Note to Republicans

Jon Stewart had a great clip showing how Republicans are fawning over Bill Clinton, while some Democrats have fawned over Ronald Reagan, both saying "now he was a you could work with, etc. etc." And then, of course, he showed the montage of Republicans, you know, impeaching Clinton, or calling him an evil socialist, etc. And he pointed out that we Democrats kind of hated Ronald Reagan at the time. He's got a point, and we'd do well to remember that Ronald Reagan kind of sucked, and Republicans thought the same of Bill Clinton. 

But I'd just like to point something else out. Hey Republicans, you know when you were all loving Bill Clinton and gettin' along and compromising in the '90s? Well, not only did you impeach him. Not only did you call him a socialist in the 1993-94 health care debate. You want to know what you did while calling his health care proposals socialist? You want to know what policies you proposed as the reasonable, conservative countermeasure? I'll give you a hint... sixteen years later, those same policies, which you proposed as the opposition to big evil socialism under Clinton, have now become big evil socialism under Obama.

And of course, it is really true that Reagan held a lot of positions that would be unacceptable in today's Republican Party, #1 being the whole amnesty-for-illegals thing. So Democrats are on much firmer ground than Republicans here in claiming that our opponents get worse and worse, though we should never forget that Reagan still kind of sucked.

On the Lawfulness of the Individual Mandate

I've never particularly entertained the notion that the individual mandate in the health care law is unconstitutional. It consists of a fine on persons who do not obtain some variety of health insurance, and opponents of the mandate argue that it constitutes a requirement that individuals enter into interstate commerce, which cannot be considered an example of regulating interstate commerce. My traditional response to this argument is that an individual mandate, "Persons not buying health care are assessed a tax of magnitude X," is structurally identical to "Persons buying health care are granted a tax rebate of magnitude X, and all persons have their taxes raised by amount X." Literally identical. Would that latter be unconstitutional? Well, the Congress can levy income taxes, and last time I checked, it can grant tax rebates for participating in interstate commerce, e.g. cash for clunkers, and I'm sure there are others. So it strikes me that this kind of conditional tax is not beyond the pale of what the Congress has had the ability to do in the past, since it is literally identical to a differently-worded policy that would clearly be constitutional.

But stipulate, for a moment, that this logic doesn't work. Suppose the simple fact that you can turn the equation on its head and make it sound acceptable is not enough to justify it. The claim is that the power to "regulate commerce...among the several states" does not include the power to compel individual to enter into that commerce. Assume that this is a true proposition, and also that the power to tax and spend to promote the general welfare does not allow the Congress to lay a tax that will promote the general welfare. I think it is still a rather easy matter to show that the individual mandate is valid; here's how.

It is *not* that hard, guys...

I just spent a minute or two playing with the NYT's budget deficit fixer tool. What I found was basically this: using the choices they offer, I couldn't eliminate the deficit in 2030 without doing one of the following three things, namely cut a whole bunch of federal domestic discretionary spending I don't want to cut, cap Medicare growth at GDP growth + 1%, or impose a national 5% sales/VAT tax. I don't like any of those options. I cut a lot of military spending, raised a lot of tax rates, etc., but came up short without one of those three. I think this is a distinctly false choice, though. It's simply not that hard. Deficit = revenues - outlays. Two ways to reduce the deficit: increase revenues, or reduce outlays. How do we increase revenues? Well, the people at NYT want you to think that a substantive national sales tax is the answer. But why? I just don't get why taxing consumption, which is after all the very thing which stimulates the economy, is thought to be a good idea. I mean, I suppose you could theoretically use a consumption tax sort of the way they use monetary policy, to put the breaks on an unsustainable boom, but sales taxes are just so regressive. I can't see any justification for them except to burden the poor. So, here's why it's not that hard: raise taxes on the rich. Substantially. There, wasn't that easy? There is literally no chance that we couldn't raise rates on the very rich enough to give us all the money we need, it's impossible. Would it impede growth? Eh, skeptical; high-end tax rates were pretty high during some pretty strong times in the American economy, and in any event cutting government spending impedes growth and does damage in other ways, too.

Of course, the other alternative lies on the spending side: just adopt a system of properly national health care, like they do in Spain; the benefits you get from being able to coordinate things are enormous, and after all, single-payer would've always been the way to reduce government health-care costs the most.

And now to return to my mind-numbing quantities of Japanese studying. Oh joy.

