Split-Course Tournaments, Continued

Not for nothing, but on both days he's played the South Course Phil Mickelson has matched the low round of the day on it. The result is that he's tied for the lead heading into Sunday, and given his performances on Thursday and today, I'd say he looks to be in pretty good shape.

How To Be A Great Golfer

I saw an article recently about how Bubba Watson had been working hard on his putting because he sees that all the great players are multidimensional and, in particular, putt well. There's no question that putting well is very, very useful for being a great player. But I think the multidimensionality is more the key. There are a bunch of different ways to break down the various skills involved in playing golf, but for this purpose I think I like the five-part division: power, accuracy, precision, recovery, and putting. The difference between accuracy and precision is that accuracy is about hitting fairways and precision is about hitting into the green. Recovery includes the short game and the art of playing from poor positions from tee to green, which is a slightly composite category but whatever. My hypothesis is that being a truly great player requires having no more than one of these five be a genuine weakness, and to be an all-time great player requires having no weakness so weak that it can overpower your game. A few examples will illustrate what I mean.

How to Follow a Multi-Course Golf Tournament

Today at the Farmers Insurance Open, formerly the Buick Invitational, formerly the San Diego Open, the lowest round of the day was a 64 recorded by Sunghoon Kang. Alex Prugh and Rickie Fowler were one shot back at a 7-under 65, while Chris Kirk shot 66. The group at -5 included John Daly, Phil Mickelson, and Fabian Gomez. The first two are bigger names than the third, but there's a reason I mention them together: they're all tied for the lead.

Now, that might sound strange, but really it's not. After all, I could have said something very similar last week at the Bob Hope Classic, though given the actual nuances of that tournament I don't think it would have been relevant. You see, like the Bob Hope, the San Diego Open is played on multiple courses. A fair number of tournaments do this, but none of them are as spectacular in the dichotomy on display as San Diego. One of the courses is the South Course at Torrey Pines Golf Course, which hosted the spectacular 2008 U.S. Open (which means it's kind of tough). The other is the North Course, which has been known to be the easiest course on the PGA Tour. It plays about three or four shots harder than the South Course in some years.

So the reason Mickelson, Daly, and Gomez are tied for the lead is because they had the best days of anyone who played on the South Course. Now, Sunghoon Kang is also in that tie, because he holds the North Course lead. What becomes of this mess we'll only be able to tell tomorrow, when the golfers all switch courses. But at a tournament like this, I really think they should show you how each player stands for that subset of the field that played the same course as they did. For instance, Phil is nominally tied for 5th, three off the lead, but he's also tied for the lead among the South Course field. It doesn't matter so much near the top of the leaderboard, but when I look at people who seem near the cut line it might help to know that some of them are actually doing way better than the others, because they played the tougher course first.

For what it's worth, Tiger played the North Course. And he shot a 69, including zero birdies on par-5s. That puts him T22 overall, but T17 for the North Course field. Of course, to project how one would end up if everyone played both courses at the same level they played today, you need to double, so he projects into a tie for 34th. But I'm not worried, because this is his modus operandi: he never plays the North particularly great, but then he gets to the South and plays that course very differently from everyone else. Hell, he can beat that course with one leg tied behind his back.

The Spending People Want To Cut

A couple of polls are out, one from Gallup asking people which parts of government they want to cut and one from CNN asking specifically whether people prefer to cut a given program for deficit reduction or not. I prefer the latter, both because it asks more different categories and because I think it presents both sides of the debate better (and yes, that ends up with a higher average "let's cut it" percent, which is contra my interests in the matter). So, what do Americans want to cut? And what do they want to save?

The programs Americans do not want to cut significantly to reduce the deficit are infrastructure spending (39%/61%), unemployment insurance (38%/61%), Medicaid (29%/70%), education programs (25%/75%), Social Security (21%/78%), Medicare (18%/81%), and veterans' benefits (14%/85). What do Americans think it's okay to cut to shrink the deficit? Defense spending (50%/49%), "welfare programs in general" (56%/44%), pensions for government workers (61%/39%), and foreign aid (81%/18%).

A few observations: the things people do not want to cut include most of the left-wing stuff. It also includes the three welfare programs the government spends the vast majority of its non-military money on, so while Americans want to cut welfare in the abstract, they like the three big welfare programs we have very, very much. The public employee pensions thing is one where the public is just wrong, and I think it's the result of some populist demagoguery. And as to foreign aid, well, yeah, okay... try balancing our budget by cutting foreign aid. You can't; it's negligible. The polls that have done experiments on this are notorious: when asked what percent of our budget people think foreign aid should be, the average answer is an order of magnitude or two higher than what the figure actually is in real life. But people also think foreign aid constitutes 25% of our budget, whereas it's actually more like, uh, 0.25%.

But I also think one should take a poll like this in context, specifically the context of several polls showing that, while voters prefer "spending cuts" to "tax hikes" in the abstract, they prefer raised taxes to cuts in, say, Social Security, or Medicare. And they really, really prefer raising taxes on the rich to cutting those programs. So I'd say that if the public has a particularly intelligible, feasible preference for deficit-reduction strategy, it involves cutting defense spending and raising taxes on the rich. Sound like liberalism, much?

Two Thoughts About the State of the Union Address

First of all, there's a bit of a meme going around that says that Obama didn't mention global warming as a problem. Okay. He did not speak the words "global warming," or even "climate change." But he did spend a lot of time talking about renewable energy, and called for 85% renewables by 2035. And he explicitly said that these policies would, among other things, "protect our planet." That, to me, sounds like he "mentioned climate change." No, he didn't focus on it. What would focusing on it accomplish? Nothing more would get done, and given that the economy still sucks and it's winter, and a cold winter at that, it's not a great time to make a big point of focusing on something other than jobs jobs jobs. If people want to engage in a genuine debate about whether he should have emphasized climate change more, that's fine, although I think that I probably disagree. But to claim that he didn't mention it strikes me as fraudulent.

Second, someone (possible Jon Chait) commented that Obama took a well-hackneyed theme, "the future," and managed to weave it into all his various policy ideas. Yeah, he did. That's because his broad and seemingly varied agenda does in fact have a common theme, that of building a new foundation for American greatness. Or, as he put it, winning the future. I've been saying this for years, and I'm very pleased that Obama figured out that he has a theme, and a very "American exceptionalist" pride-inducing theme to boot, and that he should trumpet it as loud as he can. I wish his people had used the phrase New Foundation, because I think it's a perfect tag-line in the style of the agendas of Teddy Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson. But this was good enough.

(Oh, I liked the speech. Could you tell?)

The Solid South

It used to be that the South voted, routinely, 80% or 90% or 95% Democratic. That was back in the days that ended with Harry Truman, when the Democrats were still the party of not being the party of Lincoln. In recent elections where the Democrat hasn't been a Southerner himself, prior to Obama's election, the South voted solidly for the Republican candidate, what with the Republicans now being the party of not being the party of civil rights. But of course, the vote margins were never the absurdly lopsided blowouts of the '20s and '30s. "Solid South" meant the Republican got 60% of the vote in most Southern states, or mid-to-upper 50s, and won them all.

But maybe it's not so simple. I just did a little calculation of the percentage of the white vote in a few Deep Southern states that Obama lost in '08 that he would need to win in '12, keeping the racial proportions of the electorate and the non-white vote the same, in order to win those states. Here are the numbers:

Texas: 37%
South Carolina: 33%
Louisiana: 29%
Georgia: 28%
Alabama: 28%
Mississippi: 23%

He didn't come very close to winning any of these states. Closest was South Carolina at 9 points, followed by Texas at 12-ish points. Note that those are the states with the strictest white-vote requirement for Obama. In Texas he's only getting a very, very slight handicap from the non-white vote, at least compared to the real Black Belt states. But in places like Alabama and Mississippi, white people are still only giving about 11% of their vote to the pro-civil rights party. It's still the Solid South, about as solid as it ever was. It's just that now, they let the black people vote.

Expanding the Playing Field

As Barack Obama's poll numbers have steadily improved over the past month or two, I'm starting to think about where Obama might try to push the envelope beyond its '08 borders if he's in a strong position coming down the stretch in 2012. Which states should he try to win that McCain won last time? Here are my ideas:

- Missouri: This was the state McCain won by the narrowest margin. It's adjacent to his home state, and if he has any net improvement from '08 he ought to pick up Missouri. Also, there's a tough Senate race to defend with Claire McCaskill, which would be an ancillary benefit.

- Arizona: Obviously, this state wasn't in play in '08 because of the McCain home benefit, and Arizona's become sort of radicalized under the Jan Brewer administration. But it's still a very heavily Hispanic state, and the Hispanic vote ought to be overwhelming in '12. The neighboring states with heavy Hispanic populations, Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado, have all shifted toward the Democrats; it's time to take Arizona back.

- Texas: Nothing would hurt the Republicans more than losing Texas. There are a lot of Hispanics in Texas, and if their turnout increases noticeably then a Democrat can win this state. At the worst Obama should be able to drive the Republican into a massive arms race, which isn't a bad thing if you have a financial advantage.

- Georgia and South Carolina: Polling from PPP suggests that Obama's position has been improving in the South of all places. If that's true, then these two states ought to be somewhat in play. There are a lot of black people in these states, and I have to think that it would be possible for a strong Obama campaign to win here.

The other most logical place for him to expand would be the plains/mountains west; he did quite well (for a Democrat) in the Montana/Dakotas region and managed to pick off the Omaha, Nebraska electoral vote. But I'm not sure there's really much point focusing on that area in the Presidential race, since it's just all so trivial in terms of the electoral college.

