Still testing some new software

Thinking I like Posterous better than Tumblr. Are they supposed to serve a different purpose?

Creative Destruction

While the forward march of technology is definitely a good thing, the metaphor that “a rising tide lifts all boats” is badly inadequate. The economic sea churns a lot, and it’s very easy for decent, competent, hardworking people to suddenly find themselves worse off than they were the year before through no fault of their own. The guy with the film development shop didn’t suddenly become lazier or less skilled the day his business became unviable, but he took an economic hit nonetheless. This churn and the attendant levels of risk and anxiety that it creates are an undesirable feature of the capitalist order. And the welfare state is the answer.

via yglesias.thinkprogress.org

Deborah Solomon Interviews Das Racist!

It's been awhile since I did a Deborah Solomon watch. But I gotta say, I love her interview today with Das Racist -- because it shows everything that's wrong with her interviewing style, and thus gives Das Racist a wonderful platform to display their wit and humor.

How does Deborah Solomon be Deborah Solomon today? Well, there's the obtusely phrased questions:

You jokingly describe yourself as “Puerto Rican cousins” in a song title, when in fact you are neither Puerto Rican nor cousins. What are you actually?

The obsession with finance:

If your albums are available free, how do you make money?

The it's-all-about-her pugnaciousness for no good reason:

This is precisely why I make a point of never asking rappers questions about politics.

And her sheer Deborah Solomoness:

Like most musicians, you dislike the process of categorizing your work. That said, how would you categorize your work?

But this time the whole things works as a showcase for the interviewee instead of the interviewer -- for once -- because Das Racist has so much fun with the absurdity of Deborah Solomon. Totally worth checking out.

Next Financial Crisis: The Divorce Bubble

New York Times:

But when Ms. Pont decided to seek a divorce last year, she quickly ran out of money. She had no job. Her husband controlled the family’s investments. A few months of legal bills maxed out her credit cards and drained her retirement account.

She wrestled with accepting a smaller settlement than she considered fair. Then a lawyer referred her to Balance Point Divorce Funding, a new Beverly Hills lender that offers to cover the cost of breaking up — paying a lawyer, searching for hidden assets, maintaining a lifestyle — in exchange for a share of the winnings.

In October, Balance Point agreed to invest more than $200,000 in Ms. Pont’s case.

With some in the financial world willing to bet on almost anything, it should be no surprise that a few would see the potential to profit from the often contentious and emotional process of ending a marriage.

I'm trying to figure out a way to get outraged about this, but I can't. Lots of people stay in bad marriages because they quite literally can't afford to get a divorce. On the other hand, those people aren't likely to be the ones who become the object of a Balance Point "investment." But lots of financial "innovations" start with the wealthier classes and work their way down. It might be worth it -- as long as this new industry doesn't give rise to a class of divorce speculators.

Slate: Are Conservatives Trying To Destroy The Constitution?

Apparently unlike Dahlia Lithwick and Jeff Shesol, I don't think there's a big "aha!" moment in the idea that some conservatives who supposedly revere the Constitution also want to amend it. After all, the Constitution itself does provide for being amended. There are some constitutional fetishists, I suppose, who think the document was divinely inspired and thus must never be touched. Most conservatives I know think, roughly, that the class of men who created the Constitution have never been equaled -- and that the document should be touched rarely. Unfortunately, the rhetoric of our debates obscures even this small level of nuance.

That said, I agree with Lithwick and Shesol that this bit of information probably runs counter to the Founders' intentions:

It started quietly enough: In April 2009, constitutional scholar Randy Barnett published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal offering proposals by which the Tea Party might amend the Constitution to "resist the growth of federal power." The most radical among them was an amendment permitting two-thirds of the states to band together and overturn any federal law they collectively dislike.

This week, completing the proposal's rapid march from the margins to the mainstream, Rep. Rob Bishop of Utah introduced the amendment in the U.S. House of Representatives, pledging to put "an arrow in the quiver of states." The soon-to-be House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor, said this week that "the Repeal Amendment would provide a check on the ever-expanding federal government, protect against Congressional overreach, and get the government working for the people again, not the other way around." Fawning editorials in the Wall Street Journal and chest-heaving Fox News interviews quickly followed.

