South Dakota Politics

Is Obama in worse shape than Jimmy Carter?

I am not in the habit of defending President Obama, though I have done so on occasion. I am not prepared to do so again. This post from the blog Jamie Wearing Fools has attracted some attention on the web:

President Obama's slow ride down Gallup's daily presidential job approval index has finally passed below Jimmy Carter, earning Obama the worst job approval rating of any president at this stage of his term in modern political history.

JWF (this is the first post on that site that I have read) apparently reading Gallup's Presidential Job Approval Center, which allows you to compare the job approval of every President from Truman to Obama. This interactive page is a very valuable resource. Here is the Carter/Obama comparison chart.

The chart tracks job approval by days in office. What JWF is talking about is the intersection of Obama's line with Carter's line. At day 1032 Obama is at 43% and Carter at 38%. At day 1034, Carter is at 51% and Obama still at 43%. So Obama is now running worse than Carter!

Or not. As JWF acknowledges, Carter was surging at the time due to the Iranian hostage crisis. Carter's approval rating would rise precipitously for 68 days, presumably a rally round the flag response to the crisis. Then it declined just as precipitously back into the thirties, where it remained until Ronald Reagan flattened him in the 1980 election. It was only Carter's crisis surge that puts his approval above Obama's now.

Over the last two hundred days, President Obama's approval rating has been consistently better than Carter's. Obama is running an approval rating in the low forties. That surely reflects a lack of public confidence. If it goes on, reelection looks like a real challenge. Still, low forties is much better than low thirties, where Carter was stuck for most of the last two years of his presidency.

If it were my job to cheer the President up, I would point out two facts. Given the state of the economy and the unpopularity of his key legislative achievement, he ought to be in the low thirties. So an approval rating in the forties suggests surprising strength. Second, he isn't going to have to run against Ronald Reagan. Whatever one might say about Mitt or Newt, neither of them is a Gipper.

If it were my job to bum the President out (it sort of is, by proxy of some of his supporters), I would point out that the problems facing the United States make Carter's problems look like a walk in the park. The President is likely to be dealing with a world economic crisis next year as Europe dissolves. We may be about to watch Egypt turn into another Iran. All this may, and I repeat may, be enough to force the President to stop campaigning and return to doing his job. Perhaps a rally effect will save his presidency, but it will come at the moment when the electorate has to decide whether he is up to the job. It is hard to imagine what there is in his record to inspire confidence.

Newt on Immigration

Newt Gingrich is probably not going to be the Republican nominee, though it is looking like it will come down to a Newt v. Mitt contest. The Newtster has earned that much. He is some hot water right now for daring to depart from conventional conservative wisdom on immigration. From MSNBC:

"I am not for amnesty for anyone. I am not for a path to citizenship for anybody who got here illegally," Gingrich told the crowd of roughly 750 people, many of whom were forced to stand in the hallway. "But I am for a path to legality for those people whose ties are so deeply into America that it would truly be tragic to try and rip their family apart."

That puts Newt rather squarely on the side of amnesty, whatever he wants to call it. It is a position that is very unpopular with conservatives and almost as unpopular among Americans generally.

It is also part of any viable solution to the immigration problem. We just aren't going to expel eleven million people from the U.S. So we either let them remain here illegally (which is almost surely what we will do) or work out some path to citizenship (which is what we should do).

There are two problems with any amnesty proposal. One, and the more serious one, is that it rewards scofflaws. The other is that amnesty will encourage would be scofflaws to think that the same will eventually be offered to them. Given our past failure to manage the problem, there is no practical solution to the first problem. As for the second, amnesty would have to be part of a "comprehensive" strategy that would include effective border control.

Border control has to come first. One good reason that many Americans oppose amnesty is because they don't believe that government is or will ever be serious about controlling the border. They think, with good reason, that amnesty will be real but border control will always be something that is promised but never quite happens. This is part and parcel of the general loss of confidence in government. Why aren't Tea Party people willing to accept tax increases in exchange for spending cuts? Because they think that the former will be real and now, and the latter will be deferred until never. They think that because that is what always happens.

Gingrich shouldn't back off. It's too late now anyway. He doesn't have to present a complete proposal for comprehensive immigration reform, but he does need to lay out the lines of one. If he can show a plausible path out of our present mess, it strengthens his case as a candidate in the general election. If President Gingrich, or some other president could work out an honest and effective solution, it would help to restore our confidence in our political system.

Tar Sands, Solar Panels, & China

The Sundance Kid recently weighed in on Canadian tar sands oil production. At the risk of surprising you, Robert Redford is against it.

In Alberta's great boreal forest, one of the last truly wild places on Earth, tar-sands producers have turned an area the size of Chicago into an industrial wasteland and international disgrace.

One reason to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline across the U.S. is that it will provide a market for tar sands oil. Of course, the delay or cancellation of the pipeline will stop the extraction of tar sands oil only if there is nowhere else for the oil to go.

There is, and it's China. From Yahoo! News:

SINGAPORE/BEIJING (Reuters) - China is set to embrace Canada's offer of more crude, heating up competition with the United States as the world's top two oil consumers jostle to secure supplies and meet ravenous demand…

Canada's plan to ship crude to Asia got a boost after Prime Minister Stephen Harper said his nation would step up efforts to supply the region after the United States delayed a decision on a pipeline supply link.

It seems very unlikely that the Canadians will sit on a valuable commodity. If the oil doesn't go south it will go east. This will cut out the U.S. from that market and it will do more damage to more "boreal forest" than Keystone would do, but at least South Dakota landowners won't have to suffer the indignities of eminent domain. Perhaps that is a reasonable trade.

Another argument for blocking Keystone XL and tar sands oil extraction is that it will encourage the development of renewable energy sources such as solar power. The theory behind this argument is that renewable sources are viable but more expensive than oil. Constrict the supply of oil and/or make it oil more expensive and investment will shift toward renewable sources. Earth saved.

Here the real news from China isn't good for the theory. From Business Week:

Losses for China's largest solar manufacturers, including Suntech Power Holdings Co. and JA Solar Holdings Co. may continue through next year as declining shipments prompt them to slash prices and liquidate inventory…

Cell prices have fallen 59 percent since Dec. 27, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Seven Chinese companies reported lower gross margins since yesterday and three said margins have moved into negative territory, an unsustainable level, said Hari Chandra Polavarapu, an analyst at Auriga USA in New York.

The price of solar panels is indeed falling, but not because an economy of scale is making their manufacture cheaper. The price is falling because the demand is falling. The demand for solar panels is entirely artificial. It exists because governments like it, not because it makes economic sense.

I am guessing that the Keystone XL pipeline will eventually be built. If it isn't, that will not stop oil from being extracted or used. It will not suddenly make solar power viable. It will just mean that the U.S. is cut out of the deal.

Thanksgiving For Democracy, While We Still Have It

America may be entering a period of economic stress and disappointment such as we have not known since the 1930's. It is a good time to count our blessings. We remain a prosperous people beyond the imagination of most human beings who have ever rooted out a meal on this planet. At the risk of sounding old-fashioned, I suggest that our political blessings ought to put higher on the list. Liberty and democracy are the great gifts we have received from our predecessors and for which we are responsible.

