South Dakota Politics

The National Popular Vote Idea comes to South Dakota

The National Popular Vote bill is a curious piece of reform legislation circulating among the states. Here is a brief summary

Under the U.S. Constitution, the states have exclusive and plenary (complete) power to allocate their electoral votes, and may change their state laws concerning the awarding of their electoral votes at any time. Under the National Popular Vote bill, all of the state's electoral votes would be awarded to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The bill would take effect only when enacted, in identical form, by states possessing a majority of the electoral votes—that is, enough electoral votes to elect a President (270 of 538).

I can't think of any cases (excepting Constitutional Amendments) where a very important reform passed by a state legislature would take effect only if enough other states acted in the same way. It strikes me that this makes it easier to pass the legislation now without knowing when or if it will accomplish anything. It has been introduced in the SD Senate.

My esteemed blogosphere colleague Cory Heidelberger has a good piece on the reform, and seems to be warming to it. I think Cory is surely right that the legislation isn't unconstitutional. It is surely intended to neuter the Electoral College and ensure the same result in Presidential elections as if we amended the Constitution to elect the President by raw popular vote. However, it does not violate any rules or procedures specified in the Constitution.

I like the Electoral College. In effect, it provides for states to choose the President. That benefits smaller states and especially less populous regions like the one that Cory and I inhabit.

It does involve two significant problems. One is that it can allow a candidate to win the Presidency even if his or her opponent won a larger share of the popular vote. That has happened only very rarely, but it did happen in 2000. I don't think that there is anything wrong with this in principle. It is undemocratic, but so are the U.S. Senate, the Supreme Court, and the Bill of Rights for that matter. However, it clearly makes a lot of us feel uncomfortable, and that is nothing to be ignored.

The more serious problem is that a close Presidential election can be decided by a very small number of votes in an electoral vote rich state like Florida or Ohio. That brought about a constitutional crisis in Florida in 2000 and it very nearly happened again in Ohio in 2004. If there is a sufficient reason for the National Popular Vote reform, that would be it. The national popular vote is far less likely to be close enough to occasion a crisis or invite cheating.

I believe, however, that the reform is too clever for any problems that it might solve. First, it involves a terrible inconvenience, one that Cory points out.

In 2000, SB 138 would have bound Secretary of State Joyce Hazeltine to designate three Democrats as South Dakota's Electors, based on the fact that Al Gore won the most popular votes nationwide, even though George W. Bush beat Al Gore 60–38 in South Dakota.

For better or worse, the Constitution gives South Dakota three electoral votes. This reform would mean that the people of our state would no longer have any control over those votes. No matter who we voted for, our electoral votes would be controlled by national outcomes. That may be more democratic nationally, but it is deeply offensive to democracy within this state.

Suppose a string of popular vote victories by candidates who are despised by the majority in South Dakota. Would the state's voters put up with this? Might they not conclude, quite reasonably, that there was little point in voting at all?

The NPV reform might be reasonable were there not a much simpler solution, one that does not require any multi-state compact and preserves the control of South Dakota over its own electoral votes. There is.

We need only replace the Unit Rule with a proportional rule. Under the Unit Rule, also called "winner take all", the ticket that wins a plurality in the state gets all the state's electoral votes. When Bush won 60% of the vote in South Dakota in 2000, he got 100% of our three electors. The NPV preserves that rule.

We could do something like this. With three electoral votes in play, any ticket that receives at least a third of the popular vote gets one electoral vote. In 2000, that would give one to Bush and one to Gore. The third vote would be awarded to the candidate who won at least a plurality (more than the other tickets) or the majority. That's a second vote to Bush. The outcome would reflect the popular vote in the state instead of ignoring it altogether as the NPV does.

In any state that adopted such a reform, the threshold for winning an electoral vote would depend on the number of votes the state enjoys. Such a system would remedy both the problems mentioned above if enough states adopted it. The Electoral College vote would rather neatly mirror the national popular vote. It would be very unlikely that a candidate would win the one without winning the other. If a controversy should arise over a few thousand or a few hundred votes in a state like Florida, only one electoral vote would be at stake instead of twenty five electoral votes.

It is a sign of dysfunction in our political culture that the National Popular Vote reform has gotten so much traction when a much simpler solution is available.

Mulling Over Mandates

Many conservatives have objected to the mandate in the health care act that forces them to buy insurance if they lack it. They have argued that the government does not have the authority to make them purchase goods and services. Democrats, have, by and large, been unmoved by such arguments. It will be interesting, therefore, to see what sort of reception State Rep. Hal Wick receives for his new proposal that would require South Dakotans over the age of 21 to buy guns (for self-defense). Bob Mercer of Pure Pierre Politics has denounced the move as a waste of time. He is probably right. This would have been better as a hypothetical scenario, but it does, I think, help show what sort of precedent the healthcare mandate could set. And it should prompt a discussion over the issue. If it is reasonable for the government to require Americans to purchase insurance, is it also reasonable for the government to require Americans to purchase guns? What about birth control? What can Americans be forced to buy and what can't they? What standards should we use to determine this? I look forward to the debate.

Green Hornet & Shower

Last I heard, The Green Hornet was doing well at the box office. That's too bad. It is a mess of a movie. It is not funny enough to be a good comedy and too goofy to be a serious superhero flick.

Not that it doesn't have some great scenes and really funny jokes. It wastes way too much time, however, on a silly attempt to reconcile pc tensions between the rich Brit Reid (Seth Rogen), Cato (Jay Chou), and Lenore Case (Cameron Diaz). Reid and Cato at least, had some business being in this movie. Diaz, playing a cougar with secretarial skills and a hitherto useless knowledge of criminology, sticks out like a sore tit. Do we really need to confront issues of age and gender discrimination in a Green Hornet movie?

The Green Hornet, like the mirror image character The Spider, was a product of 1930's culture. You have a rich, very White American hero with a third world side kick. Brit Reid's Cato is Chinese. Richard Wentworth (the Spider) had Ram Singh, a man from India who was really good at throwing knives.

In that context, it is very clear who is the boss man. When Ram Singh rode in the back of a taxi with his master, he sat on the floor. Was there anything fair about that? Of course not, just as there isn't anything fair about the subordination of a virtuous Samurai to his not so virtuous liege lord in Japanese film. Genuine stories, however, take place in genuine contexts and these are rarely just or fair.

It is a sign of progress that we are uncomfortable with the subordination of the very competent Cato to the inept son of privilege who employs him. In a superhero movie, that needs to be dealt with quickly and then put out of the way. It makes for interminable distractions in The Green Hornet.

Movies that focus on racial, ethnic, and class inequities almost always collapse into cliché. If you want a genuine view of another culture, skip The Green Hornet and watch Shower (1999).

The movie opens with Shenzhen businessman Da Ming (Jiayi Du) working what looks to be an ATM. But it opens a door which he enters and disrobes. He then enters an automatic shower that works like car wash. Brushes scrub him clean and a blow dryer fluffs his hair. That is the city and that is the "south", i.e., Southern China.

He then travels back to his home town in the north. His "developmentally disabled" brother Er Ming (Wu Jiang) had sent him a crayon drawing of two figures, one standing and the other lying prone. He thought it meant that his father had died.

His father is alive, still running the traditional bath house that was his life. Men come there to bathe and be massaged and get the hot glass treatment and laugh. Old men bring their crickets to fight in tiny glass arenas. Da Ming's brother, Er Ming, is simple but he can lay out towels and use the hose, and listen to another young man sing opera.

The bath house is the center of a local community that is about to be bulldozed to make way for an apartment complex or a mall (no one seems to be sure). Da Ming is rapidly entangled in the familial drama of an aged, sick parent and his adult, dependent son. He is also caught up in the dramas of a community that is about to be extinguished by forces beyond its control. We see him talk to his wife on the phone. She can't understand why he keeps delaying his return. We infer this from what he says as he talks.

Shower is a movie with a lot to say. It says it in a subtle way that is exquisitely beautiful. I learned of this movie from Netflix, which automatically recommended it after I rented the Japanese film Departures. I reviewed the latter in an earlier post. Watch both of them.

Fukuyama, Hegel, & Hosni Mubarak

I am one of the few who still think that Francis Fukuyama's thesis in his great National Interest article "The End of History?" You can read the piece here. Fukuyama presented an Hegelian account of history as a dialectic process always pitting opposed forms of civilization against one another. The last chapter in that great dialogue consisted of the contest between liberal democracy and communism. Writing in 1989, Fukuyama speculated that the dialogue had reached a conclusion. Liberal democracy had won, and there was no viable alternative on the horizon. History is at an end.

Contrary to what many of Fukuyama's critics seemed to think, he wasn't arguing that nothing more would happen, nor that we would all live happily ever after. He was arguing that previous history could be interpreted as a great drama, as Hegel had argued, and that that drama seen its climax. Whether what comes next is good or bad is another thing.

Without endorsing Hegel in more than a qualified sense (his was a useful interpretation) I think Fukuyama is largely right. There is no real alternative to liberal democracy as a model for modern civilization. To the extent that a nation achieves such a regime, it will be as happy as possible under this sun. It is far from clear how many nations can achieve it, or whether those who have can sustain it. If history is indeed come to an end, that end may be tragic rather than triumphant.