Thoughts on The Rachel Maddow Show

This is pretty random, there were just a couple of things in tonight's show that I thought worth commenting on. First is the foibles of Mitch McConnell, about which I would only like to say that I was told, during the school year two years ago, that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was a "rat bastard." That's a verbatim quote. I think that declaring, in public, that Democrats who advocated a phased withdrawal from Iraq were in favor of "cut-and-run" and surrendering to al-Qaeda on the very same day that you ask the President of the United States to begin a phased withdrawal from Iraq so that your party will be more likely to retain control of Congress qualifies you to be a rat bastard.

The other is about the fact that we now know, essentially beyond a reasonable doubt even though that standard is flagrantly irrelevant to this inquiry, that a man who was "executed" by the State of Texas on December 7th, 2000 was utterly and completely innocent. Not just "it is statistically certain that some innocent people have been "executed;"" literally the only evidence they had tying him to the scene of the crime proved to simply be someone else's hair. This has caused me to make the following decision: I do not consider execution to exist. It is simply murder. When the mechanisms of a U.S. state government, or the federal government, or any other government around the world kills someone on the grounds that they committed a heinous crime, they are not functioning as a legitimate government. As such, the act is a simple homicide, no messing about, no mincing words. When the word "execution" is appropriate in a sentence I will put quotes around it. It is an illegitimate practice in its entirety and I refuse to legitimize it even remotely by allowing itself to call itself by a fancy name. Killing is killing.

I feel about this similarly to how I feel reacting to Nelson Mandela's autobiography where he describes the various measures taken by the South African rulers in the 1960s, including a "law" "giving" them the "power" to detain a political prisoner for 90 days and, oh, yeah, however long they felt like it after that. It's simply not something a government can do, and so that regime controlling South Africa was not a government, but rather a bunch of people with guns wielding utterly illegitimate power. I don't think that the death penalty in this country totally invalidates our governments in all areas, though I would be open to being persuaded and in theory the strident ideologue in me is attracted to the idea; I just think that, when the machinery of our government acts to kill a person convicted of a crime, it is not acting as a government, it is acting as a bunch of people with guns.

As for the particulars of this case, Claude Jones was executed after the serial denial of his request to have the one piece of evidence tying him to the scene of some brutal murder, a hair the prosecution claimed was his, DNA tested. Two Texas courts turned him down, and the legal office of Governor George W. Bush excluded the DNA-testing controversy from their summary that they presented to the governor. Note that Bush does not bear particular moral responsibility here, though I would say there's a general moral responsibility to look pretty damn hard into any execution you are asked to approve as Governor. But still, the system of the Texas "justice" system conspired pretty damn effectively to murder Claude Jones, on December 7th, 2000, probably in the death chamber with a poison cocktail. God I hate the death penalty. There are two features of our current society that induce a level of pure moral outrage in me that is too strong to put into words; it transcends policy disagreements, and if I think about them for too long I find it hard to have an even remotely palatable opinion of our society. One is the institution that kills billions of non-human animals, almost all of them vertebrates, every year, and another is the institution by which the supposed democratic governing bodies of society kill hundreds of their own citizens every year. I just can't stand it. And now I'm going to go distract myself for a while, because, like I said, when I think about the institutions of meat-eating or capital punishment for too long, I just get mad.

The Great Sanity Debate

Here's the interview between Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart. It's really great; you should watch it. I want to highlight a couple of things Jon said, some that I really like and some that I really dislike.

One thing that I like is his idea that Fox News' great triumph is having delegitimized editorial authority while exercising extraordinary editorial authority. I also think this is one of the keys to the true difference between Fox and MSNBC: the two most insidious things about Fox are 1) that they lie, 100% of the time they speak, and 2) that they pretend opinion to be fact. The people at MSNBC may be just as opinionated as the people at Fox, but they never try to pretend that their opinions are anything other than opinions. See this post on the Keith Olbermann affair.

I think his argument that he merely makes his satirical critiques while Maddow and her ilk are actually "on the playing field" is wrong, not because he's on the playing field but because Rachel Maddow isn't, really, either. I think what he overlooks is that media people don't build things either, they just comment. Fox is different in this way, in that it appears, according to a fair amount of evidence, to have overtly sponsored the Tea Parties, in a way that I think the relatively more left-wing side of the media just doesn't do. (If I'm wrong about that, it forces me to retract this part of my comment, at least in part.)

