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2003

Happy New Year, everybody! Well, unless you're Saddam Hussein. Who, come to think of it, probably doesn't read my blog.
posted by David Nieporent at 12/31/2002 06:23:00 PM |

 

It depends on what the meaning of "is" is

The New York Times thinks that New York City needs to provide more food stamps. That's par for the course; it's hard to imagine the Times having any other opinion. But in the midst of making its argument, the Times supplies this stunner:

In Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's zeal for welfare reform, food stamps equaled dependency and big government entitlement that should be eliminated. In fact, food stamps are not welfare, not even charity, but a nutrition program that helps the poor buy food.

On some issues, one can understand where the other side is coming from, even if one disagrees. But I cannot even begin to fathom the mindset that suggests that food stamps aren't welfare. The Times seems to be suggesting that if the program is founded on good intentions, it isn't welfare. I guess. Any other ideas as to what they could mean?
posted by David Nieporent at 12/30/2002 11:29:00 PM |

 

So that's his excuse

The Nation reported a few months ago that various pro-Palestinian activists were being harassed electronically, often by people sending out phony emails designed to look like they came from these activists.

Even celebrated MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky, outspoken critic of Israeli policies toward Palestine, has been hit. "There is an awful lot of stuff going out in my name that's totally insane and that I haven't written," the professor complained.

Some straight lines are just too easy.
posted by David Nieporent at 12/30/2002 05:24:00 AM |

 

Therapy as foreign policy

Terrorists murder 40 people in Grozny. The response of the Independent? It "underlines the need for a settlement in Chechnya." Say what? How does the Independent conclude that an attack underlines the need to surrender? Well, they start with the obligatory denunciation:

The loss of civilian lives through terrorism cannot be justified:

...and then proceed to do just that. (Wait for it. Wait.... wait.... yes! Here it is: the BUT!)

but yesterday's assault on the civilian government does highlight the despair of the Chechen people, who believe they are fighting for self-determination and who have no other outlet than violence to air their grievances. That same despair prompted the appalling hostage-taking in Moscow in October, which resulted in the deaths of 41 attackers, and of 129 hostages.

Is there anything that better illustrates the moral bankruptcy of the left than an argument like this? It "highlights the despair" of Chechens. The left is simply incapable of ever thinking that the weaker side in a fight could be wrong, let alone evil. So, in short, the worse that someone behaves, the more it proves that he's a victim.
posted by David Nieporent at 12/29/2002 11:58:00 PM |

 

Axis of evil wannabe

We may be focusing on Iraq and North Korea, currently, but the New York Times provides a reminder that there are other evildoers in the world:

Vietnam announced this week the latest in a long string of prison terms as part of a crackdown on the mostly Christian hill tribe minorities known as Montagnards.

The longest sentence, 10 years, was given to Y Thuon Nie, 30, a church leader and land-rights advocate who led an attempt to flee into neighboring Cambodia on Christmas a year ago. Seven other men were given eight-year sentences.

A court in Daklak Province in the Central Highlands found the men guilty of "organizing illegal migration to Cambodia" and "undermining state and Communist Party policy," according to the official Vietnam News Agency.

The crackdown began in early 2001 after thousands of Montagnards converged on provincial and district government offices in some of the most widespread protests in Vietnam in recent years.

They were protesting restrictions on their evangelical Protestant churches and government-sponsored encroachments on their land by migrants from the lowlands.

Serious question: has there ever been a non-communist government which felt the need to punish its subjects for trying to leave the country?
posted by David Nieporent at 12/29/2002 06:49:00 AM |

 

I only missed by six numbers

I usually agree with James Taranto, but he had a ridiculous overreaction to this week's lottery hype in Friday's OpinionJournal. With regard to the news coverage of the man whose tickets I wish I had, he writes:

All this media attention to lottery winners serves only to glorify gambling. And the lottery is a bigger rip-off than any other form of legalized gambling. Innumeracy.com ran an experiment to see what would happened if it made 10,000 random selections and entered them in each of 479 drawings in the British lottery. Result: An "investment" of £4,790,000 returned just £1,375,082, which means that each £10,000 "invested" would have cost the player £7,129.

A lottery, Innumeracy.com notes, is "a tax on the poor and the stupid." The next time some liberal journalist complains about "tax cuts for the rich," consider how his colleagues in the media help enable the government to soak the poor.

To be fair to Taranto, this isn't an uncommon sentiment, though it usually comes from those on the left side of the political spectrum. As if. Do these commentators really believe that most people who gamble think they're going to get rich by doing it? Saying that the lottery is a "tax on the stupid" because it provides a negative return on investment -- I think it awfully strange that Taranto felt the need to provide a link to an "experiment" which proved this, as if basic probability isn't sufficient -- simply demonstrates that Taranto doesn't understand the appeal of the lottery. People don't argue that a movie ticket is a "tax on the stupid" simply because the purchaser ends up with $8.50 less than he started with, do they? Of course not. He's purchasing a couple of hours of entertainment, not an investment vehicle. And, despite what Taranto thinks, that's what lottery players are purchasing. They're purchasing the excitement of anticipating a possible win, of figuring out what they'd do with the money if they won, of mutually commiserating their friends and coworkers the next day when none of them win. And there's nothing wrong with that.
posted by David Nieporent at 12/28/2002 10:05:00 PM |

 

And make sure you wash behind your ears, also

I've blogged on this topic before, but it came up again in the New York Times the other day: activists who are ungrateful spoiled brats. New York City, of course, is one of the most generous welfare jurisdictions around, but some groups aren't satisfied. It's not enough to offer extensive benefits; the city must force them down the throats of residents:

The November numbers come as hunger-relief advocates have intensely criticized the city for mishandling the program. They have complained that with unemployment rates at 8 percent, the highest in four years, the number of those receiving food stamps has risen by less than 5 percent over the course of the year. Currently, 800,000 New Yorkers with incomes low enough to qualify for food stamps do not receive them, according to a report released last week by the Community Food Resources Center.

Hunger-relief advocates and their allies argue that lack of outreach by the city is behind the shortfall. In New York State, only 50 percent of those eligible for the program receive food stamps, according to the most recent reports by the United States Department of Agriculture, which administers the program on a national level. Nationally, the level of participation is 59 percent.

See? The problem is "outreach." Not only are the poor not responsible for feeding themselves, but they're not even responsible for putting out the minimal effort needed to take money from taxpayers to feed themselves. The ultimate nanny state: the government is responsible even for making sure people take advantage of the help offered to them.
posted by David Nieporent at 12/28/2002 05:52:00 AM |

 

Merry Christmas

Or Happy Kwanzaa, or whatever the heck it is you celebrate. On second thought, none of you got me anything for Chanukah. (Well, almost none of you.) So I don't really care what kind of holiday you have. Just don't expect a card from me.
posted by David Nieporent at 12/25/2002 05:49:00 AM |

 

Will wonders never cease?

I've criticized the New York Times' Nicholas Kristoff before, but such a sensible article appeared under his byline yesterday that you have to wonder if he has an identical twin. He praises the Bush administration on an environmental matter, namely the use of snowmobiles in national parks:

So President Bush's compromise very sensibly will ban two-stroke machines in Yellowstone but will permit four-stroke snowmobiles, confined to the same roads that cars use in the summer. In the meantime, environmental groups are still trying to evict snowmobiles from Yellowstone by going to the courts.

Not only does he question the fundamental truth of the New York Times -- that George Bush can do no right -- but he also contradicts a fundamental truth of the environmental movement: that humanity is evil.

Some environmentalists have forgotten, I think, that our aim should be not just to preserve nature for its own sake but to give Americans a chance to enjoy the outdoors. It's fine to emphasize preserving roadless areas and fighting development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, both of which are good causes, but 99 percent of Americans will never benefit from those fights except in a psychic way.

And as for Yellowstone, the moose and bison should share it each winter with humans — even humans on snowmobiles.

I don't agree with Kristoff on the ANWR -- indeed, it's hard to square that portion of his column with the rest -- but his philosophical observation is dead on. The original idea behind conservation was to preserve wilderness so that people could enjoy it; it was only later that environmental fundamentalists decided that wilderness was good only if people didn't enjoy it. Areas of undeveloped land are desirable because they make the lives of people more pleasant; they're not good merely because people aren't there.
posted by David Nieporent at 12/25/2002 05:47:00 AM |

 

Know thine enemy

The New York Times carried a story today of an Al Qaeda suspect who managed to slip through the collective fingers of German law enforcement. A Polish immigrant to Germany who had converted to Islam, he was potentially involved with the bombing of a synagogue in Tunisia earlier this year:

Prosecutors overseeing the investigation say that under German law, the evidence tying Mr. Ganczarski to the bombing and his own confession of recent contact with Qaeda leaders were insufficient to keep him under constant surveillance or to prevent him from traveling. They say those limitations are the consequence of a Constitution devised to prevent the reoccurrence of the country's totalitarian past.

The case has caused concern among officials in France and Tunisia involved in an investigation into the Djerba bombing and illustrates the complexities of fighting a global network like Al Qaeda.

Last week, the Tunisian justice minister complained openly about Mr. Ganczarski's departure. "Investigations into the attack on Djerba have moved forward very well, and I hope that the flight from Germany of an accomplice of the suspected perpetrator of the attack will not hamper inquiries," the minister, Bechir Tekkari, told Agence France-Presse.

In a recent interview a high-ranking French official, who insisted on anonymity, expressed frustration that Mr. Ganczarski had not been detained. Under French law, the official said, "he would have been."

