Is Patriotism Moral?

A professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, Dr. Gary Gutting, asks the question. It's an interesting approach to the liberal/modern problem set, which tends to argue to the conclusion that patriotism isn't moral. Dr. Gutting wants to argue that American patriotism, at least, can be; but he also wants you to understand why many modern thinkers don't think it can be ("modern," in philosophy, generally refers to the lines of thought originating in the 18th century with David Hume and Immanuel Kant, which underlie most of contemporary philosophy as well).

At the beginning of Plato’s “Republic,” Socrates asks what justice (doing the morally right thing) is, and Polemarchus replies that it’s helping your friends and harming your enemies. That was the answer among the ancient Greeks as well as many other traditional societies. Moral behavior was the way you treated those in your “in-group,” as opposed to outsiders.

Socrates questioned this ethical exclusivism, thus beginning a centuries-long argument that, by modern times, led most major moral philosophers (for example, Mill and Kant) to conclude that morality required an impartial, universal viewpoint that treated all human beings as equals. In other words, the “in-group” for morality is not any particular social group (family, city, nation) but humankind as a whole. This universal moral viewpoint seems to reject patriotism for “cosmopolitanism[.]”

The argument follows two questions:

1)  How can it be a virtue, if it causes us to value some people's interests more highly than others?

2)  Is it possible to treat people as equals while favoring your own group's interest?

I'll leave you to consider his approach to American patriotism. I'm going to propose another set of answers to the problem, which to me seem better.

Dr. Gutting should pause and reflect on how Aristotle, as well as Plato, would approach the question.  First of all, what is a virtue?  It is a strength, an excellence; it is also a capacity, which allows you to pursue new actualities.  Courage is a strength, but having courage means being able to do things that the cowardly cannot do.

But to determine what capacities are really conveyed by the virtue, we also have to know the nature of the thing. Human nature is different from horse nature. The expression of the virtue of courage in a man will therefore be very different from the expression of what is courage in a horse.

Patriotism is a subset of the virtue of loyalty. Loyalty is certainly a virtue, because it gives us strength: those who possess mutual loyalty have a capacity to do things that those without it cannot do.

But what is the proper expression of loyalty? To know that we have to look to the nature of the thing that is being loyal, in this case, human nature.

Aristotle determines (in Politics I) that man is a social animal, and that political behavior is part of human nature. Every man will thus be born into a polity as he is born into a family; for every woman, it is the same.

It turns out that patriotism is a virtue that arises from our nature. It's like your relationship with your mother: you're going to have a relationship of one kind or another, but if you can find a way to love her and forgive her, it's a healthier relationship than if you get trapped in despising and resenting her. Thus, patriotism is a kind of human flourishing; everyone should be patriotic.

But what about the concern that we need to treat everyone as equals? Dr. Gutting is thinking about the American mission to free all mankind, which I also think is an admirable mission. There is, though, another answer: we often seek justice adversarially.

Our court system works this way. The idea isn't that it's wrong for the defense attorney to be totally committed, by hook or crook, to getting his client as free of charges as possible. It's that, in the opposition of such interests, justice will emerge. So there's no reason not to fight for your country; in fact, insofar as you are interested in that higher justice, everyone should fight for his country, and justice will emerge from the contest. The better ideas and systems will rise; the worse ones will fall, or reform.

Thus, if your interest is justice for all humankind, this may be the best way to achieve it.

Chivalry in Action

Here is an interesting fact: out of those killed in the recent mass shooting, fully a third were men who had thrown themselves on top of their girlfriends to protect them. Two of these were US Navy sailors.

Another man was shot doing the same thing, but did not die. All of these men have the honor of the Hall, and deserve both our praise and acclaim. They chose a most honorable path.

A Word with Zell Miller

Professor Zell Miller, former Senator, Governor and Lieutenant Governor of the Great State of Georgia, and a former Marine as well, consented to a brief interview at a recent fundraiser for a Republican.  Zell credits the United States Marine Corps with his success in life. He had allowed himself to be made to feel inferior by those at his college who mocked his mountain upbringing, so that he had dropped out.  Depressed, drinking moonshine, he drove his truck into a ditch and was picked up by the police.  He joined the Marines looking to be straightened out.  He learned discipline, honor, punctuality, and the other tools that let him ascend to the highest office in the state, and to be the natural choice to replace a Senator who died in office.

He endorsed President Bush in a firestorm speech at the Republican National Convention, but refused to leave the Democratic Party.  It had been his home his whole life, he said.

Why would the most famous lifelong Democrat in Georgia break a long exile to help fundraise for a Republican?

“My grandmother was a Collins out of Union County. And I was impressed by what a good legislator [Doug Collins] made. “I felt I had a mountain relationship with him.”

The interviewer spends most of his time on Zell's health concerns and the terrible pain that resulted from a recent fall down a flight of stairs. He gets to something important late in the interview, though, which is to ask him why he had turned to the right so publicly back in 2004.  He had become not only a Bush supporter, but an outspoken foe of abortion, and an equally outspoken critic of the dissolution of American morality.

Why?

“I had a conversion. I had a late life conversion. I changed my views on several things. This had to do with my son going blind, and me having to carry him to the doctor with his hand on my shoulder.... I prayed and prayed that they could do something about his sight,” Miller said.

The prayers seemed to work. “He can see pretty good out of one eye right now.” But a bargain struck with God often transforms the petitioner more than the object of any plea. “I changed on a lot of things. Not just abortion, but my whole life in general. I was a pretty rough character in my younger days. I needed to change,” Miller said.

I suppose even the Marine Corps won't object to hearing that God had to finish what they started.

A Conceptual Point About the Division of Rights

We are all familiar with the division of liberties and rights into "negative" and "positive."  A negative right is the kind of right that doesn't require anyone to provide you with anything; it just forbids them from interfering with you.  A positive right requires some actual provision.  In Georgia as in several other states, for example, there is a positive right in the state constitution to hunt and to fish.  This means that the state is obligated to provide the means for such hunting and fishing.  It cannot be the case that you have a positive right to hunt, but that there is no land available on which you may exercise this right.  If you have a positive right to fish, you must have access to at least some waters in which fishing is possible.

These rights aren't unfettered -- there are licensing requirements, fees, bag limits, and so forth -- but they do require that the state provide something for you.  Your right imposes an obligation on the state not merely to refrain, but to act on your behalf to secure the thing to which you have a right.

All that is well understood.  However, what is less well understood is that there is a middle ground between the two categories.  There are some otherwise-negative rights that require physical goods.  No one is obligated to provide you with these goods, but your right to provide yourself with them is protected.  Thus, the Second Amendment says that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.  Nobody needs to provide you with arms, but you must not be stopped from purchasing your own if you desire.

But it's a little stronger than that.  There is an almost-positive element to it:  we are obligated not to try to make the arms unavailable.  It won't do to set up a case in which anyone who wishes to buy a firearm can buy one, but there are none to buy.  It won't do for a governor to say, "I'm not infringing your right; go buy a gun, any gun you can find!" if that governor has previously arranged to buy up all the guns and melt them down.

In such a case the negative right has ceased to exist even though it is allegedly still extant and uninfringed by any letter of law.  There isn't a positive right as such, but there almost is:  the government may not be legally obligated to provide the good, or even access to the good.  Yet if it isn't obligated not to prevent the possibility of access to the good, the right can cease to exist as an actual right that you can really exercise.

