Strange Doctrines

Next Thing You Know, They'll Be Residing in Extravagant, State-Funded Housing

"Michelle Obama" has asked James Lindgren to sign Obama's mass birthday card. James "find[s] it hard to say precisely why [he finds] this email a bit creepy." Fortunately for aficionados of shark-jumping, though, he gives it a college try:

[A]sking millions of Americans to sign a birthday card for the President suggests a tone-deafness about the cult of personality. If we lived in a dictatorship, getting millions of subjects to celebrate the Dear Leader’s birthday would be routine, but in a free republic this appeal to get millions of citizens to celebrate a current president’s birthday strikes a discordant note to my ear. 

No, I am not saying we are in a dictatorship; I am saying that because we are not, we should not be emulating the trappings characteristic of that fundamentally different sort of regime. Nor do I think this is particularly ominous, just a very small step in the wrong direction.

A small step, comrades, or a giant leap?

One Should Wield Guns in Campaign Ads Responsibly

I find it utterly charming that David Kopel's problem with Dale Peterson's campaign ad (Peterson is running for Alabama Agriculture Commissioner) isn't Peterson's Colonel-Kilgore affect, his inane tough talk about "thugs and criminals" (because nothing poses a greater threat to Alabama agriculture than thugs and criminals) or the fact that having dismounted his trusty steed (yes, that's right), he brandishes a very long, very manly-looking rifle. No. Kopel's problem is that while brandishing the rifle, Peterson "puts his trigger finger inside the trigger guard"!*

*Kopel's commenters point out that the trigger guard safetry rule doesn't apply to a lever-action gun with the hammer down. So I guess it's safe to vote for Peterson, then.

Oil and Water

Shorter David Bernstein: Unlike private corporations, government lacks the proper incentives to prevent disasters like the one caused in the Gulf by a private corporation.

And Now It's All This

Bob Somersby gives Christopher Edley a razzing:

Christopher Edley thinks he’s one of your “betters.” [] According to Edley, rubes like us should want our “betters” in important posts, like the post in which Kagan will serve:

EDLE: The tension between elitism and populism is embedded in our national DNA because America rejected the model of a monarch ruling by divine right in favor of an iffy experiment in democratic self-governance. So now you are responsible for choosing your leader. Do you want someone like you or someone better than you?

What an astonishing framework! But so it goes when people like Edley spends decades inside institutions like Harvard, convincing themselves that they and their peers are “better” than all the rest of us rubes.

Not fair. What Edley meant, of course, was merely to ask whether in choosing your leader you would want someone better than Yoo.

(Via Angry Bear.)

It Wasn't About the Slavery. It Was About the Freedom to Own Slaves.

Jack Balkin appropriately commemorates "Confederate History Month," here and here.

CRU Report Whitewashgate

A preliminary report into the East Anglia climatic research unit suggests that their data was on the up and up. The story is mostly failing to get the kind of attention I thought it wouldn't.

Some of the attention it has failed not to to get, however, has been kind of amusing. Iain Murray, for example, claims that the report is a "whitewash." (Bet you didn't see that coming.) But in support of that thesis, Murray (correctly) paraphrases Roger Pielke's point that "a broad reading of the report reveals an indictment of the state of climate science."

So it's a "whitewash" and an "indictment"? Riiiiight.

Murray's greedy appropriation of Pielke's remarks is more than just incoherent, though; it's dishonest - Pielke clearly disdains the "whitewash" claim as a "sideshow."

Defenders of CRU will no doubt paint the report . . . as a complete vindication of their arguments and those who have been critical will . . . call the report incomplete or a whitewash.

If you are going to quote someone as support in a blog post named "Climategate Whitewash," you should probably own up to the fact that your authority does not believe that the report is a whitewash.

On the other hand, maybe I'm being unfair - Murray did make that clear enough himself. If only by accident.

The GOP Mainstream is Exactly Like the Liberal Fringe

Orin Kerr indulges in his worst habit - straining mightily to find partisan equivalences where there are none:

If you took the public outcry over the Patriot Act in 2001, replaced “police state” with “socialist state” and replaced “privacy” with “freedom,” and then replaced the claims of violating the Fourth Amendment with claims of violating the Commerce Clause, you would pretty much have the public outcry over the health care law today — except from the Right not the Left. 

