Neil the Ethical Werewolf—an unbeatable name, really—had a post the other day picking apart the presidential primary process. Indeed, it ought to be picked apart. At the same time, the solutions usually presented—break Iowa's lock on the process! Include Southern states! Rotating regional primaries!—always seem a tad unimaginative to me, even if they're the most realistic. At the very least we ought to think about and reject radical changes to the entire system before we resign ourselves to just shuffling a few states around here and there.

The main problem with simply breaking Iowa's death-grip on the primary process is this. Iowan caucus-goers are unrepresentative of the larger electorate, true. But any state's primary voters would be unrepresentative, mainly because primary voters are largely the "party base," not swing voters or "undecideds," and that's going to pull the nominees a little further away from the median voter. According to this data-set (pdf), even in southern states Democratic primary voters tend to be older, more liberal, better educated, less white, and poorer than the general electorate. And obviously more politically active. Indeed, Iowa got a lot of heat for being "too antiwar" in 2004, but regardless of what you think about this, primary voters in South Carolina and Virginia were actually more dovish on Iraq than Iowans. Now that's not necessarily a bad thing, and it's probably true that these southern primary voters may still be more representative of the general electorate than Iowan caucus-goers, but no matter what states go first, you're still getting a decent tug away from the "center".

The defense here is that there should be some sort of system in place to reward party activists. Eh, I'm not convinced this is always a sound principle. Why, exactly, should people who spend more time—have more time—to engage in Democratic activities get a greater say in the process? That same principle, mind you, justifies the undue influence of the wealthy, better-educated, and elderly over politics in general. It's not instantly defensible, and I don't think there's anything intrinsically unfair about throwing open the primary process to the wider electorate—heck, even include Republican voters. There is a danger of scheming conservatives hijacking the whole process and throwing a whole chunk of votes towards, say, Kucinich, but I don't think that's a serious danger.

Of course, that's all based on the assumption that primary voters pick the candidate they personally want to see in office. In 2004, that wasn't true at all—most primary voters became mini-pundits, basing their picks to a large extent on who they thought would win the general election. (So you saw all sorts of exit polls indicating that most Dean voters actually liked their man, whereas Kerry voters, not so enthused, but attracting to that glowing white obelisk we all called… "electability.") Fair enough, but if that's going to be the dominant trend, I'd almost rather leave the selection to people who are better suited to this sort of guesswork: namely, the delegates themselves. Go back to the old pre-1968 days of smoke-filled rooms and let party officials pick the candidate at the convention. Yeah, it's less democratic, but hey, I'd rather get a Democratic nominee who can win the general election than a nominee chosen by the people. Within reason. Of course, the "wisdom of crowds" thesis suggests that a wide swath of primary voters could well be better at guessing who that electable candidate might be, but I think the bandwagon effect—later states latch on to what former states have done—cancels this out.

(Another possible reason to abolish primaries and go back to smoke-filled rooms? Money. With the exception of Dean and I think one other, though I forget who, since 1976 the candidate who started the primary with the most money has won the election. Also, lots of people like the primaries because it "tests" candidates with various political problems and surprises along the way. Well, humbug. Frankly, I don't really want a nominee who can solve thorny, campaign-type "obstacle courses." I want a president who can, you know, govern. That's not to say the old way of choosing candidates was flawless, but it's worth a revisit.)

Meanwhile, there's no reason why the Democrats can't add things like single-transferable vote schemes to the primary process. If anything, doing so would make the primaries more likely to pick the sort of candidate who can win in a general election—since a candidate who has, say, only the second-most number of first-place votes but the overwhelming majority of second place votes, likely has broader appeal in a wide-open race, and thus more likely to do well in a general election. I think it's been shown via computer simulation that the single-vote method for a wide field—which is what the current primaries do—only picks the Condorcet winner about half the time. (i.e., the candidate who would beat every other candidate one-on-one.) Either the single-transferable vote or even approval voting do much better.

Alternatively, I'd be open to thinking about a primary process like that in New York City (or even in the French presidential election) where all candidates from all parties run in a general primary, and then the top two vote-getters, regardless of party affiliation, move onto the general election. This would be especially valuable, I think, in House and Senate races, and make it harder for incumbents to automatically win re-election. On the other hand, you'd have chaos, but I'm all in favor of a bit of chaos.

Since rapid-fire linking is where the action is these days, or something, here's a bunch of nifty posts and articles found around the internet.

Steve Sailer dissects voting patterns and suggests that Republicans—who tend to do well among married couples and families with children, and in places where housing is plentiful—ought to make their stand on "affordable family formation". Presumably Democrats could make a stand on this as well; I'm not exactly sure where all the causal arrows are pointing here. Anyway, interesting analysis; Sailer also notes that "the spread of immigrants into the middle of the country puts once-solid Republican states [Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Georgia, North Carolina] into play."

Elizabeth Anderson channels Hayek to… well, defend the liberal welfare state it seems: "In Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. 2, Hayek argued that, for a society to secure the liberty of all, its distributive rules cannot aim at achieving some pre-established pattern of distribution based on individual need, desert, or merit. Instead, they should be purely procedural in form. Set up a system of fair, impersonal rules governing our interactions and applicable to all, let people choose freely from among the opportunities generated by acting within the constraints of the rules, and whatever distributions of goods result from following the rules will be just." So that rules out communism but not much else, no?

Ah... chess tactics. For the record, my chess game consists entirely of sneaky knight forks, primarily because they're so delightfully infuriating, and my winning strategy really involves making my opponents lose their cool and start doing stupid stuff. Which is why I never challenge anyone over the age of 12.

Jon Henke's much-linked post on torture deserves yet more links.

Fish! (Long story, but true.)

I've spent the last hour clicking around Pharyngula's fun little carnival. Fascinating stuff, especially this linked-to post on the Epoch Times revolutionaries in China.

And... a fun article about just how totally awesome math is, by way of profiling Dartmouth's Dan Rockmore. Except, at least while I was there, Rockmore didn't actually teach any math classes at Dartmouth—he taught Computer Science. And he's wrong about the slicing the cake bit. No matter; the rest is quite good.

As someone who knows approximately nothing about corporate governance, I found this paper (pdf), by Paul Gompers, Joy Ishii, and Andrew Metrick, illuminating in its own way. Firms with stronger shareholder rights, it seems, do much better performance-wise than their autocratic peers:

Corporations are republics. The ultimate authority rests with voters (shareholders). These voters elect representatives (directors) who delegate most decisions to bureaucrats (managers). As in any republic, the actual power-sharing relationship depends upon the specific rules of governance. One extreme, which tilts toward a democracy, reserves little power for management and allows shareholders to quickly and easily replace directors. The other extreme, which tilts toward a dictatorship, reserves extensive power for management and places strong restrictions on shareholders’ ability to replace directors. Presumably, shareholders accept restrictions of their rights in hopes of maximizing their wealth, but little is known about the ideal balance of power.

From a theoretical perspective, there is no obvious answer. In this paper, we ask an empirical question -- is there a relationship between shareholder rights and corporate performance? Twenty years ago, large corporations had little reason to restrict shareholder rights. Proxy fights and hostile takeovers were rare, and investor activism was in its infancy. By rule, most firms were shareholder democracies, but in practice management had much more of a free hand than they do today. The rise of the junk bond market in the 1980s disturbed this equilibrium by enabling hostile-takeover offers for even the largest public firms. In response, many firms added takeover defenses and other restrictions of shareholder rights. Among the most popular were those that stagger the terms of directors, provide severance packages for managers, and limit shareholders’ ability to meet or act. During the same time period, many states passed antitakeover laws giving firms further defenses against hostile bids. By 1990, there was considerable variation across firms in the strength of shareholder rights. The takeover market subsided in the early 1990s, but this variation remained in place throughout the decade….

We combine a large set of governance provisions into an index which proxies for the strength of shareholder rights, and then study the empirical relationship between this index and corporate performance. Our analysis should be thought of as a “long-run event study”: we have democracies and dictatorships, the rules stayed mostly the same for a decade -- how did each type do? Our main results are to demonstrate that, in the 1990s, democracies earned significantly higher returns, were valued higher, and had better operating performance.

As they say, though, "the cat jumped up on the table and the vase fell" doesn't mean the cat broke the vase—though that is a handy way to "alert" the people from whom you're renting a house that you broke their vase, ahem—and just because autocratic firms did worse in the 1990s, doesn't mean autocracy was the cause. Of course. Trying to pin this down though, the researchers do find that "autocratic" firms engaged in "an unexpectedly large amount of inefficient investment in the 1990s." I still don't quite understand why this might be: is it because entrenched managers are more likely to make a lot of moves for their own private, rather than for their shareholders', benefit? Hm. Meanwhile, the most fun hypothesis here—that corporate insiders realized their firms were going to do badly in the 1990s and hence gave themselves strong protections from shareholders—seems to have no evidence in support of it. Sad; I enjoy the truly dastardly stuff. But the lesson is clear here: democracy is the best antidote to these freedom-hating regimes.

Er, so first we were treated to the strange spectacle specter of Newt Gingrich and Hillary Clinton holding hands and collaborating on health care issues, and now I see the AFL-CIO and the Heritage Foundation are butting heads and thinking up ways to expand health care for the uninsured. Well, okay. I also heard some very liberal thoughts from the mouths of some otherwise staunch conservatives this weekend, on immigration and pharmaceuticals, so perhaps the big progressive coalition's coming sooner than we think.

At any rate, if Jonathan Gruber's right about this, the most cost effective method of extending health coverage to the currently uninsured is simply to expand Medicaid. But instead of wonking out, let's do a bit of fretting that the debate about health care for the poor has become much too narrow. "Cover the uninsured and all will be well." Well, no. Many low-income mothers and children are already eligible for Medicaid, and don't take full advantage of it. Partly that's because the eligibility rules are often stiflingly complex—acting as a deterrent more than anything else—and partly because state workers often simply deny people care, to keep costs down. I doubt this is a problem somehow intrinsic to Medicaid—private insurance companies are just as good at weaseling out of coverage if it redounds to their benefits. So long as we have a patchwork system of coverage, the poor and the sick are always going to be booted around.

But there are all sorts of other reasons why insurance doesn't guarantee good health care for the poor. As these researchers showed, it's very often difficult for people in poor areas to get access to good primary care. People don't have all the time in the world; if care isn't convenient and accessible, then a person's far more likely to shrug off a nasty cough or limp than spend hours going to see a doctor. That goes triple for someone with two retail jobs, a one hour commute each way, and kids to take care of. Plus, as economists Dana Goldman and Dana Lakdawalla argue here, the poor tend to be less adept at taking care of themselves and using care efficiently, largely for reasons of education. (If you're interested, take a look at that paper—it implies that universal coverage alone could well worsen health inequality.)

To a large extent, then, who cares about the uninsured as such? That's overstating it, since a lot of people obviously do need affordable coverage, but it's certainly not the case that if everyone received decent coverage, everyone would start receiving drastically better health care. For many low-income families, that's potentially way off the mark. So perhaps it's time to start toying around with paternalistic solutions like better education about health, more public screenings (especially in school), more public health clinics, or the like. Newt? Heritage? Robert Fogel does a lot of good work along these lines, while reminding everyone to keep their eyes on the ball—the focus here should be on inequalities and inadequacies in health care, of which insurance plays only one part. Important, but still just one part.

Following one of the comment threads earlier this week, I decided to finally read Master of the Senate, part of Robert Caro's massive ongoing biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, while I was traveling. Marvelous stuff! And Johnson was indeed the master.

Still, one question: to what great and noble end was all this "Master of the Senate" stuff? True, under his leadership (1953-1960) Johnson managed to wedge a few important bits of progressive legislation—a minimum wage increase and the disability portion of Social Security—through a chamber that had not passed any important bits of progressive legislation since the early days of Roosevelt's first term. But most liberal programs were watered down to the point of irrelevancy, and the northeastern liberals were duly abused and marginalized all throughout the '50s. Fair enough, but with such Democratic dominance—especially after they won massive majorities in the 1958 midterms—you would expect more substance. Sadly, no. Thanks Lyndon! Though it's a good reminder that liberals have far, far more influence and power in the Senate nowadays—even under the past two Congresses—than they ever did during the Truman/Eisenhower administrations.

Anyway, that leaves the 1957 civil rights act, the first of its kind in some 80 years, as Johnson's major liberal accomplishment in the Senate, and Caro really points out how difficult it was for the Majority Leader to finesse a compromise between the Paul Douglas liberals and the southern Democrats. Again, marvelous stuff. But what if he hadn't finessed a compromise? Presumably, the other southern Democrats would've just joined Strom Thurmond in filibustering the bill altogether, so then the Democrats would've been pilloried in the upcoming midterms, and the GOP would've captured the African-American vote, as per Richard Nixon's strategy at the time, and presumably retaken the Senate. That, in turn, would've pushed the southern Democrats off the Senate chairmanships, perhaps pulled in enough votes to shatter a southern filibuster, and in the end made it much more likely that the Senate could've passed a much stronger civil rights bill than what actually came out in 1957—mostly a toothless voting act that was all but unenforceable—sooner rather than later.

So then, and I'm just guessing here, you have a big realignment in which Republicans become the pro-business, pro-civil rights, and perhaps mildly pro-labor party (the AFL-CIO, as Caro tells it, was willing to make civil rights its number one priority at the time, even at the expense of certain labor provisions). At this point, alternate history gets too murky to say for sure, but presumably the Republicans would've remained strongly conservative on economic issues, there would've been no unified liberal political coalition in the 1960s (no Goldwater!), and hence: no Great Society, no Medicaid, no Medicare, no War on Poverty. Many northeastern and midwestern progressives would've still stuck with the Democrats for some time (though some would've joined the Republicans, perhaps), but their influence would be much reduced. So in the long term, perhaps that 1957 act meant a lot more than simply getting one foot in the civil rights door. I don't know. Good book, though.

Right. I'm heading off to Annapolis for a few days, to watch my younger brother graduate from some little tugboat school or other. Should be fun! But it's possible there will be no blogging 'round these parts until Sunday, unless I manage to leech someone's wireless signal along the way. But before leaving, I do want to say many, many thanks to readers here for all the truly wonderful comment threads over the past few weeks—I've learned far more about valuing forests, inequality, and when and when not to use the Force than I really thought possible. I'm very grateful. Alright, cheers.

I see Leif Wellington Haase of the Century Foundation has put out a new proposal for mandatory individual health insurance. Awesome. Rather than list all the problems with this sort of approach, though, I think I'll just link to the best argument against individual mandates that I've ever read, by... Leif Wellington Haase. Uh, right.

Cute games aside, it seems that Haase has changed his mind, no longer favoring single-payer health care, because of the innovation question. If guv'mint took over the health insurance system, he thinks, it would just tamp down costs and reimbursements—especially when fiscal stability was at stake and those crazy politicians needed to keep spending down—and hence, no one would have any incentive to innovate or try out nifty new health technologies. Life would suck! Haase's plan gets around this, supposedly, by requiring all private insurers to offer three health plans—basic, pretty good, and shiny Cadillac—with the expensive Cadillac tier being the one that motivates and drives technological innovation.

Well, okay. But look, is it actually true that single-payer plans squelch innovation? Let's do anecdotes first, since they're fun. Look at this list. Seems like our single-payer neighbor up north has been pulling off all sorts of surgical firsts over the years: first heart-valve transplant, first double lung transplants, ah, they were even the first to use pig liver tissue to keep a patient alive! If that's not ingenuity, what is, etc. On the other hand, our dear single-payer friends across the Atlantic, what with their NHS and all that, don't seem to be winning any of the all-important transplant races. Tsk tsk! And of course, the first transplant ever was done in Boston—'twas a kidney—so perhaps the U.S. is in fact the alpha male here and everyone else is just following our lead. Or something.

But enough transplant silliness. When all is said and done, the United States is probably vastly more innovative than the rest, for some generally accepted value of "innovative." (We'll quibble with that later.) But why is this? In theory, it's because the private insurance system in the United States more or less forces medical providers to compete not on cost but on quality. Hence, innovation! But notice: there's nothing intrinsic about single-payer that prevents this from happening—you can have government take over the insurance industry and still leave a competitive provider market, as is the case in Canada and France. In France, I believe, you're also allowed to purchase additional private insurance to pay for nifty extras and experimental surgery and the like, so really, there's nothing here that necessarily limits innovation from occurring, in theory.

Shifting tracks a bit, when it comes down to it, the American advantage in innovation seems to come from a few sources. One, we have a bunch of top notch universities that attract world-class medical researchers, many of whom receive plum research subsidies from... the federal government. (The National Institute for Health alone shelled out over $28 billion in research money last year.) That's important. I don't know offhand how important it is, but this isn't the sort of thing that would necessarily just disappear if we switched to a single-payer system. (Pfizer claims that 57 percent of all biomedical research comes from private industry -- fine, but is this the sort of thing that could easily be supplanted by public subsidies? If so, we're talking, what, $50 billion a year? In the grand health care spending scheme, that's peanuts, and could in theory come from savings elsewhere in switching to single-payer.)

Second, at the moment many relatively well-off Americans don't seem to mind letting health care costs balloon—in part because those Americans who do consume a lot health care and drive medical innovation generally don't pay a lot out-of-pocket. This is also important. It's worth noting that many of today's health care technologies simply don't help control costs. Exactly the opposite, in fact. And that's presumably because, as noted earlier, providers largely compete on quality rather than cost. So costs go up as niftier and niftier technologies get hauled out.

Now many conservatives want people to pay more out of pocket in order to rein in private health care spending. Okay, fine, but then presumably providers are going to start competing on cost—since that's what people will be looking for—and the character of technological innovations is going to be transformed, from the current paradigm of quality-improving innovations to innovations that involve new and cheaper variations on old techniques. Again, that's just a theory, but it seems like a sound one, and not something I think many conservatives have grappled with. Is this the sort of shift in innovation conservatives want? Well, is it? Maybe it is. Personally, I think that our nation's overall quality of life would be better today if innovation had been driven by a desire to control costs and make various technologies available to all, rather than new "quality-improving" devices that are very expensive, limited to only a few consumers, and may or may not do all that much "good" when it comes down to it. (It's all about the QALY control!) At any rate, any sort of cost containment reform is going to restrict medical innovation to some extent.

It's also worth asking: innovation where? It's no secret that our health care system focuses on hospital care and drug treatment, thus placing a high priority on acute care, and de-emphasizing a lot of preventive and even rehabilitative care. So naturally, that's where much of the innovation goes. I've heard—and I can't find anything to verify this, so dispute away—that a good deal of technological advances in the United States are concentrated in the field of surgery. And why not? The procedures aren't very closely regulated, and the specialists get paid by the buckets. But it's also not clear that more specialists lead to better health outcomes—indeed, one study showed that areas with more specialists were correlated with worse health outcomes.

On the other hand, health care reforms that placed a greater emphasis on ambulatory and preventive care could, in theory, lead to more technological innovation in those areas. And perhaps that would be better overall for the nation's health. Someone should find out! At any rate, I haven't really answered anything here, but the general question that usually gets asked on this topic is: "How do we best encourage medical innovation?" That seems crude. Medical innovation isn't monolithic. A better question, I think, is: "Where and how should we be steering medical innovation?" For all the impressive technological advances made here in the U.S., I'm not convinced they've always been heading in the right direction.

Readers of this little blog have probably picked up on the fact that I know very little about economics. Fortunately, that has never stopped me from writing about the subject. So here we go. I've been reading Peter Lindert's Growing Public—an economic history that looks at the relationship between social spending and growth. In particular, Lindert suggests that the net economic cost of big welfare programs might well be virtually zero. Heartening stuff for lefties like me. More on that big picture argument later—it's fascinating, and I'll try to lay it out when I understand it fully—but now it's time to talk about welfare and work.

As we've learned from, um, Milton Friedman, certain forms of means-tested welfare essentially act as a tax on work for the poor. Starting in 1935, for instance, the original "welfare" program, AFDC, created what amounted to a 100 percent marginal tax rate on earnings for single mothers with children. It makes sense: if a mother on welfare were to get a job, she'd lose all those welfare dollars, food stamps, medical care, subsidized housing, child care subsidies, etc., and make very little back from her paycheck. Where's the incentive? Well, that marginal rate was scaled back in 1967—by allowing the working poor to keep more benefits—but then reinstated under the Reagan administration, which wanted stricter means-testing for all welfare programs. Eventually, under Clinton, the Earned Income Tax Credit was expanded considerably, which lowered the marginal rate for people who get low-paying jobs—because people could "keep" more of their foregone welfare benefits. The British, too, are experimenting with something similar, the Working Family Tax Credit. In theory, this should spur more low-income people into finding work.

Of course, there's no free lunch here. Eventually the Earned Income Tax Credit is phased out at some income level, so in effect, the marginal tax rate for work is simply pushed up into the middle classes. Now Lindert notices two things: One, this is essentially how the European welfare states work, by not strictly means-testing their benefits, and two, that no one's figured out whether shoving the marginal tax rate "up" into the middle class is actually better for the economy than strictly means-testing benefits. What's interesting, though, is that conservatives have always argued that taxes plus welfare are bad because they place high marginal tax rates on both the wealthy (for making that extra million) and on the poor (for getting a job). As Galbraith wryly summarized the "doctrine of the eighties": "the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much."