Why I Don't Like the Word "Progressive"

At a certain time in the past, the world's most powerful nation was caught in the middle of a culture war. One side thought that relaxed sexual mores were perfectly fine, and that there was nothing wrong with youngsters gallivanting about having fun with one another. The other side was aghast at this idea, insisting that it was sinful and could not be allowed. One of these sides was the progressive side. One of them was the conservative side. Tell me, which was which?

Well, as written, I don't think you can tell me which is which. You see, I could be referring to one of two conflicts (that I know of). The first is the United States of America, during roughly-speaking the second half of the 20th century. In that conflict, the moralizers were the conservatives, and the permissivists were the progressives. But I could also be talking about England during the mid-1600s, when it was the Puritans who had burst onto the scene with reforming zeal, taking aim at the prevailing loose sexual norms. In that struggle the Puritans were the progressives, and the defenders of the practice of, for example, maying, were the conservatives.

What Liberalism Is

This post is meant sort of as a response to various writings online that I've seen recently about how liberalism has incorporated many libertarian critiques of it. Obviously, I can't speak for all liberals. I can't, in fact, speak for any liberals except myself. But I can say what I mean when I call myself a liberal, or I call myself a socialist, or whatever. As I've said previously, I think that all political positions are a combination of an underlying essentially moral value and an empirical, pragmatic calculation of what public policy will best fulfill that fundamental goal. For myself, the single moral value that I think is at the root of all of my politics is a very simple one, namely what I call kindness, or the promotion of happiness among sentient beings. As an empirical matter, there are, I think, two main factors that have reduced the happiness of sentient beings, both historically and currently. The first is scarcity of resources, which obviously does things like mandate that all human beings who don't themselves die very young indeed will get quite a lot of experience feeling what it's like when someone close to you dies. The second is the tendency of some sentient beings to inflict harm on other sentient beings.

State of the Union Advice

There's a lot of advice about what Obama should say in his State of the Union address. Most of it, I think, addresses the specific content. My main piece of advice is somewhat more meta. Basically, I think that what Obama needs to do in this SotU speech is to continue his theme of willingness to work with Republicans but unwillingness to go along with bad policy ideas. It's a theme that I thought he did a great job pushing in his immediate post-midterm press conference. The point continues to be that, while there is in fact vanishingly little policy where Obama and John Boehner can both agree, and therefore the likelihood of significant compromise is close to zero (and much lower than the chance of something like a government shutdown due to lack of compromise), the public wants compromise. Therefore, it is incumbent on Obama to make it clear that, when the ultimate compromise inevitable falls through, it wasn't his fault. So far he's doing fine on this: people are much more likely to think that Republicans will be too inflexible than that Obama will be. So he needs to continue to say, "Look, I get that there are serious challenges facing our nation, and I'm willing to work with anyone who wants to work to face those challenges. If Republicans are serious about facing our nation's challenges, I'll work with them. If they aren't, then I won't." Then, in all likelihood, his 2012 State of the Union address will be more like, "Look, I said I would cooperate if the Republicans got serious about addressing our nation's problems, but they weren't," and then he can get into attacking the Republicans on do-nothing-ness, obstruction, inflexibility, etc. grounds.

As to content, 1) don't talk about cutting Social Security. Ideally talk about ways to fix it so that it will never start running deficits, like changing the payroll tax cap; 2) this wouldn't be a bad time to come out in favor of gay marriage, I think. The moment when those favoring marriage per se are more okay with civil unions than those favoring civil unions are okay with marriage is, I think, passed; 3) if he's going to talk about innovation, emphasize energy innovation; 4) when talking about the deficit, try to get the public to realize that there's a difference between the long-term deficit and the short-term deficit, and that the latter is scarcely bad at all; 5) this wouldn't be a bad time to throw his weight behind a renewal of the assault weapons ban, support for which jumped nine points from '09 to right now (63% now support it). Also, he should tout the accomplishments of the 111th Congress. This is an appropriate time to do that, I think.

Oh, and While We're At It...

Impeach Justice Thomas, too. Apparently he's been hiding his wife's income from her work with a conservative political group on his financial disclosure forms. Once again, it's not just the fact that it's probably illegal. It's the politicking. And specifically, the politicking and then working quite hard to hide the politicking. Exactly the opposite of what we should want in a Justice.

There's nothing like an originalist for polluting the integrity of the Court. After all, a highly politicized Court with improper intrusions between itself and the political process was the state that prevailed for the first few decades of our nation. I thought it was a good thing when we figured out how to have a nice non-ideological Court, the way we were supposed to, but if it was good enough for the 1790s...

Not that any of this is really relevant anymore, but...

It's all been kind of made moot by the fact that he's been kicked off the air altogether, but I had a thought last night about Keith Olbermann's segment "Worst Persons in the World." Specifically, my idea is that the title is not making the claim, even satirically, that the three people mentioned are the worst, second-to-worst, and third-to-worst people alive in the world on any given day. Rather, the claim is that those people would be the three worst people in the world if you only considered the previous approximately 24 hours' worth of news. So Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is still dictator of Iran (although it's really more the Ayatollah, but whatever), and Osama bin Laden is still a mass-murdering terrorist, and Dick Cheney is still a mass-murdering war profiteer, but they may each not have done anything particularly wicked today. Instead, some media personality or political figure said or did something so mind-bogglingly wrong that it makes you wonder how people like that exist. Another way to put it is that it's sort of the first derivative of the worst person in the world: not whose moral standing is the lowest, but whose moral standing deteriorated the most in the past news cycle. Because, think about it: the person who was the worst person in the world, in terms of total aggregate net wickedness, would not change on a day-to-day basis. You would not routinely expect for the three worst people in the world to completely change identities every day. You would, however, expect that the three people who had done the most to weaken their own moral stature that particular day would change daily.

None of this, of course, is really relevant anymore, and none of it answers the charge that a name like that is just a little too provocative, and a little too easy for the second-hand consumer to take the wrong way. But I think this is what the title was trying to get at: who were the worst persons in the world, specifically today?

In Fairness, the Phillies

Now I'll analyze the Phillies the same way, in part because they're the Mets' main rivals and in part because they're expected to be the class of the National League once again. The players who departed from Philadelphia were Cody Ransom, Nate Robertson, and Jayson Werth, while Greg Dobbs, Chad Durbin, Paul Hoover, Jamie Moyer, and Mike Sweeney from the '10 Phillies haven't signed with anyone. Assume they all leave. These players were worth 0.0, -0.3, 5.2, -1.0, 0.4, 0.1, -0.2, and -0.1 wins. That's a total of 4.1 wins departing the Phillies, which brings them down from 97 wins to just 92.9.

The players they imported are also pretty good, though. They are: Brian Bass, Eddie Bonine, Kevin Cash, Erik Kratz, Jeff Larish, Cliff Lee, Dan Meyer, Brandon Moss, Robb Quinlan, and Delwyn Young. In 2010, those players produced -0.4, -0.1, -0.9, -0.8, 4.3, -0.3, -0.3, -0.7, and -0.6 wins above replacement. That adds up to a net gain of +0.2 WAR. Including the addition of Cliff Lee. That brings the Phillies back up to 93.1 wins.

Now, as for expected changes from their '10 performance to '11 (and yes, I will still use "hope" to indicate a better-than-expectable improvement):

Projecting the 2011 Mets

There are, I think, three categories of players to consider when trying to guess how a team will change its performance from one year to the next: the players it has lost, the players it has gained, and the players who have stayed. The Mets have done a very good job of losing players, so far. If one assumes that neither Oliver Perez nor Luis Castillo will be on the team, then the Mets will have gotten 17 players who had negative WAR numbers last year off of their major league roster (except for two possible September call-ups), players who were worth a combined -7.7 WAR last year. So that's an eight-win improvement right there. Now, they've also let 9 players who had positive WAR numbers exit the team, players worth 4.6 total WAR (mainly from Hisanori Takahashi and Pedro Feliciano, a total of 2.1 WAR), so the net improvement from leaving players is a gain of 3.1 wins. That alone moves the Mets to 82 wins.

What of the players they have acquired? They are: Boof Bonser, Taylor Buchholz, Chris Capuano, D.J. Carrasco, Raul Chavez, Scott Hairston, Willie Harris, Ronny Paulino, Taylor Tankersly, and Chris Young. Most of these guys are what I'd call the process of having enough replacement-level players that the assumption of gaining from cutting guys with negative WAR numbers will hold. Last year (since I'm doing "last year" numbers) those players were worth, respectively, -0.1, 0.1, 0.8, 0.5, 0.5, -0.4, -0.8, 0.6, -0.4, and 0.9 WAR. That's a total of 1.7 WAR, meaning that a team with the players the Mets expect to have in 2011 would have won 4.8 more games in 2010 than the actual Mets of 2010 won, a.k.a. 83.8 wins.

Rebutting Jeff Francoer, The Fancy Version

Jeff Francoeur said in an interview recently, presumably to explain part of his struggles with the Mets last year, that "Citi Field is a damn joke." This statement has been getting him a lot of criticism on Mets-partisan sites, with the argument being that, "No, Jeff Francoeur, you were the damn joke." Not that every single argument needs to be made with fancy stats, but I'll do it anyway.