Well, everyone seems to be upset at the Germans for letting the (alleged) terrorist get away, and perhaps they're right to be. But perhaps there's another place to which the anger should be directed. After all, it's not as if he stowed away on a freighter bound for South America.

A German man under investigation for links to top figures of Al Qaeda slipped out of the country last month, withdrawing his four children from school, terminating his lease and obtaining visas for Saudi Arabia without attracting any attention from the police, according to German officials.

How long are we going to keep up the pretense that the Saudis are our allies?
posted by David Nieporent at 12/25/2002 05:07:00 AM |

 

Four out of five dentists surveyed...

I've criticized the New York Times before, many times, for their use of the "news analysis" label to editorialize in the news section. But they have one standard tactic which may be even worse: their "We won't do any polling because it might get in the way of the story we want to write" polling story. If you wanted to know what black Americans felt about L'Affaire Lott, wouldn't you commission a survey to find out? Well, certainly that's one theory. Or, you could ask nine black people what they thought. And then conclude, from this perfectly representative sample, that a group of people have "mixed feelings" about a subject.

In interviews in a dozen cities and towns across the country this last-minute-shopping weekend, black Americans eagerly welcomed the chance to talk about the furor surrounding Mr. Lott's comment on Dec. 5 that the nation would have been better off if Strom Thurmond had been elected president in 1948 when Mr. Thurmond was an adamant segregationist. But their responses to Mr. Lott's removal ranged widely, from a newfound approval of President Bush to a renewed hostility toward him and all Republicans.

Which is news to whom, exactly? Is anybody other than Howell Raines surprised to find out that even people of the same skin color can have more than one opinion about something? Isn't this sort of story more worthy of USA Today than the New York Times?
posted by David Nieporent at 12/24/2002 02:43:00 AM |

 

All about race?

The left, from Howell Raines' New York Times to Bill Clinton, has argued that the modern Republican Party wins elections by playing to race because the modern Republican Party has racism at its core, starting with the civil rights movement. The standard Republican rebuttal is to point out that the segregationist south was primarily Democratic. The people filibustering the Civil Rights Act were Democrats. The people standing in schoolhouse doors were Democrats. The people passing Jim Crow laws and turning firehoses on voting rights marchers were Democrats. And this is completely true.

But as Partha points out (though erroneously including Ronald Reagan), that's not an entirely satisfactory answer:

Have they ever thought about why, during the Civil Rights movement, so many, including Trent Lott and Strom Thurmond, even Ronald Reagan for that matter, switched their party identifications from the Democratic Party to the Republican?

It's true that some of the former Dixiecrats switched parties -- though many (e.g. Robert Byrd and Fritz Hollings) did not -- during the civil rights era. But the argument that this proves the racism of the G.O.P. is overly simplistic. It would be foolish to deny that race played a role in their decisions to switch parties. But if that were the sole reason, if there were that many single-issue voters on the issue of race, then Trent Lott would have gotten his wish and Strom Thurmond would have been elected president. Or his spiritual successor, George Wallace. Needless to say, neither one was.

There's another answer. The pattern of switching can also be explained by the understanding that the switchers felt that the national Democratic Party had ceased to represent the views of these switchers on most key issues, from crime to foreign policy. Segregation was the last issue tying these people to the Democratic party. Once the national Democratic Party abandoned them on race, cutting this last tie, they saw no reason to remain in the party. In other words, in the complete absence of civil rights as an issue, the likelihood is that these politicians would also have joined the Republican Party, and in fact would have done so sooner. There's no way to prove this hypothetical, of course, but it does explain why non-Dixiecrats like Ronald Reagan were also switching parties at the time. And it fits the pattern of Nixon's success: Nixon was winning in much of the country, not just the South. In short, Dixiecrats were becoming Republicans for the same reason that so many other people were, not because the Republican Party ideology was based on racism.
posted by David Nieporent at 12/21/2002 06:30:00 AM |

 

Dog bites man: The New York Times criticizes Republicans

Here's a shocker: the New York Times approves of Trent Lott's demotion, but still isn't satisfied with the Republican Party. To the Times, Republicans are still tainted by racial politics from 30 years ago, and are guilty of "talk[ing] nobly about civil rights in the North while playing to racial division in the South to lure white voters from the Democratic Party." There's some truth to that -- but what exactly does the Times expect? George W. Bush ran as a "compassionate conservative" and "a uniter, not a divider" in his campaign, and for his troubles was accused of supporting the murder of James Byrd, and received a grand total of 10% of the black vote, nationwide.

Who exactly is creating the "racial division" for the Republicans to "play to"? The Republicans who endorse racially neutral policies, or the NAACP/Democrats, who demand race-based preferences in schools and jobs and government benefits? Where was the New York Times when the NAACP accused Bush of endorsing lynching? When can we expect the editorial from the Times denouncing the NAACP and the Democratic Party for "talking nobly about civil rights in white communities while playing to racial division in black communities?"


(In case you were wondering, by the way, the Times disapproves of Lott's presumptive heir apparent, Bill Frist:

Mr. Frist's supporters include many moderate Republicans. His voting record, however, is reliably conservative, and he rarely deviates from the party line. For instance, despite his enthusiasm for advanced medical technologies, he has sided with Mr. Bush in opposing cloning of human tissues for therapeutic purposes, which is anathema to the anti-abortion forces. From Mr. Bush's point of view, Senator Frist is trouble-free.

Which of course means that from the New York Times' point of view, he might as well be Saddam Hussein. He's "reliably conservative?" Kiss of death.)
posted by David Nieporent at 12/21/2002 05:40:00 AM |

 

WWTD: What Would Trent Do?

Given all the talk of segregation lately, an interesting story: the California Supreme Court (which regulates judicial conduct in the state) is deciding whether to forbid judges from joining the Boy Scouts, because of the Boy Scouts' anti-gay policies. This poses a clash of principles. On the one hand, the Boy Scouts have the constitutional right to discriminate. (I should clarify that: if there were a constitutional right to discriminate, then many civil rights laws, such as ones that bar job discrimination, would be unconstitutional. The Boy Scouts' right falls under the First Amendment right of expressive association. That is, if you're associating with other people for the purpose of making a political statement, then your association is protected. The government cannot force the KKK to admit blacks, because that would destroy the entire purpose of the KKK. The reason job discrimination isn't protected in the same way is because employment is considered economic, not a political statement. You're not hiring a janitor to send the message that only people of a certain race can use Windex; you're hiring a janitor to keep your building clean.)

So if the Boy Scouts have a constitutional right to exclude gays, if they're just expressing their views, shouldn't judges have that same right? Well, if we were talking about bankers, or actors, or doctors, or athletes, the answer would be an unqualified yes. If we were talking about politicians, the same -- at least until the voters had their say. But judges are different. A judge, by virtue of his position, is limited in his acceptable behavior by a Code of Judicial Ethics. He must avoid not only impropriety, but the appearance of impropriety, and must not act in a way that casts "reasonable doubt on the judge's capacity to act impartially." So we circumscribe the ways in which a judge can conduct himself. For obvious reasons, a black party or attorney might not feel he could get a fair hearing before a white supremacist judge. But does the same apply to the Boy Scouts and gays? The Scouts do claim to stand, in part, for the message that homosexuality is unclean. But that's a minor part of their message, and I assume most members of the Scouts don't spend a lot of time pondering the issue. Should a judge not be allowed to be associated with an organization that's primarily about camping (I guess)? How closely do a judge's associations need to be scrutinized?

[Full disclosure: I spent a couple of years in the Cub Scouts. Other than the Pinewood Derby races, I didn't think much of it.]
posted by David Nieporent at 12/21/2002 05:07:00 AM |

 

Case in point

Krauthammer's point about the moral high ground, and Lott's decision to not only abandon that ground, but tear down all the trees and strip mine it bare is illustrated perfectly by this Op/Ed in the LA Times. All Republicans are racist, because they don't support "civil rights" -- as defined by the left to mean "racially biased laws":

Nickles at times has even exceeded Lott in his zeal to torpedo civil rights protections.

Lott and Nickles opposed the creation of a federal holiday for Martin Luther King Jr. and voted to abolish affirmative action in federal hiring.

But on the King holiday, Nickles went further and insultingly suggested that the holiday should be an unpaid holiday, celebrated on a Sunday.

Though Lott has publicly recanted his opposition to the King holiday and affirmative action, Nickles has not.

But Nickles is not the only top Republican -- and possible successor to Lott if he steps down as majority leader -- to wallow near the bottom on the Senate civil rights scorecard.

Tennessee Sen. Bill Frist and Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell opposed expanded hate-crime protections, greater funding for minority-owned businesses, efforts to end job discrimination by sexual orientation and affirmative action in federal hiring.

For far too long, conservatives let liberals define what constituted civil rights. Mandatory discrimination, racial preferences, quotas, special treatment. Opposition to those was branded as not merely wrong, but "racist." And as long as people like Trent Lott are given positions of authority, conservatives can't credibly argue otherwise. That's why Lott needed to be demoted.
posted by David Nieporent at 12/20/2002 06:26:00 PM |

 

Bye Bye

So Trent Lott is stepping down as majority leader. Finally. There are beached whales that make more graceful exits than Lott did, but he's out.

And why is this important? Charles Krauthammer explained it brilliantly this morning, while pointing out why so many conservatives were so eager to see him go. Some, certainly, simply felt that he was an inauthentic conservative who was hurting the party. Krauthammer agrees with these arguments, but then clarifies:

These arguments are fine. They are also inadequate. Even if none of these claims were true -- even if Lott were not a clumsy and ineffective leader, even if this did not affect Republican chances for winning future elections -- Lott would have to go. It is not a matter of politics. It is a matter of principle.