But Lindert points out that European welfare states actually follow this conservative assumption pretty closely. These high-budget states tend to have very low taxes on capital and property—lower than in the United States or Japan—thus decreasing the marginal rates for the very wealthy. In particular, European states tend to shy away from double taxation on dividends. Bush's dream! But on the other end of the income spectrum, the universal benefits of the European welfare state also tend to decrease the marginal tax rate on the poor, essentially taking away the incentives to get off the dole and find a job. As it turns out, it's the middle class that gets saddled with the tax burden here. What's hilarious about Lindert's book is that his research seems to suggest that conservative economic theories are basically right, and that that's what explains why European welfare states work so well. Definitely more on this book later.

Not much time to talk about the big filibuster deal now. All I can say is that if and when the Democrats do retake the Senate, they should immediately push for a massive government takeover—and I mean an outright invasion—of the health care system, prompt a filibuster on the bill, threaten to abolish the filibuster, and then extract major concessions—expand Medicaid!—from moderate Republicans in order to avert a crisis. It's going to be awesome!

Also, this is funny.

Okay, this NARAL/Langevin/Chaffee thing is getting out of hand. As Atrios said, NARAL's endorsement of Chaffee probably didn't drive Langevin out of the RI Senate race. And if it did, well, then Langevin's not much of a fighter anyways. But let's pretend NARAL's endorsement either way makes a shred of difference. Then the second point is this: they made an entirely rational choice from a strategic standpoint. Let's just run through the four scenarios NARAL's facing here:

1) Republicans keep the Senate in 2006 and Chaffee gets elected. Well, that's bad news. But notice, whenever the Republicans slap down some bit of legislation restricting abortion rights, Chaffee will be voting against it (remember, he votes pro-choice 100 percent of the time. 100 percent!).

2) Republicans keep the Senate in 2006 and Langevin gets elected. Worse news. Republicans are still in charge, but now whenever they slap down abortion restrictions, Langevin will likely vote for them, giving pro-life legislation one extra vote and making it more likely to pass. Clearly outcome #2 is worse for NARAL than #1. But then we have...

3) Democrats retake the Senate and Chaffee gets elected. Hooray! Now whenever Democrats want to push through some legislation expanding abortion rights, Chaffee votes for it, making it more likely to pass. Which is still better, from NARAL's perspective, than...

4) Democrats retake the Senate and Langevin gets elected. Now, that legislation expanding abortion rights suddenly becomes harder to pass—at the very least, you'll have to do Langevin some favor elsewhere to get him to vote for it. But odds are, he won't vote for it!

So NARAL's preferences here are, I think, ranked: 3, 4, 1, 2. Endorsing Chaffee, then, is a pretty optimal choice—it makes either 3 or 1 more likely, rather than 4 or 2. The wild card here, of course, is that control of the Senate may actually hinge on who wins, Chaffee or Langevin—in other words, the race itself may be between outcome #1 and #4. I don't really know what the probabilities are here, or how to model this, but presumably NARAL doesn't think this scenario is very likely (in other words, the probability is low that Senate control either way will depend on the RI race). I'm sure there's a rigorous way to calculate out what NARAL's optimal strategy is here, but I'm not smart enough to do that, so I'll just eyeball and say, yes, it makes sense to endorse the pro-choice Republican over the pro-life Democrat.

With Republicans all set to override the rules of the Senate with their nuclear-mania, it's probably worth taking a quick look through history and trying to figure out why we even have an upper chamber. Jefferson's line about the Senate being "a saucer into which the nation's passions may be poured to cool" has often been quoted. And indeed, that's how the Senate was created: a chamber insulated against the masses, with its long terms and staggered elections and members who answer only to their individual states. Optimally, then, what we would expect—what, presumably, the good ol' Founders expected—is for the Senate to be a place where legislation and ideas are debated, not demagogued, where arguments and reasons win, rather than crude and stark political power.

Obviously Bill Frist is trying to change all that, as Harry Reid has pointed out. But really, what's he changing it from? When was the last time the Senate resembled, in any way, shape, or form a place where passions were "poured to cool"?

1850, perhaps, when Calhoun saved the Union with his Senate compromise on slave states. (The usual argument here is: had the country split in 1850, rather than a decade later, the North wouldn't have been so united on abolition, and likely not able to win a war against the South.) But after that, the Senate has been damned near useless. A house of opulence and corruption all through the Gilded Age. The place that sneered at Wilson's League of Nations, and nixed it, despite all the exhortations of a popular president. The place that sat, with arms crossed, and refused to prepare for World War II all through the 1930s. And, of course, the place that allowed Southern Democrats, via the seniority system and filibuster, to obstruct widely popular civil rights legislation for decades and decades. None of this was passion "poured to cool"—no, it was just one massive ice block, frozen and dumb. The two big exceptions were FDR's first 100 days, when the Senate was dumbfounded by the 1932 elections and passed many of Roosevelt's bills without even reading them (after 1936, though, the Senate thwarted virtually all of the president's domestic legislation), and, of course, Lyndon Johnson's singular time at the helm.

So really, I have no special brief for the Senate. It's rarely served any useful purpose—at least from a progressive perspective—and if it was set up to promote "deliberative democracy," it has more often been used to wage petty power struggles. Perhaps in the 1970s and 1980s there was a "golden era" of compromise, deliberation, alliance-forming, etc., among Senators. Perhaps not. Nevertheless, that era has quite clearly disappeared over the past decade, and moved in precisely the opposite direction. Both parties are pretty ideologically homogenous nowadays, and, as Mark Schmitt pointed out the other day, most of Senate work is done through the budget reconciliation process, which cannot be filibustered—one could add that time for debate is limited here, and no amendments are usually allowed. True, it's no longer an ice block, but now the Senate has become just another place where the majority pushes through whatever it damned well feels like, with little reason or deliberation, and where passions are allowed to run as high as they can go. Really, the "nuclear option" just pushes this trend to its logical conclusion. And it's not, in itself, a bad conclusion—considering the alternative.

The problem here, of course, is that the Senate isn't set up to be this sort of "majority rules" institution. For one good reason, it's not at all representative: the 44 Democrats plus Jeffords received more votes over the last 3 cycles than their Republican counterparts, and if each senator represents half a state, the minority party represents 50.8 percent of the population. Now the good thing for Republicans is that this imbalance works in their favor, and likely will for a long time—of the 20 least populous states, only five are reliably blue (Vermont, Delaware, Rhode Island, Hawaii, Maine), and it's likely that Republicans will be able to keep a healthy Senate majority more often than not, even without a national majority.

There's no good reason to do things like this—and I doubt the three or four honest Republicans in this country would disagree. So either the Senate needs to be reorganized so that, if it's just a glorified House, at least it's representative, or else the whole trend should be reversed. At any rate, not an institution I'll be happy with either way!

Will Wilkinson has a typically thoughtful post about income inequality that raises the age-old question: Why does inequality matter? If the rising economic tide is lifting all boats—which may or may not be the case—then who cares that Joe CEO brings home orders of magnitude more money than average Joe? Well, let's see.

The obvious rejoinder, I think, has to do with social status. Without getting too deep into the evolutionary psychology here, it's at least reasonable to assume that humans are hard-wired to want to make it to the very top. Good for attracting lots of fertile women on the savannah and all that. But not everyone can make it to the top, obviously, so the result is lots and lots of dissatisfaction among the losers. And the more inequality, the more dissatisfaction! Paul Krugman once used the example of a middle-class family in the 1950s. Say they were offered to be transplanted into the 25th income percentile in 2005. Would they take it? They'd undoubtedly have more stuff—iPods! color televisions!—but many probably wouldn't take the deal, because they'd lose their middle class status. (And hey, it's not like they could move up in today's world—workers from the 1950s were, on average, less skilled and not as intelligent as workers today. That's just how the future works.)

But hypothetical shmypothetical. More interestingly, Richard Wilkinson—whose book on the subject I've been meaning to read for ages—has shown that income inequality may well affect the health of nations. After controlling for all sorts of other variables, Wilkinson found that more unequal countries were found to have worse health outcomes. Part of this is due to other bad effects of an unequal society: more violence, lower levels of involvement in community life, lower levels of trust, and more downward discrimination. All of which are reasons in themselves to argue against inequality. But the other important thing Wilkinson found was that inequality affects the type of society we have—increased inequality shifts the balance from a society dominated by what he calls "mutually supportive relationships" to one rife with social dominance, class differentiation, rat races, the feeling that people no longer have personal control over their lives, etc. etc. As you'd imagine, this leads to a lot of undue stress, unhappiness, and poor health.

Now if this is all true, that's not necessarily an argument against increased inequality. It just matters what you value: stuff or happiness, and the relative trade-offs between the two. It also probably matters as to what kind of person you are. I'd rather have less material stuff and work less. So, it seems, would many French and German people. But I can't speak for everyone.

Speaking of health, though, there's another, argument that ought to be floated out there, though libertarians can cover their ears right about now. Increased income inequality seems to lead to lower levels of political participation, at least among the lower classes, as we'd expect. In theory, this should always be the case—if the wealthy have comparatively more resources—which includes both money and free time—they'll have comparatively more political influence. Duh. In turn, that should lead to less income redistribution by the government, and fewer government programs for the lower classes. If the poor were all dedicated voters and civic participants, Medicaid cuts would be as off-limits as Medicare cuts. But they're not, so it isn't. Meanwhile, and much more perniciously, those with more political influence will start distributing government resources towards themselves. No libertarian worth his or her salt should be happy with massive corporate subsidies, for instance, but that's the sort of thing you get when the corporate world has more political influence. Over the past 20 years, the Republican party has become less and less "free market" as it becomes more and more dominated by wealthy political participants.

The flip side here is that increased inequality can, in theory, entrench a certain class in power. There are only limited spots in government, top universities, and other positions of influence, and when the upper classes have a disproportionate amount of wealth, they're naturally going to scoop up more and more of these spots. The chance that a wealthy and not-so-bright (or talented, or skilled) person takes the place that should go to a brighter but not-so-wealthy individual goes up as inequality increases.

Of course, in all this, we've been assuming that increased inequality is compatible with higher levels of overall growth. Maybe that assumption's not true; economists ought to find out. This paper (pdf), by Huw Lloyd-Ellis of Queen's University, suggests that there's certainly reason to think inequality has an adverse effect on growth, though the research is still inconclusive. For example, there's only so much credit to go around in this small world of ours, and inequality could in theory drive less-wealthy people out of the credit market, thus depriving the economy of potentially productive borrowers and investors. It's not inconceivable that drastic inequality may produce serious market failures and screw up the whole system. Admittedly, though, this isn't a subject I'm at all familiar with, so I'll have to read up before saying anything more. I'm very curious to see what readers think about all this.

Although I nearly had a heart attack (so young!) when I thought I saw John Ashcroft cited as a scholarly source here—he wasn't—this David Gerlenter essay about the Bible and the decline of "Bible literacy" among young Americans today at least raises some good questions. The Bible is pretty central to American history and thought—so how does one go about teaching it?

So let's have Bible-as-literature electives in every public high school, by all means. But let's also face facts: These are hard courses to teach at best. Do we have teachers who are up to the job? (With laudable foresight, the Bible Literacy Project is already developing workshops for teachers.) And let's also keep in mind that, for most children, such courses can only be half-way houses. Children studying the Bible should learn their own religious traditions as precious truth, not as one alternative on a multicultural list.

Now as it happens, Gerlenter isn't the first to think about these questions—the First Amendment Center has put out a pamphlet, "The Bible and Public Schools: a First Amendment Guide" that, as far as I know, has been endorsed by a number of religious and secular organizations (from PFAW to the National Association of Evangelicals to the Council on Islamic Education). It suggests that the Bible ought to taught in an academic, not devotional manner, that it generally should not be the only such text in a given course, and that events in the Bible should not necessarily be taught as historical fact. Plus, various interpretations should be presented. Seems like a workable compromise.

The fear Gerlenter has, though, is that the Bible will be cheapened or somehow made mundane by being taught in public schools. It's a reasonable fear—how many kids have lost any possible love for, say, Shakespeare, by first reading it in 10th grade? Right. Meanwhile, Supreme Court doctrine on religion in public schools states that the school can officially neither "approve nor disapprove" of religion, as Sandra Day O'Connor put it. But in the classroom, teachers are perfectly welcome to approve or disapprove of the content of other literary or philosophical texts—indeed, I had an 11th grade English teacher who all but elevated Albert Camus' The Stranger, and a peculiar strain of existentialism along with it, to a religion of sorts. (And I'm not proud to admit it, but it certainly had an effect on my impressionable young mind!) That one set of ideas can be endorsed but not another seems a bit odd.

Still, the analogy to literature suggests there's no perfect way to do this—it's impossible to set national standards for taste in any artistic or cultural work without collapsing the range of things teachers can and should be allowed to do. Sometimes a teacher can give her students a deep and thorough appreciation for, say, Shakespeare, but that's not the sort of project you can force any teacher to undertake. So it is with the Bible: some will teach it in a way more conducive to religious belief, some will teach it in a way conducive to secularism. As long as there's no official school policy either way, that's probably fine with me, although I'm sure there are all sorts of things I'm not considering here.

Let me be the first, I think, to slap this bit of heresy down onto the table: Star Wars Episode III, Revenge of the Sith, was only the second best movie in the new trilogy. Episode II, Attack of the Clones was much, much better in just about every way. Yes, yes, don't worry, I've already gathered kindling, lashed myself to this here stake and if you would just be so kind as to light that match... But first, read my reasoning below the break, spoilers and all.

The main difference for me was the action. Attack of the Clones wins on this front by a running mile. Sorry, but face it: light-saber duels are boring. Or rather, any excitement they bring can be cheapened much too easily. The original Star Wars movies were cool because for most of the movie you had one Jedi—either Obi-Wan or Luke Skywalker—fighting a horde of random enemies with his light-saber, in a variety of novel situations. Hordes of Stormtroopers, or big four-legged machines, or abominable snowmen, or trash compactors. And the Jedi kicked ass, which is what Jedis are understood to do. So when you finally get Obi-Wan vs. Darth Vader squaring off—or Luke vs. Darth Vader—you think, "Sweet infant Jesus with a rattlesnake; Jedi versus Jedi?" It's a new form of battle; clash of the titans.

But in Revenge of the Sith, Jedi on Jedi battles become much too commonplace. In the first fifteen minutes of the movie we get a ho-hum sequence where Anakin easily bests the clownishly-named Count Dooku. And that's the first of five or six of these duels. By the time Obi-Wan and Annakin face off at the end, yes, it's a very good and frenetic battle—so frenetic that, in retrospect, it makes their sluggish rematch in Episode IV seem pretty pedestrian—but the climax differs only in degree, not kind, from what we've seen earlier in the movie.

Attack of the Clones varied it up much better. You had the chase after that assassin-lady, the battle in the lava pit, the Obi-Wan vs. Jango Fett duel, and the rather-cool gladiatorial scene, in all of which the sometimes saber-less Jedi had to use their odd powers and ingenuity to face off against unconventional foes. It's cool. So sorry, I'll take Episode II's gladiator scene—or, in Empire Strikes Back, the ice planet battle—against the thoroughly ridiculous "face-off" between Yoda and Darth Sidious (some lightning bolts tossed back in forth, a bit of swordplay, some tossing of Senate chairs... yawn!). At any rate, the shock of Yoda's saber-skills pretty much wore off after the climax in Episode II—which was also the first movie in which we saw Jedi maimed or killed, making it the better movie for pure "shock value."

Meanwhile, General Grievous was lame. The fight between Obi-Wan and General Grievous was lame. There was a split second where I thought, "Four lightsabers? This guy's going to wreak serious havoc!" But no, no, he's easily splattered. Grievous' "gimmick" was that he strung on his belt lightsabers of various Jedi he had slain—well, then we should've seen him slay some Jedi! Sheesh. Also, what kind of Army is vanquished when its general gets captured or killed? I'm not sure that would have even been the case with, say, Napoleon's French Army. Delegate some responsibility, buddy.

Next complaint. George Lucas, as we all know, can't do character, writing, or dialogue. Nevertheless, the third movie hinged on three very dramatic developments: Annakin's love for Padme, Annakin's turn to the dark side, Annakin's relationship with Obi-Wan. All were botched and unconvincing, leaving essentially nothing to hang the movie on. In defense of Natalie Portman's shoddy acting, though, had she played anything resembling an actual human being, we would expect Senator Padme to banish all those silly thoughts from Annakin's head (a Senate works best with one Chancellor in charge? Please!), and we'd have no Darth Vader. So she almost had to play a non-entity or the movie would have failed. Anyway, the only real emotional part of the movie was when Annakin's writhing in lava, and Obi-Wan starts screaming at him, plaintively, "You were supposed to be the one!" or something of the sort. Anyway, Attack of the Clones depended far less on character development, making it at the very least a more enjoyable and satisfying movie.

Also, when the human army turns on the Jedi in Revenge of the Sith, where's the drama? Don't they feel bad? They've been fighting along these Jedi knights for years and years? Now they turn and assassinate without blinking? And let's not speak, ever again, of Annakin Skywalker "killing younglings." Terrible, just terrible. In fact, I never thought I'd say this, but when Annakin goes Iron Chef on the Sand People in Episode II, he's much more convincing as a skilled young dude with some serious anger management problems than he is at any point in Episode III.

One final thought: If I'm not mistaken, galactic travel is a lot quicker in this new trilogy than it was in the old one. Towards the very end of the movie, Darth Sidious jets from the capital planet out to some lava planet on the "outer rim" (which is, presumably, very, very far away) in the short time it takes Annakin and Obi-Wan to finish up their fighting business. Ships weren't that fast in the original trilogy, were they? Also, Padme goes from discovering she's pregnant to giving birth in the course of the movie. Where, um, did those nine months come from?

Continue reading "The Case for Attack of the Clones"

Hm, so both Sens. Robert Byrd and Rick Santorum have compared their opponents to Hitler. But weighing the evidence, I'm going to have to say that breaking Senate rules to abolish the filibuster is a little more like Hitler than using filibusters. On the other hand, I've heard that our very own Barbara Boxer is a vegetarian, so that makes her most like Hitler.

Really, though, I don't understand why Hitler analogies are so beyond the pale. Yes, yes, not everyone wants to murder millions and millions of Jews. Not Bill Frist, not Nancy Pelosi. And yes, the Holocaust was a horrible thing, a uniquely horrible thing, even. But not all Hitler comparisons need to take the form, "If you do X, it will lead to World War II and mass genocide," to be valid. Politicians around the world can take all sorts of initial steps and abuses of power that resemble the sort of thing Hitler did in the early days. That ought to be pointed out! Billmon often makes sharp (and sometimes not-so-sharp) analogies between Germany in the 1930s and our present situation, and while no one thinks we're actually going to descend into full-blown Nazism, it's a perfectly sound reminder of the type of thing that can happen when these sorts of abuses and power grabs are allowed to slide unchecked. Even halfway to Hitler is still too much Hitler. Now Rick Santorum's problem was that his analogy was stupid, not that he made the analogy in the first place.

I don't usually write about environmental issues—in part because it's hard to care a lot about everything—but while editing this short piece for Mother Jones, a few things came to mind. My colleague Erik writes that economists are beginning to improve their cost-benefit analysis of various environmental resources. A forest, for instance, might be worth a couple million as lumber, but a billion dollars or more when you factor in: recreational use, quality-of-life benefits, and its benefits to the ecosystem—especially as a carbon sink. There are problems with this sort of valuation—can you really put a number on all of these factors?—but ideally, this should help environmentalists combat the things they'd like to combat; after all, serious liberals don't just want to preserve the environment because it's "pretty"; they want to preserve environmental resources because they're valuable—both now and for future generations.

Now from what I know about ecological economics, the proper way to determine whether a country's economic development is sustainable is whether there's a growth in wealth over time. Among other things that includes material goods, resource wealth, human capital, and natural capital. A nation could deplete some of these while increasing others, but in the aggregate, wealth should be growing, not shrinking. So a country can't just keep boosting its GDP while depleting its wealth base; otherwise you start to run into the situations seen in Jared Diamond's Collapse (which I haven't read). India, for instance, is growing like gangbusters, but environmental-types tell me that its natural resources are being quickly depleted, and that depletion isn't being compensated by increases in wealth elsewhere—building enough infrastructure, say, or investing enough in human education, etc. On the other hand, plenty of Indian policymakers are aware of this and trying to put the country on a more sustainable path.

So far, so good. Or bad. But now it doesn't seem like economists have really perfected their answers to the question about how much natural resources are really worth in wealth terms. Which would make it awfully hard to figure out exactly how sustainable or unsustainable are the paths on which certain countries—like China—are heading, no? At any rate, something else to learn more about, I guess.