But Orin hedges: "Of course, I’m not saying the two laws are the same. [Of course not.] But I’m struck by the rhetorical similarities of the case made by the laws’ outspoken opponents."

It's a good thing that Orin hedged, there. It would really have been stupid to compare the laws substantively (police powers versus healthcare) or procedurally (the one passed with a single Democratic "no" vote, the other without a single Republican "yes" vote). Idiotic even. So kudos to Orin for carefully marking that distinction. His readers might otherwise have gotten the wrong idea.

The real point Orin wants to make, then, is about the many "rhetorical similarities." Which of course there are. Thing is, they are similarities between what you hear now from congressional leaders and what you heard then from some guy on the Internets. (Okay, and maybe Randi Rhoades.)

So I guess I'd just want to suggest that the analogy is perhaps one not worth making.

Touché

Sarah Palin's thrust:

I got to meet quite a few candidates who are lining up in a contested primary who want to take out Alan Grayson. And I think Alan Grayson -- what can you say about Alan Grayson? Piper is with me tonight, so I won't say anything about Alan Grayson that can't be said around children. But thank you, Florida.... [and so forth.]

Alan Grayson's parry and riposte:

Palin, the former half-term Governor, current-nothing and future-even-less, charmed the all-Republican audience with her folksy folksiness and her homespun homespunnery. Atypically, Palin was wearing clothes that she had paid for herself. At the end of the event, she shared her recipe for mooseface pie.

In response to Palin's attack on Rep Grayson, Grayson actually complimented Palin . . . for having a hand large enough to fit Grayson's entire name on it. He thanked Palin for alleviating the growing shortage of platitudes in Central Florida. Grayson added that Palin deserved credit for getting through the entire hour-long program without quitting....

(Via Mark Kleiman.)

Has Someone Waterboarded Orin Kerr Recently?

I was surprised to see Orin Kerr stipulate that "[w]aterboarding seems to be pretty clearly forbidden under [18 U.S.C. § 2340]," and that "the only fair reading [of the section] is that waterboarding is prohibited by it."

Of course I agree with Orin - the question is a no-brainer. And Orin is a brilliant legal analyst (no snark - he's one of the best legal writers out there), so it wouldn't normally be any surprise to read that he similarly concludes that the question isn't a difficult one.

But I am surprised. Because back in 2007 Orin gave me all sorts of grief for suggesting the question was, well, a no-brainer. I've excerpted our 2007 exchange below the fold (starting with my comment; Orin's comments in official VK pine green):

Health Insurance and Health Care Denialism

I haven't had time to get up to snuff on the studies (or actually I guess it's just "study") Megan McArdle and others cite in support of the notion that health insurance has no discernible effect on mortality. But there are heuristics one can use to evaluate their claims.

Boo!

Lawrence Lessig at Huffington Post, on Citizens United:

Whatever else one believes about the Supreme Court's decision striking down limits on corporate speech in the context of political campaigns, there's one thing no credible commentator could assert: That money bought this result.

Jack Balkin's response:

The Supreme Court we have today is the ghost of campaign expenditures past.

The Altruistic Acceptance of Market Valuation

Proponents of so-called 'Rational Choice Theory' (first proposed in economics and then enthusiastically adopted by a number of political and legal thinkers) have tried hard to make us accept the peculiar understanding that rational choice consists only in clever promotion of self-interest (which is how, oddly enough, 'rational choice' is defined by the proponents of brand-named 'rational choice theory'). Nevertheless, our heads have not all been colonized by that remarkably alienating belief. There is considerable resistance to the idea that it must be patently irrational--and stupid--to try to do anything for others except to the extent that doing good to others would enhance one's own well-being." (Amartya Sen, via Linda Beale, via Ken Houghton.)

