What? No Drinking Section on the New SAT?

Former co-blogger Thoreau links to the Onion's provocative consideration of whether American high school graduates are being adequately prepared for college level drinking. While there, however, be sure to check out the tragic plight of American executives displaced by Mexican immigrants.

Ron Paul, Racist Anti-Semite?

Speaking of blowback, it seems the "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy," which now apparently includes the likes of CNN, is focusing its firepower on Ron Paul, not only for blaming America for 9/11 criticizing American foreign policy in the Middle East, but also now for his allegedly racist and anti-semitic views.

Oh my.

Herewith, a 1996 Houston Chronicle article quoting excerpts from newsletters Paul sent to supporters in 1992, such excerpts apparently provided by the campaign of his then Democratic opponent, Austin, Texas lawyer Charles "Lefty" Morris. As quoted, Paul contended that black, teen-age male criminals are "unbelievably fleet-footed," that "polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty and the end of welfare and affirmative action," that "we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in [Washington, D.C.] are semi-criminal or entirely criminal," and that "the most powerful lobby in Washington of the bad sort is the Israeli government."

I wasn't aware there was a good sort of Washington lobby, and surely there must be some less than fleet-footed black teen-aged criminals out there; but I have no interest in defending Paul, assuming the quotes are accurate and that they are not misleadingly taken out of context.

As I have repeatedly noted, Ron Paul is not going to win the Republican nomination and is not going to be President of the United States, and so all the backlash against Paul for espousing views well outside what counts as the current range of acceptable mainstream Republican opinion (more's the pity) and experiencing a surge of internet interest and activity is almost laughable.

So, for that matter, is the notion that among all the middle-aged white male candidates thus far declared as Republican candidates, Paul might be targeted by Republican conservatives as holding or publicly expressing (two quite different things) views that are beyond the pale on racial or ethnic grounds.

Here's the thing. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom of the Left, most Republicans, most conservatives and most middle-aged white men are not racists by any reasonable definition of the term. Neither are they either entirely pure of heart in such matters nor will their comments over the decades withstand close scrutiny for failure to show appropriate deference to current political sensibilities in such matters.

That said, accusations of racism (though possibly not of anti-semitism, interestingly enough) pretty much constitute the "nuclear option" in American politics. Maybe Paul can give an adequate account not only for those quotes but also for everything he has ever said or written that could be construed as indicative of racial or ethnic prejudice and maybe he can't. That all depends in large measure on what counts as racism, what counts as merely racially insensitive phrasing of an otherwise innocuous observation or opinion and what counts as fair comment on racial issues. But the same goes for every other candidate, as well, so they and their supporters had better be damned careful about that particular political gambit.

Let me repeat that I am not interested in defending Paul or any other candidate insofar as there may be legitimate evidence of that candidate holding racist or anti-semitic views. Who knows what we have yet to learn about any of the candidates as their campaigns progress? What does at least for now primarily interest and amuse and, just a little bit, worry me is how quickly and easily frightened certain elements of the Right are over what so far amounts to no more than a little internet buzz over a man who stands no chance whatsoever of being nominated or elected president.

Michigan GOP Chairman Seeks to Ban Paul from Future GOP "Big Top Tent" Debates

"Michigan party chairman Saul Anuzis said he will circulate a petition among Republican National Committee members to ban Paul from more debates."

So far, no word from Rudy "Oh Thank Heaven for 9/11" Giuliani as to the extent not having Paul to misconstrue and criticize at subsequent debates would damage Don Giuliani's campaign prospects.

Blowback

Actions have consequences. This concept is so obvious even the CIA understands it. In fact, it's so obvious even the Republican candidates for president understand it, though Rudy Giuliani appeared not to in last night's second snoozer of a 'debate.' The brief contretemps between Ron Paul and Giuliani, one of the few lively moments of the evening (Jim Gilmore naming names among his less than conservative colleagues being another), arose after Paul made the perfectly reasonable observation that 9/11 was precipitated by America's foreign policy, an observation Giuliani used as a springboard to attack Paul and implicitly wave the bloody red flag of his mayoral rise to national fame because of 9/11. Here's the exchange:

MR. GOLER: Congressman Paul, I believe you are the only man on the stage who opposes the war in Iraq, who would bring the troops home as quickly as -- almost immediately, sir. Are you out of step with your party? Is your party out of step with the rest of the world? If either of those is the case, why are you seeking its nomination?

REP. PAUL: Well, I think the party has lost its way, because the conservative wing of the Republican Party always advocated a noninterventionist foreign policy.

Senator Robert Taft didn't even want to be in NATO. George Bush won the election in the year 2000 campaigning on a humble foreign policy -- no nation-building, no policing of the world. Republicans were elected to end the Korean War. The Republicans were elected to end the Vietnam War. There's a strong tradition of being anti-war in the Republican party. It is the constitutional position. It is the advice of the Founders to follow a non-interventionist foreign policy, stay out of entangling alliances, be friends with countries, negotiate and talk with them and trade with them.

Just think of the tremendous improvement -- relationships with Vietnam. We lost 60,000 men. We came home in defeat. Now we go over there and invest in Vietnam. So there's a lot of merit to the advice of the Founders and following the Constitution.

And my argument is that we shouldn't go to war so carelessly. (Bell rings.) When we do, the wars don't end.

MR. GOLER: Congressman, you don't think that changed with the 9/11 attacks, sir?

REP. PAUL: What changed?

MR. GOLER: The non-interventionist policies.

REP. PAUL: No. Non-intervention was a major contributing factor. Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us? They attack us because we've been over there; we've been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We've been in the Middle East -- I think Reagan was right.

We don't understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics. So right now we're building an embassy in Iraq that's bigger than the Vatican. We're building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting. We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us. (Applause.)

MR. GOLER: Are you suggesting we invited the 9/11 attack, sir?

REP. PAUL: I'm suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it, and they are delighted that we're over there because Osama bin Laden has said, "I am glad you're over on our sand because we can target you so much easier." They have already now since that time -- (bell rings) -- have killed 3,400 of our men, and I don't think it was necessary.

MR. GIULIANI: Wendell, may I comment on that? That's really an extraordinary statement. That's an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don't think I've heard that before, and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th.(Applause, cheers.)

And I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn't really mean that. (Applause.)

MR. GOLER: Congressman?

REP. PAUL: I believe very sincerely that the CIA is correct when they teach and talk about blowback. When we went into Iran in 1953 and installed the shah, yes, there was blowback. A reaction to that was the taking of our hostages and that persists. And if we ignore that, we ignore that at our own risk. If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem.

They don't come here to attack us because we're rich and we're free. They come and they attack us because we're over there. I mean, what would we think if we were -- if other foreign countries were doing that to us?

For those who missed it, National Review Online has posted the video of the exchange here.

Of course, Paul said no such thing as that the U.S. "invited" the 9/11 attack, but I'll be glad to say so. Not intentionally, of course, but in the same sense that actions routinely invite unintended consequences. U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East since World War II has had three or four objectives. First and foremost, securing the supply of oil; second, Israel; third and fourth, trying to move the rest of the Middle East into the Western sphere of alliances.

Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, these latter objectives were at least as much political as commercial, but they were political in the overriding context of the Cold War. The cultural, religious and other differences between us and the Middle East were given short shrift except as factors in that U.S. vs. USSR scenario. Nor has the U.S. in particular or the West in general been all that concerned historically about the grotesque human rights violations of the various regimes we have supported (Iran under the Shah, then Iraq under Hussein against Iran) or continue to support (Saudi Arabia) either to thwart the Soviets or to keep the oil flowing.

Are the Middle East's own politics, as Paul contended, irrational? If your definition of rationality is a sort of cold-blooded utilitarianism devoid of any emotional investment in religious beliefs or ethnic and cultural differences, I suppose so. After all, all the U.S. really wants from the Middle East is (1) oil and (2) Israel. Sure, it would be nice if they all embraced free market economies and representative democracies, too, but our continued alliance with the Saudis pretty much demonstrates how much the U.S. really cares about that. So the question occurs, how rational have our politics in the Middle East been?

Let's put on our cold-blooded utilitarian hats, then, for a moment and ask the following. If the U.S. is incapable of forgoing Middle Eastern oil (as indeed it is) and unwilling to forgo Israel (as indeed it should be unwilling to do) and its continued pursuit of those two objectives alone would continue to incur the unintended consequences of terrorist attacks, is that a reasonable price to pay? Moreover, if such attacks continue to be as expensive as they have been, either in terms of the deaths, injuries and property damage of 9/11 or the deaths, injuries and expense of military forces in Iraq and elsewhere as well as the liberty we have lost in pursuit of greater security, is that a reasonable price to pay?

Those are by no means the only foreign policy questions that should be answered by both Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, but they'd be an excellent place to start.