To see how well we fare compared to our European brethren, we need only look to the way the Continent's elites are using their own abject failures to aggrandize themselves. In his column in the New York Times, Ross Douthat imagines that President Obama is forced from office by a global coalition led by Germany, China, and the IMF and is replaced by unelected technocrats. Such a scenario, Douthat admits, is

a paranoid fantasy, the kind of New World Order nightmare that haunts the sleep of black-helicopter watchers and Trilateral Commission obsessives.

Douthat points out that this is exactly the sort of thing that has taken place in Italy and Greece. This is what is needed, the technocrats insist, if Europe is to be saved and stability restored.

Stability would be achieved at the expense of democracy: the rituals of parliaments and elections would endure, but the real decision-making power would pass permanently to the forces represented by the so-called "Frankfurt Group" — an ad hoc inner circle consisting of Germany's Angela Merkel, France's Nicolas Sarkozy and a cluster of bankers and E.U. functionaries, which has been spearheaded European crisis management since October.

I can't help repeating that the current crisis is in every way the result of what those same technocrats have been doing over the last several decades. To put it mildly, they do not inspire confidence.

That Europe's peoples seem to be surrendering their right to govern themselves points to a moral failure that went all the way down to the dogcatcher. The best thing I have yet read on this or on the European crisis generally is John Lancaster's review of a new book by Michael Lewis in The New York Review of Books. Consider this comment on Greece:

Corruption and tax evasion are endemic, and successive governments have created a state in which citizens see themselves as deserving beneficiaries of state patronage; they expect to live cushioned from economic realities, and to retire at fifty-five for men and fifty for women if they do something "arduous," a definition that includes "hairdressers, radio announcers, waiters, musicians, and on and on and on." Lewis finds Greece seething at the moment, full of outrage at the demands for "austerity" imposed on it from outside: "a nation of people looking for anyone to blame but themselves."

Or this more general comment about Lewis's Boomerang:

Boomerang is about what he has come to see as the larger phenomenon behind the credit crunch: the increase in total worldwide debt from $84 trillion in 2002 to $195 trillion now. The thesis is that "the subprime mortgage crisis was more symptom than cause. The deeper social and economic problems that gave rise to it remained."…

Boomerang tells the story of how we got here…: the fact that Greek railways have €300 million in other costs; the fact that the Californian city of Vallejo spent 80 percent of its budget on the pension and pay of police, firemen, and other "public safety" workers; the fact that between 2003 and 2007, Iceland's stock market went up ninefold; the fact that in Ireland, a developer paid €412 million in 2006 for a city dump that is now, because of cleanup costs, valued at negative €30 million.

That doubling of world debt in a mere nine years is a very frightening fact. It represents a profound failure of self-government aided and abetted by a failure of basic institutions. Debt is always a form of indenture. It is a useful and essential element of modern economies; but when ill-managed, it can become a form of slavery. It would be paranoid and fanciful to suggest that the looming technocracy in Europe (and California?) is all part of some grand plan. The reckless spending by governments and reckless lending by financial institutions is part and parcel of the abdication of responsibility by voters across the developed world. However, just because the end of genuine democracy was not the intentional aim of this crisis does not mean that it will not be the outcome.

Let Americans be thankful that, due to our ancient charter, we are not so vulnerable to authoritarian technocrats as the Greeks. While we are being thankful, let us resolve to be responsible for our gifts.

The Man Who Wasn’t There

It's a bad thing to be a suspect with no alibi. It's a bit worse if you have two alibis that are, if not logically exclusive, at least surprisingly coincidental. The Supercommittee failed to reach an agreement on deficit reduction raising the famously awful prospect of an across the board sequester. Who is to blame?

Michael Gerson at the Washington Post likes President Obama for the crime.

Budget deals get done because presidents prod, plead, cajole, demand and threaten. A few phone calls and tepid public statements do not count. It is the executive, not the legislature, that gives the budget process energy and direction. The supercommittee failed primarily because President Obama gave a shrug.

Ruth Marcus, also at the WaPo, provides the President with an alibi for his absence.

For all the eleventh-hour, "where-was-Obama?" moaning, the bipartisan congressional directive to the White House as the supercommittee did its work was simple: Back off.

That's right. The message from both Republican and Democratic members of the group was that presidential involvement could only be counterproductive.

That's the best case that can be made for the President's aloofness from the Supercommittee: I would have been involved, but they disinvited me. Unfortunately for this line of defense, Carrie Budoff Brown and Glenn Thrush, writing in the Politico, provide a second alibi.

Obama — burned by the failed deficit-reduction talks with Republicans during the summer debt-ceiling fight — believes that being accused of disengagement is preferable to being lumped with the in-fighting lawmakers who fumbled a chance to reach an agreement by the Monday deadline…

Obama's defiance served as the coda to a remarkably disciplined campaign by the White House to keep him as removed as possible from what aides viewed as a doomed process, showing a degree of indifference to Beltway punditry that hasn't been on display since his days as a candidate, Democrats said.

So Obama studiously remained "as removed as possible" from the Supercommittee deliberations. It was doomed anyway, and he would just have been "lumped with in-fighting lawmakers". The political image was all that mattered to "the White House."

So which is it? Did Obama want to be involved and was rebuffed, or did he deliberately avoid involvement? The latter surely looks more like our man. It is precisely the President's job to "prod, plead, cajole, demand and threaten" those who don't want such treatment. When he fails to do that he is not doing his job, regardless of the excuse.

President Obama has consistently failed to provide leadership on the critical problem facing these United States: fiscal solvency. He created a National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform and then, with "remarkable discipline", ignored its report. He proposed a budget in February that utterly ignored the fiscal crisis. When challenged by the new Congress, he gave a speech acknowledging the need to reform our major entitlement programs. He did not provide details or any coherent proposal.

The European Union is collapsing in slow but steady motion. China is showing much the same symptoms. In the U.S., the fiscal rot is evident at every level from the Federal Treasury down to city hall. The President is utterly unconcerned with any of this. He is concerned only with his campaign. If Obama is reelected, we will surely get four more years of the same.

This may be the moment we will look back on, the moment that everything stopped getting better.

Can the Gay Softball World Series Discriminate Against Straight Athletes?

Well, if it can't, then you can't really have a North American Gay Amateur Athletic Association, can you? Eugene Volokh directs our attention to Apliado v. NAGAAA, a decisions coming from the US District Court in Seattle.

As I understand the case, a "protest committee" formed by NAGAAA decided that D2, the team that came in second in the Gay Softball World Series, was in violation of "Rule 7.05 of the NAGAAA Softball Code… [which] states that "[a] maximum of two Heterosexual players are permitted on a GSWS roster.""

The protest committee disqualified D2 from the tournament, declared its victories and second-place finish in the tournament forfeited, and recommended that Plaintiffs be suspended from NAGAAA softball play for one year.

The three heterosexual players (Steven Apilado, LaRon Charles, and Jon Russ) sued under Washington's Law Against Discrimination. The District Court found in favor of NAGAAA.

There are obvious reasons for discriminating between different classes of individuals in eligibility requirements for sports leagues. The Special Olympics comes to mind, as well as sexually segregated sports and coed sports. Those cases of discrimination turn on distinct classes of athletic abilities. Coed sports, for example, may actually discriminate within a game, as for example a rule that limits the number of times a volleyball can be hit by players of one sex. The purpose of that rule is to make sure that male players do not dominate the game to the exclusion of female play.

