11/30/2005
Lying Liars on Abortion
by Matt Singer on 4:29 pm.
It’s been a while since I’ve read anything by Ben Shapiro (aka Slappy), the young conservative idiot savant whose ramblings are well-paid for by the conservative media machine.
And I really only deal with this one because Ben repeats something that I think bears examination:
And if keeping abortion rare is a rational goal, why should state governments be barred from taking steps to discourage abortion?Interesting question indeed. And it would be a good one for many of the so-called pro-life groups to answer. Why, pray tell, is it so objectionable to have access to contraception? Why can’t we have a safety net that takes care of people who are interested in carrying a pregnancy to term?
Why can’t state governments take these basic steps to discourage abortion?
It’s not that they’re barred from doing it. It’s that the same political movement that enshrouds itself in the language of life cares very little about what happens outside the womb.
(H/T to Pandagon)
| Comments (2) | Permanent Link | Categories: policy, sex and abstinence |
On Making Your Bed and Lying In It
by Matt Singer on 11:50 am.
The Montana education community previously sued the state of Montana for having an inadequate school funding system and asked the courts to demand the legislature take action. The courts did, providing a very early deadline.
So now that Democrats have been busting ass to meet that deadline, the school community is asking for it to be ignored, for a temporary solution, and for more time to craft a long-term solution.
Unfortunately, last time I checked, the education community doesn’t have the power to void Supreme Court decisions, even ones they are responsible for bringing into existence.
There was an entire book written about an MSU professor losing his mind while trying to define quality.
I think the same thing is happening to my state.
| Comments (10) | Permanent Link | Categories: education |
More on Culture v. Structure
by Matt Singer on 11:44 am.
Angelica, the socialist Battlepanda, offers some more thoughts on the overuse of culture to explain differences between nations.
| Comments (0) | Permanent Link | Categories: economic, policy |
A Debate Worth Having (Sort Of)
by Matt Singer on 11:01 am.
I just got an announcement in my inbox that the magazine Legal Affairs is hosting an online debate regarding whether Roe v. Wade should be upheld. It’s a debate between Sanford Levinson and Jack Balkin. I could be wrong, but I’m going to run out on an awfully precarious limb and make the assumption that both of these debaters are male.
I’ve posted some of my own thoughts on Roe recently, wondering whether it might be good, not just politically but policy-wise (from a pro-choice perspective), to move the issue back to the legislative arena. Others have made strong cases that it would not (sorry, no time to link-hunt right now).
Garance Franke-Ruta has also had a must-read TAPPED entry that links to a number of other quite worthwhile pieces on the subject.
| Comments (0) | Permanent Link | Categories: health care, law, policy, sex and abstinence |
Idaho Bolos
by Matt Singer on 10:50 am.
It looks like Brian Schweitzer spread some Bolo tie love to Idaho last night with a crowd of several hundred and Congressional candidate Larry Grant. Democrats in Idaho do the work of angels. I’ve written here before that it is a state to keep an eye on. The Dems there are getting their act together. Of course, they still face one of the few states where Congressional candidates can run proudly with Bush at their side. Of course, Freudenthal pulled it off in Wyoming and Matheson is getting ‘er done in Utah. Anything is possible.
| Comments (0) | Permanent Link | Categories: political |
Heh
by Matt Singer on 10:25 am.
Dave Budge is now calling me a socialist. And here I thought I was an entrepeneur.
It turns out that you can’t argue that the structure of an economy matters and that the macroeconomy’s setup is something that most people have little individual control over.
As I said in comments over there, I don’t find the term socialist particularly offensive. I just find it inaccurate. Just as I find it inaccurate when people labelled FDR a socialist.
I’m just not particularly enamored with the economic mythology I see bandied about so often.
| Comments (2) | Permanent Link | Categories: economic, policy |
11/29/2005
Montana is for Badasses
by Matt Singer on 8:48 pm.
We’ve put in the order for the women’s shirts. They are American Apparel women’s fitted tees. They run $5 more, but the design is more colorful, the shirts are higher quality, and the people who make them don’t work in sweatshops. All of those are good things.
Order one today!
We’ve also got men’s XXLs available now. It’s a lot of work to change the form, though, so I’m not going to do it. If you’re interested in one, please email me and we’ll get it worked out.
Cool?
| Comments (6) | Permanent Link | Categories: general |
Simulating Choice
by Matt Singer on 3:01 pm.
I finally got a chance to break open The New Yorker from last week over lunch and boy was I surprised. There’s a story about a New Orleans car salesman who worked for Rimrock Auto Sales in Louisiana who moved to Billings post-Katrina.
