South Dakota Politics

The President, the Economy, and the Jellyfish

Brainless Box Jellyfish Know Which Way Is Up. Thus reads a headline in the wonderful journal New Scientist.

Box jellyfish may lack a brain, but they still make use of two dozen eyes. Now it seems that some of these eyes serve a surprising purpose: helping the jellyfish to navigate using landmarks above the water.

Who says that science can't solve political problems? President Obama should replace his entire economic team with box jellyfish. They can't possibly be any squishier than he is and looking up to see where the Hell they are going, let alone knowing which way is up, are powers that the Administration is sorely lacking.

We have for more than two years been pursuing a simple policy: revive economic growth that we don't have by spending tens of trillions of dollars that we don't have. The result has been a mass of debt that requires scientific notation to describe but not so much economic growth. From CNN:

Economic growth slowed to a crawl in the first three months of the year as a spike in gasoline, higher overall inflation and continued weakness in the housing market all took a toll on the recovery.

Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the nation's economic health, rose at an annual rate of 1.8%, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. That's a significant slowdown from the 3.1% growth rate in the final quarter of 2010.

For the most part, every Democrat has all twelve of his or her eyes focused on current spending and his or her brain (they do have them) is altogether fixed on making sure that the spending doesn't stop growing. The argument de jour is that you can't reduce spending during a down turn, as that would further depress economic growth.

The only problem with that argument is that we have been spending at unprecedented levels (excepting WWII as a precedent). If stimulus spending was going to work to revive the economy, wouldn't it be working by now? It isn't.

Maybe the problem is that, for the first time in history, confidence in the full faith and credit of these United States is failing. The U.S. budget is on a trajectory toward oblivion and the President has offered nothing whatsoever to fix it. Rep. Paul Ryan has offered a plan to restore solvency. The President seems to be bending all his power to demonize the Ryan plan.

Meanwhile China, the major holder of U.S. debt, is finally deciding that it might have to cut its losses. From CNS:

Mainland China has decreased its holdings of U.S. Treasury securities since last October, according to a report updated today by the U.S. Treasury Department.

This is big news, as evident from the fact that it has been scarcely reported by the MSM. It means that the U.S. Treasury will have a much less favorable market for future debt, which means that our debt will grow more precipitously than in previous scary projections.

We're in trouble. We desperately need to put our fiscal house in order. Our President doesn't know which way is up nor does he seem to have a clue how to navigate. Even a box jellyfish would be preferable.

Another Blow to Public Unions

Well, another evil Republican state legislature has voted to strip public employee unions of their bargaining rights. More evidence, no doubt, of Republican fascism.

No! Wait! It's Massachusetts Democrats! From the Boston Globe:

House lawmakers voted overwhelmingly last night to strip police officers, teachers, and other municipal employees of most of their rights to bargain over health care, saying the change would save millions of dollars for financially strapped cities and towns.

The 111-to-42 vote followed tougher measures to broadly eliminate collective bargaining rights for public employees in Ohio, Wisconsin, and other states. But unlike those efforts, the push in Massachusetts was led by Democrats who have traditionally stood with labor to oppose any reduction in workers' rights.

What does it mean that Massachusetts Democrats are pulling a Scott Walker? The answer, of course, is that they have no other choice. Public union contracts are unsustainable for state and municipal governments. In an era when state legislatures are having trouble balancing their books by any possible means, such contracts render large sections of the budget untouchable. That, of course, is the whole point of such contracts.

When even the Massachusetts Democrats recognize these facts, you can conclude that they are quite unavoidable in practice. It remains to be seen whether the Press outside of Massachusetts will take notice, or whether large protests will materialize, or whether anyone will liken Governor Deval Patrick a neo-fascist. Don't hold your breath.

Presidential Slide

President Obama continues to suffer a slide job approval. Mickey Kaus explains what it's not.

When did everyone decide that it's high gas prices that are hurting Obama? Seems crazy to me. He's losing two out of three wars, the economy is flagging, and his signature domestic achievement is unpopular. So it must be the gas! … P.S.: It's not surprising that in polls people who say they "are feeling serious hardship as a result of gas prices" disproportionately say they "will not vote for Obama in 2012." Or, rather, it's not surprising that people who are so economically pressured that they are feeling serious hardship as a result of gas prices say they will not vote for Obama. That doesn't mean the problem is gas prices. The problem might be the economic pressure.

I'd say that the President's slide in the polls is over determined. A new ABC-Washington Post poll shows:

A record 49 percent of Americans now disapprove of President Obama's handling of the situation in Afghanistan, up 8 points since January. And those who disapprove "strongly" outnumber strong approvers by nearly a 2-1 margin.

I doubt that any particular bit of news out of Afghanistan triggered this particular poll result. Rather, this is the kind of thing that happens when a President's center begins to fall in. People lose faith in anything he does. Once that happens, you can point to anything and say that that's the cause. The Press will look for something that isn't the President's fault.

Whatever you think the basic problem is, it is bad for the President and for the nation. It doesn't mean that Obama will lose in 2012. It means that if he wins, it will be largely by default. That sets the stage for four more years of a weak and unpopular Presidency.

Just as bad, a Republican might win by default. Obama is only one point ahead of Mike Huckabee in North Carolina, in a PPP poll, and Huckabee hasn't so much as twitched in the direction of a run.

A “Muslim Sensitivity Exception” to Freedom of Speech?

I am not in favor of burning anyone's scriptures or burning any book on the grounds that its content is offensive. Such actions always betray a meanness of mind. I am in favor of the greatest possible freedom of speech. So I am gratified but not surprised that Derek Fenton won his lawsuit.

Fenton was fired by the New Jersey Transit Authority for burning pages of Quran at Ground Zero last Sept. 11^th. With the help of the ACLU, he sued and will get his job back plus a cool twenty five grand. Apparently, Michigan didn't get the message. From the Detroit Free Press:

A judge late Friday sent two Florida pastors to jail for refusing to post a $1 bond and barred them from visiting a Dearborn mosque or its adjacent property for three years unless the mosque's leadership says otherwise. After a short time in jail they left on $1 bond each.

The stunning developments came after a Dearborn jury sided with prosecutors, ruling that Terry Jones and Wayne Sapp would breach the peace if they rallied at the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn. Critics slammed the decision to jail them, the court proceedings, and Wayne County prosecutors, saying they violated the men's Constitutional rights.

Now let us stipulate that Pastor Jones is a twenty-four karat ass. His previous burning of a Quran encouraged a mob in Pakistan to riot and kill twelve United Nations workers. That does not mean that Pastor Jones is responsible for those deaths. The killers alone are responsible. However, man who was Christian in any sense I recognize would consider the consequences of his actions.

Nonetheless, the Michigan judge's decision is an outrageous violation of freedom of speech. A government in the U.S. cannot require someone to pay for the privilege of expressing his opinions. A judge certainly cannot prohibit someone from protesting in advance of the actual protest. That is called prior restraint and it is ruled out by even the stingiest conceptions of free speech.

I am confident that the Michigan decision will be reversed. I note, however, that that decision and the action of the New Jersey Transit Authority suggest what Nina Shea called a "Muslim exception to the First Amendment." It is protected speech to stick a cross in a beaker of urine, but don't think of doing something disrespectful to a copy of the Quran.

Allowing Jones his freedom is distasteful because he is distasteful. It is worse than that of course. It has already resulted in actual bloodshed abroad and perhaps serious damage to American foreign policy interests. Perhaps, the Supreme Court might conceivably rule, preventing such damage might make for a "compelling government interest" of the kind that occasionally allows exceptions to constitutional prohibitions.

Be careful what you wish for. The New York Times has been cheerfully publishing those Wikileaks documents. Some of those may indeed have damaged American interests abroad. Can the Times be punished for publishing them? Can the Times be prohibited from publishing them?

Freedom of speech is freedom of speech. It is nothing if it doesn't cover all people and all issues. Pastor Jones would never have been fined or jailed for burning a Bible or an American flag, nor would he have been subject to either if he had only been the New York Times.

A Meditation on Easter

Quick quiz boys and girls: what do the words east, yeast, and Easter have in common? If you actually know the answer, four points off for being a know-it-all.

Here's my guess: east is where the sun rises, yeast is what makes bread rise, and after three days in the oven, the Son of Man perked up and popped out. Regardless of whether my philology holds up, I like the connection between yeast and Easter. The New Testament does not offer, as many contemporary Christians seem to think, a dualist doctrine. The Christ did not float out of the tomb like some vaporous cartoon dog on his way to the canine quarters of paradise. Christ puffed up, sat up, swung his legs off the slab, and let his feet do the walking. Why else was it necessary to roll away the stone?

I confess that I find it fascinating, and perhaps a little disturbing, that Christ's surprise exit was anticipated by none other than Christ's persecutors. They urged Pontius Pilate to set a watch on the tomb. Matthew 27:

63 Saying, Sir, we remember that that deceiver said, while he was yet alive, After three days I will rise again.

64 Command therefore that the sepulcher be made sure until the third day, lest his disciples come by night, and steal him away, and say unto the people, He is risen from the dead: so the last error shall be worse than the first.