What between George Galloway and the recently-unveiled British memo, there's been a lot of revisiting the Bush admininstration's decision to launch our excellent Iraq adventure—even if just to say, "Yes, it was still a dumb-ass idea." True. But while we're retrospecting, here's a question that's never, as far as I know, been fully answered: Why did Saddam Hussein decide to go to war with the United States? I mean, come on. And this isn't just out of idle curiosity; it sort of has relevance to Iran and North Korea, I think.

Now it's true, the White House was dead-set on invading Iraq no matter what, but surely there were things Saddam could've done that would've left him in a better state than he's in now. He could've absconded to Saudi Arabia, for instance. Or he could've immediately opened the doors to all inspectors and proved once and for all, as he knew perfectly well, that Iraq had absolutely no weapons of mass anything. (At the time of invasion, recall, there was still reasonable doubt about whether he had WMDs or not—hence the chemical suits for our soldiers.) Or whatever. But surely in a rational and sane world Saddam should've foreseen that staying defiant and letting the U.S. invade was the worst of all possible outcomes. And yes, it's true that proving to the world that he had no WMDs would've opened the door for a possible Shiite rebellion, say, but again, that would be one possible threat to weigh against the imminent threat—U.S. invasion.

Anyway, some possible explanations come from the ol' Duelfer report. Perhaps Saddam just didn't believe the United States was serious about invading: "By late 2002 Saddam had persuaded himself, just as he did in 1991, that the United States would not attack Iraq because it already had achieved its objectives of establishing a military presence in the region." Perhaps—though after his capture, Saddam told a debriefer that four months before the war he was convinced that "hostilities were inevitable." For what that's worth. Alternatively, perhaps Saddam was receiving such awful military advice that he really believed he could've defeated the United States in a conventional battle. (Tariq Aziz claims this was the case.) On the other hand, remember his cryptic remark to his advisors in late 2003: "Resist one week, and then I will take over." So perhaps he thought that he would let the U.S. invade, retreat, start up the insurgency we see now, bleed the U.S. into withdrawal, and then retake Baghdad, this time stronger than ever (because who would attack him now?).

Any of those seem plausible. Another theory: In the end, Saddam probably thought he was screwed no matter what he did. So what if he proved once and for all that he had no WMDs? Perhaps the U.S. would just attacks anyway. Indeed, the Bush administration didn't really give Saddam an exit strategy, or any assurance that backing down would yield any sort of benefit. There were a few prewar moments when Bush hinted that Saddam could just comply with the UN resolutions, avoid war, and save his own skin. But only a few. For the most part there was nothing but a steady drumbeat out of the White House: regime change, regime change, regime change. Under those circumstances, it's no wonder Saddam decided to take his chances with whatever deterrent he thought the threat of WMDs and mass American casualties might have, and failing that, the possible urban warfare/insurgency strategy.

At any rate, this is sort of moot, since it doesn't seem like the goal of the White House was ever to force Saddam to back down, comply with all UN resolutions, give up his WMD ambitions, and retreat back into his little shell. No, the goal was war, and war was what we got. Nevertheless, if Bush really had wanted to make Saddam back down, hypothetically, it seems he should have the following: 1) made it extremely clear that the U.S. was dead serious about invading, 2) made it absolutely clear that the U.S. would kick ass, 3) given credible assurances that if Saddam complied, he could save his own skin. None of those things were done. More to the point, our intelligence agencies could have focused less on what weapons Saddam did or didn't have, and more on how Saddam would've reacted to various threats and promises. Not a whole lot of prewar intelligence really focused on this aspect—again, probably because Bush wanted war no matter what—but it should have focused on this aspect; knowing what the enemy's thinking (or might be thinking) is essential. The Duelfer report suggests that we didn't have a clue. For all we know, the White House just figured Saddam was an irrational lunatic and so there was no use trying to get a handle on his thought process.

I'm bringing all this up because it seems there ought to be some lessons here for dealing with North Korea and Iran—two countries, presumably, that the White House really does want to coerce into doing stuff, and not invade no matter what. (Good god.) People doing intelligence stuff ought to be figuring out these questions: How will Kim Jong Il or the Tehran mullahs react to this or that situation? Will they find this or that condition too humiliating to accept? Is there a way for them to "save face"? Do they properly understand this threat or that promise? This seems like obvious stuff, and perhaps the CIA is on it, but the case of Iraq—and reading the Duelfer report makes this clear—suggests that our intelligence agencies really aren't very good at figuring this stuff out. The historical record's no better: No one really understood why Saddam didn't back down in the first Gulf War; no one really understood why Milosevic didn't back down initially over Kosovo. How well, exactly, do we understand our good buddies on the international stage? I wonder.

I'm not sure this was his main point, but Alan Wolfe makes the atheistic case for more funding for religious social services, by looking at the curious case of Martin Luther:

Once launched into the world, Lutheran orphanages met the same problems of limited budgets, diverse clienteles, and staff professionalization as any other kind of organization; as Thiemann writes, "their missions became shaped more by the demands of external public demands than by a clearly stated internal theological rationale." The lesson for our times is plain: provide public funds for religiously motivated social services if you wish, but do not expect them to remain "religious" if you do. Religion is an excellent incubator for such secular ideals as the modern welfare state.

This sort of logic has always somewhat made sense to me—state support for religion just ends up, well, watering down religion. Make prayer mandatory in schools and you'll cheapen it to the point where no one takes it seriously anymore. (Indeed, when the Supreme Court first banned prayer from private schools, many religious leaders backed the move for this very reason.)

So what about social services? From what little I know, the Netherlands pioneered the Christian-democratic form of governance with its notion of "sphere sovereignty": namely, that the government merely oversees a variety of self-governing religious entities that need to submit to state laws, but otherwise maintain a good deal of autonomy. The Dutch constitution, for instance, allows government funding to be split, without bias, among private and public schools. But the Netherlands didn't become a theocracy, instead—again, correct me if I'm wrong—the world unfolded exactly as Alan Wolfe said; people started shopping around for social services not on the basis of religion, but for services that suited their needs. Religion sort of faded into the background, and Netherlands became the godless heathen place we know and love today—legalized prostitution and gay marriage and all.

Germany is another model, in which public services are, I think, required to enlist churches and other religious organizations when they can for welfare provisions. And the churches and whatnot get a fair amount of independence to do whatever work they want. On the other hand, I think there are a few key differences between what Germany has and, say, President Bush's proposed faith-based initiatives. In particular, the Christian-democratic model entails a good deal of income distribution—giving families the wages and tools they need to be self-sufficient—and Bush, of course, has nothing of that sort in mind. Still, Germany: another godless country, where only 14 percent of people attend church once a week. We can see where this is going.

The other point is that, in the end, it doesn't seem like the form of delivery much matters when it comes to many social services. It's very important for some things (anything to do with reproduction, especially), but as far as anti-poverty programs go, what really makes the difference is how much money actually gets dished out. If our welfare state ended up being administered by churches, ala Germany or the Netherlands, that might work—just don't be surprised when America drifts toward atheism!—but in order for this to be effective at fighting poverty, etc. we'd also have to boost total spending to Germany and Netherlands-esque levels.

It's in the middle of a more serious article about reforms underway in Syria, but there's some quality morbid humor here:

This year, some Syrians distributed a video clip via cell phone of a smiling [President Bashar] Assad riding a bumper car with his oldest son, Hafez, at a popular park. (Those in other bumper cars noticeably kept their distance.)

Yeah, that should be a rule or something: If you're a man known for beating people on the feet with thick cables, you probably won't find people to play bumper cars with you. Life is tough.

Read the full piece, too. Bashar Assad came into office in 2000 planning to pull off a bunch of economic reforms—and that still seems to be his goal—but there were all sorts of political obstacles in the way. This 2001 overview of those obstacles, by Gary Gambill, still seems relevant today: "Bashar Assad's failure to undertake substantial economic reforms is therefore rooted in his failure to effect a controlled political opening." In particular, the security services started cracking down on the opposition without Bashar's approval. Seems like something you would want to rein in...

Speaking of CAFTA, reading about how Bush has had to make all sorts of protectionist compromises to gain support for his bill, brings NAFTA back to mind. Ah, NAFTA. Lots of people argue that that much-discussed trade deal was either a smashing economic success or a miserable failure for the United States in the '90s. On this, eh, I'll stick with Richard Freeman's analysis: there were so many other important economic factors affecting the United States and Canada and Mexico in the '90s, that if you can disentangle them all and say "NAFTA did this grand (or devastating) thing," etc., well, you deserve a serious prize.

But NAFTA did have one very concrete effect: namely, it alienated the labor unions from the Clinton White House in 1993-94. And that hurt where it counts: on health. Before the election, recall, Lane Kirkland had promised "storm troopers" to help Clinton get national health care passed. But when it came time to do health care, the AFL-CIO was too busy fighting hard against the free trade deal. Well, NAFTA got passed, but the Health Security Act flopped, in no small part due to lack of union support (the delays over NAFTA also gave Clinton's opponents time to organize against his health care plan). So thank free trade, and Bill f'n Clinton's lack of labor tact, if you're running around uninsured.

(Okay, yes, there were other factors too—although interestingly, the historical failure of national health care to catch on in America actually has much to do with labor's reluctance to join the fight at various points, for various reasons. The one fight they did truly join was the battle over Medicare. And hey!

Also, this leads to another point: if and when Democrats ever regain control of government and decide to go full throttle on health care, the key is going to be to divide and conquer various groups opposed to national health insurance. The doctors, it seems, have shifted to the side of angels after decades of recalcitrance, though Clinton never courted the AMA; big mistake. Meanwhile, there are the various business groups that should support national insurance, though again, they have to be wooed with the right measures. And obviously the insurance industry is the big end-zone blocker, but even here, some insurance companies—Aetna, MetLife, Prudential, Cigna, etc.—have said before that they'd like to see national health care, and maybe they could be enticed if the plan involved managed competition and no government caps on nationwide spending. Or something.

Basically, it's extremely tricky to thread the needle here, and it's certainly something to keep in mind when designing health care policies. The optimal policy, I think, will be an incremental reform that helps the uninsured for now, but also has some sort of ticking time bomb that eventually explodes and clears the way for a more sensible health care overhaul. Much like, um, the GOP's sneaky Social Security phase-out strategy, only hopefully this one wouldn't suck as much. Jacob Hacker's thinking along the right lines with his plan for extending Medicare to the uninsured—setting aside the merits for now, that's the slippery slope we want to be paving! But also, you don't want to give the game away, which is why I'm writing this all in parentheses. Shhhh.)

The Carnegie Foundation has a new analysis of CAFTA that I meant to blog about earlier today, but stuck it over on the mini-blog. Anyway, unlike praktike, I do think the labor standard provisions of CAFTA are wholly atrocious—my baseline for this sort of thing is at least to give workers the right to organize and speak out in the workplace, and I've seen little evidence that this would unduly harm developing nations, though I'll admit enforcement is a much, much trickier matter (how, for example, do you allow factories to break up genuinely corrupt unions?)—but setting that aside, I think we can all agree that much of this stuff is pretty horrendous:

The optimal combination of trade terms for regional rural development would be to phase out the tariffs on staple crops very slowly and gradually, so that subsistence farmers have time to adapt to competition from subsidized U.S. production, while increasing access to the U.S. market for traditional cash crops such as sugar and other agricultural products that exploit the comparative advantages of the region.

As negotiated, the CAFTA-DR gets less than half of this equation right. The Administration did recognize the need for the countries in the region to slowly open their markets for a few staple products, but does not provide adequate transition periods for all such products. This half-measure will mean little for poor farmers in the region, who typically produce more than one staple product, be it rice, beans, corn, chickens, onions or potatoes. For poor farmers, lower prices for any of the products will put already precarious household incomes at risk. Malnutrition in the region is rising due to low coffee prices. The shock of CAFTA would likely mean more hunger in Central America.

Moreover, and even more significantly, the CAFTA-DR does not provide new opportunities for rural populations to utilize and benefit from. For example, production of sugar could absorb some of the labor displaced from staple crops. Yet, sugar from Central America and the Dominican Republic is denied meaningful access to the U.S. market.

Look, I understand comparative advantage just fine, thanks, and under some conditions lower tariffs sound truly swell, yes. But this is just a boot to the teeth. The transition period will be poorly managed, there's little assistance for farmers harmed by the upheaval, and Central American farmers get screwed by our high barriers on sugar imports. "Free trade" or trans-hemispheric donkey-punch? You decide. Meanwhile, for Republicans who love open markets but hate open borders, guess where all those displaced workers are going to do? Uh-huh. Hope you've stocked up on MinuteMen.

In comments, NickS mentioned Alec Stone Sweet as a judicial scholar to read. Didn't get to it, but an itchy mouse-clicker finger led me to this long survey of a bunch of books on judicial systems around the world, including one by Sweet. Interestingly, the practice of judicial review—i.e. the ability for courts to throw out laws—was pretty much confined to the United States and Norway until 1942. Up until then, most nations guarded their "parliamentary sovereignty" jealously. But things change, and nowadays more than eighty countries have the ol' review in place. Ran Hirschl, whose book I've been reading, argues that this came about, at least, in non-European countries like New Zealand because once-dominant groups were losing power after World War II, and wanted to enshrine certain constitutional rights that would keep formerly marginalized groups in line. But that's not overly relevant for now.

So here's the good stuff: What happens when you have Godzilla-sized judicial review, as they do in Europe? Ah, Europe. With the rise of the bureaucratic welfare state, you get an increasing number of complex laws that require interpretation by the courts. So judges in Europe are essentially making more and more actual policy these days. Plus, European bill of rights are very extensive—containing rights to adequate pay and housing, to pensions, etc. etc.—so the courts really have to wade in frequently and apply various "balancing" tests to various laws. These courts, according to Sweet, often "interpret" statutes so freely that the become barely recognizable to the legislature that passed them. Even better, in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, a sizeable minority in parliament can request judicial review before a bill actually becomes a law. The mere threat of this is often enough to make the majority compromise. And you thought we had a judiciary "run amok."

But hey! What if the courts go too far? Well, in theory, European parliaments can amend the constitution to overrule activist judges, but in practice that's very difficult. The German constitution, for instance, forbids any changes that affect "the essence of a basic right." In other words, most everything. In fact, the French legislature is one of the few that can easily amend constitutions to skirt judicial review, but even they've only done it once twice—to tighten immigration rules [and improve gender representation]. So much for that. Then there's the whole question of nominating judges. As you'd imagine, it's a pretty fundamental power for a European ruling party, and in fact, when a party that's been enthroned for a long time is finally voted out, there's usually some temporary brawling between the legislature and judiciary, as the Old Guard's judges lay the smackdown on the New Guard's laws. Really, the only check on judicial power is the fact that judges are good people and try to maintain their own legitimacy by satisfying as many people as possible. That's your restraint.

Anyway, it's tough to say whether judicial review on steroids is a good thing or bad thing. Ran Hirschl thinks the constitutionalization of rights and move towards "juristocracy" is a bad thing, of a piece with the "broder neoliberal global trend toward delegating power away from electorally accountable bodies and toward quasi-autonomous decision-makers." For now, I'm in his camp, though one should add that the details matter.

Obviously the independence of the judiciary depends, to some extent, on what sort of political controls are built into the promotion system for judges. In Japan, for instance, judges are appointed by taking a civil service exam. So you'd think they'd be ultra-independent. But not so! They are more likely to get promoted if they toe the party line, and the party line is dictated from on high by the Japanese Supreme Court, which is in turn appointed by political parties in the Diet. Not so independent after all. So in theory there can always be strong political controls on the judiciary, and Europe's trying to put some of these in place. On the other hand, as the survey says in its conclusion, these books all show "just how far courts can push in the modern world without getting taken over politically." Fair warning.

Anthony Lane can do no wrong:

The young Obi-Wan Kenobi is not, I hasten to add, the most nauseating figure onscreen; nor is R2-D2 or even C-3PO, although I still fail to understand why I should have been expected to waste twenty-five years of my life following the progress of a beeping trash can and a gay, gold-plated Jeeves.

No, the one who gets me is Yoda. May I take the opportunity to enter a brief plea in favor of his extermination? Any educated moviegoer would know what to do, having watched that helpful sequence in "Gremlins" when a small, sage-colored beastie is fed into an electric blender. A fittingly frantic end, I feel, for the faux-pensive stillness on which the Yoda legend has hung.

At one point in the new film, he assumes the role of cosmic shrink—squatting opposite Anakin in a noirish room, where the light bleeds sideways through slatted blinds. Anakin keeps having problems with his dark side, in the way that you or I might suffer from tennis elbow, but Yoda, whose reptilian smugness we have been encouraged to mistake for wisdom, has the answer. "Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose," he says. Hold on, Kermit, run that past me one more time. If you ever got laid (admittedly a long shot, unless we can dig you up some undiscerning alien hottie with a name like Jar Jar Gabor), and spawned a brood of Yodettes, are you saying that you’d leave them behind at the first sniff of danger? Also, while we’re here, what’s with the screwy syntax? Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. "I hope right you are." Break me a fucking give.

True, although "Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose" is pretty miraculously uncorrupted, for Yoda. Anyway, easily Lane's best review since he jack-booted Pearl Harbor and gave us this reassuring line: "On the other hand, it must be said that a Washington in which Dan Aykroyd plays an expert in naval intelligence is not a Washington that would enjoy one's undivided confidence."

Really good article by Trish Wilson arguing that "presumptive joint custody" in divorce cases is almost never a good thing. If the two parents agree to split the kid, sure, great idea, but research shows that forcing them to do so can cause all sorts of havoc for the child. More here from Ampersand.

As a side note, intuitively I agree that custody laws should be based on what's best for the child, but I'm not always sure why I agree, exactly. Is it because children are little? Or because they'll get fucked up and hey, they didn't choose to get into the mess in the first place? Yeah, that's obviously it. (It's a weird thing to ask, I know, but why is there usually such a strong presumption in favor of children? Sometimes it's obvious, but not always. "Save the women and children first!" on a sinking ship seems noble and chivalrous, but not necessarily rational or moral.) But more importantly, and per my anti-judiciary post below, this is an instance where courts are all but certain to do a better job than legislatures.

I've been trying to catch up on my Uzbekistan reading, but yikes, hard to just wade right into a region and figure out what's going on. A few things about the recent violence in the eastern part of the country, though,—in which, reportedly, 500 protestors have been killed by the government. First, as far as I can tell, the revolt in Andijan has only a fair amount to do with Islamic extremism, and a lot to do with the fact that Uzbeks are basically poor as dirt and fed up. President Islam Karimov—of "boil the dissidents!" fame—has badly mismanaged Uzbekistan's economy, as Robert Templer of ICG has described:

The concentration of wealth and power in an ever-smaller number of hands close to the president, combined with increasing repression and a weakening economy, is fueling widespread discontent that could turn violent. Visiting officials who lecture Karimov on his economic failures are firmly reminded that his education was in the dismal science. Indeed, during Soviet times, he worked at the Uzbek branch of Gosplan, the central planning agency, where he shuffled goods from one unproductive factory to another while skimming a cut. That's still how he sees economic management.

Last year, he effectively closed down Uzbekistan's bazaars, the wholesale markets that are the center of commerce, in an attempt, many believe, to enrich members of the government trying to control wholesale trade. He has had the government buy back, at their original price, businesses that were privatized years ago. Many businesses that are then taken over by families of politicians.

The Jamestown Foundation, meanwhile, gives an overview of recent events. The so-called "rebels," supposedly including Islamist group Hizb-ut-Tahir, seem to have fled to neighboring Kyrgystan, where the southern region of the country isn't under government control. "Thus," says Jamestown, "southern Kyrgyzstan could become the center of armed resistance to the Karimov regime." But the uprising wouldn't have such wide popular support if Karimov's regime wasn't so brutal, and economic conditions weren't so miserable. That seems to be the crucial factor. Also, Nathan Hamm notes that Uzbeks want change, yes, but they're also worried about chaos and violence—he quotes one protestor saying, "All I know is that if change in Uzbekistan is possible only through violence and blood—then I don't want that kind of change." Horrible.

I have no idea whether or not the United States is going to let Karimov continue on with his little crackdown on the "rebels." Russian President Putin is backing Karimov to the hilt, worrying about "the danger of destabilization." Meanwhile, praktike catches the State Department condemning the recent violence and urging Karimov to open up Uzbekistan's political system. But we're in something of a bind here: as this report points out, the United States has an important air base in the country, and Uzbekistan is a "crucial" ally in the war on terror. More substantively, in Robert Kaplan's much-derided new Atlantic article, he claims the U.S. worries that if we disengage from Uzbekistan, China will swoop in and gain influence—killing any hope for reform there. That sounds like a reasonable concern. Still, Karimov benefits from his relationship with the United States, and it seems we ought to have some leverage over him to push for reform, though that's always easier said than done.