What these conservatives want, it seems to me, is to return American governance to something much closer to pre-Constitution days, around the era of the Articles of Confederation. Under those articles, the United States was something less than a fully functioning nation and more like the United Nations security council, a collection of sovereign governments who could put the kibosh on anything one of them didn't like.

It didn't work. And the adoption of the Constitution may have represented a point when the multiple states decided they truly were a nation, that they had to cede some sovereignty to each other, rather than each being a kingdom unto itself. (Certainly, in reading The Federalist Papers, it's clear that the creators of the Constitution saw that as the choice.) It was the Antifederalists who wanted to continue the old ways of state primacy; and the emergence of this proposed amendment confirms my opinion that today's Tea Party set has more in common with the people who tried to stop the Constitution from becoming law than they do with the men who actually founded the country as we know it.

(It also confirms my continuing believe in the Tea Party as an expression of sore loserdom. We didn't see much talk about amending the Constitution to give states more authority when the GOP controlled the White House and Congress, did we? There may be some principled beliefs at work here, but it seems to me that the amendment is also the result of efforts by the Republican Party to claim power however it can.)

If giving states a stronger voice at the federal level is the main goal, I think it might be better if another suggestion were adopted: To return to the practice of having U.S. senators appointed by their state legislators instead of being popularly elected by the citizenry of the states where they serve. I'm not certain how much that would change the dynamics of Capitol Hill -- except, maybe, to make U.S. senators more appointed to the political elites of their states instead of the citizenry at large. Certainly, there are plenty of examples of bad-idea programs continuing because a powerful senator comes from a coal state or a farm state or whatever, so it's not like these guys aren't thinking of their states when they're in Washington. I don't think it's a great idea, in other words. But it seems to me returning to the way it was originally done does less violence to the overall construction and intent of the Constitution than outright giving the states veto power. And hey, do we really need to popularly elected houses of legislative government? What's the point of that?

Giving the states veto power runs contrary to the Founders' vision; from that standpoint the proposal really does belie the idea of conservatives as somehow more faithful to that vision. And I suspect that clearing the way for smaller federal government, what it will do is add an entirely new layer of bureaucracy and politics to our public life. Instead of voting for congressmen to represent our interests in Washington and governors to take care of stuff at home, we'll start having to include national politics in our calculations of whom to vote for for state senator. Giving the states more federal power, in other words, might blur the lines between the two forms of government and make a real hash of things. So it's not just an anti-Constitutional proposal; it's probably also a bad one.

The Ben and Joel Podcast: Daniel Okrent

Daniel Okrent, the author of "Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition" joins the podcast to talk about the book -- and about his stint as the first "public editor" of the New York Times. He'll speak at the National Constitution Center on Monday night in Philadelphia; see the center's website for details.

Questions considered in this podcast:

• How did Prohibition happen in the first place?
• What was the role of race and gender in moving the movement forward?
• What lingering effects has Prohibition had on popular culture?
• What lingering effects has Prohibition had on our drinking culture?
• What's the relationship between taxes and Prohibition?
• What lessons can we learn from the last century about marijuana prohibition?
• Is the New York Times doing the right thing by publishing the WikiLeaks revelations?
• How has the Public Editor role at the Times evolved since Okrent originated it?

Music heard in this podcast:

• "I Drink Alone," George Thorogood and the Destroyers
• "Whiskey You're The Devil," The Clancy Brothers
• "Drinking Song From Hawaii," Andy Iona's Novelty Four
• "Little Brother," Grizzly Bear
• "The Drinking Song From De Fledermaus," The Blazers

Listen to the podcast here.

Wikileaks and Me

Ben and I write about Wikileaks in this week's column. My take:

There's a scene in the first "Godfather" movie where an old mobster is preparing young Michael Corleone for a coming mob war. "These things gotta happen every five years or so, ten years," the mobster tells Michael. "Helps to get rid of the bad blood."

That's probably a good way to think about the WikiLeaks' release of U.S. diplomatic cables. Democracy works best when Americans know and understand what their government is doing. It's less helpful for diplomacy, however. So it's probably healthy that we get a once-a-generation look behind the diplomatic curtain, but it's not the kind of thing Americans should hope to see every year.

