Cogitamus

Happy Easter! And Open Thread

The Lord had risen, for those of us who are into that.  And whether you are or aren't, I wish you a happy day full of family get-togethers and the like.

Here at the LTC household, the five year old has checked out his Easter basket and found all of the Easter eggs hidden around the living room.  We've breakfasted on bacon, banana pancakes, and hard-boiled eggs, and in a couple of hours we'll be headed over to my little sister's for Easter brunch.  (Probably won't sit down to eat there until 1pm or so, so the meals aren't as back-to-back as that may have sounded.)  The little rascal will have cousins to play with there, so the grownups may actually be able to talk with one another.

I'll leave politics alone for the day, except to celebrate NYC workers winning paid sick leave.  Why the national Democratic Party isn't making an issue of an entitlement to paid annual and sick leave, I have no frickin' idea.  But it seems like exactly the sort of 'wedge issue' that would put the Dems and the vast majority of Americans on one side, and the GOP, along with big corporations and rich people, on the other.  And we'd win this one if we pushed on it for a few years, and actually do something good for most Americans.

So what's everyone else up to, on this Easter Sunday?

McMegan Predicts the Future of Marriage for Your Entertainment Pleasure

"Be Good" - Waxahatchee

Really like this song and sound.  A woman named Katie Crutchfield recorded in her bedroom. 

- And you know who's telling us to be good -- that font of life wisdom Megan McArdle.  Actually, McMegan is confidently predicting that we will be good -- because the gays are getting married and that means no one will be having sex ever again.  Except for the kind of boring married sex of which Megan approves.  Now, it's true that Roy dispatched of this glib fatuous fuck in the kind of throw away manner that she deserves.  But a perverse part of me -- or maybe that is one of the many perverse parts of me -- wants to delve a little deeper, hold this gem up to the light, and join in the raucous laughter that it merits. 

It's an incredibly incoherent mess.  For example:

I know, it feels like we're riding an exciting wave away from the moral dark ages and into the bright, judgement free future.  But moral history is not a long road down which we're all marching; it's more like a track.  Maybe you change lanes a bit, but you generally end up back where you started.  Sometimes you're on the licentious, "anything goes" portion near the bleachers, and sometimes you're on the straight-and-narrow prudish bit in front of the press box.  Most of the time you're in between.  But you're still going in circles.

So what is the evidence that we are rounding the track and heading back to olden days when a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking? Beats the fuck out of me.  Well, I guess Newt Gingrich and John McCain, exemplars par excellence of Seventies decadence -- oh the days we danced at Studio 54 together, coke spoon a-dangling between Newt's man-boobs -- got divorced, while Bobby Jindal, Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, and Marco Rubio are all still on wife number one.  And?

McArdle then goes on to bemoan that the lesser sort of folk aren't getting married, are having children willy-nilly with every underemployed Tom, Dick, and Harry that they meet, and that people like her are getting married late in life -- although the latter trend will likely stop because she has now tied the knot at a still youthful -- measured in wisdom -- 37.  But all of this is going to change, because, well because she thinks it should:

If I had to guess, I'd also put late marriage on the endangered list.  I married at 37 myself, so I'm not judging, here.  But if we want childbearing to take place inside marriage (and I think we do), then the average age of first marriage can't get higher; it probably shouldn't even stay so high.  As that average age rises, you get two unwanted phenomenon on the tails of the distribution: babies born to unmarried parents at the low end, and couples who want children but can't have them on the high side.  So the current upper-middle-class tendency to push marriage later and later while people finish their educations and get settled doesn't seem very stable to me--even before we consider the difficulty of finding a mate to match your settled life, which Keith Humphreys has dubbed The Problem of Grandma's Lamp.

Of course, predictions are hard, especially about the future.  Nonetheless, here is mine: whatever the Supreme Court decides, gay marriage will soon be legal throughout the land. But this will not mean that we drive ever onwards towards greater sexual freedom--rather, it will mean quite the reverse.  The sexual revolution is over.  And the revolutionaries lost.