By way of suggestions, Ariel Cohen of Heritage writes that the U.S., Russia, China, and others ought to prod Karimov into negotiating with the secular, moderate opposition parties in the country—the Erk and Birlik parties—to bring about stability. Meanwhile, a year ago, Fiona Hill of Brookings argued that Karimov's method of "stabilizing" the country was only going to produce more and more social upheaval. Well, she was right about that, though she also doesn't have any easy answers for fixing the country:

Unfortunately, even sensible solutions to Uzbekistan's problems are now difficult to implement. Although the United States can exert some leverage on Uzbekistan's government, which sees the U.S. military presence and American security assistance as a source of legitimacy, pushing the government to liberalize suddenly could be disastrous. The pressure has to come off gradually to prevent an explosion that would have negative consequences for the whole of Central Asia.

The U.S. government must, however, push the Uzbek government to put the safety valves back in place and allow its population to let off some steam. Stopping torture and arbitrary detentions would be of the first order, along with re-opening key border crossings, allowing freedom of movement in the Fergana Valley, facilitating private trade, and reinvigorating the bazaars. If something is not done, and soon, there will be more physical and political explosions in Uzbekistan...

MORE: For those who really want to get into details, Dan Darling has a backgrounder on Uzbekistan, focusing on Hizb-ut-Tahrir, the militant Islamist group. Incidentally, there are reports that HuT is inciting the Koran-in-toilet riots in Afghanistan, but who knows.

Reading up on judges and the courts over the past few days, I've noticed that there's been a growing trend in recent years for liberals to speak out against judicial review, i.e. the power of the Supreme Court to invalidate state and federal laws on constitutional grounds.

Off the top of my head, Mark Tushnet, Robin West, Mary Becker, Michael Klarman, maybe even Cass Sunstein have all been skeptical of the courts' ability to advance progressive goals, especially in the economic sphere. (As Sunstein puts it, the judiciary tends to uphold "status quo neutrality" rather than enforce things like welfare rights.) Historically, of course, this has usually been the case—in the Progressive era, the courts were the major obstacle to change—and there was a brief uptick in progressive court-mongering during the Warren Court, but that was something of an aberration. At the very least, regardless of what you think of judicial review, it's safe to assume that a Warren-esque Supreme Court isn't going to be in the cards for the foreseeable future.

Anyway, I'm far decided on the issue, but since I do have the occasional anti-judicial review outburst, I'll sketch out some of the arguments here. Yes, disdain for the courts puts me in the camp with Tom DeLay and the wingnuts over in the picture. Life is weird. I should also say that, barring an unlikely constitutional amendment—for instance, one that allowed Congress to override judicial decisions by a three-fourths majority—there's not really anything to be done about judicial review. (I assume that the Supreme Court isn't going to wake up one day and say, "Oops! Well it looks like we've up and arrogated way too much power for ourselves these past 200 years. Sorry!") The best that can be said is that, if enough people start questioning judicial review, judges—who cater to popular sentiment more than we like to think—may start showing more deference to legislatures. Perhaps!

Anyway, one of Tushnet's big arguments against judicial review is that the courts, by taking constitutional matters into their own hands, have essentially prevented the public from taking an interest in the Constitution—junk judicial review, and we'd have a broader public debate about these matters. Eh, maybe; those sorts of arguments always seem plausible-yet-ethereal to me. One could also say that legislatures usually adhere closely to the Constitution anyway, and they would adhere even more closely if they weren't able to palm off the hard decisions to the courts. Again, who knows?

The better liberal argument against judicial review is Sunstein's—historically legislatures have been much better at enacting progressive change than courts. Again, the Warren Court is an exception, and shouldn't be leaned on too heavily. This seems to be true globally too: I've been leafing through Ran Hirschl's Towards Juristocracy, and it seems that courts in other countries haven't been very effective at enacting progressive economic change, either. (And courts in other countries usually have far more latitude to do so—though that's another post.)

Another argument for "Taking the Constitution Away from the Courts," that I think Tushnet underplays, is that the courts—and not just the Supreme Court—often make law in an extremely ineffective and clumsy manner. Of all the arguments, I like this one the best. First off, yes, it's perfectly "legitimate" for courts to make law—the Constitution is a vague and fuzzy beast, with vague and fuzzy clauses like "equal protection," and inevitably in the course of interpretation, the courts are going to make new law. Such is life. There's nothing a priori illegitimate about that. But there are other problems.

The term "impact litigation" refers to rulings that actually enact some widespread social change. Roe vs. Wade (legalizing first-trimester abortion) and Brown vs. Board of Education (ruling against school segregation) are the famous blokes here, but you also rulings as "tiny" as suits against gun and tobacco companies that resulted not only in settlements, but in real changes. We now have more safety locks on guns in large part because of litigation, instead of legislation.

Now all these decisions seem just fine and dandy to a liberal, but consider. The problem with courts making law is that judges generally aren't always qualified to do this sort of thing. Judges see evidence, the courts follow specific procedures. They can't take into account the vast technocratic expertise available on any given topic. Is it really the case that judges are experts on segregation in prisons, music distribution software, pornography, school prayer, campaign finance, etc. etc.? No, of course not. Changing the law often creates as many problems as it solves, and it takes serious finesse to anticipate all sorts of ill side-effects that come with enacting social change. The courts are terrible at doing that, and as a result, have ended up making terribly clumsy laws—from forcing mental institutions to turn out their patients and creating homelessness, to sequestering black politicians in their own special districts, to various safeguards in juvenile courts that have had bad effects—that have had all sorts of unintended consequences.

The most famous example, of course, is Brown vs. Board of Education, which a number of liberal scholars have recently been deriding as a ruling that didn't change anything about segregation per se (although it had other important effects). I've been reading Michael Klarman's excellent book, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, and Klarman (a judicial-review skeptic) notes that a decade after Brown, 98 percent of African-American schoolchildren in the South still attended segregated schools. The Court simply didn't have the tools to force the change. That doesn't seem very surprising—courts can only do a couple of ham-fisted things to make people do things: either punish violators or make people pay money. Very ham-fisted. Real desegregation only began when the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964 and state and federal agencies were given specific powers to actually do something.

Of course, that's less an argument for getting rid of judicial review than it is to enjoin liberal reformers to please, please stop using the courts to enact any and all social change. And I say this not because "impact litigation" often creates a backlash. You usually hear that argument trotted out—for instance, that Roe vs. Wade created the rise of the "values" evangelical movement—but that's not a big concern to me. Most judicial decisions that enact sweeping social change end up creating their own legitimacy. School desegregation, or Miranda rights, are virtually unquestioned today, even though they were controversial decisions at the time. That, and not the Roe example, seems to be the norm. The backlash usually doesn't happen.

No, the bigger problem with relying on the courts is that, as mentioned above, the outcomes are usually far different from what reformers actually intended. It's depressingly great fun to read about Common Cause, the advocacy group that went to the courts to get a favorable ruling on campaign finance, and ended up with Buckley v. Valeo, which protected campaign cash as "free speech," and basically imploded any hope for real campaign finance reform. Common Cause has been fighting the decision ever since. You usually don't get the reform you want going through the courts, and if you do, it's likely to cause as many problems as it solves.

Um, so I actually argued two things: the liberal case against judicial review, and practical reasons for liberals not to enact social change through the courts (or at least be selective about it!). I should say, though, that I'm not convinced that judicial review is as bad as all that, and in another post I'll try to mount a defense. Otherwise, fire away!

The other day I highlighted the Cambodian garment industry as an instance where free trade and labor standards came together to produce somewhat happy results. It's still unclear, though, whether this mini-success can be replicated anywhere else. To that end, Edward Gresser of PPI—who has done some work with the Cambodian embassy since leaving the USTR—emails in with some relevant thoughts on the subject:

On the positive side, the agreement has been a commercial success for Cambodia in ways that we didn't predict six years ago. The Cambodians got extra market access via a larger quota as expected. Over the long run, though, a more important benefit seems to be that the country has become more attractive to retail industry buyers because of the brand-image value of high labor standard guarantees. This advantage seems to have overpowered Cambodia's disadvantages for retail buyers - high crime rates, corruption, relatively weak infrastructure - & seems likely to continue doing so for a while, especially since the Bush Administration has reimposed quotas on China.

[… But] The ILO program has limits. Cambodia has about 200 or so garment factories & 240,000 garment workers - apparently small enough numbers that the ILO can manage the inspections. Bigger countries considering similar programs might run into manpower problems. Meanwhile the Bush Administration has been continually trying to cut our own international-labor assistance programs, which might make up some of the deficit were the world ever to consider adopt a big version of the Cambodia program.

Also, of course, the program focuses only on export workers. These can be pretty fortunate people, at least by local standards. In the Cambodian case, the minimum wage for a garment worker is roughly $540 a year, in a country where per capita income is $300 or so. The country also has ten million subsistence farmers and possibly as many as 100,000 prostitutes; both presumably have tougher and/or more deprived lives than the garment workers, but get little help or attention. A weakness in the anti-sweatshop movement, I think, is the concentration on enforcement and sanctions as opposed to incentives - had this been the vehicle for Cambodia policy, I think the results would have been much less heartening.

Interesting stuff—especially the bits about cuts to international-labor assistance programs, and the use of incentives rather than enforcement to promote labor standards. He also notes that, now that the quotas have been lifted, Cambodia's about to be screwed by our high import tariffs on cheap, mass-market clothing. At any rate, Democracy Arsenal's Suzanne Nossel keeps saying that this is the sort of thing progressives should be thinking seriously about. On a political level, I doubt that worrying about labor standards in Cambodia is ever going to win anyone an election anywhere, but it's important all the same.

John Kalb has some good thoughts on the filibuster, but seems to think that Frist's nuclear option is just as legitimate as the Dems using the filibuster to block Bush's nominees. Er, maybe if you subscribe to some higher notion of legitimacy—though I still have yet to hear the principled case as to why it's "fair" for all nominees to receive an up-or-down vote—but if you think Senate rules are important, it's clear that the nuclear option is pretty illegitimate in a way that judicial filibusters aren't.

A quick recap: If Republicans in the Senate wanted to use normal channels to change the rules so that filibusters are disallowed for judicial nominees, they could, but it would take 60 67 votes, which obviously they don't have. So the alternative is this: The nominees would be introduced, Democrats would filibuster. Either Dick Cheney or the Senate President Pro Tempore would declare the filibuster unconstitutional. Democrats could appeal the ruling, at which point a Republican Senator would move to scrap the appeal, and a simple majority of Senators could uphold his motion. That means Cheney's ruling would stand, and the judicial filibuster would be no more. There are a couple of other ways to do it, but in every case, the Senate parliamentarian—who was put in place by the GOP—would rule against the "nuclear option". Republicans would simply override him. Frankly, it seems that allowing a simple majority to override any Senate rule they feel like—or worse, allowing a sitting vice-president to play judge and simply declare a rule "unconstitutional"—sets a far worse precedent than any abuse of the (perfectly legal) filibuster does.

At any rate, even the National Review has admitted that the judicial filibuster is within constitutional bounds—they just think it's unseemly, or unfair. Well, fine, but let's also cut the bullshit. If the situations were exactly reversed, Republicans would have no problem launching the filibuster against, say, John Kerry's "extremist" nominees. And Democrats would bitch and likely consider going nuclear. We're all hypocrites. The interesting question, to my mind, is whether, regardless of what's been done in the past, we should agree to have a judicial filibuster in the future or not, and who wins out from not having one in the long-term. I have a piece coming out on the Mother Jones site either today or tomorrow talking about this, so, uh, stay tuned...

Juan Cole rounds up evidence that tries to solve the mystery of what the Iraqi insurgency "wants." The plausible answer seems to be: to undermine faith in the new government, to turn the public against the Americans, and eventually return to power. Obviously I don't know who's leading the insurgency, or how fractured it is, but Thanassis Cambanis rounds up evidence that ex-Baathists are in charge, forming sophisticated command structures, and are probably plotting a future coup of some sorts.

Speaking of which, I'm not sure this much-feared coup could ever possibly work. As Spencer Ackerman noted a while back, the original military coup, in 1968, worked because there was a vast security apparatus already in place and the Baathists manage to convince the Shia clergy that they had nothing to fear. This sort of thing isn't likely to succeed again—fool me once, etc. So the Baathists seem to be wrong about this strategy; at worst they'll spark a civil war that they'll likely lose. Though maybe they have something sneakier in mind.

Also, the point about that vast security apparatus is important for a different reason. Most of the attention and reporting on Iraq these days focuses on whether or not we're training enough Iraqi troops and police officers to hold down the fort when the U.S. starts to draw down. Perhaps even more important, though, is that we build the sort of institutions that preserve independent civilian control over, say, the Ministry of Defense, and spread out power among all the different security ministries. Otherwise, you get to the point where someone from within government can seize the reins of power and easily control the security services and military via his various political cronies.

Another troubling sign is that, as far as I can tell, the Iraqi Army is doing much of the internal security work right now, something you never want to see happen, especially in a country with a long, sordid history of military rule. Ideally, the country would have a strong Civil Intervention Force, under the control of the Interior Ministry, keeping the peace. Unfortunately the State Department's Iraq Weekly Status reports no longer tell us anything meaningful about who's being trained where or what's going on how, so for all we know, the United States is building the sort of state that can easily be converted into military rule. Splendid.

This bit of reporting by Helen Epstein, about AIDS prevention in Uganda, is one of the most fascinating—and horrifying—things I've read in awhile. It's not just that all those funds for abstinence education in Africa are being wasted on programs that don't work. Rather, the religious organizations carrying out these abstinence programs have actually been lobbying to suppress condom education and the highly successful "Zero Grazing" campaign in Uganda (a safe-sex version of polygamy). These battles, for the most part, seem to have little to do with ideology or religion, and everything to do with different groups scrabbling over lavish government contracts. Meanwhile, people die. Lovely.

So I spent the whole weekend away from the internet, just to prove I wasn't, y'know, a hopeless junkie or anything, and it was all very exciting. But five minutes after firing my creaky laptop back up and clicking around blogland, I'm ready to leave again. Here's Blog-Of-The-Year's "analysis" of the big Newsweek/Koran-flushing fuck-up, from one John Hinderaker: "I really think that calling Newsweek's blunder 'the press's Abu Ghraib' is unfair to the low-lifes who carried out the Abu Ghraib abuses. After all, they didn't even hurt anyone, let alone kill them."

Um...



Sorry, I'm sure there's a lot of all-important opinion-mongering to be done about this Newsweek scandal—which is appalling—but honestly, who gives a flying fuck what "Powerline" has to say about accuracy and media responsibility?

Over the past year, a handful of evangelicals, Jim Wallis especially, have been trying to get their conservative brethren to stop obsessing about sex and start paying more attention to poverty and other societal ills. It's a nice idea, but Michelle Cottle did some asking around and figures, eh, white evangelicals probably aren't ever going to play along. Her entire essay's brilliant, but this is the crucial bit:

In modern U.S. politics... personal piety has proved the more compelling rallying cry for a variety of reasons--perhaps the most basic being that sex sells. "Sex always gets people's attention," says Marvin Olasky, godfather of compassionate conservatism and editor of the religious magazine World. Talk of sexual sin "goes to the gut," agrees conservative columnist Cal Thomas…. By contrast, issues like health care and homelessness, while arguably more pertinent to more people's lives, lack the same sizzle and, as such, are unlikely to capture the imagination of the grassroots, not to mention a drama-loving press.

As a bonus, says Thomas, opposing abortion and gay marriage generally has more to do with changing someone else's behavior than one's own. He points out that, as far as the decline of American culture goes, Christians are just as guilty as non-Christians when it comes to high divorce rates, out-of-wedlock sex, and rampant materialism. (Supporting data for this and similar trends can be found in Sider's book The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience.) But addressing this embarrassing reality would involve too much self-scrutiny, says Thomas...

Similarly, issues like poverty and racial reconciliation don't lend themselves as neatly to the same good-versus-evil, us-versus-them political paradigm as gay rights or judicial activism, the right's latest bugaboo. Sociologist Tony Campolo... likes to quote from philosopher Eric Hoffer's 1951 book, True Believer: "Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without belief in a devil." Hitler had the Jews, and the communists had the capitalists, says Campolo. "I contend that it's easy to rally people around opposition to gay people. In the minds of many, they have become the devil that must be destroyed if America is to be saved."

The uncomplicated, emotionally driven nature of the right's message gives it a fund-raising edge over the non-right. "Big-time TV evangelists tell people, 'Send us your money so we can stop abortion, stop gay rights,'" snorts Thomas. "If they were to go on and talk about how Christians needed to fix what's wrong in their own house, they wouldn't raise a dime." Moreover, if evangelicals seriously began pushing for tougher environmental regulation or higher Social Security taxes, it would strain the base's comfy relationship with the wing of the GOP that cares less about social than economic policy but that has, over the years, proved amenable to helping finance the crusade for personal piety...

On a more spiritual plane, the non-right also has the theological tradition of American evangelicalism to contend with... As historian George Mardsen relates in Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, the progressive politics of the Roosevelt era (Teddy, not Franklin) "fostered a new wave of social concern in the churches and new types of proposals for social reform." Increasingly, progressive-minded Christians began insisting that believers should focus less on saving people's souls for the next world and more on redressing social ills in this one, a message referred to as "the social gospel." More theologically conservative Christians grew increasingly upset at what they saw as an attempt to supplant the message of salvation through Jesus's divine grace with a message of salvation through good works. They, in turn, responded by championing personal redemption and individual holiness over what famed revivalist Billy Sunday denounced as "this godless social-service nonsense."

American evangelicalism's emphasis on free-will individualism, personal responsibility, and the paramount importance of one's personal walk with God predisposes many adherents to distrust government intervention in social problems like poverty. In researching their book, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, Michael Emerson and Christian Smith found that evangelicals are more inclined than nonevangelicals to blame an individual's failure to thrive on personal shortcomings--say, a lack of ambition or character--rather than on any systemic disadvantages.

It's a harsh appraisal, and I certainly wish it wasn't true. But it's hard to argue against.

Continue Reading "'But Sex Sells!'"

Chien Wen Kung points to the original 1977 New York Times review of Star Wars:

In opposition to these good guys are the imperial forces led by someone called the Grand Moff Tarkin (Peter Cushing) and his executive assistant, Lord Darth Vader (David Prowse), a former student of Ben Kenobi who elected to leave heaven sometime before to join the evil ones.

Ah yes, the old "executive assistant" trick. Reminds me of the summer I worked as a hotel clerk and put it down on my resume as "reservation manager" or something of the sort. Shameless, yes, but it's what you have to do. Anyway, the full review's worth a read; apparently there were oblique Wizard of Oz references in Star Wars. Very cool! But, um, what were they? A prize and a pony ride to whoever can think of even one.

Very interesting essay in Slate: "Why Strict Churches are Strong," by Judith Shulevitz. The basic question is this: If people are in fact self-interested when it comes to faith—and that's a dubious assumption, but let's roll with it—why do so many submit to burdensome religious laws? Shulevitz, channeling economist Laurence Iannacone, has a clever thesis:

Iannacone starts by asking why people join strict churches, given that doing so exacts such a high price. Eccentric customs invite ridicule and persecution; membership in a marginal church may limit chances for social and economic advancement; rules of observance bar access to apparently innocent pleasures; the entire undertaking squanders time that could have been spent amusing or improving oneself.

According to Iannacone, the devout person pays the high social price because it buys a better religious product. The rules discourage free riders, the people who undermine group efforts by taking more than they give back. The strict church is one in which members with weak commitments have been weeded out.

Well, now. I haven't read Iannacone's paper, but it seems like strictness can't possibly be the only determinant of strength. Four strict churches that come to mind are: the Catholic Church, the Church of Latter Day Saints, the Amish, and Jehovah's Witnesses. All strong churches, yes, but only the first two are truly muscle-bound in the sense that they're far more likely to last for centuries to come. (Obviously I can't test this.) Is that because of contingent historical factors, or because of particular rules that are more advantageous to certain religions? After all, some strict sects might be strong simply because, like Mormonism and Catholicism, they encourage their followers to have many, many babies. That would, um, play a big role.

Also, how are we measuring strength here? Yes, most likely an Orthodox shtiebl has a high average level of commitment. But obviously there are going to be a lot of very committed people in a Reform congregation too. So if there are 200 committed and 10 "free-riding" Orthodox Jews, alongside 200 committed and 100 "free-riding" Reform Jews, obviously the former will look like the "stronger" congregation, but the latter church is obviously just as strong by any sensible measure. You could certainly a decent number of passionate, committed, pious peers in a Reform congregation or mainline Protestant church as you could with, say, the Holy Rollers. The benefits don't seem all that different.

So why do some people nevertheless put up with stricter churches? Some other theory is needed, it seems. It strains the imagination to think that devout people who join a strict church are joining because of the lack of free-riders. (How would a prospective new member even know whether the church has free riders or not?) And it doesn't seem likely that people are leaving mainline churches because they're frustrated with all the free riders, either. Indeed, this helpful article, which goes through data on church membership, argues that the growth of conservative evangelical movements in America—alongside the decline of mainline churches—can be almost entirely explained through changing demographics, rather than mass bouts of church-switching. But I would assume Iannacone factored all this in, so maybe I should read the damn paper (but it's not anywhere on the internet!).