What's remarkable about the documents is how little scandal they contain. The last two decades have seen anger and conspiracy-theorizing about the American government reach a fever pitch, but it appears that the United States has a team of smart, savvy and diligent diplomats working hard to protect the country -- and its interests -- in a chaotic world.

What's more, the documents that have been released are of such low classification that a reported 3 million people already had access to see them. Even Defense Secretary Robert Gates admitted they were of low consequence: "Is it awkward? Yes," he said. "Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest."

The real scandal has been the angry reaction of some American conservatives, such as Sarah Palin, who have suggested that WikiLeaks' Julian Assange should be viewed as and treated like a terrorist. That presumably means he should die for his actions. But there's no evidence that WikiLeaks' revelations have led to the harm of any American or allied collaborator.

If publishing the truth of our government's actions is so hazardous to American interests, perhaps we should reconsider those actions. Leave Julian Assange alone.

I'm not actually thrilled with the last paragraph, because even I recognize that the government does legitimately keep some secrets. On the other hand, he ratio of legitimate secrets to not-so-legitimate is probably out of whack.

Wikileaks and the Afghanistan Quagmire

I can't say often enough how critical it is to American counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan that the deep and widespread corruption in the government there be reversed. But as we already knew -- and the Wikileaks cables are confirming -- there's simply no way that's happening:

It is hardly news that predatory corruption, fueled by a booming illicit narcotics industry, is rampant at every level of Afghan society. Transparency International, an advocacy organization that tracks government corruption around the globe, ranks Afghanistan as the world’s third most corrupt country, behind Somalia and Myanmar.

But the collection of confidential diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to a number of publications, offers a fresh sense of its pervasive nature, its overwhelming scale, and the dispiriting challenge it poses to American officials who have made shoring up support for the Afghan government a cornerstone of America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan

It's time to wind down this war.

Bristol Palin Makes Me Sad

It's bad for America that John McCain plucked Sarah Palin from semi-obscurity and turned her into a walking, breathing incarnation of right-wing grievance. But now Bristol Palin is getting attention in the blogosphere, and I'll be honest here -- as much as I dislike Sarah Palin's presence in public life, I feel mainly pity for her daughter.

I think I realized this a couple of weeks ago when Bristol was still competing on "Dancing With The Stars." As the final episode neared, she reportedly cast a possible victory in political terms: "It would be like a big middle finger to all the people out there who hate my mom and hate me."

And I thought: "I don't hate you Bristol."

Bristol hasn't done anything. That's ok! She's very young! She's not supposed to have done anything yet! She's just a girl who became a single mother at almost the precise moment her mother emerged as a political icon. And that means a bunch of attention has been directed at her. And she, like her feckless ex-boyfriend, has decided to leverage that attention into even more attention -- because, well, who wouldn't?

I might change my tune on this in a couple of years. If Bristol Palin continues on this path, she'll end up being much like her mother -- with constant railing against the "lamestream media" -- but without even Sarah Palin's meager record of accomplishment. If that happens, she'll be only grievance, and probably an intolerable presence in public life. But the real tragedy is that she's in public life at all. I don't hate you Bristol; I'm sad that I even know who you are, and I'm said that millions of people have an opinion about you. If it were up to me, you'd raise your child -- and grow up a little more yourself -- in obscurity. For your own sakes, not ours. I'm sorry that can't happen.

More On 'Freedom': This Is Why Book Clubs Exist

Comments from a pair of friends on my review of Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom" remind me why literature is often more enriching -- for me anyway -- if you have fellow readers to discuss it with.

Andrew and Leslie both made me pause about my assertion that Patty, the novel's central female character, is a "thoroughly unexceptional" woman, unworthy of the struggle that takes place between the two main male characters.

Andrew first:

Look, Patty may or may not be an especially remarkable woman. But these two dudes are in a serious long term pissing contest. It could be over a patch of dirt and they'd both think it was remarkable. I don't think it's the hold she has on them that's central to the novel, it's the hold the two men have on each other *through* her. And that's left her a little...empty.