Does Megan really think that people will return to a (largely exaggerated) practice of having sex [and children] only within marriage or that people will return to marrying in their late teens or early twenties (an aberration of the 1950s)?   Does the fact that well-educated, urban blue staters are staying married -- after spending their twenties getting educated and enjoying sexual freedom -- really mean that the "sexual revolutionaries" lost and we are heading toward neo-Victorianism? 

Needless to say there is no evidence presented for these assertions. Indeed, Megan spends most of the piece decryng this and that and then suggesting things must change because she thinks they should.  It is funny that right wingers like McArdle have an abiding faith in market decisions that people make, but have a difficult time accepting people voting with their feet -- well not really their feet for most people -- for their most personal preferences.  Since bold prediction seems to be the name of the game here, my bet is that most young people will continue to find ludicrous the notion that sex should only take place within marriage and will scoff at those who try to scare them into marrying young.  

Wednesday Open Thread

"Song for Zula" - Phosphorescent

Just when I thought I was getting back in the writing groove a whole host of things professional and personal have popped up and brought me to a halt.

Hopefully will get back in the swing momentarily.  In the meantime, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the Prop 8 and DOMA Supreme Court arguments.  

 

Ten Years After - Iraq War Open Thread

I would imagine that many of you are finding a lot to be infuriated by in the current retrospectives regarding the Iraq War -- the non-apology apologies, the sheer pretense in some instances that the war was redeeemed by "the surge," and, of course, the "well I was wrong for the right reasons and you were right for the wrong reasons" rationalizations.  It's always impressive to see a complete and utter debacle treated as though it was really some sort of split-decision.

I was not blogging during the glorious war era, so I do not really have a track record to defend.  I was a war skeptic, mainly because I viewed it as an outrageous diversion from the fight against Al Qaeda.  I was also troubled by the idea of preemptive war as an explicit doctrine of American foreign policy.  But I have to say, my opposition to the war was far too muted and completely lacking in the sense of just how disastrous this adventure would prove to be.  I completely underestimated the mendacity and incompetence of the Bush Administration in both making the case for and pursuing the war.  It simply never occurred to me -- my intense dislike of the Administration notwithstanding -- that people with as much experience as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, et al. could be so completely cavalier about planning for something as grave as a war.  I didn't imagine them to be the sociopathic incompetents they would prove to be. 

I find that the losses of this war -- in lives both American and Iraqi lost or shattered, in money -- staggering, staggering sums that could have been used for so much good -- and in national reputation -- still make my blood boil.  It's a feeling that really hasn't diminished much -- maybe because there has never been a proper calling out of those responsible and those who cheered them on, maybe because as we battle over fiscal and budget issues, I cannot help but think of the trillion or so dollars completely squandered in this benighted effort. 

Many people have written things worth reading on this tenth anniversary.  Fallows had an excellent piece, grimly titled "Why We Won't Learn from Iraq." Charles Pierce in a series of can't miss posts cuts several people a new, three-bedroom, two bath, double wide asshole, including Ezra Klein, (who had the excuse of youth in 2003, but really should avoid the Ken Pollack defense in 2013), Jonathan Chait ("ouch"), and the unspeakably loathsome David Ignatius. 

And then there is this open letter to Paul Wolfowitz by Andrew Bacevich, which is in a league by itself.  It is really a must read in terms of the broader foreign policy issues it raises.  Bacevich dryly observes that   "taken as a whole, the cost-benefit ratio [of the Iraq War] is cause for weeping."  Left unsaid is the fact that Bacevich has far greater reasons to weep over this horrible war.

Honesty is a condition precedent to learning.  One cannot learn lessons about events shrouded in bad faith.  The American people will remain war weary and war wary for a time until their collective memories fade.  But I see little to suggest that the movers and shakers in foreign policy or those who shape the public debate about such matters in the media have the capacity for honesty or self reflection, that would result in genuine painful wisdom having been obtained through this debacle -- certainly not on the basis of the lame mea culpas I have seen to date.  And that might be the most infuriating thing of all about this godforsaken war.  