If the Pharisees thought of this… But I digress.

Christ's physical resurrection surely represents the essential promise of Christianity. As Christ got up and walked on after death, whosoever believes in him may do likewise. The grandeur of that promise is easy to appreciate, but not so easy to appreciate fully.

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam collectively, represent a major advance over pagan theology. The pagan Gods are in the knowable world. They dwell on mountains or in deep romantic chasms. They move about the heavens or beneath the waves. Occasionally they come down and do the dirty with earth women. Even where there is a division between world time and dream time, this is just a partition of the world into the directly and relatively knowable.

The God of the Old Testament starts out that way. He walks in the garden in the cool of the day. But He rapidly turns into a God who cannot be captured by any image or even given a proper name. This was, perhaps, the inevitable result of a single momentous idea: that God created the heavens and the earth. If the world includes all rationally knowable things and if God created the world, then He must exist before, outside, and beyond all the knowable things.

This result was anticipated by Socrates, who never made mistakes. Socrates had lost all patience with the pagan gods. If the divine is meaningful, it must be free from all limitations and especially from all moral failings. The divine can admit of no contradiction or correction. By the time that the great Medieval theologians Aquinas and Maimonides were done working this out, it became very difficult to say anything coherent about God. One could safely say only what God was not. He was not mortal, not limited in power, compassion, or wisdom, etc. It was not clear that God could have any mortal passions, as passion implies longing and hence need. Can a perfect being have any needs?

That's some God you have there. There were other problems with this theology that did not irritate the pagans. Zeus, being limited and not all that bright, didn't have to explain why he allowed evils into the world. He just works here. The God of Abraham and Isaac has some splainin' to do. The Medieval Theologians brought enormous powers of intellect to bear in order to solve the problem of evil, and they failed.

A more basic problem is how ordinary human beings can know a God who is so unknowable. How can one have any kind of relationship with a God who has neither a face nor a name? The Old Testament answer seems to be that most of cannot have such a relationship. Only Moses can go up on the mountain and talk to the Big Guy face to face.

Christ provided a more satisfactory answer. Jesus really did walk in gardens in the cool of the day. He can have a name and a face (he looked lovingly at me from my Grandmother's parlor wall). You can talk to Jesus and maybe he can even give you a good hug.

The Christ who suffered on the cross and then up and walked out of the tomb is both knowable and divine. Christianity preserved the essential Biblical idea but also resisted the temptation to move too far in the opposite direction. God may indeed be beyond and outside of the world, but we cannot and can never be so. The Gnostics wanted to believe that Christ came only "in spirit". They held that the physical world is irredeemable. The wee books toward the end of the New Testament tackle this head on. Jesus had a belly button and ate bread. He had nostrils and a scrotum. He was a tangible as my Uncle Roy. Therein lies the promise.

Happy Easter.

Gaseous Discharges & the Charge for Gas

As usual, Aristotle was way ahead of the curve. He recounts a story about Thales, regarded in legend as the first philosopher. People made fun of Thales because he was poor. Just to prove a point, Thales used his advanced science of nature to predict that there would be a bumper olive crop the next year.

The Greeks loved olives. They mostly loved to press them into olive oil, which was used not only for cooking but for cleaning and oiling the skin. Thales borrowed a bit of money from his friends and patrons (philosophers depend heavily on patrons) and put down a deposit on all the olive presses in the off season. When the bumper crop came in, Thales made a fortune with his monopoly on the presses. So philosophers could make money if they wanted to. They are just interested in other things.

Aristotle guessed rightly that Thales' trick had nothing to do with natural science. He just bought low and sold high. There is a nice and proper term for this: investment. That means spending resources on something that isn't useful right now but will be useful in the future. There is another term for it: speculation. That is what you call it when you have a bunch of olives on your hands and someone figured out before you did that you'd need a press.

Just right now it isn't olive oil but gasoline that is climbing in price. President Obama, with the nation's best economic minds at his disposal, has announced an economically illiterate policy. From CNN:

Prodded by growing public frustration over sharply rising gasoline prices, the Justice Department on Thursday announced the formation of a team -- the "Oil and Gas Price Fraud Working Group -- tasked with the goal of ensuring consumers are not victims of price gouging.

Gas prices exceeding $4 per gallon or higher are "tough" for most Americans, President Barack Obama told an audience in Reno, Nevada. "We are going to make sure that no one is taking advantage of American consumers for their own short-term gain."

One can understand the President's frustration. Gas prices and his poll ratings may be inversely proportional. Unfortunately, the market for energy is not something his Justice Department can fix.

Investors in energy markets try to do what Thales did: buy low and sell high. You buy something if you think that market forces will raise its value in the future. Can you artificially raise the price of something by your own speculation? Yes. But that would mean spending more for it now than it will be worth when you decide to sell it. It doesn't work as an investment policy. Or to be more precise, it works only if you can monopolize and horde something. No one can stash away enough oil or gas to make a difference later.

The President's Oil and Gas Price Fraud Working Group is a fraudulent working group. It has no rational purpose other than to shift the blame for high gas prices away from the President toward some shifty, pointy nosed "speculators". It would be easy to be contemptuous of the President for this, as is Powerline.

In fairness, one has to point out that President's routinely do this. George W. Bush did it. Bill Clinton did it. Barack Obama is just doing what Presidents do when oil prices climb and the electorate gets testy.

Of course, it is worthy of mention that Obama was in favor of raising energy prices only a little while ago. From Politifact:

"Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket," Obama told the [San Francisco] Chronicle . "Coal-powered plants, you know, natural gas, you name it, whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers."

You name it. The prices of energy will necessarily skyrocket. That is not would will happen if the President's cap and trade plan fails. That was his plan. Only government can artificially drive up energy prices. It is a little disingenuous for him to blame speculators when he himself is in favor of doing precisely that.

The Two Stooges Do Libya

Just in case you've forgotten, we are at war with Libya. Wars are frequently confusing and chaotic in operation, but they can be clear in their objectives. The aim of the United States in the WWII was the destruction of the German and Japanese regimes. Mission accomplished.

Most Americans are still wondering what the mission is in Libya. Perhaps we prevented a humanitarian disaster by preventing Muammar Qaddafi from annihilating his disorganized opposition. That preemptive intervention, however successful, raises the obvious question: what next? With Q. in control over everything he needs to keep going and the rebels helpless the moment we withdraw our protection, what (to use a phrase incessantly spoken by critics of Dubya) is our exit strategy?

The policy (or quazi-policy) continues to morph. From MSNBC:

The United States is using armed Predator drones in Libya to target Muammar Gaddafi's forces with the approval of President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Thursday.

The drones are very useful against small, defined targets. That is to say, they are airborne assassins. The Administration has strenuously denied that Qaddafi himself is a target, though they just as strenuously insist that he must go. What exactly is the Predator's mission?

The first two Predators, which carry Hellfire missiles and can stay in the air for 24 hours, headed to Libya on Thursday but had to turn back due to bad weather, said General James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Was it really bad weather that caused the Predators to turn back? Or did these smart weapons figure out all on their own that the Administration had no idea what it is doing?

It gets better. The Administration has been at odds with itself for weeks about arming the Libyan rebels. From Foreign Policy:

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) said in a late Wednesday interview that the Obama administration's top national security officials were deeply split on whether arming the rebels was a good idea. In a classified briefing Wednesday with lawmakers, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Rogers said it was clear that there were deep divisions between the cabinet officials regarding the wisdom of arming the rebels.

So do we arm the rebels or not? From the Washington Post:

The United States and its allies have entered a new stage of involvement in Libya, sending assistance and advisers directly to opposition military forces, which have been unable to break Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi's stranglehold over much of the country despite help from NATO airstrikes.

France and Italy said Wednesday that they would join Britain in dispatching military advisers to assist the inexperienced and disorganized rebel army, primarily in tactics and logistics. President Obama authorized sending $25 million worth of nonlethal equipment, including body armor, tents, uniforms and vehicles.

We are giving the rebels "nonlethal equipment"? We are deepening our involvement in Libya by sending in advisors and $25 million in military hardware but we aren't giving them any actual weapons.

This is nucking futs. We are putting the rebels in body armor and uniforms but we are not giving them rifles and ammunition? Maybe arming the rebels is a bad idea. After all, we don't know who they are or where the weapons will end up. What do we know, then, and what are we up to?

To say that Obama's Libya policy is bad would be misleading. It's schizophrenic. The Administration is deeply split on the next step in Libya. It's the President's job to resolve such splits by making a decision. If there is anything we have learned about Barack Obama, it is that he is not up to that job. Even the unmanned drones could figure that out.

Cloud Cuckoo Land 2

A brief addendum to the previous post. Intrepid reader says this:

Oh what a dick... Oil and gas get over 25% of US Federal energy subsidies!

