States Rights -- NYT Magazine

The New York Times > Magazine > The Way We Live Now: A States' Rights Left?

Marriage affords a vivid example. In some states it is evidently more imperiled than in others. The Bible Belt states, in particular, have a shockingly high divorce rate, around 50 percent above the national average. Given such marital instability, these states are anxious to defend the institution of heterosexual matrimony, which may explain their hostility to gay marriage. The state of Massachusetts, by contrast, has the lowest divorce rate in the nation. So its people -- or at least its liberal judges -- perhaps feel more comfortable allowing some progressive experimentation. It will be interesting to see how this experiment plays out, assuming the Bush administration does not succeed in choking off the right of a state to recognize same-sex marriages by getting the Federal Marriage Amendment enacted...

... One of the most striking differences among states is in their levels of wealth. Liberals tend to live in more economically productive states than conservatives. The top five states in per capita personal income (Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland and New York) all went to Kerry; the bottom five (Utah, New Mexico, West Virginia, Arkansas and Mississippi) all went to Bush. Since the blue states are generally richer than the red states, they must bear a greater portion of the federal tax burden. Most of them pay more to Washington than they receive, whereas most of the red states receive more than they pay. Some liberals in blue states must wonder exactly what they get in return for subsidizing the heartlanders, who are said to resent them.

Here is where President Bush is their friend. According to a recent Brookings Institution analysis, as much as two-thirds of the benefits from the income tax cuts he pushed through in his first term go to taxpayers making more than $100,000 a year. These well-off Americans tend to be concentrated around New York City, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco and other liberal enclaves. By contrast, relatively few of the benefits from the Bush tax cuts go to the Southern and Prairie states, where low-income working families with children are more the norm. At present, the Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire by 2010. If the president succeeds in making them permanent, as he has vowed to do, it will mean lasting relief for the blue states. The money they had been sending to the red states could then be spent locally, according to their own liberal values -- say, on public schools (where they already spend more per pupil than the red states) or stem-cell research.

The more conservatives succeed in reducing the size and scope of the federal government, the more fiscal freedom the blue states will have to pursue their own idea of a just society....

/// Meanwhile, blue-state liberals should stop despairing and start thinking locally. Instead of saying, ''The United States is. . . . '' try saying, ''The United States are. . . . '' See? You feel better already.

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This is a sly article, slashing at the hypocrisies of the red states while nobly asking for the rights of states to differ.

I, of course, am a huge fan of states rights.

Note that Bush's plan to remove the deduction for state income tax will make the blue states even bigger donors to the red states than we already are.

The fact that will not speak its name

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: A Doctrine Left Behind

They might have said that it is a deeply uncontroversial fact that the United States has from the beginning had too few troops in Iraq: too few to secure the capital or effectively monitor the borders or even police the handful of miles of the Baghdad airport road; too few to secure the arms dumps that litter the country; and too few to mount an offensive in one city without leaving others vulnerable.

They might have said that it is a deeply uncontroversial fact that the insurgency is spreading: when I arrived in Iraq 13 months ago, the insurgents were mounting 17 attacks a day; last week there were 150 a day. If the old rule of thumb about counterinsurgency warfare holds true - that the guerrilla wins by not losing and the government loses by not winning - then America is losing the Iraq war. The Iraqi insurgents have shown 'outstanding resilience,' as a Marine intelligence report compiled after Falluja put it, and 'will continue to find refuge among sympathetic tribes and former regime members.'

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In every discussion that goes nowhere, there's an elephant in the room who's name cannot be spoken. The elephant in this room is the draft.

Yes, we don't have enough soldiers to conquer Iraq. Half-conquering Iraq has inflicted vast sorrow upon that nation; the humane choice would have been either to give up on the sanctions and focus on assassinating Saadam, or to invade with 350,000 troops.

So where would we get 350,000 troops for a 2-5 year period? It's not clear we have them -- not given other commitments, even if we did redeploy.

We're not a very youthful nation any more. Qualifications for troops have risen. Commitments have increased -- even outside of Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if we increased compensation by 50%, could we really fill a volunteer army large enough to meet demands?

I've read the arguments against the draft. They don't persuade me. It's true that the draft is a lousy way to create a modern fighting force -- but the draft could be used to fill a lot of non-critical non-fighting spots. This is particularly true in supporting services -- from packaging gear to sewing up abdomens.

So those of us who say Bush/Rumsfeld/Cheney are probably war criminals, are also saying that the decision to conquer Iraq implied a draft. That's not a popular thing to say -- either on the right or the left. That's why no-one names the elephant in the room -- and the sterile argument continues.

Power corrupts - Republicans want access to tax returns

MSNBC - Republicans red-faced over tax-disclosure gaffe

Congress debated legislation Saturday giving two committee chairman and their assistants access to income tax returns without regard to privacy protections, but not before red-faced Republicans said it was all a mistake and would be swiftly repealed.

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A mistake? Only in its presumption.

What would they do with those returns? Decide who to reward -- or who to punish?

Don't worry. This will happen in a less public way. Or, since there won't be much reaction to this, it will happen in a quite public way.