The stat ISO, or isolated power, is defined as slugging percentage minus batting average, or, equivalently, total extra bases per at bat. Over his career, Jeff Francoeur's ISO has been .157. A stat that I prefer to see how powerful a player is independently of how good a pure hitter they are is TB/H or, equivalently, slugging percentage over batting average. Francoeur's bases-per-hit rate for his career is 1.586. And finally, just to cover all the bases as it were, Francoeur's on-base gap (on-base percentage minus batting average) for his career is .042 (which is a really dismal number). How were those numbers in CitiField?

Well, his ISO was .155, a truly tremendous decline. That wide outfield was really taking away a lot of his extra bases, huh? Especially since his bases-per-hit rate was 1.622, above his career average. And his on-base gap was .044, also slightly above his career average. The only thing that Jeff Francoeur did badly at CitiField was hit for average. Now, I'm not sure but I would expect a ballpark like CitiField to strengthen batting average if anything, because there will be so much more empty space in the outfield. Perhaps the distance of the walls will make pitchers that much more confident and lead them to pitch more aggressively to a guy like Francoeur, but does that really constitute the stadium's being "a damn joke"? I don't think so; I think what Francoeur is trying to say is that he hit a lot of balls that would have been home runs elsewhere but were measly outs in Flushing, and that having a stadium like that is a joke. But his power numbers didn't get worse. So the story doesn't hold up.

Impeach Scalia!

In 1791, the First Congress passed the law establishing the Bank of the United States. President George Washington was uncertain as to whether the Bank was Constitutional, and indeed, people disagreed about this question quite a lot. Given his believe about how to use a veto, i.e. if and only if the law in question was unconstitutional, this was kind of an important question for Washington. His Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, had an ingenious idea: it just so happened that there were six eminent lawyers on hand in the capital who had been particularly chosen to decide whether things were constitutional or not. So Jefferson sent a letter to the Supreme Court requesting that they give their opinion as to whether or not the Bank was Constitutional, and several dozen other legal questions.

Chief Justice John Jay wrote back. And it was a reasonably scathing reply. Jay said that what Jefferson asked was improper and impossible. The President could (it said it in the Constitution, after all) ask the heads of departments for opinions, but the Supreme Court could only decide cases or controversies. For the Court to issue an advisory opinion was beyond its powers. This letter has been called the actual first instance of judicial review, since the Court decided that an action of another branch of government, i.e. Jefferson's asking for an advisory opinion, was unconstitutional. And this is a precedent we've more or less stuck to for the following two hundred years and more. This idea of not giving advisory opinions is part of the basis for the standing, mootness, and ripeness doctrines, each of which is designed to make sure that when a federal court issues a ruling it is about an actual case or controversy in which one party has a claim to an actual legal injury and has demanded the remedy and the judgment has a chance of actually redressing the injury.

In 2011, Justice Antonin Scalia will deliver a closed-doors lecture to approximately 40 members of the House of Representatives. Specifically, the lecture will be on constitutional law, the first of a series of "conservative constitutional seminars," and it will be delivered to the Tea Party Caucus, co-sponsoring the event with the Congressional Constitution Caucus, a right-wing group. I feel like this ought to be an impeachable offense (not, obviously, that Speaker Boehner's House will impeach him over it, and I don't suppose Speaker Pelosi's would have either), or at least close, for the following reasons. First we have the fact that it at least resembles an advisory opinion, of the sort that the Jay Court decided was Right Out. I mean, I get that Supreme Court justices sometimes give speeches (I've heard Mr. Injustice Scalia take himself), and they talk about constitutional issues, but this feels different to me. I get the feeling that the idea is that these members of Congress want to be informed about what the Justice they respect thinks about the Constitution, specifically for the purpose of incorporating those ideas into their legislation. Then there's the fact that this is partisan politicking. He's not just speaking to Republicans, he's going to be speaking to a particular radical sub-faction of Republicans. In doing so, he is essentially making a public endorsement of Tea Party-ism. I'm pretty sure that this is Not Done. Yeah, it's often known which party which Justice favors, but they usually try pretty hard not to actually mention it in public. When Charles Evans Hughes ran for President in 1916, as a sitting Supreme Court Justice, he resigned, before he was even nominated. (He was later re-appointed to the Court as Chief Justice, several years later.) The whole point of having an unelected, life-tenured federal judiciary is that it is removed from politics. For a sitting Justice to openly politick pretty clearly contravenes that, I dunno, original intent seems like an appropriate phrase?

Now, the Wikipedia article on advisory opinions says that the custom against advisory opinions has been weakened in recent years in this country. But isn't Antonin Scalia kind of, you know, an originalist? I don't think he's supposed to be able to plead that people's standards have loosened in recent years. If it was good enough in 1791, it's supposed to be good enough for Justice Scalia, and the rest of us, too.

And the best part? You want to know what the lecture that Justice Scalia will be delivering to the Tea Party caucus will be about? Separation of powers. I kid you effin' not.

Texas: Messing With It

According to PublicPolicyPolling, Barack Obama (who currently sports about a +2 approval rating in the Pollster.com aggregates) would trail in Texas against all four leading Republican candidates. Specifically, he'd trail Huckabee by a blowout-style 16, Gingrich by 5, Romney by 7, and Palin by 1. Their take on those results is that Obama would be competitive but only against Palin. I don't think it's quite accurate to say that being down six with about twenty months to go is out of range, though. Now, maybe this wouldn't be the case if Obama weren't a little more popular than he was a couple of months ago, but let's remember that he's not more popular today than he was on Election Day '08. But he's doing much, much better in Texas, except against neighboring-state favorite son Huckabee, than he did on '08. He also appears to be doing better against all four of these top contenders in the aggregate than he did in '08 in Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia. Strange to say it, given how ugly the South was last year, but it looks like the early numbers suggest that the big shift in the electoral landscape from '08 to '12 will be the South moving toward the Democrats. Again. 2008 was already the best performance in the South by a non-Southern Democrat since Kennedy.

Anyway, I highly recommend making a race out of Texas to President Obama. I doubt he'll be at a financial disadvantage, so getting into an arms race in an expensive state like Texas would be to his advantage overall. And the Republicans really couldn't afford to fail to defend Texas: a loss there would come very close to dooming their chances altogether. So yes, Obama: mess with Texas.

What the Right Doesn't Get About Global Warming

Liberals will often scold conservatives when stories like "2010 was the warmest year on record" come across the wire. My theory is that this makes a lot of conservatives believe that not only do liberals believe that they are right about global warming (if they're even willing to admit that, and not claim it's an intentional fraud), but that they want to be right about global warming. Global warming is something the liberals want to use to gain political leverage/power and to, I don't know, tax real Americans and give giant handouts to Big Wind and Big Solar. In truth, of course, liberals really, really, really wish they were wrong about global warming. If somebody comes up with credible evidence that the world's climate is not changing rapidly now and that humans are to blame for it, we'd be thrilled! We'd still probably advocate getting off of coal and oil, because those energy sources have other problems like mercury and finite-ness, but if global warming turns out to be a red herring it would save the world from soooooo much human suffering. We'd all love to believe it. It's just this thing about living in the reality-based community, which means that, actually, we just have to accept that all of the evidence suggests that this will be at least as bad as we fear. We just think we should do something about it, sooner rather than later if possible.

Things Jon Stewart is Wrong About

The problem with Rep. Steve Cohen's remarks that involved a comparison between the Republican line about health care reform being a "government takeover of health care" with the Nazi idea of the big lie was not that he was saying the Republicans were Nazis. That's because he didn't say that. It also wasn't that he invoked a comparison to the Nazis, because if people do things that are similar to Nazis or that require using the Hitler regime as an analogy then you need to use that analogy. The problem was that his phraseology was slightly awkward and accidentally placed the description of the Nazi idea of the big lie and the assertion that the "government takeover of health care" thing is a big lie next to each other in such a way that it looked like he was directly comparing the two. Yeah, it was unfortunate, but it was reasonably obvious that he didn't mean any offense by it.

Similarly, the criticism of the Worst Person in the World segment of Countdown with Keith Olbermann, made by Jon Stewart among, I gather, others, is just plain wrong. Yes, in a world with Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Osama bin Laden and Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh (okay, that one's not in the same class, but I'm watching a Stephen Colbert segment about how hideous Limbaugh is; he's the kind of person who deserves the actual Worsts) in it, the idea that someone like Bill O'Reilly is the worst person in the world is ridiculous. So is the idea that the identity of the three worst persons in the world changes nightly. It's rather clear, I'd say, from watching the segment that the use of the words "worst person in the world" is entirely satirical. About half the time, the "worst person in the world," or the runners up, are people who just had a spectacular fail in the last news cycle, someone who made a dreadful gaffe or had a nasty scandal or bit of hypocrisy leak. The rest of the time it's usually someone of whom you can at least think, boy it's a shame that this person isn't the worst person in the world. People, like Limbaugh, who just display so much awfulness that you can actually scarcely believe that anyone could be that awful (and anyone who disputes it about Limbaugh, watch Stephen's segment about him, and then call the Golf Channel to complain about their promotion of him). Sometimes even people who are doing things that are actually killing large numbers of people in direct and quantifiable ways, like Jan Brewer rescinding medical coverage for people in need of live-saving transplants. Or torturing people. Or whatever. And he makes it very clear when he's being serious, as in "Yes, this person really is shockingly awful," and when he's being silly, as in "No, this is just a really hilarious FAIL."