OIL and GAS are highly profitable and need NO external manipulation by the US government in order to encourage production... Ethanol gets over 30% so if you've got a farm and are growing corn you are officially a "Welfare Queen"... Coal gets 20%. Nuclear gets 9%. And wind? Wind gets 3.5% of federal energy subsidies...

The fact is that solar power, wind power, and biofuels receive less than 10% of government energy subsidies...

The odd thing is, this dick finds a lot here to agree with. Oil and Gas (and coal) need no subsidies to encourage production. That is because they contribute to the energy supply. Wind, solar, and biofuels do need subsidies because they do not contribute at all, or not enough to make them economically viable. Thanks, Dave, for confirming my point.

It would almost certainly be better not to subsidize oil, coal, and gas production. Why does Congress do so? Because it gives them leverage over those industries. I am completely in agreement with Dave over ethanol.

However, the percentage of energy subsidies that goes to wind, solar, and biofuels as opposed to oil and gas is obviously irrelevant. What counts is subsidies per kilowatt hour, or some other measure of energy produced.

Finally, the whole point of cap and trade is to make energy more expensive in order to force the industries to develop clean energy. If you don't agree, take up the point with Barack Obama. From Politifact:

It didn't take us long to find Barack Obama's original quote, which came from a videotaped interview he did with the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board very early in the presidential campaign, January 2008.

"Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket," Obama told the Chronicle . "Coal-powered plants, you know, natural gas, you name it, whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers."

What Obama doesn't say is that C&T cannot possibly have any significant effect on greenhouse emissions unless the costs are horrendously expensive. That was my point.

Cloud Cuckoo Land

I argued recently that the American Left is empty of ideas and has become a conservative movement, for all practical purposes. Like a herd of water buffalos facing a pride of lions, the Left has formed a circle around its cherished offspring: entitlements.

That is not quite fair. The Left has one big, relatively new idea: the threat from anthropogenic global warming (AGW). That idea is particularly attractive to the Left for two reasons. One is environmental morality, which is the closest thing to a grand mythology the Left has left (Marxism having lost its reptilian luster). The other is that the AGW threat justifies increased government control over the economy. Gotta like that!

There are, however, two really big problems with the AGW program. One is that it is politically impossible. In order to have any credible chance of actually slowing down AGW, you would have to make energy a lot more expensive than it is at present and thus retard economic growth. Even if you believe that green jobs and energy independence can be achieved if only we shift enough investment into wind, solar power, biofuels, etc., policies like Cap and Trade try to force that shift by increasing the cost of energy sources that now fuel the economy. In the short run, that means that everything becomes more expensive and that is the very opposite of "stimulus".

The Democrats couldn't pass Cap and Trade when they held the Oval Office and both Houses of Congress. That is because the people (see of, by, and for in the Gettysburg Address) won't go along. This explains the recent court case, celebrated by the New York Times.

The case about global warming scheduled to be argued on Tuesday before the Supreme Court is a blockbuster. Eight states — from California to New York, plus New York City — sued six corporations responsible for one-fourth of the American electric power industry's emissions of carbon dioxide.

Rather than seeking money or punishment for the defendants, they seek what everyone should agree is the polluters' responsibility: abatement of their huge, harmful part in causing climate change. The purpose is not to solve global warming or usurp the government's role in doing so. It is, rightly, to get major utilities to curb their greenhouse-gas emissions before the government acts.

Let's unpack this. The Times wants the courts to force "one-fourth of the American electric power industry" to curb emissions of carbon dioxide in order to abate "their huge, harmful part in causing climate change." Consider what the courts would have to do. They would have to reach a judicial determination concerning global warming. They would have to seize control of one quarter of America's power supply. They would have to make it stop supplying so much power. Can one really imagine that any of this is within the competency of the courts?

This is profoundly undemocratic. Having failed to push its AGW program through the elected branches of government, the NYT's wants the courts to enact it by legislative fiat (at least until "the government acts").

If this really happens, can one imagine what the political fallout will be? The electric bill of Americans all over the country will rise dramatically. Everything that is produced with electric power (see: everything) will go up in price. The GOP will patiently explain why this is happening. Hitherto loyal Democrats will excoriate their leadership for letting this happen. The fate of Democratic Party will depend on exactly when, in the election cycle, the people first grasp what is going on. The AGW program may be the only hope for saving the earth from boiling seas, but it spells political doom for the Democrats.

There is another big problem with the Democrat's one big, new idea. It is altogether at odds with their conservative stance on entitlements. As the Economist puts it, there are only three ways to deal with the budget imbalance with or without punitive cuts in government spending: growth, inflation, or default. The last item would be a disaster for everyone. The second item would (probably will) eat into the benefits that entitlements distribute. While no realistic projections for economic growth are sufficient to cover the cost of entitlement expenses, vigorous expansion of the economy would make the problem a little more manageable. It is precisely economic growth that the Times wants the courts to put a lid on.

So it wasn't entirely fair of me to say that the Left has no new ideas. It has at least one big one. The big one will kill everything else that the Left thinks it stands for.

Below Standard & Poor

It is not often that a President gets a failing grade from a financial institution. It happened today. From Reuters:

S&P, which assigns ratings to guide investors on the risks involved in buying debt instruments, slapped a negative outlook on the country's top-notch credit rating and said there's at least a one-in-three chance that it could eventually cut it.

A downgrade, which would leave Germany and France with a higher rating, would erode the status of the United States as the world's most powerful economy and the dollar's role as the dominant global currency.

If investors start demanding higher returns for holding riskier U.S. debt, the rise in bond yields would crank up borrowing costs for consumers and businesses. That would threaten to hurt the economy as it recovers from the worst recession since World War II.

Congress, of course, must pass a budget. Here both sides get a share of the blame. To bring the United States back to solid fiscal ground, we are probably going to have to raise taxes. Raising taxes on the rich may indeed be in order, but that isn't going to come near solving the problem. There just isn't enough taxable income left among the rich. We're going to have to raise taxes on middle class Americans as well.

The wealthiest 1% of Americans pays almost 40% of income taxes. The wealthiest 10% pays about 60%. The bottom 50% pays almost nothing. When you cut off half of Americans from paying income taxes, you effectively cut them out of the political loop. Republicans are more responsible for this skewing of the tax burden than the Democrats are, and they will defend it with all their might.

We are also going to have to reduce spending on Medicare, Medicaid (et al.), and, yes, Social Security. In the case of the first two, we are going to have to reduce it by a lot. The Left in general and the Democrats in particular are dead set against meaningful reductions in these programs. All the New York Times and E. J. Dionne can talk about is how destructive the Republican cuts would be. They write as if the fiscal problem did not exist.

Unfortunately, it does. The Reuters piece above hardly tells the half. Current long term budget projections, alarming enough on their own, assume that the U.S. continues to enjoy the Triple A rating that it has enjoyed since 1917. If we lose that, borrowing costs will go up and the debt will increase at a much higher, much less manageable rate. Bloomberg has this:

The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note jumped as high as 3.45 percent in the minutes after the S&P report from 3.37 percent. The yield was back down to 3.37 percent at 4:27 p.m. as investors focused on speculation that Greece will be unable to avoid a default, driving them to the relative safety of U.S. debt.

We're not Greece yet, A.I., but that's only because there is still a Greece. Greece isn't going to last.

It's the President's job to provide leadership when we approach a crisis. We are and he ain't. If Obama had any substance, this would have been his moment to seize history. He might dare to tell the Republicans what is implicit in the Wall Street Journal article cited above. He might dare to tell Democrats what is obvious to everyone: that government has made promises it cannot keep and it must begin to face reality. If he did that, he might deserve a statue some day.

Unfortunately, he is utterly bereft of substance. He is as empty as a windsock; flaccid, but for the wind. Two months ago he produced a budget that ignored the fiscal dilemma altogether. Last week he pious announced a "budget plan" that included neither a budget nor a plan. Its only purpose was to position him to attack Republicans.

The Standard & Poor report is a sign of impending disaster. It will have no effect on the President. The Senate is somnambulant. The House cannot act on its own, had it the will and clarity. Hope rests on the Republican nomination process. May God have mercy on our souls.

It is unlikely that a statue of Barack Obama will ever rest in any significant public place. He should be commemorated by something. I suggest a windsock.

For Whom the Bell Polls

The Republican wave that swept away Democrats in Washington and across the state legislatures and state houses was first visible in November of 2009. The elections of Republican governors in Virginia and New Jersey were shortly followed by the election of Republican Scott Brown to replace Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts. The wave was clearly visible in primary elections for the rest of 2010. The reelection of David Prosser to the Wisconsin Supreme Court suggests that the wave has not yet subsided to the point that it can be resisted.

Electoral events are far more reliable indicators than polls, but polls are all we have when it comes to Presidential elections. I make no predictions. I have my election shaman for that. I will point out that the President is not in a strong position.

Gallup has Obama's overall approval rating down to 41%, which ties his previous bottom in August and October 2010. Fifty percent of Americans disapprove of the job Obama is doing as President. That is not good, not matter how you cut it. Pollster, now at the Huffington Post, lists the major polls as they are announced, and the numbers are similar across the board. Obama is stuck in the forties and maybe in the wee forties.