The current uprisings in the Arab world bring these thoughts back to mind. The Egyptians are revolting. If you don't believe me, ask Hosni Mubarak. He is clearly trying to hang on to power, but he also sent his family abroad. It looks like his regime is at an end. The conflagration began in Tunisia, and it has spread to Yemen. This is something.

Our esteemed Vice President said that Mubarak is not a dictator and shouldn't step down, and that the current uprisings in the Middle East "weren't comparable to the popular uprisings in Eastern Europe that brought down the Iron Curtain." Isn't there some bunker somewhere that we can stash this clown?

Mubarak is a dictator. Everyone but Joe Biden knows this, though perhaps someone has now explained it to him. There are two reasons we have supported Mubarak. One is that he was an ally (read: our Son of a Bitch). The other is that he seemed preferable to the militant Islamists. That's reasonable policy, but it involves a great risk. We may have helped to stifle genuine democratic elements in the Egyptian population. If those forces triumph, they may see us as an enemy.

Biden aside, the Administration has been trying to walk a very narrow line. They don't want to repeat Jimmy Carter's great error and help to usher in another Iran. They also want to be seen as encouraging reform. President Obama's remarks on Egypt Friday night tried to have it both ways. That may be all that our President is capable of, but it is hard to see what else he could have done.

Working to advance democracy in the Middle East is probably the right policy. This is another example of Obama morphing into Bush. At least that is a policy. The stakes are rather high.

Militant Islamists represent a coherent and dangerous challenge to modern civilization. That doesn't mean that Hegelian history has started up again. Unlike Marxism-Leninism, militant Islam has failed to generate alternative forms of social and economic organization. The Iranians spoke, in the early days of their Islamic revolution, of an "Islamic banking system". No such system emerged. Islamist regimes are dependent on the modern world for their technology and almost all their effective institutions. They are modern regimes that try, with all their heart, to say no to modernity.

Fukuyama is probably right. History has ended. The question before us now is whether it will be a happy ending. Stay tuned.

Breach of Trust Fund

One of the things that we have argued about in these pages is the nature of the Social Security Trust Fund. What I have said about that institution is confirmed by this story.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Social Security will post nearly $600 billion in deficits over the next decade as the economy struggles to recover and millions of baby boomers stand at the brink of retirement, according to new congressional projections.

This year alone, Social Security is projected to collect $45 billion less in payroll taxes than it pays out in retirement, disability and survivor benefits, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.

Social Security will run a deficit this year and large deficits over the next decade. Why should that matter to the struggling economy if, as some readers have said, the trust fund has the program covered for decades to come? Then there is this:

Last year, Social Security posted its first deficit since the program was last overhauled in the 1980s. The CBO said at the time that Social Security would post surpluses for a few more years before permanently slipping into deficits in 2016.

But the new projections show nothing but red ink until the Social Security trust funds are exhausted in 2037.

So we're good until 2037, right? No.

Social Security is a "pay-go" system. Payroll taxes coming in are not invested; they go right out as benefits. For decades, the system ran surpluses. What happened to the extra bucks? The surplus went directly into the general treasury and every dime of it was spent. It's long gone.

In return for the money, trust fund bonds are issued covering the money paid into the treasury plus interest. These are IOU's. To be sure, they are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. They are not, however, assets of the government; they are liabilities.

What happens now that the program is running a deficit? Those bonds are "redeemed", which means only that the flow of cash is reversed. Money is now moving out of the treasury to pay Social Security benefits.

So what is the significance of the 2037 date? Only this: until the Trust Fund is exhausted, the transfer of monies from the treasury is automatic. After 2037, assuming the projections are correct, Congress will have to act to authorize a continued supply of funds.

The Trust Fund guarantees payments from the Treasury for decades after the system goes into the red, but in involves an element of fraud. It disguised the fact that money collected in the name of social security was spent on other things. That fraud is still operating a bit in the AP article, but the appearance of that article suggests that the jig is up.

Two Obama Promises Exposed

Intrepid and cherished reader A.I. and I have frequently locked virtual horns over two questions: is Barack Obama honest and can his healthcare reform really reduce healthcare costs? The two questions are obviously connected, as the President made the latter claim the basis of his case for reform.

I thought and have frequently written here that the answer to both questions is no. Turns out I was right.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Two of the central promises of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul law are unlikely to be fulfilled, Medicare's independent economic expert told Congress on Wednesday.

The landmark legislation probably won't hold costs down, and it won't let everybody keep their current health insurance if they like it, Chief Actuary Richard Foster told the House Budget Committee. His office is responsible for independent long-range cost estimates.

Common sense alone was enough to tell me that a vast new government program wouldn't save money. A cursory look at the legislation and a little familiarity with the history of such reforms told me that choices would have to be tightly curtailed.

Of course, the President's solemn words that "if you like your health care plan you can keep it" and his equally solemn promise that he wouldn't sign the bill "if it adds one dime to the deficit" were only lies if he didn't know the one thing and really intended to do the other. That would mean that Barack Obama was as clueless about the legislation he pushed as he was about himself.

Unfortunately, I can't rule that out. I can believe that Obama might have really believed rosy scenarios about the legislation. I don't want to believe that he really thought he would veto a bill that was too expensive. I think it manifest that expense in fact has no influence on his decisions whatsoever.

At any rate, having passed the bill, Chief Actuary Foster has now told us what it does.

This time, unfortunately, we’re the Russians

This, President Obama said, is our "Sputnik moment". The President was speaking, of course, of the launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957. By getting the first man made satellite into orbit, the Soviets kicked off the space race. This was a factor in the economic growth and technological advance in America that followed the Second World War. Whether Sputnik was all that big a factor is doubtful.

What the President had in mind was the fact that the U.S. Federal debt declined from an astonishing 120% of the GDP to under 40% by 1981. That was accomplished almost entirely by robust economic expansion which led in turn to robust federal receipts. "Let's do it again!" the cheerleader in chief was, perhaps, trying to cheer.

The comparison is not felicitous. The enormous debt in 1945-6 was the result of fighting a world war. We had to produce larger armies and navies, more tanks, ships, and airplanes, than our major adversaries at two ends of the earth. After the war we stopped having to do that. As our money and our men at arms came home and turned instead to building highways, cars, and little pink houses, the debt was relatively easy to pay off. It was in fact coming down rapidly well before Sputnik was launched and did not appreciably accelerate with that event. To be sure, our space program left the dysfunctional Soviet economy in the terrestrial dust.

Today the public debt is rapidly climbing toward 100% again. We are fighting a couple of wars right now, but hardly on the scale of WWII. The Taliban has no navy or air force. The growth of U.S. debt today is structural rather than expedient. Imagine what post war economic history would have been like if the U.S. had had to keep spending WWII levels of national treasure for decades. It is unclear to me what level of economic growth would be necessary to compensate for current rates of spending, but I am doubtful that the President's rhetoric or more wind towers will produce it.

The day after the State of the Union address, the CBO dropped a bomb.

The nation's budget deficit will widen to nearly $1.5 trillion this year, and the country faces "daunting economic and budgetary challenges," the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said on Wednesday as it released its most updated fiscal report.

The budget office noted that "the deficits of $1.4 trillion in 2009 and $1.3 trillion in 2010 are, when measured as a share of gross domestic product, the largest since 1945 – representing 10 percent and 8.9 percent of the nation's output."

You might have guessed, by the President's speech, that he didn't see this one coming. It is clear that the President isn't thinking much about it. He barely mentioned it in his speech. He surely did not offer, nor has he ever offered, any hint of how he plans to deal with it or even that he considers it very important.

He did mention a "spending freeze," but one at current high levels, one that does not affect the biggest spending programs. That's like a guy losing a million dollars a minute at roulette who decides to become fiscally responsible by promising that he won't gamble any faster on one part of the table. Almost all of the President's speech was devoted to encouraging more federal spending, which appears to be the compass of his imagination.

The Washington Post was disappointed by Mr. Obama's speech. When a Democrat loses the Post…

Where will the money come from? … Mr. Obama didn't elaborate… The reality, as Mr. Obama understands [please insert evidence here], is that the country is headed for fiscal catastrophe unless it does some politically unpopular things: unwind the Bush tax cuts, including for the middle class; reduce projected Social Security benefits for future retirees, exempting the poor and disabled; rein in the cost of health care; limit popular income tax deductions. Mr. Obama knows this, but last night he did little to prepare Americans for any of it. The best you could say is that he left the door open to work with Congress on these issues.

Leaving the door open or perhaps pointing toward the door is the modus operandi of this Administration. By the end of his first term, the U.S. will have racked of deficits of close to six trillion dollars. Contrary to what the Post says, I see no evidence that the President understands this or is the least bit interested in it.

Our frightening fiscal deficit is compounded by an appalling deficit of leadership at the top. A lot of people once hoped for greatness from this man. Right now I'd settle for the competence of a mediocre minor league manager. It is not longer possible to hope for that.

ps.  Its' not only my conclusion!  From The Hill:

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) said Thursday that his panel might have to take the lead in solving the nation’s long-term budget problems.