As for Jon's implication, embedded in a question to his two guests who run a political satire show in Iran, that the routine use of the phrase "worst person in the world" drives a sort of criticism inflation, cheapening the value of such words so that, if America ever did encounter oppression on a scale similar to that of Iran, we wouldn't know what words to use for it. Well, as I see it there are two groups of people regarding Worsts: those who think Keith is being even half serious in using that phrase, who I believe unanimously condemn him for it and think that those words are inappropriate, and those who get that he's being satirical and that he also has a special way to let you know when he's really pissed off. When he's in a mood to make really serious criticisms, even beyond the level of having someone like Cheney be the WPitW when he actually deserves it, he uses a Special Comment. Also, the first thing I noticed Keith for was his coverage of electoral malfeasances in the 2004 election. And actual election-stealing, when there's actual evidence of it, is the kind of thing that begins to approach Iran-style oppression, isn't it? Now, perhaps Keith was wrong that Bush was stealing Ohio in '04, but given that he believed it, I think the proper thing to do was to try to get the story out there. And if Iran-style despotism really did come to this country in anything resembling full force, I think that Keith and most other commentators would find ways to express the fact that this was not cool. Maybe it wouldn't work to prevent that tyranny, but people making the occasional Nazi comparison isn't the crucial element; at least one famous tyrant came to power a little bit before they had Nazi comparisons, you know.

The worst thing that you can say about Worst Person in the World is that, because it's such a good/noticeable segment, a lot of people will hear of it without actually being people who watch the show, and will get the impression that Keith Olbermann goes around saying that commentators on Fox News are the worst person in the world. And because the name is formulated such that some people get that misimpression, they are going to change the segment, unfortunately in my opinion since it was bloody brilliant. But in any event, do people have an obligation to craft their satire in such a way that no one will misunderstand it? Jon Stewart frequently argues that his standard in terms of civility is much lower, because he's a comedian. If somebody decided to take him seriously, he'd come off looking pretty damn bad by the standard he seems to want to hold Keith Olbermann to. But Worsts is primarily a satirical segment. Should it be against the rules for a "serious news" guy like Keith to have a satirical segment? (If so, Oddball had better go first!) Why? He telegraphs pretty clearly to his viewers that he's going into satire mode. He also telegraphs bluntly when he's going into very, very serious mode. Is there something wrong with this? Jon Stewart, a nominal comedian, is often criticized by all and sundry for entering the terrain of the news. He disputes that this is a bad thing for him to do. Is it bad for a genuine serious newsman, who does a genuinely serious job of covering the news, to include a bit of levity and humor? Is he obliged to word that humor in a sufficiently non-humorous way that no one will accidentally take him seriously and think he's being over the top, which is, mind you, one of the chief elements of political satire? Does his use of satire for one small segment of his program make him "incivil"? And no, it's not the same as what someone like Limbaugh does, or what someone like Beck does. If someone who watches them wants to correct me, I'm open to being corrected, but my impression is that if anything Beck says is comedy then all of it must be, and he's some sort of elaborate Stephen Colbert who's managed not to let on that he's in character. I don't think that Glenn Beck has a special segment where he telegraphs that he's going to be relatively silly rather than serious in his approach to the news for the next two minutes. Maybe he does, and I just never see it; if so, I would appreciate being corrected. But I don't think I am wrong about this.

Anyway, that's my contribution to the "Jon Stewart is wrong about how both sides do it" argument.

About that Flawed Republican Field

The latest round of PPP's national poll finds that while Republicans are rather happy with their current top 4 crop of major Presidential contenders, Palin, Romney, Huckabee, and Gingrich, independents seriously think they ought to reconsider and nominate someone else. In other words, the people you supposedly need to win to win elections do not like what the Republican Party seems to be selling so far. And the Republican Party, or at least its elites, knows this, and would really like to start selling something else.

These four candidates, we are told, are deeply flawed. Palin is divisive and inexperienced and flaky and, well, sports a neat 19/57 approval rating. Gingrich nostalgia will soon wear off and people will remember him for the fickle, temperamental firebrand he used to be and still is. Huckabee's probably the strongest, but he's thought to have regional problems (I think these are overestimated) and he seems to be polling just as badly as the others anyway. And Romney, well, is a shape-shifting Mormon robot who used to support ObamaCare. So these aren't great candidates.

Is the Republican Party screwed? No, no, they say: the fact that these four candidates are so flawed just means that a dark horse candidate would have that much better a chance to come from behind and win the nomination. Someone like Tim Pawlenty, or John Thune, or Mitch Daniels, or Haley Barbour, or whoever. But funny thing... those guys are flawed, too. And I don't mean that they're getting 3% in the polls if they're lucky. Barbour's kind of a racist, and people have noticed. Also he looks the part. Pawlenty, Thune, and Daniels, meanwhile, are mind-numbingly boring. What's the track record of mind-numbingly boring Presidential candidates? Kerry lost (I dispute his boringness, but I'm going by popular impression). Gore won, but should've won a hell of a lot bigger given the great economy. Dole lost badly. George H.W. Bush lost to Clinton, but beat Dukakis. Oh wait, Dukakis was the more boring of those two. Mondale lost. Ford lost. That's a pretty bad track record. And of course, both Pawlenty and Daniels have shown glimmerings of moderation or reality-basedness over the years, which rules them out as contenders for the nomination.

So Republicans hoping for a white knight dark horse to save them from the Palin/Romney/Huckabee/Gingrich mess: you don't have any white knights waiting in the wings. Your starting lineup sucks... and your bench sucks, too! If you want a candidate that I as a Democrat will worry about, nominate Huckabee (and convince him to run first); no one else who's even remotely being talked about for this cycle scares me in the slightest.

Idiocy

Keith Olbermann's current segment discussing Jan Brewer's Arizona "death panels" that are denying life-saving transplants for about 100 people is reminding me of something that the odious Chris Christie, my unfortunate governor, notoriously did a few months back. Christie, that stalwart of small government and fiscal rectitude, shut down a project to build an additional tunnel under the Hudson river. Sure, it was already at approximately the "let's build the thing!" stage, and millions of dollars had already been spent on planning, and it was such a massively good idea to build it, but it would cost money, so nope, we couldn't do that. Oh, wait. The federal government was giving New Jersey more money for that tunnel than the state was spending on it. And when Christie canceled the project, the federal government took its money back, thank you kindly. So the decision not to build that tunnel... increased the New Jersey budget deficit. Likewise, the health care coverage in Arizona that Jan Brewer has cut was being funded more than 1:1 by the feds, so cutting it has increased Arizona' deficit.

This is not fiscal conservativism. This is just stupidity, or perhaps malice.

Adapting to Jeopardy-Playing Robots

This post by Kevin Drum interests me, and intersects with something I've been thinking about for a while. Basically, my idea comes from the following observations:

1) There are a large number of people doing unskilled or semi-skilled jobs;

2) Many or most of those jobs are of a sort that could easily be done by a robot instead;

3) Capitalism being what it is and robots being cheap, it is not at all unlikely that many of those jobs will be done by robots in the medium-term future;

4) Most of those jobs are quite unpleasant and/or unfulfulling jobs to have, relatively speaking.

Observations 1-3 are the bad part of the robot revolution, the part that Kevin Drum says could lead to robot riots. But it strikes me that Observation 4 means there ought to be some potential upside in all of this. If society needs fewer actual human beings to be doing boring, unhealthy, and sometimes dangerous factory work, then fewer people will need to do that work. In and of itself, that's a good thing. The problem comes from the fact that if nothing else changed, those people would have no job instead of a lousy job, and would therefore live a life of poverty and hardship, which is not cool. But there ought to be ways to take the promise of robots doing our dirty work for us and make it actually into a good thing. I think one of the keys is education: if all of the people displaced by robots were given access to genuinely good higher education, then they could become "skilled workers"/people who could have more satisfying jobs. We could devote more of society's resources to things like education (teaching, after all, is often a highly fulfilling job), intellectual pursuits, the arts, entertainment, etc. But only if society realizes that this robot revolution is coming and that, far from fearing it, we need to work to get positive value out of it.

The other key, I think, is a stronger social safety net. Things like entertainment jobs, though obviously amazingly lucrative if they pan out, often don't. And there's no guarantee that society would always need as much in the way of labor if robots were doing most of the manual labor necessary to keep society operating at its most basic level. Indeed, I've sometimes seen in this potential mechanization of most low-level labor a back-door path to something almost resembling the world Karl Marx wished to see: if we get to a world that doesn't need very much human labor for its basic functioning, perhaps we could eventually decide to come up with some way of letting people have decent lives even if they aren't doing labor. I'm not sure exactly how it would work, but I think it's the kind of thing that's worth considering in the coming several decades.

Jose Reyes, MVP

Reyes says he feels like he could put up MVP-type numbers this year. I've thought before about what it takes for Reyes to win the MVP award, and I think it's something like this:
 
   - Lead the Major Leagues in stolen bases and triples
   - Lead the Major Leagues in hits
   - Lead at least the National League in runs scored

I will also say that if Jose Reyes ever were to lead the National League in batting average, he would be the most valuable player in the league, no questions asked. When Reyes gets hits, his team wins, a lot. I continue to believe that Jose Reyes is capable of winning an MVP award, and I hope he does it this year and then signs a nice long-term extension deal with the Mets.

When One Party Always Lies

I said in a previous post that liberals like to think that our policies are non-ideological because we think that our conception of good is so utterly obvious that everyone ought to agree with it. I also either said in a previous post or just had the thought that conservatives by and large disagree with us liberals because they don't share our conception of good, not because they get the empirical logic damn wrong. But it is also undeniably true that conservatives in the public eye make a good many claims of fact that are empirically demonstrably false. So what gives?