Mini-Review: More Sex Is Safer Sex by Steven E. Landsburg

Steven E. Landsburg is my favorite economics writer. Admittedly, it's a small field of competition, but I'd have to say I don't think I really began to understand what economics is all about until I read his The Armchair Economist back in 1993. Economics is not about money, let alone money and banking, gross domestic product, or even supply and demand. Sure, that's the stuff that gets covered in an economics survey course, but the underlying theme, apparently lost on the vast majority of those who take the course, is about choices and the consequences and trade-offs of those choices. Money is only a convenient method of measuring. No contemporary economist I know (including, e.g., David D. Friedman, Steven D. Levett, Todd G. Buchholz and Tim Harford) does a better job of making the underlying "Big Picture" of economics more clear or more entertaining than Landsburg.

His latest book, More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics (Free Press, 288 pp.) is a delight and highly recommended, even though I find that I don't always agree with Landsburg (for noneconomic reasons) in some of his views. Well, that actually adds to the fun.

I will almost certainly write more about several of the themes and topics in Landsburg's new book when time becomes available. In the meanwhile, I encourage you to check out his "Why I Am Not an Environmentalist" and, for the libertarian crowd, I offer a bit of red meat from More Sex Is Safer Sex, as follows:

... Cabinet departments like Agriculture, Commerce and Labor have powerful constituencies that make it impossible to eliminate them one at a time. But what about eliminating them as a package?

The Agriculture Department helps farmers steal from workers and businesses; the Commerce Department helps businesses steal from farmers and workers; the Labor Department helps workers steal from farmers and businesses. With a plan to abolish all three, you could promise every American that he was losing one friend and two enemies.

Several readers took issue with my criticism of Ron Paul's performance during the Republican candidates' 'debate.' Let's not kid ourselves, folks, Ron Paul is not going to be our next president. Still, instead of confusing people with talk about the "inflation tax" and fumbling over why the Founding Fathers wouldn't want Arnold Schwarzenegger to be eligible for the presidency, the above quote is precisely the sort of thing he should be saying in his all too brief media exposure. So here's my current Paul campaign contribution: Dr. Paul, read Steven Landsburg's books and steal from them flagrantly every chance you get!

The Naked and the Nearly Dead

Here's some news you probably can't use. Nudist resorts have "become increasingly upscale." What's a young, budget minded nudist to do? More to the point, what must an increasingly graying nudist community with a median age of 55 do to keep from becoming "a gated assisted living community"?

To draw 20- and 30-somethings, nudist groups and camps are trying everything from deep discounts on membership fees to a young ambassador program that encourages college and graduate students to talk to their peers about having fun in the buff.

Think of it as the Baby Boomer naturalist's equivalent of Ladies Night at the local watering hole.

I wish them luck, 'cause I have every reason to think they're going to need it. If I were a twenty-something still, it would take more than a deep discount to get me to spend my leisure time amidst entirely dishabille fifty-somethings no matter how upscale the accomodations. In fact, you'd jolly well have had to pay me to wander in their midst, and that's even taking into consideration that I was no prime specimen in my 20's either.

To each his own. My own, however, is that the overwhelming majority of us look better at any age with our clothes on, and the advance of years, if anything, only increases this tendency. It has nothing to do with modesty, mind you. I'm not saying the human body in all its varieties is ever dirty; I'm saying it's usually ugly. Moreover, I base this conclusion on no small amount of empirical data. I've been to beaches so close to nude it's hardly worth mentioning the difference. Nor am I shy about my own body in particular, such as it is. I merely recognize the simple fact that it looks better altogether clothed than in its altogether. So, almost certainly, does yours, and if it doesn't yet, it soon will.

Then there's this whole "back to nature" aspect of nudism; hence, the "naturalist" synonym. Well, sorry, but nature isn't your friend and you shouldn't encourage it any more than necessary. The whole point of civilization, in fact, is to avoid or defeat the many distasteful, unpleasant or downright dangerous aspects of nature.

Sooner or later, nature wins. I prefer later to sooner, however. What's more, I plan on siding with civilization until the bitter end.

Transparency vs. Anonymity on the Internet

In today's Washington Post, former Post reporter and editor Tom Grubisich makes a bad case for greater "transparency" on the internet. It is a bad case because, among other things, Grubisich begins his argument with a false premise, as follows:

These days we want "transparency" in all institutions, even private ones. There's one massive exception -- the Internet. It is, we are told, a giant town hall.

The first sentence, taken literally, is obviously false. I don't want transparency in private institutions, do you? Of course you don't. Your family is a private institution, after all. How much transparency, whatever that means, am I entitled to about your private affairs, institutional or not. Precious little, and rightly so. Mr. Grubisich may want transparency in private institutions, though I seriously doubt it. Perhaps he's just accustomed to writing in the editorial plural. Regardless, the premise is false.

Furthermore, we're told all sorts of things about the internet. Sure, "town hall" is one such metaphor, but metaphors are not to be taken literally. You can't get arrested for speeding on the Information Superhighway, nor do you even need to buckle-up. The internet is a communications medium, similar in some ways to other media, different in others. That it can be used as a sort of public forum doesn't mean that it is sufficiently like a real town meeting or public gathering of any sort to make it reasonable to apply the same rules.

Anyway, Mr. Grubisich's principal complaint is the anonymity of many "hate-mongering" commenters on such websites as, well, as wasingtonpost.com. Grubisich again:

You would think Web sites would want to keep the hate-mongers from taking over, but many sites are unwitting enablers. At washingtonpost.com, editors and producers say they struggle to balance transparency against privacy. Until recently, many of the site's posters identified themselves with anonymous Internet handles -- which were the site's default ID. Now, people must enter a "user ID" that appears with their comments.

Hal Straus, washingtonpost.com's interactivity and communities editor, says the changes "move us in the direction of transparency." But the distinction is not quite a difference, because washingtonpost.com user IDs can be real names or fictional Internet handles. While the site prohibits comments that are libelous, abusive, obscene or otherwise inappropriate, Mr. anticrat424 could still find a well-amplified podium at washingtonpost.com.

The news and opinion site Huffingtonpost.com requires posters to register with their real names but maddeningly assures them that it will "never" use those names.

Well, now. Amused though I am to see the Washington and Huffington Posts thusly compared, a bit of perspective about those nasty anonymous commenters seems in order here.

In the first place, not that many people spend that much time reading that many comments on these or any other websites. Oh, sure, if a reader finds a particular article interesting he might well peruse the reader comments, agreeing with some, disagreeing with others, finding some amusing or insightful and others insulting or disgusting. There are a few popular websites where the readers' comments are at least as interesting and fun to read as the primary article (Reason's Hit & Run strikes me as one example, probably because I frequently comment there), but they are the exception to the rule, at least when it comes to MSM websites like the Post.

Knowing the writer's name would be of little additional value to the average reader at such websites and of no value to the website's owner and operator who can, in any case, delete offensive comments and ban commenters fairly easily. Yes, some internet trolls can get around such bans up to a point, but very few are willing or able to go to the trouble.

In the second place, while there are all sorts of reasons someone may wish to be anonymous on the internet (though some are better, in my opinion, than others), anonymity automatically carries with it a certain penalty in terms of credibility, the only exception being where anonymous commenters build up a reputation, for better or worse, at a particular website over time. In a sense, therefore, market forces are already at play in assigning value to reader comments.

Moreover, Mr. Grubisich's comparison to an actual public meeting is entirely inapt. Internet trolls or, for that matter, "hate-mongers," can't "take over" a website. They can't shout over other commenters and drown them out. Yes, they can collectively flood a site with spam; but that, in fact, rarely happens. In reality, Mr. Grubisich would apparently really rather that the anonymous "haters" have no voice at all on the internet or at least that they be marginalized beyond the extent to which both their anonymity and the substance of their comments already marginalizes them. After all, he already acknowledges that sites can prohibit comments that are "libelous, abusive, obscene or otherwise inappropriate," so what we are pretty much left with is that he would prefer those with whom he disagrees either identify themselves (why?) or, more likely, simply not comment at all.

Websites are free, and should remain free, to treat commenters as they see fit. As I have written previously, the notion that there is something special about an MSM website beyond the fact that it provides straight news reportage is a dubious proposition, though apparently a common one among professional journalists.

On a personal note, odd as it might seem, I am inclined to agree with Grubisich in that I, too, would prefer that commenters used their real names. Again, I understand why many believe they cannot or should not do so; but then I am, after all, merely stating a preference. In fact, my reasons are similar. Using one's real name tends to have a moderating effect on what one posts on the internet. At least it does for me, which is one of the primary reasons I use my real name here and elsewhere.

Now, I've written enough over the past five years or so on the internet that there are already any number of really dumb comments of mine encased in virtual amber for all times. Some of them I now recognize as dumb. Others I may eventually and probably already would have recognized as dumb were it not for the fact that I remain a bear of very little brain. Patience, dear reader, patience!

