, but it's not as though they needed them. Yes, they could have potentially called several timeouts when the Colts brought the ball down to the 1 with just under a minute left, but that would have been delaying the inevitable. They did burn timeouts on that final failed drive, but once again, that was the strategy. Just as they went for it on fourth down, taking the timeouts was designed to win the game then and there. 2:23 left, all they needed was one first down and they couldn't do it. Given the nature of the game, given the nature of the quarterback on the other sideline, I just can't argue with the strategy of giving your superstar a chance to win the game.

The story today should be that Manning beat Brady and manning may be the most unbelievable quarterback ever. I've always placed Brady ahead of Manning, but after last night it's hard to argue against the proposition that Manning has surpassed Brady. But instead, the story today is nothing but criticism from the Monday morning quarterbacks who can't hold a candle to Belichick in terms of football strategy. Criticize coaches when they do Dick Jauron like things and actively do things that hurt your football team and don't put players in the position to win. But don't be a Monday Morning asshole and criticize a reasonable strategic move when it fails. Remember back in 2003 when Belichick took that safety? It was the right call and would have still been the right call if the Patriots had lost that game in Denver. And last night's call was tough, no doubt, but it certainly wasn't stupid.

More Thoughts on Terrorism

2009-11-16T14:05:00.004-05:00

I had a number of other thoughts this weekend related to Nidal Malik Hasan and the upcoming trial of 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, which, according to announcements last week, will take place in Manhattan Federal District Court.

I laid out my opinion on Hasan last week, that while he may have engaged in acts of terrorism, the terrorist label is not particularly useful. In regards to Mohammed, many folks on the right are upset that the trial is taking place in a civilian court, while reaction on the left has been mixed. Personally, I've found Glenn Greenwald's take to be useful, as he points out that any enthusiasm for civilian trials must be tempered by harsh, cold, political reality. Ultimately, what the Obama administration has chosen to do is pursue in civilian court only those cases which it thinks it can win. I've got a real problem with this and anyone with respect for the rule of law ought to have a problem with this. I won't claim to have the be-all, end-all answer on the mechanisms for judging the guilt of terrorists, but I do know that what I said over five years ago still holds true. While a makeshift system may have been appropriate in the wake of 9-11, we, as a civilized society, need to have specific procedures laid out for dealing with terror suspects. We didn't get it under Bush and we're still not getting it under Obama.

I bring this up in relation to Hasan because, as I've written before, that terrorist label has lots of baggage. On Red Eye last week, I heard Republican Congressmen Thaddeus McCotter make the point that we need to treat Islamic terrorists differently (and not try them in civilian courts) because they are not criminals out for profit, but engaged in an ideological war against us. It's a weak argument when one thinks back to Timothy McVeigh, who was tried in civilian court and executed for the Oklahoma City bombing.

Again, this is not to say that Khalid Sheik Mohammed should be tried in civilian court. I'm torn on that question, but the answer is ultimately not as important as the need to have a system laid out ahead of time, with clear rules regarding who is funneled into what system of justice and why. I haven't ever heard this point being made specifically, but the general thrust of the argument on the right seems to be that Islamic terrorism should be pigeonholed into it's own category and this is troublesome, sort of like hate crimes legislation to the extreme. It's problematic, plain and simple, to have a different system of justice based solely on religious and political beliefs.

And the other problem here goes right back to Hasan and whether or not he is a terrorist. I don't see any way how someone like Hasan, acting alone, could ever be logically funneled into a special system of justice. Other than political and religious belief, there's just no way to separate Hasan from Timothy McVeigh's, the Unabomber, or even the Coulmbine shooters. In the end, we're just talking about language, but the larger point is that language should correspond to specific legal consequences.

New Television Power Rankings

2009-11-11T16:01:00.004-05:00

Mon. Nov. 2 thru Sun. Nov. 8

A bit shorter this week, as the flu kept me from keeping all the blog notes I typically keep.

1. Mad Men (Last Week # 1) (And who says nothing ever happens on Mad Men? A fitting season finale for our number one show, as we saw the destruction and rebirth of Sterling Cooper and the apparent end of the Draper marriage. Best of all, I have no idea where this leaves us for the fourth season.)

2. It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia (Last Week #2) (There's not a better comedy on television right now, end of story. I loved the return of the lawyer, Frank's stress egg, and yet another ridiculous video production.)