Well, I think the answer is that most conservative elites are not operating under the liberal conception of good, i.e. that public policies ought to make the lives of everyone they can manage better. And in some areas, specifically those touched on by conservative religion or questions of race, much of the hard-core conservative base isn't playing by those rules either. But that only extends to, maybe, the 30th or 35th percentile of liberalness in the country. Beyond that, most people basically endorse kindness as the guiding principle of public policy (though they might be squeamish about that word). So the liberal are right that, for an awfully big majority of this country, center-left policies are in fact a relatively simple matter of pragmatism and empiricism. And conservatives know that!

I once ran a thought experiment of trying to figure out what you can reasonably infer if a major political party in a given country repeatedly makes demonstrably false claims of fact. My conclusion was that it means that have a hidden agenda, an ulterior motive that they don't want becoming public. The idea is that they have their real agenda, but they know that it's an unpopular agenda and that if they openly advocated, say, giving all the country's money to rich people, they wouldn't win elections. So instead they make arguments for why the policies which in truth advance their hidden, unpopular goals will actually advance the common goals of society. But these arguments are empirically false, which gets you to lots and lots of lying.

So what we can infer from the fact that the organized Republican Party is devoutly anti-fact is that they have an agenda which is not popular and will not play with anyone close to the median voter. And they know this. But they also know that the median voter is typically relatively non-wonkish about public policy, and that it will therefore be easier to convince them that when it comes to, say, economic redistributive policies, black is white than to convince them that they actually like black better than white. So they lie. And they get very largely away with it. And we liberals are left to stew in our frustration that of the 65% or so of this country that basically agrees with our moral philosophy, much of it gets taken in by these lies, often before the truth has its boots on.

Why Kindness?, Continued

I just read a post by some random person I had never heard of arguing that Sam Harris is the "No Labels" of ethical philosophy, because of his claim that all statements of the form "X is morally good" either are or ought to be equivalent to the statement "X will increase the happiness of or decrease the pleasure of one or more sentient beings." (Note that I rephrased that a little bit to fit what I would say, rather than what they quote Sam Harris as saying.) The argument is that both entities, Harris and No Labels, begin with a value statement that they don't feel like defending in an argument but are perfectly happy to just assert are true, and then claim that their conclusions are utterly empirical and non-ideological. (In No Labels' case, the value judgment is that large federal deficits are always bad.) I think this is wrong in the case of Sam Harris; at least, I think it's a disanalogy.

Why the Facts Have a Liberal Bias

Matt Yglesias has a post about how people on the left always like to think that liberalism is, can be, or should be presented as wholly pragmatic or non-ideological. I think I know why liberals tend to conclude that the facts have a liberal bias, and it has to do with our view of our own ideology. In previous posts I've explained that I think all policy positions consist of a goal/value/fundamental step and an empirical, what-will-get-it-done? step. The reason why I think liberals tend to think that our policy positions involve only the empirical step, or at least that we can and should present them as such, is that our goal is a very simple one, and it's one that we think ought to be really, really uncontroversial: making people's lives better. I think most liberals would tell you that making people's lives better is just about the sole criterion on which policies both public and private ought to be judged, or if not quite the only criterion certainly the most important. And I think we tend to think that this ought to be a given: what the hell else would you do with public policy other than make people's lives better? But I think a lot of conservatives don't believe that this is a legitimate or important goal of public policy. Some might simply deny that kindness has any place in public policy; some might believe in kindness but only applied to a very narrow, exclusive group, like straight white Protestant rich men, or, for many rich people, themselves and their rich friends. Some might think kindness is all very well and good but things like "security" or "maintaining (/restoring) traditional society" or "preserving American greatness," or something like that, are more important. But liberals tend to give these people what I think we would see as the benefit of the doubt, and assume that like us they agree that making people's lives better ought to be the #1 goal of public policy; the result is that we also think that they adopt policy positions which are, then, just plain empirically wrong. Well, very few policy positions advance no goals, it just happens that conservative policies do a very bad job of advancing this goal of kindness, in ways that can be demonstrated empirically.

I also think that there was a lot more of a kindness consensus a few decades ago. Well, okay, there was a kindness consensus in the sense of people agreeing that making people's lives better was one of the most important goals of public policy. Lots of people weren't okay with extending that kindness to blacks, or women, or gays, or whatever, but I think the proportion of the population, and especially of the politicians, who would deny that within some circle of "people who count" the government ought to be making people's lives better. Personally I blame Reagan, and especially what he represented, namely that the conservative movement has now decided that rather than accept general kindness and fight specifically to have an exclusionary application of kindness, they were just going to fight against kindness at all. In fact, this might even be an ironic unintended consequence of the triumph of the civil rights movement and inclusionary liberalism: because we've been so successful at making it not okay to have explicitly discriminatory policies, i.e. policies that help only white people, or only Christians, or only straight people, the people opposed to helping blacks and Jews and gays decided to simply oppose helping anybody. We created a consensus that the sphere of kindness must be rather broad indeed, but in doing so may have destroyed the consensus that within the sphere of kindness public policy should be used to promote people's wellbeing. So I think a lot of liberals long for the day when people looked at the nation's health care system, and saw that it wasn't working very well, and the left had one idea for how to fix the problem and the right had another idea and they were both ideas that were genuinely aimed at solving that problem. But the right isn't really interested in problem-solving anymore: they've decided to simply accept a world in which the well-off stay well-off and the less fortunate stay less fortunate.

So now the liberals have managed to back the conservatives into a corner where the only policies left to them simply do not make sense if you assume policies are supposed to improve people's lives. But that doesn't mean our policies are non-ideological: rather, it means the right has gotten a more extreme ideology. And we should fight them on that, and quit trying to pretend we're so apolitical in our politics.

Things The Stats Miss

Nate Silver wrote a post a few days ago about how a certain basketball player's value cannot be seen just by looking at his own stats, but must be judged by looking at his effect on the performance of his teammates. There are a variety of ways in which I think this phenomenon might be happening in baseball, too, that there just aren't any statistics to measure it with.

First of all, catchers. A catcher has three functions: they are supposed to hit, they are supposed to field, and they are supposed to work with the pitcher in crafting a winning game plan to mow down the opposing team's lineup. And I think it is generally admitted that, just as some catchers are better hitters than others and some catchers are better fielders than others, some catchers are also better at calling a game than others. Best I can tell, there are no statistics to measure this effect. And I can't see how in the world one would do so. You could, of course, take a given catcher and look at the average ERA of all pitchers pitching to him against those pitchers' average career ERAs when they weren't pitching to him, but there are soooooo many confounding variables. Most teams have one primary catcher in any given season, and a pitcher will spend most of their time pitching to that catcher. Thus, if they happen to be having a good year in a given year, that would show up in that catcher's stats. When they then get injured and have a few years of struggle, that would also show up in that catcher's stats. Some pitchers even have their own "personal catchers," in which case one catcher would have up to 100% of that pitcher's starts in a given year. Perhaps if you saw that a long-time catcher had compiled a significantly lower ERA on average with his pitchers than those pitchers had without him, you might be able to conclude that he had something to do with it, but boy it's messy. One person who I think would benefit from having this kind of stat would be Mike Piazza, a dreadful defensive catcher but from what I've heard perfectly competent at calling a game.

Second, lineup "protection." This one, I think, would be somewhat easier to measure. The idea is that a player who is batting immediately before a highly dangerous hitter in the lineup will face easier pitches to hit, because the pitcher doesn't want to walk them and give the slugger in the on-deck circle an extra guy to drive in. You could do something similar here as what I suggested for catchers, only I suspect it would work better. For hitter X, you would take the average OPS, or whatever total hitting stat we're enamored of, of all plate appearances one ahead of his, and compare it to the average OPS of those same players when hitter X wasn't batting right behind them. I suspect there would be less contamination here, although it would still be possible to say, you know, "hitters X and Y hit 3rd and 4th all year this year, and hitter X happened to have a career year. Was that because of hitter Y's protection, or something else entirely?"

Finally, speedsters. If you watch any given Mets game, say circa 2007, you would observe that pitchers really, really, really didn't like it when Jose Reyes got on base. Hell, he's so good he's made multiple pitchers balk him home when he's on third base. An elite base-stealer, especially one who is aware of this power and uses it deliberately, can distract the hell out of pitchers. You'd expect that to have a Carmelo Anthony-like effect of making the guy at the plate's numbers better. I think the methodology here would be the same: you would define situation X, perhaps plate appearances with a given runner on base with an open base in front of him, and you'd look at the OPS or whatever of hitters during those plate appearances against their average OPS when not in situation X. My intuition is that the level of difference required for it to feel significant would be lower than for the other two. After all, sure David Wright had a great year in 2007, and Jose was running like crazy that same year, but not every David Wright plate appearance was one in which Reyes was on base with a running opportunity. If it turned out that Wright did even better in '08 when Reyes was a threat, it would probably be significant, and we also might think that part of Wright's monstrous numbers that year was the monstrous number of stolen bases posted by Reyes.