Leslie second:

Patty was a dedicated mother, house renovator, and gutsy defender of her neighborhood. She licked her own wounds after being raped, no thanks to her parents, and still managed to forgive her father and find peace with him in his final days. I found her quite remarkable, and by far my favorite character.

Both comments widened my perspective of the novel; Leslie's comment actually made me feel as though I'd been unbearably sexist -- because, well, I probably had been. I thank my friends for taking time to chime in with valuable perspectives.

John McCain Continues His Evolution Into Strom Thurmond

McCain Questions Pentagon on Repealing ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ - NYTimes.com: "“I couldn’t disagree more,” Mr. McCain shot back. “We send these young people into combat, we think they’re mature enough to fight and die. I think they’re mature enough to make a judgment on who they want to serve with and the impact on their battle effectiveness.” Mr. McCain, a naval aviator in the Vietnam War who was shot down and imprisoned in Hanoi, then added: “Mr. Secretary, I speak from personal experience.”"

Meh. Part of maturity -- in addition to making decisions about life and death -- is learning to live with people who live life differently from you. And part of the maturity that goes into military service is accepting much less control over decisions about the work you do and whom you do it with. McCain's defense of DADT boils down to this: He apparently believes that members of the military are so prejudiced against homosexuals that they cannot possibly be expected to maintain their discipline and honor in the face of such a provocation. That's a low estimate of the sensibilities of our uniformed men and women, one that's largely belied by the Pentagon's own survey of servicemembers.

Tax Cuts For The Rich Matter More Than Anything Else

Slatest: "Mere hours after President Obama's bipartisan meeting with Congressional leadership, the Associated Press reported that 'Senate Republicans intend to block action on virtually all Democratic-backed legislation unrelated to tax cuts and government spending.' Those GOP leaders Obama was meeting with had already 'quietly collected signatures on a letter pledging to carry out the strategy.' That letter, which Steve Benen calls a 'hostage plan,' was released today, and it signals Republicans' intent to torpedo the DREAM act and a DADT repeal, among other things."

The Military's Un-Christian Chaplains

The Washington Post reports on the views of military chaplains about the repeal of DADT. The official Pentagon report includes one of the most depressing sentences in the history of the world:

"'In the course of our review, we heard some chaplains condemn in the strongest possible terms homosexuality as a sin and an abomination, and inform us that they would refuse to in any way support, comfort, or assist someone they knew to be homosexual,' the report stated. 'In equally strong terms, other chaplains, including those who also believe homosexuality is a sin, informed us that 'we are all sinners,' and that it is a chaplain's duty to care for all Service members.'"

It doesn't bother me that Christian chaplains believe homosexuality is a sin, although I disagree: that's to be expected. But I'm horrified at the attitudes of those who would refuse to show Christian love to gay servicemembers -- and gratified for the example of those chaplains who would provide assistance despite seeing homosexuality as a sin. The Christ of the Bible hung out with prostitutes and tax collectors, and railed against Pharisees who sneered at people who didn't share their moral rectitude. I'm not a Christian anymore, but I know which group of chaplains more clearly emulates the man they supposedly worship.

That said, I really hope we're not going to be in the business of letting chaplains set military policy, no matter which policy they favor.

The Daily News' War Against Philly's War On German Christmas

Philadelphia's City Hall finally capitulated in the War on Christmas, and thank goodness. The end of the "controversy" means that today should be the last day we get saturation coverage of the "controversy" -- like, say, the Daily News' three opinion columnists lambasting officials for getting the "controversy" started in the first place. Luckily, all three columnists played precisely to type, indicating that you probably never have to read them again in order to know their feelings on a given subject.

Stu Bykofsky, of course, went the Muslim-blaming route: "If the words "Christmas Village" offend you, what is the basis of your offense? Are you anti-Christian? Remember those offended by the "Ground Zero mosque"? Their feelings didn't win out. Oh, that's different. Islam is a minority religion here, but it's OK to disrespect a majority religious belief."

Michael Smerconish went with dripping sarcasm: "And that creche they moved from the front of the Municipal Services Building to the JFK Plaza is what, just some baby bunking down in the hay? And how about that "holiday tree" set to be lit this afternoon? I haven't seen it, but something tells me it's not a bonsai or a fig. Maybe it's part of Mayor Nutter's Greenworks Philadelphia sustainability plan. And the Nat King Cole classics providing the village's soundtrack? Maybe the city can get the name of "The Christmas Song" changed to "The Winter Number.""