Conrad's comment that solutions “may fall to this committee” came shortly after Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the ranking Republican on the Budget panel, ripped President Obama’s State of the Union speech for failing to tackle the nation’s budget problems.

The Abominable Doctor Gosnell

If you go on a ghost tour of New Orleans you will hear about a couple of all too human monsters who once lived there. Delphine LaLaurie and her husband Leonard, performed nightmarish and torturous surgery on their slaves in their Royal Street house in the 1830's. Because they were considered respectable people, New Orleans society protected them from scrutiny. That came to an end when a fire, set by one of the servants, brought outsiders into the house. Seven dead and near dead victims were discovered hidden there, all horribly mutilated. LaLaurie and her husband were allowed to make their escape.

A similar horror, occurring perhaps over a longer period, was recently revealed in Philadelphia. From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Despite repeated warnings about dangerous practices at the Women's Medical Society, the state and city did nothing to stop Dr. Kermit Gosnell. They allowed him to endanger the public for 30 years.

The charges detailed by District Attorney Seth Williams portray Gosnell as a butcher of women and babies born alive. Witnesses said he routinely killed viable infants after inducing premature birth - hundreds of them delivered after the legal limit of 24 weeks - by snipping their spinal cords with scissors.

There were no limits to his alleged horror show. One infant was said to be alive for 20 minutes before being killed. Heavily drugged women were described as waiting on toilets for hours for Gosnell to dispose of their aborted fetuses. Pipes often became clogged with the aftermath.

The report said patients caught venereal diseases from filthy instruments. Fetal remains were packed into freezers. One woman apparently died after being given an overdose of sedatives; another patient died after Gosnell allegedly punctured her uterus.

Dr. Gosnell, who deserves a wax image in Madame Tussauds' chamber of horrors, dispatched one large, healthy baby while remarking that he could have walked him to the bus station.

Gosnell is a serial killer. He murdered infants and killed and maimed women. He could easily have been stopped years ago had the state of Pennsylvania exercised even the barest scrutiny.

The state, which could have shut down the clinic or revoked Gosnell's medical license, ignored complaints repeatedly. Gosnell's clinic was inspected in 1989, 1992, and 1993. Deficiencies were found each time. Yet state evaluators reapproved it without requiring corrective action.

The state Health Department decided after 1993 to stop inspecting abortion clinics for "political reasons," the grand jury concluded. That occurred during the administration of Gov. Tom Ridge, a supporter of abortion rights.

As a result, nail salons in Pennsylvania received tougher government scrutiny than Gosnell's clinic.

Bear in mind, it is not a newspaper but a grand jury that found "political reasons" behind the protection Dr. Phibes, excuse me, Dr. Gosnell enjoyed for 30 years.

William Saletan has an excellent column on this story and on the pro-choice absolutists who reject any limits on abortion whatsoever. Now we can see in grisly detail what no limits abortion looks like.

I admit to being simpleminded when it comes to abortion. I hold that all human beings are created equal, black and white, male and female, born and not yet born. I hold that all abortion is a violation of the principles of the Declaration. It is wrong for the same reason as slavery and genocide are wrong. It violates the only protection any of us enjoy.

I am willing to admit that a decent and reasonable person, someone who has tried to think it through, might conclude that abortion can and should be permissible prior to some stage in a pregnancy. I insist that such a person would have to think it through. The vigorous defense of late term abortion by the pro-choice movement and its allies in Congress and the White House, not to mention state officials in Philadelphia, either aren't thinking it through or are willing to sanction infanticide. Either way, that is morally corrupting.

The abominable Dr. Gosnell proves the point.  Over thirty years he victimized the most vulnerable women and slaughtered infants.  The state of Pennsylvania not only allowed him to go on, it gave him every reason to believe that what he was doing was okay. 

Rape on the Reservation

Intrepid reader Larry Kurtz does yours truly and all my readers a service by reminding us from time to time of the situation on the reservations. To my post on Martin Luther King Day, Larry made this comment:

Nice post, Doc. And just a few miles down the road apartheid represses the descendants of Si Tanka in another failed red state.

I can't agree that the situation of Native Americans is an example of apartheid, but I admire the clever construction "failed red state". That wraps a lot of central threads into one flamboyant metaphor.

I haven't ignored the plight of South Dakota's tribes. A little over a year ago I posted this on a British Guardian article about Pine Ridge Reservation.

Today I read a piece by Kathy Dobie in the January 19th issue of Harper's. Dobie's article, "Tiny Little Laws", describes vividly and in appalling detail the "plague of sexual violence persists in Indian Country." She focuses mostly on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Unfortunately, the article is not available online. You can read the opening paragraphs here. It's worth your while to pop into a library and read the whole thing.

As Dobie tells it, Native American women (and not a few young men) suffer from an epidemic of sexual assault and other forms of violence. This plague of sexual violence is largely enabled by

inadequate police protection, and an ineffectual legal system that allows rapists and child molesters to go unpunished, free to commit the same crimes again and again.

A Native American woman who has been raped and/or beaten by her husband, or boyfriend, or nephew, cannot count on the police to arrive and protect her, let alone punish the abuser. Part of the problem, as she tells it, is the Byzantine web of tribal, state, and federal authorities. The bigger problem is a lethargy that is endemic to the law enforcement regime on the reservations. There are too few cops, not enough rape kits or persons trained to use them. The people in charge feel helpless or, much worse, just don't care very much.

There is nothing that state or federal authorities can do to fundamentally change the economic and social conditions on the reservations. That doesn't mean that the former can do nothing to help the helpless.

In the summer of 2009, where there thirteen officers patrolling Standing Rock, South Dakota Senator John Thune urged the BIA to increase the force to twenty-five, reminding them that the lack of law enforcement had contributed to a crime rate that was "six times higher than the national average." By October, the force had, instead, been reduced to eleven officers responsible for the protection of almost 9,000 people.

Senator Thune had the right idea, but as seems to happen over and over in this tale, after all is said and done, a lot is said and nothing is done.

This is something we ought to care about. Very little happens on this dangerous planet that is more terrible than rape and child abuse. Federal and state budgets are tight, but surely when a woman living on the Standing Rock Reservation calls the police, we can afford to have a patrol car show up at her door.

Here’s the turkey, where’s Tim Cratchit

Sometime soon someone is going to write a very interesting book about ObamaCare. It won't happen until we have a good idea how it came out and it won't be written by me. There is plenty of drama and lots of Byzantine strategies to provide material.

So far more than half the states (27) have joined suit to stop certain elements in the program. This is not simple partisanship. A lot of state officials see the demands of the program to be ruinous to their budgets. Just right now, that is a big deal.

Part of the legislative strategy that came out of the Democratic leadership was to arrange for the program to be implemented a little at a time. That would be sound strategy if it attracted a constituency faster than it alienated the voters. Is it doing that?

Not so much. John Goodman has some interesting news about a bit of the bill that we passed so we could find out what was in it.

Although the most important parts of ObamaCare (the individual mandate, subsidies, employer fines, etc.) do not kick in until 2014, the legislation made interim provision for those with pre-existing conditions problems. A new kind of risk pool is open to anyone who is denied insurance in the private sector and it's available for the same premiums healthy people pay. Twenty-three states are operating their own risk pools and 27 are relying on a federal plan.

It's been like giving a party to which no one comes. The Medicare program chief actuary predicted last spring that 375,000 would sign up for the new risk pool insurance in 2010. But by the end of November, only 8,000 had done so. As Amy Goldstein reports in The Washington Post, this includes 75 in Virginia, 80 in New Hampshire, 97 in Maryland and a whopping 700 in North Carolina.

The President argued for his healthcare reform largely on the grounds that it would reduce pressures on the federal budget and on the economy at large. No reasonable person really believed any of that, but the game turned on what you could legitimately say rather than on what was plausible.

In the background was the idea that a lot of Americans were being denied access to medicine. There was never any evidence that that was true, or else we'd have heard the numbers and we'd have seen the tragic frowns of all the poor Tim Cratchits out there. Confronted with a deplorable deficit of Tiny Tims, the Administration pinned its hopes on folks denied insurance coverage for pre-existing conditions.

The Tims don't seem to be showing up. Megan McArdle at the Atlantic has this:

We're not talking about a program that isn't serving quite as many people as expected. We're talking about a program that was supposed to serve almost 400,000 people, and is instead serving around 2% of that number. Nor have these people been turned away due to budget constraints; they don't seem to have applied in the first place.

McArdle considers the logical possibilities: either there aren't really a lot of people needing this reform or somehow the news isn't reaching them.

However that turns out, it is clear that ObamaCare was a solution in search of a problem. That's true especially if you think that there were big problems with the health care system in the U.S. The party that controlled the White House and both Houses of Congress after 2008 might have gone back to the drawing board. Obama, Reid, and Pelosi might have presided over an honest examination of healthcare in America. They might have conducted a serious examination of healthcare in Canada and Europe, looking to see what worked (they say France is pretty good) and what doesn't (every British PM announces that the system is broken and promises to fix it). They didn't do any of that.

