Edgewise

Remember Republicans?

Kung Fu Monkey writes I miss Republicans and I pretty much agree.

We liberals have our work cut out for us reforming the Democratic Party but is there anybody even left to try to straighten out the supposedly conservative party?

Her Body Her Self?

I find the current congressional furor over a certain woman's body (pretty much just body since her mind is gone)quite hysterical and tragic. The story is about everything but the woman herself. "A woman who at the age of 26 was apparently in the process of starving herself - that's what an 'eating disorder' is, folks - and succeeded to the point of triggering a heart attack?," writes Chris Nolan in her March 20 entry at Politics From Left To Right.

Robin Toner and Carl Hulse describe it a little differently in their Sunday New York Times article: "Ms. Schiavo suffered extensive brain damage when her heart stopped briefly 15 years ago due to a potassium deficiency; she remains in what doctors have testified is a "persistent vegetative state."

Potassium deficiency can cause heart problems - and can be caused by vomiting and laxative abuse, both symptoms of an eating disorder. Nobody now seems to think the cause of her life-ending heart attack is important. Everyone is completely caught up in who will have control over her body now that she has no control over it herself.

I want to know about her. Not her parents, her husband, or the grandstanding politicians who have made control over her body their cause celebre. Who was Terri Schiavo? And is there anything we could have done to help her before the feeding tube became her claim to fame.

"Kill It before It Grows"

A BBC World Service poll that surveyed 23,518 people in 23 countries finds...

--"There is an extraordinary degree of consensus in favor of the UN becoming 'significantly more powerful in world affairs.'
--"This prospect is seen as 'mainly positive' in every country (21 a majority, 2 a plurality) and by an average of 64 percent. A mere 19 percent on average sees this prospect as mainly negative....
--"Six in ten Americans (59%) favored it, with only 37 percent opposed."

And...

--"In all countries but one, more people favor than oppose the idea of giving the UN Security Council the power to override the veto of a permanent member....
--"Respondents in the US, Britain, France, Russia and China were reminded in the question that their own country would lose the veto....
--"In the US, 57 percent favor giving up the absolute veto (34% opposed)"

What was the US really pre-empting with its pre-emptive war? Not Saddam, but effective UN sanctions and inspections. They had to be stopped before they could succeed and spread--metastasizing peace and eroding the diktat of the world's only remaining Great Power.

How do you measure work ethic?

In What's so great about the work ethic?, Mark A. R. Kleiman wonders why the much longer hours we work in the US (as compared with Europe) should be interpreted as a good thing and a sign of a strong work ethic.

Glad someone is questioning this.

Remember When Conservatives Believed in Free Markets?

Once upon a time, Conservatives advocated a free market, with "consumer sovereignty," for healthy Capitalist development.
Consumers would have money to spend. Businesses that efficiently offered them things they wanted to buy would get a larger proportion of consumer spending. They would thus be rewarded for their efficiency and desirable selection of offerings.
These businesses would thrive, and with their superior rate of profit, they would invest, hire, and grow, thus directing additional economic resources into efficient production of desirable products and services. The growing wages they paid would put money into the hands of consumers so they could afford to purchase the things they want--again rewarding the best busnesses.
In those days, Conservatives had faith in the "invisible hand" of consumer sovereignty as the engine of economic growth--specifically of efficient growth in desirable directions.

But wait a minute! What about the businesses that do not efficiently produce things that people want to buy? Is this fair to them? They make their campaign contributions just like everybody else. They hire retired legislators and former government regulators--in fact, they do more of this than the businesses that are better run. So all of a sudden they are arbitrarily cut out?

The answer to this dilemma is called "Supply-Side Economics." Give money, in subsidies and tax breaks, to all businesses and all the wealthy, not just those that happen to be efficient in meeting consumer demand. Furthermore, give them incentives for all the things they were already doing, not just incentives for which they have to do more, more investing and more hiring than they would have done anyway.
If you give enough money to the wealthy, some of it is bound to be spent in ways that benefit consumers, wage-earners, and society at large. They can't just grab, spend, and waste it all. Can they?