3. Dexter (Last Week, #4) (Perhaps the television shock of the week, Dexter breaks his father's code. It was completely unexpected, yet shouldn't have been given the time constraints we've seen Dexter under. It was sloppy work and Dexter knows that sloppy work is what's likely to get him caught. John Lithgow's Trinity killer has taken on a life you couldn't have imagined when the season started and while the end result seems obvious, the path to that end is not so clear.)

4. V (Last Week, Not On Air) (The series premier of V makes its way this high up the list just because, wow, it was just so well done. I know, it's the same old alien invasion story, but when was the last time we saw this played out on the small screen. It's an intriguing premise and I'm curious to see where they go with it.)

5. Fringe (Last Week, #5) (Finally back on the air, Fringe gave us another excellent chapter which finally made more use of the underutilized Agent Broyles.)

6. 30 Rock (Last Week, #3) (Last week was actually a step up in quality from previous weeks, but the new season has still been a let down thus far.)

7. South Park (Last Week, #8) (A few weeks back, I criticized South Park and they've responded with a string of fantastic episodes. This was one of those great moments where a political statement about language is heavily anchored with the kids. The truth is, kids do use words like "fag" to mean much more than the narrow views of the PC police. Could be do a big bump up next week.)

8. Californication (Last Week #6) (I actually still have yet to see this last week's Californication, but I see no reason why David Duchovney would ever be knocked out of the top 10.)

9. Parks and Rec (Last Week, #7) (It was nice to see Ron get some more air time, but overall, a fairly mediocre episode.)

10. Flash Forward (Last Week, #9) (Two weeks in a row now the show has returned focus to the characters and the deeper existential questions posed by the flash forward. But the big shocker was the suicide, calling into question just how inevitable these flash forwards actually are. Another good installment and Flash Forward may see a bump up in the rankings.)

Is Nidal Malik Hasan a terrorist?

2009-11-10T16:12:00.002-05:00

It's a deceptively simple question and I've got two answers depending upon your definition of the word terrorist. Yes, if terrorist means one who commits an evil act that causes terror. Under this definition, Hasan is a terrorist, as are Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine killers, and Seung-hui Cho, the Virginia Tech killer. And while such a definition is worthwhile in pinpointing evil, I'd have to say such a definition is fairly worthless in a political sense.

When we use the word terrorist in regards to "the war on terror" or even the "war on militant Islam" we're referring to a far narrower definition of the word terrorist and it's this definition that I wonder whether or not Hassan actually fits. To connect Hassan to Al Queda and to militant Islam is to connect each and every wannabe violent actor to their individual political fantasies. It's not that Hassan's political motivations aren't important; we'll certainly find out over time just what Hassan's motivations really were. But the simple fact is that the militant Islam angle of this case may play to the motivation of this tragedy, but that angle has little to no bearing on the planning, execution, or even the ultimate outcome.

This is precisely not the sort of case "the war on terror" is designed to stop. The purpose of the war on terror is to prevent another 9-11, to prevent those sorts of planned and coordinated terrorist attacks. The moment the war on terror becomes about stopping lone madmen is the moment we know we've gone too far. If this is the sort of terror the war on terror is designed to prevent than the war on terror truly is a lost cause.

To respond to the comments in the last post, if we're to find out that Hassan wasn't dealt with appropriately before this tragedy happened because of PC fears about discrimination, heads should role. But ultimately, the connection to militant Islam is a relatively unimportant one- the idea of a soldier seeking information on and attempting to contact any violent and radical fringe group should have raised enough red flags to prevent this from becoming the violent bloodbath it became.

Lessons From Fort Hood?

2009-11-09T15:47:00.003-05:00

I basically agree with Megan McArdle on the Lessons of Fort Hood in that there are no real political lessons to be learned from this tragedy. I've already heard the cries of "terrorism" from several voices on the radio today, but why should the political beliefs of Nidal Malik Hasan really matter anymore than beliefs of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine shooters? Sick people acting on their own have no shortage of reasons for committing heinous acts and there's nothing about their reasons that are particularly helpful in preventing future tragedies.