Instead, since they already knew what kind of system they wanted (Canada), they bent all their awesome will and sub-awesome intelligence to getting it, or something as near as possible to it, or something that would inevitably collapse into it. The only attention they paid to the actual problems to be solved was motivated by the need for public justifications. The cost of healthcare, the many uninsured, pre-existing conditions, these were candidates for the advertising campaigns.

Conrad & Lieberman Call It Quits

Senators Kent Conrad (D-North Dakota) and Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut) have announced that they will retire at the end of this term. Big news in both cases.

Sean Trende has a typically excellent analysis of the Conrad retirement. It obviously seems to be part of the trend in this neck of the electoral woods: the resurgence of Republican dominance in national delegations where Democrats used to do pretty well in spite of largely Republican electorates and Republican domination at the state level. Trende has this:

North Dakota has always been a Republican state, but that was only because of sectional concerns. The real powerbroker in the state was the Nonpartisan League, whose platform was Populist-Socialist; this is why North Dakota has a state bank, state grain elevators, and a ban on corporate farming. Conrad and Dorgan were squarely in the NPL tradition.

Many older voters recalled this tradition; North Dakota was one of the few states in the 2004 elections where young voters voted more heavily for President Bush than did voters over 60. (President Obama barely carried 18-29 year olds). In other words, the Democratic/Progressive base in the state is dying off.

From 1987 until this year, Democrats held both the Senate and House seats from North Dakota. Now Republicans hold one Senate seat and the at large House seat. It would be silly to assume that the Republicans will win Conrad's seat when it comes open two years from now. It would be almost as silly not to expect it.

If a Republican does take Conrad's seat in 2012, and Republicans hold the house seats, that will leave only Tim Johnson. Given the balance of power in the Senate, that would be a serious blow to Democrats.

Joe Lieberman's retirement is harder to game. If Connecticut Democrats can't win back his seat in 2012, the national party will be in really big trouble. It is more useful, at this point, to reflect on what Lieberman means.

When it became clear that Senator Ross Feingold was in trouble in Wisconsin, Democrats argued that Feingold deserved reelection because he was a genuinely independent mind. They were being disingenuous. Feingold was a solid leftist. When he moved against his party, it was always a move to its left.

If Democrats really admired someone who was willing to buck the party line out of principle, they would have had at least a grudging respect for Joe Lieberman. Instead they loathed him. Emily Bazelon at Slate has a sample:

My corner of Connecticut was covered in ice today, until news broke of Sen. Joe Lieberman's impending retirement. Magically, a warm glow spread. It was a delicious feeling: the end of the reign of the politician I despise most.

Why do I loathe, loathe, loathe my 68-year-old four-term senator? My feelings are all the stronger for being fairly irrational. Lieberman's views are closer to mine than many politicians on whom I don't expend one iota of emotional energy. This, of course, is his power: He never loses his power to disappoint. Then there is the spectacle of it all: After each act of grand or petty betrayal, each time he turns on his former supporters, the Democratic Party and the Obama administration came back begging for more. Throughout the last Congress, he never let anyone forget he was the 60th vote.

There you have it. The Democrats forced Lieberman out of their party in 2006, and he won his Senate seat in spite of them. He continued to caucus with Democrats and to provide the 60^th vote they needed at critical moments, yet they loathe, loathe, loathe him. Because, unlike Feingold, he wasn't the right kind of genuinely independent mind.

Joe Lieberman was an interesting man. We won't see his like again. He did, after all, come very close to being Vice President. Therein lies a tale.

Darkly Dreaming Dexter

I have just finished the first season and about half the second season of Dexter, Showtime's series with a serial killer as the hero. I am somewhat shocked that the show is in its fifth season. For those of you who have been watching it through to the present, bear in mind that I don't know anything beyond season 2, episode four.

So far, it has been magnificent. It isn't as good as HBO's Deadwood, but it's the best thing I have seen since Deadwood. The writing, casting, and acting are all superb. Best of all, it raises very interesting questions. The first season was based on the novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter, by Jeff Lindsay.

Dexter Gordon Morgan works as a blood spatter expert for the Miami police. In his spare time he hunts down and kills other serial killers. His adopted father Harry Morgan was a cop. Harry recognized his son as a psychopath with an irresistible need to kill. He dealt with this parenting dilemma by giving the boy the "code of Harry". Dexter can only kill those who really need killing, and only those who the law cannot reach. Harry taught his son the skills he would need to indulge his "dark passenger" and survive. He turned Dexter into a weapon. So far, Dexter has remained scrupulously faithful to the code. On the other hand, he is still doing what comes natural to a psychopath.

If I thought for a moment that the series was justifying vigilantism, let alone serial killer vigilantism, I would have been too offended to watch it. It doesn't do that. Instead, it abstracts from that issue in the same way as all superhero dramas do. Batman is a vigilante. So are Superman and Spiderman, and most superheroes.

Dexter is a superhero with the Bruce Wayne dysfunctional personality twisted five steps to the weird end of the dial. Batman didn't kill, but the Shadow and the Green Hornet did. Okay, so Dexter wraps his victims in plastic and dispatches them with power tools instead of just blowing them away with pistols. Still, dead is dead.

Being a psychopath, Dexter doesn't have the normal pallet of emotions. He gets by imitating normal people. He has a girlfriend and is a good father figure to her kids, because that's what normal people do. He discovers along the way that normal things, like sex, aren't really so bad. What about other normal things, like love?

That raises the interesting question: can a human soul be built from the outside in? You couldn't really enjoy the show if Dexter was as immune to ordinary feelings as he pretends to be. In the second season Dexter tells his girlfriend, Rita (Darla from Angel) that he is an addict. She thinks that means heroin, and she is an old hand at dealing with an addicted partner. She pushes him into a twelve step program. It turns out to help him deal with his addiction to killing, though it does nothing to curb that addiction. Dexter has feelings alright, but he acquires them largely by observation.

The first and second seasons are on Netflix instant watch. I am salivating for the second one. Dexter is brilliant TV.

ps.  It occured to me tonight that Dexter's character is analgous to Mr. Spock and Data on the first and second Star Trek shows.  He is supposed to be without normal emotions.  Such characters work because we can't really believe the premise.  An automoton can't really be a character. 

Dexter, in fact, shows plenty of emotion.  When the disturbed Lila threatens his girlfriend and her children, he reacts pretty much as I would. 

Martin Luther King, Jr. & Other Founding Fathers

We are approaching the 100^th anniversary of President Ronald Reagan's birth (February 6^th, 1911). I'll get back around to that next month. I mention it here because in 1983 President Reagan signed into law an act creating a federal holiday in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Tomorrow many Americans will celebrate that holiday they way they celebrate most holidays: by sleeping in. I think it deserves a few more words.

Martin Luther King, Jr. richly deserves to be recognized as one of America's founding fathers. He deserves this in the same way that Abraham Lincoln deserves it. Lincoln saved the union that the aforementioned fathers founded, first from the peril of popular sovereignty and second from the peril of disunion. But just as the principles of the Declaration were fundamental compromised by almost a century of slavery, they were compromised by another century of apartheid. King moved the country to the completion of the founder's project.

The story of MLK's rise is a profound historical drama. American apartheid forced African Americans to build their own social and economic institutions inside the larger nation. When the historical moment ripened in Montgomery Alabama, the Black church was most readily available meeting place for that city's African American residents. The de facto leader of such a meeting would be the pastor.

As Machiavelli observed, the ripeness of the times is known by the rising of the great man, and the great man in turn is revealed by the times. King is responsible for two immortal pieces of American rhetoric. In Letter from a Birmingham Jail, King recognized that the moment had come and put the force of his rhetoric and personality behind it. In his I Have A Dream speech, King realized that moment. I won't call that speech incomparable. I will go one better, and say that only Lincoln's greatest addresses compare.

America's race problems were hardly solved by the success of the Civil Rights Movement. What that great motion solved was the Constitution's race problem. The powers of the federal and state governments will never again be used to keep one portion of the population in subordination to another. With that, the history of the American founding concludes.

If I could edit Mount Rushmore, I'd replace Teddy Roosevelt with James Madison and add Martin Luther King, Jr. That would be a more fitting and instructive shrine. Have a happy Martin Luther King Day!

Let Us Hope That Global Warming Is True

I confess that I have a simple idea about science. I think that any scientific claim is meaningful only if it is falsifiable. If hypothesis X or theory Y is viable, each has to state what data will confirm it and, what is the same thing, what data will refute it. The Daily Caller asks the obvious question concerning Anthropogenic Global Warming:

Increased warm temperatures indicate global warming. Severe winter storms also help prove global warming, according to a recent op-ed in the New York Times. So is there any weather pattern that would disprove or call into question the existence of global warming?

I thought it obvious that one day, or one year, or even a decade of temperature records can't confirm or refute the proposition that we are in a period of long term warming. Only long term records can speak to that. Apparently I was wrong.

"And now, what about all this [cold, snowy] weather?" ["World News Tonight," anchor Diane] Sawyer said. "The experts on climate change say the evidence is in: 2010 is tied for the hottest year ever on record. And last year, it was the wettest one in recorded history. And those scientists say that's why we're reeling from the deadly weather extremes."