Presumably there is no such factor involved in forming a Gay softball league. So how does one justify discrimination against heterosexual players by the NAGAAA? The District Court ruled under Boy Scouts v. Dale.

To determine whether or not the First Amendment did indeed protect Rule 7.05, the Court applied the three-pronged test found in Boy Scouts of Am. v. Dale, 530 U.S. 640 (2000). Under that test, NAGAAA's decision to exclude someone from membership is protected by the Constitution if NAGAAA can show three things:

(1) NAGAAA is an expressive association,

(2) forced inclusion of unwanted members would affect NAGAAA's ability to express its viewpoints, and

(3) NAGAAA's interest in expressive association outweighs the state interest in eradicating discrimination.

Is NAGAAA an expressive association? Yes, if the Boy Scouts of America is. NAGAAA can claim to be making a point about LGBT persons, and it works in their favor that they also exclude "closeted" gays.

I am strongly inclined to agree with the District Court on this one for the same reasons as I agreed with the High Court in Boy Scouts of Am v Dale. Free speech and freedom of assembly give people the right to form expressive associations. With that comes the right to exclude persons who do not agree with the collective expression. The Boy Scouts can exclude homosexuals and, presumably, atheists, just as a Christian Amateur Athletic Association could do.

That requires me to follow the principle to its logical conclusion. What if someone forms a North American Straight Amateur Athletic Association, or a North American White Amateur Athletic Association? As we used to say back in Arkansas, same difference. Anyone joining such an association is very publically agreeing with the principle of exclusion. That allows the rest of us to make up our minds about them. The power of popular sanction is the way to deal with such cases, without resort to the force of law.

Obamanomics Comes a Cropper

The news of late hasn't been good for the President Obama's policies, as I have pointed out in my last several posts. The bad news keeps coming. While the President's general approval rating is in negative territory, his public approval on the economy is rather worse. Pollster.com has a 60% disapproval vs. 35% approval of Obama's economic performance average across all the polls Pollster monitors.

While such polls are thought to register how prospective voters feel rather than what they think, they have good reason to think that Obamanomics has come a cropper. Consider the infamous $800 billion stimulus bill. The Administration claims it kept us from falling into a second recession or maybe even a depression. No one really believes that. What the Congressional Budget Office believes is that the stimulus bill is, on balance, a bad thing for the economy. From Powerline:

On Tuesday, Doug Elmendorf, head of the Congressional Budget Office, testified before the Senate Budget Committee. Ranking Republican Jeff Sessions recalled the CBO's projection, made around the time the stimulus bill was enacted, that the measure would have a negative long-term impact on economic growth. Elmendorf confirmed that this is still the view of the CBO.

Over ten years the stimulus bill will retard economic growth, according to the CBO. The CBO is the only standard we currently have.

Next consider Obama's bailout of the auto companies. A lot of us thought that this was really a bailout of the auto unions, but never mind that. In the case of General Motors, the balance sheet looks rather grim. From Shikha Dalmia, at Reason:

The Treasury Department yesterday revised its loss estimate for the Government Motors bailout from $14.33 billion to $23.6 billion, thanks to the company's sinking stock price. GM's Sept. 30 closing price, on which the new estimate is based, was $20.18, about $13 less than its December IPO price and $35 less than what is needed for taxpayers to break even.

The $23.6 billion represents a 25 percent loss on the feds $60 billion direct "investment" in GM. But that's not all that taxpayers are on the hook for. As I explained previously, Uncle Sam's special GM bankruptcy package allowed the company to write off $45 billion in previous losses going forward. This could work out to as much as $15 billion in tax savings that GM wouldn't have had had it gone through a normal bankruptcy. Why? Because after bankruptcy, the tax liabilities of companies increase since they have no more losses to write off.

This means that the total hit to taxpayers, who still own about a quarter of the company, could add up to $38.6 billion. That's even more that the $34 billion on the outside I had predicted in May.

It looks as though the government isn't any better at venture capitalism in the auto industry than it is in the energy sector. It also seems to have the same instinct to protect the well-heeled at the expense of the taxpayers.

Perhaps the good news is that the President isn't even trying to make policy anymore. He has been traveling a lot lately. In his campaign trips about the U.S. he kept urging Congress to pass a jobs bill that couldn't pass the Senate, where his party has a majority. What he didn't do was get on the phone or meet with Congressional leaders to try to bring them behind his proposal.

Now that the Supercommittee is approaching a deadline for recommending deficit reduction, the President has said he will veto any attempt to evade the "draconian" cuts in the budget that will occur if the Supercommittee fails. Has the President been in contact with the Supercommittee members? Has he tried to use his influence to encourage a deal? Well…no. From the Politico:

As the clock counts down to the deadline for the Supercommittee to come to a deficit-reduction agreement, President Barack Obama hasn't been in touch with congressional leaders in recent days, the White House said here Saturday.

"The president's obviously been engaged in numerous bilateral and group meetings here. He has not made any other calls to leaders of Congress," press secretary Jay Carney said at a briefing for traveling reporters.

Barack Obama has pretty much given up policy making for campaigning, which is the only thing he has ever been really good at. That, and world traveling. I applaud the President's decision to travel to Burma, with this qualification: he should not go there unless he can personally meet with Aung San Suu Kyi (gassho). I assume that that has been arranged.

It is sensible that he is doing the Chief of State thing and ignoring the Chief Executive and Chief Legislator thing. He has done enough damage for one presidential term.

The Recusal Borking of Justices Kagan & Thomas

The constitutional system for placing judges on the Supreme Court has been in jeopardy since the nomination of Robert Bork. The nomination of Elena Kagan was the most recent consequence of that. However good a justice she may prove to be, her qualifications were modest. She was selected at least in part because she had a very thin paper trail. It may well be that a strong record of judicial work and/or legal scholarship will in the future prevent anyone from getting past the United States Senate.

I see no way out of this situation so long as both sides see the Constitution as a political weapon as opposed to a set of rules that governs the game. We can at least make sure that political vetting is not used against judges who are actually on the Court.

Just now, both the left and the right are attempting to remove a judge from the upcoming case on ObamaCare. There is this from ABC:

Carrie Severino, a former clerk of Justice Thomas and the chief counsel of the conservative group Judicial Crisis Network called for the recusal of Kagan citing her previous job as Solicitor General of the Obama administration. Severino said Kagan's office was "responsible for formulating the administration's defense" of the health care law.

And this:

Last February 74 congressmen lead by the now-disgraced Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-NY, wrote Thomas a letter asking him to recuse himself from hearing cases on the health care reform law because of his wife's ties to a group opposing the health care law. The liberal group People for the American Way posted a letter on its website arguing "Justice Thomas' wife Ginni has earned hundreds of thousands of dollars working for and leading groups that have repealing health care reform as one of their chief goals. Considering challenges to the health care law are expected to reach the Supreme Court, that could present a major conflict of interest."

This is noxious numbskullery on both sides. I am sure that Justice Thomas has opinions about ObamaCare. I am sure I don't know whether or how he is influenced by his wife and her profession. It would be sheer speculation, not to mention implausible, to suggest that his vote in this case will have any effect on his wife's income or vice versa.