Now, obviously, if Hassan was being monitored by various authorities, as has been reported, there are plenty of questions to be answered, just as you have at least contemplate the missed warning signs when it comes to school shootings. But the terrorism connection is just a nasty manipulation of the tragedy. As Megan McArdle points out, we already knew there are Muslims out there who wish death on all Americans. And more importantly, Hassan was American born and no one has disputed that this shooting was the project of a sick mind and not the operation of a clandestine sleeper agent. Hopefully it occurred to relevant law enforcement 8 years ago that terrorists might try to infiltrate our military.

If there's anything to be learned from this tragedy, it's that I find myself further alienated from the entire concept of the war on terror. It's unwinnable in the sense that free societies will always be vulnerable to the violent machinations of sick minds and eliminating each and every terrorist is no different from eliminating each and every serial killer or each and every rapist. That's not to say we just throw up our hands and let bad people go about their evil business, but it is a real soul searching question about how we as a society wish to move forward.

This Week's TV Power Rankings

2009-11-02T20:42:00.001-05:00

Monday Oct. 26th - Sun. Nov.1st

1. Mad Men (Last Week # 1)(JFK, JFK, JFK! Admittedly not this season's finest hour, but in a series so concerned with historical time and place you just had to tackle JFK head on and it was about as well done as you could expect. Kudos to the writers for getting to JFK before the season finale, leaving us all wondering where we're going to be left at season's end.)

2. It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia (Last Week #3) (Sunny leaps past 30 Rock this week out of the sheer superiority of it's storytelling. Whereas other comedies have an irritating tendency to simply try too hard, Sunny has the unique capability to allow both story and humor to emerge from a simple premise, flowing naturally through the utter selfishness and dysfunction of the main characters. As with Dee's realization that she's rejected a perfectly able bodied soldier, the characters are almost always aware that life's cruel jokes are on them, but are completely oblivious to the fact that these jokes are a direct result of their narcissism and inhumanity. My favorite line of the night: "Frank, no one wants to watch a 60 year-old man eat garbage." Actually, that's exactly what we want.)

3. 30 Rock (Last Week, #2) (30 Rock slips because of some sloppy storytelling. I loved Liz's message that whether New Yorkers or Middle America, we're all terrible people, but having her get sick from her southern sandwich was a rather tired plot device that cut against the themes of the rest of the episode.)

4. Dexter (Last Week, Not Ranked) (The only reason it's took Dexter so long to crack the top ten is that I only got caught up with Season 4 this weekend, having steamrolled through the show's first three seasons over the past month. Of course, while the week I jumped in was good, it wasn't nearly as the cliffhangers from either of the last two weeks, with the surprise shooting and the revelation of the Trinity Killer's real identity. Season four is halfway done and color me impressed, although the family theme, from Harry's constant badgering in Dexter's vision and the use of the baby to portray both calm and chaos, has been a bit heavy handed.)

5. Fringe (Last Week #4) (Fringe returns this week, but will need a strong showing to keep it's spot.)

6. Californication (Last Week #5) (Kathleen Turner's Sue Collini has me cracking up with every raunchy line she delivers. For all the strength of it's main cast, what really keep Californicaton interesting is it's supporting players.)

7. Parks and Rec (Last Week #6) (Pikitis! There was something endearing about Leslie's feud with teenage vandal Greg Pikitus, in a Scott Tenormon sort of way, minus the evil Cartman element. Unlike the Office, where only a few of the characters have any real depth, Parks and Rec has done a great job of slowly setting up our supporting cast as real people, not just caricatures.)

8. South Park (Last week, #7) (The first great South Park of the new season. My wife watched Whale Wars this summer and I can see Trey and Matt must have done the same and must have been thinking exactly what I was thinking: Why don't these hippies fucking do something. You couldn't watch Whale Wars and not feel something for those whales, so it's hard to imagine caring about whales so much to actually be out in the South Pacific and not wanting to blow shit up and kill some bad people. That all being said, this was one of those rare moments where South Park acknowledged a truly complex issue of conflicting values and morals with no clear cut answer.)

9. Flash Forward (Last week #8) (Now that was more like it. The series has been so driven by the mosaic investigation that it was nice to finally see the characters have a chance to take a breath and just be themselves for a bit. Simon's introduction as the show's seeming villain has been rather drawn out, but it was nice to see Dominic Monaghan back in action. Because I was relatively happy with this week's installment, I'll keep the complaints to myself and focus instead on the fun aspects of the show. My big question now is about the kid's flash forwards: What else did Charlie see to get her so freaked out?)