All right, let's try some arguments out. I've been teetering back and forth over whether it's a good thing for the Senate to be able to filibuster judicial nominees. Please note: This is entirely separate from the issue at hand, namely, whether Bill Frist and James Dobson should be allowed to override Senate rules with their "nuclear option". The answer to that is: No, of course they shouldn't. Respect the rules, boys! But suppose we could all sit down and decide, without knowing anything about the composition of Congress or the presidency, whether a minority of Senators should be able to block a judicial nominee. What would we choose?

On the one hand, as I've written before, there's a principled case to be made for requiring every court nominee to undergo some sort of supermajority approval. This is because: a) the Senate is appallingly undemocratic and a one-party majority in the Senate will not always represent the majority of the country (as is the case today), and b) judicial nominees are, for better or worse, imposed on the entire country for a period of time that outlasts the politicians who choose those judges. So it makes sense to try to get as wide a consensus as possible before confirming our lil' black-robed princes. No why do I think 60 votes is a good cutoff for that consensus, as opposed to 75 votes or 100? Dunno. It just seems about right. We make arbitrary limits all the time (why is the drinking age 21? Why not 20 or 22?), but that's no argument against drawing some sort of line.

Another good pro-filibuster argument I've often heard is that it would force presidents to nominate more moderate judges. It sure seems, after all, that the mere threat of a filibuster by the Republican Senate forced Bill Clinton to avoid radical nominees and put up Breyer and Ginsburg instead, two liberal but ultimately very "technocratic" judges. (In fact, if you define "judicial activism" by willingness to strike down state and federal laws, then Ginsburg and Breyer are, with Rehnquist, the three least activist judges on the court.) Now I'm still conflicted as to whether judicial restraint would be better for progressivism in the long term, but that's me. If you like moderate judges, as most people seem to do, then the filibuster might be appealing. Especially since parties are far more unified these days, and vote less on principle and more along strict party lines, it's less likely that voices of moderation will come from within a given majority party.

(Of course, you could also say that the very idea of a moderate judge is silly. You could argue that good judges can't be uncontroversial, because all good judges have some sort of coherent methodology for interpreting the constitution, that methodology will inevitably raise hackles, and hence, good judges are precisely the sort who will inevitably cause friction. This seems like a weird argument to me, but it is true that the notion of a "moderate" judge is kind of goofy. Legislators are called "moderate" when they compromise with various interest groups to write laws. But that's not the sort of thing judges should be doing.)

Anyway, let's see how a pro-filibuster arrangement would work in practice, today. Say both parties agree that 40 senators can now block whatever judges they deem too radical. Now the minority party can't block every judge, so they'll have to pick and choose who to filibuster. So clearly the smart strategy for Bush to take would be to nominate more radical judges. Want to get Janice Brown through? Fine, just nominate 10 people even wackier than she is, and the Democrats will eventually have to relent on some of them or pay the price. For their part, Republicans might also pay a price for trying this tactic—they'd have to associate themselves with a lot of genuinely terrifying judges, after all—but so long as the Democrats are formally allowed to block the absolute scariest, I don't think voters will much care who Bush nominates. (The interesting question here: Assuming that filibusters of nominees were allowed and agreed upon, then in the event of gridlock, on whom would the political pressure fall? The Senate, to ease up its standards? Or the president, to start putting up more acceptable nominees?)

Furthermore, if it's true that, even with supermajority approval, some radical judges would still get through, then there's another weird side-effect. The party in power is less likely to pay the price for appointing radical and unpopular judges, since those judges, after all, were confirmed with the consent of the minority party.

Now let's say the filibuster is eliminated, and Republicans can confirm any judge they want on a party-line vote. At this point there's more of a limit to how radical and unqualified the nominations can really be, since Republicans, and Republicans alone, have to bear responsibility for whoever gets put on the courts. Or at least that's the theory, and it's certainly the vision of the confirmation process laid out in Federalist #76 and #77. The reality, though, depends on how responsive you think our democracy really is, and my answer here is "not very"—not just because voters are lazy and apathetic, but because the structure of the Senate and the electoral college can prevent a democratic majority from expressing its frustration. (The 55 Republican senators we have now, after all, represent less than half of the population, and received fewer votes than their 45 Democratic opponents.) The idea that popular political pressure alone will keep the majority party in line seems, sadly enough, quite specious.

At any rate, I'm leaning towards keeping the filibuster and imposing a supermajority requirement for all judicial nominees, partly out of my belief that so long as simple congressional majorities don't need to reflect actual popular majorities, as is the case now, then there should be obstacles to letting those congressional majorities have their way. Especially on something irrevocable, like judges. Although, true, this is just a bizarre obsession I have. (Ah, how many editorial meetings end with me saying, "Well, this wouldn't be a problem if we just abolished the electoral college and had 50 at-large senators"? Um, most or all.) Anyway, I'm still thinking about it.

Astarte says that smoking bans in bars just aren't the end of the world. Seriously! Even the cigarette junkies learn to deal, and the non-smokers get to enjoy the night without tarring their lungs and smelling smoke on their underwear the next morning. Good times all around. I'll add two more things. First, it's very, very close to an undeniable fact that smoking bans actually improve the social lives of smokers. Everyone now has to wander outside to light up, where you get to mingle with... other smokers. Lots of new people you might not otherwise meet inside, an easy excuse to chat, and, if that's what you're after, everyone's make-out compatible here, since there's not the much-dreaded smoker's-breath barrier. (Well, it's true...)

Oh right, and the other thing: the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis just released two studies on smoking bans, including a case study in Missouri. Some economic benefits, very few if any drawbacks, that's their conclusion. So if you believe in stuff like numbers, that probably settles it.

Cambodia has been one of the most encouraging global stories over the last few years. Not because it's a model country—far, far from it—but because it's a developing nation that embraced higher labor standards and still managed to stay afloat in the global marketplace. Way back in 1999, the United States signed an experimental trade agreement with Cambodia, in which U.S. quotas on Cambodian garment imports depended on improved working conditions in the local factories. More reform meant more shirts and shoes that could be sold in America. And it worked! Cambodian garment workers got to unionize, got better working conditions, pay increases, and the country still attracted foreign investment. Cambodia may even weather the coming storm of cheap Chinese garments about to flood the world market.

Part of this is because companies that desperately need good publicity, like Gap and Nike, have been flocking to Cambodia. Which all reinforces the oddly paradoxical thesis, often touted by free-trader Jagdish Bhagwati, that most anti-globalization activists are sorely misguided, and yet... and yet their loud, angry existence is one of the few reasons why "free trade" actually does lead to a rise in global labor standards—because companies are shamed into action. In other words, the activists refute themselves! Funny. This could also mean, however, that not every country in the world will be able to duplicate Cambodia's success. There are only so many companies that badly need better P.R. (As it happens, I still think other countries can raise their labor standards without losing foreign investment, just probably not by following the Cambodia model.)

Anyway, this New York Times story today lays out some of the details, and notes that Cambodia still has severe problems—rampant poverty in every other sector, official corruption, labor leaders turning up murdered—but the garment industry may be leading the way to reform. Like I said, far from perfect, but encouraging.

Everyone's heard some version of the argument that the war in Iraq is fueling a global jihad and making the United States, in the long run, less safe. Why, my own magazine ran a cover story on this subject last summer. To some extent, though, this argument always seemed slightly unconvincing to me. Thousands of Muslims around the world were no doubt radicalized by the U.S. invasion, yes, but ultimately that only matters so much. A pissed-off Salafist in Jordan, say, is still at some point going to need to stop surfing his angry jihad websites and go find someone who can teach him to blow lots of stuff up.

Now that sort of training has always been, when it comes right down to it, incredibly hard to find, and it's doubly hard to find now that al-Qaeda no longer has its vast Afghanistan training bases. So in the end a lot of people who are pissed-off about the invasion of Iraq simply aren't going to become terrorists. Or they'll become incompetent terrorists, like the 2003 Casablanca bombers, who ended up doing more harm to their cause than good by accidentally killing a bunch of fellow Muslims.

But there's one glaring exception—namely, the mujahideen now duking it out with American troops in Iraq. These fighters really do have the ability to kick the global terrorism movement back into high gear. Terrorism expert Evan Kohlmann explains the process:

As thousands of budding, would-be terrorists are drawn to the conflict in Iraq like flies, the Sunni Triangle has become an virtual engine driving religious terrorism and a breeding ground for the next 9/11. In previous decades, Al-Qaida has relied on Muslim brushfire wars in places like Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya as its very lifeblood to recruit and train an army of skilled social misfits. While many of these men are quickly "martyred" in local combat operations (as has undoubtedly occurred frequently in Iraq), the survivors develop advanced combat experience in an urban environment. They learn in detail the arts of sabotage, assassinations, suicide bombings, and downing commercial aircraft with missiles.

Eventually, the local conflict comes to an inexorable end, and the majority of the foreign mujahideen are forced to exfiltrate the area and return to their countries of origin… But rather than becoming demilitarized, these battle-hardened fighters inevitably continue to carry on their terrorist activities at home, albeit in a new environment.

That's bad. But it's worth noting, if only to be contrary, two reasons why it might not be quite as bad as all that. For one, sheer numbers: there simply aren't that many foreign fighters in Iraq nowadays. Iraqi Sunnis still comprise both the bulk and the brains of the insurgency, and they probably won't ever leave Iraq to go wreak havoc in New York or Los Angeles. Most of them won't, at any rate. Meanwhile, estimates of foreign fighters in Iraq usually top out at around 2,000. That's a lot, but it pales beside the estimated 100,000 foot soldiers who passed through al-Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan.

And even those vast and undisturbed Afghan camps only churned out a very small number of "hardcore" competent fighters, and an even smaller number of competent planners and masterminds. After the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 2003, note, al-Qaeda's planning operations were essentially put on hold. That's telling. I'm not saying the entire organization hinged on one guy—surely not—but it shows that even after years and years of sifting through recruits and finding the best and brightest jihadis, it was never that easy to find people who could carry out highly sophisticated planning operations. (Read the Stratfor book—America's Secret War—to get a sense for just how mind-boggingly complicated the 9/11 attacks were to plan and carry out. It's the only remotely worthwhile chapter in the book, but it's good.) Will the Iraqi foreign fighters, once they disperse, produce terrorists and planners of this caliber? Well, maybe. After all, Zarqawi and some of the other insurgents are becoming shockingly sophisticated in their attacks. But maybe not. Many of these fighters will die, many will be captured, and it seems unlikely that the remnants will be anywhere near as skilled and well-funded as al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was in the late '90s.

The other reason for optimism—mind you, optimism literally ripped from the jaws of a bitter, bloody travesty—is that the United States is also training its own "next generation" of counterterrorism specialists in Iraq, something we really didn't have before, not to this extent. That could help tip the scales against whatever global terrorist movement emerges from Iraq. Now that doesn't mean the war was "worth it," not in the slightest, but there's at least decent reason to think it may not produce the vicious backlash everyone is expecting. Sadly, though, I'm not at all certain about this.

Here are two fun-but-not-terribly-important trivia items that would have been nice to know during the 2004 election campaign, and never really came up at any point:

1. In 1991, after Dick Cheney's spokesperson had been outed by gay activists, the then-Secretary of Defense said: "the notion that somehow there is a security risk involved---in allowing homosexuals to serve in the Armed Forces---is something of an old chestnut." (This would've been relevant given that groups like the Center for Military Readiness were bashing John Kerry for believing similar things.) (Source: Andrew Webb, "Silence=Relief" in the 3/01 Washington Monthly)
   
   
2. John Kerry's health reinsurance scheme for health care was actually first proposed by President Eisenhower in 1954. Unlike Truman, Eisenhower was against national health insurance, but he wanted government to insure against the most catastrophic costs so that insurance companies could have the flexibility to experiment with expanding coverage. He called it "a hundred per cent endorsement of the principle of private insurance." It was. But the AMA pilloried the whole scheme as socialist, as they did pretty much any health care plan back then, and it was defeated in the Senate by one vote. Afterwards, Eisenhower muttered that the AMA was "just plain stupid... a little group of reactionary men dead set against any change." True that. (Source: One Nation Uninsured, pp. 44-46)

Oh well, perhaps they'll come in handy some other time. And yes, this is much like thinking up a "devastating" comeback long, long after the argument's ended. I think Voltaire had a term for this, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was... [GOT IT: The term is esprit de l'escalier or "staircase wit" -- a comeback you think of after you've left the parlor and you're halfway down the stairs. Thanks Nadezhda! And it was Diderot, not Voltaire.]

I don't know if there's anyone out there who takes a consequentialist view of abortion—as opposed to some sort of rights-based view—but obviously there are all sorts of secondary consequences that stem from legalized abortion. This technical paper, by Jonathan Klick of AEI, looks at the relevant econometric research on the subject. I can't say what Klick's bias might be—AEI can be hackish sometimes, though not pure undiluted hackery like, say, Heritage—but presumably the survey tinges conservative. (Klick gives space to John Lott, after all.) But anyway, the findings are worth summarizing:

Abortion and risky sex. The relationship here is surprisingly hard to measure, because it's hard to know just how much sex people are having (I know I lie about it). But it really does seem that people, especially young people, are quite sensitive to the costs of sex. With that in mind, legalized abortion doesn't appear to increase the overall level of sexual activity, though people seem to view abortion as a substitute for ex ante birth control. Looser abortion laws, more risky sex, but not necessarily more overall sex. (I don't know how this squares with recent research on the morning-after pill.)

Parental notification laws. Two findings. Laws requiring minors to get consent before receiving abortion seem to decrease the incidence of unprotected sex among women by a decent amount, but barely impact the overall sex rate. That leads to finding two: a 1996 study found that parental notification laws lead to lower teen birth rates. (Note: This isn't what I would have expected, though I'm still very much against parental notification laws. Explanation later.)

Child abuse. As you'd expect, legalized abortion seems to have reduced the incidence of child abuse among the cohort of kids born after legalization. The commonsense explanation, of course, is that legalized abortion means fewer unwanted births.

Abortion and crime. The debate here is fascinating, but fairly technical, so read the paper if you want to know the details. Basically, though, Steve Levitt (the Freakonomics guy) and John Donohue first made this connection a few years ago, arguing that about half of the crime decrease in the '90s was due to the fact that, thanks to legalized abortion, there were fewer unwanted children born after 1973, and therefore, fewer criminals around in the '90s. They've been bickering with critics ever since, and from the way Klick presents it, the debate still seems inconclusive.

Abortion and opportunities for women. You'd expect that fewer unplanned pregnancies would mean more opportunities for women. But there are a lot of other factors to try to weed out. (Perhaps women who are more likely to have unplanned pregnancies are less likely to do well in the workplace? Doubtful, but still.) Anyway, two researchers found that abortion legalization was a boon for black women—if not for white women—as far as graduating high school, entering college, and employment goes.

Bargaining positions. This is the best part. Economists Akerlof, Yellen, and Katz argued that women who are willing to have abortions have a "competitive advantage" on the dating circuit, since they can offer sex at a lower expected price. Women who are unwilling to have an abortion are either at a disadvantage or must reduce their expectations that the man will help out in the event of an unplanned pregnancy. (In other words, unmarried women are less able to demand marriage and support in exchange for sex.) And yes, the world seems very fucked up when it's looked at in this way. Also, Sonia Oreffice found that married women increase their relative bargaining power, since they have more control over their own fertility.

Anyway, like I said, none of this stuff really changes the debate in any meaningful way. These results aren't even all that surprising. And it doesn't even make for good cocktail party chatter. Basically, this post is useless. But it's either this or endless Star Wars Episode III discussions...

Very interesting. Seth Jones has a new Brookings report on "The Rise of Europe's Defense Industry." Don't laugh! European states, it seems, are biting fingernails over the dominance of America's defense tech industry, and have been slowly integrating their own defense industries for quite some time, no longer collaborating quite as much with the United States on military research and development, as was the case during the Cold War. (Part of this, too, is due to idiotic export controls in the U.S. and regulations on American foreign investment.)

Anyway, it's a slow process, but could be a trend to watch if it proceeds apace. Obviously it would be nice for Europe to have its own well-equipped, independent security force to bust out for peacekeeping and conflict-prevention operations. (Really, it was just plain embarrassing when Germany had to rent a few Ukrainian jets to get to Afghanistan in 2001.) On the downside, Europe could start selling a lot of this defense technology to China, as a way of balancing the United States. Certainly that's what I would do if I were worried about excessive U.S. dominance.

Everyone's favorite Aardvark has more on the upcoming Egyptian presidential elections. International monitors? Nein. Rules that allow for a real campaign? Nein! Crackdowns on Islamists? Ah, but of course. Now we see what Bush and Rice do. Meanwhile, what is with this AP lede: "CAIRO, Egypt -- In a major step toward multi-candidate presidential elections, parliament Tuesday overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment…" Good god, people. On the other hand, this AP story on tensions within the Muslim Brotherhood is good.

Also, Knight-Ridder's Warren Stroebel has a nice overview of goings-on in Egypt. I still don't understand, though, why people are worried that a more democratic Egypt might one day elect an "anti-American" government. Who cares? No, really, who cares? It's not like they'll shut off the oil spigots. And yeah, they might not be as supportive of the "road map" between Israel and Palestine, but I figure that's not going to get resolved anytime soon anyway. Now on the military side, it's true that we have two CENTCOM facilities in Egypt, a series of naval and air bases, and use Egyptian airspace and port facilities quite frequently. But eh, we'll live. The worst thing an Islamist government in Egypt might do is not let our little petroleum boats use the Suez Canal, pushing up oil prices—in theory, they could choke off transport of 3.8 million barrels/day. But since I think that higher oil prices are better in the long run, that's a risk worth taking!

Well, maybe this is all too glib. But I don't see an anti-American government in Egypt as that big a catastrophe for us. And at any rate, if the United States were to engage the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups right now, speaking out against Mubarak's mass crackdowns, that would sort of lessen the odds that an eventual MB government would hate us irreparably, no?

Well this sure looks like good news: the White House is getting ready to adopt "the John Kerry plan" towards North Korea and open direct talks with Kim Jong Il. Of course, they could've done this four years ago, but then again... er, never mind. I don't know what the counterargument would be.

UPDATE: Oh, never mind. Reading the full story, it doesn't actually look like anything will change. This isn't the John Kerry plan after all. By "direct talks," the State Department means that it will continue to chat up North Korea within the six-party framework. Oy. This is madness. All the "six-party framework" has ever meant is that delegates from all six nations would crowd into a poorly-ventilated room, with 40 translators speaking every which way, while U.S. envoy James Kelly and NK envoy Li Gun trotted over to one corner to speak quietly. Except that the U.S. wouldn't put forward any actual negotiating positions. Not surprisingly, nothing ever got accomplished.

The key issue here has never been whether North Korea and the United States should start speaking to each other directly. They've been speaking to each other directly. The issue is whether the United States actually decides to offer anything to Kim Jong Il in return for abandoning his nuclear program. That, oddly enough, is how negotiating tends to work. And Kim Jong Il seems at least vaguely receptive to further negotiations. But according to the CBS report, it seems the White House has only offered to recognize North Korea's sovereignty. Oh, please. Colin Powell has been recognizing North Korea's sovereignty since late 2002. This isn't remotely serious. On the bright side, if San Francisco gets nuked I won't have to fix that rickety cabinet door in our kitchen...

South America is far, far outside my field of pseudo-expertise, but Randy Paul's post on how to think about Hugo Chavez seems exactly right. Chavez' anger over the plight of Venezuela's poor is certainly well-founded, and it would indeed be wonderful if he could put the country's oil wealth towards productive ends. At the same time, he's a thug, doing very thuggish things, and he really shouldn't be. He says bizarre stuff that's often counterproductive. He deserves much of the criticism he gets. But then again, he's not actually a Cuban stooge, and he was, after all, elected, so loose talk about regime change is really quite unhelpful. Anyway, I'm not sure why people think you have to be either vehemently pro-Chavez or vehemently anti-Chavez, but I guess that's why they're called "polarizing figures," eh?

In other South America news, genuine kudos to Condoleeza Rice if this bit of reporting is true and she's been quietly smoothing over tiffs between the U.S. and our neighbors down south.

Reading Kevin Drum's review of Tom Friedman, along with Matt Yglesias' follow-up, made me wonder: Why don't democracies go to war with each other? Will this always be the case? And, the other big question, why should we expect that countries with deep economic ties won't go to war with each other? (Friedman's cutely-named "Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention.") My brain's a bit sluggish today, but it's not obvious to me why Friedman's two peace theories should be true.

Uh, okay, let's take a whack at democracies first. I'm not sure it's entirely true that no two democracies have ever fought each other, but I'll agree with Jack Levy that saying democracies rarely do battle is "as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international politics."

So why is this? You could say, if you were a fluffy constructivist, that democracies refrain from clubbing each other's brains out because they share some "common identity". But this seems wrong, obviously "common identities" aren't even stable within democracies, as when, for example, the United States had its little civil war. Moreover, in the future, if every country in the world becomes a democracy, it's hard to think that they'll all share one stable "democratic" identity, as one might think the U.S. and Europe do now, for instance.