Indiscriminately subsidized Capitalism is fair to all business and wealth. It is the heart of our American system. The most subversive threat to Capitalism today is consumer sovereignty in a free market economy. Frittering money away on wage-earning consumers only gets in the way.

A Favorite Paradox

With thanks to Bertrand Russell...

"I thought your boat was larger than it is."

"No, my boat is not larger than it is."

The Mainstreaming of Vice

I've been puzzling for a couple of years now about the pornification of America. Take a step back and, at least to me, it's really quite remarkable and a bit unnerving how casually pop culture 2005 assumes everyone's comfortable with hardcore pornography.

This is especially true in sitcom-land, where porn-related jokes are a dime a dozen, not just at prime time, but throughout the day on Friends reruns and the like.

There's a root assumption here, a significant cultural change, which is that porn is sort of a harmless, victimless, personal sin. Which is one perspective. There's another perspective, however, which is that the porn industry is a gigantic, tragic, victimizing beast of a machine. And that no one really knows what kind of impact routine exposure to hardcore porn is having on the raised-on-the-Net generation.

I guess that (unpopular) perspective isn't all that funny.

Now someone could easily argue that this porn-is-harmless perspective isn't new. That it was mainstream in the '70s as well. But it seems indisputable that there's been a change -- that if you compare a Happy Days script to a Joey script, you'll see an obvious shift.

Meanwhile, at a coffee shop this morning, I overheard an interesting conversation about the mainstreaming of gambling. And there's a lot of truth to that too. Poker, of course, is leading the way. All our favorite TV, film, and sports stars have been lining up to play Celebrity Poker. Hell, I happen to love that show. It's amusing, quick moving, well-edited. And it's got Dave Foley. What's not to like?

Anyways, eavesdropping thusly, it occured to me that there may be a connection here. Perhaps there's something more generally going on in the culture. I mean, maybe there ain't. But the mainstreaming of vice? Loveable poker? Cuddly porn? What's it all mean?

A few fairly obvious insta-observations: 1) porn and gambling are both substantially driven by big industries. 2) porn and gambling are both substantially supported by the Internet, with its illusion of anonymous vice in the comfort of your own home. 3) this mainstreaming of vice is happening at the same time the government is (arguably) getting more repressive about issues of free speech, free religion, etc.

What's it add up to? I'm not entirely sure. The really surprising thing to me is how little has been made of this trend by either the Left or the Right. On the Right, that Ward Churchill -- now he's a real threat. And don't get them started on gay marriage. Or among the true wingnuts, there's the way SpongeBob SquarePants and A Shark's Tale are subtly reprogramming today's toddlers toward an unwholesome tolerance for ocean-dwelling sodomites. But the wholesale mainstreaming of porn and gambling? These topics don't get much more than a peep.

The obvious play for the Right would be to trumpet these examples as the height of moral decay. It's such an obvious play, I find their silence flat-out creepy.

And for the Left I wonder, could there be a real opportunity here? To talk about a cultural trend with (arguably) real impact, vices that actually do wreck lives?

Or do people just not want to hear it? Perhaps there's nothing to be gained from pointing out to Rome the true symptoms of its decline.

What do you think? Am I wildly offbase here? A typical uptight repressed American? Or there a real mud slide in process and not a hell of a lot of noise beyond the occasional glub glub?

No Flawed Policies Here.

"Admiral Church concluded that the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan had been the result primarily of a breakdown of discipline, not flawed policies or misguided direction"
NYT

That old "Do your own thing" military!

Got me thinking: Maybe they could have policies and direction that involved beakdowns of discipline, that discouraged them. I remember in Cub Scouts we had Pack Leaders. Maybe they could have something like that.

Kerry/Cantwell petition against drilling in Alaska

Kerry is collecting names of citizens opposed to drilling in Alaska. I signed up. If you're interested in joining this effort, spearheaded by Kerry and Senator Cantwell of Washington State, here's the link.