So hot weather, cold weather and wet weather all confirm "climate change." One wonders about dry weather. At least now we understand why "climate change" has replaced "global warming" as the term of choice.

The AGW ideology has always rested on the answer to several specific questions. First, are we in a period of long term warming? The answer to that is very probably yes, at least until recently. It has tapered off a bit, but there was surely a spike in the last half of the last century. Second, is human activity influencing that spike? I think that question is very hard to answer, but let's assume it is yes. Third, can national policies and international agreements modify human activity in a way that might have a significant influence on climate change?

That is the easiest question to answer and the answer is definitely no. Neither the developed nations nor India and China are going to voluntarily restrict carbon emissions (economic growth), let alone reduce emissions/growth to 19^th century levels. Here, all the data and common sense converge and there is no reasonable doubt that the proposition is refuted.

Almost all the public conversation has been confined to the first three questions, but there is a fourth. Is further global warming a bad thing for us? AGW ideology simple assumes that the answer is yes. The ideology recognizes that question only in order to answer it with nightmare scenarios.

Powerline directs our attention to a recent article in Reuters manages to raise the question while trying to bury it.

Climate change seems a factor in the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, according to a study of ancient tree growth that urges greater awareness of the risks of global warming in the 21st century.

Well, that seems relevant. If global warming doomed the Romans (here we thought it was Christianity and the Germans) then surely it can doom us. Of course it seems unlikely that the industrial output of the Roman Empire really had a large carbon footprint, but let that aside.

The problem is that it warming wasn't the problem for the Romans or for anyone else so far.

Good growth by oak and pine trees in central Europe in the past 2,500 years signaled warm and wet summers and coincided with periods of wealth among farming societies, for instance around the height of the Roman empire or in medieval times.

Periods of climate instability overlapped with political turmoil, such as during the decline of the Roman Empire, and might even have made Europeans vulnerable to the Black Death or help explain migration to America during the chill 17th century.

Warm and wet climates have been good for the Romans and for Medieval Europe and for human beings in general. So what has been bad? Reuters's villain is "climate instability," which almost avoids saying "cold." That bit about the "chill 17^th century," however, gives the game away.

The terrible truth may be that civilization arose in and only because of an unusual warming period. If that is the truth, God help us, we are probably doomed in pretty short order (historically speaking). Meanwhile, warming has always been good for us and there is no reason to think that that will be different in the future. Individual persons and societies in general suffer much more from cold than from heat. If or when the global climate cycles back and the glaciers return, let us hope that human activity really can heat up the world.

It's hard not to like this

Insanity & Responsibility

If, as seems very likely at this point, Jared Loughner is mentally ill, that will raise questions about sanity and responsibility that we have had a hard time resolving. The insanity defense, in particular, remains very controversial. What ought to be done with Mr. Loughner?

Punishing criminals is one of the most awesome tasks of government. By awesome, I mean properly fear inspiring; and by government, I mean us. There are three good reasons to deal out punishment. First and foremost, we punish the guilty for the same reason as we protect the innocent: because they deserve it. Second, let the promise of punishment stand in order to discourage the temptation to commit crimes. Finally, we imprison and execute people who have committed crimes so they can't do it again.

The first two principles rest on the concept of moral responsibility. Some neuroscientists believe that recent advances in their field have undermined the concept of free will and some, a smaller number perhaps, think that this undermines the concept of responsibility. If every human decision is a perfect function of subconscious events in the brain and environmental factors, then in one sense the most sane and stable individual is no more responsible for his actions than an automatic stoplight.

I believe in free will in the robust sense. I think that an act of human deliberation is not strictly determined by preexisting conditions. The concept of moral responsibility, however, does not require such a belief. Punishment is an expression of the collective moral sense. We punish because we think that people ought not to do certain things to other people. That collective morality is something very precious. A society in which most people didn't think there was anything wrong with rape would be a much worse society for women to live in. If you think that social behavior is determined by social factors, you ought to be just as concerned that the moral sense remains among those factors as someone who believes in robust free will.

Likewise, precisely if you believe that human action is determined, you want to keep punishment as one of the determining factors. To be sure, the law is not nearly as effective as we wish it were, but you do want the criminals to clear out when the patrol car shows up.

Both punishment as retribution and punishment as deterrence allow for an insanity defense. It surely seems the case that some people are so mentally ill that they cannot be held morally responsible for their actions. Just as someone pushed off a ledge isn't responsible for hitting someone on the street below, a man who was incapable of resisting the impulses of his dysfunctional brain and/or could not recognize that he was killing a real human being cannot be held morally responsible for his actions. Recognizing that does no harm to the general moral sense.

Likewise, sane people can weigh the legal consequences of their actions even if the mental scales they use are not really under their control. Someone so unbalanced that he cannot make that calculation will not be responsive to legal sanctions. There is no point, then, in trying to deter someone like that with a threat of punishment. The view that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism is called, aptly enough, Compatibilism.

The insanity defense is altogether in order, for defendants who are genuinely insane. It is rarely used, and even more rarely does it succeed. We ought not to abandon it, however much we fear that it may be abused.

There is, of course, the fear that by refusing to hold the criminally insane legally responsible for their actions, they will end up being freed to do terrible things again. That is the third principle of punishment. There is a simple solution to that problem, one we already apply in many cases. Let's codify it.

If a person is found by a court to have committed a violent criminal act and is found to be legally irresponsible by reason of insanity, that person should be confined to an institution for the rest of his life. No exceptions. If that person receives treatment and regains sanity, fine. He still spends the rest of his nights in a bedroom locked from the outside.

That takes care of the third principle for offenders who really satisfy the standards for an insanity defense. For those inclined to fake such a defense, well, lifetime in the loony bin looks like about as good a deterrent as life in the slammer. It sounds worse to me. Eating lunch every day with a gaggle of cutthroats, you might at least expect some interesting conversation. If everyone else at the table is mumbling and trying to sculpt the mashed potatoes, welcome to Hell.

Disingenuous Leftists & a Jaundiced Press

Byron York does a superb job of contrasting the way the media handled the Fort Hood shooting and the Tucson shooting.

On November 5, 2009, Maj. Nidal Hasan opened fire at a troop readiness center in Ft. Hood, Texas, killing 13 people. Within hours of the killings, the world knew that Hasan reportedly shouted "Allahu Akbar!" before he began shooting, visited websites associated with Islamist violence, wrote Internet postings justifying Muslim suicide bombings, considered U.S. forces his enemy, opposed American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as wars on Islam, and told a neighbor shortly before the shootings that he was going "to do good work for God." There was ample evidence, in other words, that the Ft. Hood attack was an act of Islamist violence.

Nevertheless, public officials, journalists, and commentators were quick to caution that the public should not "jump to conclusions" about Hasan's motive…

"I'm on Pentagon chat room," said former CIA operative Robert Baer on CNN, also the night of the shooting. "Right now, there's messages going back and forth, saying do not jump to the conclusion this had anything to do with Islam."

And then Tucson happened.

In the hours after the attack, little was known about Loughner beyond some bizarre and largely incomprehensible YouTube postings that, if anything, suggested he was mentally ill. Yet the network that had shown such caution in discussing the Ft. Hood shootings openly discussed the possibility that Loughner was inspired to violence by…Sarah Palin. Although there is no evidence that Loughner was in any way influenced by Palin, CNN was filled with speculation about the former Alaska governor.

There is a word for this kind of journalism: jaundiced. CNN is hardly the worst offender. Paul Krugman has this:

We don't have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was. [Giffords]'s been the target of violence before. And for those wondering why a Blue Dog Democrat, the kind Republicans might be able to work with, might be a target, the answer is that she's a Democrat who survived what was otherwise a GOP sweep in Arizona, precisely because the Republicans nominated a Tea Party activist. (Her father says that "the whole Tea Party" was her enemy.) And yes, she was on Sarah Palin's infamous "crosshairs" list.

Not to be outdone, Michael Daly has a piece on the New York Daily News with this flamboyant title: "Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' blood is on Sarah Palin's hands after putting cross hair over district".

Here is what Sarah Palin said on the Facebook page where she depicted Gabrielle Giffords in the cross hairs of a rifle scope: "Don't retreat! Instead - RELOAD!"

What, exactly, is that "crosshairs" list? Here is the image that Palin's group posted. I have heard this image mentioned about a dozen times over the last two days.

Contrary to what Daly says, Giffords wasn't depicted here. Her district was. Giffords may in fact be so stupid as not to know that "targeting" something one is "aiming at" is customary usage in politics as it is in business. I think he is rather a contemptible son of a bitch. If he really thinks that this graph is tantamount to encouraging murder, what about this one:

That is pretty much the same graph constructed in the same way. Bull's eye targets replace cross hairs, with the targets defined by a scheme of political vulnerability. But notice those words "Behind Enemy Lines". That's militaristic language now, isn't it?

Another bit of Republican malfeasance? Actually, that is from the Democratic Leadership Council and dates back to 2004. It is still on their website.

In fact Krugman and Daly are scoundrels. They are cynically exploiting a tragedy as part of a campaign to delegitimize those who disagree with them. They accuse Republicans, conservatives, and Tea Party activists of encouraging political violence, but their only evidence consists of language and images that they themselves and other Democrats routinely use.