Obama's Approval, Gallup Tracking Clues

I just downloaded the full Gallup tracking poll data for Obama's approval rating. I made averages for each month since the data set begins, April 2009, of Obama's approval, disapproval, net approval, and (except for the first month) change in net approval since the previous month. Here's the data:

April 09: +35.6%
May 09: +36.2%, +0.6% change
June 09: +28.6%, -7.6% change
July 09: +21.8%, -6.8% change
August 09: +13.5%, -8.3% change
September 09: +11.8%, -1.7% change
October 09: +12.7%, +0.9% change
November 09: +9.1%, -3.6% change
December 09: +7.3%, -1.8% change
January 10: +5.5%, -1.9% change
February 10: +7.8%, +2.3% change
March 10: +4.4%, -3.4%
April 10: +3.5%, -1.0% change
May 10: +4.1%, +0.6% change
June 10: +1.1%, -3.0% change
July 10: -0.8%, -1.9% change
August 10: -4.4%, -3.6% change
September 10: -2.0%, +2.3% change
October 10: -2.7%, -0.7% change
November 10: -2.1%, +0.6% change
December 10: +0.1%, +2.2% change
January 11: +4.3%, +4.1% change

(Change numbers not always what the subtraction looks like, due to rounding.)

So, a few notes:

On Albert Pujols

I saw someone say recently that if Albert Pujols doesn't sign with the Cardinals before Spring Training of this year, and therefore hits free agency next off-season, the Mets would be among the favorites to sign him. The logic is obvious: there's considerable doubt as to whether any teams will be able to afford Pujols and also 24 other players who don't suck; the two teams with the most financial resources, Yankees and Red Sox, are already going to be heavily invested in their own All-Star-caliber first basemen; and the Mets, in addition to being right behind those two behemoths financially, are going to have a whole lot of money coming off the books next year, especially if they avoid having Francisco Rodriguez's $17.5 million vesting option invoke. Now, Albert Pujols is clearly the best player in the game right now, so I sort of feel like, as a Mets fan, I sort of ought to want him on the Mets. But I don't, and not just because he went to Glenn Beck's rally last year, although that's part of it.

Spectacular

Sarah Palin's fall, that is. A new poll shows her trailing by, wait for it... 26 points!!! 56%-30%!!! Only a few months ago she was able to poll within 10 routinely. Strike that, only one month ago she was able to poll within 10. It's really amazing how fast and hard she's been dropping like a stone. It began well before this latest kerfuffle; indeed, I don't know that the Marist poll included yesterday at all. It almost feels like it had to do with her reality show, but that would be pretty extreme... Maybe people are just finally tiring of her?

The main point about her, though: only 66% of those who disapprove of Obama would vote for her. That's pretty shockingly bad.

Still More Things I Agree With

Bernard-Henri Levy's statement, on last night's Colbert Report (which I have just gotten around to watching) that Sarah Palin is the inescapable black hole of political discourse in America, which must be escaped. As much as a part of me, the rational part, still wants her to win the Republican nomination or, even better, lose the nomination and run as an independent, I really seriously just long for the day when I don't have to consider her, or think about her, at all. If her debacle of yesterday ends up pushing her out of public life sooner than would otherwise have happened, I will deeply enjoy that.

Pawlenty Doesn't Get It

 ...or at least he acts like he doesn't get it. Specifically I'm referring to his statement that "it's a continuum between liberty and tyranny." Several centuries ago people wrestled with this idea, trying to figure out whether you could actually have any sort of government without walking down this path toward tyranny. And they came up with an answer: there's liberty, and there's liberty. Specifically, in the words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, there's natural liberty and there's political liberty. In the absence of government, a state of perfect natural liberty, you get to do anything you want. In a state of perfect tyranny, you have literally no discretion over your life: everything not forbidden is compulsory. But the problem is that in a state of perfect natural liberty, your life ends up kind of sucking. But the choices are not, as people realized during the 1600s and 1700s, no government or bad government. We also have the option of good government, which moves toward the ideal of perfect political liberty. In a state of perfect political liberty, one is forbidden, by the government, from doing those things which make people's lives worse. Everyone is forbidden from doing those things, but only forbidden from doing those things. And the result is that people's lives are quite good, but they also have a whole lot of remaining discretion about how to live their lives. Conventionally, most people in the mainstream buy into the idea that some amount of trading natural liberty for political liberty is a good thing; that's why they are not anarchists.

So yes, maybe the Obama/center-left agenda does move us away from natural liberty. But that by itself does not mean he is moving us toward tyranny, not that his agenda is bad. You might believe that the natural liberty to not buy health insurance is more important than the political liberty to life in a world where your life is not ruined when you get sick, and we might believe the opposite, but none of that means that anyone is doing anything tyrannical.

What Liberalism Is

I thought Obama's speech was bloody brilliant, obviously, and in particular I thought he did a great job of getting political without getting political, if you will. But there was line where I thought he just got brass-knuckledly partisan:

We should be civil because we want to live up to the example of public servants like John Roll and Gabby Giffords, who knew first and foremost that we are all Americans, and that we can question each other's ideas without questioning each other's love of country and that our task, working together, is to constantly widen the circle of our concern so that we bequeath the American Dream to future generations.

What's partisan here? Well, the phrase "widen the circle of our concern." Because, you see, that little phrase is the entire heart of What Liberalism Is.

When I want to say what underlying moral value serves as the foundation of my political ideology, I almost always say, "kindness." But that's not really accurate, because I don't think there are very many people who think that kindness per se is a bad thing. Kindness, mind you, is defined here as wanting to make the lives of people in general better, by reducing suffering and increasing happiness. I don't really think that very many Tea Party types would tell you that kindness is a bad thing (although I might expect that most people who disapprove of kindness are conservatives). What I do think is that I and they disagree about how broadly to view the sphere of kindness.

Americans are a highly privileged people, in the aggregate, being among the richest societies in history and certainly the most powerful. And the people who tend to hold power in our country tend to be the sort of person who has traditionally held power in America and its Western European forebearers. They tend to be male. They tend to be Caucasian. They tend to be wealthy. They tend to be Christian, and in particular Protestant. They tend to be heterosexual, or at least to say they are heterosexual. They also tend, of course, to be the sort of person who the political system puts in power. Also, they tend to be members of the group Homo sapiens. And I think there is a tremendous tendency among those people in power to extend the scope of their kindness only to people in more or less these same groups. In some cases and along some dimensions, this happens with more malice than others where it's more unthinking, but it tends to happen along all of these dimensions.

Liberalism, to my mind, is largely the desire to widen the circle of our concern, to include women, and Africans, and Asians, and native Americans, and Arabs, and the poor--hell, the middle class, even!--and Catholics, and Jews, and Muslims, and Buddhists, and Hindus, and pagans, and atheists, and gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, queers of all sorts, the politically dispossessed of all sorts, and, most radically, the non-human. This is a framework that carries very well from place to place, because there are almost always some people who tend not to get the benefit of kindness in any society. Liberalism is the desire to extend it to them. (I should point out that in my view kindness extends to everyone and everything in this universe or any others that exist, but that most objects in this universe are non-sentient and therefore have no actual interests to help them fulfill.)

That, I think, is why conservatives get so upset about empathy: broad-based empathy is the fundamental basis of liberalism. Of course, they don't like to put it that way, because it sounds bad to say you're opposed to broad-based empathy or kindness. So kudos to Obama, for slipping in a line of utmost partisanship in a way that nobody can actually criticize, and that doesn't actually sound particularly partisan.

 

Two Minor Thoughts

1) Pursuant to my thoughts about pointless discussions and fundamental values, what happens if you have a policy situation that both requires action by the federal government and requires the settling of a fundamental-values-level disagreement before you can address it, and the veto players in the political system cannot agree on one fundamental value? Answer: failure happens. In some countries, the solution to this is that it is simply not allowed to happen, because one party is always in total control of the government. In this country, we don't do that, and if the three Houses, one White and two of Congress, are held by different parties there's nothing you can really do to guarantee that a shared fundamental value will exist among those three players. We will have that system over the next two years, and if something comes up that requires legislation to address it and also requires a fundamental value to underpin it, we're going to get legislation that nobody much likes. But we have this peculiar institution in this country that allows our system to be paralytically unable to settle on one set of values even if one party holds all three Houses overwhelmingly. It's silly, and it's senseless, and we should be rid of it. (The filibuster, of course.)

2) One key moment in Newt Gingrich's fall from grace involved his conduct on Air Force One, when he was perceived to have given President Clinton a snub, a childish snub, over the government shutdown.

Today John Boehner refused an invitation to Air Force One, to come to this memorial to mourn the tragedy and celebrate the victims' lives, choosing instead to attend his scheduled fundraiser cocktail gala. Just sayin'.

Sarah Palin and Responsibility

Yikes I'm posting a lot today. Anyway.

Sarah Palin's violent, incendiary rhetoric had, it seems, very little or nothing to do with the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others. She is not "responsible" for that tragedy. The killer, Jared Lee Loughner, appears to have long been motivated by a simply bizarre brand of conspiracy theory/nihilism/anarchism/misogyny, and there is no evidence whatsoever that he was inspired by Palin, or Sharron Angle, or Joyce Kaufman, or any other right-wing figure who has spewed this kind of language over the past two years. She is not responsible for this event.

She got lucky.

Because let's face it, it would have been entirely possible for the shooter to have been an actual skinhead. Or a member of a minutemen organization. Or a slightly-fringe Tea Partier. Or a crazy person who was also a right-winger. It was entirely possible, during the middle of the day last Saturday, that the shooter had been someone who had been inspired by "don't retreat, reload," or by "Second Amendment remedies." And if it had been, Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle, Joyce Kaufman, Michelle Bachmann, etc. would all be 100%, utterly, responsible for the tragedy. That they are not, that they have a distinct right to complain that many of us assumed, prematurely as it turned out, that the killer would be right-wing (and mind you, I think he's more right-wing than not, though not a doctrinaire conservative) were unfair to them, is purely a matter of luck. And what exactly do they expect to say if another assassination comes along, and that one is a straight-up right-wing terrorism event? Will they complain that we are being unfair to them then?