Likewise, I have no doubt that Justice Kagan was all for the healthcare reform bill when she was Solicitor General and I would guess that that is an indication of how she will vote in the upcoming case. All that means is that Kagan has opinions about ObamaCare. Having opinions is what federal judges do for a living.

There is some controversy, according to the ABC story, about Kagan's testimony before the Senate and her isolation from the healthcare legislation.

Attorney General Eric Holder … recently testified that Kagan was "physically, literally" moved out of the room "whenever a conversation came up about health care freeform legislation".

I hardly know the law here, but this strikes me as utterly silly. Kagan was Solicitor General. It was her job to defend the Administration's positions. I can see why her involvement might have been politically sensitive during her confirmation but I don't see how it constitutes a conflict of interest now. She has a new job.

It is proper for a judge to recuse herself or himself in a case where she or he has a direct financial interest. If the judge has investments with a firm that is a party to a case, that would be an example. Neither Justice Kagan nor Justice Thomas has any such interest, as far we can tell.

It would be best, as a matter of judicial decorum, if federal judges kept some distance from political activists, not to mention Congressmen and other officials. This decorum is not something they always observe. It is too much to insist that they have been innocent of political involvement in the past, or that their spouses and friends remain innocent in the present.

Those trying to force Justices Thomas and Kagan to recuse themselves from the healthcare case are trying to Bork the respective judges. They are very unlikely to succeed and that is a good thing.

High Speed Rail Going Nowhere, Mighty Fast

Yet a third devastating piece on government venture capitalism appeared this week, this time in the form of an editorial in the Washington Post. The subject this time was not energy but transportation.

THINGS JUST WENT from bad to worse for high-speed passenger rail in California. After the Golden State's voters approved a $9 billion bullet-train bond issue in 2008, officials said they could build an 800-mile system by 2020, for $35.7 billion. The cost projection now, as issued by the state Nov. 1: $98.5 billion, with a completion date of 2033.

Time to pull the plug, right? Not according to Gov. Jerry Brown (D). The new "business plan is solid and lays the foundation for a 21st-century transportation system," he said. Equally upbeat, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood offered Mr. Brown his congratulations on "a sound, step-by-step strategy for building a world-class high-speed rail network."

This is unreal. Apart from the bond issue and $3.6 billion in federal funds already in hand, the cash-strapped state hasn't credibly identified a source of funds for the system. The new report basically repeats previous assertions that, if California builds, federal and private-sector dollars will come. This is wishful thinking in an era of massive federal deficits, and if the opportunities for the private sector were really so great, where are the companies clamoring to invest?

I have pointed out the stupidity of high speed rail projects. What the WaPo notes is that government just can't let the idea go. Even after it has failed almost everywhere it has been tried. Even when everyone can see that a particular project is doomed, there is some governor and Barack Obama to double down.

The way the stimulus legislation is written, California will lose $2.3 billion is federal subsidies unless it starts construction by October 2012.

Alas, there is only one place where the state could finish the necessary environmental impact statements and other bureaucratic requirements before the use-it-or-lose-it date: a thinly populated 130-mile stretch of flatland that starts just north of Fresno and ends just north of Bakersfield…

In the all-too-likely event that funding for the rest of the system never materializes, the report adds, "the state will be left with a rail segment unconnected to major urban areas that has little if any chance of generating the ridership to operate without a significant state subsidy." It would be a train to nowhere, but at least it would go nowhere fast.

It may be the one grace of big government, if not a saving grace, that it often ties itself in knots before it can do all the damage it sets out to do. High speed rail lines might be cut through granite, but not through the barriers of "environmental impact statements and other bureaucratic requirements", or at least not in time.

The fact that this is even being considered is evidence of the dysfunctional political culture we now enjoy. It is a good sign, if a small one, that the WaPo has not taken leave of its senses.

Government's Green Gold Rush

This may have been the worst week yet for the green energy agenda, at least at two major liberal newspapers. I posted last about the Washington Post's devastating article on the U.S. Government's adventures in funding energy projects.

Maybe, as Cory says, there are lots of cases where this was successful. He doesn't name any. It would take quite a list to measure up to the WaPo's list of failures. Granting what Cory says about venture capital being a chancy game, I suspect that any venture capital firm with that record would be in trouble regardless of the times it succeeded.

No doubt Congress can do some good by subsidizing basic research and by creating a more favorable legislative environment for prospective industries. What happens when government tries to bootstrap new, untested, and highly speculative technologies?

We are about to find out according to a second, even more appalling article on solar energy subsidies from the New York Times. Eric Lipton and Clifford Krauss have this:

Halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, on a former cattle ranch and gypsum mine, NRG Energy is building an engineering marvel: a compound of nearly a million solar panels that will produce enough electricity to power about 100,000 homes.

The project is also a marvel in another, less obvious way: Taxpayers and ratepayers are providing subsidies worth almost as much as the entire $1.6 billion cost of the project. Similar subsidy packages have been given to 15 other solar- and wind-power electric plants since 2009.

The government support — which includes loan guarantees, cash grants and contracts that require electric customers to pay higher rates — largely eliminated the risk to the private investors and almost guaranteed them large profits for years to come. The beneficiaries include financial firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, conglomerates like General Electric, utilities like Exelon and NRG — even Google.

Let's note the most interesting items in those three paragraphs. There are about 132 million housing units in the U.S. What would it take to supply 10% with electricity from solar arrays? If the NRG project works as projected (a big if) and if can be replicated on a large scale, it would take about 132 million solar panels. I would be interested to see an analysis of the economic and environmental costs of covering ground with that.

The cost of the NRG project is being almost entirely covered by taxpayers and ratepayers. That means that the immediate economic consequence of the new solar power generation is to raise the cost of electricity for consumers. Every poor Joe turning on his kitchen light will be footing part of the bill.

Meanwhile the robber barons will make out like bandits. Let me repeat one devastating line:

Government support largely eliminated the risk to the private investors and almost guaranteed them large profits for years to come.

This removes any incentive for the investors to even ask whether the project is economically viable, which is one vital thing that investors are supposed to do. They are guaranteed profits even if the whole solar array melts down on the first day of operation, profits covered by taxpayers and ratepayers whose rates will not go down "for years to come."

It's not just the NRG people mining that green gold rush.

At least 10 of the 16 solar or wind electricity generation projects that secured Energy Department loan guarantees intend to also take the Treasury Department grant, and all but two of the projects have long-term agreements to sell almost all of their power, according to a survey of the companies by The Times.

These projects, in almost all cases, benefit from legislation that has been passed in about 30 states that pushes local utility companies to buy a significant share of their power from renewable sources, like solar or wind power. These mandates often have resulted in contracts with above-market rates for the project developers, and a guarantee of a steady revenue stream.

"It is like building a hotel, where you know in advance you are going to have 100 percent room occupancy for 25 years," said Kevin Smith, chief executive of SolarReserve. His Nevada solar project has secured a 25-year power-purchase agreement with the state's largest utility and a $737 million Energy Department loan guarantee and is on track to receive a $200 million Treasury grant.

Kevin Smith, "chief executive of SolarReserve," should know when to keep his mouth shut. It's hard to blame him though. He is tit-deep in a river of government guaranteed green gold. He has every reason to believe that he is among the blessed.

Maybe government can invest wisely, and help new industries gain their footing. What it actually does is illustrated above. This is economically and morally dysfunctional. My friends on the left will continue to support it. They can scarcely do otherwise, without rethinking their most cherished opinions. They are altogether incapable of that.