The ghosts of the children

Children Pay Cost of Iraq's Chaos (washingtonpost.com)

As near as we can tell about 50,000-150,000 Iraqi women and children were killed during the invasion and insurrection. Now we learn malnutrition has doubled following the invasion.

Do the "moral values" people give a damn?

What does the "missing link" mean?

The New York Times > Science > Fossils Found in Spain Seen as Last Link to Great Apes

In their report, the researchers noted that the skeleton showed that those early great apes 'retained primitive monkeylike characters' and thus did not seem to support 'the theoretical model that predicts that all characters shared by extant great apes were present in their last common ancestor.'

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This doesn't shock me as much as the mini-human discovery. I don't think it's quite in the same league; there was no real doubt among scientists that there was a primate ancestor of both humans and gorillas. The primary surprise seems to be that we actually found something from the miocene. Now we'll look for more.

It doesn't seem surprising that gorillas would have evolved over the past few million years. Why wouldn't they?

Of course this won't have any effect on the anti-rational anti-evolutionists. They're in a different universe.

Degenerative democracy

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Colmunist: No More Sham Elections

...The U.S. electoral system looks increasingly dysfunctional, and those of us who used to mock the old Soviet or Iraqi 'elections' for lacking competition ought to be blushing.

In Arkansas, 75 percent of state legislative races this year were uncontested by either the Republicans or by the Democrats. The same was true of 73 percent of the seats in Florida, 70 percent in South Carolina, 62 percent in New Mexico.

And Congressional races were an embarrassment. Only seven incumbents in the House of Representatives lost their seats this month. Four of those were in Texas, where the Republican Legislature gerrymandered Democrats out of their seats.

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American democracy is somewhere between 35 (civil rights movement), 100 (women vote), 140 (emancipation) and 300 (first revolutionary war) years old. During those times there've been periods where it was pretty sick, and periods where it was quite healthy.

This is not one of those healthy times.

I wonder if this is merely a historic cycle, or a consequence of applying technology and technique to elections between two cynical and adaptive parties. In a system designed for two parties, wouldn't the combination of adaptability, research and information technology ultimately carve the population into balanced sets?

Of course a very cynical party could always take power and then change the rules, or exploit flaws in existing rules, so that we had an effective one party system.

Irelands smoking ban closing pubs ...

Europe: Where The Smoke Is Clearing

So Europe is finally facing reality. About time. The interesting item, though, is the fall off in pub business. I dimly recall reading some months ago that there's a synergistic pleasure interaction between smoking and alcohol use. I wonder if these patrons find drinking less pleasurable when they smoke less.

Passive-aggressive behavior in the NYT

The New York Times > Health > Mental Health & Behavior > Oh, Fine, You're Right. I'm Passive-Aggressive.

This is a fun review. The author correctly distinguishes between passive-aggressive behavior and passive-aggressive personality disorder. The former is normal and not rare (Minnesotans claim they're experts in it, I can't say if that's true or not), the very existence of the latter is in question.

I've long been fascinated by the so-called personality disorders; they dwell in the twilight zone between true pathology (which is never adaptive) and awkward individual variation. Borderline personality disorder tends to the pathologic, narcissistic personality disorder is a prerequisite for some careers.

It's always fun to pick one's unique personality disorder ...

Paying for intellectual work

Marginal Revolution: A Market for Journal Articles

The current academic publishing system is slow, tedious, and error prone.  David Zetland, a clever economics graduate student at UC Davis, has a better idea.  Zetland suggests that journal publishers should buy manuscripts in an auction.  You probably already have some objections, Where would the money come from?  Why would journal editors buy what they can get for free? etc.  But wait.  Here comes the clever part:

The money paid in the auction would flow not to the author of the paper but to authors cited by the paper and their publishers.  For example, if a journal buys a paper by A.Tabarrok for $1000 which cites an article by T.Cowen published by Oxford University Press and an article by M. Friedman published by the University of Chicago Press then Cowen, Friedman and their publishers would each receive $250 (the author/publisher split could vary.)

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It's rather unusual to come across a new idea in the domain of intellectual property. The general principal is that contributors (in this case publishers) are paid for their contribution to a derivative work. Can this be extended to other open source content types?

Beyond mockery

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: November 14, 2004 - November 20, 2004 Archives: "'House Republicans were contemplating changing their rules in order to allow members indicted by state prosecutors to remain in a leadership post, a move designed to benefit Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) in case he is charged by a Texas grand jury that has indicted three of his political associates, GOP leaders said today.'"

Fighting science: evolution and education

Boston.com / News / Education / K-12 / Evolution foes see opening to press fight in schools

The usual bad news. The forces of stupidity are on the march, and Bush is their champion.

How do these people explain antimicrobial resistance? Do they think Staphylococcus became resistant to Penicillin due to divine intervention? Or maybe the Devil did it? How they heck do they think biology can be taught without natural selection?

What's next? Mathematics? Maybe it's time to ban the transcendental numbers. After all, they could be considered blasphemous.