Alternatively, one could say that democracies represent people who no longer believe in crude and barbaric things like nationalism or honor, and the people in a working democratic society become the sort of people who believe in liberal law and order. Now that too seems wrong; certainly nationalism is on the rise in good voting countries like Japan, and as Frank Foer pointed out in How Soccer Explains the World, globalization is actually inflaming nationalist sentiment in many parts of the world. I don't think a world of democracies would be at all free from nationalism and war-mongering. Certainly the United States is not.

There are also various structural explanations. Democracies move at a torpid pace, with lots and lots of veto points, so there are all sorts of obstacles in the path to war. That depends, of course, on what kind of democracy you have; here in the United States the president has usurped the right to declare war over the years. And as Matt Y. points out, Bush saw no reason to listen to business interests who were against the war in Iraq. Certainly this political structure hasn't stopped democracies from going to war with non-democracies, so then there's no reason to think it would stop two democracies from fighting each other.

Perhaps you could say that since democracies are open and transparent, they are more likely to make rational estimates on how best to keep the peace and avoid conflict with each other. (Assuming that war is likely when one or both sides misestimate its chances for success.) Now true, the U.S. has shown in Iraq that miscalculation is hardly exclusive to non-democracies. On the other hand, the Iraq war shows that democracies have a hard time bluffing about war. Everyone could see the invasion of Iraq coming from a mile away; one could say it happened in part because Saddam Hussein did not respond rationally to it, as a democratic leader might have. This is the best explanation—that is, a weaker democracy, threatened by a stronger, would a) know it was weaker and b) do everything to avoid war because it would be constrained by public opinion—but hardly certain.

Meanwhile, there are a few factors, theoretically, that make it more likely that democracies would go to war with each other. Democracies often have inexperienced leaders. Elected politicians must think in the very short-term. Popular opinion can often be very wrong about the best course of action. (From all the polls I've seen, people think and care less about foreign policy, so it stands to reason that democratic foreign policy could often be worse than autocratic foreign policy, though in practice I don't know.) All these things could very well create miscalculation and conflict.

At any rate, I can't see any real reasons why democracies wouldn't go to war with each other. Presumably I've missed something. But if not, that means the question of why, historically, democracies haven't bloodied each other up is mostly due to the fact that democracies are a recent phenomenon, the bipolar structure of the Cold War made everything weird, and the ironclad law's just an aberration. Of course, I'm merely nitpicking the ludicrously strong claim about democratic peace theory: that democracies would never go to war with each other. Obviously anything is possible. The more pressing question is whether two democracies would simply fight each other less than other alternatives. On that, I have no clue, though it seems plausible. And oh yes, I was supposed to talk about economic interdependence. Well, this post is getting long, so I'll have to get back to that later...

Here's a fun diversion: the Social Security administration just released its list of the most popular baby names for 2004. Jacob takes #1 for boys, and Emily is the top girl name. (Incidentally, Madison is #3? Is Madison really that popular? What brought that on? I'm not wholly up on my pop culture, but there doesn't seem to be an actor or celebrity driving the choice.)

Also of interest to no one but me and the rest of the Brad conspiracy, both "Bradford" and "Brad" have been rapidly and steadily declining in popularity over the past 15 years. At this rate they'll both be out of the top 1000 by next year. On the other hand, "Brady" has surged in popularity (122), but that's a poor substitute if there ever was one.

Er, there seems to be some debate out there as to whether the latest big al-Qaeda capture, Abu Faraj al-Libbi, was confused with someone else or even an important capture, for that matter. But Dan Darling—whose terrorism analysis is always stellar—does the research and argues that no, this guy was definitely a major al-Qaeda dude. If not the #3 man, whatever that matters, then at least "one of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's deputies who has been linked to terrorist attacks in both the United Kingdom as well as to a potential attack during the US presidential election or the inauguration." So no confusion. Also, there was this interesting passage from Time magazine:

Hours before the Libyan's arrest was made public last Wednesday, two Pakistani journalists received telephone calls from men identifying themselves as al-Qaeda. The callers asked that news of al-Libbi's arrest be broadcast, hoping to dissuade other operatives from trying to contact him and to alert his associates to flee before U.S. and Pakistani authorities could track them down. When asked how he knew that al-Libbi had been caught, the caller replied, "Because he used to be with us."

Well, good. Our intelligence agencies seem to know what they're doing. Of course, it's no puzzle why most people assume our intelligence agencies don't know what they're doing. But certainly it's an amusingly far cry from the good old days the CIA was thought to be the all-powerful puppet-master behind every kidnapping, conspiracy, and assassination on the face of the earth.

Harold Meyerson peers deep in the bowels of recent AFL-CIO disputes and finds... a lot of shit-slinging. Perhaps I'm naive, but these intra-labor disputes always sound far more ferocious than they really need to be. Still, things don't look good. The SEIU and other dissident unions aren't happy with the halfway changes that current federation president John Sweeney has just announced—namely, new industry Coordinating Committees, rebates for unions doing "serious" organizing, more money for solidarity with unions abroad, abolishing the International Affairs Department, etc.—and would prefer that Sweeney just stepped down. At the same time, the dissident unions don't really have the votes to get their preferred changes enacted. So perhaps the SEIU, UNITE, and the Teamsters will all secede. Or perhaps they're bluffing. Either way, plenty of insults are flying.

Meanwhile, I wish some smart labor analyst could tell me which side's proposals would be "better" for organized labor, so that I could have the correct opinion about all this. For now, though, none of the disputes seem all that fundamental, and all sides could probably agree on some compromise measure, if only Sweeney were to step aside and be replaced by someone who could introduce sweet, sweet unity.

The latest BusinessWeek cover story tries to puzzle out why Social Security—and social insurance programs in general—are so goddamn popular, with some useful polling data on the demographics of risk aversion:

According to a BusinessWeek analysis of data compiled by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, at the core of Safety Net Nation are white men. You read that right. These are the same white-male swing voters who have been trending strongly Republican in recent Presidential contests. They tend to be socially conservative and patriotic. They have average incomes and are slightly less educated than the citizenry as a whole.

The Safety Netters are not monolithic, however. They include aging men who are suspicious of Big Government and Big Business and who view private accounts as a giveaway to Wall Street and a gamble for their children and grandchildren. There are suburban Security Moms -- convinced by Bush that Uncle Sam should aggressively protect them from terrorists and cultural pollution -- who worry that the President is making retirement dicier. And there are the burned investors of the Baby Boom generation, who want some government safeguards from the serrated edge of globalism -- from corporate downsizing to vaporware pensions and rampant outsourcing...

Among those resisting a Bush move to pare middle-class entitlements are thirtysomethings who feel squeezed between saving for their kids' college education and taking care of retired or soon-to-retire parents. Then there are disillusioned techies who once wanted government to get out of the way and let them get rich by age 30 but who now favor a federal role in shielding them from the excesses of capitalism.

Um, so that's just about everyone then, isn't it?

I noticed a comment or two from yesterday defending tariffs and protectionism, and, rather than offer a tepid rehash of neoliberal talking points in response, I thought I'd try to dig up the best pro-protectionism arguments I could find on the internet. Anyway, it wasn't exactly what I was looking for, but "Kicking Away the Ladder: The 'Real' History of Free Trade" (pdf), by Cambridge's Ha-Joon Chang, is pretty convincing.

Short argument: All of the first world countries used heavy interventionist trade and industrial protection measures to get a leg up during their infant stages. Especially the U.S. and Britain, who are often lauded for their laissez-faire approaches early on. Sadly, no. The United States slapped down, on average, a 40 percent tariff rate on manufacturing imports from 1820 up until World War II. Combined with its "natural" transportation barriers, Chang says "U.S. industries were literally the most protected in the world until 1945." In fact, he adds, the now-reviled Smoot-Hawley Act barely made a dent in overall levels of protection. (Though he also touches on the "Civil War was fought over tariffs, not slavery" argument, which has never been all that convincing to me.)

Ditto Britain, which did slash tariffs after the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1860, but still had a manufacturing tariff rate of 45-55 percent during its early growth spurt. (For a long while, Britain was far more protectionist than even France, which has a reputation for being excessively barrier-happy prior to World War II. 'Twas not so. In fact, the only time France was truly barrier-happy, under Napoleon III, was the one period of pre-WWII economic dynamism.)

There are other examples too, and we all know about Japan and the other East Asian "tigers" using interventionist measures during their miracle years. Blah blah. But what's interesting is Chang's claim that, when you correct for various factors, tariffs among less-developed countries are lower today than they were for First World countries way back when. As in:

For example, when the United States accorded over 40% average tariff protection to its industries in the late nineteenth century, its per capita income in PPP terms was already about three-fourths that of Britain...

Compared to this, the 71% trade-weighted average tariff rate that India used to have just before the WTO agreement, despite the fact that its per capita income in PPP terms is only about one-fifteenth that of the United States, makes the country look like a champion of free trade. Following the WTO agreement, India cut its trade-weighted average tariff to 32%, bringing it down to the level below which the U.S. average tariff rate never sank between the end of the Civil War and World War II.

Well, assuming all of Chang's numbers, etc., are correct, this seems like a serious argument, no? And presumably helps explain why developing countries have been growing so sluggishly over the past two decades. Seems the only way you could argue that developing countries don't deserve the same protections that the U.S., Britain, France, etc. got during their infancy is to say that times have changed in relevant ways. But how? In what relevant ways? Otherwise, seems time to rewrite WTO rules and World Bank policy to allow these sorts of industry-promotion tools.

We all know, since it's part of age-old Condoleeza Rice lore, that once upon a time the Sec. of State had some harsh words for Egyptian Prez. Husni Mubarak, and refused to visit his country after an opposition candidate was jailed. So Mubarak got nervous and promised to hold multiparty presidential elections this summer. The End. Victory for freedom and democracy, right?

Er, guess not. Check out Josh Stacher's post on the new draft legislation governing the upcoming elections in Egypt. Far from allowing an open race, there are so many exclusions and restrictions tossed into this bill that it's hard so see anyone other than Mubarak even getting nominated. Josh thinks the bill will probably get tweaked a bit once it passes through parliament, but not by much. As he says, it's a "masterful manipulation of cosmetic reform."

Now Mubarak presumably thinks he can get away with this because he won't be criticized by the United States. We'll see if that's right or wrong. I'd guess he's right. But I'm also not sure I entirely understand Mubarak's rationale here. This is his last election, and from all accounts he's going to win regardless of who else runs, so why restrict popular (er, in Western eyes at least) liberal groups like Ayman Nour's al-Ghad party? Why not instead let them run, give them a good drubbing, and then claim the mantle of semi-legitimacy? Instead he's just going to spark more protests over this latest round of bullshit. Kifaya, indeed. Plus, if Robert Springborg's right, setting a precedent for elections now could prevent the military from blocking his son Gamal's candidacy in 2011.

Meanwhile, a little internet surfing turned up this recent interview with Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif, who says they're going to take things re-e-e-e-e-al slow on the way to democratic reform in Egypt. No kidding: "He suggested that the opposition will not be prepared to run serious candidates until 2011 at the earliest." Uh-huh. Nazif also has nothing to say about recent calls from Egyptian judges for greater independence, or anything, for that matter, about judiciary reform, which, as praktike noted a few days back, is in many ways more important than free elections. But as long as there's no serious electoral challenge to the status quo, I can't see Mubarak pushing very hard for any sort of serious reforms, judiciary or otherwise. He's becoming a master of making concessions to the opposition without giving up any real power, and there's no reason to think that trend won't continue long, long into the future. Unless, of course, the White House wants to say something...

In that lecture linked below, Frankel has some other observations too, and lays down the oft-heard line that the two parties have swapped economic policies over the years: "Republicans have become the party of fiscal irresponsibility, trade restriction, big government, and bad microeconomics." While Democratic presidents have advocated mostly the opposite.

Fair enough, though he doesn't quite explain the shift (it's a tiny data set in any case). On trade, for instance, I think George W. Bush is at least as committed to free trade as either Bill Clinton or, say, John F. Kennedy was. (Yeah, yeah, people bring up the steel tariffs, but the way I see it: after watching Clinton cost Gore the 2000 election by refusing to impose those tariffs, any president would have been stupid not to throw them down in 2002.) But Bush's trade agenda is constrained by two things: First the jobs situation has mostly languished since he entered office, and whether that's his fault or not, it's made free trade a much, much tougher sell; and second, Bush hasn't made any effort to lend a hand to those who lose out from globalization—trying to kill the Trade Adjustment Assistance program didn't help much.

That makes the politics of trade thorny, and they were thorny for Bush from the start—as a post-election Democracy Corps poll found, "Bush voters who had seriously considered Kerry are hostile to NAFTA by a two-to-one ratio." But it's not just swing voters: white rural voters, older voters, and non-college educated males are all overwhelmingly hostile to NAFTA. That's the Bush base right there. Also, I don't have a cite, but I seem to remember Greenberg making the point somewhere that white evangelicals were pretty lukewarm on NAFTA too. (So why did they vote for Bush anyway? Part of the reason might be that only 13 percent of his supporters correctly understood the president's position on trade.) In fact, it wouldn't be too surprising if most of the grassroots-ish support for freer trade could be found among non-union Democrats. Note that opposition to CAFTA is actually stronger in red states than in blue states—presumably because it would affect farmers and textile workers the most, but perhaps for demographic reasons as well.

Here's a wide-ranging lecture by Jeffrey Frankel that, among other things, gives new CEA chair Ben Bernanke advice on how to preserve his academic reputation while supporting a president with dismal economic policies:

Bernanke has one major factor working in his favor: in these situations, the press seldom asks persistent or sophisticated questions, or at least (whey the do) seldom finds the responses worth printing. So one can usually formulate a careful sentence that appears to be consistent with the White House line and yet is not literally false, and get away with it.

Bush’s first CEA chairman, Glenn Hubbard, crafted the White House statement "Interest rates don’t move in lockstep with budget deficits." He, like Mankiw, has a textbook with the standard model linking interest rates to budget deficit. But because the sentence is true as written, Hubbard had nothing to fear from his colleagues when he returned to university life. The press did not ask the obvious follow-up questions. ("OK, we understand that budget deficits are not the only factor that determine interest rates. But, in your view, doesn’t a budget deficit cause interest rates to be higher than they otherwise would be? And regardless whether that increase is small, doesn’t the deficit crowd out investment?")

Excellent.

Sweet! Someone's come up with a plan for lowering oil prices that doesn't involve tapping into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Good stuff from the Center for American Progress. In the short term, the solutions mentioned here—scrappage programs for low-income car-owners, "feebates" for fuel-efficient cars, letting single-occupancy hybrids drive in HOV lanes, hiking up standards for all tire replacements, etc.—all seem quite doable. In the long run we'll need more drastic measures, of course, but there are no end of ideas for that.

Incidentally, now seems like the time for Democrats to push hard for an alternative energy bill that's far, far more sensible than the pork-filled disaster Tom DeLay and Dick Cheney are trying to yank through Congress. And I say that not just because drivers are pissed about $3 per gallon. It's also interesting to note that when Bush talks about high oil prices these days, he almost always says that he wants Congress to deliver him "an energy bill." Not "a bill that does X, Y, and Z," but just any old energy bill. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it reminds me of the debate over No Child Left Behind, when Bush didn't much care about pushing through an education bill that did X, Y, or Z. He sort of knew he wanted "accountability." But all he really cared about was passing some sort of education bill, because he was the "education president" and that's what education presidents do.

And when it came time to get the thing written, Bush ended up backing many of the ideas Clinton had proposed in the late '90s. Conservatives in Congress, meanwhile, lost out on almost everything they wanted: they had to give up vouchers, and they got strong federal standards shoved down their throat, the very thing they had filibustered when Bush's father proposed it back in 1991. (Most of the "no" votes against NCLB came from Republicans.) But hey, the president didn't care; he was getting his education bill! And all told, it was a pretty good bill—horrendously implemented, but setting the stage for a more rational policy down the road. Anyway, seems like something similar could happen today with energy. Unless, of course, the bill's too far along and the best that the minority party can hope to do is strip out some of the worst provisions, like the MTBE waiver. Okay, let's face it, the latter's probably the case. Egad.

Masha Gessen reports on the return of the show trial in Putin's Russia. Good article, though one paragraph in particular was—I'm naïve, sorry—shocking:

When Khodorkovsky was first arrested 18 months ago, a survey conducted by a Moscow newsweekly showed most entrepreneurs and politicians expected him to get away with a slap on the wrist. Now, courtroom reporters are taking bets on whether the oil tycoon will get six, eight, or ten years in a labor camp when the verdict is announced in mid-May

Russia still has labor camps? What kind? What do the prisoners do? A quick bit of googling doesn't yield anything overly descriptive (Mostly it's just pages about Soviet-era gulags), although here's some useful information from the Justice Department:

Every prisoner must work. Prisoners are paid for their labor according to the quality and quantity of their work and in compliance with the national economy's standards and rates. Due to the economic situation in 1993, over 200,000 prisoners were unemployed - there was no job for them. The new Constitution prohibits forced work, but it is not clear whether these provisions are being enforced.

Okay, so these aren't exactly gulags, though that "it is not clear" clause sounds ominous. Meanwhile, some fun incentives: "For good... labor, the convict may be encouraged by premiums and given permission to spend additional money for food and everyday goods, permission for additional short visits... and permission to receive additional mail and parcels." Okay, then. Most of Russia's prisoners are held in labor camps, 764 in all, known as ispravitelno-trudovich colonii, and there are also 13 prisons. If you want to read the gritty details about Russian prison conditions—the best place in the world to catch TB!—here's a good resource.

James Taranto defends the Religious Right today. Pick over what you like, but I'm sticking a fork in this little morsel:

The hysterical talk about an incipient "theocracy"--as if that is what America was before 1963, when the Supreme Court banned prayer in public schools--is either utterly cynical or staggeringly naive.

Okay, no, America never quite had a theocracy, although certainly for a long time many states had established churches. Virginia, for instance. What prevented America as a whole from ever becoming a theocracy, though, wasn't the Establishment Clause or any provision in the Bill of Rights. No, it was the fact that there was enough religious diversity among the different states that no one sect could rule them all. (In fact, James Madison, a devout church/state separator, didn't even want the religious clause in the Bill of Rights, because he thought nurturing multi-sectarianism would do a far better job of keeping America anti-theocratic than any scrap of paper ever could.)

But what was America? Well, look at the public schools. When public schools first came about in the 19th century, the point wasn't to teach math and science—there wasn't much math and science to teach, and besides, who needs to teach a future factory worker how to long divide? No, public schools were bult to create good citizens, moral citizens, upstanding citizens. But at the time, "morality" was more or less inseparable from "religion"—almost no one thought otherwise—so public schools generally endorsed a generic "nonsectarian Christian" curriculum. You read the Bible, and got edified, but you weren't being indoctrinated in the specific ways of the Baptists or Presbyterians or Quakers or anything else.

The problem, though, was that Catholics were mighty upset by all this, and who could blame them? Having your young'uns learn the Bible from Joe Schoolteacher is a pretty Protestant concept if there ever was one. So the infamous "Bible Wars" kicked off, as Catholics pushed for funding for separate Catholic schools that would learn their kids right and proper. In response, Republicans across the country, led by Senator James Blaine (right), pushed for state constitutional amendments to ban sectarian public schools, largely for cynical political reasons—to force Democrats to choose between sticking up for their Catholic base and placating angry Protestant supporters. But notice, no one considered the nonsectarian Christian education to violate any sort of church/state principles. After all, what were public schools if not for moral edification? And how else could you have edification without teaching the Bible? Impeccable logic. Eventually Catholics were beaten to a bloody pulp, gave up their fight, and sent their kids to the nonsectarian Christian schools anyway.

Well, now flash forward to the post-WWII era, at which point secularism had grown as a movement, and more importantly, a legal movement. First, the Supreme Court ruled that the Establishment Clause applied to states, and not just Congress. Then, in a whole series of cases, the Court declared that the government couldn't even support nonsectarian Christian stuff. No, government activities had to be secular.

Now this sounds like a random innovation, but there were some good reasons for it besides the mere fact that secularists got very, very good at working the courts. For one, the Jews. Jewish-Americans were immigrating en masse to America, they were quite obviously not part of the "non-sectarian Christian" culture, so that culture was becoming de facto more exclusionary. Now some intellectuals tried to invent a "Judeo-Christian" heritage for America—to jibe with the idea that government could do things to promote this heritage, but had to refrain from supporting any one particular sect—but that didn't really fly. Legal secularism prevailed.

Now this all came to a head in the 1970s with, among other things, Roe vs. Wade. It's important to note, I think, that evangelicals were caught completely off guard by the Roe decision. It was only afterward that an actual evangelical movement was formed, by people like Pat Robertson and the rest, which argued that the courts were becoming anti-religion, and more importantly, that without religion, there could be no "moral values" in America. Framing the argument this way allowed the movement to gain support from a wide swath of different sects, including conservative Catholics and Orthodox Jews. The line from this point down to James Dobson and Bill "nuclear" Frist today seems clear enough.