But the internet is a "big enough place" that there's room for dumb guys like me and for everyone else, too. Of course, neither the Washington Post nor any other website is obligated to give me or you or anyone a forum. But as is unfortunately more often said than believed in some journalistic quarters, the remedy for bad speech is more speech. Even including anonymous speech and even if the likes of Mr. Grubisich disapproves.

Housekeeping

I've been on the road -- well, in the air, actually -- this weekend, back now in the Old Dominion (aka Virginia) to do a bit of real housekeeping for the next month or so. So, if anyone's wondering why I haven't posted anything in the last couple of days or why, as I suspect will be the case, my blogging slows down for a while, that's the reason.

Cats and Dogs (Updated: Oh, if only a reporter had been there!)

Oh goody, a Blogwar! Well, a skirmish, anyway. Voicing his views with perhaps unintentional irony by using, of all outlets, a blog, "grizzled reporter" and "no ivy tower thumb-sucker," Jonathan Alter takes Radar's Jebediah Reed to task for his coverage of a conversation including Alter, Tom Edsall and former Sen. Mike Gravel. Salon's Glenn Greenwald then weighs in, skewering the underlying pomposity and arrogance of Alter's journalistic gripes with the blogosphere.

Greenwald gets the better, so far at least, insofar as the the argument is over the parasitic faults of the blogosphere versus the parasitic faults of news reporters. Damning a cat for being an unsatisfactory sort of dog is foolish, especially for someone like Alter who has gone from dogged reporter to feline columnist (and consultant to that hard-hitting news organization, MTV, no less!) over the years.

For that matter, whether Reed's reporting of the conversation was bad (as opposed to Reed merely being "a bad reporter") seems less a matter to Alter of getting the facts wrong than of not interpreting or understanding what was said in the way that Alter, himself, would have done. Yeah, well, welcome to the club, Jon. Wanna take a poll of the people you've reported on over the years who might make the same sort of complaint? Hey, maybe Reed just isn't grizzled enough yet.

One point, though, I'll give to Alter. If the now infamous lunch in question was really "off the record," Reed had no right to report it as he did. Maybe that's a fact in dispute, too. I couldn't say. But fair's fair. Even a mildly grizzled ivy tower thumb-sucker like me knows that.

UPDATE: But wait, there's more! Now Reed fires back, claiming Alter not only knew the lunch wasn't off the record, save for a moment, but that Reed had his tape recorder running and note-pad out the entire time! Well, it could still technically have been "off the record" as background only, but it sure sounds now like there's some pretty good evidence not only that it wasn't but that Alter clearly knew it wasn't. Hmmmmmm. I think Mr. Reed is calling you a liar, Mr. Alter. Care to respond?

Reed's priceless P.S. -- "Thanks for the cup of black bean soup! (Actually, please thank General Electric.)" Meow!

Why I'm Not Blogging About Ron Paul (Yet)

I'm probably missing the web opportunity of a lifetime by not blogging more about Ron Paul, as Technorati still amazingly lists him at the top of its Top Ten "Where's The Fire?" list.

The fact is, though, I have nothing of interest to say about Paul. He's a decent guy, I like his politics, and he has a Texas snowball's chance in August of making it very far in the Republican presidential nomination race.

Rumor has it all this blogosphere traffic about Paul is the result of some small coterie of diehard libertarian supporters spamming web polls and such. I suppose the possibility can't be ruled out, but if there was ever a political category for which "herding cats" was the apt metaphor, it's libertarians. Just try to get a concerted effort out of three or more libertarians at a time, I dare you!

Maybe Paul is just the internet flavor of the month. If so, it can't be for his less than sterling performance during the first Republican candidates' "debate." He gets national air time and wastes it confusing people about the "inflation tax" or original intent regarding presidential citizenship requirements? Oh puleeze!

Still, I'll happily jump on the Ron Paul bandwagon just as soon as I have reason to believe its current momentum isn't from already having plummeted over the edge.

"That's none of your business."

I admit it isn't quite up there with, say, Grover Norquist's Taxpayer Protection Pledge, but if I was of an activist bent, I'd like to start a national movement to get all candidates for elective office to sign a Pledge promising to respond to all questions regarding their private lives with a simple and unqualified "That's none of your business." Break the Pledge, lose the election.

I'm willing to make an exception on health issues. If a candidate has been diagnosed with some imminently life threatening or debilitating disease, voters need to know about it. Not so much because the natural death or disability of a politician in office is such a threat to the republic but because it's disruptive and annoying, especially when your regularly scheduled programming is preempted for tedious and soporific coverage of the state funeral.

Also, anything already on the official record is fair game. If a candidate turns out to have had half a dozen arrests for driving while impersonating a Kennedy, have at him. Otherwise, "That's none of your business." Mere rumors are circulating about the candidate's three 8-ball a day crack habit, membership in a cult that worships a graven image of Carmen Miranda or has an unusual fondness for barnyard animals? I'm sorry, "That's none of your business."

Now the Drudge Report is leaking the "juicy tidbits" from a Mike Wallace interview with Mitt Romney scheduled for airing on Sunday. Drudge writes:

Romney's wife, Ann, who converted to the Mormon Church before they were married, is also interviewed. When asked whether they broke the strict church rule against premarital sex, Romney says, "No, I'm sorry, we do not get into those things," but still managed to blurt out "The answer is no," before ending that line of questioning.

Assuming the Drudge report is accurate, this puts Wallace in roughly the same category as whoever once asked Bill Clinton whether he wore briefs or boxers. The American people do not need to know whether Clinton wears briefs, boxers or frilly silk panties with lace trim. We do not need to know whether Mitt and Ann slept together before they were married. We do not even need to know if they sleep together now.

We didn't need to know whether Clinton smoked pot at Oxford or whether he inhaled, and we especially didn't need to know about his Oval Office ménage à trois with Monica Lewinsky and a Cuban cigar. Clinton spent a lifetime successfully weaseling out of scandal after scandal, and so naturally he tried to weasel out of that one, too. But the nation would have been far better served if he'd simply stuck to his guns and refused to answer questions about such things even under oath. Even if he was the one wearing the blue dress and someone had pictures. Sure, he might have faced a contempt charge as a result. Big deal.

Let me preemptively respond to the argument that such questions inform the public about the real character or expose the hypocrisy of the candidates. No, they don't. All politicians are liars and hypocrites because (1) they're politicians and (2) they're human beings. (Well, for the most part.) None of these people are running for sainthood and Messiah isn't an elective office. I understand people love gossip about the prurient details of the rich and famous, but that's what we have show business celebrities for. And isn't it more fun to learn the ugly secrets of beautiful people than the largely hum-drum peccadilloes of people so boring they willingly chose politics as a career?

We don't need to know anything about the purely private failures, foibles or follies, sins of commission or omission, minor vices or squalid little secrets of our politicians or their spouses or family members. Not only do we not need to know these things, I insist on believing, eternal optimist that I am, that the majority of us really don't want to know them, either. Hence, the "It's none of your business" Pledge. Candidates must promise to repeat this one and only one acceptable answer to all such "gotcha" questions from the press and public, preferably with the same facial expression appropriate to witnessing the questioner pick his nose in public.

The only permissible variation on this theme is that if the questioner is within smacking range and the candidate happens to have a large trout on hand, smacking the questioner over the head with the trout is encouraged. Candidates should, in fact, keep a large trout on hand at all times for this very purpose. Whatever ratings boost Mike Wallace might have hoped to garner from asking about the Romney's sex lives in the first place, it pales by comparison to the millions upon millions of Americans who would tune in specifically to see him get whacked with a trout.

I know I'd watch.

Life Imitates Zork?

You are standing inside a White House, having just been elected to the presidency of the United States....

What do you want to do now?
> INVADE IRAQ


"Who is the boss? Me! I am the boss of you!"
-- White House legal memorandum (full text) regarding scope of Executive war powers.

Of Course It Isn't A Guarantee, It's From the Government!

My guess is that Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman is having a very busy afternoon. Contrary to what appears to have been a very clear policy decision made by Defense Secretary Robert Gates on April 11th, "particularly guaranteeing that [troops] will be at home for a full 12 months" between deployments in Iraq, the Stars & Stripes reports Whitman as saying that this “is [not a guarantee but merely] a goal, to have units and individuals to have an appropriate amount of time for recovery and for stability purposes at home station and to be able to be with their families.” Apparently, Gates was caught short when told of a company being redeployed to Iraq some three months short of the 12 month "dwell time." Defense Secretaries just hate it when that sort of thing happens.