They figure they can get away with it because they are backed by a jaundiced press.

What Does It Mean?

God bless U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the other victims of the shooting in Tucson. Among the dead are a U.S. District Court Judge, an aide of Giffords' who was engaged to be married, and a nine year old girl. This is terrible beyond any reasonable hope of consolation.

I had a strong feeling of déjà vu when I watched the clips on CNN and Fox. In 1998 I watched news people I recognized standing in front of a building I recognized in Jonesboro, Arkansas. They were reporting on a school shooting. Five people died. The shooters were two boys, ages 13 and 11.

I was born in Jonesboro and lived there until my early twenties. I left to attend the University of Arizona in Tucson. It's possible that I shopped at the Safeway grocery store where today's shooting occurred. The landscape was eerily familiar. I had a disturbing feeling, for just a moment, that my connection with both places means something. It doesn't. It is just chance.

The day after the Jonesboro shooting I asked a room full of American Government students "what does this mean?" After a bit of uncomfortable silence, my students began to offer some answers. One student said that it demonstrated a culture of guns and violence in America. Another thought it meant that we needed stricter gun control laws. A couple of students thought it was a sign that America had abandoned God.

I acknowledged all the opinions offered with respect, but I let it be known that I had a different answer. I thought, and I still think, that it didn't mean anything.

Like any population of animals, human beings display variation. Some are very tall, some very short, with most somewhere in the middle. Sort them on a simple two variable graph, and you usually get a bell curve. The same is true of psychological traits like mental stability and a tendency toward violence. At one end we get heartwarming, heroic stories. At the other end is the terror.

It is altogether proper that we praise the one and deplore the other. That is healthy moral action. It is harder, but still a good idea, to recognize that in a nation of more than three hundred million people, random variation is going to produce more than a few dangerously disturbed individuals. A few handfuls of the latter will be fully capable of doing dreadful things. Some of those things, like landslides and earthquakes, will occur. Lee Harvey Oswald and Timothy McVeigh just didn't mean anything, beyond our vulnerability to the facts mentioned above.

As yet very little has been reported about Jared Lee Loughner. It is conceivable, of course, that he will turn out to be part of some dark political conspiracy. One can imagine that he is an agent of the militant wing of some Tea Party organization. The deplorable Paul Krugman seems to imagine that. One can imagine that he was hired by the Daily KOS to discredit the Tea Party movement. If anything like that turns out to be true, today's atrocity will mean a lot.

It wouldn't fit the pattern. Organized political violence in American history is all too common at the street level, but pretty rare above that. Assaults on public officials are usually the work of isolated and disturbed individuals or small groups of the same. John Hinckley Jr. shot President Reagan for the same reason that Mark David Chapman assassinated John Lennon: they were psychopaths who chose celebrities as their targets.

Violent acts are easier on the public psyche when they are meaningful. We know who to blame, who to go after. We can persuade ourselves that we can get them before they get at us. Sometimes that is true. Meaningless acts are unnerving. They remind us of how little control we really have, of how many bottomless pits lie beneath the institutional and psychological edifices we construct.

We will find out more, no doubt, about Mr. Loughner. Maybe what we find out will be meaningful and even in some dark sense comforting. Don't count on it.

Reverence For the Constitution & the Dreadful Alternative

Anyone who doubts that American citizens should revere the Constitution should be locked in a closet with a copy of the collected works of Shakespeare. Said skeptic should not be released until he or she has passed a test on Henry VI, parts 1, 2, and 3.

The Henry VI plays are the bard's attempt to put Machiavelli to music. They describe the gradual disintegration of political order in England. The root cause of that disaster is a Christ-like and (or therefore) altogether ineffectual king. Everyone acknowledges his authority and acts as if he didn't exist. The result is that pretty much everyone cuts someone's throat and then gets his own throat cut by someone else. Serial assassinations, betrayals, and wholesale slaughter on the battlefield, make for rocking good drama but very woeful history.

Contemplate Sudan or Cote d'Ivoire. You'll see why Thomas Hobbes thought that tyranny was a good idea. Fear of that uber-rascal Saddam isn't pleasant, but all the other rascals are hiding and it's quiet at 3am. John Locke thought we could do better than that. He thought that we could transfer our reference for the king to the social contract between all the citizens, a contract that in turn empowered the King or Congress or what have you. Such a social contract could secure order while protecting each against the powers that provide that security.

The United States is, in part, a Lockean experiment. With more than two hundred years of data logged, it's going pretty well. Our great factions duke it out with ballots rather than bullets. Republicans may fear the policies of Democratic majorities, and vice versa, but neither side is afraid of being tortured or disappeared. If there is anything to fear on America's streets, it isn't the House of Lancaster or York.

It's a little disturbing then that the recent reading of the Constitution in the U.S. House has encouraged a lot of very educated folk to remind us of how unsacred that institution is.

New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler

called the "ritualistic reading" on the floor "total nonsense" and "propaganda" intended to claim the document for Republicans. "You read the Torah, you read the Bible, you build a worship service around it," said Nadler, who argued that the Founders were not "demigods" and that the document's need for amendments to abolish slavery and other injustices showed it was "highly imperfect."

Michael Lind urges us to stop pretending that the Constitution is sacred. Alex Altman weighs in on a Times blog.

The Constitution is a remarkable document, and eminently worthy of the reverence heaped on it, but it's also flawed. Despite their genius, the framers were fallible. Law professor Sanford Levinson wrote a book called "Our Undemocratic Constitution" which points out some of these flaws-including its treatment of slavery, which the House papered over today.

I have argued that a genuine reverence for the Constitution requires that we acknowledge the flaws of its authors and the costly compromises out of which it was fashioned. If that is Altman's point, I am with him.

Why then attack the "cult of the Constitution"? Well…

It's not that it isn't worthy of veneration or study. It's that too often, the Constitution is wielded as a political cudgel, even if, as Garrett Epps wrote this week at the Atlantic, the cudgelers fail to grasp the document's finer points.

The Constitution is worthy of veneration or study (why not both?), so long as it doesn't get in the way of something really important like ObamaCare. There's the rub. Genuine veneration for the Constitution might stop Altman from getting something he wants, like ObamaCare or a York on the throne.

I am very skeptical of the health care legislation as policy, but I would put up with it gladly if the alternative were to diminish the reverence with which Americans regard the Constitution. Would Barack Obama do the same in reverse? I really don't know.

Contrary to what Altman says, it's a very good thing when each side claims that they are right by the Constitution. That is a way of revering the document. But somebody has to lose. When someone says the Constitution isn't really all that sacred because it stands in the way of his or her policy preference, well, a little time in the closet with Shakespeare is in order.

Keloland Pulls the Plug

For the last three years this blog has been posted at the Keloland website Issues Blog, along with Cory Heidelberger, David Newquist, and others. Today I learned that Keloland has decided to fire us, with lots of appreciation and five days notice.  Here is what passes for an explanation:

We have spent the past few months reviewing the traffic and format of our pages at KELOLAND.com. I am sure that you have noticed several changes over the past year, including the removal of our Forums section in favor of Facebook Comments at the end of selected stories; as well as the addition of a newly-formatted video player. These are just a few of the adjustments that have been made to ensure that KELOLAND.com continues to be South Dakota's #1 website.

Among the changes we have discussed is the removal of the Issues Blog section under KELOLAND Blogs. We have decided to eliminate this section due to the low number of regular contributions and our desire to take the site in a different direction. This is certainly not a reflection of the quality of your work and we appreciate all you have done to provide content to our website. I anticipate that this change will take place on Wednesday, January 12.

Well, I suppose we can hardly compete with a newly-formatted video player, let alone Facebook, but I confess I am a bit confused about the "low number of regular contributions".  Scrolling back a little way, I notice multiple posts almost every day.  Only Christmas day, I think, had no posts.

Hosting a forum for dedicated if amateur journalists alongside the professionals struck me as a good use of a new medium.  It brought together some of the state's best bloggers at one location, and gave readers a chance to view some interesting opinions and occasionally some lively debate.  I flatter myself that we provided some content that was at least as interesting as a video about the Last Stop CD Shop expansion.  Apparently that cool new video player is of greater value.  To judge the value of this forum (you have until Wednesday), you might go back to September and October of last year, when Cory and I were fencing over the Rasmussen poll.  I would dare to say that you could have learned more about the election, and certainly about local elections, from Cory Heidelberger's posts alone than from the rest of South Dakota's #1 Website.

I thank my readers, especially those who chose to leave comments.  Pretty much everything I have posted here can also be seen at my primary blog: http://southdakotapolitics.blogs.com/.  If you have been reading me here, you can continue to read me there.

I can also enthusiastically recommend Cory Heidelberger's Madville Times, David Newquist's Northern Valley Beacon, Doug Wiken's Dakota Today, Joel Rosenthal's South Dakota Straight Talk, and the Radioactive Chief (great title!).  If I left any blogger active on this site, I apologize.

So goodbye and good night, Keloland.

Juan Williams & Ellen Weiss

It would be interesting to know what Ellen Weiss was thinking when she decided to fire Juan Williams. Was NPR's top news editor really so concerned about what Williams said on O'Reilly that she failed to consider the political consequences? That would be the most charitable guess.