Why am I recounting all this? Well, three tentative thoughts. One, Taranto's right, America was not a "theocracy" before 1963. Government promoted non-sectarian Christianity, which was thought to be the foundation of this country and the key to producing good, upstanding citizens. No one really thought twice about this state of affairs, except the Catholics. Which brings me to point two: Many Catholics were badly mistreated under the old state of affairs; they felt, quite rightly, that their freedom of conscience was being violated by Bible-teaching in school. Although eventually many Catholics more or less signed on to the nonsectarian Christian project, the road forward was bloody. That's not the sort of thing we want to have happen again. And it's even more likely to happen nowadays because there are far more varieties of religions here in America—we've got more Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, etc. than ever before.

Third, it's fair to say that today's religious right would like to go much, much further than their predecessors. Now that they know exactly what secularism can do, and what its aims are, many religious conservatives feel embattled and threatened in a way they simply didn't prior to the 1970s. So they're a wee bit more militant nowadays. Judges, on the new view, ought to be able to have a judicial philosophy that's grounded in faith, rather than mere secular legalism. (Certainly Antonin Scalia seems to agree.) What exactly this all means in concrete terms is still unclear. Obviously it means they'd like judges with a zero-tolerance stance on gay marriage, striking down abortion rights, no sodomy unless you're a Republican mayor, allow creationism to be taught, etc. And probably a constitutional doctrine that supports public funding for sectarian religious organizations, even though that would be beyond anything that's ever been done in the past. (Indeed, it's the sort of thing Republicans used to oppose!)

But what's the broader aim here? Certainly now, as in the past, no one religious sect can dominate any other and set up an established church in the United States. Basically, that would never happen. A more likely goal is government backing for the sort of state-endorsed non-sectarian Christian culture that has existed for most of this country's history. And on this very general level, maybe there's a compromise to be reached here with secularists, and perhaps our side could be more accomodating here. Maybe. But on the specific hot-button issues being fought over here—gay rights, abortion rights, etc.—the debate has nothing, really, to do with respect or lack of respect for religion, and everything to do with two irreconcilable moral points of view clashing against each other.

Thanks praktike, for passing along this RFE/RL primer on the upcoming Iranian elections. Predicting anything in Iranian politics is always a mug's game, especially this early on, but in this case, the outcome looks sort of preordained, doesn't it? Rafsanjani it is?

Here's the way I figure it: Mustafa Moin, the leading reformist candidate, is probably going to be a non-factor, a victim of either low youth turn-out or else disqualification. (Though I seriously can't see the Guardian Council disqualifying Moin from running; he's not a threat to win and the mullahs don't need the outcry from abroad.)

Meanwhile, the right-wing vote looks like it will be split between Ali Larijani and Ali Velayati (right), since both of them seem intent on sinking the other's candidacy for some unknown reason. Most of the other conservative candidates will probably drop out under pressure, but Velayati seems set to play a Ralph Nader-esque maverick role and run no matter what happens (RFE/RL seems wrong about this; a spokesman recently insisted that Velayati was staying in even if Rafsanjani enters the race, though it's possible that het's bullshitting.) Meanwhile, the hardline Coordination Council has officially backed Larijani, though he's said he would drop out if the consensus favored another conservative. But at this point, it's possible that both men stay, in which case the true hardliners will vote for Larijani, while traditionalists will vote Velayati. (That's the word; interestingly, though, Velayati has made a serious play for the women's vote in recent weeks as well.) On foreign policy, I'd say that over the years Velayati has been the harder of hardliners, but they're both pretty aggressive, and neither seems like the sort of dude who would ever surrender the nukes.

Anyway, if that happens, it means former president Hashemi Rafsanjani's going to stroll in and win, despite the fact that influential conservative outlets like Kayhan are raking him over the coals of late. But oh well. Hm, I could be very wrong about how the jockeying among the right-wingers plays out, though, and they might well coalesce around a single candidate, so we'll have to wait and see. And Rafsanjani still hasn't officially declared his candidacy, so maybe he could throw a serious curveball, but I doubt it. The other two big wild cards here are what, if anything, Supreme Leader Ali Khamene'i does to clear the field, as well as the possibility that no one gets enough votes in the first round to win outright. That would mean a runoff—probably between Rafsanjani and Larijani, and then things could get... interesting.

Inspired by Tom Friedman's new book, I've been browsing "The Flat-Earth Bible" as a fun little diversion from work. The case for reading a flat-earth cosmology into the Bible has always been pretty strong, but that hasn't stopped a bunch of truly clever chaps known as "spherical apologetics" from arguing otherwise. Watch the contortions!

Those who claim Biblical support for a spherical earth typically ignore this forest of consistency and focus on one or two aberrant trees. Some take refuge in audacity. Henry Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research, cites one of the more explicitly flat-earth verses in the Old Testament Isaiah 40:22, the "grasshopper" verse quoted earlier as evidence for the sphericity of the earth. Quoting the King James version "he sitteth upon the circle of the earth" Morris ignores the context and the grasshoppers and claims "circle" should read "sphericity" or "roundness" [1956, 8]. This divide and conquer strategy is poor scholarship and worse logic...

Perhaps the scripture most frequently offered as evidence of the earth's sphericity is the King James version of Job 26:7, "He stretcheth out the north [tsaphon] over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing [beliymah]." (The New English Bible translates it, "God spreads the canopy of the sky over chaos and suspends earth in the void.") It is not clear what this means. The Hebrew tsaphon literally meant hidden or dark, and it was used in reference to the northern regions. Beliymah literally means "nothing." That would contradict all of the scriptures which say the earth rests on foundations...

Bouw's most interesting argument for sphericity is based on the gospel of Luke. He compares the King James version of Luke 17:31 and 17:34. The former says "In that day, he which shall be upon the house top..." and the latter "in that night there shall be two men in one bed..." (italics added). Bouw then cites 1 Corinthians 15:52 to argue that the events are simultaneous, claiming simultaneity is possible only on a spherical earth. First of all, the latter claim is wrong. The modern (though not the ancient) flat-earth model has day and night occurring simultaneously at different points on earth. Second, the Greek hemera was used much like the English "day." It could mean the daylight hours, a 24-hour day, or (figuratively) an epoch of unspecified length. Third, Luke appears to have been writing figuratively, and citing Paul to prove otherwise begs the question.

Hey, I'll definitely give this Bouw fellow points for effort, but come on, getting the modern flat-earth model wrong? What was he thinking? Oh, by the way, I've also heard a case made that all those references in the Bible to "the four corners of the earth" can be translated as "the four regions of the earth," which would attenuate the flat-earth reading somewhat. But it's a pretty weak case. Four regions? No.

For Lakoff-lovers and science dorks alike, here's an interesting cognitive science paper (pdf) from Emory's Alan Cienki on the difficulty in figuring out how prevalent "framing" metaphors are in our political discourse. Here's a bit of the abstract:

Research in cognitive linguistics has shown how metaphorical expressions in language can reflect deep-seated ways of thinking about one domain interms of another. In his book Moral Politics, Lakoff (1996/2002) proposed two cognitive models [i.e. the "Strict Father" Republican and "Nurturant Mother" Democrat] involving sets of conceptual metaphors which he claims underlie (American) right- versus left-wing political rhetoric. In this paper, I will first summarize the findings of my research in which I coded the debates between George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000 for the metaphors proposed by Lakoff. That research raised questions about the models, as the metaphors in them appeared rarely in the debates. Then I will propose a method for deducing generalizations over metaphorical expressions…

Very interesting! I've said it before, and it didn't go over well, but I'm generally skeptical of this whole "framing" craze. Not because I don't think it happens (insofar as it did happen, Gore really did do the Nurturant Parent thing, and Bush the Strict Father). Theoretically, it seems like a powerfully cognitive phenomenon, but in practice it seems framing is much less pervasive than we tend to think. Though I guess that's something that will be figured out and tallied up by linguistics researchers, and not amateur bloggers like me. Okay, well then, back to work.

What's going on in Russia? From today's Washington Post, this seems like an odd thing to ask Putin to do:

Without mentioning the stymied private-channels U.S. lobbying, Hadley added that Moscow should renounce Molotov-Ribbentrop, as the Congress of People's Deputies did 16 years ago. "Obviously it would be an appropriate thing for Russia, now having emerged out of the Soviet Union, to do the same thing," he said.

Huh? If Moscow's supposed to "renounce Molotov-Ribbentrop" just to assure Poland and the Baltics that they won't ever be swallowed up again, well okay, that seems fine. Or if this is all part of a larger game of purging historical ghosts and denouncing Stalin for the fun of it, that's okay too. But if Hadley's point is that Molotov-Ribbentrop was objectively wrong or evil from a historical standpoint, well that seems a bit odd.

Stalin had a lot of reasons for allying himself with Hitler, but the most convincing explanation I've heard is that he was genuinely afraid that the Western democratic powers were all too happy to let the Germans and Russians beat the hell out of each other. Indeed, Stalin made several overtures to Chamberlain concerning an alliance against Germany, but it never came about, and the 1938 Munich agreement made Stalin really quite nervous. Now it's true, poor Josef was excessively paranoid most of the time, but in this case he had good reason to believe he was being sold out. (To be fair to the Western democracies, one of the reasons they opposed an alliance with Stalin was that he was essentially asking for unchecked influence over the Eastern "satellite" countries.) The pact itself was vile, and the divvying up of Poland totally immoral, but it's not as if Stalin didn't have real security concerns here, no? Especially given that he had, y'know, shot most of his competent generals a few years before and wasn't in any position to fight a war.

UPDATE: Ah, okay, Justin Logan gives as convincing explanation as any in comments. Or at least part of one. Seems that Russia still has "peacekeepers" and military bases in Transnistria, a separatist region of Moldova. Russia originally annexed Moldova (then known as Bessarabia) in 1941 as part of Molotov-Ribbentrop, so it's possible that a full renunciation of the pact would force Moscow to acknowledge it no longer has any right to keep troops in Transnistria. Or something. Seems plausible; surprisingly not a single news story has mentioned this angle (it is sort of minor, I guess), although former Estonian PM Mart Laar made the connection last year in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, which also makes a broader pro-renunciation case.

Michael Ledeen on the upcoming elections in Iran and former president Rafsanjani's candidacy:

The anti-Rafsanjani demonstrations are very important, because Rafsanjani will soon formally declare his candidacy for the presidency. Elections are scheduled for June, and the regime is desperate to "prove" its standing with the people. To that end, they will use force and trickery to produce a huge voter turnout. They will compel all government employees and all military personnel to go to the polls, and they will spread rumors (if you don't vote, you'll never get an exit visa; if you don't vote, your family members will be punished, etc.) to bring the unwilling to vote. The mullahs know that many millions of Iranians plan to boycott the elections, in a kind of silent demonstration of contempt.

The trickery has to do with Rafsanjani's grand return to national politics (he is an ex-president). He intends to campaign as the anti-establishment candidate par excellence, and has reportedly connived with Khamenei to prepare a super-reformist image. Rafsanjani intends to run against the Supreme Leader, criticizing the regime's performance on everything from foreign policy (hoping to seduce the West into thinking that he — who has been a key figure in the mullahcracy for decades — will produce the long awaited "opening" to the United States) to the management of the economy.

It is unlikely that many Iranians will fall for this; they remember Rafsanjani as one of the most brutal leaders of the vicious crackdown on the student demonstration of the late eighties (a story recounted in shocking detail in the memoirs of the Grand Ayatollah Montazeri), and they are aware of the billions that he and his family have reportedly stashed away in foreign banks and real estate.

Hm, interesting. I'd always thought of Rafsanjani as at least something of a sincere reformist—certainly he's not averse to negotiating with the West or foreign investment and the like, though he can run a corrupt kleptocracy with the best of them—who was just never willing to run too far ahead of the powers that be. And he may be a hater, but he's not a true lunatic or a hardline ideologue like many of the younger conservatives in his Islamic Builders party. Certainly it's better for him to win then someone like Ali Larijani, no? At any rate, it's probably time to start reading up on the Iranian election… Speaking of which, I sure wish I could read Mustafa Moin's Howard Dean-esque campaign blog, but alas.

Yes, yes, yes. That is all.

Hm, the hawkosphere is all abuzz over a letter intercepted in Iraq, intended for Zarqawi, in which a bunch of jihadis are complaining about "low morale." But is it actually low morale? Let's see, from the letter:

"I swear by God that you will be asked about what happened to us because you have not asked about the situation of the migrants. Morale is down and there is fatigue among mujahedeen ranks."

Grumble, grumble, grumble. But this isn't necessarily proof of low morale. An old Robert Kaplan piece about Marines in Niger offers some useful context here:

According to the military expert Edward Luttwak, soldiers and Marines complain all the time -- but that doesn't mean morale is bad. Luttwak would be suspicious if they didn't complain. Bad morale is when troops have lost their spirit to fight.

So have Zarqawi's faithful correspondents actually lost their will to fight, or are they just bitching? It sure seems like the former, but hard to tell... [UPDATE: Steve M. points out that we saw a letter like this a year ago. So maybe it's just bitching, after all?]

Aha, via Talking Points Yglesias, I see Robert Ball, everybody's favorite former Social Security Commissioner, has a new issue brief on the subject. So I pry it open, and lo, the man's endorsing most of the Brad Plumer plan for Social Security. He's too kind! And what are the odds? Actually, pretty good, since I lifted most of "my" ideas from an earlier piece by Ball. Okay, enough navel-gazing. Just to add one thing, though, bear in mind that after we win the current debate about whether to keep Social Security or not, and move on to the debate about how to actually improve Social Security, we'll want to fix two oft-neglected things: the broken disability guidelines, and the too-meager benefits for both minimum wage workers and elderly survivors.

But now's not the time for that discussion: No, the biggest problem with Social Security today is that the President of the United States wants to eliminate the program. So with that in mind, Ball makes a very important point, re: Bush's price-indexing:

The only true measure of the effectiveness of a retirement system is the extent to which it replaces what the worker has been earning in the years shortly before retirement.

Yes, well done! Look, in the debate over whether future benefits should be indexed to wages or prices, there are a lot of very red herrings strewn about. The pro-wage-index side says, hey, benefits ought to keep up with standards of living so seniors of the future can still buy innovations of the future, like DVD players with buttons on them or whatever. The pro-price indexing side, meanwhile, responds with arguments about how the basket of goods to measure CPI changes over time so no, seniors of the future will be just fine if they have benefits that are equal in real terms to what they are today. And so forth.

Bah! As Ball says, the main thing that matters here is the drop-off from pre-retirement to post-retirement. As wages rise, you want post-retirement income to rise with it, so that the replacement rate is constant. Otherwise, if you're living off X dollars a year at the age of 67 and then have to live off 0.2X dollars the next, that's a big jump down, and a drastic and difficult change in lifestyle, regardless of what you can and can't buy with 0.2X. So Social Security should be the sturdiest leg of a three-legged stool (the other legs being private savings and possibly a 401k or other company pension) that helps minimize that drop once you, uh, finish dancing on the bar-counter. With price-indexing, the bar-counter would keep getting higher and higher, but the stool wouldn't be guaranteed to rise along with it, so you risk having the drop-off on retirement get steeper and more difficult over time. Whatever, this metaphor sucks, but you know what I mean...

Oh, P.S. Speaking of three-legged stools, what the devil? Not only is Matt maintaining Marshall-like replacements rates at TPM, but I click over to Tapped and the eponomyous site and he's still barn-blazing at both of those sites as well. Truly insane! What I'd really like to see is a "post-off" between him and our ominpresent friend praktike to find out who can produce the most original content per hour.

More interesting and wholly random studies. (I'm going to start collecting this stuff.) First, a fun fact: Over the last 40 years, immigrants have been segregating themselves from native populations at an increasing rate, even as racial segregation as a whole has remained constant or declined for many of the fastest-growing immigrant groups. (Mexicans, for instance.) Why is that? Well, three possible theories:

1. Immigrants simply prefer to live among groups with similar cultural characteristics, and away from the Anglo-Saxon-dominated, English-speaking natives. Perhaps. If this is true, then we'd expect more assimilation from immigrants with cultural ties or whatever to the bulk of the native population. Yes? Yes.

2. The natives are trying to get away! Either natives are fleeing from immigrant populations, or they're trying to restrict where immigrants can actually live. Either one could explain segregation.

3. Economic segregation explains it all. Because of the changing nature of the American city, in which cars are important in some areas but not others, you might see immigrants cluster around areas with easy access to public transportation.

So which is the winning theory? Well, David Cutler, Edward Glaeser, and Jacob Vigdor ran the numbers on this (PDF), and the results are pretty interesting. First, Theory #1 is true to some extent—immigrant populations with more experience in the U.S. and those from countries where the language is linguistically similar to English are less segregated. As you'd expect! But the trio found that this only explains a small amount of segregation. Nevertheless, because more and more immigrants are coming from the Caribbean and West Africa, and these groups are more dissimilar to native populations (as opposed to, say, Europeans), this explains some of the rise.

Theory #3 turns out to be a pretty good one: More and more immigrants are coming from poorer countries, they're less able to afford cars, and hence more likely to move to areas with good public transportation. (This doesn't quite explain Los Angeles, but then, nothing really does.) Immigrants from better-developed countries, meanwhile, are less likely to follow these patterns.

As for theory #2, well, as far back as 1970, immigrants were still paying a premium for housing in segregated neighborhoods, meaning that either their housing choices were restricted by natives or, alternatively, they were actively seeking out segregation. But nowadays, say the researchers, it seems that immigrants are mostly occupying neighborhoods that are cheap because they've fallen out of favor with natives for reasons not related to ethnic composition. So it seems that natives are fleeing to the suburbs, as we know, but not necessarily to get away from the ethnic immigrants. It sure looks like that's what's happening, obviously, but no. (The paper does this by looking at housing premiums; I can vaguely follow along but not entirely.) Very interesting! But no word on why the natives are fleeing. Because they think the city is more dangerous? Fools!

UPDATE: Aha! Much, much more on the great urban exodus from the ever-tireless Garance Franke-Ruta.

Here's a paper (pdf) I just stumbled across from the always-interesting Richard Freeman on labor unions and the internet.

This paper shows that in the 2000s unions in the UK and US made innovative use of the Internet to deliver union services and move toward open source unions better suited for the modern world than traditional union structures. In contrast to analysts who see unions as being on an inexorable path of decline, I argue that these innovations are changing unions from institutions of the Webbs to institutions of the Web, which will improve their effectiveness and revive their role as the key worker organization in capitalism.

Not sure all the examples he gives entirely support the strong version of this thesis, though. The best use of the internet so far seems to have been the AFL-CIO's Working Families Network, which was essentially a massive email list of union members and activists. The AFL-CIO used the lists to raise around $350,000 to support the Safeway grocery strike in 2003, and deployed their email minions to give their activists a swift kick in the pants. Good times all around. Well, hopefully this works on a broader scale. I certainly don't know what, exactly, it will take for unions to reverse the steady decline in labor density over the last twenty years—maybe nothing can stop the trend, maybe only drastic Congressional action, maybe some slick new organizational strategies—but Freeman seems optimistic that the internet will be a flaming scimitar here. Don't we all...

A question: What, pray tell, is the principled case for arguing that each judicial nominee must get an "up-or-down vote"? Why is this supposedly "fair"? I think Cass Sunstein made a pretty good argument here:

It may be granted that the Senate ought generally to be deferential to Presidential nominations involving the operation of the executive branch . . . The case is quite different, however, when the President is appointing members of a third branch. The judiciary is supposed to be independent of the President, not allied with him. It hardly needs emphasis that the judiciary is not intended to work under the President.

This point is of special importance in light of the fact that many of the Court's decisions resolve conflicts between Congress and the President. A Presidential monopoly on the appointment of Supreme Court Justices thus threatens to unsettle the constitutional plan of checks and balances.

Right-o. Most of the conservative commentary I've seen on this has harped on the fact that the president is being denied a "fair" chance at getting his nominees through. Poor Mr. President! Now insofar as modern conservative commentary mostly consists of batting doe-eyes at Bush, that's fair enough. But this debate shouldn't really be about the president, and Sunstein makes that point nicely: there's no reason that he ought to get his way on nominees. He's not hiring a personal aide here.

And the "up-or-down vote" question still remains. Again, why? Judicial nominees aren't supposed to work for the Senate, either. They work for the people of this country, and since it's either very hard or impossible for any configuration of majority rule, now or in the future, to override the decision of the judiciary, these judges out to be put into place with as wide a consensus as possible. The Democrats in the Senate, after all, represent more people in this country than their Republican counterparts, and there's no principled reason why the latter ought to be able to foist their choices on the former, especially when the Senate has well-established rules for preventing that.

The problem seems to be that people treat elections as war. If your party comes out victorious, you're the big winner, and you can do whatever you feel like because those are the spoils of war. To quote Dick Cheney: "We won the mid-term elections. This is our due." But that's not what elections, or democracy, are supposed to be about. Yes, yes, I realize I'm preaching to the deaf, mute, and blind here, but it's maddening to watch folks like Andy McCarthy over at the Corner yip and yap day after day about how the Democrats aren't playing fair and all nominees "deserve" an up-or-down vote. Unless you subscribe to the Dick Cheney theory of democracy, they "deserve" no such thing.