The Sorry History of Government Venture Capitalism in Energy

I have been critical of the President's "green jobs agenda" for two simple reasons: it isn't green and it doesn't create jobs. There is no evidence that large government investments in wind and solar power here and in Europe have yet had any beneficial effect either on the national economies or on the environment. If anything, the evidence suggests the opposite. See here, here, and here.

My friend and esteemed fellow columnist at South Dakota Magazine Online, Cory Heidelberger, recently instructed me that government subsidies have always been necessary to bring new technologies online. You can read my amused reaction to this argument here.

Steve Mufson, writing in the Washington Post, takes a larger view. He looks at the history of government as a venture capitalist in energy. It is a sorry spectacle.

The Clinch River Breeder Reactor. The Synthetic Fuels Corporation. The hydrogen car. Clean coal. These are but a few examples spanning several decades — a graveyard of costly and failed projects.

Not a single one of these much-ballyhooed initiatives is producing or saving a drop or a watt or a whiff of energy, but they have managed to burn through far more taxpayer money than the ill-fated Solyndra. An Energy Department report in 2008 estimated that the federal government had spent $172 billion since 1961 on basic research and the development of advanced energy technologies.

What does Washington have to show for these investments? And should the government even be in the business of promoting particular energy technologies?

The answers to the last two questions are "losses" and "no." The U.S. Government has a very bad record of picking technologies that have any long term viability. Worse still, government decisions to invest are almost always reactions to immediate circumstances. When those circumstances, such as the price of some commodity, change, what looked like a good idea at the time is revealed as a very bad one.

It isn't just that government is bad and looking ahead. It is just as bad at looking back at the historical record.

Despite this track record and the recent Solyndra failure, Energy Secretary Chu remains undeterred. Citing examples from Civil War-era railroads to airplanes to semiconductors, he has defended government's role in funding new technologies and promising companies.

"Americans have always led by looking ahead. Even in the midst of the Civil War, when our country was under incredible stress, we planned for the future," Chu said in September. "President Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act of 1862, which authorized generous public financing for two private companies — Union Pacific Railroad Company and Central Pacific Railroad Company — to lower the investor risk in building railroads in unsettled territories. In 1869, the first Transcontinental Railroad was completed at Promontory Summit, Utah, revolutionizing transport in this country and opening up a world of possibilities for industry."

Enter Stanford University professor Richard White, a historian of the American West who wrote "Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America."

"I admire Steven Chu a great deal, but his knowledge of the Pacific Railway Act unfortunately appears to be about equal to my knowledge of high-energy physics," White said in an interview. He said the legislation produced a disaster far larger than the lifeless factory that Solyndra has left behind.

White said that Union Pacific and Central Pacific became two of the most hated corporations in the West, spawning political opposition wherever they went. Within 10 years of giving them land grants and loan guarantees, the federal government reversed its policy and eventually sued to recover its investment. The litigation dragged on into the 20th century.

I have no objections to government funding for basic research in energy or anything else of public interest. Congress can surely look for ways to get out of the way of innovation and investment in new technologies. It may be a good idea to publically fund the extension of proven technologies (electricity and internet access come to mind) to people who cannot yet afford them.

When government sets out to create and sustain whole industries, it almost always results in disaster. Apart from the failure of vast enterprises based on sub-vast ideas, it encourages corruption both in Washington and wherever Washington's money is being spent. Just say no.

Conspicuous Conservation as Costly Signaling

One of the things that evolutionary psychologists pay a lot of attention to is costly signaling. This is when an animal, human or otherwise, does something that is costly in terms of resources in order to send a signal to someone one else. When an antelope performs a series of unnecessary leaps in view of a predator, the animal is believed to be sending a message to the predator: I'm way too healthy for you to bother chasing.

Among human beings, costly signaling is also tied to cooperation and coalition formation. A conspicuous display of charity or a costly sacrifice to the gods sends the message that I am someone who fulfills his obligations and so I am a good potential partner. Our willingness to make large donations to charity is much lower when the gift is anonymous.

Economists have been aware of this for a long time. Conspicuous consumption is a term for spending a lot of money on something very visible precisely so that people will know how rich you are. It is a way of advertising your fitness as a partner to potential allies.

Economists Steven E. Sexton and Alison L. Sexton (brother and sister) have identified a delicious version of this, which they call conspicuous conservation. Sexton and Sexton examine the market for hybrid automobiles. Consider the latter:

Today Prius is the clear leader among 24 different hybrid models available in the U.S. In fact, 48% of the 290,271 hybrid cars sold in the U.S. in 2009 were Priuses. The success of the Prius can certainly be attributed to an aggressive and innovative marketing effort by Toyota and to the equity in the Toyota brand. However, national marketing effort does not explain why ownership increases in green communities disproportionately relative to other hybrid cars, conditional on the green attributes of the models. It does not explain why, for instance, Toyota Camry Hybrid ownership does not increase proportional to the Prius after conditioning on green attributes. Likewise, the Civic Hybrid achieves a green rating that is nearly identical to the Prius from a number of sources, including the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy's "Green Book," yet the Civic is underrepresented in green locales.

The Prius is, as hybrids go, a very well designed car. The Sexton's point out, however, that its market share in "green locales", i.e., places where a concern for environmentalism is a strong cultural force, cannot be explained by its features or its marketing. What does explain it?

The answer is that, until recently, the Prius was the only hybrid that was instantly recognizable as a hybrid.

The unique design of the Prius is not accidental. Toyota executives instructed their designers to develop something unique, regardless of the quality of the styling. Prius design has been described as utilitarian as it seeks to maximize on aerodynamics. Still, its design made it unique among the class of green cars that also provide the comfort and performance characteristics to which consumers in the U.S. have become accustomed. When Toyota updated the Prius in 2009, it kept the outside styling virtually the same. The Honda Civic Hybrid and other hybrid models, in contrast, share body styling with the other trims in the model class that have conventional drive types. The Hybrid trims of these models typically carry only a badge on the side or rear of the vehicle indicating their type. The Prius has, therefore, historically provided the most powerful signal of the owner's affinity for the environment of any vehicle in the U.S.

The Prius' popularity is in large part a result of the fact that it sends a signal about the owner. I am, to quote South Park, a part of the solution rather than a part of the problem. I am the kind of person you want in your circle of friends. The Sextons call this "green signaling."

The Sextons have been looking into other examples of green signaling. This is my favorite from the Freakonomics podcast where I first heard about the Sexton's research.

A. SEXTON: One of the more common ones that we see here in California is people putting solar panels up on their house. In fact, there's a number of cited cases where people will put solar paneling on a shadier side of their house because it's the street side, so people will be able to see it.

Putting solar panels on the wrong side of your house so that they will be visible to the street is a classic case of conspicuous conservation.

It would be a fallacy to infer from this that the greens don't really care about the environment, but only about their image. I am sure that they do care. However, political passions are political. They result from evolved dispositions and they emerge in political contexts. People in Europe between 1618 and 1648 had to decide whether Jesus was a Catholic or a Protestant. The religious fervor that often accompanied that decision was no doubt genuine. Just as genuine was the awareness that one was choosing sides in a very bloody war and a major social/political reallignment.