Well, maybe Whitman is, in fact, speaking for Gates. Nobody who knows the slightest thing about the military (and I just barely qualify by that criterion) believes that its senior leadership would honor its word in such matters if doing so seriously and genuinely jeopardized the mission. Soldiers understand that. But if Whitman is speaking for Gates, this is precisely the sort of thing that will undermine the new Secretary of Defense's efforts to rebuild trust and morale after the long overdue ouster of Donald Rumsfeld.

Oh, and all that happy horsesh*t about individual soldiers transferring from unit to unit making a guaranteed 12 month stationing outside Iraq for every soldier impossible? That's just so much Penta-babble. Of course, soldiers are rotating from unit to unit all the time and the “United States military is not a static organization." But that's irrelevant and Whitman knew it was irrelevant when he said it. And as the story is making the rounds of the blogosphere, so does everyone else.

Nothing, In Particular

While dallying earlier today over at Urkobold® (your one-stop shop for all things internet trollish), I did a bit of research (read: "typed in a Google search") and came upon an unauthorized posting of an article by the late philosopher Peter L. Heath. My high respect for intellectual property notwithstanding to the contrary, having some personal knowledge of Professor Heath's sense of humor, I cannot help but think that nothing would please him more. Herewith, then, a link to what may very well be the all-time definitive short article on the subject of "nothing."

Put a bit differently, you will find a better article on nothing in particular nowhere, but what are the chances of ever finding yourself there? Oh, sure, many philosophers have written extensively about nothing in particular or at least nothing that was especially interesting and the number of philosophical treatises about nothing worth reading are legion. Still, although nobody has written more cogently about nothing than Professor Heath, nobody's work wasn't as readily available. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, as no one I can remember at the moment once said.

Sadly, Professor Heath's other great work of philosophical whimsy, The Philosopher's Alice, a (serious) philosophical look at Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures In Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, appears to be out of print. Should you run across a used copy or find it in your local library, I strongly recommend it to you.

You'll Never Get Rich...

Say what you will about military service, the pay ain’t all that great. Never has been, never will be. Even general officers’ pay and benefits, while hardly subsistence level, pale by comparison to private sector executive compensation. Obviously, financial compensation issues are hardly at the top of the list of hardships and sacrifices made by members of our Armed Forces these days, but they are significant nonetheless.

Benefits do compensate somewhat for lower wages. Obviously, there is the matter of health care. Military personnel also qualify for education benefits and, of course, have access to commissaries and exchanges to do much of their shopping. These stores are extremely important for military personnel stationed overseas, but whether they are really all that much of a bargain and therefore benefit to service members back in the States in these days of big box discount stores is increasingly questionable.

Another military benefit is specialized recreational facilities. Typically, but not always, these facilities, e.g., libraries, bowling alleys, movie theaters, golf courses, etc., are located on military installations. Again, they are of great value to service members overseas. The question occurs, however, whether Armed Forces Recreation Centers, several of which are located overseas, should also be operated inside the United States. Currently, such centers are maintained in Hawaii and in Orlando, Florida and now one is being added in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

I learned of the Virginia Beach facility at James Joyner’s Outside The Beltway, where a question of whether these facilities are tax subsidized or not arose. They are. While the day-to-day operations of the facilities may be self-sustaining from user fees and other non-appropriated fund revenues, the facilities themselves are paid for by appropriated funds (tax dollars) and, I know from personal experience, there are a variety of methods by which appropriated funds can also be channeled quite legally into such facilities. An installation commander might decide, for example, to locate some official function there, all costs for which would come from the commander’s (appropriated fund) budget. There’s nothing wrong with this, but the claim that AFRC’s are “self-supporting” is misleading, at best.

Another possible objection raised by Mr. Joyner is that these facilities charge lower ranking military personnel less than higher ranking, higher paid personnel. “The communistic approach of subsidizing lower paid employees at the expense of those higher in rank/grade is puzzling but fairly common for MWR activities. Day care centers and similar activities on bases typically operate that way, too.”

Well, it is indeed fairly common but not really all that puzzling. As one reader at Mr. Joyner’s site noted, the operation of these facilities permit poorly paid enlisted personnel the opportunity to take a vacation in Hawaii or Disney World or, now, the Virginia coastline. (Loyal Virginian though I am, this last isn’t quite on a par with the American Beach on the Italian Riviera at Camp Darby.) The Department of Defense publicly downplays the reality that the military services operate as a planned, command economy; but they obviously do, and that includes subsidizing low revenue activities with high revenue activities and sliding user fee scales for some recreational facilities. Yes, colonels pay more to use these things than sergeants, but they have a much easier time getting reservations there, too.

Even we minimum-state libertarians, or at least the majority of us, nonetheless recognize the need for national defense, a recognition quite apart from how large that military structure should be or whether we think the Armed Services are being properly used. In the grand scheme of government waste, fraud and abuse, I can’t imagine seriously begrudging the average soldier, sailor or airman a dollop of tax subsidy to support a vacation facility the service member can more easily and readily afford and enjoy. Nor do the socialistic mechanisms of these things bother me, especially after having had lunch a few times over the years in a general officer’s (tax subsidized) mess. Put differently, when we get anywhere close to that minimum state, then I’ll gladly take another look at such things.

Finally, on a personal note, Mr. Joyner writes, “I can understand having a place where soldiers serving overseas can get away and be among English speakers, although, frankly, doing that takes away most of the personal benefit of serving abroad.” I couldn’t agree more. Sadly, however, a significant number of military personnel and their families stationed, not in the Middle East but in Europe, mind you, do not consider such a posting the exciting opportunity Mr. Joyner or I might. In fact, many consider living, e.g., in Italy to be a hardship.

I know this first hand, having worked for the U.S. Army for several years in Vicenza, Italy, twenty minutes away from Venice. Of course, dealing with “the local economy” outside the military reservation is daunting for anyone who, like me, struggles with foreign languages. But it goes deeper than that. There, in a country with some of the best cuisine in the world, one enterprising American did very well for himself by opening right across the front gates of the camp, of all things, a Domino’s Pizza franchise.

Edward Hopper

“Calm, silent, stoic, luminous, classic.” -- John Updike

I probably won't be able to get to Boston's Museum of Fine Arts to see the Edward Hopper retrospective (May 6th to August 19th) including nearly a 100 of the artist's paintings, watercolors and prints, but maybe I can make it when the exhibition moves to the National Gallery of Art in September or next year when it travels to the Art Institute of Chicago. Without question, Hopper is my favorite American painter; his work evokes an immediate emotional reaction in me unlike just about any other artist I know except maybe Cezanne.



I suppose I'll have to settle for now on the slide show at the MFA site, the slightly different selection by Christopher Benfey noting the MFA exhibit over at Slate, and of course the images of Hopper's work variously located throughout the internet. I'm not sure I agree with Benfey's comparison of Hopper with the Surrealists, but then I'm one of those "don't know much about art but I know what I like" guys. Oh well. Hopper fans, especially those in the Boston, D.C. or Chicago area, enjoy.

"Con" is short for conservative and "neo" is short for, um, conservative?

Camille Paglia, the liberal feminist liberal feminists love to hate, resumed her former Salon column not too long ago. Paglia’s style and wit reminds me of a fireworks display – brilliant, colorful sparks flying every which way all at once. It suits her well and I’m happy her unique voice is back.

Cohabiting Salon’s virtual digs these days is Glenn Greenwald, whom my friend and former co-blogger Mona much admires but whose pre-Salon blogging I admit to not having much read. His column yesterday, however, reminds me of the indefatigable Paglia, with salvos flying hither and yon over his contention that neoconservatives hold themselves or their compatriots personally above the law much as they have been accused of contending that the state in its war against terrorism must not be constrained by the law of the land. (The latter criticism, I hasten to add, is all too valid.)

Greenwald writes:

[N]eoconservatives automatically and reflexively defend any neoconservative accused of wrongdoing, before any facts are even known. They insist that they have done no wrong, that the real guilty parties are the accusers, and that even where they have done wrong, they should not be punished.

It’s a very, very busy piece of writing and it would take a very long time to give each accusation due deference. I don’t plan to do that here, nor do I mean to contend that there is nothing at all to Greenwald’s concern. Still, where he sees a seemingly vast pattern if not a downright conspiracy among those he calls neoconservatives of both the official and pundit variety and the latter's varied reactions to charges leveled against some of the former, I’m afraid I see little more than politics as usual and nothing uniquely neoconservative or even generally conservative about it at all.

Here’s the quick version of Greenwald’s thesis: Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Conrad Black, Paul Wolfowitz, and several AIPAC officials (with Eliot Abrams thrown in for good measure) have variously been accused, tried or convicted of various wrongdoings, some criminal, some ‘merely’ ethical, at least so far. They, in turn, have been defended “with virtual unanimity” by the “neoconservative” likes of pundits working for FOX News, National Review, the Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic . (Why doesn’t the Weekly Standard make the list? Bill Kristol, a writer who's so Neo that Morpheus probably thinks he's The One, gets mentioned but not his most quintessentially neoconservative platform. What gives?)