My main trouble with Jon's message in this interview is his contention that the main conflict in this country isn't Democrats vs. Republicans or liberals vs. conservatives, but rather corruption vs. not corruption or extremists vs. normal people. My question for him is, largely, define corruption vs. non-corruption, and give some examples of it; likewise with extremists vs. normal people. And in both cases, make sure that the scope of your examples are such that I can't line up one side of the division with either liberals or conservatives. What is corruption here? Not just the $90,000 in a freezer corruption, as he says, and that's an essential point, but what, then? Is it just some kind of conventional impropriety? Or deeper things like a dysfunctional government? And are there examples of ways in which the left doesn't line up pretty neatly with "non-corruption," and the right with "corruption?" (And keep in mind, I reserve the right to consider conservative Democrats not to be exemplars of liberalism.) Are liberals in the "pocket" of unions, one of the right's favorite corruption charges against us? Or do we honestly believe in labor rights? Is it easy to tell the difference? Likewise vis-a-vis extremists, show me the extremists on the American left. If by extremists we mean, as I think a reasonable narrow definition of the term would, persons who don't want to pursue their agenda using the established processes within society, especially the political ones since we're in a political context, I defy him or anyone else to come up with one person on the left who has advocated the potential extralegal overthrow of the United States government. And if you want me to find some on the right, I can, starting with U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle (R-NV) and continuing from there. There isn't a shortage. If we define extremist a little more broadly, okay, what counts as extremist? I'm a self-avowed socialist, but what I mean by that is approximately the same thing that the second-largest party in the European Parliament means by it, and which is approximately the same thing as the word "liberal"'s conventional meaning in this country. Am I an extremist? What does extremism mean when we're talking about opinions, rather than means? And what's a "normal person"? A person without a defined political ideology? But when did a coherent set of political opinions become a bad thing? Is extremism what happens when your arguments and ideologies are not soundly rooted in public reason, which I think would be a plausible definition? If so, show me the liberals who are making arguments unsound at public reason. Meanwhile, I'll be hauling a truckload of Republican U.S. Representatives who make arguments about the broadest areas of public policy on explicitly religious grounds, something which is defined as being outside of public reason.

I think I would also say that, while I definitely see the American political culture as being home to a fairly sharp divide, I don't think that that part of American culture that is non-political, whatever it may be, is particularly conflict-ridden; at least, it doesn't have very much in the way of arch-conflicts. I think that was a point he made well at his rally: outside of the political context, it's alternate merge, and we're not all that divided; the division is only in the political context. But the political context is an important one, and a very far-reaching one, and if the political world has more conflict than the nonpolitical realm, then isn't the political conflict the main conflict in the nation? Does it mean that we're not as bitterly divided a people as we might seem on election day? Yeah, I think it does, and it's worth keeping in mind that even people one disagrees with so strongly on matters of politics as to make you hold it against them as a person, and I believe there is a level at which that's legitimate, is probably not a bad person in everyday life (though, of course, they could be, as could someone you agree with on political matters).

I thought point about how Anderson Cooper has a specific segment called "Keeping 'Em Honest," whereas that ought to be the main function of the news apart from pure factual reporting was very apt. He went from that point to argue, look, why is it all about teams and supporting the people on your side? Why not just attack bad arguments wherever they may be found? It's a reasonable premise; the problem is the empirical one I addressed at the end of this post, namely, what if all the bad arguments are on one side? And it's more than that: if you respect a person's mental faculties and intellectual honesty, presumably any opinion they hold is one that they believe is correct and that they can defend with good, correct arguments. And therefore presumably they believe that arguments in opposition are wrong in some way, shape, or form. That form can either be the logic of the argument or the premises, and one should keep in mind the distinction. But we should expect that, it is necessary and proper that, it will be only natural that people with well thought out opinions think people who disagree with them are wrong, and therefore either approaching things from an unreasonable set of fundamental goals/priorities/values or making a logically poor argument. Yeah, we should criticize bad arguments whenever they happen. Liberals, in fact, both at MSNBC and at DailyKos or anywhere else, will criticize those nominally on our team just as readily as those on the opposing team, when they make bad arguments. This is usually when they drift toward the "center," but this is again proper because we are liberals.