A similar case occurs with these "Free Speech zones," whereby the government orders you not to engage in assembly or speech near a political convention (say), except in a narrow area too small for all the competing groups (and usually far from the actual event).  You have a negative right that is technically not being infringed; and technically, there is even a place provided for its exercise.  But practically, the right is denied if there is not a place in which to practice it.

So yesterday I wrote up a piece about Commerce, Georgia, and the public pool that does not permit cursing.  Is that an unacceptable infringement of freedom of speech, for the government officials who run the pool to refuse to allow you to speak certain words in a public park?  Perhaps not, if you think that the existence of the rest of the world is an adequate amount of space for cursing in; in that case, you could say that this is better, because we have one place for people who don't like to hear foul language (and do like to swim), and people who like to curse can go do it elsewhere when they are done swimming; or they can simply forgo swimming, and curse all day if it pleases them.

How far can we take that principle?  Can we ban cursing on all public property?  Within the city limits, whether the land is public or private?  Within the county?  Within a state?  Within the United States?  At some point we're crossing that line pertaining to the mostly-negative right that has a necessary physical component.  Just where?

A Place Called Commerce

I happened to ride through Commerce, Georgia today. It's a simple town, with a main street full of law firms and banks or credit agencies, antique shops and little shops for women, a couple of small restaurants -- including a pretty good pizza joint with pool tables and draft PBR -- and an active railroad track running right through the center of town. At one end of town is the Confederate memorial, kept up by the Daughters of the Confederacy and featuring an old-style Georgia flag.

At the other end of town is Veterans' Park, which is where the pool happens to be. The pool is open to the public for a small fee during the height of summer, Wednesday through Saturday from one to five.

If you go to the pool, though, leave your bad language behind. Signs proclaim in very tall letters that there will be absolutely no foul language at the pool, with violators ordered to leave at once.

The rule seems to have sparked little rebellion. Lifeguards refer to their elders as "Sir" or "Ma'am," as young Southerners are supposed to do. Teenagers at the pool are mannerly and obedient to it, though their tattoos suggest that they are otherwise embroiled in the culture that they see on television.

It's a nice little town. Too far from the mountains for me, but a pleasant enough place to pass through on a Saturday in the summertime.

Prices

This is courage, if you like.  A South Korean man soaks up Marxist fantasies to the point that he defects to North Korea with his wife and children, expecting free health care and a nice government job.  Right away he and his family are put into a brutal camp and told that his job will be to tour Europe and entice other families to the same fate.  He explains to his wife that he may have to do it in order to preserve their new life.  She slaps him in the face, saying "they would have to pay the price for his mistakes – he could not entrap others."

He goes to Copenhagen and defects, intending to spend the rest of his life telling the horrible, cautionary tale. His wife and children disappear into a camp to starve and die.

And in her place, what would we have done?

Elizabeth Warren Annoys Us for the Wrong Reasons

Via HotAir, an excellent summary of what regulations might help in the financial market, vs. what regulations actually will be pushed by the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Congress should require federal agencies dealing with mortgages to put into place a minimum down-payment rule.  Existing regulators and law enforcement agencies could do better at policing deception and fraud—and show that they’re willing to shut down repeat offenders, even big ones.  And lawmakers should start phasing out Fannie and Freddie, so that government dominance no longer distorts the housing market.

Instead, the focus of CFPB enthusiasts, notably including Elizabeth Warren, is the kind of jam that 10% of consumers can get into when they demonstrate why the bottom 10% of consumers shouldn't be trusted within 100 feet of a financial instrument without a court-appointed guardian (leaving the rest of us alone, thanks very much).  New York economic-justice advocate Sarah Ludwig uses a middle-aged government worker as an object lesson.  Finding herself short of cash one month, she resorted to a payday lender, which lent her money a sky-high rates in exchange for a post-dated check on the strength of a pay stub proving she was employed.  Each month she could either pay the loan back or extend it.  Eventually, if she failed to do either, the payday lender would present the check at her bank.  Now, this was a deliberately kited check; there were no funds to pay it.  So she started incurring bounced-check charges and ended up with bad credit.   Is the solution for this once-burned consumer to work through the bad credit and repair her reputation?  Or is it greater federal government involvement in consumer protection and education?  It's hard to imagine that lack of education led this middle-aged government worker to close her eyes to the consequences of kiting a check.

Another poster child:

Andrew Giordano’s bank mistakenly gave him a replacement debit card that offered overdraft protection, and he failed to realize it.  He proceeded to overdraw the account multiple times, enough to result in $814 in fees.  “Funds obviously were not there,” his wife says plaintively.  “Why would [the bank] continue to accept the charges?”  Warren neglects to respond with the obvious question:  Why did Giordano have no idea how much money was in his account?

I had a little more sympathy for the woman who "became a victim when she racked up long-term debt on a variable-rate credit card and then professed shock when her card issuer exercised its right to raise the rate."  But Congress already passed a bill in 2009, with bipartisan support, requiring credit-card issuers to warn customers of an impending rate increase and to continue to apply the old rate to existing balances.  What's left for the CFPB to do?  Well, for one thing, a rule

that requires home buyers to pay a minimum-percentage down payment would be a simple, effective option.  People who have been able to save, say, 10 percent of a house’s value demonstrate financial discipline.   Further, a family that has equity in a house can refinance easily to get out of a bad mortgage; such a family also has the flexibility to move, if a breadwinner has the opportunity to take a better job in another city or state.  And creating a minimum down-payment rule would be fast and easy—a major benefit, since continued uncertainty about financial rules is contributing to banks’ reluctance to lend and thus to today’s sluggish economy. 

Yet the CFPB almost surely won’t take such an obvious step, and again, the fault lies with Congress.  The Dodd-Frank bill didn’t specify a down-payment rule because such a rule would push house prices down further—anathema to Congress.   Moreover, a down-payment requirement would run afoul not only of America’s debt-carrying middle class but of the affordable-housing and minority-group advocates who want poorer Americans to enjoy the same dream of indebtedness that the middle class enjoys.  As Orson Aguilar, executive director of the nonprofit Greenlining Institute, puts it, any mortgage rules that would require homeowners to have a good job, good credit, and a hefty down payment are “problematic.”

The author concludes: "the CFPB is likely to encourage poorer people to take on debt that they cannot afford."

The bureau can do so because Congress gave it the responsibility to enforce some “fair-lending” laws.  As Congress put it, the CFPB must study “access to fair and affordable credit for traditionally underserved communities” and ensure “nondiscriminatory access to credit for both individuals and communities.”  The probable result will be to strong-arm the financial industry to lend money cheaply to the poor—and when something is cheap, people buy more of it, even if they shouldn’t. 

The CFPB is already moving aggressively on this front.  . . .  In April, the CFPB’s deputy director, Raj Date, told consumer advocates at a Greenlining conference that the bureau would work assiduously to make sure that “lenders are not creating conditions that make loans more expensive, or access more difficult, for certain populations."

An Analysis of the Mass Shooting Problem

It's a little surprising when a mass shooting gets a lot of attention these days; we've seen so many of them over the years that they usually have to contain some especially shocking element (like last year's famous one, almost exactly a year ago). People often seem to think about these things as a sort-of disease.

For a long time we tried to understand how the disease was spread -- was it by violent video games? Movies? -- but that kind of efficient cause proves elusive, and for good reason. There is no such cause. The actual cause is not the efficient cause but the choice of the individual killer. They are doing these things for reasons of their own.

In spite of what we hear from determinists, humans are not pinball machines. We don't do X because we experienced Y; rather, we ourselves determine what experience Y means. We do that according to our beliefs, attitudes and upbringing, informed by far from determined by our physical makeup. The determination of meaning, and the decision of what to do about the meaning we find in the world, is a spontaneous process in the sense that it arises at least as much from our concepts as our biology.