No blood was shed when Honda finally caught on and produced a version of their Insight that looks just like a Prius. One thing that evolutionary psychologists have noted is that costly signaling can frequently be faked on the cheap. If you don't have the hybrid version of a car but want the green credit, you can always opt for the instant hybrid conversion kit. For a cool $4.99 you get a plastic hybrid tag to stick on your gas guzzler.

The Do Nothing President

President Obama has decided not to decide about the Keystone pipeline, at least until after the next election. It may be, as my esteemed blogosphere colleague Cory Heidelberger wants to believe, that the Obama Administration has effectively killed the Keystone XL project. What seems rather more certain is that the President has given up even the pretense of governing for the remainder of his current term in office.

The Keystone XL pipeline is either a good idea or not. Perhaps Cory is right to believe that trading with other nations is un-American. If that is what President Obama believes, then perhaps he ought to have said so and then killed the project. Perhaps I am right that trade is a good thing and importing a raw source of energy, refining it here, and then selling it where there is a market for it, is good economics. If the President thinks that way, he ought to have approved the project. Either way would have been an example of a President earning his pay.

Instead, he did what he is best at: not deciding. Here is how the New York Times puts it:

The move is the latest in a series of administration decisions pushing back thorny environmental matters beyond next November's presidential election to try to avoid the heat from opposing interests — business lobbies or environmental and health advocates — and to find a political middle ground. President Obama delayed a review of the nation's smog standard until 2013, pushed back offshore oil lease sales in the Arctic until at least 2015 and blocked new regulations for coal ash from power plants.

To be fair, the President has been too busy to bother with any of these silly things. He has been traveling about, mostly to key states on his electoral map, urging Congress to act NOW on his jobs bill. He knows what everyone else knows, that this bill can't even pass the Democratically controlled Senate. That would only matter if he were trying to make policy.

Meanwhile, at least one Senate committee seems to be actually trying to pass a real jobs bill. From Fox News:

Demonstrating a remarkable burst of bipartisanship that appeared to surprise even committee members, a Senate committee unanimously passed a bill Wednesday to repair the nation's infrastructure that they pledge will do more than a failed measure proposed by President Obama.

Chairman Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., announced the 18-0 vote in the Environment and Public Works Committee. She then praised ranking Republican James Inhofe, R-Okla., for being "tough but fair."

The Senate bill will spend $85 billion over two years, compared to Obama's legislation, which would have spent $57 billion over 10 years. Senate lawmakers predicted the measure -- which is all but paid for -- could create as many as 1 million jobs.

The President is running against a do-nothing Congress. "If they won't act, I will" he has said. But according to the CBO, only 10% of the money in the President's jobs bill would be spent next year. Much of it (40%) wouldn't be spent until after 2015. The bill reported out by the Senate committee will be spent over the next two years. If the President were really concerned about the need to act now and if he really believes that this sort of thing stimulates job growth, this is the sort of thing he might have proposed.

Of course, he might have also bothered to produce a budget. He might have begun serious work on entitlement reform. He might have taken my advice and left the campaign trail to work on legislation like the bit passed by the Senate committee. That just isn't our man.

Democracy in Ohio

The big prize on this November's Election Day was seized by the unions. In a landslide, Ohio voters rejected limits on collective bargaining for public unions. At last count, the vote was 61% to 39%. Republicans will try to spin this, probably by pointing out that the union coalition outspent the opposition by about 4 to 1. That may be true, but it doesn't help much. Spending is as much a reflection of political strength as a cause of it.

The simple truth is that Ohio Republicans overplayed their hand on this one and their opponents ran the table. Governor Kasich now has to walk back with his tail between his legs. No surprise, but I think that this will prove unfortunate. The state of Ohio, like most states, is facing very severe fiscal challenges. Local governments are in even worse shape. This will make it a lot harder to meet those challenges. That, however, is democracy.

The news wasn't all bad for Republicans. Voters also passed a constitutional amendment that says that Ohioans cannot be legally required to purchase health insurance. Unlike Issue 2, this will have no real effect. That's a good thing because if it did have legal weight it would be a case of nullification, which is a bad thing. However, it may have a very real meaning on a national level. The health care mandate in ObamaCare has polled very poorly since before the bill was passed. The vote in Ohio is a lot more authoritative than any opinion poll. ObamaCare is really, truly, unpopular in a key state for next year's presidential election.

Something the same is true of Mississippi. Voters rejected a personhood amendment, which is a blow to prolifers. That amendment would have been entirely symbolic, as almost any real effect would have been rejected by Federal Courts. If the prolife side can't win in Mississippi, it can't win at all.

Voters in Mississippi apparently did pass an anti-Kelo restriction on the eminent domain powers of the state, a very strong victory for property rights. Libertarians and conservatives can take a great deal of satisfaction in that. So in these United States, all human beings enjoy unalienable rights to life, liberty, and property, so long as said human beings have skulls on this side of the birth canal. All are created equal, with qualifications on the "all".

Are Tea Partiers Better People Than Occupiers?

Well, yes, by at least a bit, but what does that prove?

When the Tea Party movement emerged, the left launched a scurrilous campaign to vilify it. The campaign pressed two general charges: that the movement was motivated by racism and that it encouraged political violence. There was never a shred of evidence for either charge. Whatever its flaws, Tea Partiers were about as well behaved as any group of angry citizens has ever been.

Liberals certainly hoped that the Occupy Wall Street movement would become their version of the Tea Party. Conservatives quickly came to share that hope. Conservatives are reporting with glee on incidents of lawlessness and violence in OWS camps. A favorite item is that the OWS camp in Zuccotti Park, in New York City, found it necessary to set up a rape shelter for women.

Let us assume for a moment what seems likely, that a lot of scofflaws and rascals are prowling around OWS camps doing a lot of lawless and rascally things. If any Tea Party meeting had to erect a shelter against anything other than the weather, no one has reported on it.

To these eyes, this seems to be mostly a result of demographics. Tea Party attendees were mostly older Americans. They are predominantly religious and I suspect that that is especially true of the younger persons in attendance. A considerable number of Tea Party events drew from rural and small town populations. That's just not a recipe for crime and violence.

Occupiers, by contrast, tend to be young men and women. They draw from urban populations and their camps are in urban settings where the crime rate is generally the highest. The urban, activist left is, let us allow, more likely to draw young men and women with a drug problem. It is also likely that OWS sites will draw urban predators who are not especially motivated by political passion.

It's hard to blame conservatives for OWS lawlessness, given the way that the Tea Party was treated by the press. As the left used the Tea Party as a brand to discredit Republicans in general as extremists, the right was sure to follow suit. Initial public sympathy for the occupiers now seems to be turning. The OWS may prove an albatross around the neck of the left.

Still, the use of this issue to discredit the left relies as much on an ad hominem fallacy as did the left's attack on the Tea Party movement. The argument of the OWS movement is either valid or not. Unpleasant behavior has no more relevance to this than their haircuts.

Of course that assumes that the OWS has an argument, which is a dubious assumption. They have a sentiment, to be sure. Banks got bailed out, we got sold out. Nothing that has emerged from the OWS suggests a coherent set of policies. Nor has the OWS movement shown any signs of coherent political organization.