Jay Cost has some thoughts on this.

If you look carefully at Obama's job approval numbers, you'll notice that they are being propped up by strong support among Democrats. In last week's Gallup poll, for instance, Obama was holding 80 percent of Democrats, and just 39 percent of independents and 11 percent of Republicans, for a total job approval of 45 percent. Given that most party battles happen between the 45 yard lines, the Gallup numbers suggest that most of the voters that both sides actively play for are no longer on Obama's side, at least for now.

What Obama cannot suffer is a drop in support among Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents. That's how he could fall from the mid-40s into the high-30s. And that makes a huge psychological difference – like the price of oil going above $100. A president in the mid-40s is still in the game vis-à-vis the next election. A president in the 30s is flailing.

Obama has not yet suffered a fall into the 30% approval range, but he has precious little margin for error. He has suffered defections among all three of the major demographic groups.

The President's approval rating has fallen into the seventies among Democrats. Gallup has found that his approval has fallen even among Black Americans, from highs in the 90's to 85%. A 54% majority of Hispanics still approve of the President. A mere 39% of "non-Hispanic whites" approve.

The numbers that should worry the President most are those reported by independents. Only 35% of independents approve of the job the President is doing.

Two things, I think, are dragging the President's approval rating down. One is the intervention in Libya. Whatever you think of the wisdom of intervening, the Administration's handling of the affair doesn't inspire confidence. It just isn't clear what the President wants to do or how he intends to do it. To be fair, not a lot of Americans are paying much attention to this. That doesn't mean that they have no impression of the President's leadership or lack thereof.

The other thing is the fiscal dilemma. Jay Cost thinks that the President's speech on Wednesday was aimed solely at Democrats. He meant to assure them that he would resolutely oppose any reductions in Federal spending and would support only tax increases on the rich. That means that he has given up on independent voters, who normally decide elections.

That seems right. The question is whether it is working. Maybe the weakening in Democratic support came because the President agreed to marginal cuts in present spending in the recent budget deal. In that case, the President's speech may revive his support on the left.

Maybe the weakening of support across the board indicates a loss of confidence in the President's leadership. That is obviously the case among independents. Independent voters have a clear sense of the fiscal crisis and they expect the President to take charge in fixing it. He ain't, and they know it. What if that same sense is beginning to eat into the Democratic share of the electorate?

The Republicans have yet to produce a viable candidate for President. They may well fail to do so, and Obama will be elected by default. Just right now, that seems to be what he is hoping for.

The President Proposes Greece

Sixty days after the President delivered a budget that did nothing to curb the growth in federal debt, he produced a new "Framework for Shared Prosperity and Shared Fiscal Responsibility." The "Framework" (one cannot call it a budget since there is no indication of what revenues will be raised from where or what will be spent on what) purports to be a plan to reduce the deficit by $4,000,000,000,000 over 10, excuse me, 12 years.

Why the sudden concern for fiscal responsibility? It is unlikely that some new bit of economic information suddenly convinced the President of the seriousness of the problem. What moved the President to act was the release of the Ryan Plan. The President views the Ryan plan simultaneously as an opportunity and a peril. He can use it to demonize the Republicans and he must. If Americans really come to fear national fiscal insolvency more than a loss of personal benefits, he doesn't want to be seen as part of the "do nothing" party.

The Ryan Plan, whatever you think of it as a whole, is a serious proposal for fiscal reform. The President's Framework is a political document, long on blame shifting and "save grandma" rhetoric, and very short on specifics. It does, however, concede the essential point to the Republicans and, I dare say, to the Tea Party Movement: something really, truly, no kidding must be done about the growth of public debt. Here is what Obama said in his speech today:

Even after our economy recovers, our government will still be on track to spend more money than it takes in throughout this decade and beyond. That means we'll have to keep borrowing more from countries like China. And that means more of your tax dollars will go toward paying off the interest on all the loans we keep taking out. By the end of this decade, the interest we owe on our debt could rise to nearly $1 trillion. Just the interest payments.

As Powerline observes, this is what happens under the President's own budget. That was his plan, two months ago! Now he is suddenly aware of our fiscal dilemma. That alone is a lot progress in two months.

There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical about the "Framework". For one thing, the 12 year time period is unusual. A decade is customary in budgeting. That gives the President two years and one election to do little or nothing. Like most such proposals, all the savings are delayed. Most of the proposals for spending cuts and increased revenues are vague and/or implausible.

The Framework wasn't, however, altogether unserious. The most interesting nugget is this:

We must provide a strong incentive for Congress to act on a deficit reduction framework and renew confidence that we will hit this goal. Therefore, the President is calling for:

• A debt failsafe that will ensure that our nation's debt is on a declining path as a share of our economy. If by 2014, budget projections do not show that the debt-to-GDP ratio has stabilized and is declining in the second half of the decade, the failsafe will trigger an across the board spending reduction, including on spending through the tax code.
• The trigger will ensure that deficits as a share of the economy average no more than 2.8% of GDP in the second half of the decade.
• Consistent with prior fiscal enforcement mechanisms put in place by Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Clinton, the trigger should not apply to Social Security, low-income programs, or benefits for Medicare enrollees.
• The trigger should also include a mechanism to ensure that it does not exacerbate an economic downturn or interfere with our nation's ability to respond to a national security emergency.

This is an old idea and one that has never worked yet. If the deficit isn't reduced by a specified amount, the failsafe mechanism will trigger an automatic spending reduction. Sounds good! Let's unpack it.

If, by 2014 (the second year of Obama 2, he hopes), the "the debt-to-GDP ratio" is not "projected" to "stabilize and decline in the second half of the decade" (10 or 12 years?), then a "failsafe will trigger an across the board spending reduction, including on spending through the tax code." So we will now have a governor on the federal budget, like the one that keeps your go kart from going too fast. If the deficit isn't reduced by Congressional action, it will be automatically reduced. Problem solved.

There is a bit of confusion here. The "Debt to GDP ratio" is not the same as the "deficit to GDP ratio." The plan is also dangerously vague. "Budget projections" by who? The Congressional Budget Office? The Office of Management and Budget? Paul Krugman? If real spending cuts are at stake, the pressure to manipulate projections will be overwhelming. Better yet, the failsafe won't trigger if it might "exacerbate an economic downturn," which will be determined by who? Paul Krugman? It will always be easy to think that the economy is too fragile "just now" for cuts.

This plan is a recipe for disaster. Consider that the failsafe mechanism exempts Social Security, low-income programs (see Medicaid), and Medicare. As Keith Hennessey puts it:

It appears that the President's trigger would exempt more than 90% of government spending from the automatic across-the-board cut.

That doesn't mean that the President's trigger would do nothing. Consider these ominous words in the passage above: "the failsafe will trigger an across the board spending reduction, including on spending through the tax code." What does "spending through the tax code" mean? Let's say the Federal Government takes 20% of your income in taxes. The rest of your income is federal "spending through the tax code." The idea here is that the federal government owns all your income and letting you keep any of it is federal "spending".

So let's put the puzzle together. The President's failsafe mechanism would exempt Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, the three programs that are driving long term deficit growth. The failsafe would cut virtually no spending, but would trigger automatic income tax increases large enough to close the gap between revenues and expenditures. The President tries to game this by talking about taxes on millionaires and billionaires, but the very rich already pay the lion's share of income taxes. There is no way that ends meet here unless taxes are raised on almost all working Americans.

What the President is in fact proposing is the unrestrained growth of federal spending and the unrestrained growth of taxation to keep up with it. No wonder Paul Krugman likes it. Obama thinks (assuming he thinks) that this will turn the United States into Canada.

In fact, it would turn the United States into Greece. Our big social programs would continue to grow without check, and taxes would increase to the point that everyone stops paying them. Revenue for investment would shrivel. We would eventually reach the point of default, with no European Union to bail us out.

It would be uncharitable to think that the President has thought this through. He isn't thinking about the fiscal future of these United States. He is thinking (assuming he is thinking) about November 2012.

He might have chosen this moment to do something worthy of reelection. Probably we need to raise taxes on almost all Americans. Certainly we need to cut spending on entitlements. At the very least we needed an alternative to the Ryan budget that was serious, so that Congress could work out a rational solution to the present dilemma. I did not expect such from this President and I was not surprised.

Spud Guns & Blind Cave Fish

Last night's episode of House is proof that the series hasn't lost an ounce of its punch. I think I counted six distinct story lines, all of them fascinating, and all woven seamlessly together. If all that weren't enough, it involved someone shooting someone with a potato cannon. That's what I call fine TV!

This brings me to tonight's topic: the sleeping habits of blind Mexican cave fish. Blind cave fish provide, perhaps, the most elegant and compelling demonstration of natural selection at work. They are very similar to species of fish that live outside the caves, except for the blindness and lack of pigmentation. They do have "scars" where once their ancestors had eyes.