Since concepts are invisible, we cannot prevent the free choice of evil. We can sometimes predict it, but often we cannot.

So: a certain number of people are going to decide to become killers. What to do about it?

One idea we often hear is that we should restrict access to firearms. There are reasons not to do this arising from the broader nature of human life, and the free citizen's relationship to the state. However, there are also reasons not to do it within the context of the problem. The first one is obvious: an armed citizenry can sometimes stop these attacks, whereas a disarmed citizenry is much more vulnerable.

Carrying a gun is kind of a pain, really, and the odds that something like this shooting will come up are small enough that most people may not think it's worth the hassle. However, a former Marine who happened to take his pistol to the movies that night could have stopped the attack earlier. This is in fact the best defense to an attack in progress, since it is an unpredictable factor from the point of view of the killer. He can avoid the police, but he can't be sure about the concealed weapons in the audience.

There's a second reason that is less obvious. The kind of mind that chooses this path is capable of worse. Even Timothy McVeigh, far from the smartest man in the world, could concoct a huge bomb. This fellow appears to have been brilliant: there's no limit to what kind of harm he could have created if he had chosen that route.

This is to say that the easy availability of firearms, and the glamour they are endowed with culturally, acts as a kind of brake on the harm done by mass killers. Firearms are less deadly than bombs, they take longer to do their work, and you have to be right there operating them in person. That exposes you to being stopped mid-act by armed citizens, and potentially even to the police arriving (although that is unlikely, since 'longer than a bomb' is still only 'a few minutes' rather than 'instantly'). You are available to be stopped before the harm is completed. You're easier to catch afterwards. Finally, a single person with a firearm can only kill so many people because of weight limits on how much ammunition he can carry.

For all these reasons, the best response is to encourage the carrying of arms by citizens, and to continue to glorify the gun. The last thing we want is for the evil among us to innovate.

In Praise of Sprawl?

What if a major reason for the income inequality that concerns many on the Left was anti-Sprawl aesthetics?

Economists have long taught this history to their undergraduates as an illustration of the growth theory for which Robert Solow won his Nobel Prize in economics: Poor places are short on the capital that would make local labor more productive. Investors move capital to those poor places, hoping to capture some of the increased productivity as higher returns. Productivity gradually equalizes across the country, and wages follow. When capital can move freely, the poorer a place is to start with, the faster it grows.... Or at least it used to....

In a new working paper, Shoag and Peter Ganong, a doctoral student in economics at Harvard, offer an explanation: The key to convergence was never just mobile capital. It was also mobile labor. But the promise of a better life that once drew people of all backgrounds to rich places such as New York and California now applies only to an educated elite -- because rich places have made housing prohibitively expensive....

[T]here are two competing models of successful American cities. One encourages a growing population, fosters a middle-class, family-centered lifestyle, and liberally permits new housing. It used to be the norm nationally, and it still predominates in the South and Southwest. The other favors long-term residents, attracts highly productive, work-driven people, focuses on aesthetic amenities, and makes it difficult to build. It prevails on the West Coast, in the Northeast and in picturesque cities such as Boulder, Colorado and Santa Fe, New Mexico. The first model spurs income convergence, the second spurs economic segregation.

So, to fight inequality, encourage sprawl. Or, if you hate sprawling cities like Atlanta or Phoenix, accept that you're the problem when it comes to creating inequality. You're making it too expensive for the working man to come live and work where you do. That means he'll live in Atlanta, where he will make a bit less money, but he can afford to live better on it. Which, in turn, means you might rethink what "inequality" means. If I could earn $5,000 a month here, or in New York City, or in China, there's a significant "inequality" even at the same rate of pay. After expenses I'd be scraping by in New York, doing quite well here, and rolling in dough in China once I converted my pay into Renminbi.

Addendum: Hank III & The Edge

My series on country music is over, but I wanted to provide a response to a comment.  Raven expressed an opinion that modern, pop country music seems to have lost the Outlaw edge.  That's true.  It has.

But there are some out there who are pushing the edge still, and one of them is Hank Williams Sr.'s grandson.  If you look into his music far enough, you'll find a lot you don't like.  He's part of a country band, a punk rock band, a metal band, and pushes out without regard to what people will be ready to accept.  So, you know, be warned.

Here's a couple of easier to digest things to get you started.





Here's him doing a couple of Outlaw classics.





...and some less easy things, which some of you will not like, and some of you will like even better.



This next one is NSFW at all... but for the record, he doesn't like pop country either.



And then there's this one, featuring a "hellbilly" sound.



So if you're interested in edge, it's out there.  He's far from the only one; if you liked the more radical pieces, you might also try the Pine Box Boys and see where that leads you.  They have less range, but they're very good within their range, and are linked to a lot of other bands who are looking for the edge.

If you didn't like Hank Williams, stay far away from those guys.

The Attack Dogs Eat At Waffle House

I had much the same sentiment when I saw this list.  Naturally, the presumptive explanation is that these organizations are, well, you know.  I mean, "Dixie" cups and "White" Castle burgers, well, how loud does a dog whistle have to be?

But I have to admit, I was a little surprised to learn this guy was among them.

The safety net

From the American Enterprise Institute, an essay speaking exactly to what's been troubling me lately about the argument that we have to submit to mandatory entitlement programs because capitalism is too risky:

What used to be called "public charity" is now "entitlement programs."  The difference is much more than semantics.  The word "charity" carries with it the implication that the intended beneficiary is someone else.  Those who paid taxes to support such programs, approvingly or not, did so in the clear understanding that they were paying to help other people; they neither expected nor desired any personal benefit from the programs.  . . .

Gradually, however, the left inculcated the notion that we are all at risk, due to the nature of "capitalism" (i.e., freedom), and hence that government programs for those in need ought to be seen as a universal necessity.  In other words, such programs were no longer to be viewed as something the vast majority of citizens provide for the benefit of the very few, but rather as something government ought to be providing for each of us as a primary function.

As I read somewhere else today, the safety net is supposed to be a trampoline for the very few, not social flypaper for the many.  I've been arguing with Grim recently about the conflation of insurance with subsidies.  The distinction is critical:  Insurance is appropriate for most adults, but subsidies are not.  If the category of "needy citizens" expands to include a large fraction of Americans, or even (as is now becoming the norm) a majority of Americans, the category has lost its meaning and programs that address it have lost their justification for existence.

H/t Maggie's Farm.

Taxing Internet Sales

Dr. Mercury at Maggie's Farm has been discussing the current proposals to tax Internet sales nationwide.  Some states are already doing it; my own beloved Texas has bullied Amazon into assessing sales tax, effective this month.  One of the ostensible rationales is the need to "level the playing field" for brick-and-mortar stores (as if anyone believed the motive was anything but the obvious desire to glom onto more revenue), but as Dr. M and many commenters pointed out, the local stores are going to need a lot more than an 8% advantage to complete with the on-line prices and selection.

Here at Swankienda99, we rely heavily on Amazon for things we can't get locally.  Ever since Amazon expanded out of books and took on the entire retail market, I've depended on them for the many food brands my duopolistic grocery store won't carry.  They're an especially good source for brands that have fallen out of disfavor but haven't completely ceased production.  In fact, I buy most things from Amazon that I don't need to touch or handle ahead of time, from cookware to linens to small appliances.  They let me search efficiently for products by key word and best price, they provide customer reviews that take the place of indifferent sales clerks, and they get me my stuff in two days for a flat annual fee.  It just has to be a product that can be easily shipped, so it can't be too heavy, too voluminous, or too perishable.