The principle is colorblindness, the bedrock idea enshrined in the 1964 Civil Rights Act that guides the thinking of the third strain of conservatism, neoconservatism. Neocons have been the most passionate about the Lott affair and the most disturbed by its meaning.

Why? Because many neoconservatives are former liberals. They supported civil rights when it meant equality between the races, and they turned against the civil rights establishment when it began insisting that some races should be more equal than others. Neoconservatives oppose affirmative action on grounds of colorblindness and in defense of the original vision of the civil rights movement: judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.

Having thus staked their ground for decades on colorblindness and a reverence for the civil rights movement as originally defined, neoconservatives were particularly appalled by Lott's endorsement of its antithesis, Thurmond segregationism. Not to denounce it -- on grounds not of politics but of principle -- would be to lose all moral standing on matters of race. Lott has subsequently provided even more evidence of his moral unfitness for leadership. In desperation to save himself, the clueless Lott has now groveled his way to supporting affirmative action. Two weeks ago he was pining for 1948 segregation; now, on Black Entertainment Television, he embraces 2002 racial preferences -- without even a pit stop at 1964 colorblindness! It's an amazing trajectory, and a disgraceful one. It can only happen to a man without a principled bone in his body on the issue of race.

In his multiple confessions, Lott has practically pledged himself to enacting the modern liberal agenda of racial preferences. It is an ironic recapitulation of what happened in the late '60s. Out of shame and atonement for the racist past, liberals abandoned racial blindness and became apologists for racial preferences. Lott's newfound shame and atonement are as phony as it gets, but the result is the same: He, too, has ricocheted from one kind of racialism to another. Except that he did it in one week.

A man who has no use -- let alone no feel -- for colorblindness has no business being a leader of the conservative party. True, if Lott is ousted, he might resign from the Senate and allow his seat to go Democratic, thus jeopardizing Republican control of the Senate and undoing the great Republican electoral triumph of 2002.

So be it. There is a principle at stake here. Better to lose the Senate than to lose your soul. New elections come around every two years. Souls are scarcer.

You can say that again.
posted by David Nieporent at 12/20/2002 05:55:00 PM |

 

Guns don't kill people, houses kill people

In the Wizard of Oz, a house came out of nowhere and killed the Wicked Witch of the East. Apparently, truth is stranger than fiction, because houses in Israel are now killing people all over the place. See, the "underlying cause" of all the deaths in Israel, according to terrorist spokespersonPalestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, is Israeli settlements. One might think the cause of violence is people who commit violence. But those wacky Palestinians know better.

There are currently two opportunities to save prospects for a two-state solution. First, the quartet must make a full and internationally monitored settlement freeze the top priority. Without such a freeze, ongoing settlement construction will only provoke more hostility and undermine any attempts to stop violence.

Get that? First Israel should stop building those evil killing machine-houses. Then we can have attempts to stop violence. No guarantees on whether those "attempts" will succeed, of course, as we can see...

Second, elections next month give Israelis the opportunity to send a message to Palestinians. By electing a leadership committed to evacuating settlements rather than building them, to ending the occupation rather than intensifying it, Israelis can undermine the Palestinian extremists and help bring an end to the horrors of the past two years.

So it's up to the Israelis to pacify -- to "undermine" -- Palestinian extremists. (Note that he doesn't bother to talk about Palestinian elections, presumably because he knows how silly that concept is.) He doesn't suggest that Palestinians "undermine" Israeli extremists by ceasing to blow up buses and supermarkets and the like. Israel apparently has to handle all sides of the peace "process," while Palestinians can just sit around twiddling their thumbs.
posted by David Nieporent at 12/20/2002 08:00:00 AM |

 

Apples and not-apples

With all due respect to my colleague Partha, the assertion that "These Middle Easterners are being treated like they are for no other reason than where they're from. That's how it's like Japanese-American internment" is completely wrong. Completely and utterly wrong. Had what happened today actually been what happened sixty years ago, the internment of Japanese would have been reasonable. There is nothing wrong with interning enemy aliens during a war. It happened with Japanese, with Italians, and with Germans. What made the World War II internments of Japanese problematic, what made their situation different than Germans and Italians, was that the Nisei and Sansei were interned, as well as the Issei. The relevant orders applied to "all persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and non-alien."

That's not a semantic difference; that's a real, significant difference. A citizen of a foreign country during wartime should expect to be singled out. Discrimination on the basis of citizenship -- i.e. "where they're from" -- is rational and reasonable (although this particular policy may or may not be). But the World War II internments were not based on "where they're from," but on ancestry. The World War II internments were done by people who insisted on viewing internees as "Japanese-Americans" instead of as "Americans."

That's not what's happening now. Only foreigners, non-citizens, on temporary visas are being required to register. And only those who broke the law, such as by overstaying their visas, are being detained. It's unclear to me how this is "unfair" or "not the American way."

[Update: I see that Eugene Volokh had a similar take on this brouhaha, and on the distinction between this and Japanese internment.]
posted by David Nieporent at 12/20/2002 07:06:00 AM |

 

Like predicting the Emmy winners by looking at UPN's schedule

Everyone links to this column, by political analyst John Ellis, who has begun handicapping the new, post-Gore Democratic presidential field for 2004. He suggests that South Carolina will be pivotal, winnowing the field of candidates down to two, and that those two are likely to be Dick Gephardt and John Kerry, with Joe Lieberman probably dropping out at that point. (He doesn't even mention John Edwards, which is interesting in itself.) And he's completely dismissive of Howard Dean and Wesley Clark.

But what he fails to address -- what so many analysts fail to address -- is the history of presidential elections. I fully recognize that John Ellis knows many more insiders than I do. If he tells us what these people are saying and thinking and planning, I'll buy it. But I can read history as well as anybody, and what I read is this: members of Congress don't win. Oh, sometimes they get nominated, though even that's pretty rare. But they don't get elected. Isn't that an important piece of information?

Since 1900, there have been 26 presidential elections. Unless I've missed someone, exactly two of those were won by someone coming directly from Congress. The most recent one was John Kennedy in 1960, forty years ago. (The other was Warren Harding, in 1920.) Indeed, if you expand the field to look at the losers of these elections, you only add three more: Barry Goldwater in 1964, George McGovern in 1972, and Bob Dole in 1996. (I only consider the major party nominees, for simplicity's sake.) So out of 52 election slots, we see just 5 sitting senators, of whom only two won.

Now, there's nothing deterministic about these statistics; there's no scientific law which prevents congressmen from becoming president. But doesn't the fact that nobody has been elected to the presidency from the House of Representatives since James Garfield in 1880 suggest something about Dick Gephardt's chances? (Indeed, barring an error on my part, I believe that was the last time a congressman even won his party's nomination.) Doesn't the fact that four decades have passed since a senator got elected tell us that John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and John Edwards might not be in as strong a position as people think?

Yes, I concede that it seems pretty absurd right now to suggest that Howard Dean could actually win the nomination, much less the presidency. But on the other hand, who would have guessed in 1990 that Bill Clinton would have been nominated? Did Mike Dukakis really look like the strongest Democratic candidate in 1986? Of course not. But governors are far more likely to be nominated, and win election, than senators are. So why is this factor always ignored? If I had to guess, I'd say that most pundits live in Washington and get their information from Washington sources. And who do Washington sources know? Washington politicians. I doubt they spend much time in Little Rock, or Montpelier, or Albany. So they're not really in a position to assess the governors' strengths and weaknesses, and the governors don't have people dropping their names every day around journalists and pundits. Maybe that's too simplistic -- but regardless, I'm not going to bet the mortgage money against Howard Dean.
posted by David Nieporent at 12/19/2002 06:04:00 AM |

 

We're a full-service blog

From my referral log: Yahoo! Search Results for busty arabs. Yep, you'll find them here.
posted by David Nieporent at 12/19/2002 02:39:00 AM |

 

The empire strikes back?

I'm sick of Trent Lott, but like a horrible traffic accident you can't avoid looking at, I seem to keep talking about him. I said that Lott was probably gone, and I think he is, but I did see this story earlier today in the New York Times about a conservative backlash to the Lott controversy. Now, you can't trust the New York Times to report accurately on conservatives, but if we assume they're accurate for once, some conservatives are still circling the wagons around Lott.

"I think he's been treated badly by the White House, I think he's been treated badly by his colleagues, for what was certainly, in my opinion, not a hanging offense," said Robert Novak, the television host and syndicated columnist.

"The Democrats wouldn't have kept it alive if conservatives had said let's not keep it alive," Mr. Novak said. "The conservatives all piled on, and when the president in his speech last Thursday said what he did, that opened the door wider."

Novak, though, is one of the only people -- Pat Buchanan is the other one I've heard -- who doesn't think that Lott said anything wrong in the first place. He didn't think any apology was required because it was a joke. He's so into partisan politics, though, that he can't even understand why conservatives are criticizing Lott. Let me rephrase: he's so into partisan politics that he doesn't even try to understand why conservatives are criticizing Lott. But that's understandable; Novak is into partisan politics as a spectator sport. His interest is ratings, not governing. For conservatives who actually care about the principles, who aren't just trying to raise money or put on a good show on television, the problem is Lott, not whether Democrats "win" a round.

My favorite quote in the article, though, is from South Carolina political operative Richard Quinn:

"Part of the Democrats' agenda," Mr. Quinn said, "is to confuse conservatism with racism."