There’s also an indecipherable story about Baudrillard (despite the fact that I wrote a paper on Baudrillard’s theories of the hyperreal my senior year of high school, let me say that I do not now nor did I then actually understand what the devil he was talking about; I rolled the dice assuming that the student teacher grading the papers would also not know what in the devil I was talking about). But one part of Baudrillard’s utterances do make sense to me.
Baudrillard, the French philosopher, is best known for his theory that consumer society forms a kind of code that gives individuals the illusion of choice while in fact entrapping them in a vast web of simulated reality.Now this only makes sense to me up to a point, but it makes sense in so far as I do believe that most of our free choices are really so completely controlled by factors outside of our control that to describe them as free choices is, well, laughable.
And then I turn a page and, voila, there’s some great proof just waiting for me. It comes from James Surowiecki’s summary of the difference in European and American work habits:
The French work twenty-eight per cent fewer hours per person than Americans, and the Germans put in twenty-five per cent fewer hours.Interesting, so what some would put forward as mere individual choice is really the result of the active structuring of the economy? You wouldn’t say.[...]
Folk wisdom suggests that the reason for this difference is cultural, which, depending on your perspective, means either that Europeans are ambitionless café-dwellers or that Americans are Puritan grinds with no taste for the finer things in life. But, while culture undoubtedly matters, not that long ago it was the Europeans who worked harder; in 1970, for instance, the French worked ten per cent more hours than Americans.
[...]
A more plausible explanation was put forward recently by the economists Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote: European labor unions are far more powerful and European labor markets are far more tightly regulated than their American counterparts. In the seventies, Europe, like the U.S., was hit by high oil prices, high inflation, and slowing productivity. In response, labor unions fought for a reduced work week with no reduction in wages, and greater job protection. When it was hard to get wage increases, the unions pushed for more vacation time instead. Governments responded to political pressure by plumping for leisure, too; in France in the eighties, for instance, a succession of laws increased mandatory vacation time and limited employers’ ability to use overtime.
Hmm, maybe there is good reason to look to social engineering, since it, um, seems to matter.
Surowiecki doesn’t really get into it, but what’s notable about this is that it indicates that social power can enforce certain relationships that participants would otherwise not agree to. Again, for thinking humans, this is unsurprising. For some of my libertarian friends, please, read on.
Surowiecki points out that most Americans are quite pleased that our nation’s laws enforce a 40-hour work week. Why? Because it creates a social contract that cannot be breached by employers. On the other hand, without the force of law or collective bargaining, it is quite easy to pit worker against worker and threaten to fire those who will not accept the terms set forth by the employer. The unregulated market at work will create a contract that most workers find unacceptable.
Surowiecki doesn’t really get into this. What he does get into is a judgment of whether the American social contract (less regulation) is better than the European social contract (more regulation) and he walks away with a rather bizarre conclusion:
In the American model, then, you work more hours and use the money you make to pay for the things you can’t do because you’re working, and this creates a demand for service jobs that wouldn’t otherwise exist. In Europe, those jobs don’t exist in anything like the same numbers; employment in services in Europe is fifteen per cent below what it is in the U.S. Service jobs are precisely the jobs that young people and women (two categories of Europeans who are severely underemployed) find it easiest to get, the jobs that immigrants here thrive on but that are often not available to immigrants in France. There are many explanations for the estimated forty-per-cent unemployment rate in the banlieues that have been the site of recent riots, but part of the problem is that voluntary leisure for some Europeans has helped lead to involuntary leisure for others. The less work that gets done, the less work there is to do. Helping some people get off the labor treadmill can keep many people from ever getting on the treadmill at all.Now, I could expect that someone would easily point out that regulation of business would make the overall unemployment rate go up, but what about this 40% figure. After all, we have places with much higher unemployment here in America and even actions like deregulating certain businesses (think gambling) has little long-term impact on employment in those areas. It just may be that there is a more systemic problem going on here.
But this is of course what is worth remembering. Individual workers don’t choose the industrial structure into which they enter. They have virtually no say over whether certain jobs exist or what those jobs pay. They can build individual skills and relocate in order to perform well compared to the market as a whole, but they have relatively little ability to improve the market conditions that they face.
The people with the power to really impact what economic structure looks like sit in two places: board rooms and the halls of political power. Understanding that is critical.