In order to compete, local stores may have to specialize in that kind of tricky freight, or provide expertise and advice that can't be duplicated by my fellow customers on-line, or carry things for which I'll pay a premium for same-day availability.  Big-box stores have gotten used to being passive purveyors who make their customers wander through miles of aisles on scavenger hunts.  I wonder if future retail merchants won't have to function a bit more like knowledgeable brokers in order to lure customers back.

What do you guys buy online?

They never learn

James O'Keefe always uses the same trick to get people to admit what they're doing.  He pretends to be a guy with a scam to bilk money out of the taxpayers, and he runs it by an organization he suspects is aiding and abetting similar scams.  He gets them talking and joshing with him.  He repeats, in increasingly outrageous terms, exactly what kind of scam he's running and how it works like a charm.  They laugh and agree that, yes, it works just like that, and they're totally cool with it.  Hey, the money's sitting right there, who wouldn't pick it up?  Ah?  Ah?  Usually they give him a little friendly advice about magic words to use in packaging the scam.  Then he releases the video and waits for them to complain that they were taken out of context.



In his wake he probably leaves a trail of emergency meetings designed to prevent anyone from each organization from spilling the beans to any more strangers who might be carrying cameras.  But he keeps moving from industry to industry, so they never see him coming.  And he doesn't seem to be running out of targets.

Act One, Scene One

The Post Office defaults on nearly eleven billion dollars in benefit payments for 'future retirees.'  That's not a state or a city; that's the US Federal Government.

So, what does that mean for the 'future retiree,' i.e., the current worker?  Does he or she have those retirement benefits or not?  Not, I would think, at least not to the same degree.

The Post Office is the least important of services, and so merely the first to arrive at where all are heading.  Soon it will be veterans' benefits and pensions, or the benefits and pensions of other federal agencies; then it will be Medicaid, or Medicare.  The question in front of us is mostly, I think, "How soon can we accept that this is the end of everything we've believed in and fought for, and start thinking about what comes after?"

We've come to the denial stage in our grief over the death of America.  Can it still be saved?  So much, we want to believe that it can be.  We've given so much.  I once watched rockets come in over Camp Victory, and saw them burst under the Phalanx guns.  'The rockets' red glare; the bombs bursting in air!' I thought at the time.  'Now I've seen it:  now I understand.'

Maybe half of one percent of us saw something like that in Iraq or Afghanistan.  I am speaking to Cassandra's point -- second link, above.  What matters most to what most people believe is where their interests are vested.  There are too many vested interests against reform on the scale necessary for America to survive.

Look out for them petards

It looks like bad things can happen when you jam an unpopular law through Congress using a tricky parliamentary procedure.  For one thing, some of the usual inconsistencies that might have gotten worked out in conference in a smaller bill are set in stone when the conference process has to be avoided like the plague and, in any case, the bill is thousands of pages long and full of the inconsistencies that inevitably result from brutal last-minute horse-trading.   In the case of ObamaCare, Congress managed to pass a bill that provides for consumer subsidies and employer penalties for states that set up the required insurance exchanges, but does not authorize either consumer subsidies or employer penalties if the states opt out and the federal government establishes the exchanges on their behalf.

Nor was this a scrivener's error, as the IRS now claims.  It was a conscious choice to increase the pressure on states to set up exchanges.  Apparently everyone calculated that, as the Cato Institute put it, the bill would reach state capitals to be greeted as a liberator.  As things stand, however, there is real doubt whether the IRS has the power either to issue subsidies in the form of tax credits or to impose penalties on non-conforming employers in the states that say "Thanks, but no thanks."  To date, eight states have politely declined, while many more are stalling.

The Cato paper provides a helpful summary for those of us who have forgotten just how contorted the parliamentary shenanigans got:

Congressional Democrats had intended to empanel a conference committee that would merge the PPACA with the “Affordable Health Care for America Act” (H.R. 3962) that had passed the House of Representatives.  Had this occurred, the PPACA might look quite different than it does today.  But in January 2010, Republican Scott Brown won a special election to fill the seat vacated by the death of Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA).  Brown’s victory shifted the political terrain.  It gave Senate Republicans the 41st vote necessary to filibuster a conference report on the House and Senate bills. 

As a result, House and Senate Democrats abandoned a conference committee in favor of a novel strategy.  House Democrats agreed to pass the PPACA exactly as it had passed the Senate, but only upon receiving assurances that after the House amended the PPACA through the “budget reconciliation” process, the Senate would immediately approve those amendments.  Since Senate rules protect reconciliation bills from a filibuster, the PPACA’s supporters needed only 51 votes to pass the House’s “reconciliation” amendments.  The downside of this strategy was that the rules governing budget reconciliation limited the amendments House Democrats could make.  Supporters opted for an imperfect bill – that is, a bill that did not accomplish all they may have set out to do, but for which they had the votes – over no bill at all. 

The Act signed into law by President Obama and the law that the IRS rule purports to implement — the PPACA — is a hybrid of the two Senate-committee-reported bills, as amended by the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (HCERA).  This history, and the need to resort to the reconciliation process to pass the final law, helps explain why the final legislation looks as it does, and why the Act does not conform with the hopes or expectations of some of its supporters.

Normally, if a bill contains a technical glitch, Congress can just fix it . . . . Oh, wait, they don't have the votes any more, do they?

Love and welfare

Building

It's fun watching a meme take root.  This week, President Obama put his finger on the sore point that divides individualists from collectivists when he made a speech that has been paraphrased as "You didn't build that -- somebody else built it for you."  By now you've all seen a number of posters showing Mr. Obama cheerfully explaining the concept to the Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison, and Steve Jobs.  I enjoy watching the Net play with the theme:

Outlaw Country: A Final Word

Now that I've spoken to the things that seem to me to really matter, I want to just give the singers a chance to relax and have some fun. It wasn't all about a serious movement. Some of it, at least, was about the joy they found in life.

 





















They weren't just Outlaws.  They were merry men.  Maybe that makes a difference.  Maybe it makes all the difference.

Ya'll know the words to "Rocky Top," right?

Encyclopedia Brown

When I was in the second grade, our teacher offered us special credit if we could learn to spell "encyclopedia."  We all did:  e-n-c-y-c-l-o-p-e-d-i-a, or -p-e-a-d-i-a.  I think at this point the old form is no longer taught even as an option.

One of my favorite series of books as a boy were the Encyclopedia Brown mysteries.  I read that the author died today, at the age of 85.  The neat thing about them, for an aspiring boy detective, was that they presented all the facts but none of the solutions.  The solutions were collected in a separate section in the back, for you to check once you had sorted out what you thought the proper answer might be.

In this the author -- his name was Donald Sobol -- answered the complaint raised by no less than Raymond Chandler in his famous essay, "The Simple Art of Murder."

 The poor writer is dishonest without knowing it, and the fairly good one can be dishonest because he doesn’t know what to be honest about. He thinks a complicated murder scheme which baffles the lazy reader, who won’t be bothered itemizing the details, will also baffle the police, whose business is with details. The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with; the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody only thought of two minutes before he pulled it off.

Donald Sobol didn't do that:  he gave you the cute answer, but he assumed you would figure out the missing piece.  Learning to do that was the point of reading his stories; it is why they are still worth reading, for boys of a certain disposition.

But if I am going to quote from the Chandler essay, I ought to quote the parts everyone ought to know.  Here they are.

[Hammett] wrote at first (and almost to the end) for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street...