By contrast, the Tea Party movement solidified around the idea that government is going broke and has to return to fiscal responsibility. That is a coherent political position, whether or not the partiers are really prepared to follow it through. The partiers were also able to effectively organize and become the vanguard of voter blocs large enough to influence the 2010 election. The occupiers seem nowhere near that level of organization and they may well have lost their chance to lead any popular movement.

These considerations are far more relevant than the demographic distance between the two crowds.

The Better Angels & Worse Demons of Human Nature

What is the difference between human beings and chimpanzees, besides body hair and 2-4% of our DNA? I have been reading Michael Tomasello's excellent book, Why We Cooperate? Tomasello has an answer, backed up by a lot of research. Chimpanzees are capable of cooperating but they lack any understanding of cooperation. Two chimps can each learn to pull a bar in sequence, so that food is delivered. But all each chimp knows is that if I pull the bar, I get the food. Neither chimp understands that the other has to do his part, nor does either expect, let alone demand, that the other cooperates.

Human children, from an early age, have a sense of "we-ness". Helping behavior, unlearned and not signaled, develops spontaneously. When a child (about 3 years old) sees an adult in need of assistance (say, opening a cabinet door), the child is moved to provide it. In one fascinating experiment, an adult plays a simple game with a child. The child puts a block in one of two inclined tubes. It slides down the tube and the adult catches it in a tin can. It makes a pleasant ring and the adult shouts in satisfaction. The game is obviously fun, so when the adult walks away the child will try to bring him back to the game. The child understands that the adult is a partner whom he needs to keep playing, that the game is something that "we" are doing. This is something that chimpanzees cannot grasp.

I haven't read Steven Pinker's new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. I have been following Pinker's argument as it developed over the last several years. You can get a short version of it at The Edge. Pinker demonstrates something that is not at all common knowledge: human beings are much less violent today than they were in the distant past. Even accounting for the horrific carnage of modern wars, human males are much less likely to die by the hands of another male than in earlier times, and the likelihood has been steadily declining.

For a very long time, social scientists believed that the opposite was true. Violence was thought to be largely a recent historical artifact. Christianity, capitalism, and social injustice distorted human nature and made men bad. By contrast, earlier societies were peopled by noble savages who lived in harmony with nature and each other. Our nearest primate relatives, the chimpanzees, spent their days eating and coupling in peace.

Then we discovered that chimpanzee groups fight brutal wars of annihilation and that rivals for leadership routinely assassinate one another. Hunter gather societies were marked by very high levels of murder and mayhem, and their wars were disproportionately lethal. All of us descend from savages, but those savages were not in any sense noble. They were murderous in the extreme.

There is good news and bad news in this. The good news is that we have made a great deal of progress. The bad news is that we remain what we have long been: modified chimpanzees. The peace that we have achieved cannot be taken for a given. It has been hard won and could be easily and quickly lost. It is important to know that.

Is Obama Toast?

That is a question asked by Nate Silver at the New York Times.  Silver is a polling analyst and a pretty good one. He is honest so far as I can tell and does a very good job when it comes to reading the tea leaves. In the NYT piece he tries to guess whether President Obama can win reelection. The answer is:

Obama has gone from a modest favorite to win re-election to, probably, a slight underdog. Let's not oversell this. A couple of months of solid jobs reports, or the selection of a poor Republican opponent, would suffice to make him the favorite again.

That is, probably, modestly uncertain. As I said, he seems to be honest. Silver tries to game Obama's chances based on three variables: the President's approval ratings, the economy, and the "the ideological positioning of the Republican candidate." His discussion of the three variables is well worth a read.

He presents a number of "case studies", i.e., projections based on various possible values for his three variables. Here is the most interesting:

Obama approval rating in November 2011: 43%

G.D.P. growth in 2012: 0%

Probability of winning the popular vote: Romney: 83%, Obama: 17%

If Obama's approval rating is at 43% and GDP growth is zero in 2012 and Romney is the nominee, then Romney very likely wins. Okay. GDP growth will likely be better than zero. Will it be as good as 4%? If so:

Obama approval rating in November 2011: 43%

G.D.P. growth in 2012: 4%

Probability of winning the popular vote: Romney: 40%, Obama: 60%

That gives Obama only a marginal likelihood of reelection. If zero is too pessimistic, 4% is too optimistic. Silver is being careful.

I enjoy this sort of bone tossing, but the outcome obviously depends on a lot of things that are difficult to measure. For example, what can the Republican nominee say about the Obama's economic record? Here is Peter Wehner at Commentary:

Obama is now on track to have the worst jobs record of any president in the modern era. The unemployment rate will be significantly higher than when he took office. Chronic unemployment is worse than it was during the Great Depression. And during the Obama presidency the United States saw its bond rating downgraded for the first time in history.

Mr. Obama will have shattered all the records when it comes to the deficit and the debt. For example, under Obama the budget deficit and federal debt have reached their highest percentage since World War II. The same is true when it comes to federal spending as a percentage of GDP. During the post-recession period from June 2009 to June 2011, the median annual household income fell by 6.7 percent – a more substantial decline than occurred during the Great Recession. The Christian Science Monitor points out: "The standard of living for Americans has fallen longer and more steeply over the past three years than at any time since the U.S. government began recording it five decades ago." The housing crisis is worse than the Great Depression. Home values worth one-third less than they were five years ago. The home ownership rate is the lowest since 1965. The number of people in the U.S. who are in poverty has seen a record increase on President Obama's watch, with the ranks of working-age poor approaching 1960s levels that led to the national war on poverty. And government dependency, defined as the percentage of persons receiving one or more federal benefit payments, is the highest in American history.

That's a lot of arrows in the quiver of the Republican to be named later. The Republican nominee can repeat them over and over and maybe that is all he ought to do. What can President Obama say in response, except to deny responsibility? That might not help.

What Obama will do is try to change the subject by attacking his opponent. I doubt that Nate Silver has any way to calculate the chances of that. One thing is for sure: if Obama wins with that record, he will have earned a place in the record books.

How Politico Undermines the Concept of Sexual Harassment

I argued that the Politico story on Herman Cain was a very bad piece of journalism. It a story almost completely innocent of who, what, where, when, why, and how. That's a textbook case.

Dahlia Lithwick provides a more substantial case against the Politico story, though that was not her intention. Writing at Slate, she has this:

We have gone from not knowing what sexual harassment is to not believing it still happens. All in less than 20 years.

Remember, we don't know what happened, beyond the fact that several employees came forward with complaints and received cash settlements. That's not a lot of information. Cain defenders could have stopped there.

Instead, great swaths of them have opted to assert that there could never be a valid sex discrimination claim because the whole thing is just a racket. And they went even further: The same folks criticizing the National Restaurant Association employees who came forward with claims that they were uncomfortable in their workplace are willing to deploy the most archaic and gender-freighted stereotypes to get there. Sexual harassment can't be "real" because the women who claim it are money-grubbing, hysterical, attention-seeking tramps.

Lithwick goes on to quote several conservatives who have dismissed the whole idea of sexual harassment and treats these dismissals scathingly. Her interpretation of conservative positions is exaggerated and jaundiced. It would have made for a better case if she had acknowledged that some of the conservative criticisms of the sexual harassment regime have a point. Nonetheless, I agree with her general point.

Just because accusations of sexual harassment can and have been deployed as political weapons and just because someone might have reasonable objections to the legal definition of sexual harassment doesn't mean that it is isn't real. It most certainly is. Employers sometimes do harass their employees and it can be a terrible thing.