And pretending that letting individual workers make their own decisions about when they are willing to work and behave competitively in the market is a joke. The only way they get a say in that is by unionizing to give themselves the same shared voice the employer has or to work through the social contract enforced by a democratic government.
| Comments (12) | Permanent Link | Categories: economic, policy |
The Externalities of Reporting
by Matt Singer on 1:46 pm.
Matthew Yglesias looks at the externalities associated with journalism. I wrote previously about news as natural monopoly. I still think a lot of what I wrote then is pretty dead on in explaining why the media world is experiencing such an upheaval. The most expensive thing for a newspaper to gather is facts, which Matthew Yglesias points out cannot be copyrighted. The cheapest thing in the world to get is commentary and analysis. So the facts become a public good and the media organization that gathered them just ends up in rough shape.
Sucks to be a newspaper company.
| Comments (1) | Permanent Link | Categories: cultural, economic |
Screw Hampshire
by Matt Singer on 1:34 pm.
It looks like some whiny New Englanders are complaining that they may soon be forced to share their toys. Let’s face it, nobody in the world really has a good argument for why NH or IA really deserves to be first in the nation time after time. I’m not saying that the people of these good states suck and should be punted off into a no-caucus, no-primary zone. I’m just saying that they aren’t God’s anointed few, put in place as Kingmakers since time immemorial.
They’re U.S. citizens just like the rest of us. I’m glad the DNC is starting to take them on. What blows my mind is how tepid they’re being about it. The proposal is simply to insert a couple new caucuses in between IA and NH, a proposal which allows New Hampshire to maintain its claim to fame as “First Primary in the Nation” as well as have a good shot at the title it is going for now “State Party that Sounds Most like a Primary School Kid.”
And now NH’s party elders are gladly promoting their new compromise that would put one or two new states into anointed slots before the rest of us are allowed to line up. That sounds great. I think what we need in this country are more states that believe that they are the promised land of democracy.
What we need to do is seriously mix up the calendar. And we need to have more early primaries that allow for broader participation. Caucuses do some really cool things, but they’re also a fairly exclusionary form of government.
My own vote here would be for Howard Dean to suck it up, challenge IA and NH, have the prospective ‘08 candidates offer their own half-hearted opposition to a new calendar and then move on.
Of course, that’s just me.
| Comments (2) | Permanent Link | Categories: democrats, political |
1 to 100 in 2 Months?
by Matt Singer on 12:34 pm.
Somebody call the Pope. Rumsfeld is performing miracles.
Brace yourself for a mind-bog of sheer cynicism. The discombobulation begins Wednesday, when President George W. Bush is expected to proclaim, in a major speech at the U.S. Naval Academy, that the Iraqi security forces—which only a few months ago were said to have just one battalion capable of fighting on its own—have suddenly made uncanny progress in combat readiness. Expect soon after (if not during the speech itself) the thing that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have, just this month, denounced as near-treason—a timetable for withdrawal of American troops.News that this was imminent started making the rounds yesterday. Bush is now claiming that the Iraqi security forces are up to the task of defending the country. That runs counter to what military leaders were saying publicly recently and it runs counter to James Fallows’ excellent reporting in The Atlantic this month. But hey, as we learned with the 9/11 commission and the DHS debacles, when this Administration sees the need to turn on a dime, they will do it, yelling treason the whole time.
And just as we witnessed the non-recovery recovery of the economy. It seems that we will soon witness the non-withdrawal withdrawal from Iraq. But where the non-recovery recovery was a recovery only rhetorically, this withdrawal will be non-existant only in the words of fearless leader.
Jacques Derrida is laughing somewhere.
Oh, and it’s also worth wondering whether these well-trained Iraqi units the Bush Administration is lauding are the same ones today described in the LA Times as sectarian death squads.
| Comments (1) | Permanent Link | Categories: foreign, iraq, policy |
More on Dorgan
by Matt Singer on 12:22 pm.
Kagro X takes a look at the “new” evidence that Byron Dorgan was bought off by Abramoff and reveals (surprise! surprise!) that the source of it is a Republican lobbyist.
Make no mistake, there is a concerted strategy on behalf of the Republican Party to make it appear that both sides are awash in pay-to-play self-enriching schemes. But let’s just say that while some Democrats my be knee-deep in big money they shouldn’t have, the most powerful players in the Republican establishment are on the brink of drownding from their illicit funds. On the Democratic side, this is, at worst, a handful of bad apples. On the Republican side, it is systemic and starts at the top.
| Comments (4) | Permanent Link | Categories: corrupt, political, republicans |
Heh
by Matt Singer on 12:11 pm.