Was she craving revenge against Williams for daring to be a regular on Fox News? Perhaps she shared the Obama Administration's view that Fox News is the voice of the enemy. Perhaps she hated Williams for his willingness to take conservative views seriously. She thought she had a chance to get him and she went for it. That would be the least charitable guess.

Either way, one might ask what she was thinking about the outcome. Did she not consider that this would make Williams a hero among conservatives? Did she not consider that NPR is National Public Radio and that Republicans might soon be in a position to control funding for that institution? I'm guessing that she didn't consider any of these things because she spends every minute of her working day and probably every other minute around people who agree with about everything. No one she knows or works worked with has any sympathy for Juan Williams or ever watches Fox.

Ms. Weiss has now resigned her post after an internal review of the Williams affair, which is a charitable way of saying that she was sacked. Williams, meanwhile, has a fat new contract with Fox. He wins, she loses, big time both ways.

Fox News would like to have a few more like Juan Williams and more Mara Liasson. NPR brought pressure against both to tow the party line. That is the difference.

Republicans Damage the Constitution In Order To Save It

My father once told me that the difference between the two parties is simple: the Democrats are stupid whereas the Republicans are just plain dumb. That bit of wisdom has held up well, though not always in the same proportion at the same time.

Today the Republicans did something smart and promptly turned it into something really dumb. Reading the Constitution was the smart thing. The founding document possesses enormous authority and reverence toward it is altogether proper.

The dumb thing was to read an "amended version". The text they read, I gather, removed all the language that has been superseded by amendments. There is a lot of language in the Constitution that isn't in the Constitution anymore, in a legal sense. For example, the original text states that senators are chosen by the state legislatures, but that was changed by the Seventeenth Amendment to election by the people of each state. I gather that the original language of the text was changed to reflect later amendments. I can't seem to find a complete audio version to check.

This was politically dumb because you surely undermine your case for fidelity to the original document by producing a new, edited document that no ratifying body ever saw. It was dumb also because it invited folks like Dahlia Lithwick at Slate to accuse the Republicans of "whitewashing the Constitution" by leaving out the passages about slavery. It was dumb because it looks dumb.

It was also dumb because the very passages that we are now justly ashamed of reveal both the corruption of the American idea by slavery and also the genuine greatness of what that peculiar institution corrupted. Here is one of the passages, I gather, that was not read in full.

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

In reading the document aloud, they skipped over that last clause. One can understand why. Those "other persons" were slaves. The presence of slavery in a Republic based on the principles of the Declaration of Independence exposes the founders as hypocrites.

But you can't be a hypocrite without acknowledging, if only by pretense, that you know what is right and what is wrong. The language above is laboriously constructed for the precise purpose of omitting the words slavery and slaves. The founders recognized that those words would stain the document, and so they are absent from the several provisions that recognize the institution.

Moreover, the Three Fifths Compromise expresses a logical division already present in the Republic. If those "other persons" aren't really people, with rights and dignity, then it makes no sense to count them for purposes of representation in the House. If they are really people, then they ought not only to be counted; they ought to be freed and given the vote.

If we hadn't really believed what we wrote in the Declaration, the Civil War would not have been possible. If we hadn't practiced slavery, in blatant contradiction to what we wrote, the war would never have been necessary. Skipping over the Three Fifths Clause throws the baby out with the very foul bathwater.

It's a bad sign that the Republicans had no one around to point this out. I'm available, if they are reading. This was not an auspicious start.

What is the Constitution?

The rise of the Tea Party movement, along with the explosive growth in Federal debt that buoyed it, has occasioned some debate on what the U.S. Constitution is and what it means. House Republicans will their session by reading the document aloud. In reply, E.J. Dionne reminds us forcefully that the Founding Fathers were just guys.

They were as enmeshed in historical circumstances as we are, they had no special divine insight into politics, and their thinking was certainly not free of passion, ignorance, and foolishness."

An examination of the Constitution that views it as something other than the books of Genesis or Leviticus would be good for the country.

I doubt that anyone wants the document to be added to the King James Bible, but, straw men aside, he has a point. The Founders may have had a special insight into politics, but it surely wasn't divine. The Constitution is an act of very human beings.

The Constitution of the United States is really three things. First, it is a statement of the source of all legitimate authority. "We the People" have the natural authority to "institute new Government", in the words of the Declaration,

laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Second, the Constitution is an arrangement of offices, an organization of powers. The power that always resides in the people is refracted into distinct institutions. One ray of power produces the state governments. The other, the federal government. The latter is refracted again into three distinct branches, and the legislative branch into two houses. The Constitution is not a mere blueprint. It is the living, breathing President and the legislators and the judges, it's the governors and the state legislators and state courts, and it is the voters.

Third, the Constitution is a set of limits on the powers of government. Congress cannot grant titles of nobility. The state governments cannot make treaties.

The Constitution is not particularly hard to understand, and certainly not because it was written more than a hundred years ago. The arrangement of powers remains as clear today as it was when the ink was still wet on the parchment. Controversies over its interpretation arise because the language is, necessarily, abstract. What exactly is Congress forbidden to do when it is forbidden to abridge freedom of speech? What powers are "necessary and proper" and what unnecessary and improper when Congress is doing what the Constitution explicitly authorizes it to do?

There are only two answers to that question, and both are provided by the scheme above. The constitutional limitations on the powers of government mean what the various offices of government, exercising their proper authority and including the electorate, decide that they mean. That is the most practical answer and in all cases so far it has been decisive. We may be nervous about intrusting a government, however divided, to decide what its limits are. However, in the absence of angelic arbitrators, it will have to do. The Constitution is what the Constitution does.

The second answer is that the people retain the right to alter or abolish the government if it ceases to serve the ends for which it was established. This may seem idealistic, but it is not. What happened to the Soviet Union? When support for the government collapsed, the tanks refused to move. Can one imagine the U.S. military moving against the U.S. people? I cannot, but if it came to that, debates over the meaning of the necessary and proper clause would have long since become meaningless.

Keeping the Republic means keeping the government within the bounds set by the Constitution. That is the responsibility of all Americans. That responsibility is the foundation that the Founding Fathers established.

Inequality, Income, & Macaques

Suppose you had to choose between two pieces of legislation. One would reduce inequality between the incomes of the rich and the poor, making the nation more egalitarian, but would reduce the incomes of everyone, making everyone a little or a lot poorer. The second would raise the incomes of nearly everyone, but would raise the incomes of the rich faster than those of the middle and lower classes. If that's your only choice, which do you choose?

Conservatives will have little trouble with this question. Liberals, I suspect, will be at least a little conflicted. Liberals are talking a lot right now about rising inequality, but they run into a problem. It's easy to feel that there is something wrong when the gap between the incomes of the rich and not so rich widens, but not so easy to say what is wrong with it. I can spend the money I make. What can I do with the gap between my income and that of Oprah Winfrey?

Nicholas Kristof went fishing for an answer and hauled in a book. From the New York Times:

There's growing evidence that the toll of our stunning inequality is not just economic but also is a melancholy of the soul. The upshot appears to be high rates of violent crime, high narcotics use, high teenage birthrates and even high rates of heart disease.

That's the argument of an important book by two distinguished British epidemiologists, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. They argue that gross inequality tears at the human psyche, creating anxiety, distrust and an array of mental and physical ailments — and they cite mountains of data to support their argument.

Kristof surveys the evidence and the argument. The result is pretty murky. One problem is the confusion of correlation and causation, a persistent dilemma for social scientists.

Among rich countries, those that are more unequal appear to have more mental illness, infant mortality, obesity, high school dropouts, teenage births, homicides, and so on.

They find the same thing is true among the 50 American states. More unequal states, like Mississippi and Louisiana, do poorly by these social measures. More equal states, like New Hampshire and Minnesota, do far better.

All that tells you is that there is a correlation between poverty and social dysfunction. It doesn't tell you whether poverty caused the dysfunction or vice versa. It certainly doesn't tell you that inequality itself is causing the dysfunction.

The bigger problem is confusion between the influence of abstract numbers and the concrete experience of competition.

There's similar evidence from other primates. For example, macaque monkeys are also highly social animals, and scientists put them in cages and taught them how to push a lever so that they could get cocaine. Those at the bottom of the monkey hierarchy took much more cocaine than high-status monkeys.

Among primates, including macaque monkeys and software designers, success provides its own high. That's the way brains work. Successful dominance floods the mind with happy neurotransmitters. So I have no trouble believing that cocaine is more attractive to a macaque that has just lost his job, his pickup truck, and his girl to the monkey next door.

I do have trouble believing that the down on his luck macaque is much influenced by bar graphs illustrating the rising income inequality since the 1970's. What eats at one of us primates is not what some guy he never met on Wall Street is making. It's what the macaque who got promoted ahead of us is making. That stress is very real and no doubt it contributes to a lot of downward spirals.

There is no remedy to the stress of competition except to reduce or eliminate competition. That isn't altogether impossible. The New York Times explains how this worked out for young people in Southern Europe.