Conservatives are supposed to believe in traditional virtues like professional responsibility and respect, not to mention the virtues of the gentleman. Sexual harassment is an unambiguous offense to those virtues.

Stories like the Politico piece do more to undermine the concept of sexual harassment than conservatives ever could. Dredging up vague accounts of accusations by parties who were paid off and who are unwilling to come forward and tell their stories plays right into the hands of sexual harassment deniers. I have heard several young men and women recently express scorn for Cain's anonymous accusers. These were not Cain supporters. They were just tired of what they saw as muck raking for gain. I am guessing that a lot of folks reacted to the story in this way. Irresponsible journalism can do worse than damage the reputation of the journal.

The Wages of Europe’s Contempt for Democracy

The wages of sin is death, or so I have read. The wages of Europe's sins against Democracy are now being paid out. Just when it seemed that the Eurocrats had fashioned a solution to the problem of Greece, democracy rears its many ugly heads. From the British Telegraph:

On Monday afternoon, [Greece's prime minister George] Papandreou announced a referendum on whether to accept the EU's bail-out terms. He had evidently had enough of the antics of the opposition party, New Democracy, which kept insisting that Greece remain in the euro, while opposing all the austerity measures necessary to that end – an outrageous stance given that New Democracy ran up the deficit in the first place. Papandreou hoped to force his opponents off the fence: in favour of the spending cuts or against euro membership. Perhaps he also hoped to put pressure on the EU to offer more generous terms.

Now I have to say that this looks like the worst possible moment to hold a referendum. Europe is facing an unprecedented fiscal crisis, one which threatens banks all over the world. Working out an agreement on a very specific and complex issue involving a number of nations is the kind of thing that governments are for. In such a case as this, democracy is best honored by letting the voters judge the government in the next election.

That this is happening now is largely a consequence of the fact that the Eurocrats were utterly contemptuous of democracy as they were cobbling their system together. No nation should have joined the European Constitution without a popular referendum. The formation of a real European union involved a transfer of national sovereign powers. Well, who was properly in possession of those sovereign powers?

The problem was that many important nations that held such referendums (France is a good example) saw them voted down. At that point the proper procedure would have been to go back to the drawing board and try to produce a system that would be acceptable to Europe's various peoples. Instead, the Eurocrats did an end run around democracy by substituting a treaty for a transnational constitution. That might have worked if the system they produced had been coherent and sustainable. It wasn't.

The conduct of the Eurocrats was based on the idea that the elites in Europe know better than the people what is good for them. It is now rather evident that the elites don't their ass from oatmeal. With the exceptions of Germany and the UK, Europe's governments have run themselves off a fiscal cliff. The European monetary system they created was all but designed to fail and it is failing. Europe looks to be splitting into two, with Germany presiding over the nations that adopted the Euro as their currency.

So now the fate of the European Union, and perhaps the world economy, is about to be decided by referendum in Greece, perhaps the most fiscally irresponsible European state of all. The wages of the Eurocrats' sins will be paid, even if nothing else is.

Herman Cain & Politico’s Irresponsible Journalism

Herman Cain now gets to field his first scandal. Welcome to the majors Mr. Cain. Much of the commentary has focused on how well the Cain Campaign responded to the story broken by Politico. Not so well, everyone seems to agree. The trick in dealing with an embarrassment is to get ahead of it. Get your story straight and then get it out all at once. Cain had plenty of warning that this was coming and still seemed flatfooted when it broke.

Politico was surely right to break the story now and they may have done Cain a favor. This is the kind of thing that should be vetted well the snow becomes general over Iowa. Still, the Politico story is a textbook case of irresponsible journalism.

Here the opening:

During Herman Cain's tenure as the head of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s, at least two female employees complained to colleagues and senior association officials about inappropriate behavior by Cain, ultimately leaving their jobs at the trade group, multiple sources confirm to POLITICO.

The women complained of sexually suggestive behavior by Cain that made them angry and uncomfortable, the sources said, and they signed agreements with the restaurant group that gave them financial payouts to leave the association. The agreements also included language that bars the women from talking about their departures.

In a series of comments over the past 10 days, Cain and his campaign repeatedly declined to respond directly about whether he ever faced allegations of sexual harassment at the restaurant association.

Consider the words "at least" in the first paragraph. That suggests that there may have been more women who brought complaints against Cain. If there is any evidence of that, Politico does not provide it. Now consider the words "allegations of sexual harassment". Sexual harassment is a legally defined term:

unwelcome verbal, visual, or physical conduct of a sexual nature that is severe or pervasive and affects working conditions or creates a hostile work environment.

If you are going to suggest that Cain was guilty of that, you had better have some very specific facts to back it up. Does Politico have such facts? Here is what Politico says it has concerning Cain's misconduct.

On the details of Cain's allegedly inappropriate behavior with the two women, POLITICO has a half-dozen sources shedding light on different aspects of the complaints. The sources — including the recollections of close associates and other documentation — describe episodes that left the women upset and offended. These incidents include conversations allegedly filled with innuendo or personal questions of a sexually suggestive nature, taking place at hotels during conferences, at other officially sanctioned restaurant association events and at the association's offices. There were also descriptions of physical gestures that were not overtly sexual but that made women who experienced or witnessed them uncomfortable and that they regarded as improper in a professional relationship.

So the complaints were made by two women who remain anonymous, Politico tells us, "for privacy concerns." Facts about the nature of their complaints rely on "a half-dozen" anonymous sources, "— including the recollections of [anonymous] close associates and other [unspecified] documentation."

As for what the complaints actually were, we get only the vaguest clues. Conversations involving who, exactly? What were the personal, sexually suggestive questions? At whom was the innuendo directed? What were the physical gestures that were "not overtly sexual but that made women who experienced or witnessed them uncomfortable"? I have to confess, I am at a loss on that one. Arm farts? The reader has no idea what the alleged transgressions amounted to, let alone whether they actually occurred. To put it mildly, there is no evidence here of anything amounting to sexual harassment.

The closest Politico gets to something specific is this:

A second source with close ties to the restaurant association from that period said the woman revealed at the time that she had suffered what the source described as "an unwanted sexual advance" from Cain at a hotel where an event involving the group was taking place.

So we have an anonymous source claiming that he heard from another anonymous source that she suffered what the first anonymous source describes as "an unwanted sexual advance". This is stuff of the Politico story.

Information about the incidents was apparently closely held, even among association board members. But one woman's complaint apparently did make its way to at least some figures on the governing board when, at an association event, one board member got word that a female employee had complained about Cain's advances, according to a source who was at the event.

So the National Restaurant Association board kept information about the alleged incidents "closely held". How do we know this? We learn that the allegations made their way to "at least some figures on the governing board" because one unnamed board member got word of it. We learn this from another unnamed source.

I can easily believe that Herman Cain, despite his marriage of 43 years, propositioned an employee. It may turn out that that is what happened. It is the kind of thing that powerful men frequently do.

I also know that there is a very good reason why anonymous accusers and hearsay are not creditable, in the absence of confirmation. Whatever actually happened we cannot guess from anything that Politico provides. What we can tell is that this story was an atrocious piece of journalism. If this is the standard, then no one is safe from the vaguest allegations from any army of anonymous sources.