I just read someone accusing Democrats of hypocrisy for not calling out the wrong-doers in our own party. What’s humorous is that one of their examples of a corrupt Democrat was former Rep. Jim Traficant. Fair enough. Traficant was a Democrat. Of course, he just happened to be the Democrat who had his committee assignments withdrawn by Democratic leadership after he vowed to vote for Republican leadership in the House. In other words, he was a Zell Miller Democrat. Which is to say, he’s a lot like a Jefferson Davis American.
Beyond that, Traficant was notably expelled from the House by a damn near unanimous vote. Who was the only dissenting vote? Well, that would be crazy Rep. Gary Condit. Of course, you could again make the rather worthwhile point here that Condit is also a Democrat. Again, fair enough. Except that the issue with Condit wasn’t corruption, but tragic adultery.
And it was one of Condit’s former aides who actually defeated Condit in an election, so it was a Democrat who brushed him aside.
Already, Markos, one of the fiercest partisans of the blogosphere, is expressing his willingness to cut Byron Dorgan loose if it looks like Dorgan even begins to smell like he’s connected to the Abramoff scandal. Meanwhile, NewsMax, an ostensibly independent news source, is parroting Tom DeLay spin.
So, yeah, accuse us of hypocrisy. Whatever. Just don’t be hypocrites about it.
| Comments (0) | Permanent Link | Categories: corrupt, political, republicans |
Chris Bowers Becomes a Committee Man
by Matt Singer on 11:47 am.
Chris Bowers has an interesting read on his oddysey to become a member of his local Democratic committee and the process of reformation within that tiny slice of the Democratic Party. Essentially, Bowers has also become a precinct captain. It’s an interesting read, but it was also a reminder to me to plug something that more people should do, which is joining their local central committee.
I’m not a member of the Yellowstone County Democrats currently, largely because I know my time here is temporary. I am moving to Helena soon, though, and do plan on getting involved with the party there.
There are, of course, good reasons to maintain some distance from the party. People who move up the ranks of the party are expected (as they should be) to stay above intra-party fights, promote all Democrats, etc., etc. Although I’ve been accused of being such a kind of partisan, I like to think that such actions aren’t really my forte.
The central committee, though, is really one of the most basic levels of democracy. It is the place where the rubber meets the road, theoretically at least. It is the place where you accept responsibility for making sure that your little geographic neighborhood is voting and voting for Democrats.
If you’re interested in getting in joining your central committee, it is quite likely that there are vacancies. Details on county leadership, meeting times, and how to get involved are available from the state Democratic Party. Doing this work doesn’t mean 100% agreement with the party any more than pride in America means 100% agreement with every American policy or joining a church means 100% agreement with everything the church does. It does say, on the other hand, that you’re more interested in engaging your friends and neighbors and also in representing their views to the party than you are in bitching about the state of affairs.
| Comments (2) | Permanent Link | Categories: democrats, political |
10% Distinctions Don’t Get Noticed
by Matt Singer on 10:58 am.
As Kevin Drum points out, merely being slightly better than the other guy isn’t going to be enough. Now, this seems pretty simple, but it also seems that pretty simple just may be over the head of Washington, D.C. The DCCC and DSCC need be pulling together aggressive ethics agendas and need to convince their incumbent members that it is worth it to jump on board. That means grand-standing on Congressional pay raises. That means fighting for tougher ethics rules. And it means being united on the subject.
It probably also means throwing a few of our own over the side of the boat. Frankly, if we’re headed for corruption free waters, we shouldn’t let members of our own caucuses keep us out.
This, frankly, is exactly why I was so annoyed by the Baucus/Giacometto thing. It’s not just that it is the epitome of Washington-style, out-of-touch politics. It’s that it maintains the myth that when it comes to ethics that there is no difference between the parties and that we’re both content to run around, genuflecting before the all-powerful bag men.
I suppose that’s fine if we want to maintain our minority status, watch the country continue to fall apart, and bitch and moan about how we could do better. Frankly, though, I’d rather win, build a majority, start setting things right, and rebuild our country.
Sorry if that means your expense account dries up a little bit. I understand how painful it can be to live a bit more like the people you represent.
Damn unwashed masses.
| Comments (1) | Permanent Link | Categories: corrupt, democrats, political |
Things to be Proud Of
by Matt Singer on 10:48 am.
Don Pogreba asks whether there are things to be proud of in America. While I often share Don’s pessimistic view of our current government, this really is going a bit far.