10. House (Last week, #9) (House wasn't on the air last week, not for a baseball-related reason, which would be understandable, but for a "So You Think You Can Dance" results show. I imagine they had left the day open in case there was baseball, but come on.)

Not On The List:

# Curb Your Enthusiasm (Last Week, #10) (This was much closer to classic Curb than the past few week's, with the story flowing from several classic Larry incidents. But a black swan? Remember what I said a few weeks ago about Curb being hard to relate to? Things don't seem to be improving on that front.)

# The Office (Last Week, Not Ranked) (It's interesting that a few years ago the Office excelled at doing hour long episodes when the past few years it's been at it's best in doing 1-2 minute comic strip type productions, like last Thursday's haunted warehouse. Not a bad episode about Michael's fall into Koi pond, but- continuity check- it seems as though there should have been more follow up with Pam and Michael after last week's revelation.)

Coming Soon: V premiers on ABC this Tuesday night and the AMC's the Prisoner starts up in two weeks, on Sunday. Nov. 15th.

The Two-Faced Mandate

2009-11-01T08:56:00.001-05:00

In an editorial in today's New York Times on Mandates and Affordability, the need for a health insurance mandate is explained thusly:

WHY IS A MANDATE NECESSARY? It is important that everyone be required to buy insurance, either from their employers or on new insurance exchanges.

Reliable studies show that people who lack insurance seldom get regular medical care and therefore suffer more severe illness and death than those who are insured. When they do get sick, they often turn to expensive emergency rooms for free care — driving up costs for everyone else.

Finally, the health care reforms, which require insurers to accept all applicants, will not work well unless nearly everyone carries health insurance. Unless the pool includes a large number of healthy people, the costs for everyone on the exchange will be too high. It is important that everyone be required to buy insurance, either from their employers or on new insurance exchanges.

Reliable studies show that people who lack insurance seldom get regular medical care and therefore suffer more severe illness and death than those who are insured. When they do get sick, they often turn to expensive emergency rooms for free care — driving up costs for everyone else.

Finally, the health care reforms, which require insurers to accept all applicants, will not work well unless nearly everyone carries health insurance. Unless the pool includes a large number of healthy people, the costs for everyone on the exchange will be too high.

So on one hand, we need a mandate to prevent the uninsured from driving up costs for everyone else. But on the other hand, we need a mandate to ensure that the uninsured help offset the costs of sick people with insurance. It's sneaky because on the surface, you're talking about getting people to pay "their fair share," but the reality is that those are contradictory rationales. Now perhaps it's not entirely contradictory if we're talking about different groups of people, but the language above seems intentionally unclear.

After all, the "free care" in emergency rooms is only free for those who can't afford to pay their bills. The working young and healthy Americans who have chosen to go without health insurance will pay emergency bills because they don't want unpaid debts to ruin their credit. Or in other words, to the extent that free emergency room care actually drives up health care costs for everyone, this is only the case amongst the poor and those who can't afford health insurance in the first place. However these folks have their health care costs covered, they're not paying in the first place, so any sort of a mandate has no real effect on them.

As I've written before, the real reason for a mandate is to force the young, healthy, and working uninsured to join the insurance pool. This notion of offsetting costs literally represents a transfer of wealth, from young to old, healthy to sick. Of course insurers can charge lower premiums if the young and health sign up- the young and healthy don't need much health care, so the money they pay in premiums will offset some of the costs of the old and the sick. It's not about fairness, but a blatant attempt to further hide costs. And the Times practically says as much.

The Real Problem With The Public Option

2009-10-29T15:52:00.002-04:00

The public option is in the news again of late, despite the Obama administration's politically motivated indifference to the idea. For those who may not remember (or have never been quite clear), the public option, put simply, would involve creating a government health insurance company to compete with private insurers. Supporters claim such a plan would help insure more Americans and lower costs, while opponents claim such a plan would result in higher taxes and higher premiums for those with private insurance.

Obviously, I'm in the latter camp, but it occurred to me today that there's a major, simple flaw with the public option beyond the more complicated looks at future costs. That flaw becomes more clear when you ask the simple question, what specific problem is the public option looking to address? The general problem is health care costs, but the specific problem must involve the pricing particulars and profit margins of the health insurance industry and that alone makes me suspicious of the public option.