Richard Quinn, of course, is the founder of Southern Partisan magazine, the one that tries to pretend that the Confederacy was about something other than slavery. Richard Quinn, as much as any liberal, has tried to confuse conservatism with racism. The only difference is that the liberal tries to confuse the two in order to discredit conservatism, while Quinn tries to confuse the two in order to legitimize racism.
posted by David Nieporent at 12/19/2002 12:53:00 AM |

 

Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy

David Duke has pleaded guilty to wire fraud and tax evasion. He could be sentenced to up to 15 months in prison and $10,000 in fines. (No, this isn't part of the Trent Lott theme of the week. Except maybe karmically.)
posted by David Nieporent at 12/18/2002 10:54:00 PM |

 

Of course, I've been wrong before

Andrew Sullivan proclaimed that Lott was done as soon as Don Nickles called for a leadership vote. I wasn't quite as convinced. But now I am. Another Republican senator has publicly come out against him, this time explicitly.

"It's time for a change," said Chafee, a moderate Republican from Rhode Island. "I think the biggest problem has been that his apologies haven't connected," he told WPRO-AM radio.

Yes, Lincoln Chaffee is a liberal Republican who may not -- almost certainly doesn't -- reflect the sentiment of the core of the Republican party. But that actually works in his favor, I think; with a near evenly divided Senate, the party can't afford to alienate Chaffee, who may be one Klan rally away from switching to the Democratic Party.

And as further evidence, Colin Powell came out and, while giving the obligatory I-don't-think-he's-a-racist, said, "I deplored the sentiments behind the statement. There was nothing about the 1948 election or the Dixiecrat agenda that should have been acceptable in any way, to any American, at that time or any American now." Does Powell say these things if the White House is standing by Lott? I don't think so. But the real kicker is Jeb Bush:

But his brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, said Lott's since recanted endorsement of South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist presidential campaign was "damaging" Republicans.

"It doesn't help to have this swirling controversy that Sen. Lott, in spite of his enormous political skills, doesn't seem to be able to handle well," Gov. Bush told The Miami Herald. "Something's going to have to change. This can't be the topic of conversation over the next week."

No way does Jeb inject himself into this controversy without his brother's permission and approval.

Lott's toast. The only question is how selfish he is, and how much damage he's willing to do to the party before admitting it.
posted by David Nieporent at 12/18/2002 05:38:00 PM |

 

Some dogs bite men.

Some companies will provide information about their customers to law enforcement agencies, even without a court order. Some companies won't. This startling news, coming from that magic news source -- a new study -- is made slightly more banal when one reads the caveat that, "The survey questions do not give a sense of what information might be shared or under what circumstances." So, in other words, the survey makes no distinction between a bank giving out personal account information for a guy arrested for littering, or a credit card company revealing a mailing address of a suspected terrorist.

The article does make one good point:

But growing concerns about government encroachments on privacy and civil liberties have not taken into account the degree to which people hand over information willingly, said Mark Rasch, a former federal prosecutor who now works for Solutionary, a computer security company.

"We've been so worried about giving them extra power and authority without worrying about what they can do with no extra power and no extra authority, just by asking," Mr. Rasch said.

When one has ideological blinders on, one can get so worked up about a particular issue -- the expansion of law enforcement authority, in this case -- that one misses the forest for the trees.


Here's an interesting aside, unrelated to the substantive point:

Nearly a quarter of the corporate security officers in a survey to be released today said they would supply information about customers to law enforcement officials and government agencies without a court order.

...and later...

Legal experts were divided on the implications of the survey. "

The survey hasn't been officially released yet, but we have a New York Times story on it, and quotes from several people about its "implications." Shouldn't a reporter wait until people actually read a survey before asking them about it? Or is this just another example of what CalPundit described last week: the formulaic approach to journalism, in which the reporter determines the topic of the story and then calls the usual suspects from the Rolodex, regardless of whether they have anything specific to contribute?
posted by David Nieporent at 12/18/2002 08:19:00 AM |

 

Brother, can you spare a dime?

Clearly, the Bush economic plan isn't working for ordinary folk:

Nicholas E. Calio, the White House liaison to Congress, announced today that he was leaving his $145,000-a-year position, for a job he did not disclose.

Whatever the new post, it is certain to come with a higher salary than his current government pay. Mr. Calio, who has a daughter in college, a son on the way to college, another daughter in private school and a wife who does not work outside the home, said he needed to make more money.

"I can't pay my bills," he said. "It comes down to the two F's: family and finances."

What's this world coming to when a man can't make even $150,000 a year in government? How can he expect to raise a family on that kind of money?
posted by David Nieporent at 12/18/2002 07:11:00 AM |

 

Woohoo!

I've been waiting a year, and The Lord of the Rings : The Two Towers opens today. I'll be going Saturday.
posted by David Nieporent at 12/18/2002 12:03:00 AM |

 

Maybe he should join the Council of Concerned Citizens

No wonder Canada took so long to put Hezbollah on their list of terrorist groups. One of my readers alerts me to this story (and now I see that Damien Penny links to it also), in which a "respected Saskatchewan Indian leader" praises Hitler.

In comments one local Jewish leader described as unfortunate, David Ahenakew, a senator with the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations (FSIN), a former chief of the organization and a former chief of the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), said the Nazi leader was trying to clean up the world during the war.

"The Jews damn near owned all of Germany prior to the war," Ahenakew said in an interview.

"That's how Hitler came in. He was going to make damn sure that the Jews didn't take over Germany or Europe.

"That's why he fried six million of those guys, you know. Jews would have owned the goddamned world. And look what they're doing. They're killing people in Arab countries."

I wonder if he'd apply the same logic to the treatment of Indians in the Americas. Were they a "disease" to be gotten "rid of?" Somehow I suspect he might not. Of course, in Canada, such speech might well constitute a crime (i.e., hate speech) -- thank god for the first amendment, since I hate lots of people -- but that's somewhat beside the point. Let's see whether he gets the Trent Lott treatment, or whether only speech against the right kind of minorities receives condemnation.
posted by David Nieporent at 12/17/2002 04:41:00 AM |

 

Is Univision next?

Unfortunately, I was eating at 8 PM. Then I decided to watch Trent Lott on BET. I need to clean up the floor, now; I couldn't keep dinner down. The two lowlights I remember:

• "I am for affirmative action, and I practice it. I hired black people for my staff." The only thing he left out was "Some of my best friends are black people."
  
• "My actions don't reflect my voting record." Huh? If anybody knows what that means, please let me know. It's either a repudiation of his voting record, or it's simply incoherent.
  

I think that about sums it up. Reading body language is always tricky, but I've seen burn victims who looked more comfortable than Lott did tonight. His explanations don't pass the laugh test. He didn't know who Martin Luther King Jr. was? He announced his retroactive support for Strom Thurmond's presidential campaign because Thurmond stood for anti-communism? As opposed to the pro-Soviet Harry Truman?

The questions about Charles Pickering showed the real problem with Lott remaining in power, though. Bill Clinton had no shame, and apparently neither does Trent Lott. But Bill Clinton was term limited, and his sins were personal, not ideological, so they couldn't seriously taint his agenda. Nobody was going to think that support for public health care, or taxes, was an endorsement of adultery. But with Lott, it's different. Everything and everyone he supports is going to be tainted with racism from now on. If he's majority leader, every bit of the Republican agenda, regardless of how active he is in promoting it, will be seen as racist by some. I've seen some conservatives saying that Lott should be removed as majority leader, but because he's not a good conservative rather than because of these comments. That's wrong. He should be removed for these comments. The fact is, we don't know whether Trent Lott is racist -- and the mere fact that we need to debate it is the problem.

And the mere fact that Lott won't step down is evidence of his lack of concern for the Republican party, and thus a reason to remove him.
posted by David Nieporent at 12/16/2002 09:38:00 PM |

 

Lotts more to come

The New York Times is reporting that Republicans are going to put on the full court press to support Trent Lott this weekend. They're going to send people out on the Sunday morning talk shows -- including supposed "maverick" John McCain -- to explain to us how Lott's really a wonderful guy, and how he was just funning us when he expressed his longing for segregation.

Still, Senate Republicans, in a conference call put together by Mr. Lott's supporters after Mr. Lott's news conference on Friday night, had decided to began a campaign on his behalf.

Several Senate officials said that was intended as much to help Mr. Lott as to protect Republicans from political damage.

The senators, in their meeting, discussed arguments that Mr. Lott's allies would use in their appearance on the Sunday morning talk shows to defend the senator and his party. According to participants, Mr. Lott's surrogates would say they accept Mr. Lott's apology and believe that he sincerely changed his ways over the years.

You mean, from 1980, when he wished a segregationist had been elected, to 2002, when he wished a segregationist had been elected? Joshua Micah Marshall, as everyone knows, has been all over this story, compiling a list of the dozens of red flags throughout Lott's career. Go look at the dates of the various little "incidents," and please pinpoint for me exactly when he "changed his ways."

They also intended to portray Republicans as a moderates who embraced civil rights.

Yes. Embrace civil rights. And white supremacists. It's a big tent, you know.

And the really bad news?

At the same time, Republicans said they would be planning to expedite consideration next year of legislation that Republicans said was intended to rebut the perception of the party as hostile to civil rights.

So Republicans won't do something that might actually show they repudiate Lott's views, by repudiating Trent Lott as leader. Instead, they'll either (a) push some watered-down policy proposals that will convince absolutely nobody of anything, or (b) they'll repudiate their own principles (HAHAHA) to push some big government, high-spending/affirmative action program. Which, of course, still won't convince anybody of anything.