First, let’s note that there is a very wide spectrum of wrongdoing involved here. From charges of espionage (the AIPAC case) to the Libby conviction for his statements made in the investigation of the idiotic Plame debacle to the comparatively trivial case of Wolfowitz’s personal / professional conflicts of interest at the World Bank. So, at minimum, this is a very apples and oranges sort of list of wrongful behavior. Okay, apples and oranges are still both fruits; but I'd say selling secrets to foreign governments counts as more egregious conduct than juicing your girlfriend’s salary, wouldn’t you?

For that matter, yeah, I think Libby was a small potatoes fall guy in the Plame affair and should get a pardon, too. Does that make me a neoconservative? I hope the hell not. (Also, just for the record, I don’t really give a rodent’s hindquarters how Wolfowitz’s main squeeze, um, earned her raise at the World Bank -- which I, too, would like to see go bye-bye -- or how much U.N. coffers swag Kofi Annan managed to throw his son’s way, either.)

Greenwald writes, by the way, that Libby was “convicted by an obviously conscientious and unanimous jury.” Yeah, well, you need unanimity for any conviction last time I checked, and it isn’t as though the jury was entirely comfortable in doing its “conscientious” duty under the circumstances, either. I think for good reason. Apparently he disagrees.

But here’s really my basic gripe. Greenwald is simply painting with too broad a brush, or at least it seems so to me, when he rattles off all these various and admittedly conservative defenders of these various current and former administration officials and labels all such writers as neoconservatives. Thusly used, does “neo” do any work at all? Is Jonah Goldberg really a neoconservative? I think the fact would come as news to him (though that isn't to say he might not agree with some neoconservatives about some things some of the time.) Does it matter at all that what he actually wrote about Black was “to the extent I understand the charges, I am all in favor of defending Conrad Black” (my emphasis) and that even that sounds to me like a throw-away line in the context of criticism of a Tina Brown column? Is the entire editorial staff of the Wall Street Journal really comprised now exclusively not only of conservatives but of neoconservatives? Golly! No wonder Rupert Murdoch wants to pay a premium for it.

Look, conservatives, “neo” or otherwise, rising to the defense, sometimes inappropriately, of their fellow conservatives charged with wrongdoing is nothing new in politics, nor is such behavior unique to the right side of the political spectrum. It’s business as usual. Many of the writers Greenwald accuses of unprincipled defense of the likes of Wolfowitz or Libby do indeed qualify under the “neo” rubric, and I probably even agree with him about some of his examples.

But whether everything they or other "mere" conservatives write in such defense stems from the motives Greenwald ascribes to them seems to me a very different sort of thing. It is, after all, possible to do the right thing for the right reason, e.g., write against the onslaught of also dubious and biased liberal media criticism of such persons, even if one is a neoconservative, isn’t it? Or has "neoconservative" simply become a secular catch-all synonym for Satan and his evil minions in some quarters?

I gotta say, this sort of scatter-shot patterning is a lot more fun when Paglia is doing it.

POSTSCRIPT: Greenwald's piece in Salon today, urging Democrats to amend the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and restore habeas corpus is right on the money. I'd only add it would be nice to see more Republicans join in that effort, too. As always, I call 'em as I see 'em.

Q: Are We Not Men?

First there was the Lincoln-Douglas debates, then Kennedy-Nixon, and now...

The Hitchens-Sharpton debate!

The question under debate (“Is God great?”) and the speakers — two men who are often depicted in harsh caricatures by their critics — might have caused some to expect something like a circus. Perhaps surprisingly, it turned out to be the public intellectual event of the evening, a bit like Bertrand Russell vs. C. S. Lewis.

Well, maybe if Russell had a reputation for heavy drinking and blistering invective and Lewis was inclined to make slanderous, race-bating charges. (Are those harsh caricatures?) Anyway, these two theological powerhouses squared off not to discuss politics but to get this pesky God business straightened out, so maybe the better historical reference would be Darrow vs. Bryan in that staged celebrated debate better known as the Scopes "Monkey" Trial.

Speaking of monkeys, from the report of the debate neither Hitchens nor Sharpton managed to make nearly as much of a jackanape of himself as one might have expected. At one point, however, Sharpton did show something less than proper liberal respect for ecumenical diversity when he said, “As for the one Mormon running for office, those who really believe in God will defeat him anyway, so don’t worry, that’s a temporary situation.”

Of course, that might have had more to do with Mitt Romney being a Republican than a Mormon. Still, it looks like Mitt can forget any hopes of getting the National Action Network's endorsement. I guess that also means Romney won't be proxy baptizing the Reverend Al after he goes to his non-Mormon glory. As for Hitch, he wouldn't go anyway, as I'm pretty sure the Latter Day Saints' notion of heaven is an alcohol-free zone.

"But I didn't say Minnie was crazy..." (Re-Updated)

Sometimes the set-up is just too good to be true. Here's FOX News reporting that Hamas is using a rip-off of the world's most famous cartoon character as a propaganda tool on a weekly children's program.

Excerpts from episodes that aired last month show the squeaky voiced mouse egging on children with nationalistic fervor.

"We, tomorrow’s pioneers, will restore to this nation its glory, and we will liberate Al-Aqsa, with Allah’s will, and we will liberate Iraq, with Allah’s will, and we will liberate the Muslim countries, invaded by murderers,” Farfur says in one episode that aired in April.

The message seems to be working. Poems and songs submitted by young viewers contain violent imagery. "Rafah sings ‘Oh, oh,’" one caller says as Farfur mimes carrying a rifle. "Its answer is an AK-47."

So what's a blogger to do? Go with the obvious "This proves what a Mickey Mouse operation Hamas really is!" or the slightly more analytical "If these people think Israel or the U.S. are evil, oppressive powers, just wait until Disney gets through with them!"

I blog, you decide.

UPDATE: The AP (via Der Spiegel) reports, "On Wednesday, after this story went live, the Palestinian Information Minister Mustafa Barghouti announced that the Hamas-affiliated television station al-Aqsa TV had complied with a government request to pull the show 'Tomorrow's Pioneers' for 'review.' He said the use of a cartoon character to urge Palestinian children to fight Israel and work toward world Islamic domination was a 'mistaken approach.'"

See? I told you those Disney lawyers are enough to scare even the Palestinians! Maybe Hamas should look up those out-of-work puppets from Team America as possible replacements. They struck me as mercenaries under the veneer, anyway.

(Hat tip to memeorandum.)

UPDATE REDUX: And now the Hamas television station is refusing to cancel the show in which the "Mickey Mouse look-alike named Farfur and a little girl [not only] urge resistance against Israel and the United States [but also stress] the importance of daily prayers and drinking milk."

My money's still on Disney parachuting in combat hardened airborne lawyers to kick a little Farfur butt; but who knows, maybe a flanking action by Big Dairy is in the works, too.

A Case of Wrongful Life? (Notes on Facts and Values)

Old joke: A doctor tells his patient, "I'm sorry but you only have six months to live." The patient takes the news stoically and asks the doctor how much he owes him. "Five thousand dollars," the doctor says. "But I'll never be able to come up with that much money in six months, Doc!" "Okay, then," says the doctor, "you've got a year."

I said it was an old joke, not a good one. Meanwhile, while I look for better material, John Brandrick, 62, was told two years ago that he had terminal pancreatic cancer and only months to live. Brandrick quit his job, sold his possessions and spent what he thought was his brief, remaining life taking vacations, eating in swank restaurants and such. A year later, his doctors revised their diagnosis. Brandrick was suffering from non-fatal pancreatitis.

Oops!

The AP reports:

"My life has been turned upside down by this," Brandrick said. "I was told I had limited time to live. I got rid of everything — my car, my clothes, everything."

Brandrick said he did not want to take the hospital to court, "but if they have made the wrong decision they should pay me something back."

The hospital said there was "no clear evidence of negligence" on its part.

"Whilst we do sympathize with Mr. Brandrick's position, clinical review of his case has not revealed that any different diagnosis would have been made at the time based on the same evidence," the hospital said in a statement.

Personally, I think the mere fact that the hospital used "whilst" in its denial is pretty clear evidence of negligence. No, not really. It's an interesting case, though. Here's this poor guy in his sixties, naked and carless, expecting to shuffle off this mortal coil any moment now, probably stuffing himself with fatty foods, gadding about in cabs instead of taking the Underground and tipping big all the while when suddenly his imminent demise is snatched from his grasp no doubt just as the money was running short.

Does he have any legal recourse against the hospital? I haven't a clue. Aside from not knowing how the British courts deal with the various potential tort or contract remedies that any first year law student could think of scribbling down on an exam together with all the likely defenses to those causes of action, the more interesting question is whether he should have some sort of legal remedy here.