And yet:

For the last thirty years, in much of the English-speaking world (though less so in continental Europe and elsewhere), when asking ourselves whether we support a proposal or initiative, we have not asked, is it good or bad? Instead we inquire: Is it efficient? Is it productive? Would it benefit gross domestic product? Will it contribute to growth? This propensity to avoid moral considerations, to restrict ourselves to issues of profit and loss—economic questions in the narrowest sense—is not an instinctive human condition. It is an acquired taste. (Tony Judt, via ???.)

What's My Motivation?

Will Wilkinson chimes in on "climategate":

The hacked/leaked emails and data seemed to me like prime fodder for motivated cognition. My expectations were pretty much met. Many alarmists have inappropriately minimized the importance of the evidence of a shameful conspiracy to enforce what is clearly an ideological party line among climate researchers. Many skeptics have gone too far in using the revelations as grounds for casting doubt on the entire scientific case for AGW. But, clearly, the thrust of the scandal vindicates the skeptics’ claims that the science of climate change is conducted in an ideologically charged atmosphere, that there really are coordinated attempts to suppress or marginalize studies and scholars out of step with the favored narrative, and that there really are coordinated attempts to make evidence in favor of the favored narrative look better than it really is.

When the Going Gets Rogue

I found the following review of Sarah Palin's book helpful:

4,702 of 5,875 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ain't afraid of no Vietcong king, November 17, 2009

By	Gen. JC Christian, patriot (Tremonton, UT United States) - See all my reviews

There are many kinds of truth. There are truths based on facts, truths based on faith, and truths based on something that sounds as if it should be true (truthiness). Then there's the kind of truth we find in Sarah's book: stories and concepts that become truths simply because she states them. She's a lot like our Lord and Savior, Glen Beck, in that respect.

But Supply Side Ideas Were Already Upside Down

Greg Mankiw quotes David Stockman quoting Ronald Reagan's parable about high taxes: "You could only make four pictures, and then you were in the top [tax] bracket. . . . So we all quit working after four pictures and went off to the country."

Hmmm. Maybe Reagan's true calling was to be a fitness trainer.

Anyway, Jonathan Bernstein decides to check the facts (apparently at task that neither Mankiw nor the Times were up to*) and runs the numbers by reference to Reagan's imdb page:

1937 - 2
1938 - 9
1939 - 7
1940 - 7
1941 - 4
1942 - 3
1947 - 3
1948 - 0
1949 - 4
1950 - 1
1951 - 4
1952 - 3

The moral of the story, I think, is that we should immediately return to the tax structure of 1948; a tax regime that resulted in zero Ronald Reagan pictures was clearly getting incentives right.

*This is slightly unfair to Mankiw, since the point of quoting Reagan stories is never that they're true, but that they're convenient.

(Via Brad DeLong.)

Chances of Winning the Run-Off Tomorrow?*

Abdullah withdraws from Afghan presidential run-off.

*Alternative title: Chances of a credible election process in Afghanistan?

Zero

(Via onegoodmove.)

Just Do It

You've probably wondered how it was that with all that was going wrong around him, George W. Bush still managed to get up every almost every morning.

Now, you too can learn his secret,* by attending the San Antonio "Get Motivated" Business Seminar, featuring guest motivational speaker George W. Bush.

*My anonymous sources tell me that the secret is to get eight square or more hours of sleep every night and take frequent vacations.

The Higgs Loop

Shorter Robert Higgs: How can anyone believe in figments like Good Government when the Invisible Hand is right there in front of them?

(Via Marginal Revolution.)

Vicissitudes

Poor Barack Hussein Obama. Some people want to give him the Nobel Peace Prize. Others want to impeach him:

Are you terrified at Barack Obama’s campaign to change our country into a third-world nation? Are you willing to sit back and watch Obama bulldoze our great nation? Are you willing to let him construct a totalitarian regime... fascism, socialism, Obamaism... take your pick?

      If any of the above scenarios concern you... join us.

     At the very least, fire a shot across the bow... a shot that will be heard around the world... and send Barack Hussein Obama a clear and unmistakable message that he does not have carte blanche to ruin the United States of America.

I'm sorry - did they just use French?

(Via Talking Points Memo.)