I just don't get it. It's not like Trent Lott has actually accomplished much in his tenure as majority leader, or for that matter in the rest of his career. What exactly is the incentive to keep him on here? I know nobody wants to be seen bowing to pressure, but in this case, the pressure is coming from conservatives as much as, if not more than, from liberals. I'm sure Lott has built up some political capital over the years, but come on. Or is this just Republican stubbornness over the fact that the Democrats never abandoned Bill Clinton? Or is the blackmail theory true? Whatever the explanation, the Republican party is making a huge mistake here. They must see this. The only question is how gutless they really are.

posted by David Nieporent at 12/15/2002 07:18:00 AM |

 

Swing and a miss

I just watched Trent Lott's press conference, and my reaction is: pretty lame. It would have been an acceptable speech by Lott, had it been given the day this story broke. As a first apology, it might have seemed sincere. But now? Come on. He's learning as he gets older? What's that? He's sixty years old.

It was extremely reminiscent of Bob Torricelli's farewell speech, minus the farewell. When you're admitting you screwed up, and are begging for forgiveness, it's not the appropriate time to demand credit for good things you've done in the past. "I'm sorry I forgot our anniversary, honey. For the fifth year in a row. But, you know, I've worked hard to make sure I take out the trash every week and clean out the gutters."

And he's still "apologizing to those who got that impression," and apologizing for his "word choice," instead of admitting that he actually said something wrong. Now, I don't expect him to say, "I'm racist," whether he is or isn't. But couldn't he acknowledge that the words themselves were? He started off strong, condemning segregation, but then he acted as if he were just a poor, misunderstood individual.


What I find amusing is that Tom Daschle, Paul Simon (the former senator, not the singer), and James Jeffords, liberals, have come out in support of Lott. It seems that the Old Boy's Club is stronger than any ideology. Most Republican/conservative commentators that I've read, particularly online, including but not limited to James Taranto, Andrew Sullivan, Jonah Goldberg, Charles Krauthammer, David Frum, and Bill Kristol, have come out against Lott, but his buddies are standing by him.
posted by David Nieporent at 12/13/2002 06:32:00 PM |

 

Two out of three ain't bad

Just heard on the news: Henry Kissinger has just resigned as head of the independent commission set up to investigate 9/11. Earlier today, Cardinal Law resigned his post as archbishop of the Boston Archdiocese, and the Pope accepted his resignation. And in a few minutes, Trent Lott is scheduled to hold a press conference over his outrageous comments, but CNN is reporting that he won't step down.

(Actually, I don't necessarily have an opinion on the Kissinger resignation yet, but I couldn't resist the headline.)
posted by David Nieporent at 12/13/2002 05:29:00 PM |

 

Didn't see that one coming

Exhibit A in Why Trent Lott Needs To Go: Bob Herbert's column in today's New York Times. It's entirely predictable, entirely dangerous, and very simple: Republicans are all racist. Trent Lott proves it.

But Mr. Lott is not the only culprit here. The Republican Party has become a haven for white racist attitudes and anti-black policies. The party of Lincoln is now a safe house for bigotry. It's the party of the Southern strategies and the Willie Horton campaigns and Bob Jones University and the relentless and unconscionable efforts to disenfranchise black voters. For those who now think the Democratic Party is not racist enough, the answer is the G.O.P. And there are precious few voices anywhere in the G.O.P. willing to step up and say that this is wrong.

[...]

There are calls now for the ouster of Trent Lott as the Senate Republican leader. I say let him stay. He's a direct descendant of the Dixiecrats and a first-rate example of what much of his party has become.

Keep him in plain sight. His presence is instructive. As long as we keep in mind that it isn't only him.

Okay, I misspoke earlier. Republicans aren't all racist. Just most of them. "Much" of the Republican party wants to return to segregated schools, in Bob Herbert's mind.

And why should those of us who aren't Republicans care? Because Herbert also says this:

Much of the current success of the Republican Party was built on the deliberate exploitation of very similar sentiments. One of the things I remember about Mr. Reagan's 1980 presidential run was that his first major appearance in the general election campaign was in Philadelphia, Miss., which just happened to be the place where three civil rights workers — Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney — were murdered in 1964.

During that appearance, Mr. Reagan told his audience, "I believe in states' rights."

Enough said.

Yes, enough said. As long as people like Trent Lott are spewing their idiocies, perfectly legitimate principles such as federalism will be tarred with the racism brush, either by demagogues like Al Gore or by people like Bob Herbert who are too dumb to know better. Republicans are never going to win over black voters on issues like affirmative action, but there is common ground -- school vouchers, the elimination of the death tax -- on which they could work. But not as long as Trent Lott is one of the major faces of the Republican party. It's not like he's some sort of genius; if he were, he wouldn't be in this mess. He's replaceable. And Republicans need to replace him, yesterday.
posted by David Nieporent at 12/12/2002 07:08:00 AM |

 

Like a kid in a candy store

You're walking along the street. Suddenly, a bag filled with hundred dollar bills falls from the sky at your feet. Whoopee! Paul Krugman is acting as if he's that lottery winner right now. For a couple of years, he has been bashing Republicans as evil liars who are out to destroy the country. Now, thanks to Trent Lott's idiocy, Krugman gets to call all Republicans racist. He's been chomping at the bit for years to claim that opposition to excessive government was the equivalent of joining the KKK, and Trent Lott handed him his own head on a silver platter.

And even so, Krugman couldn't resist overreaching in a desperate attempt to smear all Republicans:

Indeed, this year efforts to suppress nonwhite votes were remarkably blatant. There were those leaflets distributed in black areas of Maryland, telling people they couldn't vote unless they paid back rent; there was the fuss over alleged ballot fraud in South Dakota, clearly aimed at suppressing Native American votes. Topping it off was last Saturday's election in Louisiana, in which the Republican Party hired black youths to hold signs urging their neighbors not to vote for Mary Landrieu.

Say what? Accusing people who commit fraud of fraud is "an effort to suppress nonwhite votes?" Asking people not to vote for one's opponent is "an effort to suppress nonwhite votes?" Next Krugman will complain that Republicans have to all stop buying campaign ads, because these ads are insidious attempts to get people to vote against the Democrats.

Anyway, even if Krugman thinks the media isn't playing up the Trent Lott story enough, that will probably change tomorrow, now that Al Gore has weighed in. He thinks the Senate needs to censure Trent Lott for his racist statement. (Incidentally, I didn't hear Gore suggesting that the Congress censure David Bonior, Jim McDermott, or Mike Thompson for their pro-Saddam Hussein comments in Baghdad. Which is worse: supporting a murderous dictator, or supporting a guy for segregationist views when he himself abandoned those views decades ago?)

I don't know whether Trent Lott is a racist. But if he's not, he's a jackass who's doing a damn good job of faking it. And if he is, well, that speaks for itself. Apologizing isn't enough; he has singlehandedly driven a stake through the "compassionate" side of "compassionate conservatism." I don't know that he needs to leave the Senate, but I don't think the Republican party can afford to keep him in a leadership role anymore. Sorry, Trent, but as Ari Fleischer tried to warn you last year, "Americans need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that; there never is."
posted by David Nieporent at 12/10/2002 12:10:00 PM |

 

I'll drink to that

In an article attempting to lightheartedly portray the prevalence of alcohol in Iraq, the New York Times slips in these comments about how things have changed:

After his defeat in the Persian Gulf war in 1991, he was an isolated figure, no longer credible as a pretender to the leadership of the Arab world. His 1996 "iman" campaign — the word means faith in Arabic — was one response. He began showing up more regularly at mosques and suffusing his speeches with Koranic references, and in the late 1990's he ordered the construction of two new Baghdad mosques that are to be the biggest in the Islamic world, one to be named after himself.

Deviations from Islamic social norms also caught his eye. According to Western human rights reports, one result of the faith campaign that has gained increasing momentum in the last year has involved the arrest and summary execution of prostitutes, some of them by sword.

The 1996 ban on drinking in public places was another result. Iraqis say its most obvious effect, apart from the closure of bars and pubs, has been the proliferation of speakeasies and a sharp rise in drinking at home.

Hmm. Remember all the anti-war types who insist that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda couldn't possibly have any dealings because Hussein is secular and Al Qaeda is religious?
posted by David Nieporent at 12/10/2002 10:08:00 AM |

 

Garbage in, garbage out

Great article by Joshua Kurlantzick in The New Republic arguing that the Chinese economic boom is a myth, and that the real conditions of the economy are very different than those reported in the media. The article focuses on the implications for American businesses and American foreign policy if the hype turns out to be false, but the part that caught my eye was the explanation:

How could Rawski's numbers differ so much from Beijing's? The primary explanation is that China's national economic statistics, which are compiled from provincial data, have no safeguards against political meddling. When the central government declares its growth targets early in a year-- in 1998, for example, Beijing announced that 8 percent annual growth was "a political responsibility"--provincial officials simply make up numbers to substantiate them. "China's statistics are based on a Soviet-type system where each town and province reports figures, rather than having a national organization do the reports, and many local officials I have met feel intense pressure to meet targets," says Joe Studwell, editor of the China Economic Quarterly. In 2001 alone, according to the government's own State Statistical Bureau, there were over 60,000 reported falsifications of provincial data.

Other prominent economists share Rawski's doubts about China's reported growth rates. Leading Chinese economist and writer He Qinglian told me that, in 2000 and 2001, she traveled around southern China, stopping into provincial officials' offices. When she asked them for their provincial GDP statistics and their methodologies, many were unable to provide either; when they did provide them, the numbers almost never added up.

In private, and when speaking to certain domestic reporters, even China's leaders admit the fix is in. When Rawski and other leading economists chat with official statisticians in Beijing, they often hear that no one in the government believes recent GDP numbers.