Apparently, the genes coding for working eyeballs and those for pigmentation are very sensitive to mutation. Outside the caves, eyes are useful for avoiding predators and finding food and mates. Color is useful for attracting mates. Accordingly, mutations that damage eyesight and pigmentation are constantly selected out. Inside the caves eyesight and color are useless and so the mutations quickly accumulated in the species. That is almost as cool as a spud gun.

One difference between the spelunking Astyanax mexicanus and its less agoraphobic siblings is that A mexicanus doesn't get much shuteye. From Wired:

[Researchers] monitored the different species of fish under simulated 12-hour day and night cycles and found that all three populations of cave fish slept way less than the surface fish. Cavefish slept an average of 110 to 125 minutes a day, while the surface fish averaged 800 minutes.

I am not sure that "surface fish" is the right term. Siesta fish sounds more like it. The fish outside the caves are getting better than twelve hours of sleep a day. Only a beagle can compete. But how can you tell when a fish is asleep? I am interested in this because I have the same problem with students in the back row of some of my classes.

It turns out sleeping fish have a stereotypical posture: They stop moving, drop to the bottom of the tank and drop their tail. The scientists found that once a fish had been in this position for 60 seconds, it was definitely in a different state: Like rousing a sleepy teenager, it took three times as many taps on its tank to get a sleepy fish moving after that 60-second mark.

Well, yeah, that's pretty much how you can tell when I'm asleep. I drop my tail and sink to the bottom of the tank. What happens when a fish suffers from sleep deprivation?

To verify that the fish were indeed sleeping, the researchers also explored what happened when they deprived the fish of sleep. They put the fish on top of a Vortex mixer set to its gentlest setting and had it vibrate for 10 seconds out of every minute, all night long. The next day, fish of all four species were far less active. "It's like they were out at night partying," said co-author Eric Duboue. "The next day they had to sleep it off."

I was in fact subject to a similar experiment back in college. It was called a "dorm," which is derived from the Latin word for sleep and was a lie. I note that the researchers failed to consider an alternative explanation. Perhaps the fish were merely attending lectures on public administration.

Why do cave fish sleep only a couple of hours a day? Adaptation provides an answer.

At the surface, fish have to use energy to escape predators during the day, but have plenty of food available. It's the opposite in a cave, where the fish are the top predators but food is scarce. A fish that's awake more has a better chance of snagging the rare morsel as it wanders by.

Ok. The sleep patterns are probably adaptive. But how do we know that the work of adaptation is preserved at the genetic level rather than being a conditioned response to different environments?

To confirm that the differences in sleep habits they observed were genetic, the researchers bred the various cavefish populations with the surface fish. The offspring slept like cavefish, indicating a dominant gene for sleeplessness. A second generation, bred by mating that first hybrid generation, showed sleep behaviors in between the two populations. The researchers concluded that a few specific genes must be responsible for the sleep change.

That nails down the Darwinian angle. The cave fish and the siesta fish have a recent ancestor in common, which is evident from the fact that they can be bred together. Try breeding with a hamster. That was a rhetorical suggestion. The results of cross breeding show that the sleep patterns are heritable. Natural selection alone explains the synergy between inheritance and adaptation.

The Wired article goes out of the way to suggest that this can offer hope to human beings who can't sleep even when they aren't sleeping atop a blender. I think that discovery alone is good enough.

Can Darwinian natural selection explain all the differences between sleepy fish and sleep college students? No. It can only explain those that are genetic in origin. That, however, turns out to count for a lot. Now, can we get the fish into a potato gun?

They toil not, neither do they spin

Nothing illustrates the distance between the political culture and reality in modern governments so much as the billions invested in wind power. Presumably the purpose of such investments is to a) reduce greenhouse emissions and b) reduce dependence on fossil fuels. The plain fact that it increases both seems not to have bothered anyone.

Except, perhaps, the John Muir Trust. The JMT is a conservation charity that protects wild lands in Scotland. The trust commissioned a study of wind power that covered UK wind farms for about two years (2008-2010). The BBC summarizes the results.

Statements made by the wind industry and government agencies commonly assert that wind turbines will generate on average 30% of their rated capacity over a year, it said.

But the research found wind generation was below 20% of capacity more than half the time and below 10% of capacity over one third of the time.

"Capacity" here indicates how much of its full potential an energy actually generates over time. Wind farms operating at full capacity produce relatively modest amounts of electricity. As the Beeb notes, even the wind industry and the government agencies that promote it don't claim that wind farms will operate at more than 30% capacity over a year. By contrast, a coal fired plant will usually operate at more than 70% capacity over the same time, and a nuclear plant at more than 90%.

It gets better:

During each of the four highest peak demands of 2010, wind output reached just 4.72%, 5.51%, 2.59% and 2.51% of capacity, according to the analysis.

It concluded wind behaves in a "quite different manner" from that suggested by average output figures or wind speed records.

The report said: "It is clear from this analysis that wind cannot be relied upon to provide any significant level of generation at any defined time in the future.

Surprisingly enough, wind is less predictable than you might guess from "average output figures." Even the 10% capacity is exaggerated. During periods of peak demand, when additional power is needed most, wind power output in the UK was between 2 and 6% capacity.

The BBC piece doesn't do justice to the report. Wind generation was below %2.5 capacity one day in twelve during the period studied, and below %1.25 capacity one day a month. A lot of really expensive toys were not even spinning.

The report's conclusion is beyond reasonable doubt: there is no realistic chance that wind power will contribute anything to the power needs of the UK or any other nation. Yet massive investment in wind power continues. Last August I noted the fact that Portugal had jumped into the renewable power business. I did find one happy note.

It hasn't bankrupted the country. Yet. On the other hand, it has increased the cost of electricity to Portuguese households by 15%. They were already paying twice what Americans pay to flicker on an energy efficient bulb. What it hasn't done is to produce green jobs.

That was a bit premature. Portugal is bankrupt now, going hat in hand to the EU for another of its infamous bailouts. I doubt that Portugal's rush to renewable was a major cause of its fiscal disaster. The estrangement from reality that wind power represents is in fact the cause of that disaster.

Wisconsin Court Election 3

Mickey Kaus notes that "the opposite of a smoking gun," i.e., an obviously exonerating detail, has been present in the Brookfield blunder story all along. From the Brookfield Patch:

On election night, the City of Brookfield reported that Prosser received 10,859 votes from city residents, or 76 percent of the vote, compared to the 3,456 votes cast for challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg. The Brookfield Patch reported those numbers in a story with chart posted about 12:30 a.m. election night.

Schmidt said her office also posted the results on the city's web site before going home on election night.

So the numbers reported for Brookfield by Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus on Thursday are the same as those reported in Brookfield and posted in the Patch and on the town's web site on election night. That clears Ms. Nickolaus of any suspicion that she made the numbers up. Without that, there is no story.

Short of some new, equally large error in the unofficial reporting, it is clear that Prosser won by a small but convincing margin. At this point the Kloppenburg camp would have to pay for a recount. That is up to Kloppenburg. I doubt that a total recount is likely. A cheaper alternative would be a partial recount. From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

The campaign manager for Justice David Prosser said Saturday he was open to a recount of votes in Waukesha County.

"If you need to do a recount in Waukesha (county) and Waukesha (county) alone to satisfy heightened interest, that's fine," said Brian Neimor. "We believe it will only affirm the margin of victory we now enjoy."

The purpose of such a limited recount would be to assure everyone that the count from Waukesha County is genuine, which I think would be a good idea. Assuming the count is accurate, it is very unlikely that corrections elsewhere would change the outcome.

The Journal-Sentinel has a list of the unofficial (April 6^th) and certified (April 8^th) vote counts from all Wisconsin counties. Two things stand out.

One is that there were a lot of corrections, though none nearly as big as Waukesha County. In Milwaukee County, Prosser picked up 99 votes and Kloppenburg 665. That would have cemented a Kloppenburg victory, but for the news from Waukesha. There is a reason why unofficial reports are called "unofficial".

The other is that Kloppenburg ran away with two counties. She beat Prosser by almost 30,000 votes in Milwaukee County. In Dane County, she beat Prosser 3 to 1 for a gain of about 80,000 votes. Without those two, she wouldn't have come close to winning.

The judicial elections split Wisconsin into the party of government and the party that has to pay for government. Make what you want of that.

Wisconsin Court Election 2

Once again from the top: From ABC:

On Wednesday, liberal challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg, an assistant attorney general, had appeared to eke out an upset -- besting Prosser by 204 votes in an unofficial tally. But officials in heavily Republican Waukesha county now say they discovered a counting error that, when rectified, gives Prosser an additional 7,582 votes.

Let's face it: if the numbers were reversed, Republicans would be in full tilt conspiracy mode right now. No one can blame Democrats for being in the same mind. Do the added votes for Prosser pass the smell test?

Craig Gilbert, at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, does an excellent job of answering this question.