Goss and the CIA

Salon.com News | Killing the messenger

The CIA will serve the president.

The cabinet will serve the president.

Congress serves the president.

Soon the supreme court will serve the president.

I really hope I'm wrong about this guy.

How Kerry would have fought the war on terror

Salon.com Politics

A new report, 'Preserving Security and Democratic Freedoms in the War on Terrorism,' authored by Juliette Kayyem and Philip Heymann of Harvard University, pulls together the recommendations of a range of bi-partisan policy and security experts on 10 critical issues and the 'clear rules' they say are needed to reconcile 'critical democratic norms and security concerns around each.'

On coercive interrogations, the group says, 'The United States must comply with its treaty obligations not to engage in torture. Treaty obligations not to use cruel and inhuman techniques short of torture must also be obeyed unless there is a clear immediate threat to American lives that only coercion might stop; the president must approve this limited exception. Regularly permissible interrogation techniques consistent with the Convention Against Torture should be approved by the president and provided to Congress.' ...

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A reasonable balance -- that's what a Kerry administration would have brought. A balance one could bring to judgment day.

Voted for Bush? Then pray for a merciful God.

Salon.com Politics

The two prisoners extradited from Sweeden to Egypt in December 2001, at least one of whom was later cleared, claimed they were beaten and tortured with electric shocks to their genitals. The report also notes a harrowing treatment that may have been used in Uzbekistan -- one country the Bush administration has aligned itself with under the banner of the global war on terror.

Among the countries where prisoners have been sent by America is Uzbekistan, a close ally and a dictatorship whose secret police are notorious for their interrogation methods, including the alleged boiling of prisoners. The Gulfstream made at least seven trips to the Uzbek capital.

The details bolster claims by Craig Murray, the former British ambassador, that America has sent terrorist suspects from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan to be interrogated by torture.

In a memo, whose disclosure last month contributed to Murray's removal, he told Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, that the CIA station chief in Tashkent had 'readily acknowledged torture was deployed in obtaining intelligence'.

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We may never know the truth. Bush has surrounded himself by loyalists.

The allegations, however, are consistent with what has been admitted and with a series of allegations that came with supporting evidence.

Those who voted for Bush, voted for this. Many of them those voters believe in a vengeful God. They may have need of a merciful God.

Understanding Bush II: Dobson and homophobic america

James Dobson - The religious right's new kingmaker. By Michael Crowley

... no one helped Bush win more than Dr. James Dobson. Forget Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson ... Forget Ralph Reed, now enriching himself as a lobbyist-operative, leaving the Christian Coalition a shell of its former self. Forget Gary Bauer ... Dobson is now America's most influential evangelical leader, with a following reportedly greater than that of either Falwell or Robertson at his peak.

Dobson earned the title. He proselytized hard for Bush this last year, organizing huge stadium rallies and using his radio program to warn his 7 million American listeners that not to vote would be a sin. Dobson may have delivered Bush his victories in Ohio and Florida...

... An absolutist disgusted by the compromises of politics, he sneers at those who place "self-preservation and power ahead of moral principle." ... as the gay-marriage movement surged this year, Dobson's moral outrage over the direction of American culture went supernova, asserting in his recent book Marriage Under Fire that Western civilization hangs in the balance....

Dobson's clout emanates from Focus on the Family, a Colorado Springs-based ministry he founded that is awesome in scope: publishing books and magazines, disseminating Dobson's weekly newspaper column to more than 500 papers, and airing radio shows—including Dobson's own—that reach people in 115 countries every week, from Japan to Botswana and in languages from Spanish to Zulu. The ministry receives so much mail it has its own ZIP code.

His rise began in 1977, when as an unknown pediatric psychologist in California he published Dare to Discipline, a denunciation of permissive parenting that tried to rehabilitate the practice of spanking. The book sold 2 million copies. Dobson then cranked out a string of follow-up Christian self-help books, with titles like Straight Talk to Men and What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women.

... In 1983 he established the Family Research Council as his political arm in Washington, although he had his friend Gary Bauer enter the Gomorrah of Washington so Dobson could concentrate on his ministry in Colorado. Then, in the late 1990s Dobson began to grow disenchanted with Republican leaders in Congress for not pushing the Christian social agenda harder. In the 2000 campaign his tepid support of Bush may have helped dampen turnout among evangelical voters, a disappointment Karl Rove dwelled on for four years.

It was the gay-marriage debate that finally hurled Dobson into politics wholeheartedly. The subject of homosexuality seems to exert a special power over him, and he has devoted much idiosyncratic thought to it. When discussing gays he spares no detail, no matter how prurient...Dobson further contends that homosexuality, especially in such an early stage, can be "cured." His ministry runs a program called Love Won Out that seeks to convert "ex-gays" to heterosexuality....

To Dobson, gay marriage is a looming catastrophe of epic proportions. He has compared the recent steps toward gay marriage to Pearl Harbor and likens the battle against it to D-Day.

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Is reaction-formation the dominant pychopathology of the religious right? One wonders if Dobson fears that he might be gay -- or could at least lean that way.