California judge strikes down gay marriage ban

A quickie (I'm at SXSW): California Insider - Court strikes down gay marriage ban:

A San Francisco Superior Court judge has found the state's ban on gay marriage unconstitutional. [Full story here in the Sacramento Bee].

The Pro-Life Party: Us, Goddammit!

"Are you pro-life or pro-choice?"

"Yes."

That's not an original "joke," but it's one that bears repeating. This morning on Democracy Now, Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez were interviewing a woman from NOW and a man from the Democratic Senatorial (?) Council about the latter group's policy of encouraging pro-choice senatorial hopefuls to step aside for supposedly more electable anti-choice candidates in 2006. All four of them used the phrase "pro-life" to describe opponents of legal abortion.

That's [bleep]ing crazy. Of all the distortions and hijackings of language perpetrated by the right-wing noise machine, none is more pernicious in its scope than their claim to be "pro-life." Those of us who can loosely be called "progressives" are the party of Life. We are pro-life when we assert the right to regulate economic activity to prevent species extinction, to preserve workplace health and safety, and to improve air and water quality. The right opposes all those kinds of regulation because they don't see any value to life and health beyond what can be quantified monetarily. We are pro-life when we oppose war, and particularly the targeting of civilians in war. We are pro-life when we oppose the death penalty. And we are pro-life when we assert the value of a mother's actual life over the abstraction of a fetus's potential life.

Having said that, I also found it disturbing that Amy Goodman took issue with Hillary Clinton's description of abortion as a "sad" choice. To be sure, Mrs. Clinton's comment implies more in the context of her DSC maneuvering than it literally says, but it seems grotesquely callous to suggest that the decision to end a potential life is not sad, even when it's the only humane choice.

Obviously, there's a lot more to be said about this. The progressive movement and the Democratic party need to find a way to deal with the fact that even though the majority of American voters support legal choice, they also support candidates who oppose it. This is a deeply rooted paradox. It has something to do with the tension between the morality we actually practice (what I'm calling "humane" values) and what we think we believe. Others may be able to articulate this better than I can.

A Mockingbird for our times

Hush little baby don't you cry,
Daddy's gonna buy you an alibi.
If that alibi don't work,
Daddy's gonna bribe the county clerk.
If that county clerk don't bribe,
Daddy's got Congress on his side.
If that Congress still don't budge,
Daddy's in tight with a Supreme Court Judge.

- The Mammals, "The Bush Boys"

The made-for-TV war

According to this report (Ex-Marine Says Public Version of Saddam Capture Fiction), the much-vaunted capture of Saddam in his spiderhole was fictitious.

If true, it might be time to add your sense of what's real to the list of collateral damage from the propaganda war.

That nuclear option: building a better House

Xian beat me to it; I was going to post about the idea to stop electing Representatives from districts and have each state choose its electors as a bloc (thus, California would send 53 Democrats). Kleiman was talking about only amending California's constitution, and thus producing a Democratic-controlled House.

Such a change won't happen, but I got thinking about the same hypothetical as xian: if every state did this, what would the party breakdown be? Presumably Texas would send 32 Republicans; what would happen if this were universal?

Currently there are 232 Republican seats and 203 Democratic ones (if we include independent Bernie Sanders, who caucuses with the Dems). To figure this very precisely, someone would have to total up all the votes for the House in each state by party. But we can get a first approximation by using the statewide vote count for president: If in every state, the party that won the presidential race also chose the entire block of Representatives, we'd have 224 Republicans and 211 Democrats.

OK, so (to use Cold War vocabulary) Kleiman's idea is a first-strike advantage, and because Democrats currently dominate the most populous states it would probably give them a long-term edge. But that edge would shrink as Republicans copy the idea in their most populous states.