Health insurers simply don't make enough profits to explain the drastic increase in health care costs that have occurred over recent years. And from what I understand, profits in the health insurance industry have been traditionally lower and remained traditionally lower from a large number of other industries. If increases in health care costs were be explained by rapidly growing corporate profits, than you'd expect to see the same exponential increase in health insurance profits that you see in overall health care costs. That we don't see such trends tells us that if we're looking to the health insurance industry and the practices of third party payers to fix the problem of escalating health care costs, we need to look not at profits, but at administrative costs and the payments to health service providers. And this is where the argument for a public option breaks down even further.

That the competition of a publicly administered health care plan would somehow reduce administrative costs in the private sector is preposterous on it's face. If simple, practical, and legal solutions to reduce the administrative costs of health care plans existed, someone out there would have figured them out, as it's not as though the incentives to reduce overhead and drastically improve profit margins don't already exist. What your left with is the real way for the public option to reduce costs and what the public option is really all about. What your left with is the ability of government to force health care providers to accept lower reimbursement rates than they currently accept from health insurance companies. And yes, it works, but at what cost to the economy? There's never been an individualized market for products and services in the history of the world that's been able to provide a better product for less money through government fiat. What we're talking about is either a system that would pass costs on to those with private insurance coverage or a system of de facto price controls. It's one or the other and supporters of the public option can't seem to be honest about it. Unless you beleive in the magic wand of government there's just no reason to beleive in the long term success of the public option.

This Week's TV Power Rankings

2009-10-27T11:34:00.004-04:00

Monday Oct. 19th - Sun. Oct. 26th

1. Mad Men (Last Week #1) (And what are you supposed to be? Just oh so good as Betty confronts Don over his hidden past. But in typical Mad Men fashion, this confrontation occurs as Don's fling in sitting in the car on the street, waiting to run off on a trip with him. Not only is the audience left waiting for the other shoe to drop (which it never does), but arguably the greater sin of Don's continual infidelity is kept hidden.)

2. 30 Rock (Last Week, #2) (Will Arnett's Devin Banks is every bit the comedic equal of every regular on 30 Rock. If I had to make a minor complaint it would be that last week's installment ended rather abruptly and for a show that thrives on actual storytelling, I'm a bit unclear as to whether or not Jack intended to accept Devin's offer of a Washington bailout. If he did accept the bailout that sort of cuts against my argument of Jack as a Randian superman, doesn't it?)

3. It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia (Last Week #3) (Bonus points for relatability in the form of baseball and parking ticket court. I loved Mac's letter to Chase Utley, Mac's first instinct of scaling building, and Green Man versus the Philly Frenetic.)

4. Fringe (Last Week #4) (Off for the week, but nothing has surpassed it.)

5. Californication (Last Week #5) (Ahhh Hank Moody. Californication works because amidst all the sex and raunchiness a healthy layer of love anchors the show. And as this week's episode shows, there is a big, big difference a man who loves sex and loves women and a man who only loves sex.)

6. Parks and Rec (Last Week #6) (Kaboom! Parks and Rec continues to soar, bolstered this week by a Kaboom! appearance by the same guy who played Kenneth's page nemesis on 30 Rock.)

7. South Park (Last week, #8) (That's not Wrastling! Great return of "they took are jobs!," one of my favorite South Park jokes ever and clever utilization of the same sort of humor in having the boys wrestling matches morph bit by bit into actual theater. The past few weeks have been good, but this was finally one of those South Parks that works on several different levels.)

8. Flash Forward (Last week #7) (I desperately want Flash Forward to be Lost and each week I think the writers are trying to tell me they want the show to be more like 24, as last week's episode started an ended with an explosion and gunfight far more reminiscent of 24 than Lost. That the show wants to be more action than character drama is my own problem, but the continued mediocre writing falls solely on the shoulders of the show's writers and creators. It's not that I'm not enjoying it, but right now Flash Forward seems stuck on brilliant premise, mediocre execution. Case-in-point from last week, everything about the Janis-girlfriend plot was just so bleh, almost as if the writers had started with two chicks kissing and worked their way back from that point. The dialogue from their dinner date was painful, as if the only thought was, "let's write a quick scene to show some chemistry." What sucks- and what keeps me watching- is that there's such weighty material just hanging out in the background. Thus far, the flash forwards have been dealt with primarily through the question of whether or not they are true and our characters acceptance of those truths. But about fate and the nature of time and of the universe, the show has been almost silent. Lost spent an entire season with an incredible mindfuck about time and fate and we get nothing here. Somehow the real weighty question about our existence- do we have choice or free will- has been glossed over.)