[B]efore the "adjustment," Waukesha County was a big outlier. It showed by far the largest drop-off in turnout between the 2010 race for governor last fall and Tuesday's judicial race (from about 63% to 37%, for a decline of 26 points). After the adjustment, the drop-off is still one of the biggest in the state (from 63% to 42%), but not freakishly so. The statewide drop-off in turnout rate was 16 points, from 50% to 34%.

Adding the Brookfield numbers makes Waukesha County turnout numbers less surprising. Gilbert also places the Brookfield numbers in context, and again they look plausible. Unless evidence surfaces of mischief in the actual vote counting, it looks like Prosser won fair and square.

Not a lot in institutional terms. A Supreme Court Justice JoAnne Kloppenburg wouldn't have blocked the Governor's bill for long. In moral terms, it means a lot. Politico's Arena invited a number of pundits, professors, and political activists to analyze the Wisconsin court election, just before the Waukesha County surprise.

Democratic pollster Margie Omero has this:

This is absolutely a rebuke of Walker and his policies. Polls show voters in Wisconsin have buyers' remorse, and this is the first opportunity they have to express it. But it's not just Wisconsin. Voters around the country have shown support for workers' rights. And Republicans nationally, and in states around the country, are greatly overplaying their hands. This climate is mobilizing the left and will quickly alienate independents.

Clyde Prestowitz, President of the Economic Strategy Institute, says:

This is a clear repudiation of Walker's policies.

Well, if a two hundred vote victory for Kloppenburg is "absolutely a rebuke of Walker and his policies," is a seven thousand vote victory absolutely an affirmation of Walker and his policies?

It is interesting to try to game these results, if they hold. In an ordinary court election, the incumbent would win by a large margin. It is beyond doubt that this election turned into a Walker referendum. What was the result? With or without the Brookfield vote, the result was very nearly fifty-fifty out of a million and a half votes cast.

The judicial election revealed the political fault lines in the state. Milwaukee and Madison went heavily for Kloppenburg. College students and public employees voted conservatively, against reform. More traditionally conservative parts of the state came out big for Prosser. Prosser, it seems, won. That is the meaning of this election.

Budget Deal Victory for Tea Party Conservatives, Blow to Pro-Lifers

In 2004 or 2005, President Bush was serving his second term and I had begun to wonder who the Republicans would run in the next election. I didn’t see any likely candidates on the horizon, so I asked Dr. Blanchard, who was teaching several of my classes that semester. He prophetically guessed that John McCain would be the Republican nominee, much to my disappointment.

Life was (and still is) my first consideration when voting and unborn babies are particularly close to my heart. They were before I was a mother and are even more so, now that I have had the good fortune of having two children. Once, I believed that it might be easy for women to convince themselves that babies were blobs. Now, I think it must be very hard not to suspect that the flipping, kicking child who responds to his father's voice more than to any other sound might be just a mass of tissue. But I am getting off topic here.

John McCain had spoken out against repealing Roe v Wade, and was not as firmly pro-life as I would have liked him to be. So I objected to the idea, but Dr. Blanchard argued that abortion wasn’t really an issue anymore. This, he clarified, was not because it wasn’t important, but because Congress was unlikely to pass an abortion ban. I objected to this at the time, but I had to admit that he was probably right.

This year, for a brief moment, abortion was an issue in Congress. The government’s entire budget hung on Congress’s decision to either fund or defund Planned Parenthood. I had a feeling that the Republicans would be the ones to back down. It is one thing they are tremendously good at. They lived up to my expectations. And, with the Democrats refusing to send military personnel their paychecks, its hard not to think the Republicans were right to compromise. Still, I was holding out a bit of hope and I will confess that my heart sank a little as the deal that allowed Planned Parenthood to keep its funding was announced.  In a way, it seemed like the Republicans had sold unborn babies down the river. On the other hand, abortions would have continued, whether or not Planned Parenthood kept its funding. Nevertheless, the decision is a blow to pro-life conservatives.

On the other hand, it is a marked victory for Tea Party conservatives. President Obama announced this evening that the deal would bring about the largest budget cut in history. Of course, part of that is because Congress is dealing with one of the biggest budgets in history. Still, this is an accomplishment to be proud of. I am giving most of the credit to conservatives. Democrats, as Dr. Blanchard has noted on this blog, came to the table with nothing. Nor were they willing to compromise on the issue of Planned Parenthood. Many argued that the budget stalemate was due to the politics surrounding the abortion debate. If so, the Democrats proved unwilling to put politics aside, while the Republicans showed themselves willing to compromise on a very tough issue. I hope that compromise proves wise.

Bad Faith, Fiscal Crisis, and James Joyce

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

If you have never read James Joyce's short story 'The Dead', let alone the collection Dubliners, from which it comes, you have much to look forward to. The work has a point and I happen to think that the point is pernicious; however, the execution is superbly beautiful and penetrating. I haven't given much away by giving you the punch line.

The newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. Snow here is a metaphor for spiritual numbness, all direct contact with reality and life is muffled.

Joyce's words came to mind when I read an excellent account of the fiscal crisis in Europe. The government of Portugal fell in late March when Parliament refused to support Prime Minister Jose Socrates' austerity plan. Portugal now joins Ireland and Greece in the cue for an EU bailout.

In 'Original Sin', in Foreign Policy, Wolfgang Münchau explains the root cause of the European crisis, which is moral more than anything else.

The European debt crisis -- which saw its latest iteration inaugurated on Wednesday, April 6, when Portugal indicated it would request an EU bailout -- has exposed every single lie, every fudge, and every political, legal, and economic loophole that went into making the continent's common currency. One reason Europeans have yet to set the euro right is that they still haven't reckoned with the extent of bad faith that went into its creation.

To sell the euro to a diverse populace back in the 1990s, its advocates made a series of mostly inconstant promises. The Germans were promised that monetary union would not give rise to fiscal transfers, and would create a currency at least as stable as the Deutschmark. The French understood the euro as a vehicle for improved domestic competitiveness and global reach. For the Italians and the Spanish, it offered an opportunity for monetary stability and permanently low interest rates. And in countries with highly deregulated banking systems, such as Spain and Ireland, it brought the prospect of sudden wealth.

The root cause of the crisis is bad faith. This is not quite the same thing as lying, but it is damn near. The Eurocrats believed deeply in the cause of economic and political union. To sell the idea of a common currency, they made a lot of practically and perhaps logically irreconcilable promises to Europe's various peoples and governments. Some of the Eurocrats may have known full well that they were lying through their teeth. Most of them, I suspect, simply resisted ever thinking through their promises to the logical conclusions. That is how bad faith often works.

Now that a debt crisis has put severe pressure on the Euro, it is becoming clear that the irreconcilable promises cannot be reconciled. I highly recommend the entire essay. For one thing, it seems clear that the U.S. bank bailout was the right policy. Chalk up one for Obama/Bush.

Bad faith is at work across the developed world and has been busy for decades in the U.S. Many state governments are in fiscal crisis because of promises made that were not plausible when they were made. On the federal level, the same is true for Social Security and much truer for Medicare and Medicaid.

Perhaps the best example of bad faith was President Obama's early decision to sell health care reform as an instrument to reign in the growth of health care cost and thus to help balance the budget. We were going to extend guaranteed health insurance to tens of millions of people, without raising costs to individuals. This could be done without limiting choices. The President promised that he would veto the bill if added one dime to the deficit, and he promised that "if you like your health care plan you can keep it."

Was the President lying? Maybe. I expect he just neglected to think these things through. That's bad faith.

The snow has been general over all of Ireland, and Portugal, and the European Community, and California, and the rest of the United States.

Big Advance for Prosser in Wisconsin Court Election UPDATE

As I think my spirited interlocutors have been saying spirited things about, it looks like someone in Wisconsin found a big heap of votes for Prosser in the Wisconsin Senate election. From ABC:

On Wednesday, liberal challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg, an assistant attorney general, had appeared to eke out an upset -- besting Prosser by 204 votes in an unofficial tally. But officials in heavily Republican Waukesha county now say they discovered a counting error that, when rectified, gives Prosser an additional 7,582 votes.

The Milwaukee paper has this this morning. 

Before the big adjustment, Waukesha County's vote total was just under 111,000. That is equal to 37.4% of the county's voting-age population of 296,081 people in the 2010 census.

After the big adjustment, Waukesha's vote total was roughly 125,000 votes. That is equal to 42.2% of the county's voting-age population.

By comparison, Ozaukee County's turnout was 44.1% of voting-age adults Tuesday, and Washington County's turnout was 40.9%.

The Unbearable Emptiness of the American Left

It looks as though Governor Walker in Wisconsin has lost the State Supreme Court election.

On Wednesday, nearly 20 hours after the polls closed, Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg claimed victory over Justice David Prosser after an unofficial tally showed her holding the thinnest of leads. According to an unofficial tally by The Associated Press, she was up 204 votes out of nearly 1.5 million cast - a margin of 1/100th of a percent.

There will be a recount, but Republicans almost never win recounts.