It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization. All this still is not quite enough.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.

If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.

If you have that, you have enough to write a good mystery; you may even have a great deal more.

Socialize the Loss

Bloomberg is looking more at the Bain Capital issue.

What’s clear from a review of the public record during his management of the private-equity firm Bain Capital from 1985 to 1999 is that Romney was fabulously successful in generating high returns for its investors. He did so, in large part, through heavy use of tax-deductible debt, usually to finance outsized dividends for the firm’s partners and investors. When some of the investments went bad, workers and creditors felt most of the pain. Romney privatized the gains and socialized the losses.

What’s less clear is how his skills are relevant to the job of overseeing the U.S. economy, strengthening competitiveness and looking out for the welfare of the general public, especially the middle class.

Oh nonsense, man! Nothing could be more relevant to overseeing the U.S. economy.

Imagine that the country was a corporation, and its shareholders were those entities rich or powerful enough to arrange major campaign contributions.  The workers are those who, well, aren't that rich.  What happens when we suffer severe losses as a corporation?  We socialize the losses.

When things go well, why that's private profit!

I'm surprised you don't get this.  The President's out campaigning on the very point this afternoon.  How many times does he have to explain how economic management works?

Changing diapers prevents Alzheimer's

. . . Or, what can happen when popular science writers get hold of almost any story about non-human biology.  It seems that bees stay vigorous as long as they're tending larvae in the hive, but slide into decrepitude quickly after assuming their mature function of foraging.  When researchers removed the young larvae caretakers, some of the older bees were forced to give up foraging and tend the larvae themselves.  A protective protein in the brain slowed the decrepitude that afflicted their foraging colleagues.  The irrepressible authors cannot restrain themselves from noting:

They found Prx6, a protein also found in humans that can help protect against dementia – including diseases such as Alzheimer’s – and they discovered a second and documented “chaperone” protein that protects other proteins from being damaged when brain or other tissues are exposed to cell-level stress. 

In general, researchers are interested in creating a drug that could help people maintain brain function, yet they may be facing up to 30 years of basic research and trials. 

“Maybe social interventions – changing how you deal with your surroundings – is something we can do today to help our brains stay younger,” said Amdam.  “Since the proteins being researched in people are the same proteins bees have, these proteins may be able to spontaneously respond to specific social experiences.”

France to California: This Means War

Animal-rights activists in California attempted to block not only the in-state production of foie gras but also its importation.  The French, never willing to take an act of aggression lying down, responded with a call to boycott California wine.

An interesting side note:  California Republicans argue that, while the state can do almost any fool thing it wants within the state, the Interstate Commerce Clause forbids it to regulate what happens outside its borders.  It falls to the federal government to make mistakes in that arena.

Love that Thomas Sowell

He's a potent anti-Orwellian force:

Let us begin with the word "spend."  Is the government "spending" money on people whenever it does not tax them as much as it can?  Such convoluted reasoning would never pass muster if the mainstream media were not so determined to see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil when it comes to Barack Obama. 

Ironically, actual spending by the Obama administration for the benefit of its political allies, such as the teachers' unions, is not called spending but "investment."  You can say anything if you have your own private language.

An Insight into Information Warfare

Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post suggests a model for thinking about the negative advertising campaigns of the Presidential election that is straight out of US Army doctrine.

The extent of [the Obama campaign's] effort is only now becoming clear. The Associated Press reports: “President Barack Obama’s campaign has spent nearly $100 million on television commercials in selected battleground states so far, unleashing a sustained early barrage designed to create lasting, negative impressions of Republican Mitt Romney before he and his allies ramp up for the fall.” Think of it like the Confederacy’s artillery barrage on the third day of Gettysburg before Pickett’s charge — you have to in essence disable the other side before the charge begins or its curtains.

This is exactly how the US Army thinks of what it currently calls "information operations."  It considers them a kind of strategic effect, a "shaping" effort almost precisely analogous to artillery.  You can use a heavy information barrage to deny terrain (as for example by blanketing a neighborhood with wanted posters with a picture and a large reward:  you might not catch the guy, but he'll have to feel very shaky about trying to pass through the neighborhood).  You can use it to demoralize.  You can use it to disrupt the cohesion of an enemy unit.

It's sort of surprising to see someone like Rubin get that concept so well.  It's also surprising to see the Obama campaign's efforts likened to a Confederate barrage.

"Always go right at 'em"

Photon Courier on why Admiral Nelson could beat the tar out of his opponents, and on the disquieting trend in the U.S. to follow rules and regulations rather than do what makes sense.   He quotes a 1797 Spanish naval official about why he always got his butt kicked:

An Englishman enters a naval action with the firm conviction that his duty is to hurt his enemies and help his friends and allies without looking out for directions in the midst of the fight; and while he thus clears his mind of all subsidiary distractions, he rests in confidence on the certainty that his comrades, actuated by the same principles as himself, will be bound by the sacred and priceless principle of mutual support. . . .  Experience shows, on the contrary, that a Frenchman or a Spaniard, working under a system which leans to formality and strict order being maintained in battle, has no feeling for mutual support, and goes into battle with hesitation, preoccupied with the anxiety of seeing or hearing the commander-in-chief’s signals for such and such manoeuvres.

Following the links at Photon Courier takes us to this 2005 article at WaPo bemoaning the lack of "insurbordination and freelancing" witnessed in the stumbling aftermath of Katrina:   "Everyone coloring inside the lines -- it's a great system until the wind starts blowing really, really hard."

Outlaw Country, Part 4: Raven's Requests

Raven asked toward the beginning of this series for some "libertarian country."  I don't think they were thinking in exactly those terms, but they often did sing about the independent capabilities of the country-born man.



They didn't much care for welfare:





...or affirmative action...



...or government regulations imposed on their business activities.





Some of that's libertarian, but a lot of it's just outlaw.

The LIBOR Scandal

A surprising unity of right and left seems to be forming around the news that American regulators were fully informed of fraudulent LIBOR rates as early as 2007, and chose to do nothing to protect American borrowers, states or localities.  The cost to the American people is unknowable; the additional instability brought on by added mistrust of the banking system, and suspicion that the "regulators" are complicit in ongoing fraud and thievery, could produce additional unknowable costs.

The usual response from the left on this kind of issue is for greater regulation, but here the regulation has demonstrably done nothing to fix the problem.  It's not that they weren't aware, it's that they knew and gave a pass to their buddies.

The guy who was the head of the NY Fed at that time, by the way, is now our Secretary of the Treasury, one Timothy Geithner:   the same Timothy Geithner who became Secretary of the Treasury even though he had massive unpaid taxes; indeed, the same Timothy Geithner who was allowed to pay back the money without penalties by the IRS (try that if you own a small business like, say, the Dawsonville Pool Room).  In other words, when he was caught, he was extended the same kind of look-the-other-way courtesy that he extended to the London bankers.

In both cases, the loser was the American people.  Who were the winners?  What can we say about them, and what ought we to do about them?

Women and Bikes

Via Instapundit, "Women and motorcycles:  ridership is on the rise."  (Alternative title by Arlo Guthrie.)

There still aren't a lot of women bikers, but my wife has taken up riding.  The persistent high gas prices of the last several years finally broke down her sense that they were too scary and dangerous.  Now, she rides everywhere -- rain or shine, city or mountains -- and she's getting pretty good.  She tells me that, for her, it's almost everything she loves about horses, and that she's really come to enjoy just getting on her bike and riding with me.