The Personal is Political and Open Thread

Interesting conversations have been ongoing about Rob Portman seeing the light on marriage equality as a result of his son being gay.  Many on the liberal side of the equation have noted that this seems to be a common Republican affliction -- one can only identify with a problem when a member of one's own tribe is affected.  I share that general view.  Naturally, Will Saletan takes the contrary position --it's what they do over there -- arguing that this is just human nature and that we on the left are no different in this regard. Saletan points to Barak Obama's conversion on the gay marriage issue as proof of this. 

Let's be clear -- Barak Obama's stated opposition to marriage equality (and Hillary Clinton's and many others) was the product of a craven political calculation.  The President, along with many other liberal Democrats, feared the marriage equality issue and felt that it was a bridge too far in national electoral politics.  It turns out he was wrong -- public opinion has moved incredibly swiftly on this issue.  This sort of thing is not admirable, but it's not unusual.  Polticians are rarely opinion leaders.  Having said that, Barak Obama was quite progressive on gay rights issues for a mainstream politician even before he announced support for marriage equality -- as seen by his administration's handling of Don't Ask, Don't Tell and DOMA.    Rob Portman has shown no such disposition until this moment.  He has basically toed the Republican Party line on thes issues for his entire political career, albeit he has not been an affirmative hater a la James Inhoffe.  In short, there is no true comparison between Obama and Portman, notwithstanding any drivel Glenn Greenwald might write in this regard. 

Saletan refuses to accept that liberals are any more empathetic then conservatives -- in his view they arrive at their positions simply through "inertia" -- i.e. they just believe what all of their liberal friends believe:

When I try to understand their misperceptions of Portman, my best guess (which, to take my own point, could be wrong) is that they haven’t experienced what Portman is going through. When your parents and peers are liberal, reaching liberal conclusions is no sweat. You don’t support SNAP benefits because you know malnourished kids, any more than you support climate-change legislation because you know peasant farmers. It isn’t empathy that leads you to these conclusions. It’s inertia.

This is nonsense.  I have been a liberal for a long time as have many of the people I've known.  And let me assure you, it wasn't because back in 1980 or 1984 or 1988 all of the cool kids were doing the liberal thing and supporting food stamps.  It was because I -- like most people who hung in there during the Reagan years -- had the moral imagination to consider what life might have been like if I lost the lottery and was born poor.  It was because a study of history led me to understand how tenuous the climb to middle class status had been for so many people and how much the government giving people a hand up had meant to vast swaths of society.  I was a white male middle class kid, but I understood that the world was bigger than my tribe, a spirit that continues to animate most people on the left.  I did not grow up in an ideological household.  When I was a kid, my father voted Democratic for the most part and my mother Republican for the most part -- but they were both very devoted to overall notions of fairness.  (Neither has voted for a Republican since 1976 -- I take some of the credit.)  I took that overall spirit of fairness and constructed a political view that struck me as consistent with it -- a kind of Rawlsian view of the world long before I ever heard of John Rawls.  It wasn't inertia or any other reflexive or tribal behavior.  

I think Saletan misses the fundamental divide between right and left in considering this question.  It goes to the very heart of the world view that makes someone choose either poltical direction. 

I am glad Rob Portman came around on this issue.  I am hardly going to beat him up for doing so.  But this "personal" type politics has grave limitations -- particularly in a world in which politicians are increasingly drawn from the ranks of the well to do.  It does, however, speak to the power of individuals "coming out," a phenomenon that has truly been world changing for people who need their politics personalized. 

 

 

Happy St. Paddy's Day and Open Thread

"James Connolly" - Black 47

(I think everyone celebrated last night -- okay I went to the movies -- but this is officially the day -- well for another 21 minutes.) 