Lots of people are no doubt familiar with the back-and-forth about freedom of and freedom from religion. Nevertheless, I've been reading Noah Feldman's wonderful new history of the debate over church and state in the U.S., Divided By God (it will be released soon, and it's much recommended), and then earlier this evening had a heated argument with a friend over church/state stuff, and realized I really don't have the various constitutional arguments at all straight in my head. But hey, that's what internets are for! So after a few hours of errant Googling and an amateur trawl through Supreme Court history, here's a briefly simplified outline on the subject that might be of interest, or perhaps superfluous for many. Still, it's here.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Where you stand on religion in America, of course, depends on what you think of both the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause. The history here is very complex, but it's safe to say that the Establishment Clause was originally meant to refer only to the national government—indeed, the religion portion of the First Amendment wasn't extended to states until a series of decisions in 1940 over whether Jehovah's Witnesses could be granted religious exemptions from saluting the flag. (Originally the Court said no; two years and three new FDR-appointed Justices later, the Court said yes, much to the chagrin of Felix Frankfurter.) But way back in the day, states like Virginia certainly had an established Anglican church and no one thought anything of it.

Anyway, it seems to me there are four "basic" positions one can take with respect to the two clauses (This schema is stolen directly from Charles Fried's Saying What the Law Is, by the way.):

1) The Philip Kurland position. Essentially, religion is treated much like speech here, and the government is supposed to be "religion blind" in all things. So the Court does not grant special exemptions from laws for religious reasons, or, really, accommodate religion in any way. On the other hand, the federal government is required to extend benefits to religious organizations just as it would any other organization. This seems decently coherent to me, but it ignores the fact that religion was quite obviously granted special import in the Constitution, since it was explicitly separated from the speech clauses. So…

2) The Justice William Brennan position. Here we get a very strict separation of church and state. Religious beliefs are to receive a high amount of immunity from civil law—certainly no forcing Jehovah's Witnesses to salute the flag if it tickles their conscience, for instance. On the other hand, religious organizations don't get any goodies and handouts from the federal government, period. This is a rather contradictory position.

3) The Michael McConnell position. Aka, the James Dobson fundie special. McConnell, mind you, is a possible Bush nominee for the Supreme Court. His take is that religious beliefs are very much protected from civil law, but also that there is a very high "ceiling" for the extent to which government can cooperate with religious groups.

4) The John Paul Stevens position. Aka, the "godless liberal" position. Very low judicial protections for religious expression (a position, it seems, Scalia actually supports). Very low "ceiling" for government cooperation with religious organizations (less Scalia love on this one).

So there's a lot of variation here. Now a little more history, by looking back at a few cases.

First, the Free Exercise Clause. In a 1963 case, Sherbert v. Verner, a Seventh-Day Adventist was fired from her job because she refused to work on Sundays. She was then denied state unemployment benefits, on account a bein' a slacker. The Court overturned the denial. Justice Brennan acknowledged that, yes, yes, this wasn't a case of government regulating her religious beliefs, and merely a regulation that posed an indirect burden on her religious expression. (Just as government regulations that pose an indirect burden on ordinary speech generally pass constitutional muster.) Nevertheless, when it came to religion, Brennan argued that there must be a "compelling state interest" to pose this sort of indirect burden. From what I can gather, it was a shocking decision and wholly unprecedented: why, earlier the Court had ruled in favor of anti-polygamy laws over the objection of Mormons.

But in 1990, a similar case—Employment Division vs. Smith—came before the Court that resulted in an opposite ruling. Ms. Smith was fired from her job because she was carrying a bit of peyote, useful for some Native American religious ritual but illegal in Oregon. She was refused unemployment benefits, on account a bein' a crook, and this time the Court upheld the denial; Antonin Scalia's decision declared: "[T]he right of free exercise does not relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a valid and neutral law of general applicability on the ground that the law proscribes (or prescribes) conduct that his religion prescribes (or proscribes)."

Both of these cases are opposite extremes. If we followed Sherbert, then any government action—taxes, zoning laws, etc.—that posed an "incidental burden" on religion could be overturned willy-nilly. Especially since Courts aren't allowed to decide just how burdensome the religious burden in question really is. (In practice, though, it doesn't appear that many laws were overturned using Sherbert—usually the government could find a compelling "state interest," as when they made the Amish pay Social Security taxes to preserve the universality of the program.)

On the other hand, Smith doesn't offer religion any special protection at all. So long as the law in question isn't targeting religion specifically, it's fine. In fact, this actually protects religion expression less than speech is protected. After all, if a law puts an indirect burden on speech, then according to United States v. O'Brien, the state much show that the law "furthers an important or substantial governmental interest… and [] the incidental restriction… is no greater than is essential for the furtherance of that interest." As far as I know, there's no such middle ground in Free Exercise doctrine. Scalia's reasoning for his harsh view was that religious exemptions can always be carved out by legislatures themselves, who have historically been understanding about this sort of thing. But, of course, it's not likely that legislatures are always going to be overly generous to religious minorities, who are the ones needing protection, so this still seems like an imperfect compromise. Well, it's a hard needle to thread.

Next up... Establishment Clause. Ah, the good stuff, the one that gets everyone all riled up. Okay, Googling around, it seems the most oft-cited test for determining whether a state has complied with the Establishment Clause, was put forward in Lemon vs. Kurtzman:

[T]he statute must have secular legislative purpose; second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion; finally, the statute must not foster an "an excessive entanglement of religion."

Okay, but there's a reason everyone seems to hate this thing. Right away we run into problems: what happens when legislatures want to do what Scalia says and carve out exemptions in laws for religious observers? (For instance, an exemption in a drug law allowing peyote in Native American religious ceremonies.) Uh, oh, violation! So there's a lot of muddle. And the muddle's made worse by the fact that many of the Justices are inconsistent on the matter. Those who want to set up a thick concrete wall between church and state, like Stevens and Ginsburg on the current court, often shrug over symbolic things like the prayer that opens Supreme Court sessions. Why draw this line? Who knows? Furthermore, they never go so far as to say that no taxes of any kind can go to support religious institutions—surely we're not ready to prevent publicly-funded firemen from putting out a church fire. (Likewise, no one objects to people using G.I. Bill benefits, etc. to attend private religious college.)

Then there are those who, like Michael McConnell, claim that so long as government isn't giving any special favors to religious organizations, it can lend them aid, so long as secular organizations are also eligible for aid. But the whole historical point of the Establishment Clause was that people wouldn't have to pay taxes for religious things they didn't support—on the grounds that this violated religious conscience. (Interesting note from Feldman's book: For a long time, the U.S. got away with religious schools by making them "non-sectarian Christian," which no one considered to be in violation of the Establishment Clause. Well, except for Catholics, but they were eventually beaten into submission.)

Then there's the middle ground, held by Sandra Day O'Connor in Wallace v. Jaffree, that the Establishment Clause prevents government endorsement of religion, where endorsement means anything that "sends a message to nonadherents that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community." So no student-led prayers at high school football games, or anything that might be construed as "indirect coercion." Government also can't disapprove, which would make adherents feel like outsiders. In other words, O'Connor envisions a respect for all people from all corners. The problem is that this leaves challenges to religious expression open to those who "feel offended," a very fuzzy and perilously subjective thing on which to base the separation of church and state.

And nowadays, it seems, the Court has gotten to the point where it has ruled that government funding for, say, private vouchers is okay, even if those vouchers are used for private religious schools, on the grounds that "public funds become available [to religious organizations] only as a result of numerous, private choices of individual parents of school-age children." (Mueller v. Allen) This came up in the 2002 case ruling in favor of Cleveland's voucher program.

All done for now! At any rate, I'm obviously not a lawyer, and a bit of time searching the internet does not a scholar make, so feel free to point out anything I've severely botched here. I'm not going to get into my thoughts on the whole matter quite yet, only because I wanted to get a rough sense of the actual constitutional issues first. On account a knowledge being cool and all.

Best part of the Times Magazine profile of Jack Abramoff today:

Despite some reports to the contrary, Abramoff was not prepared to turn on his Capitol Hill friends, DeLay among them. But there were occasional hints that the knowledge he possesses could indeed be quite damning. At one point, for instance, I asked Abramoff to gauge the influence of lobbyist money in Congress.

''I just don't think members of Congress for the most part sell their votes or their ideology,'' he told me.

For the most part?

''Ahem!'' Lowell [i.e. Abramoff's lawyer] interjected. ''Hold on, hold on.''

Lowell stood and summoned his client from the table. The two men walked to a corner of the room and huddled with their arms around each other. After a minute or two Abramoff returned and sat down.

''I would say the same thing,'' he told me. ''I would say, generally speaking, that's the case.'' Generally speaking, that is.

Ah… do tell. Oh, by the way, I meant to link to this earlier, but The Hill ran a fascinating story a few weeks back that helps explain why so many moderate Democrats voted for the recently-passed bankruptcy bill. Seems Rep. that Joe Crowley (D-NY) had set about trying to re-assert his party's influence in K Street, by rounding up a bunch of Democratic financial-industry lobbyists and then sending them off to shore up Democratic support for the bill. Lobbyists turned out to be quite pleased with this, and "expressed hope that their joint effort on the bankruptcy bill would become a blueprint for future coordination between Democratic leaders and lobbyists."

Now this isn't quite a mirror image of the famous Republican K Street project: in which the GOP leadership basically chooses the key lobbyist positions in Washington, thus ensuring that trade associations and the like will support the broader GOP legislative agenda, all in exchange for various business favors. Nevertheless, it's possible that Crowley's trying to carve out something similar. Now if the end result is that he up drawing in key K Street support for various Democratic health or Social Security initiatives, hey, maybe it will all be worth getting that hideous bankruptcy bill passed. Maybe. Though not likely.

Proving that no topic is too trivial to blog about, here's a passage from Joseph Epstein's otherwise-amusing take on the academic novel in the Weekly Standard:

In Lucky Jim, the setting is a provincial English university and the dominant spirit is one of pomposity, nicely reinforced by cheap-shot one-upmanship and intellectual fraudulence. Jim Dixon, the novel's eponymous hero, striving to become a regular member of the history faculty, is at work on an article titled "The Economic Influence of Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485," a perfect example of fake scholarship in which, as he recognizes, "pseudo light" is cast upon "false problems."

Egad, no. It's "the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems." As in: "It was the perfect title, in that it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems." A trifle, sure, but Epstein's version not only isn't very funny, it doesn't even make any sense. Wither copyeditors?

Speaking of which, dropping by the coffee shop earlier today, I heard a guy mocking Bush's use of "misunderestimated." But no, I think this is a perfectly valid construction. For instance, if you were to underestimate someone, but ended up, by mistake, not underestimating that person as much as you otherwise would have, you would be "misunderestimating" him. In other words, a set of mistaken impressions caused you to underestimate, but a second set of impressions caused that underestimation to be less than what it would be if the initial set of mistaken impressions were all you had to work with. Voila! Whether this word is useful remains to be seen, but I don't think "antediluvian" is useful (does the distinction between pre- and post- Noah's flood really matter?) and it's still a word.

So as we all know, the White House made a little boo-boo and North Korea could soon have the ability to vaporize my house here in San Francisco. That sucks. Still, there's no excuse for Andy Card making things worse with mixed-up metaphors:

"We're not surprised by this," Mr. Card said, appearing to play down the military significance of the test. "The North Koreans have tested their missiles before." But as to their motivation, he told CNN, "I think they're looking to kind of be bullies in the world."

Come again? You can say a lot of unkind things about North Korea, but it's obvious they're not anything resembling bullies here. Try: "the kid in a trenchcoat who opens fire on his math class." And by the by, what exactly does the president gain from calling Kim Jong Il a "philistine" and a "hooligan"? I mean, true, I enjoy calling the president an "incompetent dipshit" from time to time—it's fun, and it helps me blow off some steam—but then again, I'm also not expecting him to surrender his nuclear weapons if I tell him to. [EDIT: Oh, haha, I see. Well, less insanity than I thought is always a good thing!]

This is from a few days back, but according to the Los Angeles Times, new studies may soon show that the number of uninsured in America has been overstated, and it might be "only" 36 million instead of the oft-cited 45 million. Well, bring 'em on. I doubt studies like this are ever going to minimize the scope of the problem in the public mind: is there anyone who's going to say, "Well, I thought 45 million was a major fucking problem, but 36 million? Eh, I'm going to the beach..." It's still tens of millions, and the more attention on this, the better.

But there's another point to make here: it's not just enough to count up the uninsured, since the problem of inadequate coverage also extends to the underinsured, a much-neglected group. In that famous Elizabeth Warren study on how health emergencies cause all manner of bankruptcies, one of the under-reported statistics was that 75.7 of the sick actually had medical insurance at the onset of illness, but ended up paying $11,354 out of pocket on average. Much of this, I suspect, stems from the twisted structure of employment-based insurance, which often lapses at the worst possible moment—when illness causes a worker to lose his or her job, for instance. But there are all sorts of ways in which that 45 million—or 36 million—number doesn't begin to capture the scope of the problem.

David Brooks reports that the deal Harry Reid offered Bill Frist on judges—in which the Democrats would help confirm the least offensive GOP nominees on hold, and Frist would abandon the nuclear option—also had a hidden component:

I've been reliably informed that Reid also vowed to prevent a filibuster on the next Supreme Court nominee. Reid said that if liberals tried to filibuster President Bush's pick, he'd come up with five or six Democratic votes to help Republicans close off debate. In other words, barring a scandal or some other exceptional circumstance, Reid would enable Bush's nominee to get a vote and probably be confirmed.

Well, I can see why Reid would make that deal. Odds are the next Supreme Court justice to go will be the ailing Rehnquist, in which case Democrats will probably decide that replacing a conservative with a conservative is no big deal, and wouldn't have filibustered anyway. Now I think this is a wrong way to approach it; Rehnquist has been a voice of moderation on the Court, and replacing him with a Clarence Thomas clone would push the Court in new and not-too-wonderful directions. Nevertheless, just as the Democrats didn't oppose Scalia to replace Warren Burger in 1986—figuring they should save their fire to oppose the Rehnquist promotion to Chief Justice—they'll probably give Bush latitude to replace Rehnquist with whatever wingnut the president chooses. The upside for Democrats is that they'd look reasonable here, and could seize the high ground for when it came time to replace the more liberal John Paul Stevens.

But here's what I don't get. If this deal was in fact offered, and Brooks thought it was so great, then why did he blow Reid's cover? Sure, Frist rejected the deal, but who knows, after a few weeks of political thrashing, he might come crawling back to Reid and try to swing a compromise like this. Probably not, since he's got to satisfy the Dobson crowd, but who knows? But now liberal interest groups are almost sure to oppose Reid if he offers to get Bush's first Supreme Court nominee confirmed. So the whole thing has been scuttled. Well, perhaps Brooks was just full of shit. Wouldn't be the first time.

Nadezhda reports that the African Union is planning on beefing up its peacekeeping force in Darfur, from the woefully inadequate 2,300-strong force it has currently, to 3,300 in May, and hopefully 7,700 by the end of September. Even more importantly, it seems as if the AU force will now be given a mandate to protect civilians rather than simply monitor the sham-ceasefire between Khartoum and Darfur. The new mandate is, as I have noted in the past, an all-crucial step for the AU to be even remotely effective. On our side of the equation, the U.S. is going to shell out an extra $50 to $60 million to support the expanded force, and NATO will "consider" providing logistical help.

This is good news, and certainly better than nothing. But for those of us who, like me, believe that the AU alone will be insufficient to stop the ongoing mass-slaughter and alleviate the humanitarian disaster there—which has claimed up to 400,000 victims and counting—this needs to be looked at much more critically. Because in the end, these new steps are still not nearly enough. Not even close.

First, a bit of bone-picking. Justin Logan seems to think that the AU has wanted to expand for a long time, and the only thing stopping them was a lack of U.S. support, which has been undermined, he says, by "knee-jerk" liberals who have been calling for invasion. Um, no.

One of the main reasons many us have been calling for a Western intervention is that it seemed like the AU had neither will nor desire to expand its peacekeeping force. As the Congressional Research Service pointed out in its report last month: "Many members of the African Union do not share the view that a genocide is occurring in Darfur and still consider the government of Sudan as the central player in the resolution of the conflict and protector of civilians." The hold-up here has long been not American liberals, but the AU itself, as the Nigerian leadership has insisted that Africa alone should handle problems in Africa, and then sat idly by and did nothing. They seem to have shifted their stance of late, and I'd be interested to find out why. (I'm guessing that pro-intervention African countries, like Rwanda and Senegal, won over Nigeria.) But this is a big reason why liberal interventionists have been saying, "Fuck the AU, get NATO in there."

Anyway, now the AU's finally waking up. So what to make of their proposed solution? Here's Matt Yglesias:

I think [expanding the AU is] almost certainly a better way to handle this than a Western invasion of some sort or, more likely, doing nothing while humanitarians plead for a Western invasion of some sort.

Well, yes, in an ideal world, letting the AU handle everything is obviously better than invading. If they can handle everything. And that's the key question: whether or not the new AU deployment will be able to prevent as many deaths as humanly possible. My answer? No, it won't be, not by a long shot. Look, at the moment the AU is planning 7,700 troops by September. But even if you think that's a big enough force to police an area the size of France and deter the janjawid militias and secure humanitarian corridors and provide refugees safe passage home—and on the face of it this notion is sheer lunacy—it's still a much-too-sluggish measure. Keep in mind that we're talking about four more months of inaction, four more months of increased body counts. Do note that the rainy season will soon get underway in Darfur, which will only deepen the crisis—hampering aid delivery and spreading disease—just as it did last summer.

Meanwhile, Jan Pronk, the UN's envoy to the region, has said that the AU will need 12,300 troops to "restore order to Darfur." Okay, fine, so assume this is enough to secure order in a region the size of France, and deter hostile militias who have no qualms about firing on even humanitarian workers, and providing refugees safe passage, etc. etc. (Pronk's number also seems ludicrous to me. Like Marine Capt. Brian Steidle, who worked with the AU monitoring team, I think a peacekeeping force of 25,000 to 50,000 sounds much more realistic. And hey, it's not as if UN peacekeeping estimates have never been wrong before—why, Pronk himself used to think a mere 8,000 troops would suffice.) But even this expanded force of 12,000 wouldn't be ready until next spring at the earliest. In the interim, there will be death and decay and lots of it. Now I don't know what it takes to grab people by the coat-lapels and scream, "People are dying right now, for fuck's sake," without getting waved off as a whiney little "humanitarian," but if anyone has any suggestions, let me know. Nevertheless, there's an element of urgency here that can't be overlooked.

Moroever, there's good reason to believe that an AU force of any size, even with NATO "logistical" support—should it ever be forthcoming—wouldn't be able to stop the janjawid militias or the Sudanese security forces from massacring civilians in Darfur. For one, I've seen absolutely nothing about rules of engagement for AU forces against the janjawid—presumably they'll be largely useless—but it's a dead certainty that AU peacekeepers will not be authorized to engage Khartoum government forces, even though the latter have been just as thoroughly involved in the slaughter. That means Khartoum will just speed up the integration the janjawid into its police and army forces, as it has been doing in the past, and then continue butchering civilians unimpeded. Simple as that.

Second, the genocidaires have been relying notoriously on the government's airpower to strafe and bomb villages before sending in ground militiamen for the kill. Exactly how does the AU think it's going to stop this? The "no-fly zone" over Darfur, established in the ceasefire signed last November, has been utterly useless, and has been violated by Khartoum time and time again. At the bare minimum, that no-fly zone needs to be enforced with NATO or U.S. airpower. Even this might be insufficient, as it will be near-impossible for the West to stop Khartoum's hundreds of helicopter gunships from, er, "patrolling" the region low to the ground. Again, I'll defer to military analysts here, but it seems likely that an effective civilian protection force would have to involve destroying—or at least threatening to destroy—much of Khartoum's air force.

So the case for more Western intervention remains strong, at least if we want to avoid turning "never again" into a sick, sick joke. Intervention wouldn't amount to full-blown invasion, though I've stressed before that some of the steps, like establishing a no-fly zone, could be tantamount to an act of war, with potentially very serious and bloody consequences. Or they might not. Personally, I think it's a risk that needs to be taken, but I'm not going to pretend that intervening will be an easy and cost-free solution at all. At the very least, I'd like to see the Darfur Accountability Act passed, with the understanding that stronger steps may still need to be taken. Perhaps the U.S. simply doesn't have the ability to stop the genocide, or more robust intervention would do more harm than good. Fine, let's debate that, so long as we're not pretending this AU force is going to come in and save the day.

Oh, one other note: As we all know, the Los Angeles Times reported on Friday that the U.S. may be shirking both intervention and increased pressure on Sudan's government all because we're getting such plum counterterrorism intelligence from the ruling National Islamic Front. Now I don't think that's the only reason we're hesitant on intervening in Darfur, but it's probably a big one. Nevertheless, I think this is exact the wrong way to go about things, but I'll have to talk about that tomorrow.