So if any of you female readers have been thinking about it -- or if you haven't, but reading this is making you think about it -- you might give it a try.  You'll save on gasoline, and you might find a new source of joy in your life to boot.

Actually, This Makes Perfect Sense:

Hot Air is giving him a hard time about it, but really, this is a perfectly accurate description of the President's experience.

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

That's just how it really happened for him: it's not that he was smarter than everyone else, or harder working, but he rose from success to success -- from Columbia to Harvard, from Harvard to the University of Chicago, two published autobiographies, two Grammy awards for the audio recordings of those same autobiographies, the Senate, even the Presidency and the Nobel Prize.

He didn't publish at Harvard, didn't do much at U. Chicago, was a failure as a community organizer, didn't succeed in his first push to get elected to public office... but there was always somebody there to dust him off, and push him up to the next rung.

Somebody else made all that happen -- a whole system of somebodies else.  Naturally he feels loyal to the system that raised him so high.  That system includes unions, especially teacher's unions; the academic system, especially affirmative action; and the Democratic Party, especially the Chicago machine and, more recently, the DNC.  At the international level, the community of saints at the UN and the Nobel committee are likewise contributors to his success.  All these people had to work very hard to pull him through to the pinnacle of human achievement.

It's less likely to be true of the small businessman, for whom there may be 'that special teacher,' or a friend or family member who helped them build an initial stake.  On the other hand, there really may not be.  A great deal more comes from individual effort in these cases.

Still, even for those who lack access to the networks and alliances that make it easy for the well-connected to move upwards and onwards with little effort, it surely would be nice to have such access.  And you can get some, if you want, by purchasing dinner with Barack tonight at one of his spectacular fundraising efforts.

Why wouldn't he believe this?  You can't argue with success, and by many measures he is the most successful man in the world.

"Your rejection does not meet my needs at this time"

Admirable anti-rejection letter.

H/t Rocket Science.

Outlaw Country, Part 3: Songs of the New Frontier

We've talked about the way that the drug culture of the 1960s and 1970s was involved in bringing the Outlaw movement to endorse a fair amount of the cultural rebellion of that era.



But there was a tension within the music, which was more likely than rock-and-roll to see the value of the era that was passing.  Above is Willie Nelson and Ray Charles singing a Western-style ballad linked to the earlier time.

There were a lot of songs like that, where the old icons are given again in the terms of the new generation.  The old cowboy movies sometimes featured 'girls of the night,' as for example the spirited young lady who played opposite John Wayne in Stagecoach.  Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson picked this up and put it into one of the more famous songs of this type.



Waylon Jennings was an outspoken advocate of moving on to new ways of doing things.  Too many people were trying to re-live the life of Hank Williams, Sr., and he wanted them to know that he wasn't going to play that game.



But, as Gringo pointed out, it was the same Waylon Jennings who took time to pen this tribute to Bob Wills and the Western Swing movement.



So maybe that's three ways in which the changes that came over country music starting in the late 1960s were different from otherwise similar changes in rock-and-roll.  They remained tied to the gospel tradition  They remained faithful to the American serviceman.  Finally, they retained that supernatural loyalty to the American project -- including icons like the cowboy, the flag, and the ideal of riding free on the new frontier.

On the Blessings of Daughters

It was not my fate to have a daughter, but apparently Timothy Dalrymple did.

Your daughter is waiting for you. She will expand and soften your heart. She will make you a better man. A daughter too is a blessing beyond measure. Give yourself to this, and she will make you into a protector and provider.... I have never recovered. After years of scarcely feeling anything, suddenly I found myself broken by grace, shattered with gratitude into a thousand happy pieces....

Every man should have a daughter, if only for his own sanctification. If a daughter comes your way, know the truth that she will love you with all her heart if you let her. Cherish her, and she will be a daddy’s girl. Love her, and your heart will expand to encompass the immensity of her soul. Sacrifice yourself for her, and soon you will discover that you will do just about anything to make her happy.

Cost of Government Day

The year is half over, but we're still not quite to Cost of Government Day this year!

Actually, it turns out that we are if you live in the Great State of Georgia.  The overall number provides an average for state-imposed costs, but you can dig into the by-state numbers later in the report.  It looks like three states -- Louisiana, Tennessee and Mississippi -- actually managed to hold down costs so that their citizens need only work six months of the year to pay for the cost of government.

Outlaw Country, Part 2: Outlaw Songs

Johnny Cash at San Quentin

That song really seems to capture what was going on in the Outlaw movement of the late 1960s through the early 1980s.  You can see the roots in Hank Williams, Sr., who focused on honky tonks and hard living.  When the elder country music community complained that the Outlaws were taking this all too far, Hank Williams, Jr., had an easy reply.

They weren't hippies, but they had some links with the longhaired movement.  I just put David Allen Coe's "Longhaired Redneck" up a couple of posts down, so we'll do Charlie Daniels this time.



The "Outlaw" thing wasn't just a nickname.  Johnny Cash played San Quentin and other prisons, and declared his friendship to all those locked down or suffering from the wrongs of society.  David Allen Coe was a patched member of the Outlaws motorcycle club during the period.  Most of the others preferred to associate with the Hells Angels.  For example, here's Johnny Paycheck singing about being an angel of the highway; and again, in tribute to Hells Angels president Sonny Barger; and Willie Nelson, singing a song he wrote to honor the Hells Angels; and Merle Haggard and Johnny Paycheck talking about a time when Merle bought Johnny a bunch of cocaine from the Hells Angels they had hanging around during a session.  (This was another way in which the Outlaws were similar to the rock-and-roll movement:  here's Jerry Garcia singing to and talking about the Angels, and of course, Altramont.)

Their alignment with outlaw bikers and outlaw truckers was partially rebellion, and partially righteous response to the corruption of the age.  It was also partially an old loyalty:  Red Sovine had been a bard for truckers long before Jerry Reed.  They were big on old loyalties, which to me says a great deal in their favor.  The Outlaws never broke faith with their God, nor -- in spite of the Vietnam war -- did they break faith with the American warrior.



Even so the excesses of the age were a great test.  Johnny Cash himself gave into despair and went to die in Nickajack Cave.  Instead he found in its depths a wish for life, and a soft breath of air that led him back out under the light.  His friend, and fellow outlaw, wrote this song in memory of that hard time.

The Victory of the Elites

Anne Applebaum notes that both of the candidates for President this year are members of the elite... two different elites, she posits.

Which is just as well, because the political success of both Obama and Romney proves that radical populism in the United States has failed spectacularly. For all of the attention they got, neither Occupy Wall Street nor the tea party has a candidate in this race. Neither found a way to channel inchoate, ill-defined public anger — at the deficit, at the banks — into electoral politics or clear alternatives. Whoever wins in November, we’ll therefore get the elite we deserve.

She's a member of the elite herself, of course:  the one she identifies for Obama.  Like many members of the elite(s), she is clearly happy to see that money can still buy power.  And for now, it clearly can.

UPDATE:  Another elite, David Brooks, writes that the problem is really that the elite aren't as elite as they used to be.  Now that it is at least possible to rise into the ranks via test scores or performance (and therefore possible to fall out through poor performance), those within the elite have become more corrupt in order to ensure that they remain in the upper ranks:

The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous). Wall Street firms, for example, now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character. Most of their problems can be traced to this.

Brooks' vision of an elite born to privilege but educated like Spartans is an old one:  that is how the higher ranks of the continental nobility used to view itself, before the revolution.  I wonder if it's really true, though, that they were any better.  Their interests were more perfectly aligned, which meant that there was less likelihood of their misdeeds becoming publicized in the press that they owned, and which was also aligned with their interests.