- Ross Douthat is under the impression that the scorn that many feel for the Catholic Church and its hierarchy in light of the multi-decade, world wide child molestation scandal is simply a bit of schadenfreude, people feeling good about the hypocrisy of the order of the red beanie.  This take on one of the world's great criminal conspiracies shows just how much Douthat, despite being an incessantly moralizing douche bag in all matters sexual, has no sense of the enormity of the crimes committed here.  Schadenfreude is what we heathens might feel about Jimmy Swaggart or David Vitter or Larry Craig, etc., etc.  Folly among consenting hypocrites is, in the end, amusing.  But what has gone on in the Catholic Church is a horrific abuse of power, the use of the sacred for the most profane ends, followed by a cover up on a cosmic scale.  These are serious crimes against the very vulnerable, not some sort of faux pas that exposes the church to ridicule.  People should go to jail for this shit, many more than have to date.  Guys like Cardinal Mahoney and Cardinal Law belong in prison cells for what they have done and what they have allowed to happen.  This is not a PR problem Ross.  It's not even just a sin.  It's a series of serious felonies, the likes of which would have brought massive prosecutorial and police effort if perpetuated by anyone but the privileged princes of the church.  Fuck 'em.

Join in the fray my friends.   

 

Proof of Life and Open Thread

Yes, I am still among you.   The past week was utterly without breathing room, but hopefully things will slow a bit for the next couple of weeks. 

In what little time I had, I also found myself a bit stumped in terms of anything interesting to say.  My general impression as I scanned political headlines is that the Republican Party has predictably enough reverted to form, that its phony post-election moment of reflection has passed, and the consensus remains that there is nothing wrong in the party's positions that cannot be improved upon by going further right.  The result has been a whole flurry of recent crazy, breathtaking in its brazeness: Tax cuts for the rich remain paramount, the social safety net should be destroyed in order to obtain them, people making minimum wage are overpaid, that minority voters need to be more sensitive to Republican needs, abortion rights should be gutted completely, while the run to own any kind of gun and ammunition should be sacrosanct.  This is a party that has moved somewhere beyond doubling down on its agenda into a far right netherworld.

And the bottom line is that until the GOP is convincingly and overwhelmingly defeated at the polls on multiple occasions, they are going to continue to be a plague on our society.  Only their complete removal from the levers of power will allow for a sane path forward in this country. 

We have got to get people to vote in mid-term elections with the same level of enthusiasm that they bring to presidential races.  We need to undo the grotesque gerrymandering that has magnified Republican voting power well beyond what it should be.  This is difficult. painstaking, and slow work.  some of it will take at a minimum four or five more election cycles to accomplish.  But it strikes me as the only way forward in which we can stop this kind of crap -- which is clearly out of step with majority opion -- from continuing to dominate our political agenda. 

What's on your minds? 

 

 

No Future for You - and Open Thread

"Anarchy in the U.K." - Sex Pistols

I apologize for the radio silence.  I would complain about my schedule but it seems a bit churlish to bitch about a good paying legal job in which one is in demand, given the subject matter on which I am posting. 

Even as we receive some modestly good economic news, I have been reading a series of things over the last week or two that leaves me wondering how it is our children are supposed to make a decent living in this country.  It seems to me that what we are reaping societally is the predictable failure of the totemic worship of the free market over the last three decades to actually work for the many.  On a largely bipartisan basis, American elites bought into the notion that the unfettered free market and its vaunted "efficiency" would leave us more prosperous collectively.  Advances in technology along with increased global trade and education levels were held out as the future of the American economy -- and well they might be, but it is apparent it will be an economy that leaves huge swaths of the population behind, including many who are highly educated.

The market has ceased to serve -- it instead has become a rapacious beast that must be continuously fed human sacrifices.  Ends are ignored while means are worshipped to no discernible good outcome.  Fools like Friedman jabber about the need to continuously educate ourselves, to hurl our children into the economic war of all against all with endless gusto without ever once seeming to question where all of this gets us.  Yglesias -- the Kinsley of a new generation -- urges people to write for free -- hey it worked for him -- not understanding why this does not seem a particularly pleasing path for middle-aged folks who have spent decades actually getting paid for their work.  Law schools deceive people into burdening themselves with life long debt for jobs that aren't there or just don't pay.  Universities and community colleges are following suit. 