It's good news if that's true in Beijing, but many people outside the Chinese government swallow these sorts of numbers credulously.

This points out a larger problem: people tend to believe statistics, no matter how flimsily those statistics are supported, if the statistics coincide with their world view. I was watching Phil Donahue yesterday -- yes, one of the four or five people who did -- in yet another of his endless series of programs attempting to prove how supporting Saddam Hussein is the moral thing to do, and one of his guests trotted out the old sanctions-killing-billions-of-Iraqi-babies canard. Phil Donahue echoed his approval, pointing out that these were U.N. numbers, so they had to be believed. Now, Matt Welch has already thoroughly debunked this statistic, but that's not the point. The point is the total willingness of the speaker, the host, and the audience to believe these numbers, just because some organization published them, with no investigation of how the numbers were calculated. In my own experience, I can't count the number of defenders of Fidel Castro I've run into who cite his great successes with literacy, infant mortality, and universal health care as "proof" of the superiority of socialism to the American system. I always wonder exactly how these people become so convinced of these numbers. Saddam Hussein claims a 100% re-election rate, and nobody takes him seriously. But Fidel Castro claims a 99% literacy rate, and people proclaim him a genius. So now people are doing the same with China.
posted by David Nieporent at 12/10/2002 09:19:00 AM |

 

Happy Thanksgiving

Enjoy the food, and your families.
posted by David Nieporent at 11/28/2002 05:07:00 AM |

 

In our name

I meant to post this last week, but Thanksgiving might be an even more appropriate time. Vincent Ferrari has put together a little pledge to let people know that signing petitions doesn't have to be a wacky leftist thing. I know that not all of my friends agree that the U.S. should get involved around the world, but I think most can agree that we shouldn't be afraid to stand up for ourselves. At a time when death threats are issued against newspaper editors, someone needs to say that freedom isn't a western value; it's a human value. At a time when humanitarian workers are murdered, someone needs to say that defending liberty isn't insensitive. At a time when terrorist attacks happen almost every day, someone needs to say that self-defense isn't illegal or immoral, and that appeasement isn't the more "sophisticated" approach. Vincent has done that.
posted by David Nieporent at 11/28/2002 04:59:00 AM |

 

C'est la vie

Public sector employees are striking in France. Why? Why not?

"We are saying no to privatization in public service," said Thierry Victoire-Feron, a postal worker who earns only $1,200 a month after 20 years on the job. "As civil servants we will no longer have jobs for life. We have to keep our tradition of strikes. It's a French thing to do."

That is, when they're not trashing McDonalds or appeasing dictators.
posted by David Nieporent at 11/28/2002 01:48:00 AM |

 

Huh?

I'm a big admirer of Steven Den Beste's blog USS Clueless -- especially for the way he spends the time to think through issues and explain his thoughts, rather than posting the typical blogger's short link + snarky comment format. (And yes, I include myself in that latter category.) That having been said, the major problem with Steven's approach is that when he goes off track, he ends up many paragraph-miles beyond left field. And he's way off the deep end with his latest missive, in which he argues that blog boycotts are wrong.

(The background, for those of you not familiar: a lefty blogger, Jim Capozzola, has announced that his blog, Rittenhouse Review, is going to engage in a vast boycott of the wonderful Little Green Footballs, which concentrates on Middle East/War on Terror issues. Not only is Rittenhouse going to refuse to link to LGF, but it is going to refuse to link to any blog that links to LGF. This is generally known as a secondary boycott. Although, in a sense, this case is a tertiary boycott, because Rittenhouse objects primarily to what readers of LGF say, rather than to what LGF says.)

Steven argues against Rittenhouse's approach:

In essence, you have no obligation to associate with people like that. You have no obligation to in any way help them spread their opinions. But you should not attempt to actively suppress them, to actively work to try to prevent them from expressing their point of view. In part that means you should not attempt to use the power of government to persecute them, but it also means you should not attempt to coerce others to join you, except through the power of argument on the basis of the issues. Where you cross the line is when you do anything which works to prevent others from making up their own minds.

Translated into modern terms and choosing an example, it would go like this: if you hate the Nazis, you should not link to their web site. If you find others who do link to the Nazis, you can send them mail and try to convince them that the Nazis are despicable and that the link should be removed on that basis. But when you go beyond that, and try to use means not related to the issues (e.g. threatening a boycott of the person's business) then you've crossed the line. You've ceased to try to deal with the issues, and moved into attempts to suppress information to prevent others from even being exposed to the issues. That's where disapproval ends and censorship begins.

To quote physicist Wolfgang Pauli when confronted with a bizarre paper submitted to him by a colleague, "This isn't right. This isn't even wrong."

Now, do I agree with Rittenhouse Review's position? Not in the least, substantively or procedurally. Rittenhouse is wrong about LGF; it is not a hate site (although some of the posters do cross the line from time to time.) Rather, it is an extremely valuable site, the most comprehensive MidEast-related blog in existence. But even if LGF were a lousy, hate site, Rittenhouse's position would be silly. Site A linking to Site B does not mean that Site A agrees with Site B. Will Rittenhouse also refuse to link to newspapers that print Osama Bin Laden's alleged manifesto?

But a boycott, primary, secondary, or tertiary, is not censorship. It isn't even coercion. There's no force here. It's simply a refusal to associate. (I suspect that if Steven found his friends hanging around with white supremacists, or vocal supporters of Osama Bin Laden, he might well tell his buddies that he can't remain friends with them if they're going to run in these crowds.) That doesn't prevent other people from associating.

Steven seems to be worried about the slippery slope: what if a lot of people do what Rittenhouse is doing? Wouldn't that force everyone to stop linking to LGF? Well, first of all, of course it wouldn't. It would only convince those people who value Rittenhouse-related links more than LGF-related links to stop linking. Those would primarily be the people who didn't and wouldn't link to LGF in the first place; the people who think LGF has something worthwhile to say would hardly be worried about a threat from Rittenhouse. Second, what if it did cause most to stop linking? Steven wants to create a "freedom to listen," but (a) no such thing could exist, and (b) this wouldn't infringe on that right if it did. The wonderful thing about the internet is that there need be no centrally-planned distribution. LGF could go along happily whether or not anybody put it in his blogroll.

I don't argue that there are no dangers; if Google stopped indexing a site, that could pose a serious threat to that site's existence. But Rittenhouse Review is not Google. Even Instapundit is not Google. And search engines are unlikely to join a boycott, since that would discredit the search engine, doing far more harm to the engine than to the site. Rittenhouse Review has only the leverage people choose to give to it. It's no big deal.
posted by David Nieporent at 11/27/2002 08:07:00 PM |

 

9/11 Proves that Americans Don't Like Muslims

Last week, an American nurse/missionary was murdered by Islamists in Lebanon. Perhaps I'm reading something into this that wasn't intended, but it sure sounds to me like the New York Times is claiming that it was her fault, given this headline: Killing Underscores Enmity of Evangelists and Muslims. Say what? Enmity of evangelists and Muslims? Who killed who, here?

"She was in the habit of gathering the Muslim children of the quarter and preaching Christianity to them while dispensing food and toys and social assistance," he said, and her actions upset the city's Muslim hierarchy. "In these times, there are people in the Muslim community who don't even want to hear the word `conversion.' "

The Rev. Sami Dagher, regional leader of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, which ran the clinic where Mrs. Witherall volunteered, denies that she did any proselytizing outside the clinic. He sidesteps the general issue of conversion, however, saying the group merely seeks to expose people to the idea that Jesus Christ is their savior and let them decide for themselves.

But a somewhat more direct goal emerges amid the Web site postings of the previous pastor and his wife, Darrell and Cheryl Phenicie, who were here when Muslim resentment of missionary activities broke into the open last year, but have since moved back to the United States.

"Dramatic conversions are being reported," it says. "And nearly 600 women have received prenatal care and heard the good news of our compassionate Healer, Jesus Christ."

Yeah, it really sounds as if those missionaries hate the Lebanese, doesn't it? Food, toys, social assistance, prenatal care.

Read on, though, and it gets even worse:

Sheik Hammoud said Muslim religious leaders grew wary of the Christian and Missionary Alliance because its members combined computer lessons, English instruction and gifts of toys and candy with Sunday school classes for hundreds of Muslim children. "It was upsetting to hear about this because they were trying to exploit their poverty to get them to change their religion," said the sheik, who began denouncing the missionary alliance last fall from the pulpit.

After the initial outcry last year, the church agreed to stop sending its vans out to collect children from poor neighborhoods and Palestinian refugee camps for Sunday school. It considered the matter settled.

But Muslims continued to protest. The missionary alliance remained the target of Friday sermons and last spring a small but influential Muslim monthly called "The Pulpit of the Calling" denounced the group as a Zionist organization.

"They destroy the fighting spirit of the children, especially of the Palestinian youth, by teaching them not to fight the Jews, for the Palestinians to forgive the Jews and leave them Jerusalem," the article said. It also said the group lured the children and young men with promises of an education in the United States, and then threatened to take it all away if they did not convert to Christianity.

For these Muslim fanatics, it always comes back to the Jews, doesn't it?
posted by David Nieporent at 11/26/2002 07:38:00 AM |

 

Silliness in black and white

The Weekly Standard summarizes the latest controversy involving the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. It seems that, with the liberal chairwoman Mary Frances Berry no longer having a majority on the Commission (and thus being unable to run roughshod over conservative members), she has found a way to do an end-run around the Republican appointees: she has her staff write the report, and fails to even to show it to the Republicans.