9. House (Last week, not ranked) (Finally back in the top 10 where it belongs, House seems to finally have put the plot heavy baggage of the James Earl Jones African dictator episode behind it. Last week also featured a presumably dead man coming back to life and a confrontation between House and Wilson over their individual demons. Clearly, what had been missing over the last few weeks was Wilson, the one character on the show weighty enough to counterbalance House.)

10. Curb Your Enthusiasm (Last Week, #9) (Some funny moments, but a fairly uneven episodes with some atypical jokes that fell sort of flat. The interactions between Jerry and Larry were interesting, but not particularly funny or enlightening and the jokes centering on the assistant's inappropriate attire strained credibility. To top it all off, the Jesus drips and the entire subplot with the assistant's mother and the literal collision with the Richard Lewis subplot seemed forced. That the ending was terrible was painfully evident with so many other good comedies on the air.)

Not On The List:

# The Office (Last Week, Not Ranked) (Michael dating Pam's mother is potentially a jump the shark type moment. That being said, not such a bad episode, but the Office still has a lot of work to do to work it's way back into the top 10.)

The Truth About Water

2009-10-22T16:14:00.005-04:00

For the past several months, the New York Times has been running a series of supposedly hard hitting investigative pieces on water quality in the United States. Earlier this week I happened to catch part of the syndicated Dr. Oz program, in which the good doctor devoted half an episode to the threats from our drinking water, culling most of the information presented from the New York Times series. And on Thursday, October 22, the Times followed up it's series with an editorial calling for more money and more regulation to fix these dangerous problems.

I've blogged about this before, but the manner in which these types of stories are reported are downright disgraceful, pure agenda driven reporting. It's not that any of the information here is wrong, but, to go back to this blog's theme that narratives matter, the narrative here is a story that should be unrecognizable to anyone familiar with the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act, business and regulators alike.

The most damning story is told in this Charles Duhigg piece on Clean Water Act violations, which is accompanied by a database of Clean Water Act violations. The theme of the piece is that the Clean Water Act is not enforced as strictly as it should be by state regulatory bodies. The database chronicles the millions of violations made by polluters and notes how few of those violators have faced fines. Several stories are told, most notably the one about the West Virginia coal mining town, about drinking water supplies that have been polluted by activities that presumably should be Clean Water Act violations. The end result is a scare story, designed to worry people about the safety of our drinking water supply and designed to push a solution of more forceful and heavy-handed regulation. The problem is as I mentioned above, that the facts may be correct, but the story lacks any comprehension of the regulated world of public drinking water and discharge permits. The individual stories of polluted drinking water may well be serious issues that require some form or another of government action (water can be a very complicated issue), but there's no evidence that justifies portraying them as indicative of a nationwide problem.

First off, some basics on the difference between the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act. The Clean Water Act regulates polluters, or really, anyone making a point discharge into a regulated body of water. This includes, as the article indicates big companies, small companies, and, as the article neglects to mention, municipal and other government sources of pollution. The term pollution itself is a bit misleading, as the Clean Water Act doesn't ban pollution, just restricts it. Polluters obtain a permit, usually obtained through the appropriate regulatory agency within their state which indicates the limits of what can be discharged into the given waterways. The permits are industry specific and require monitoring on varying schedules, once again, in accordance with the nature of the pollution. The Safe Drinking Water Act regulates all public water systems rather broadly, requiring water quality monitoring at various intervals in accordance with the size and nature of the system.

What's driven the New York Times story is not the facts of polluted water, of which they have only several specific stories to tell, but the language of regulation, which tells us the following:

Records analyzed by The Times indicate that the Clean Water Act has been violated more than 506,000 times since 2004, by more than 23,000 companies and other facilities, according to reports submitted by polluters themselves. Companies sometimes test what they are dumping only once a quarter, so the actual number of days when they broke the law is often far higher. And some companies illegally avoid reporting their emissions, say officials, so infractions go unrecorded.