Were they better, though, because their power was more firmly seated?  That seems an unlikely effect, given what I think I know about human nature.

A Bad Day for Mitt Romney

Today's Bain Capital story is serious stuff, one that opens him to a powerful attack by the Obama administration that his remarks appear to merit a criminal investigation.

Romney and Bain claim that he was not involved with Bain, but Bain and its portfolio companies in their required filings under the Securities Exchange Act continuously certified to the Securities and Exchange Commission say precisely the opposite--asserting without qualification that he was a controlling person, fully in charge of Bain, under the Federal securities law. Under normal circumstances, the question of the truth of this representation would result in an investigation by the SEC into possible criminal, as well as civil, violations of the law.

Lying to the SEC is a serious crime, but of course the high probability is that any investigation will discover that he didn't lie to the SEC.  What we know of his background suggests a businessman who would have been careful to know the rules, and whose character does not lead him to take reckless risks of this sort.  It's far more likely that his recent remarks, which carry no legal penalty and which are the remarks of a politician in an election campaign, will be the location of any truth-stretching.  That is also consistent with the charge -- opinions differ, even here, over how accurate the charge might be -- that his statements in election campaigns are aimed at what he thinks voters want to hear rather than the whole truth of the matter.

(Though from my perspective, the Obama administration's remarks are more damning than the probability that Romney stretched the truth for political advantage.  What is meant by 'under normal circumstances,' here?  Is the suggestion that the SEC will not investigate the claim?  Are we to believe that the Obama administration will not do what it claims to be its duty, and if so, why not?  Out of a sense of fair play?  Do the Marquess of Queensberry rules apply to criminal investigations as long as the offender is a member of the political class, or just during elections?  This is a serious matter, enforcing the law, especially when the rich and powerful are the ones who merit investigation.  If Romney's remarks call into question the honesty of his SEC filings, as they do, then the investigation ought to occur.)

Tonight there is a rumor floating that Romney might choose Dr. Rice as his Vice President.  I certainly hope that Allahpundit is correct in his guess that this is just a wild hare to distract from the Bain story.  My impression of her from my time in DC was entirely negative, and I don't find her competent for succession to the Presidency nor the power it entails.  I recall Cassandra saying that her husband had the opposite impression, though; but Dr. Rice has likewise come under sharp criticism from most of the people she worked with in the Bush administration, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Bolton -- none of whom are perfect (well, Bolton is close), but all of whom seem to have a common impression of her as not terribly competent, helpful, or principled.  That aligns with my experience as well, so I tend to believe it is probably the case.

It's also true that the selection of a pro-choice VP would undermine any confidence pro-lifers might have that Romney's conversion on the issue of abortion is genuine.  I would think a candidate who knows he is on thin ice with such a large and important part of his base would take some care to choose a running mate who was at least not opposed to them.

Immunity

Last week, Congressman Issa bolstered the contempt charges against Attorney General Holder with incriminating admissions contained in sealed wiretap applications.  The admissions fatally undercut Holder's argument that he had not lied to Congress in December 2010 when he protested the ignorance of senior Justice Department officials of the most damning aspects of the "Fast and Furious" campaign.   That campaign involved, among other things, running guns into Mexico for the purpose of waiting until they had been used in a murder, then collecting their serial numbers after they had been abandoned at the scene, as was the established habit of cartel thugs.  The scheme ostensibly served a political effort to institute stricter gun control regulations by showing that U.S. guns were being funneled to Mexico to support criminal operations there.  Holder told Congress that the Justice Department never knowingly lost track of guns, and that the operation was shut down when they realized the failure.  Holder retracted this claim of ignorance ten months later, in October 2011, but has cited executive privilege in refusing to produce documents relevant to whether his initial claim was a deliberate lie.

In particular, Holder is concealing documents relevant to the facts revealed to senior Justice Department officials in the March 2010 wiretap applications, including emails.   The applications themselves are under seal by a federal judge in connection with the underlying criminal investigations of gun-running in which they were issued, but they were provided to the House Oversight Committee by an as-yet unidentified whistleblower.  Rep. Issa created a stir by reading summaries of the facts recited in the applications into the Congressional Record, relying on his immunity under the Constitution's "Speech and Debate Clause" to protect any statement made on the floor of Congress.  The summaries strongly suggested that the Justice Department knew as early as March 2010 that federal agents had abandoned surveillance of a straw-man purchaser in the process of running nearly 1,000 guns into Mexico, even though they then elected not to halt the operation until publicity exploded over the murder of Border Agent Brian Terry with one of them.  (The murder weapon was found by his body, just as might have been expected, and traced by its serial number to the "Fast and Furious" operation.)

A politically hostile watchdog group now claims that, although Issa may be immune from outside prosecution, he should be disciplined under internal House ethics rules.   This approach avoids the thorny separation-of-powers issues that would be raised by retaliation from the Justice Department.  The speech-and-debate immunity, designed to guard the separation of powers, is very strong.  It has led courts to dismiss claims of "invasion of privacy, slander and libel, civil rights violations, wiretapping, incitements to violence, violations of First Amendment rights, age discrimination, racial discrimination, sexual discrimination, retaliation for reporting sexual discrimination, larceny and fraud, and McCarthyism."  This leaves us with a fascinating battle of the privileges.  The executive privilege on which Holder relies is subject to well-known exceptions for Congressional investigations into wrongdoing.  Will Holder or his surrogates find that it is stronger, or weaker, than the Congressional speech-and-debate privilege?

None of this is to say that the House may not decide to discipline its own members if it believes they should not violate a federal court's seal on sensitive documents.  That may turn out to be an essentially political calculation, suggesting that Issa has little to fear from a vote in the current House.   It's possible that some House Republicans will not like the notion of a deliberate violation of a federal court seal, but on the other hand they may consider it overridden by the improper assertion of executive privilege and Justice Department cover-up that started all this.

Outlaw Country: Part I

So now we're coming to my favorite part of country music -- probably not coincidentally, the stuff I grew up with -- the movement that was called "the Outlaws."

Since Gringo objected to my putting the popular-culture versions of Western Swing ahead of the core of the project, though, I'm going to start off by doing the same thing here.  You've seen the Outlaw movement in its popular, stripped-down form.  (Embedding disabled.)

But it's not just the Dukes of Hazzard.  You saw the stripped, Hollywood version when Burt Reynolds drove a firebird to block for a truck bootlegging beer across the South:



And you saw it when a convoy of trucks stood up to police corruption, led by Outlaw country singer Kris Kristofferson as "Rubber Duck."



So, that's how it became famous:  but now that I look at that, I can kind of see Gringo's point.  Kris Kristofferson is a real Outlaw, and Jerry Reed is too.  And Waylon Jennings sang the Dukes of Hazzard anthem:  and Johnny Paycheck, featured in that first clip, he's as Outlaw as it gets.  But none of this is what is really core to the movement.

What I think is most important to lay down, first, is that the Outlaws also did this:



And this:



So what we're about to explore in the next few posts is how the turmoil of the 1960s got expressed in Outlaw country.  It's a different kind of expression in two ways.  We already talked about Hank Williams' devotion to God and gospel:  we'll find that proves out in Johnny Cash and others, too.

But here also is the second difference.  In spite of the rebellion against corruption by the extant authorities, the Outlaws retained what Chesterton called a supernatural loyalty to the American project.  They didn't like where we were, but they loved America.  They were ready to fight for her.

We'll do some more shortly.