I don't know whether there is settled case law on this particular situation, but something like it must have happened somewhere before and it would be mildly interesting to know how a court or jury trial resolved similar such situations. Aside from being interesting at that level, however, it is also interesting as a good example (regardless of what, if any, law there is on point) of how knowing all the facts of a situation do not necessarily resolve a dispute arising from that situation.

Moreover, it isn't just a straightforward case of the difference between facts and value judgments, either. It is a case of that, to be sure, but of more as well. There are also applicable legal rules or at least legal rules that we want to say are not "mere" value judgments and that should apply even though we may not know how to apply them. Learning the formal elements of negligence, for example, is easy: the defendant must have owed a duty to the plaintiff, must have breached that duty and that breach of duty must have proximately cause the plaintiff harm. Of course, it can get much more complicated than that, "proximate" is a special bit of legal jargon and so forth, but that's the nutshell version.

Even so, learning the mere rules tells you next to nothing about how to apply them in a particular situation, how they should be applied in this situation. And if we face a new and somehow different set of facts from the facts to which the rules have previously been applied, then we must decide which facts are relevantly similar and which are relevantly different from those prior cases and how much weight to give to those similarities and differences. Herewith, the late philosopher John Wisdom approaching the matter a bit differently:

In courts of law it sometimes happens that opposing counsel are agreed as to the facts and are not trying to settle a question of further fact, are not trying to settle whether the man who admittedly had quarreled with the deceased did or did not murder him, but are concerned with whether Mr. A who admittedly handed his long-trusted clerk signed blank cheques did or did not exercise reasonable care, whether a ledger is or is not a document, whether a certain body was or was not a public authority.

In such cases we notice that the process of argument is not a chain of demonstrative reasoning. It is a presenting and representing of those features of the case which severally co-operate in favour of the conclusion, in favour of saying what the reasoner wishes said, in favour of calling the situation by the name by which he wishes to call it. The reasons are like the legs of a chair, not the links of a chain. Consequently although the discussion is a priori and the steps are not a matter of experience, the procedure resembles scientific argument in that the reasoning is not vertically extensive but horizontally extensive – it is a matter of the cumulative effect of several independent premises, not of the repeated transformation of one or two. And because the premises are severally inconclusive the process of deciding the issue becomes a matter of weighing the cumulative effect of one group of severally inconclusive items against the cumulative effect of another group of severally inconclusive items, and thus lends itself to description in terms of conflicting ‘probabilities’. This encourages the feeling that the issue is one of fact – that it is a matter of guessing from the premises at a further fact, at what is to come. But this is a muddle. The dispute does not cease to be a priori because it is a matter of the cumulative effect of severally inconclusive premises. The logic of the dispute is not that of a chain of deductive reasoning as in a mathematical calculation. But nor is it a matter of collecting from several inconclusive items of information an expectation as to something further, as when a doctor from a patient’s symptoms guesses at what is wrong, or a detective from many clues guesses the criminal. It has its own sort of logic and its own sort of end – the solution of the question at issue is a decision, a ruling by the judge. But it is not an arbitrary decision though the rational connections are neither quite like those in vertical deductions nor like those in inductions in which from many signs we guess at what is to come; and though the decision manifests itself in the application of a name it is no more merely the application of a name than is the pinning on of a medal merely the pinning on of a bit of metal. Whether a lion with stripes is a tiger or a lion is, if you like, merely a matter of the application of a name. Whether Mr. So-and-So of whose conduct we have so complete a record did or did not exercise reasonable care is not merely a matter of the application of a name or, if we choose to say it is, then we must remember that with this name a game is lost and won and a game with very heavy stakes.

(John Wisdom, "Gods," reprinted in Philosophy and Psycho-Analysis, 1969.)

We would like to say, or at least some of us sometimes think we would, that facts and values and the rules we use to apply the latter to the former have some sort of determinate and separate logic to them -- "No ought from an is!" or "Ought implies can!" we might proclaim. If we are very sophisticated indeed, perhaps we pull out some bit of philosophical legerdemain like supervenience to bridge our tidy looking dichotomy between facts and values. At the end of the day, however, whether we come equipped with theory or not, we must decide whether the hospital was negligent or breached some contractual duty and whether Mr. Brandrick's spending-spree was proximately caused by a breach of some such duty or implied promise and thus constituted harm to him now that he will likely live much longer and so forth. That, in turn, requires the application of rules which are neither facts nor values or, if you like, are both.

How should we decide?

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose... or something like that.

I like Newt Gingrich. Really. Yeah, the guy is an incorrigible fountain of often nutty ideas, but he has the courage of his convictions, whatever they might happen to be at any given moment, and unlike 99% of those who have ever been elected to any political office whatever, he’s interesting to listen to. So, for example, when Newt (we were once at the same party when he was still Speaker, so I call him “Newt” and he calls me “Who?”) says there is a political lesson to be learned from the recent French election, I’m interested. Here’s what he says:

In France, voting for change meant voting for the party in office, but not the personality in office. And voting to keep the old order meant voting for the opposition, not for the incumbent party.

This is, I take it, supposed to encourage Republicans to believe that if they offer a bold vision of change they have some hopes of hanging on to the White House in 2008. And Newt, let’s face it, knows something about bold visions of change. Still, Republican presidential hopefuls with any chance whatsoever of getting nominated (sorry, Dr. Paul and, for that matter, Newt) face certain obstacles in adopting this strategy.

First, short of renouncing entirely the big spending domestic programs the Republican’s have enacted in the last six years ("We're sorry we did it and we promise to stop stealing so much from you next time!"), there isn’t all that much on the domestic front Republicans can campaign on and still sound like Republicans. As always, voters don’t want program cuts; they only want tax and spending cuts.

Bush, to his credit, took a whack at Social Security and failed miserably. Voters may still balk at Hillary-Care, but if Republicans have any politically viable plan to reform health care, they’re keeping it better hidden than Nixon’s Secret Plan for Viet Nam. Basically, in other words, the Republican Party has bupkis to offer in terms of bold change on the domestic front.

Then there’s foreign policy. Let’s face it, the current mood in America is to withdraw troops from Iraq, let it go to hell in the handbag it seems destined to leap into at the first opportunity anyway and finally catch that bin Laden guy who used to be in the news all the time. Maybe that’s the right thing to do, maybe it’s the smart thing to do, and maybe not, but it’s pretty much where the average voter is at this point, anyway.

Well, guess what? There’s already a whole other political party gearing up to run on that position and it ain’t the Republicans. Oh sure, Hillary Clinton is staking out the moderate ground on that one for the moment, and that’s the smart thing for a female candidate to do for now; but if the polls keep heading south on Iraq, she’ll be on board with the withdrawal as soon as she can figure out a way to spin it so she doesn’t look weak by doing so. In short, if America wants out of Iraq – and it does – it doesn’t need a Republican to get the job done.

So sorry, Newt. I’m not saying the Democrats are sure to win the White House in 2008, although I think it’s still most likely at this point. Heck, it isn’t as though the Democrats have offered much yet besides not being Republicans and the elections are still a political light-year away. But if Americans do want significant political change in 2008, and except for a couple of key issues I’m not at all sure they do, they’re not likely even to look for it, let alone find it this time around in the Republican Party.

And Don't Even Get Me Started on The Price of Textbooks!

If I were a real economist, as opposed to someone who merely pretends to understand economics on the internet, I’d want to know why, since 1958, college tuition has continued to increase at an average rate of 8% and somewhere between 1.2 and 2.1 times the general inflation rate.

William F. Buckley, also no economist, offers the following analysis:

The marketplace rule is that competition reduces prices. Well, the marketplace rule is hogwash when it comes to higher education. The explanations for this are multifarious. 1) More Americans, especially in the two decades after the war, decided to attend college, making for great rises in demand. 2) Choice colleges are hotly competed for, giving them a relative immunity to market pressures. 3) Ever since the fifties, teachers have been demanding a living wage. 4) College perquisites increased; academic offerings for students with exotic interests are understandable, but some college administrators think themselves delinquent if they do not offer a course in jujitsu.

The free marketeer is tempted to address the problem with the kind of fatalistic glibness that makes us so offensive to so many fellow citizens. He will say: So what? There is the demand — a lot of students desiring a lot of things. And there is the supply — 4,140 colleges and universities nationwide. Obviously these colleges would not survive if the money needed to operate them were not provided. So what we have arrived at is an amalgam of contributors to the students’ needs.

The rest of Buckley’s column addresses that amalgam, including the increased role of the federal government in guaranteeing and subsidizing loans since the 1960s. Though he doesn’t especially stress this factor, my instincts are that it is crucial in understanding why the cost of college, together with the cost of health care, has consistently outpaced overall inflation.