The Supreme Court race became a proxy for the war between Gov. Walker and the Republicans in the state legislature on the one hand and the Democrats and Unions on the other.

This looks to me like a big moral victory for the Anti-Walker people, though it is easy to spin it both ways. Prosser would have been a shoe-in for reelection, but for the wave of anti-Walker sentiment. People-power! On the other hand, with all the Union money funneled into the race, and all the state employees down to the janitor voting in Milwaukee and Madison voting to keep milking the rest of the state, the vote still split almost exactly fifty-fifty.

What strikes me about this victory for the left, if that is what happened, is how conservative the left has become. At the state level, the left is all about holding on to what it has won in the past. Are the Democrats and the Unions in Wisconsin the least bit interested in solving that state's fiscal dilemmas? Do they have any coherent proposals for the future? I'll let intrepid reader Donald enlighten me.

On the national level, it's pretty clear that the Democrats have become the party of 'No'. Here is the USA Today editorial on the Democrats and the Ryan Plan:

Love it or hate it — and we do some of both — the Wisconsin Republican's proposal is the first plan in Congress big enough to do something serious about the nation's runaway deficits and debt…

Democrats have already begun to demonize the Ryan plan, but where is theirs? Two bipartisan deficit panels produced serious, workable proposals last year, which President Obama treated as if they had cooties. Asked Tuesday about Ryan's plan, Obama said merely that he looks forward to having a "conversation" about the parties' "sharply contrasting visions."

Attacking the Republican plan might reap short-term political rewards, but the lack of presidential leadership is distressing. Without a credible proposal of their own, it's hard to believe the Democrats understand the danger posed by the rapidly escalating national debt…

It's hard to have a serious debate… if one side appears to be in denial about the extent of the problem. Democrats' lack of an alternative suggests that all they really support is the unsustainable status quo.

Yes. The left has become conservative in the worst sense of that term. No more big projects are in the pipeline. The grip of debt is threatening all their cherished achievements. The left has no instinct except to hang on to the status quo but that, as USA Today points out, is unsustainable. Even without any reform, the great progressive programs are beginning to crowd one another out.

It remains to be seen whether the Republicans can rise to the occasion. It is already abundantly clear that the Democrats have nothing.

The Ryan Plan

My friend and esteemed blogosphere neighbor, Cory Heidelberger, has a note on the ten year budget plan produced by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). Cory's heading informs us that Ryan's plan would "End Medicare and Medicaid". He later amends the indictment to read "eliminating Medicare and Medicaid as we know them."

This is of course how the argument will play out. Democrats will do what they have done for decades: accuse anyone who proposes any real fiscal reforms of wanting to destroy Medicare, Medicaid, and throw Grandma off the ship. It always worked in the past and I have no reason to think it won't work this time, politically speaking.

Fiscally speaking, Medicare and Medicaid "as we know them" are going to end, one way or another. They are simply unsustainable. Here is a clue:

And here is Erskine Bowles, former Clinton Chief of Staff and Co-Chair of the President's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility.

"I'm really concerned. I think we face the most predictable economic crisis in history. A lot of us sitting in this room didn't see this last crisis as it came upon us. But this one is really easy to see. The fiscal path we are on today is simply not sustainable."

Unfortunately, the President ignored his commission's findings and produced a budget that shows, well, here is a chart from Keith Hennessy:

Bear in mind: that's not what happens if the President's plans fail, that's the plan.

So I ask two questions. First: do you believe that the budgetary trends in the chart above can actually happen? I don't. You may believe that we can raise the revenue lines substantially by raising taxes and if you do you might be right. But can we possibly raise them to catch up with the spending line? I don't believe that we can even if we wanted to. Unless you can somehow disagree with Erskine Bowles, and that seems ridiculous to me, you will have to concede that federal spending has to be substantially reduced.

Second: if you agree that federal spending has to be reduced dramatically, but you object to the Ryan plan because of what it does to Medicare or something else, then what is the alternative? The President hasn't offered one. The Democrats in Congress couldn't even produce a budget for this year. The Hill reported that House Democrats were "likely" to offer a 2012 budget bill to counter Ryan's plan, but they can't quite make up their minds. I am waiting to hear from my friend Cory.

We can assume that the President will not provide any leadership. Two prominent Senate Democrats, Kerry and Baucus, recently published an essay in the Wall Street Journal urging the President to act on a treaty with Columbia. The President is a lead weight. We can assume the Democrats in Congress will bend all their will toward demonizing the Ryan plan. Let's be clear about what this demonic plan looks like.

Ryan's plan, like Obama's, shows steady growth in federal spending over the next decade. It just shows less growth. That is what the Left has already begun to excoriate.

Just right now, the only leadership on the fiscal crisis at the federal or state level has come from Republicans. Paul Ryan has taken a big risk, which is to say that he has acted responsibly. I am not optimistic about the chances for this plan or for any fiscally responsible policy.

But if Ryan falls, who shall stand? I will leave you with a final bit of reality. There is only one part of the federal budget that cannot be cut by simple legislation. That's the interest on the debt. Just right now that's the third largest item, after Social Security and Defense. If that continues to grow at present rates, it will eventually crowd out all public and private spending, one way or another. Our descendants will labor, but not to provide for themselves or their families. They will pay taxes, but not to provide for the poor, the sick, or the elderly. They will support a federal government that has little money for defense or for entitlements, and people will wonder what the phrase "discretionary spending" could possibly mean. They will labor to pay off the debt that these generations have left them.

The Health Care Mandate is Unconstitutional

I return to the topic I considered back in December. Since the power to compel individual citizens to purchase health insurance is obviously not among the enumerated powers in the Constitution, can it be inferred under the Commerce Clause and Necessary and Proper Clause? I expressed some doubts based on the fact that the word "proper," at least, had to impose some limits on Congress's power to have any meaning at all. I reached no conclusion. I do so here.

The Boston Globe has a couple of thought provoking pieces on the constitutionality of the health reform mandate. Here is Randy Barnett's opening paragraph:

IMAGINE THAT I tell you 100 things that you may not do tomorrow. For example, you may not run on a treadmill, eat broccoli, buy a car, and 97 other things. While your liberty would certainly be restricted, there would still be an infinite number of things you may still do. Now suppose I tell you 100 things that you must do tomorrow. You must run on a treadmill, eat broccoli, buy a car, and 97 other things. These 100 mandates could potentially occupy all your time and consume all your money. This helps illustrate why economic mandates are so much more onerous than either economic regulations or prohibitions, and why so dangerous an unenumerated congressional power should not be implied.

That is a very powerful point and one largely missing from the argument so far. Telling me I cannot enter a government building is much less restrictive (if not quite infinitely less) than telling me I have to do so.

Barnett acknowledges that the government can compel individuals to do certain things.

You must register for the military, you must submit a tax form, fill out a census form, and serve on a jury. And you must join a posse organized by a US marshal. But … each of these duties is necessary for the operation of government itself; and each has been widely recognized as inherent in being a citizen of the United States.

I would go a bit further than Barnett. These are existential obligations of citizenship; these examples are tied to explicit constitutional functions and without them, the existence of this constitutional order is in question. That tells strongly against the use of such compulsive powers for the purposes of ordinary legislation.

If Barnett's point weren't strong enough on its own, it received unintentional support from the pro-mandate argument by Lawrence Tribe.

As early as 1790, Congress penalized ship owners for failing to stock medications their crews might need. Some economic boycotts, which are obviously decisions not to purchase, have been banned by federal antitrust laws since 1890.

In 1942, the Supreme Court upheld a regulation supporting agricultural demand by "forcing some farmers into the market to buy wheat they could provide for themselves.'' And in 1964 the Court invoked the Commerce Clause to uphold federal laws compelling hotels and restaurants to serve people they wanted to exclude. All those measures carried out Congress's constitutional powers by affirmatively requiring people to act.

Each of these examples falls within Barnett's category of regulation. Like driving on the right side of the road, they are requirements that have to be met if you wish to enter into a certain business. None of them requires you to enter the business against your will.

The poverty of Tribe's examples is telling, as is his use of the appalling Wickard v. Filburn decision. Congress can, apparently, forbid a farmer to grow wheat for use on his farm and for the feeding of his family because this might have an indirect effect on interstate commerce. This means not that it might affect the price of wheat, but that it might interfere with Congress's attempt to raise the price of wheat by legislation. That is a commerce power unbridled by any conception of necessary and proper powers.

Apply the rule in Wickard to the health insurance mandate. Congress can not only forbid an activity but require one, if the failure to act has some conceivable effect on interstate commerce. Of course, that effect is the result of the legislation itself. Having required insurance companies to insure persons with pre-existing conditions, Congress basically abolished rational "insurance". The mandate is necessary to deal with free riders who might wait until they are sick to purchase insurance that they could not be denied. Without it, the system will probably collapse. The mandate is not there to prevent some public disaster. It is there to save the legislative project.

Ok. Now, since the government has bailed out the auto companies, why not just require every American to buy a car from GM? That would stimulate the economy! Here is the question: do you think that Congress could, under the Constitution, compel Americans to purchase a car just in order to make the auto bailout work? Yes or no?