Let’s look at a few of the things we have to be proud of:
- Freedom of Religion. This is often forgotten, but it doesn’t really exist in most of Europe. In France, for example, you can actually be accused of fraud if you are simply a religious leader that most people consider a cult. People can be forced to remove religious head garb. And in many industrialized countries, the government actually collects taxes to fund church services. We don’t have that here in America, preferring instead our mosaic of believers and non-believers. There are some who would change that, but that only leads to…
- Freedom of Speech. Bush, for all of his faults, recently made it quite clear that disagreeing with him on the strategy of Iraq is patriotic and to be expected in a democracy. That’s something that many other countries don’t have. In fact, we should even take heart that this country’s laws may, out of respect for free speech, let the perpetrators of the (I believe) heinous outing of Valerie Plame go largely unpunished, while leaking a memo in England can lead to quite heinous treatment. It is quite an old liberal principle that it is better for ten guilty persons to walk free than to let one innocent person suffer. I think an even better principle is that it is better to afford speech protections to those would do harm than to deny those same protections to those who would do good. Good for the bill of rights.
- Even on a Supreme Court heavily dominated by conservative Republican appointees, fair labor law was still upheld in a recent unanimous opinion. That’s a point of light.
- The generous response of Americans to both Tsunami victims and to the people harmed by Hurricane Katrina demonstrated that, exactly as we might expect, most Americans are good-hearted people.
- For all it’s faults, the system is correcting itself. The fact that DeLay, Cunningham, Abramoff, Safavian, Libby, and others, all among the most powerful men in America, are facing indictment speaks volumes about how even broad and deep corruption at the top levels of the legislative and executive branches has failed to seep into the career civil service.
| Comments (5) | Permanent Link | Categories: cultural, general |
Republicans are Pushing Dumb Plan
by Matt Singer on 10:35 am.
I was right yesterday. The House Republicans really are proposing that we have a special session and not use any one-time money to shore up the state’s pension problems.
And here I hoped it was just plain old media error. Two reporters, same facts. It looks like my giving the ol’ benefit of the doubt to Roy Brown was a dumb move.
Well color me surprised.
| Comments (0) | Permanent Link | Categories: montucky |
Whoa
by Matt Singer on 8:24 am.
Martin van Crevald, one of the world’s leading military historians and theorists, is calling for withdrawal and Bush’s impeachment.
I could imagine the former. The latter honestly surprises me.
And van Crevald is not exactly optimistic about the likely result of withdrawal. He seems to think it will launch a massive internal civil war and a number of U.S. casualties as soldiers and marines leave.
In other words, he looks at the worst case scenario for withdrawal and still says it is the only real policy course.
| Comments (0) | Permanent Link | Categories: foreign, iraq, policy |
Can You Afford These Low Prices
by Matt Singer on 7:48 am.
PLAN and The Policy Institute have teamed up in Helena to show Robert Greenwald’s new Wal-Mart documentary. Joel Barkin, the Executive Director of PLAN, and Rep. Christine Kaufmann, VP of The Policy Institute, also have an op-ed on the “High Cost of Low Price” in today’s Helena IR.
What would you do if you owned the biggest corporation in America? Would you make sure your workers made enough in wages to cover their basic necessities, that their families could afford health care, and that they were rewarded for their loyalty?Go read the whole thing.Well, that’s the difference between you and Wal-Mart. The corporate executives who run Wal-Mart have been running ragged over American values.
(Full disclosure: See above.)
| Comments (0) | Permanent Link | Categories: economic |
11/28/2005
Bone-Headed Plan
by Matt Singer on 10:51 pm.
The Republican Party is looking to spend money we’re not even sure we have yet. Roy Brown wants a January session to spend some one-time money on K-12, property tax relief, and something to do with a water relief fee. I have to plead ignorance on this last issue.
What I can’t figure out is whether Mr. Brown has just completely forgotten about the huge pension shortfalls that also need to be dealt with, as there’s no mention of using any money to shore up those accounts. He does, however, talk about splitting up the estimated $300 million surplus. Of course, there is some chance that much of that surplus is due to incorrectly large withholdings following some changes to the Montana tax code.
This is only a cursory glance, but given that Matt Gouras, the AP reporter who tackled the story, has had a good run getting his facts straight in the stories I’ve read to date, I’m left more than a little perplexed as to why Roy is putting forward such a stupid idea.
Nevermind, it’s Roy Brown. Smart money says Bob Keenan crafts a dumber plan tomorrow.
| Comments (0) | Permanent Link | Categories: montucky, policy |