Backtracking a bit for a moment, first, it is certainly true that more Americans and more Americans as a percentage of the overall population have sought a college education in the past fifty years. But that is true of the increase in demand for all sorts of goods in the last half century, too, some of which have actually decreased in real price over the same period.

As with health care, however, higher education is labor intensive, also using lots of high capital-investment labor, at that. Still, when you look at the PhD glut in some academic fields and the increased reliance on contract instructors for many undergraduate courses, the similarity between, say, hospitals and universities begins to shrink. So, also, while some academic disciplines require heavy capital investment, especially science, engineering and medicine, by contrast, law schools (which, by the way, almost invariably run at a profit) and most of the humanities and social sciences operate much as they did fifty years ago. If anything, computer assisted legal research has diminished the need for the one major capital expense of previous generations of law schools; namely, law libraries.

Choice colleges are indeed vastly more competitive than they were decades ago, but choice colleges represent a tiny fraction of the four thousand colleges from which students can themselves choose. Okay, so maybe Yale or Stanford or other brand-name universities can set their tuition pretty much wherever they please, but does that mean No-Name College can do the same?

George Washington University in Washington, D.C. charges nearly two thousand dollars more in annual tuition than Harvard ($35,630 vs. $33,709). GWU is a good school with a good reputation, don’t get me wrong; but it certainly doesn’t carry the same cachet as an Ivy League school, let alone better. What permits it and hundreds of much less prestigious schools to charge tuition comparable to that of the nation’s most elite schools?

Buckley’s third observation, that “since the fifties, teachers have been demanding a living wage,” is especially amusing from a man who ten years ago wrote, “Mr. Carey insisted that part-time workers for United Parcel Service earned ‘too little to live on,’ which prompts the question, Why aren't they dead?” Still, we know what he means.

Collective bargaining of one sort or another plus the genuinely rising value of academic stars over the years have largely eliminated the notion of an academic career as one of genteel poverty, at least for those who successfully run the tenure gauntlet. Still, unless fifty years of higher than inflation raises in tuition can be accounted for by faculty salaries, there must be more at play than full professors now earning six-figure incomes at many universities.

Finally, there is what I would call the amenity issue. There’s something to be said about this. College dormitories weren’t air conditioned when I was an undergraduate (and, yes, air conditioning had in fact been invented back then), nor were student lounges, dining facilities and many other amenities nearly as comfortable or in some cases downright posh as they are today.

Still, not counting the one significant and comparatively inexpensive option of community colleges, it is odd that in the absence of some extrinsic factor there would not be more price competition at least among the vast majority of schools that don’t make the cut in the U.S. News rankings every year. And the most likely culprit would appear to be ready access to subsidized loans.

Universities are free to set tuition at a level that factors in the student’s ability to borrow money. Were that money not readily available to prospective students and the result was a decrease in the number of students applying for or accepting admissions offers, there would be at least that much more pressure on the schools to cut or at least contain costs. In a crude sense, it is as though car dealerships knew that young car buyers could count on Mom and Dad (or Uncle Sam) kicking in a few thousand dollars toward the negotiated purchase price. How do you think the average dealer would use such information? Is there any reason to expect universities to act differently?

One critical factor missing from my argument is whether the amount available to borrow has increased commensurately over the years. The student loan market is a hodge-podge and the sorts of loans available to students have varied over the years. Thus, I admit I haven't been able to determine whether, as I suspect, increased tuition costs have successfully put upward pressure on loan limits. I know that students may borrow more nominal dollars today than in my student days, but I don't have any clear data as to how borrowing limit increases over the years, adjusted for inflation, have tracked tuition increases. [UPDATE: Reader AC directs my attention to a CATO Report that appears to close the gap here.]

In any case, I don’t contend that this is the only or even the major factor contributing to rising college costs, but only that it is likely one of the significant factors in play. Higher education is, after all, still a market. We shouldn’t be surprised when government involvement perversely affects that market’s prices or when the unintended consequence of attempting to make college affordable for some is making it less affordable for most.

To the Editor: Dear Sir, Who Cares?

In Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell's latest column, Online Venom or Vibrant Speech?, Howell writes, “Two important journalism values -- free, unfettered comment and civil, intelligent discourse -- are colliding.”

Oh dear. One might ask, only rhetorically mind you, just whose free, unfettered comments journalism has ever really valued?

I grew up with the Post, and I’ve read a number of Howell’s columns and she strikes me as no better and no worse than her WaPo predecessors. Putatively appointed to serve as mediators between the newspaper and its often critical and frustrated readership, ombudsmen such as Howell tend to rise from the ranks of working journalists and thus bring with them both the common prejudices of the trade and the typical obliviousness to those prejudices that especially infuriate their customers.

I don’t mean ideological bias. Yes, the Mainstream Media is biased toward the left, but journalism’s more fundamental problems would remain were the press right-leaning or dead center, whatever that would mean. Too heavy reliance on certain sorts of sources and too much skepticism regarding other sources, sloppy fact-checking and the tendency to ignore for as long as possible and then downplay as much as possible whenever reportage is shown to be erroneous or worse are all endemic problems with the profession. Thus, ombudsmen like Howell tend to see their role, wittingly or not, as one of explaining to critical readers why the newspaper is right and the readers are wrong. Actual criticism of their newspaper’s behavior tends to be both rare and timid, sometimes to the point of being almost apologetic to their colleagues.

On the topic of reader feedback, especially comments posted on the Post’s website, Howell writes:

Complaints first came from the newsroom. Reporters don't appreciate the often rude feedback, which I get, too. (A sample reader comment on my column last week: "I think we can all agree after reading Howell's lame comments week after week that the Post should save money by eliminating her position entirely. She is worse than a dupe.")

But the reader is wrong; Howell is no worse than a dupe. Okay, I admit that’s pretty snarky, but the real issue isn’t Howell. The real issue is that the very concept of a news ombudsman is a rear-guard tactic and a failed attempt at providing the appearance of objectivity and accountability. It doesn't matter. Thanks to the internet, the public no longer needs a media-provided conduit to its editorial desks. Whether the Post continues to publish reader comments at the end of its articles on its website is as irrelevant as whether it continues to publish Letters to the Editor in its print edition. (Which, by the way, newspapers do not print out of any sense of professional responsibility but because they increase circulation.)

Working journalists are absolutely essential to the real business of journalism, which is basic news reportage. But the media no longer needs to pretend to be self-correcting, nor can it withstand or control the forces that monitor and continually criticize and correct its work product any longer. Free, unfettered comment will continue apace, whether or not Howell or her superiors at the Post find it sufficiently civil or intelligent. I might even agree with them more often than not that much of such comment is neither. Fortunately, my opinion on the subject doesn’t matter any more than theirs does.

Constant Viewer: Next

It’s hardly up to his Oscar-winning performance, but once again Nicholas Cage squeezes a worthy showing out of a role that has him, well, leaving Las Vegas. What’s more, Julianne Moore reprises her FBI Special Agent Clarice Starling persona, albeit as Special Agent (they’re all special in the FBI) Callie Ferris this time around in Next.

Cage plays Cris Johnson, a stage magician with the unexplained power of seeing his own life two minutes ahead of time. Better still, knowing how his life unfolds if he zigs one way permits Johnson to zag instead and thus change his short-term future. This permits him to perform his low budget lounge act in Las Vegas and supplement his earnings with a bit of low stakes gambling on the side. Meanwhile, nondescript but decidedly European looking nuclear terrorists are on the loose. Somehow, also unexplained, both the FBI and the terrorists get wind of Johnson’s uncanny ability and set out to get to him either to prevent or keep him from preventing the bomb from causing eight million deaths. Johnson wants nothing to do with any of it and so flees Las Vegas, finding love interest Liz (Jessica Biel) en route to the rest of this preposterous and yet still entertaining movie directed by Lee Tamahori (Mulholland Falls, Along Came A Spider). Peter Falk has a nice though small role in the film, as well.

Philip K. Dick is currently the hardest working dead author in Hollywood, his stories having provided the basis for Impostor, Minority Report, Paycheck, A Scanner Darkly and now Next, all in just the last five years. Not bad for a guy who died twenty-five years ago and thus can’t take lunches with Hollywood players. Next is based on his 1954 short story “The Golden Man,” which Constant Viewer admits to not having read and thus will leave to others to say where Dick ends and the screenwriters begin here.

The thing about Next is that the viewer must completely suspend disbelief, and then just sit back and enjoy the ride. In return, there are three or four really fun scenes in Next that develop the potential of Johnson’s short range clairvoyance splendidly and Cage, himself, who takes the absurd premise and offers a convincing performance of a man whose gift (as Tony Shalub’s Monk would say) is also a curse. Movie goers who have already weathered Spider-Man 3 and are looking for something else to see until Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End opens on May 25th, will likely enjoy seeing what's Next.