This has raised questions about fairness and procedure and Berry's fitness for the job. But here's a better question: why exactly do we have a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights? What purpose does it serve? If you're like me, you've probably never thought much about the organization or its origins. Well, according to its About Us page:

The United States Commission on Civil Rights (Commission) is an independent, bipartisan, fact-finding agency of the executive branch established under the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The Commission has the following mandate:

• Investigate complaints alleging that citizens are being deprived of their right to vote by reason of their race, color, religion, sex, age, disability, or national origin, or by reason of fraudulent practices;
  
• Study and collect information relating to discrimination or a denial of equal protection of the laws under the Constitution because of race, color, religion, sex, age, disability, or national origin, or in the administration of justice;
  
• Appraise Federal laws and policies with respect to discrimination or denial of equal protection of the laws because of race, color, religion, sex, age, disability, or national origin, or in the administration of justice;
  
• Serve as a national clearinghouse for information in respect to discrimination or denial of equal protection of the laws because of race, color, religion, sex, age, disability, or national origin;
  
• Submit reports, findings, and recommendations to the President and Congress;
  
• Issue public service announcements to discourage discrimination or denial of equal protection of the laws.

In short, they write reports. They have a budget of $9 million to write reports. Reports which, of course, nobody reads.

Keep in mind that the Department of Education has an Office for Civil Rights. The Department of Health and Human Services has an Office for Civil Rights. The Department of Transportation has an Office for Civil Rights. The Department of Agriculture has an Office of Civil Rights. The State Department has an Office of Civil Rights. The Federal Aviation Administration (!) has an Office for Civil Rights. (I could go on, but you'd probably kill me. Do the Google search yourself if you're interested.) And, of course, the Gulliver among all these Lilliputians: the Department of Justice has a Civil Rights Division, which does everything the Commission on Civil Rights does, as well as having actual enforcement powers.

So why exactly does the Commission on Civil Rights exist? (Other than the obvious: for Democrats, it's a sop to the black community, and for Republicans, it would open them up to further charges of racism if they tried to kill it.) There's some sort of lesson here about the self-perpetuation of government, but I'm too disgusted to draw it.
posted by David Nieporent at 11/26/2002 07:16:00 AM |

 

A study in contrasts

Some people wonder why the United States supports Israel? Maybe it has something to do with this: while the hottest historical work in the Arab world is the Protcols of the Elders of Zion -- or rather, a television show based on the century-old forgery, the Israelis are studying the Federalist Papers.
posted by David Nieporent at 11/26/2002 05:31:00 AM |

 

I'm Emmitt Smith

The FBI, finally doing something useful, arrested several people involved in a huge identity theft scheme.

An identity-theft ring that relied on a low-level employee of a Long Island software company stole the credit histories of more than 30,000 people and used them to empty bank accounts, take out false loans and run up charges on credit cards, among other crimes, federal authorities in Manhattan said yesterday.

This is believed to be the largest-ever identity-theft case in the nation, federal officials said yesterday, in terms of the number of victims, the type of detailed personal information about them that was stolen and the losses — at least $2.7 million and likely to climb much higher. The authorities were still trying to determine how many of the 30,000 victims suffered financial losses.

Note that with all the hype over internet security, with credit card companies devoting commercial after commercial to assuring us that we can shop online safely without having to worry about hackers, this was a simple old-fashioned approach. These criminals simply used an inside source to acquire credit histories, and then either opened new accounts or accessed existing ones. It's just another sign that worries about new technology are generally overstated. The worst case scenarios rarely happen; why bother hacking into Amazon.com to steal someone's credit card number when there are so many common, everyday, low-tech ways to get one? And yet people get hysterical over possible new dangers, while accepting existing ones matter-of-factly.
posted by David Nieporent at 11/26/2002 04:45:00 AM |

 

It's funny because it's true

In a typically hilarious Mark Steyn column about the lack of commitment among many to the war against Islamofascism, he has an important insight:

Daniel Pipes and others have argued that this is the Islamists' great innovation -- an essentially political project piggybacking on an ancient religion. In the last year, we've seen the advantages of such a strategy: You can't even identify your enemy without being accused of bigotry and intolerance.

Exactly. The United States has to spend more time explaining who its enemies aren't -- the Iraqi people, Islam, Muslims, the Palestinian people, the Afghan people -- than who they are -- all the people I named that we have to pretend I didn't name. I'm not saying the World War II approach of portraying our enemies as subhuman is the ideal approach, but can't we at least admit that we're at war? We've gotten to the point that if we actually manage to kill a terrorist, we have to apologize because we didn't read him his rights first.
posted by David Nieporent at 11/26/2002 04:15:00 AM |

 

You think there's any connection?

Two stories seen this week. The dismal results of a National Geographic survey that was just released:

Young Americans may soon have to fight a war in Iraq, but most of them can't even find that country on a map, the National Geographic Society said Wednesday.

The society survey found that only about one in seven -- 13 percent -- of Americans between the age of 18 and 24, the prime age for military warriors, could find Iraq. The score was the same for Iran, an Iraqi neighbor.

and, from a New York Times story on new NCAA requirements:

He said that SUNY-Buffalo's president, William Greiner, had made increasing football attendance, and remaining in Division I-A, a university-wide priority.

"When you look at the peer universities that we measure ourselves against academically, you look to see what is missing here, and about 90 percent of our aspiring peers are strong in athletics," Vecchio said. "We are already there academically, but a lot of people don't find out about Michigan's science program or its tremendous fine arts program until they have learned about it through football or basketball."

No comment.
posted by David Nieporent at 11/24/2002 03:12:00 AM |

 

All animals are equal. Some are more equal than others.

When is it okay to be rich? If you're willing to spend everyone else's money. That's the message of Paul Krugman's latest column. His argument is that a society where rich people can pass along money to their children is evil. Well, sort of. Because he can't resist turning it into a partisan argument, the column becomes completely incoherent. Conservatives are all incomptent boobs who benefit from nepotism, he suggests:

America, we all know, is the land of opportunity. Your success in life depends on your ability and drive, not on who your father was.

Just ask the Bush brothers. Talk to Elizabeth Cheney, who holds a specially created State Department job, or her husband, chief counsel of the Office of Management and Budget. Interview Eugene Scalia, the top lawyer at the Labor Department, and Janet Rehnquist, inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services. And don't forget to check in with William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, and the conservative commentator John Podhoretz.

What's interesting is how little comment, let alone criticism, this roll call has occasioned. It might be just another case of kid-gloves treatment by the media, but I think it's a symptom of a broader phenomenon: inherited status is making a comeback.

Careful readers would note that this really has little to do with the rest of his column, which is about economic mobility. Note, though, that Andrew Cuomo, or Hillary Clinton, or Al Gore, or Nancy Pelosi, or Linda Daschle, or any one of a million Kennedys aren't listed. Why not? 'Cause they ain't Republican.

Why exactly should there be criticism? Is Krugman implying that these people aren't qualified for the jobs they hold? If so, he should say that explicitly. If not, what's his argument? That someone who's qualified on the merits should be disqualified if he's related to someone else famous?

But here's where the argument goes from muddled to absurd:

It wasn't always thus. The influential dynasties of the 20th century, like the Kennedys, the Rockefellers and, yes, the Sulzbergers, faced a public suspicious of inherited position; they overcame that suspicion by demonstrating a strong sense of noblesse oblige, justifying their existence by standing for high principles. Indeed, the Kennedy legend has a whiff of Bonnie Prince Charlie about it; the rightful heirs were also perceived as defenders of the downtrodden against the powerful.

See? If you spend other people's money, you're a good person. Noblesse oblige used to involve giving away your own money. Now "high principles" = "government spending." And does having sex with lots of women really qualify as a "high principle"?

But today's heirs feel no need to demonstrate concern for those less fortunate. On the contrary, they are often avid defenders of the powerful against the downtrodden. Mr. Scalia's principal personal claim to fame is his crusade against regulations that protect workers from ergonomic hazards, while Ms. Rehnquist has attracted controversy because of her efforts to weaken the punishment of health-care companies found to have committed fraud.

Hmm. I thought Scalia was crusading against costly heavy-handed government rules that cost workers their jobs.

You'd think, after the last couple of elections, Democrats would give up on the idea that they could play More Compassionate Than Thou just because they support big government. Krugman hasn't quite gotten that message.
posted by David Nieporent at 11/23/2002 08:05:00 PM |

 

It must be the fault of the United States. Everything is.

Remember all that angst on the left over George Bush's arrogant unilateralism pertaining to the International Criminal Court? How come we don't hear similar complaints with regard to obstructionism by a country that actually needs such war crimes trials?

After nine months, the United Nations revived plans yesterday for an international trial for the surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge. They are charged with genocide and gross human rights violations in the deaths of more than one million Cambodians in the 1970's.

But the resolution that ultimately passed in a key committee had been watered down to meet Cambodia's approval.

[...]

The measure also notes with approval a new Cambodian law that insists that Cambodia's ill-trained and corrupt courts have the final say in the proceedings, rather than the United Nations.

Yeah, who could have seen that one coming? Who could foresee that Cambodia would stall and delay and then allow farcical trials only?

This is why President Bush is right to oppose American participation in the I.C.C. There will always be a double standard, with Americans being expected to go along with whatever international bureaucrats come up with. Meanwhile, countries with no real respect for human rights, the ones actually breaking the rules, will get a free pass, because after all, you can't demand too much of them.
posted by David Nieporent at 11/22/2002 03:49:00 AM |

 

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

A bunch of teenagers getting drunk is hardly something to make a federal case out of. But apparently New York Senator Charles Schumer wants to do so -- literally.