And finally, a word or two about their discussion of George W. Bush, and whether his bragging about waterboarding makes him "evil," especially in comparison to FDR's Japanese internments. This is one of the reasons why I don't like the word "evil." Is George W. Bush evil? Well, let's see. I think he committed atrocities and shows zero remorse over them. But I also think he probably was making a roughly-speaking good faith effort, to the extent that he was making an effort at all. I think the problem of whether Dick Cheney is evil is a considerably different one, on the facts, but my personal hypothesis about George W. Bush is that he was a slightly simple-minded fellow who does have a fairly straightforward view of What Is Right that the neocons roped in so that they could manipulate him into executing all of their malicious plots. Does that make him evil? Under the Truman principle, Bush has ultimate responsibility for everything the Executive Branch did under him, whether because he did it or because he let Cheney's gang do it. But is he an evil person? I dunno. It's hard to say. That's why I don't like the word evil, or the word stupid, when applied to people. I try never to say, so-and-so is a stupid person. I don't think it's an intrinsic quality; I think it can change, and I think that to the extent that it changes it is mainly about earning it. I believe very strongly that there are stupid opinions and stupid actions, and just as strongly that there are evil opinions and evil actions. And so I believe that there are people who hold a lot of stupid beliefs or do a lot of stupid things, and there are a lot of people who hold a lot of wicked beliefs or do a lot of wicked things, but I have a fairly principled opposition to calling those people "stupid" or "evil."

On a slightly less explicitly moral note, the comparison between FDR and Bush is a telling one, I think. I'm not talking here about "evil" vs. "non-evil," or even "war criminal" vs. "non-war criminal," but rather about "strongly approve" vs. "strongly disapprove." If I look back through history and make a list of my rankings of each President, from strongly approve to strongly disapprove, Franklin Delano Roosevelt gets the most emphatic Strongly Approve, and George W. Bush gets the most emphatic Strongly Disapprove. And yet, what they have in common is that they both can lay claim to some of the worst atrocities in U.S. war history. So what's the difference? The difference is as follows. Both George W. Bush and Franklin D. Roosevelt did a very large amount of very bad things in their Presidencies. I think Bush may have surpassed FDR in this regard, and there are other Presidents who are in a similar league. And yes, I think FDR is in the higher ranks of Presidents by the metric of doing bad stuff. But the thing is, he's also far and away President #1 in terms of doing good stuff. Massively. Something close to the majority of all the good things Presidents have ever done were FDR, or at least a percentage wildly disproportionate to his 5% of U.S. history presided over. Maybe 30% is a reasonable figure. No other President comes close. And so, while there is a whole lot to say against Franklin Roosevelt, most notably Japanese internment and the court-packing plan but also some smaller things as well, there is a whole frickin' lot to balance that out. And in my view, he comes out way ahead, especially since every other President after Washington did a fair amount of bad stuff and Washington balanced that by being pretty bland.

But George W. Bush's problem is that he has nothing to balance it. What good did he do? What good things did he do? I think once he added some ocean near Hawaii to a wildlife preserve. Honestly, I'm hard-pressed to come up with another example. He wasn't too bad on immigration, but his motive there may well have been a desire to give big businesses cheap exploitable labor. There's just nothing. Meanwhile, you have a staggeringly all-encompassing array of damage he did. And there's just nothing to outweigh it. So that's why, in my book, two of the biggest war criminal Presidents in US history occupy opposite ends of the rankings.

Adventues in Demographic Modelling

I recently developed a whim to try and create a demographic electoral model. That is, a model that would look at the distribution of eight demographic variables across the 51 US federal voting regions (50 states + DC), and use nationwide tendencies of those demographics to come up with a set of topline numbers. In other words, assume that, say, Catholics, or those with income between $75,00 and $150,000 per year, had uniform behavior across the nation (which is untrue), and see what results the elections would provide. To test my model, I used data from the 2008 Presidential election. The results were rather interesting.

On Keith Olbermann

I really like Ezra Klein's take on the Keith Olbermann affair. The point to keep in mind, about whether the anti-donations rule makes sense, is that once you accept that there is no such thing as a journalist without any opinions, the very worst thing is a journalist who pretends they don't have any opinions. The problem with FOX is not so much that they lean right-wing; in fact, that isn't the problem with them at all. The problem is two-fold: one, they lie every time they speak; and two, they have made a massive PR campaign over the last decade or so to convince people that they are "fair and balanced" and that therefore anyone who disagrees with them is biased. No: they have an opinion. Other people, like Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, have different opinions. Everyone has opinions. And it's a hell of a lot easier to divine whether someone's being biased when you know what their true opinions are, instead of having to try and figure out what they might believe and then whether they're biasing their coverage in favor of that position. So the anti-donations rule, while it may not have been anti-1st Amendment, was distinctly bad policy. The only way for bias to be effective is to pretend that no one has opinions and that journalists are the Voice of Objective Fact.