Excuse Me While I Kiss the Sky

The Washington Monument is some 555 ft. tall. It is the tallest building in Washington and legal restrictions practically guarantee it will always remain so. It is not, however, the highest artificial elevation in Washington, that honor going to the top of the Gloria in Excelsis Tower of the Washington National Cathedral at some 676 ft. above sea level. Still, the Washington Monument towers over the National Mall, which is not really a shopping center except for K Street lobbyists.



But the borders of the federal city were not always as they are today, originally including a part of what is now the City of Alexandria and Arlington County in Virginia. In recognition that the federal government would never grow large enough to need all that land, the Virginia contribution to the city was retroceded to the Commonwealth in 1847. Thus Northern Virginians enjoy the dubious benefits of taxation with representation denied District of Columbia residents.

Arlington County is an unusual place on several grounds. Best known as the location of both Arlington National Cemetery and the Pentagon, it is one of the best educated “cities” in America (having a county form of government but being an urban area in demographic fact) with excellent public schools and the highest percentage of residents with graduate degrees in the nation. It is also one of the smallest counties in the U.S. at some 26 square miles, roughly the size of Manhattan.

There, however, with one minor exception, its comparison with Manhattan ends. The exception being that what little high-rise cityscape one finds inside the Capital Beltway is to be found primarily in Arlington County, especially that part of Arlington called Rosslyn.



Rosslyn lies directly across the Potomac River from Georgetown and is connected to Washington by the Francis Scott Key Bridge. It is in the local Washington news now because of controversy over plans to build two new high-rise buildings, one thirty stories tall, the other 31 stories in an effort to revitalize the area. The taller building would be 388 ft. tall, 76 ft. taller than the currently tallest building there.

Taller buildings might pose some problems for the flight paths of aircraft using Reagan National Airport, but most of the outcry is over the aesthetics of high-rise construction as it might affect the overall aesthetics of Washington. The Washington Post refers to these buildings and others already in Rosslyn as skyscrapers, absurdly comparing them to the Sears Tower and the Empire State Building. Only someone suffering from acute vertigo would find that comparison apt, but we’ll let that go for now.



The first such “skyscraper” in Rosslyn was the Key Bridge Marriott hotel, shown above. Built during my childhood – did I mention Arlington is my hometown? – it was the subject of great controversy for much the same reasons the proposed construction faces opposition today. At 14 stories tall, roughly half the height of the proposed new buildings, one gets dizzy just looking at it, doesn’t one? Okay, maybe not.

On a personal note, I will always have fond memories of the Key Bridge Marriott because it happened to be the location where the first great love of my life and I celebrated the occasion of her 18th birthday. (She later ditched me, found someone else and lived happily ever after. The second great love of my life, by contrast, suffered the great misfortune of being my wife for nearly thirty years now.) Nostalgia aside, however, the cityscape of Rosslyn not only does not overshadow the aesthetics of Washington architecture, it contributes to it. I can’t speak to questions of air traffic safety, but the notion that a thirty-some storey building or two will be a blight on the landscape of the Washington area is palpable nonsense.

That said, unlike Manhattan where real skyscrapers arose because land was at such a premium, there is no practical need for skyscrapers in most of the cities where they have been built. Tourists wishing to get a splendid view of Washington might well flock to the observation deck of a thirty-one storey building in Arlington, but that is hardly a compelling reason to build one.

No. The reason we build modern skyscrapers, unlike the reason we once built towering cathedrals or even soaring monuments to our Founding Fathers, is because the skyscraper is the ultimate symbol of Western civilization. It is, if you will, our monument not to gods or heroes but to ourselves as mere mortals; to our capabilities, our aspirations and our dreams. The 9/11 terrorists understood that, and that is precisely why we should continue to build them now.

Brutal, Barbaric Savagery

Shocking but hardly unusual evidence of why neither Iraq, nor much of the rest of the Middle East will be joining what counts in the West as the community of civilized nations any time soon, the U.K. Daily Mail reports of a 17 year old girl in Kurdistan brutally stoned to death for the crime or sin, take your pick, of having a romance with a boy of a different religion.

(As is nearly always the case now, the video from which the still shots shown on the first linked article were taken is also available for viewing, if you have the stomach for such things, here.)

Yes, my own culture and its people have too often committed or condoned and sometimes still commit or condone different sorts of brutal, savage acts; so, no, I won't be taking this opportunity to take a shot at cultural relativism. Let's just say instead that stonings, female genital mutilations and beheadings are among the many reasons why, not only do "they" not want to be like "us," but most of us don't have a clue as to how profound those cultural differences are.

Aside from their evidence of crimes, the only ethically legitimate reason to look at videos such as these (and I would just as quickly say to view evidence of our own acts of savage brutality) is to get a better sense of the human condition as it all too often really is.

Her Majesty's a Pretty Nice Girl

Every fifty years, just like clockwork, the Queen of England shows up at my alma mater, originally named “Their Majesties’ Royall Colledge of William and Mary in Virginia.” Founded in 1693, William & Mary discreetly dropped the “Their Majesties’ Royall” part after a bit of trouble with England back in the 1770s and then at some unknown point finally noticed and corrected the “Colledge” typo, too. Needless to say, the real King William and Queen Mary have long ago, as my Baptist relatives would say, gone to glory and, just like my rich Uncle D.A., left not so much as a farthing in their wills to the College, either. Still, the royal name remains and suffices for subsequent English monarchs to drop by when they’re in the neighborhood.

As was Elizabeth II, here to help honor the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown (as she was for the 350th) and soon to be dropping in at the White House for tea and chicken-fried steak sandwiches. No word yet on whether any of Pocahontas’s ancestors descendants [thanks, Seamus] were invited either to the Jamestown celebration or the White House fête or whether discussion of lax immigration laws are on the agenda.

I’m not sure what value the perpetuation of royalty still contributes to Great Britain. Some argue it is important as a matter of national identity, others argue it helps tourism. Maybe. It’s their business and not mine, in any case. I frankly feel a little sorry for Elizabeth Windsor. By all accounts she’s had a pretty stressful and a pretty boring life. Most celebrities find at least some private space where they can kick off their shoes and scratch where it itches, but I get the impression this poor woman needs to retreat to the smallest room in the palace to get that sort of privacy.

Our own Founding Fathers, who themselves have taken on a sort of Arthurian mythos by now, were pretty clear that titles of nobility were a bad idea for the new republic and made a point of making them unconstitutional. Of course, between the progressives’ notion of a “living Constitution” and our own George II’s increasingly imperial view of the presidency, this might not last much longer. Still, we tend to reserve our fawning admiration for actors, musicians and athletes whose celebrity can in at least some tenuous sense be said to have been achieved rather than inherited. Heck, these days it’s hardly worth even being born a Kennedy any more.

Other people’s royalty, on the other hand, continue to fascinate Americans. Many of us are impressed even by such minor honorifics as knighthoods and take to calling actor Anthony Hopkins “Sir Anthony” at the drop of a fava bean. Hopkins is a fine actor, but let’s face it, his stardom and hence his knighthood rests on having played the world’s most famous psychotic cannibal. (Lucky for Helen Mirren, I suppose, she got her damehood in 2003, long after the death of Elizabeth I and before her staring role in The Queen.) Though far from a psychotic cannibal, one has to wonder whether Mick Jagger quite personifies the knightly ideals of chivalry, either. Oh well, there’s always been a bit of supply and demand about these things. According to Debrett's Peerage & Baronetage, in the 13th century knights were expected to do military service and so many men therefore declined the honor that King Henry III began imposing fines on those who refused.

Anyway, while her Virginia visit is already concluded and you’re probably not invited to the big white-tie dinner at the White House on Monday, just in case you do bump into the Queen while she’s in the U.S. (she’s going to the Kentucky Derby, I hear), the Commonwealth of Virginia has posted a brief royal etiquette guide.

Oh, and if you are going to be at the White House Monday night and especially if you’re going to be hosting the dinner, I thought I might add a few more etiquette tips to the list:

1. Do not refer to your Guest of Honor as Queenie.

2. Do not have Queen’s Greatest Hit’s piped in over the White House stereo.

3. Do not invite the Queen to “pull my finger.” (The Duke of Edinburgh does this all the time at the palace and it really ticks the Queen off.)

4. Do not refer to the twins as “my own princess problems, if you know what I mean?”

5. Do not demand she show you a Five Pound note to prove it’s really her.

6. Do not ask her if it’s true J.K Rowling is worth a lot more than she is now.

7. Do not serve Steak Diane.

8. Do not offer a summer vacation swap of the White House for Buckingham Palace.

9. Do not ask if Prince Charles is planning to run for king when she retires. And finally,

10. Do not ask if she has any suggestions where you and Laura can get a good price on a couple of crowns.