Raising the subject allows me to throw out my own wish, although it's not one that would realign the party count: We need to expand the number of members in the House of Representatives. Here are some calculations from one web site:

If Congress wanted to keep the electoral college but make it fairer, there is a simple (but unlikely) solution: increase the size of the House of Representatives. There is nothing in the constitution mandating a particular size except that each member must represent at least 30,000 people (which puts an upper limit on the House of about 10,000 members). In fact, the House has been expanded repeatedly in the past as the nation grew. The most recent expansion was in 1911, when the U.S. population was about 93 million, so a representative had 212,000 constituents. With the current population of 293 million, a representative has 674,000 constituents. To bring this number back to its 1911 value, the House should be expanded to 1370 members. Since a state's electoral vote is equal to its congressional representation, with 1370 House members, the effect of the 100 senators would be much smaller and the electoral votes would be almost proportional to population. To increase the size of the House, Congress would merely have to pass a law; the states would not be involved at all.

It would be harder to gerrymander smaller districts. Each Rep. would have to be more in touch with their specific constituents; they'd still be subject to purchase, but the lobby money would have to be spread among more pols, reducing the impact on most individual races. The electoral college would be closer to representing one-person-one-vote, reducing (but not eliminating) the disproportionate clout that low-population states currently hold, using a method that dodges that clout (Congressional vote and Presidential signature instead of Constitutional amendment).

But such a proposal would have to be nearly "revenue-neutral" to pass: if a larger House would necessary and obviously swing control of Congress or the White House to the Democratic party, it won't happen. Under the current apportionment method, if you increase the number of members, the Democratic states would pick up new ones faster. Change the calculation method slightly so the Republicans hold about the same proportion (51.5%) of the new House seats / Electoral College votes, and the idea would have a chance. In a 1000-member House, we'd be talking about moving 10 to 20 seats in absolute terms to maintain the current balance in percentage terms.

OK, we need a large, odd number, but nobody's going to get anything done in a legislative chamber with 1370 participants. What if we just went to 999 members? No, somebody would complain that that's really a surreptitious way of imposing the Mark of the Beast on America. Then, how about 869, just about double the current number? Ah, no; the American Taliban wouldn't allow "69" in public discourse.

What about 835? Not quite doubling the number; each member would represent just under 350,000 people. It would certainly be attractive to a lot of politicians, because it increases their job market—more state legislators move up. States that currently have very few reps would waffle: After more than 225 years, Delaware finally gets a second representative; Utah sued because they were only 80 residents away from a fourth rep, and here's a way for them to get it. But overall, power in the House and in the Electoral College would be diluted away from small states in general.

However, I think most medium-sized states would like to send another five to ten members. And because we wouldn't have to vote state by state, I think the current large-state advantage could make such a vote a slam-dunk.

OK, shoot that down.

(updated to reflect Doris Matsui's win yesterday)

California über Alles

Mark A. R. Kleiman proposes a nuclear option for the Democrats: changing the state constitution to elect a congressional delegation on a winner-take-all basis, take over the Congress, and elect Speaker Pelosi.

Sounds cool, but what happens if other states do it too?

Taking David Brooks to the woodshed

A pointer from Politics from Left to Right led me to Kirsten Powers' Progressive Pundette blog, where I greatly enjoyed her giving David Brooks what for (David Brooks -- Ultimate White Boy).

Sometimes I can't tell if Brooks is a deluded tool or an insidious creep.

Why I read the Poor Man religiously

It's simple, really: Even his throwaway lines are 10 x teh funny of just about any other blog out there. For example, in Hugh Hewitt is the stupidest man alive, he locates the source of the Happy Talk Virus in "the right-wing Prozacosphere."

Are they lining up Hizbollah for the Syria sequel?

James Wolcott notices (Second Verse, Same as the First) that the Syrian-sponsored, Lebanon-based, Israel-hating Party of God terrorist group is being groomed for supervillain status in the next big middle east blockbuster coming soon to an election season near you.

B said we should have a party of God in this country. We do, I said. They are in power.