If "yes", see Barnett above. Liberty is abolished. If "no", then can Congress compel every American to buy health insurance in order to make its health care reform legislation work? If "yes", then please explain the difference.

I have been uncomfortable with constitutional arguments against The Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act because I am a judicial minimalist. I prefer these questions to be settled in legislatures. I am now compelled to go the other way on this one. I am convinced by Randy Barnett's arguments against the mandate and even more by Lawrence Tribe's arguments in its favor.

Gareth Edwards’ Monsters

Last Chance Lance and Feedback, Rue Morgue Radio's Caustic Critics, split on Gareth Edwards' Monsters; so I consulted the only higher authority, my brother. He is the only person I know who likes Sci-Fi/Horror as much as I do. Dave made it two to one in favor. It's on Netflix Instant Watch. With some serious caveats, I give it a thumbs up.

The film opens with the simplest method for conveying background information: print it in white on a black screen. We learn that a NASA probe bearing samples of extraterrestrial life crash landed in Northern Mexico. An "infected zone" now stretches all the way from one coast to the other and it's literally crawling with large, cranky monsters. Put an octopus on top your basic crab chassis, blow it up to about a hundred feet tall, and you get the idea. Or imagine the biological equivalent of the Martian machines in War of the Worlds.

This is a case where less information would have been better. The explanation raised more questions than it answered and the essential information was conveyed by the next images: milky television footage of the monsters running amok in some Mexican town. It would have been eerier to leave it at that, or maybe drop some clues later.

A photojournalist is ordered by his boss to escort the boss's daughter back to the United States after she is injured in the aforementioned monster romp. Due to a series of misadventures, they end up having to walk through the infected zone.

There are holes in this plot big enough to fly a starship full of extraterrestrial aliens through. There are, after all, a lot of ways to get from Central Mexico to the U.S. without going through Northern Mexico, at least if you have a passport and your dad has cash. Of course a romantic/sexual tension arises immediately between the jaded photographer and the young woman, but that is so obligatory in an American movie that its presence is almost a tautology. Fortunately it is kept on the back burner long enough that (with the exception of one very goofy scene) it doesn't turn the movie into a joke.

All that said, I thoroughly enjoyed the film. It was more than amusing to find out that even after Northern Mexico is overrun with deadly octopoid monsters, and even after the United Sates builds a real wall to keep the monsters out, you can still hire a coyote to get you across. This was not one of the movie's implausibilities.

Three things made the movie work for me. One was the simple use of official warming signs along the road, rather like the Wicked Witch's "I'd turn back if I was you" signs in the Wizard of Oz. The ubiquitous signs created a sense that one was moving ever closer to some terrible menace. Jet bombers flying over did nothing to lessen the tension. Better yet, the cinematography was superb and the pacing was perfect. Our heroes move steadily through a flamboyantly gorgeous landscape and encounter a host of vivid faces, each one of which you'd like to see more of.

The third thing is that Edwards borrowed the style of the modern travel drama. Stretches of this movie could be mistaken for a Michael Winterbottom film. Like most such movies, Monsters is essentially a Heart of Darkness story. Two middle class Americans go abroad and discover that they are not only in another country but, in this case almost literally, on another planet. The horror, etc., etc. The horror, moreover, is leaking out in both directions.

The writing frequently goes off the rails when some character has to tell us what we don't need to be told. We are shown what we need to know. This is a flawed movie, but I thought it was a lot of fun. If Joseph Conrad with giant octopi is your cup of tea, log on to Netflix and dial this one up.

False Choices & Phrase Addiction

If, in the near future, someone compiles a collection of great rhetoric by American Presidents, Washington, Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan will be found in the table of contents. George W. Bush will be lucky if he is included in the index, and the reference will not be flattering.

President Bush (43), like his father (41), had a hard time stringing an English sentence together. President Obama (44) does not seem to suffer from the same speech impediment. He does in fact get tongue-tied a lot, but he usually managed to come with subject, verb, and object. He is not given to mangling words.

President Obama does, however, suffer grievously from phrase addiction. How many times has he said "let me be clear"? How many stars are in a clear night sky? How many times has the President said: "my highest priority"?

The problem is deeper than mere redundancy. When the President says "let me be perfectly clear" it usually means that he is about to be perfectly opaque, or about to say something that is contradicted elsewhere in the same speech, paragraph, or sound bite. As for the President's "highest priority", it turns out that this is the only kind of priority that the President has. Virtually everything the President thinks worth of mention is his highest priority.

I am not the only one who has noticed the President's dysfunctional phrase addiction. Ruth Marcus, at the Washington Post, finds one that I had missed: the "false choice".

The false choice phrase is a rhetorical con job, a "dodge" as Marcus puts it. She documents three distinct versions of the dodge. Here is one:

The first, a particular Obama specialty, is the false false choice. Set up two unacceptable extremes that no one is seriously advocating and position yourself as the champion of the reasonable middle ground between these unidentified straw men.

For example:

Obama on financial reform: "We need not choose between a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism and an oppressive government-run economy. That is a false choice that will not serve our people or any people." [P]lease find me the advocate of either extreme.

The purpose of this false false choice is make it look as though everyone who disagrees with Obama is on the absurd extremes and his policy is the only one in the sensible middle. In fact no one is on the extremes. A lot of people are advocating positions in the middle, but the President is trying to close off the debate.

Marcus presents two more versions of the false choice dodge and documents Obama's use of it. Give her essay a read.

The false choice dodge always functions to discredit any opposition. Barack Obama has always been most comfortable when he can agree with everyone in the room. That is much easier than exercising moral autonomy and forming one's own opinions. He has never learned how to engage with someone who honestly disagrees with him or with the crowd whose opinion he has adopted.

Marcus is a liberal who ought to be on the President's side. However, she is also an honest and independent mind. She sees the shallowness and sleight of hand in the President's rhetoric.

I point out that, as she documents, the President uses the "false choice" phrase again and again ad nauseam. The President's words won't make it into a collection of great political rhetoric. But if someone publishes a collection of Presidential clichés and rhetorical dodges, he'll get his own chapter.

The Blanchard Plan

For the second time in four years, the Republican Party is in crisis mode over its presidential nomination calendar. From the Miami Herald:

Florida's insistence on an early presidential primary kicked up a storm Thursday from Republican officials in Iowa and South Carolina who are demanding the national party force the Sunshine State to pull back.

If not, GOP leaders in the two states say, Florida should lose the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa.

Florida Senate President Mike Haridopolos scoffed at "idle threats" and said the state has no intention of jumping ahead of the early primary holders, which also include New Hampshire and Nevada. By RNC rules, the four states are the only ones permitted to hold elections in February.

Florida's primary is currently scheduled for Jan. 31, 2012. No one expects that date to hold, but state Republicans seem determined to go in February, even though it would violate party rules.

This is nuts. States that have early primaries get an inordinate amount of attention and influence. Barack Obama's victory in the Iowa caucuses put in him the race, while Hilary Clinton's comeback in New Hampshire temporarily revived her campaign. Because these two states have gone first for decades they think they have a right to go first forever.

Naturally, all the other states would like some of that mojo. States that go late in the year are often overlooked because the nomination has already been decided. That has resulted in "front-loading". More and more states have moved their nominating events to earlier times in the year, and Florida seems determined to follow suit.

There are obvious problems with states moving up their primaries. If everyone goes first, no one goes first. If everyone goes early, then the nomination will be decided before voters really get a good look at the candidates.

The only virtue to front loading that I can see is that it might make it hard for any candidate to wrap up the nomination. In the past the nomination process has taken months, and candidates win in part by building momentum. If all the primaries and caucuses happened early, we might end up with two or three or four candidates claiming different regions instead of one with enough delegates to ensure nomination. That would mean that the nominating conventions would become nominating conventions again, and I am not sure that wouldn't be a good thing.

We were looking at the problem four years ago, and I proposed a solution.

I [favor] dividing states into an order of five or six [or seven] groups, with a mix of regions and state sizes in each group, and with a new group moving to the top of the cue (say, the first Tuesday of January [or February]) at each election. An alternative would be to divide the states by regions, with New England going first in 2012, and then the Southwest in 2016, etc. In either case a lottery would determine the order.

This still strikes me as an obvious solution to the problem. The nomination process would take place over five or six months. Well known candidates would concentrate their resources for the long haul. Lesser known candidates would put all their chips on the first set of states, in hopes of a big win and more chips. After the first two primary dates, a viable candidate (or two) would start to gain momentum and others would drop out. By April or May, the voters would have a good read on the contenders. By rotating the state groups with each election, every state would get to go first eventually.

I dubbed this "the Blanchard Plan". For some strange reason, the RNC did not adopt it. Lately I have been getting about fifteen hundred readers a day. So I urge you: write your Congressman. Text or twitter your party officials. Urge them to adopt the Blanchard plan. If that works, I'll be a monkey's uncle. But I will be one famous monkey.