The hollowing out of the middle class is real and happening before our eyes.  The decline of social mobility too.  Those with a leg up -- who won't have to begin adult life weighted down with massive debt -- will have extraordinary advantages over their peers, while inequality grows and grows ever more entrenched. 

The challenge for the next generation of the left -- politicians, activists, academics, thinkers, and policy makers -- is to figure out a new path, one that moves beyond free market dogma toward an economy that actually delivers for people.  It seems to me that it is one in which far more intervention in the market place -- including (gasp) protective tariffs -- may need to be explored.  Taxes are going to have to be higher and sharply more progressive, the social safety net will need to grow rather than contracting, industries like finance will need to be brought to heel in the interest of the public good.  In short, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that we are going to need to move beyond the Clintonian consensus of the 1990s and figure out strategies that allow our children to have prosperous and decent lives.

What say you?    

 

Why I'm Glad Elizabeth Warren's a Senator, Part XLIV

Damn, she's already making an impact over there.  Here's the latest, in a hearing where Senators were asking questions of bank regulators:

The US government takes money laundering very seriously for a good reason. And it puts strong penalties in place… It's possible to shut down a bank... Individuals can be banned from ever participating in financial services again.  And people can be sent to prison. in December, HSBC admitted to... laundering $881 million that we know of... They didn't do it just one time... They did it over and over and over again… They were caught doing it, warned not to do it, and kept right on doing it. And evidently made profits doing it. Now, HSBC paid a fine, but no individual went to trial. No individual was banned from banking and there was no hearing to consider shutting down HSBC's actives in the US.... You're the experts on money laundering. I'd like your opinion. What does it take? How many billions of dollars do you have to launder for drug lords and how many sanctions do you have to violate before someone will consider shutting down a financial institution like this?

And:

"If you're caught with an ounce of cocaine, you're going to go to jail... But if you launder nearly a billion dollars for international cartels and violate sanctions you pay a fine and you go home and sleep in your own bed at night."

There are plenty of people in Congress willing to give a pass to the big-money boys.  Warren's a Senator for the rest of us.

Birthday Open Thread

 

The Federal government thought my birthday was a sufficiently important occasion that it gave the day off to every Federal employee in the DC area.  Very thoughtful of it - I'm touched. :)

To accompany the occasion, here's one of my favorite pieces of music, the first movement of Beethoven's Seventh.  (Yes, the first movement. I know everybody goes gaga over the second movement, and it's a great piece of music too. But the opening movement is quite something all by itself.)

Sorry about its being broken into two videos, but I love this particular version, and I couldn't find it all in one piece.  There's also a four-minute overlap between the two, so when you shift to the second video, start just before the 4-minute mark.

I love Kleiber's sweeping gesture at the 4:23 mark of the first video, as he sends the orchestra into the full, wild, joyous romp of the main movement.  Up until then, Beethoven's just been building up the anticipation.  You've got to come up with something pretty damn impressive to justify that much buildup, but this is Beethoven we're talking about, so he succeeds.

 

And on a completely different note, a song containing a not-so-subtle hint about my current age.

 

 

Open thread.

What Business Does the Supreme Court Have To Even *Consider* the Voting Rights Act?

I just don't understand where Roberts, Scalia & Co. have any business even looking at this law.  Can anyone explain this to me?

The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution is very simple and straightforward:

SECTION 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

SECTION 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Okay, Congress has this power to enforce this Amendment with 'appropriate legislation.' What are the boundaries of 'appropriateness'? If it hasn't exceeded them by passing the Voting Rights Act, then the Supreme Court should sit down and shut up.

Quite a few other Constitutional amendments have a section with essentially the same language as Section 2, specifically the 13th, 14th, 19th, 23rd, 24th, and 26th Amendments, and the defunct 18th Amendment to the Constitution.

So, how big a grant of authority to Congress is the power to enforce a Constitutional amendment with appropriate legislation?