Environmental groups say the number of Clean Water Act violations has increased significantly in the last decade. Comprehensive data go back only five years but show that the number of facilities violating the Clean Water Act grew more than 16 percent from 2004 to 2007, the most recent year with complete data.

....

Some violations are relatively minor. But about 60 percent of the polluters were deemed in “significant noncompliance” — meaning their violations were the most serious kind, like dumping cancer-causing chemicals or failing to measure or report when they pollute.

The problem is, none of this data is indicative of any environmental or health hazards. The thrust of the narrative is that these violations are a cause for alarm, but there's miles and miles of difference between a regulatory violator and a polluter. As the article itself indicates, significant violations include "failing to measure or report when they pollute." Maybe it sounds bad on the surface, but let's unpack those words. Discharge permits require specific monitoring during specific time periods. And ask anyone subject to any form of regulation and they'll tell you that the biggest problem is paperwork. Being very familiar with the Clean Water Act I can say for certain that a number of those polluters in "significant noncompliance" are guilty of having committed a paperwork violation. Monitor in the wrong time frame and you're in "significant noncompliance." Monitor for the wrong parameters in the wrong time frame and your in "significant non-compliance." Monitor in the correct time frame, for the correct parameters, but using a method the EPA deems unacceptable, and once again, maybe you'll find yourself in "significant noncompliance." My guess is that a large percentage of these violations are paperwork violations, but that's just a guess. I can't be sure, but neither can the New York Times or Mr. Duhigg without any of the specifics. On it's own, the data tells us a lot about regulation, but tells us very little about pollution or clean water.

There are other major problems here as well. The focus here is the Clean Water Act, with nary a mention of the state and local laws that protect watersheds and public drinking water supplies. These laws vary by state, mostly because drinking water circumstances vary a great deal according to each state's geography. Connecticut for example has very strong watershed protection laws, such that bodies of water that receive point sources of pollution are not intermingled with the drinking water supply. This is not the case in some other states, where local conditions necessitate different sorts of protections and the strict laws of a Connecticut would result in either no business and industry or no public drinking water. The larger point is that a multitude of laws and various layers of government are supposed to protect water quality. The individual cases cited in the Times piece are relevant and should not be dismissed out of hand, but again, the connection between these specific instances and a larger national problem is tenuous to say the least.

The underlying assumption seems to be that regulation can solve everything, but even in the West Virginia coal mining case cited in the article, stricter regulation wouldn't have prevented the groundwater contamination that occurred. According to the story, the coal mining companies exceeded the limits on their discharge permits and were never cited or fined for doing so. But a fine or a citation wouldn't have change the fact of the discharges, nor would it change the discharges made within the limits of the permit. The biggest problem here was a poor assessment of the ground water situation as those discharges shouldn't have been permitted at any levels if they were likely to contaminate a drinking water supply. The lack of after-the-fact enforcement through the Clean Water Act is sort of besides the point as all of us, big government liberals and small government libertarians don't like the idea of poisoned drinking water in the first place.

That such a major story could miss the target is disappointing, but hardly surprising. Journalists still do a decent job on some subjects, but the intersection of law and science, a notoriously complicated affair, is not one of those subjects. I referred to this as agenda-driven reporting and I don't mean the sort of blatant biases that are easily weeded out. What I refer to is the pernicious sort of bias that permeates the mainstream narrative, in the case, the narrative that a heavy-handed can and should prevent all harms in the world. Unlike some, I have no problem with this viewpoint being presented in the context of news, so long as this viewpoint is made clear, rather than hidden beneath the facade of neutral reporting. More importantly, I'd like such a story to show some understanding of the subject matter in question, more than could be gleamed by reading through the EPA website. Yes, Charles Duhigg has come up with a monstrous amount of data, but without context, that data lacks real meaning.

The Politics of 30 Rock

2009-10-20T15:28:00.001-04:00

I remember a few years back that Bill O'Reilly did a piece on 30 Rock that was some what of a hit job, trashing the show's liberal politics and claiming that the critical attention the show garnered was only from like-minded liberals. Or something like that. The problem was, Bill O'Reilly clearly hadn't seen the show and I may be making this up, but I can almost remember him smugly asserting that he didn't need to see it. It'd be easy to dismiss 30 Rock as liberal propaganda, just as some dismissed the brilliant Arrested Development for it's subtle critiques of the Iraq war, but it's missing the point. It's easy to dismiss the Jon Stewarts and Bill Mahers of the world because their shows are about news and politics, but 30 Rock is a fictional, character driven drama. Good fiction is rarely first and foremost about politics and when it is, it has to be about ideas to succeed. In other words, there's a difference between a few throw away jokes about Republicans and a show designed to point out how Republicans are stupid.