(Keep in mind that we have been critical of this for a long time, and that a decision can only be judged based on the reasonable expectations of the outcome at the time it was made.)

Civility, Values, and Respect

Andrew Sullivan quotes someone who says that liberal hubris consists in thinking (our)selves smarter than everyone else, and conservative hubris consists in thinking (them)selves more moral/noble/patriotic than others, and that these hubrises both entail a delegitimizing of the other's opinions. I wish to disagree. I don't find either compelling, as I tend not to find things like this which suggest that "both sides have a problem." I don't think it's exactly about thinking that "liberals are smarter" or "conservatives are more patriotic" (at least, I know I disagree about liberals, and tonight at least I'm willing to extend conservatives the benefit of this doubt). Here's what I think it is: we disagree. Fundamentally. On the liberal side, we see Republicans advocating positions which are based on flagrantly false "facts" or just plain bad logic. I personally don't believe in "intelligence" as a fixed, inherent quality of a person, but the act of arguing for a bullshit, flagrantly wrong idea, a probably, objectively wrong idea, is an act of stupidity. Obviously, I do not think that I often commit that specific act, since if I thought something was wrong I wouldn't advocate for it. And I tend to think this act occurs more on the right than on the left; that's a large part of why I disagree with people on the right. I don't think that amounts to a hubristic assumption that liberals are more intelligent than conservatives. Likewise, I think most conservatives simply think that criticizing the military in any way/shape/form is unpatriotic, and they see more liberals doing that than conservatives. I don't think it's a hubristic assumption that conservatives are inherently more patriotic. Now, I think both of these are probably the general rule, and I imagine that some members of both sides do fall into the "hubris" that Sullivan mentions, though I don't think it's a major deal.

But as to this idea that these hubrises lead us to treating the other as illegitimate, and therefore "not worth talking to, respecting, listening to, understanding, or even debating reasonably. Certainly not worthy of compromising with to solve the huge problems facing our nation." As I see it, there are three kinds of political debate that are potentially productive, in descending order of theoretical likelihood of productivity: 1) discussions about policy specifics among those who share relevant fundamental values; 2) debates about fundamental values among those who do not share relevant fundamental values; 3) discussions between those who disagree as to fundamental values to attempt to find, by what I believe to be dumb luck, policies that happen to satisfy both/all sides' goals. But I should stress that I believe that Type III discussions are only possible at the margins, and occasionally, by dumb luck. Usually, I think, if two people who don't share relevant fundamental values try to discuss policy specifics, they end up shouting at each other and getting nowhere. They should debate the fundamental values themselves, but I also think it's a rare occasion when you convince someone to change their fundamental values. And so if I think that, say, Sarah Palin is someone whose ideas as to policy I have no interest in, it isn't because I think she's illegitimate, or that her opinion is worthless or whatever. It's because I disagree with her, passionately, intensely, fundamentally. Given how much I do not share her fundamental values, at least within the broad scope of things people in America ever disagree about, it would be essentially impossible for her views on policy to be of any value to me. Her arguments are not in the same logical framework as mine; she and I define good and bad differently in the field of public policy, so why on earth would I think that her opinions as to the merits of Policy X ought have any weight at all in my worldview? Again, debating worldviews is fine, though in my opinion unlikely to often yield results, but trying to have a policy debate when you're not really speaking the same values language is just pointless.

See this post for more on that argument.

Early 2012 Analysis

PublicPolicyPolling has done fourteen state 2012 general election matchup polls so far: Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Iowa, Virginia, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Missouri, and Montana. In each of these states they have tested Barack Obama against Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and Newt Gingrich, and occasionally a "favorite son" home-state Republican. Palin does clearly the worst of these Republicans, looking like she trails Obama nationally by anywhere from the 7.5-ish points he lost by in 2008 to something more like twice that margin. Romney and Huckabee do the best, with Romney seeming to put some deep blue states almost on the margins of becoming competitive and Huckabee just plain looking strong all-around. Gingrich is somewhere in between. But I also just took the step of averaging together these four Republicans' performances in each state and seeing how those states appear to have moved relative to each other.

First of all, the total weighted-average swing that these polls demonstrate as compared to the 2008 election is... zero. Specifically, a swing of 0.00276 points toward the Republicans, according to my methodology. Obviously, that depends a good deal on taking the stronger candidates, Huckabee and Romney, and averaging them in with the absurdly weak candidate, Palin. But in any event, it does mean that we can look at individual states' apparent swings and take them at face value as the shifts in those states against the underlying electoral landscape. So, here goes.

The Trouble With Non-Partisan Goodwill

 ...is that it's become partisan. Obama's speech was, I think brilliant, and moving, and spectacular, etc. You could also see him making damn sure to make it clear that he was not not not pointing fingers at Republicans or trying to take this opportunity to criticize his political opponents, or whatever. Instead, he confined his "meta," vaguely political section of the speech to expressions of perfectly non-partisan human goodwill and kindness. But the problem with that kind of stuff is that kindness itself is becoming increasingly partisan, so something as simple as hoping for "a more civil and honest debate," or for expanding the reach of our concern, that is a political thing to say. That constitutes an attack on his opponents' ideologies. It makes it hard to do the kind of simple goodwill type of rhetoric that he was going for. Now, I think he was spectacularly successful at it, and that very few people, and virtually none who are not hard-core opponents of his anyway, will argue that these lines were anything other than wonderful. But still, it's worth observing, I think...

The Loyal Opposition?

The loyal opposition is a phrase which indicates that while the minority party may be opposed to the majority's actions and policies, perhaps even bitterly so, it remains loyal to the government itself. The idea is one that arose in Britain, and it was in part central to putting the monarchy above the field of politics, making it both non-controversial and relatively impotent. Instead of squabbling over who the monarch was, people disagreed over policies in the Parliament, while all remaining loyal to the king. Now, in America we don't have a monarch, so "His Majesty's Loyal Opposition" would be a nonsense phrase. But Thomas Jefferson used the idea of loyal opposition in establishing the Democratic-Republican Party, while the Federalists didn't want any formalized opposition. Alexander Hamilton and John Adams believed that criticism of the Government, in the sense of the party currently in power, was also criticism of the government, in the sense of the institutions and practices of the government, and was therefore divisive and damaging to the emerging republic. Jefferson argued that no, he wasn't criticizing the Constitution, he was just criticizing Hamilton and Adams. That is, he was criticizing the actions and policies of the government without criticizing its legitimacy. And he won the day, and we tend to think that the idea of a loyal opposition is very important to a healthy polity.

I'm not convinced that the Republicans right now, and in particular the Tea Party, are a loyal opposition. I feel like there's a strong undercurrent in right-wing thought that says that the Presidency of Barack Obama means, either causally or indicatively, that our system of government has outlived its welcome, and is no longer deserving of legitimacy. Causally, as in "Obama has created tyranny and we must rebel against it," or indicatively, as in "a political system that allowed Obama to become President is hopelessly broken and needs rebelling against," and I should add that I think the latter is less common, and more radical (in the abstract). Now, the Tea Party types like to maintain that when/if they talk this way, they are just being loyal to the true government, and that Obama has usurped (or might be soon usurping) that true government. But the thing about that claim is that it's a load of bull. The claim that Obama's government is illegitimate is simply a load of bull, not only vehemently contradicted by the facts (he was born in Hawaii) but also contradicted by the logic (he was born of an American mother, so even if he was born in Kenya he is a natural-born citizen). During the Bush years, I never felt like my intense opposition to Bush meant that the entire federal government was the enemy. I did think that the public policy of the federal government was very very bad, but I didn't think the government was illegitimate.

The disloyalty of the opposition can arise from only a slight tweaking of something like Justice Thomas' philosophy, the idea that the federal government has massively overstepped its bounds over the last eighty years. Because if that's true, then isn't everything the federal government largely illegitimate? And isn't it then the responsibility of every citizen to oppose that government by any means possible? (This is a part of the puzzle of legitimacy in a government that claims to be limited.) Well, okay, the Supreme Court has upheld the things alleged to be unconstitutional, Justice Thomas notwithstanding. But the Court held for a mighty long time that segregation was constitutional, they were wrong, and those who opposed them engaged in a massive campaign of resistance to that ruling. What's the difference?

Well, the difference is, I think, that the civil rights activists argued that segregation was illegitimate and should be resisted, not that the entire federal government was illegitimate and should be resisted. And the civil rights campaign was not really about resisting segregation until the Court had established that segregation was, in fact, illegitimate, and a bunch of states kept trying to do it. Before Brown, the civil rights movement was mainly about, well, getting something like Brown. They got it, they won the day, they were declared correct that the policy they opposed was illegitimate. The South refused to listen or change its behavior. Then they resisted. If and when the Court strikes down all of the Commerce Clause expansion that has taken place since 1937, and the federal government continues enforcing the laws thus overturned, I'll start listening about how the government is tyrannical and overstepping its bounds. Until then, you make your case in court, you hope you win, and if you win you win and if you lose you lose, and you try to change minds, and change the composition of the court (which follows from the "changing minds" thing), and then make your case again and hope you win. If the Court's pronouncement that government policy X is legitimate is not understood to mean that policy X is indeed legitimate, as a matter of current positive fact if not in truth, then there is no convincing way to get to an understanding of legitimacy in a government like ours. (For a fuller version of that argument, see my grandfather's book The People and the Court.) So you see how it's a tweaking of Justice Thomas' argument: he thinks that the Court has been wrong, but to go from there to opposing the operation of the government's laws, believed to be unconstitutional in truth, is a leap too far, and a very dangerous one.