The Bishop, the Senators, and the 24-hour impeachment

Paraguay is being touted as a repeat of the 2009 ouster of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya.  If you'll recall, that ouster was widely reported as a "coup" even though it was accomplished entirely by constitutional and non-violent means.  Likewise, the impeachment of Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo a couple of weeks ago is causing the feathers to fly all over Central and South America.

Like Zelaya, Lugo is a failed leftist, or we wouldn't be hearing any of this noise about how a non-violent constitutional processes is tantamount to a coup.  He's an unlikely leftist hero, however.  For one thing,  he was a Catholic Bishop who was officially "laicized" by the Church only after he won the presidential election in 2007.  And yet he wasn't exactly your garden-variety Bishop, either.  Raised in a thoroughly secular but highly politicized family, he defied his father's wish that he study law and instead became a teacher in a strongly religious rural community that lacked a priest.  At age 19, inspired by their need or their piety, he entered a seminary and was ordained a priest at age 26.  Not surprisingly, he quickly fell in with liberation theology.  He became a Bishop in 1994 at the age of 43.  Eleven years later, he attempted to resign his ordination to run for president, in compliance with a constitutional ban on simultaneously holding religious and national office.  The Church refused at first to laicize him, but relented after he won the election.  In the interim, Lugo admitted fathering at least two illegitimate children while still a Bishop.

Paraguay gained its independence in 1811.  When Lugo was sworn in as president in 2008, it was that country's first experience of a ruling party's peacefully surrendering power to an elected member from the opposition party.  Lugo was the first leftist president to be freely elected and the first leftist leader to gain power by any means since 1937.   His cause célèbre was agrarian reform.  Soon, however, he lost the support not only of the oligarchs-that-be but even of the poor and landless contingent that catapulted him to power.  The last straw, evidently, was a recent bloody clash between landless protesters and police that left eleven dead among the former and six among the latter.  Paraguay's house quickly brought impeachment charges by an overwhelming margin; on the very next day the Senate voted by an equally overwhelming margin to convict him of "incompetence," as permitted by Paraguayan law.

Other explanations, of course, are possible. A site called "Truth Out" suggests that Lugo is a victim of giant agribusiness, a theory I'm not always predisposed to credit (especially from a site called something like "Truth Out"), but one that receives some support from the following facts, if they are true:

First and foremost is agribusiness.  None other than the infamous Monsanto is a major player in Paraguay.  The company collects royalties on the transgenic soy and cotton seeds planted throughout Paraguay, and in 2011 it collected $30 billion tax-free.  And 40% of the production and refining of Paraguayan soy is owned by private U.S.-based giant Cargill ($100 billion annual profits a year).  Again, agribusiness giants in Paraguay enjoy broad protections from Congress and pay no taxes.  ***  According to Paraguayan investigative journalist Idilio Mendez Grimaldi, one of the reasons behind Lugo's removal was his cabinet's unfavorable stance toward the release of Monsanto's transgenic cotton seed into the country.  After the head of the National Service for the Quality of Seeds, the Minister of Health, and the Minister of Environment did not green light the seed's release into the market, [the opposition press] led a smear campaign against accusing them of corruption.

Things aren't always all that rosy here in the U.S., but I take heart from the knowledge that I'm not living in South America.

Shifting the Risk

One of the success stories of the recent decades has been the decline in the crime rate.  Rape, especially, has plummeted:

When it comes to rape, the numbers look even better: from 1980 to 2005, the estimated number of sexual assaults in the US fell by 85 percent. Scholars attribute this stunning collapse to various factors, including advances in gender equality, the abortion of unwanted children, and the spread of internet pornography.

What if the rate hasn't fallen, but merely been shifted out of sight?

Before last year, the federal government had never bothered to estimate the actual number of rapes that occur in prisons....  After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.

The article is by a progressive, and suggests a place where there is an opportunity for left/right political compromise.

If ever there were a time to launch a coordinated assault on the prison-industrial complex, the time is now. Budgets are strained, voters are angry, and crime is low. The Tea Party is in the midst of convincing everyone that government is the enemy— and so it is, in the field of criminal justice.

Popular resentment against an authoritarian state shouldn’t be denied or pooh-poohed— it should be seized and marshaled toward progressive ends. The prison crisis was created by centrists. Limited reforms and immoral moderation will not end the crisis.

So let's think this through.  We don't want to reform the system in such a way that we lose the benefit of having all the rapists out of the general society:  that's clearly a good thing.  What we do want is to reform th system so that (a) rapists don't continue to prey on a different population, and (b) we spend less money on prisons and prison guards.

That suggests a two-pronged approach.  Rape should carry the death penalty, in or out of prison:  it is obvious that rapists shouldn't be released from prison, but their containment exposes us to this problem.  Killing them is the right response.

The second part of the approach concerns the drug war, which I think we need to declare a sad failure.  Some movement to legalize most recreational drugs -- even if we do so with controls such as requiring a prescription and regular oversight by a doctor -- makes more sense than continuing to imprison so many people whose main crime was to desire a different way of getting high than whiskey.  The probable expenses of doing so are greatly outweighed by the savings involved in not having to have so many prisons, and not having to support so many prisoners and guards.  We would be a better society, too, than one which tolerates hundreds of thousands of people we have rendered helpless to be raped each year while they are under our alleged protection.

Governors Refuse to Implement PPACA

Politico has a headline that is rather striking, but the emphasis is probably not wholly wrong.  One of the warning signs that Eric Blair and I used to talk about, years back, was the states organizing in defiance of the Federal government.  The refusal to abide by orders here has been licensed by SCOTUS, in the recent Roberts decision.

For now, then, the refusal is entirely legal, and does not represent a crisis -- just a defiance.  The use of state governments to openly oppose the Federal, though, is something that bears watching.  State governments are quite powerful even individually when compared to protest movements or political rallies.

Amazing what you can do with tree rings

A new Nature article reports a cooling trend for the last 2,000 years suggested by tree ring data.  The cooling trend is statistically correlated with orbital mechanics but uncorrelated with CO2 levels.   Commenters at Watts Up With That quickly pointed out that the sample was regional (Finland) and that tree-ring data articles published to date have been notoriously unreliable.  As one put it:

The divergence problem is a mathematical artifact of calibration.  Formally known as “selection on the dependent variable”, it is a statistical flaw in the methodology that creates bias in the results.  This bias leads to divergence at the calibration boundaries, and misleading results over the proxy period. 

In other words, it isn’t the trees that are at fault.  It is the knuckleheads looking at the tree cores that have improperly applied amplifier technology to statistics, thinking they were inventing a better way to look at noisy data.  What they invented instead was a way to amplify noise, while making it look like signal.  They fooled not only themselves, but most of the world as well.

"Divergence," in the climatology context, refers to the discrepancy between thermometer data and tree-ring temperature inferences in periods when we have access to both.  Thermometer and tree-ring data agreed reasonably well during the last 150 years until about 20 years ago, when they began to diverge sharply.  AGW skeptics infer from this that the thermometer readings are being jiggered, a charge that involves controversies over climate scientists' doctoring of data, refusal to reveal basic data, cherry-picking of temperature sensor sites, and location of too many sites near urban heat islands.  AGW believers infer from the same divergence that tree-ring data are less accurate than thermometer data, and therefore that past warming periods deduced from ancient tree-ring records may have been overestimated.  Part of the excitement over the new Nature article (in both AGW camps, skeptic and believer) is that it does not suffer from the divergence problem; its tree-ring data match up well with thermometer data in the recent period.

A draft? Really?

I've discussed this sort of crap previously. As I noted here, Do your duty.