Sen. Charles Schumer is asking the Justice Department to look into the underage drinking problem in Westchester County, which has seen several startling episodes of teen drunkenness _ and one death at a party _ in the past year.

At a news conference with County Executive Andrew Spano, Schumer called on the department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention to study why alcohol is so readily available to minors and why there is excessive drinking among minors in Westchester.

"When teenagers are literally dying for a drink, we need to do everything in our power to fix the situation," Schumer said. "Teenagers have always tried to drink and can access alcohol too easily. This is nothing new and it's certainly not just a local problem. But we still don't know exactly how to deal with it."

The problem has recently won wide attention in Westchester. From the Chappaqua football team's beer-and-a-stripper party to Scarsdale's chaotic homecoming dance, where as many as 200 students arrived drunk, inebriated teens have raised the concerns of parents, teachers and law enforcement.

Wow. Drinking in high school. Whoda thunk it?

I know that Democrats don't believe in federalism, but I still can't begin to fathom how Schumer thinks this is a reasonable idea. Oh, I know -- it's For The Children ™. But what really galls me is the ideologues like Paul Krugman who insist that tax cuts are such a dangerous idea. If the federal government has enough resources to look into high school parties, it's too damn big. That would seem obvious and indisputable to me. I don't know why the government at any level is worried about such a trivial matter -- but certainly there's no reason for the federal government to be.

Chuck Schumer wants to know why kids drink? People like drinking. There. I just saved millions of taxpayer dollars. The only remaining question? Oh: why didn't I ever get invited to the beer-and-stripper parties? Maybe we can do a federal study of that.
posted by David Nieporent at 11/20/2002 11:21:00 PM |

 

Or else

Last week, Al Qaeda sent a letter to Al Jazeera making more threats. The news got less attention because it happened at the same time that the alleged Osama Bin Laden tape surfaced. Or, at least, I paid it less attention for that reason. But perhaps it would have been useful to focus on Al Qaeda's specific demands:

[A statement attributed to Al Qaeda threatened more attacks in New York and Washington unless the United States stops supporting Israel and converts to Islam, according to a reporter for Al Jazeera television news who said he received the unsigned letter.

[The reporter, Yosri Fouda, told The Associated Press that he received the six-page letter on Wednesday, a day after Al Jazeera broadcast an audiotape purportedly made by Osama bin Laden. He said the statement called on Americans to stop supporting Israel and other governments that "oppress" Muslims or face more attacks. It also called on all Americans to convert to Islam, he said.

[The statement also demanded that American troops leave the Arabian Peninsula, and justified the killings of American civilians because they pay taxes that finance the military, Mr. Fouda said.]

Everyone in the Blame America First crowd is quick to point out the specific grievances that Al Qaeda claims -- support for Israel, support for other Middle East governments, troops in Saudi Arabia. But they conveniently ignore what some of us have been saying for a long time: Islamofascists doesn't want "peaceful coexistence" with the west. They don't believe Islam is a religion of peace. They want conversion by the sword. Or suicide bomb.
posted by David Nieporent at 11/20/2002 05:28:00 PM |

 

Pot. Kettle. Well, you know.

Isn't there something a little unseemly about the New York Times gloating about media bias? It's one thing to write a story about Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News Channel, providing advice to the president, and pointing out that this creates the appearance of impropriety. (Of course, the Times did that also.) But to add a second piece saying "Gotcha"?

The revelation that Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, the self-proclaimed fair and balanced news channel, secretly gave advice to the White House after the Sept. 11 attacks was less shocking than it was liberating — a little like the moment in 1985 when an ailing Rock Hudson finally explained that he had AIDS.

Ever since Mr. Ailes changed jobs from Republican strategist to news executive, he has demanded to be treated as an unbiased journalist, not a conservative spokesman. But the cable channel he controls has an undisguised ideological agenda, which has made his protestations a bit puzzling.

For the record, I agree with these comments -- but they apply equally to Howell Raines' New York Times, as bloggers from Ira Stoll to Andrew Sullivan to Susanna Cornett have documented extensively. They spin polls, ignore inconvenient facts, and slant their reporting.

Case in point:

Even the most doctrinaire Democrats would concede that there is room in the United States news media for a conservative cable news network. What galled even some right wingers was Mr. Ailes's refusal to accept the label.

Of course. Which "right wingers" were "galled"? The simple way to prove you're not biased, as every Washington insider knows: claim that people on the other side of the aisle agree with you. The problem is that the Times keeps getting caught falsely attributing opinions to people -- remember the Henry Kissinger fiasco? So now they just cite anonymous people.

And, the icing on the ironic cake is that the editorial was (as usual for the new New York Times) stuck into the news section. (This time, with the odd label "An Appraisal," instead of the more typical "News Analysis.") If Howell Raines wants to express an opinion, can't he do it on the Op/Ed page?
posted by David Nieporent at 11/19/2002 10:45:00 PM |

 

Subtext, schmubtext

Joshua Micah Marshall questions some Republican rhetoric:

More on Pelosi. For all the conservative chattering and outrage about alleged Democratic gay-baiting in Montana and South Carolina this Fall, don't we all know the subtext of Republican efforts to tag Pelosi as a "San Francisco Democrat"? Is this something we're not allowed to discuss? And why not?

Go ahead and discuss it, Joshua, but I don't believe that this is the "subtext" of the phrase at all. It's not as if Pelosi from Massachusetts, after all; she literally is a San Francisco Democrat.

(And what's with the claim of "alleged" Democratic gay-baiting? It was explicit, at least in the South Carolina situation.)

Still, if that perfectly descriptive phrase has become off-limits thanks to the Sensitivity Police, how about if we just go with "Berkeley Democrat?" It's not quite as geographically precise, but it captures the political image quite nicely.
posted by David Nieporent at 11/19/2002 08:52:00 AM |

 

Bush = evil

Paul Krugman could just write that every week. Then he wouldn't have to bother phoning it in like this, and it would be slightly less embarrassing.

Rule No. 1: Always have a cover story. The ostensible purpose of the Bush administration's plan to open up 850,000 federal jobs to private competition is to promote efficiency. Competitive vigor, we're told, will end bureaucratic sloth; costs will go down, and everyone — except for a handful of overpaid union members — will be better off.

And who knows? Here and there the reform may actually save a few dollars. But I doubt that there's a single politician or journalist in Washington who believes that privatizing much of the federal government — a step that the administration says it can take without any new legislation — is really motivated by a desire to reduce costs.

Rule No. 1: Always focus on motives. That way, it doesn't matter whether it's a good decision. After all, if you make the right decisions for the wrong reasons, you're still a bad person, worthy of condemnation. We saw this with the spectacularly successful welfare reform law of the mid-1990s; Republicans who supported it were denounced as "mean-spirited," thus relieving critics of any obligation of actually analyzing the law or its effects. Kind of like how Krugman dismissed the possibility of the idea working with a throwaway line -- it "may actually save a few dollars" -- and went right into attack mode.

Note also the Krugman tactic of the "virtual poll." Don't bother to find out what people think; just announce that everyone agrees with you, or at least probably so.

Rule No. 2: Always assume the worst case scenario for the proposal:

After all, there's a lot of experience with privatization by governments at all levels — state, federal, and local; that record doesn't support extravagant claims about improved efficiency. Sometimes there are significant cost reductions, but all too often the promised savings turn out to be a mirage. In particular, it's common for private contractors to bid low to get the business, then push their prices up once the government work force has been disbanded. Projections of a 20 or 30 percent cost saving across the board are silly — and one suspects that the officials making those projections know that.

So if sometimes there are significant cost reductions, how can officials "know" that their projections of significant cost reductions are silly?

Rule No. 3: Get past the innuendo and explain the real truth behind the proposal:

First, it's about providing political cover. In the face of budget deficits as far as the eye can see, the administration — determined to expand, not reconsider the program of tax cuts it initially justified with projections of huge surpluses — must make a show of cutting spending. Yet what can it cut? The great bulk of public spending is either for essential services like defense and the justice system, or for middle-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare that the administration doesn't dare attack openly.

Privatizing federal jobs is a perfect answer to this dilemma. It's not a real answer — the pay of those threatened employees is only about 2 percent of the federal budget, so efficiency gains from privatization, even if they happen, will make almost no dent in overall spending. For a few years, however, talk of privatization will give the impression that the administration is doing something about the deficit.

But distracting the public from the reality of deficits is, we can be sure, just an incidental payoff. So, too, is the fact that privatization is a way to break one of the last remaining strongholds of union power. Karl Rove is after much bigger game.

Ah. Karl Rove. The antichrist. So this is all an evil Republican plot. (Isn't that redundant, in Krugman's world?) But doesn't Krugman even read his own newspaper? Because just last week, the Times explained that this wasn't a sinister Karl Rove idea:

Paul C. Light, an expert on the federal bureaucracy at New York University and the Brookings Institution, the liberal-leaning research group, called the administration's policy "an aggressive and a dramatic extension" of the effort by both parties at all levels of government to save money and improve the quality of public services.

Mr. Light said the Clinton administration had shifted many federal government jobs to private contractors in an effort to show it was reducing the size of government.

Oops.

Not bothered by these facts, though, Krugman goes on to assert that this is all a plot to get campaign contributions for the Republican Party. (The possibility that the status quo is an attempt to buy votes for the Democratic Party doesn't even enter his one-track Bush-hating mind.)

To paraphrase a famous American, "Paul Krugman, have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"
posted by David Nieporent at 11/19/2002 08:29:00 AM |