But beyond the basics, I've found 30 Rock to be pretty darn fair, particularly considering it's writers and stars, notably Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin, are well known liberals. As I was saying above, it's obvious that their primary concern has been making a quality show, not pushing liberal propaganda. 30 Rock isn't always great on big D and big R Democrats and Republicans, but they know people and they're awesome when it comes to class issues. Baldwin's Jack Donaghy was designed as a stereotypical Republican executive, but over the course of the show's first three seasons, Baldwin has infused Donaghy with such humanity that the character has outgrown the caricature. It's a very unique situation in comedy, where characters tend to become caricatures over time rather than the other way around.

In making Donaghy a real character, Baldwin and the writers have had to make him relatable and that's taken the far too easy jokes- such as Republicans being racist- off of the table and instead we get throw away lines about the free market, big business, social class, and the value of hard work. I don't know what the exact intent of the writers is, but Baldwin is so good that he makes the audience believe in Jack Donaghy's earnestness.

Jack Donaghy's counterpart on the show is Tina Fey's Liz Lemon, a liberal in name only. In her politics, Lemon is a lighter version of Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm, the stereotypical guilty liberal who's politics are just as much about what she's supposed to believe as they are about what she actually believes. But unlike Donaghy, who's been shown to be reasonably consistent and honest in his beliefs, Liz Lemon is shown time and time again to be not as principled as she likes to think she is. There was the episode where Liz admitted that she'd probably vote for John McCain while telling her friends she voted for Barack Obama. Or the episode where Liz was ready to drop everything in order to "go corporate." Or the episode where Liz refused a flu shot as part of a principled stand against the companies policy of rationed flu shots for the most integral people, only to turn her back on those principles to save her own skin. Time and time again, Liz is shown to abandon liberal principles in favor of her own interests.

One of the major thematic elements of the show since it's inception has been Jack's John Galt-like role as mentor to Liz, where he's tried to help her unleash her inner Randian egoist. Superficially the characters of Jack and Liz are very different, but time and time again we see the ways in which they are similar and that is precisely what Jack tries to nurture. To go back to the class issue a moment, just look at Jack and Liz's treatment of Kenneth, the lowly page. Generally, both Jack and Liz treat Kenneth with respect, but when he stands in their way, neither are above cursing at him or referring to him as a hillbilly. But when Kenneth hosts his annual party, Jack is confident enough to tell Kenneth that the invitation was ridiculous, while Liz, fully in tune with her liberal guilt, reluctantly accepts the invitation. Jack is actively pushing Liz to be more like him- to be confident, to be a leader, and to accept her position in the hierarchy of GE and society at large.

And I can here the protests now, what about the Season 4 premier, where the pages went on strike and large executive bonuses in the face of recession were ridiculed? Once again, the brilliance of 30 Rock doesn't lie on the surface of the plots, but the intricacies of it's characters. As we're reminded at the end of the episode, the page strike was never really about money, but honesty. Kenneth, who already gets paid next to nothing, doesn't object to the lack of overtime pay, he objects to having to lie on his time card. And Jack's justification of his bonus is simple and he puts it bluntly: he deserves it. Kenneth puts one over on Jack and that's because Jack knows Kenneth is right about the honesty issue- it's never about the money and we don't see Jack giving in on anything to do with the money.

Does 30 Rock make fun of Republicans? Certainly. Season two ends with Jack out at GE and taking a job in the lame duck Bush Administration. Sure it's brutal in parts, but no one ever said comedy was nice. I found the jokes funny and as an exercise in political humor, it's the government that comes off looking incompetent. Perhaps the writers intended this to be seen as unique to the Bush administration, but that's in the eye of the beholder. So yes, there are plenty of jokes made at the expensive of Republicans, but on the deeper level of political ideology, 30 Rock isn't so clear cut. Is 30 Rock a leftist take on the big business of tv? Or is a Randian justification of television's elite and accomplished? Or is it both? Like any good show, what you take from 30 Rock depends on just where you're coming from.