So I don't buy that the Tea Party types who think of opposing not the policies of the government but the government itself are actually defending the True Government. They're just a disloyal opposition.

(NOTE: I am not alleging disloyalty of this sort against any particular Republican figure, just saying that I think this sentiment of disloyal opposition is alarmingly current among Republicans and conservatives in general.)

Buyer's Remorse, Continued

Per the Associated Press poll released today, the public's feelings of which party is more trustworthy on seven key issues (the economy, national security, health care, the deficit, taxes, creating jobs, and immigration) have swung toward the Democrats by an average of 6.7 net points since mid-October, as well as 7.3 net points since mid-September and 4.4 net points since mid-November. The October poll being the last pre-election poll, though, it's the one that I'm focused on. Because the Republicans won the generic congressional ballot by 6.8%, 51.6% to 44.8%. Applying a 6.7% net shift toward the Democrats gets us to, well, a dead heat. And pre-election forecasters were suggesting that a tie on the generic congressional ballot would tend to keep the Democrats in control of the House. So it strikes me as a reasonable inference that, according to this poll, the Democrats would have kept the House if the climate of today had been prevalent in November. Just sayin'. (Also, Boehner's favorability down five net points since November, mostly his unfavorables shooting upward four points. Watch for that trend to continue.)

UNRELATED: I like the title "Together We Thrive" of the memorial service tonight. It strikes me as a neat play on "united we stand." It corrects the two flaws of the typical statement, though, I think: first, the word "united" conveys a certain lack of disagreement, and when Republicans said it I always thought that it was an attempt to argue that anyone who criticized them was hurting the country; second, "united we stand" could be read as a statement of current fact rather than a conditional, as in, we stand united, whereas it actually is part of a whole phrase that includes the flipside of the coin, "divided we fall." Together We Thrive is first of all most emphatically an assertion that if we are together then we thrive, not that we are necessarily currently meeting this criterion at present, and it also does not imply that "unity" is required to achieve the good result, but just "togetherness," which I think is a standard that allows for much more disagreement and rancor. It's kind of like the idea of a loyal opposition, that you can disagree, vehemently, and even perhaps get rancorous and shout things like "Shame!" from the back benches of Westminster Hall, but still be loyal to the country.

Speaking of which, that gives me an idea for my next post.

On the Second Amendment, Continued

In my previous post, I argued that the Second Amendment is aimed at a right of the citizenry to overthrow the central government if it became tyrannical, but that, for various reasons, that is now an outdated and irrelevant right, and we should therefore discard it, ideally by repealing that odious Amendment. But one could make an argument like this: we have a bit in the Constitution protecting the right to own guns; might there not be some other good use we can make of it, even if that wasn't the original purpose? In this post, I aspire to show that there are no other good uses for the Second Amendment, and why.

On the Second Amendment

"A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." So reads the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. In the wake of the Arizona massacre, and the debate about "violent rhetoric" that really ought to be focusing on the right wing's idea of using "Second Amendment remedies" in the near future, I think this is a good time to discuss the history and philosophy of the Amendment itself. As I see it, there are two fundamental interpretations of the Second Amendment, one in which it protects a personal right to self-defense using "arms" and one in which it protects citizen militias with an eye toward overthrowing a tyrannical government. The problem with the former interpretation is that it is incorrect, while the problem with the latter is that it is, while correct, also deeply wrong.

Violence Becoming Legitimate, Actual Data

There's a CBS news poll going around, the most cited part of which is that 57% of Americans don't think the political tone contributed to Mr. Loughner's bout of terribleness. But the part that interests me is a different part. 16% of Americans say that violence against the government can be justified, while 76% say it never is. But, uh, those numbers among Democrats and Independents, identically, are 11%/81%. And among Republicans, well, only 64% say violence against the government is Right Out, and 28% say it is sometimes appropriate. I'd be interested in seeing the same question broken down by things like ideology or Tea Party-ism, but in any event, the front-line conclusion is obvious: violence against the government is much more mainstream among Republicans right now than non-Republicans. There are more Republicans who think that violence against the government is sometimes justified than think gun control laws should be made more strict. Or less strict, for that matter. Or thought, in one recent poll, that gay people should be allowed to get married. Or who opposed, in 2006, raising the minimum wage. This is not an utterly fringe position among Republicans right now. It is a minority position, yes; it is still solidly a minority position. But it's also a position that doesn't really care if it's in the minority or not, because it doesn't take a majority vote of the Republican caucus in order for some group of malcontents to start shooting. This is the problem. Not incivility. This, the simple fact that a disturbing number of Republicans think it is acceptable to use violence against the government, is the problem.

More Things I Agree With

Rachel Maddow's point that it's not about incivility, it's about threatening to shoot people. I continue not to think that calling people socialists, or communists, or fascists, or whatever, is the problem that we all felt, perhaps wrongly in this instance, had finally manifested itself in an assassination on Saturday. The problem is the idea that it is legitimate to use violence against political enemies if you are losing the political battle, which has become eerily respectable on the conservative side of the isle since Obama became President. I really don't think that Joe Wilson's "you lie" remark is a Big Problem; it was a breach of decorum, but hey, it's about one-one-thousandth of the level of "disrespect" that we see in, I don't know, the House of Commons, where backbenchers routinely just shout things out. Things like, "Shame!" I don't think "you lie" would register in Parliament. And I don't think Britain has either a gun massacre problem or a political assassination problem.

As my dad, who spent time in England in his youth, is telling me, the idea of being civil toward your political opponents, the Reagan/Tip O'Neill post-6 o'clock thing, just isn't done in Britain. Labour and Tories just didn't do getting along with one another. Britain neither has a dysfunctional political system nor, as I said, a culture of assassination (N. Ireland aside). The reason for the former is that they don't have something absurd like the filibuster where the minority gets to rule if it wants to be an ass about it. The reason for the latter is that nobody much has guns.

So let's not bicker and argue about who insulted who. But yes, do let's bicker and argue about who killed who, or who threatened to.

Spending Cuts vs. Tax Hikes, A Thought

I'm watching a Rachel Maddow segment about Arizona's cuts to mental health services, and it is provoking the following thought to me. I learned in my Econ 11 class that one dollar of increased government spending plus one dollar of increased taxes will increase aggregate demand by one dollar, because the multiplier on spending is bigger than the multiplier on taxes. This means that, purely in terms of the contractionary effect on the economy, tax hikes are less damaging to aggregate demand than spending cuts when trying to balance a budget in the face of a recession.

But I'm just thinking about the absolute human-suffering effects for a moment. When you cut Medicaid, people don't get life-saving transplants and they die. When you gut mental health services, unbalanced people are that much more likely to fall through the cracks and, uh, well, you know The Story of this week. When you cut firefighters, or turn the fire department into a feudal rent-charging racket, people's houses burn down. When you cut police, crime rates go up. When you cut government jobs, those people are out of a job. All of these are direct, immediate results of these spending cuts, and they all involve tremendous immediate human suffering. Frequently irrevocable human suffering, i.e. death.

What happens when you raise taxes? People, roughly uniformly across the community or weighted a little bit toward the more fortunate already, lose a wee fraction of their after-tax income. Unless I'm missing something, that just plain inflicts less suffering than spending cuts. Less immediate human suffering, less pro-cyclical contraction to the economy. Sounds good all around, doesn't it? But of course, no states are raising taxes to help close their budget shortfalls. That would be socialist, wouldn't it?

Right-Wing Projection, A Continuing Series

So, you know how one of Karl Rove's tactics is to accuse your opponent of exactly the dirty trick you yourself are trying to pull? Like accusing Kerry of trying to steal Ohio? Well, I think the right-wing makes such a projection about how one goes about taking a strong disliking to a certain politician.

On the left, here's how that works, at least among people I know who are liberals: We have strong ideas and beliefs about stuff. If there is a politician who strongly disagrees with us about those beliefs, and who uses their power to work against causes we believe in, we tend to take a strong disliking to them.

Here's how I feel like it works on the right-wing, at least in some quarters: So-and-so becomes designated as Bad. Things they support, then, must also be Bad, because they themselves are Bad. We witness this with the current attitudes in conservative circles to cap-and-trade and to the individual mandate-centered health insurance system, both originally sensible Republican ideas. But Obama proposes them, so they are BAD.

So now in the wake of this Arizona shooting, with some liberals starting to talk about how maybe the talk of violent overthrow of our government is a bad thing, I think the right is treating this as us "targeting Sarah Palin" or "going after" Palin. It isn't. Here's how it works, as I see it: we think violent rhetoric is bad, and she happens to be one of the foremost purveyors of the stuff (although really Glenn Beck is out of her league), and so she runs afoul of our esteem. We aren't looking around trying to find something to go after her with, because we're opposed to her; rather, we're opposed to her because there's such an abundance of things with which to legitimately, in our view, go after her.

Side Note: I think this relates to the sin vs. consequences method of morality. In particular, as I wrote the bit about how I see some right-wingers practicing their opposition I was reminded of the Puritan notion that some people are just inherently Good, and some people are inherently Bad, and therefore you knew that the things that good people did were good, and vice-versa. Whereas we atheist humanist whatevers tend to judge people based on their actions, the consequences of their actions, and perhaps the foreseeable consequences of their actions.

Things I Agree With

Kevin Drum's suggestion that we go after Glenn Beck rather than Sarah Palin for "violent rhetoric." Amen.