The Supreme Court, discussing the identical section of the 14th Amendment in Ex Parte Virginia, 100 U.S. 339 (1879) said at 345-346 (emphasis mine):

It is not said the judicial power of the general government shall extend to enforcing the prohibitions and to protecting the rights and immunities guaranteed. It is not said that a branch of the government shall be authorized to declare void any action of a State in violation of the prohibitions. It is the power of Congress which has been enlarged, Congress is authorized to enforce the prohibitions by appropriate legislation. Some legislation is contemplated to make the amendments fully effective. Whatever legislation is appropriate, that is, adapted to carry out the objects the amendments have in view, whatever tends to enforce submission to the prohibitions they contain, and to secure to all persons the enjoyment of perfect equality of civil rights and the equal protection of the laws against State denial or invasion, if not prohibited, is brought within the domain of congressional power.

"Whatever legislation is...adapted to carry out the objects the amendments have in view...is brought within the domain of congressional power."

That seems pretty clear to me.

How can the Court possibly say the Voting Rights Act fails that test? As best as I can tell, it is not for them to judge whether the VRA enforces the Fifteenth Amendment in a way they like. It is not for them to judge whether the VRA enforces the Fifteenth Amendment in a way that they regard as effective.  It is not even for them to judge whether the VRA's enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment is superfluous at this point in time. It is only for them to judge whether the VRA is "adapted to carry out the objects the amendments have in view." Which it obviously is.

The Supreme Court should sit down and shut up before they gut all seven Constitutional amendments that include this language.

There Is No Conservative Crisis of Ideas. They Just Aren't Interested In Solving Actual Problems.

This is a response of sorts to Brad DeLong's American Conservatism’s Crisis of Ideas: Project Syndicate Monarchy, Patriarchy, Orthodoxy Weblogging.

 

There is no crisis, Brad.  Where we see problems in need of solutions - millions of people with no jobs and no jobs available for them, tens of millions of people without health insurance, millions of people working full time but still not having enough money to live on, crumbling infrastructure, millions of young people either not being able to afford college, or coming out saddled with unconscionable piles of debt, money in politics drowning out the voice of the people, millions headed to retirement age with 401(k)s without any money in them, people not having any sick days to take when they or their kids get sick so that they have to keep working anyway, you name it - they see stuff that they're basically A-OK with.

And ideas, in politics, are for solving problems that can, and that you believe should, be solved by some sort of governmental action.  The conservative dearth of ideas is because they don't see problems, or believe that they should be solved through market forces and individual choices. 

So in response to actual problems, you get conservative ideas like this: if you're poor, you must be poor because being poor didn't give you sufficient incentive to do something about it.  So we'll take away what little public aid there was, because you need more incentive.  The fact that there are no jobs out there, and that means of improvement like affordable education and training aren't there for them, isn't a problem in their eyes.  Oh, maybe we should get rid of the minimum wage, then there'd be more jobs.  The additional jobs wouldn't pay enough to live on, but they don't see that as a problem either.

When they regard something as a problem, they're creative and persistent enough.  Rich people still have to pay taxes - that's a problem, so they keep pressing for more tax cuts for rich people.  Corporations still have laws and regulations they have to follow - that's a problem, so they keep pressing to remove regulations.  Poor people and minorities can vote - that's a problem, and they've been very creative in their attempts to solve it.  More people vote for Democrats rather than Republicans, which would be a problem if it resulted in Democratic control of the government, so they've been attacking that with gerrymandering of House districts, and schemes to split the electoral votes of states that vote Democratic in Presidential elections.

But most of the stuff we see as problems, they don't.  So of course they don't have any ideas about solving them.  Sometimes political realities prevent them from straightforwardly admitting to not seeing something as a problem.  In those cases they generally take the solution to one of their problems, like lower taxes for rich people, and claim it's really a solution to the problem the rest of us are grappling with.  But that's just pretense.

So the absence of conservative ideas isn't a crisis for conservatives; it's the natural reflection of who they are and what they believe.  It isn't a problem, so they aren't going to solve it.  It's here to stay.