Even before the economic crisis hit, Southern Europe was not an easy place to forge a career. Low growth and a corrosive lack of meritocracy have long posed challenges to finding a job in Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal. Today, with the added sting of austerity, more people are left fighting over fewer opportunities. It is a zero-sum game that inevitably pits younger workers struggling to enter the labor market against older ones already occupying precious slots.

As a result, a deep malaise has set in among young people. Some take to the streets in protest; others emigrate to Northern Europe or beyond in an epic brain drain of college graduates. But many more suffer in silence, living in their childhood bedrooms well into adulthood because they cannot afford to move out.

I won't comment on the differences between Northern and Southern Europe. See correlation and causation above. Notice instead the words "a corrosive lack of meritocracy." That means a restriction on competition. These governments have tried to guarantee a place to as many people as possible. Those who get a coveted job surely suffer from less stress. Perhaps they use less cocaine. Meanwhile you have a 29 year old university graduate with knowledge of five languages who has to live in her parent's home because she can't ever find a job.

Income inequality in America is largely worse than in Europe. Is Europe a model we should adopt? We may in fact be facing the choice described at the beginning of this post.

Same Sex Marriage & Incest

Proponents of same sex marriage often defend it on the grounds that people have a right to marry who they want (provided of course that the desire is reciprocated). Opponents frequently reply that this same reason is equally effective a justification for polygyny and incest. This usually makes the former very angry. "Shut up," they explain. What they don't do is the one thing they most need to do. If you want to demonstrate that same sex marriage ought to be legal, you need to show why incest should to be illegal.

Unfortunately, gay marriage advocates are almost always liberals, and liberals aren't usually comfortable at defending traditional sexual morality.

A welcome exception is William Saletan's recent piece in Slate.

Incest is for hicks. That's the stereotype among educated liberals: Homosexuality is urbane, polygamy is for Mormons, and incest is for hayseeds. So when David Epstein, a Columbia University political scientist, was charged last week with third-degree incest for allegedly shagging his adult daughter, the blogosphere erupted.

That first sentence presents a very powerful insight. Sexual morality begins with more or less vague impressions of what is noble and what is ugly, and almost always involves a distinction between our kind of people and people who aren't our kind. Consider the case of the Duke University Lacrosse players who were very nearly railroaded on a false rape charge. Many if not most Duke professors instinctively lined up against the athletes and that had a lot to do with their assumptions about what kind of people (male) athletes are. There is a reason for this. The moral sense is rooted in the evolved human capacity for forming partnerships and that in turn requires a capacity for discriminating between reliable and unreliable people.

Fortunately, our moral repugnance at rape is sound and very easy to defend. What about incest? Saletan begins with the most common argument for criminalizing incest.

The old answer was genetics. Germany's high court relied on that argument two years ago when it upheld the conviction of Patrick Stuebing for sex with his sister. Of the four children the couple produced, three had physical or mental disabilities. In general, studies show a significantly higher rate of birth defects in offspring of incestuous couples. The reason is simple: Every family has genetic flaws, and if you reproduce within your family, you're more likely to get two copies of the flaw—thereby producing the defective trait—instead of acquiring a new, protective allele from another family.

There's more to it than that. Inbreeding reduces genetic diversity, which makes any population of animals more vulnerable to pathogens. The genetic argument explains why animal societies (including our own) are typically matrilineal or patrilineal. Either the females or the males are exchanged between groups.

However, Saletan points out that this only means that incestuously inclined couples shouldn't procreate. It doesn't prove that they shouldn't have sexual relations. I think that the genetic argument is good enough. How would we allow the one while policing the other? I think there are pretty good reasons for not allowing first cousins to marry.

Saletan recognizes that the genetic grounds for prohibiting incest are not the most important grounds.

The conservative view is that all sexual deviance—homosexuality, polyamory, adultery, bestiality, incest—violates the natural order. Families depend on moral structure: Mom, Dad, kids. When you confound that structure—when Dad sleeps with a man, Dad sleeps with another woman, or Mom sleeps with Grandpa—the family falls apart. Kids need clear roles and relationships. Without this, they get disoriented. Mess with the family, and you mess up the kids.

That's the basis on which the Ohio Supreme Court upheld [the incest conviction of Paul Lowe, a former sheriff's deputy, for what the court called "consensual sex with his 22-year-old stepdaughter."]: "A sexual relationship between a parent and child or a stepparent and stepchild is especially destructive to the family unit." This destructive effect, the court reasoned, occurs even if the sex is adult and consensual, since "parents do not cease being parents … when their minor child reaches the age of majority."

Incest is wrong because it quite literally perverts the familial relationship. The family is the most basic institution in all human societies. If you don't believe me, ask Aristotle or Aristophanes. Its essential function is the nurturing of offspring by their parents and the honoring of parents by their offspring. It works by subordinating the self interest of each member of the family to the welfare of the family as a whole. Incest destroys that.

There are very good reasons for our moral repugnance at incest and for expressing that repugnance with the force of law. Having made that argument, Saletan is now in a strong position to defend same sex marriage.

When a young man falls in love with another man, no family is destroyed. Homosexuality is largely immutable, as the chronic failure of "ex-gay" ministries attests. So if you forbid sex between these two men, neither of them is likely to form a happy, faithful heterosexual family. The best way to help them form a stable family is to encourage them to marry each other.

Incest spectacularly flunks this test. By definition, it occurs within an already existing family. So it offers no benefit in terms of family formation. On the contrary, it injects a notoriously incendiary dynamic—sexual tension—into the mix.

Conservatives may be skeptical about this defense of same sex marriage. I think Saletan is right, but either way conservatives should recognize that he has confirmed their general view of sexual morality and the family. Liberals would be wise to follow suit. If you really want to defend same sex marriage, you have to defend marriage. You can't do the latter without defending the traditional family. Saletan's essay is an exemplary piece of moral reasoning.

Protecting the Nation’s Frigid Air

For the last two days Mother Nature has expressed her opinion of the global warming debate by dumping a ton of white powder on yours truly. The snow drifts in my back yard are waste high and my beagle transformed into a dolphin this afternoon to navigate them.

Maybe Mother Nature is trying to tell me something, only it is difficult to determine what that is. It seems obvious to me that a very cold day, or week, or even a decade of flat line temperatures tells us little or nothing about long range climate trends. Judah Cohen, writing in the New York Times, thinks otherwise.

It's all a snow job by nature. The reality is, we're freezing not in spite of climate change but because of it.

Only a fool could doubt the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis since, apparently, virtually any data confirms it.

Tomorrow will be a bitterly cold day here, whatever that means, and it will be the first day of the rest of Barack Obama's first term. One of things that Obama/Reid/Pelosi failed to do so far was to pass strict limits on carbon emissions. If they couldn't do it when they controlled the White House and both branches of Congress, they won't have better luck now that Orange John Boehner is replacing Pelosi as Speaker of the House.

Never mind. The Pittsburgh Post-gazette informs us that the limits are coming anyway.

The decision by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to move forward on limiting greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and refineries is a welcome step, especially because it comes as Congress stubbornly refuses to enact measures to protect the nation's air.

The EPA announced last week that it will propose standards for new and refurbished power plants in July and for new oil refineries next December; rules for existing power plants -- there are 16 coal-fired power plants in Western Pennsylvania -- would follow in 2015 or 2016. Nationwide, the plants and refineries emit about 40 percent of all greenhouse gases, and the rules are aimed at reducing carbon dioxide and other substances that are fouling the air today and harming the planet in the long term.

I am not quite sure what it means to "protect the nation's air." Air is one of those things that no government, however rapacious, has yet found a way to seize. Clouds drifting ashore over Seattle drift from further east, and the EPA has precious little jurisdiction over China.

I do know what it means for a bunch of executive branch bureaucrats to try to impose a policy favored by Democrats that failed in a Congress that Democrats controlled. It means big trouble for the President and his party.

Cap and Trade legislation failed because there is no way on God's green earth that the American people would put up with it. Maybe green technologies will one day flower and give us abundant energy while shrinking our carbon footprint back to the days when firewood was carried on donkey carts. Meanwhile the only way to achieve significant reductions in carbon emissions is to dramatically reduce energy consumption by making energy much more expensive. That means that everything produced with energy becomes more expensive, and all of us become poorer. The voters will notice.

Congress failed to pass restrictions on carbon emissions because Congress is directly responsible to the voters. Even in boom times such legislation would have been a dubious proposition and these ain't boom times. The folks who staff the EPA don't have to run for office, so they are more insulated from the people.

Barack Obama does have to run again, if he wants a second term. If the EPA really tries to protect the nation's air by putting the screws to the nation's power plants, that will mean either a big rise in energy bills for pretty much everyone or energy shortages. Either would be a great gift to whoever wins the 2012 Republican nomination.

I have a hard time believing that Obama will really give the Republicans so generous a gift. He surely wants to convince his core support on the Left that he is serious about this issue, because the Left cares. So the EPA will do something. Congress has provided the template. The Cap and Trade bill that passed Pelosi's House contained so many loopholes that it would have been ineffectual if it had become law. That's how cap and trade worked in Europe. I am guessing that the EPA regulations will look something like that.

Welcome to the second half of Barack Obama's first term. Happy New Year!