Christine Flowers let loose with pure rage against political correctness and a bit of Philly-hating: "IF SANTA HADN'T already been turned off by this city after getting pelted with snowballs at Franklin Field way back when, Mayor Nutter has guaranteed that he'll be avoiding this mediocre metropolis like the plague on a permanent basis. ... I didn't think that Philadelphia's warped experiment with diversity could sink any lower than the subterranean depths it reached with the crusade against the Boy Scouts. Was I ever wrong. The City of Brotherly Love had decided to show a little less love toward the roughly 75 percent of its citizens who celebrate a holiday that has, at its core, the principle of peace. I'm sure that made the remaining 25 percent happy, but was it really worth it?"

No. I'm pretty sure I can speak for all of us when I say it wasn't.

Bag O' Books: Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom"

Three thoughts about Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom":

* I tried something different with this novel, listening to it on audiobook. There are probably better choices for an audiobook than the longest prominent novel of the last year. It took me two months to listen to the whole thing. Forever. I discovered that audiobooks rob you of time to read a passage, then stare out the window and think: The audio moves forward whether or not your attention does. On the other hand: scenes involving phone sex and a character's feces had extra potency in an audio format -- almost vomit-inducing, in fact. The narrator's attempt at accents? Cringeworthy. On balance, I wish I'd read the book instead of listened to it.

* The book, while well-written, is made a bit wearying by Franzen's apparent need to have Something Important To Say about the Bush Era we've all just recently lived through. It makes for distracting fiction, and it makes you wish that Franzen -- an accomplished essayist -- would've just written a collection of magazine columns, instead of placing his fictional adulterous housewives and angry rock stars among real events. Instead of bringing us closer to his characters, it distanced me -- a reminder that everything I was reading (hearing) wasn't real. The suspension of disbelief is still important in fiction, especially when (like Franzen) one is aspiring to old-school traditional storytelling instead of formal innovation.

* The other distraction: Two men in the book believe that the novel's central female character, Patty, is a remarkable woman. But there's precious little evidence that she is remarkable. She played basketball well in the 1980s. She finally got around to reading serious books a few years ago. She writes as well as Jonathan Franzen does, but we're the only ones who know that. Other than that, though, she seems thoroughly unexceptional. It's impossible to imagine the hold she has on the two main male characters in the book, and that makes much of the resulting action less believable and less weighty.

* BONUS THOUGHT: In the end, everybody gets a happy ending. But it doesn't seem earned. In fact, the happy endings that the characters get -- one gets rich selling shade-grown coffee -- seems at odds with Franzen's carefully detailed satire at the beginning of the book, in which one long paragraph lays bare the shallowness and banality of every yuppie goal ever. "Freedom" ends with its characters actually achieving bourgeois goals like the ones it lampooned, only without the irony, making it feel like Franzen is selling out to the very forces he seemingly understood so well. All in all, a very frustrating novel.

Bill Simmons: Possibly A Bad Dad

Bill Simmons' love of Boston teams and hatred of the LA Lakers is usually amusing, but his campaign to keep his daughter from becoming a Lakers fan seems psychopathic:

"The big strategic play? Lying. Sorry, I had to. This was important. I convinced her that the Lakers were bullies (she hates the concept of bullying; it drives her crazy in movies), that Kobe is a mean daddy to his young daughters and that Phil Jackson absolutely hates golden retrievers. Did I show her the Artest melee on YouTube, then point out Artest in a Lakers uniform and tell her that she couldn't root for the Lakers because Artest might run into the stands and punch me during a game? Yes. Yes I did. The only time I screwed up? When I tried to convince her that Pau Gasol was a vampire -- that made her like him more. (F***ing Edward. He swayed an entire generation of girls under 15.) Everything else worked. Everything. I killed off every possible Lakers chromosome."

Even assuming some comic license on Simmons' part, that's why I don't let myself ever become too much of a sports fan. When you start working that hard and dishonestly at swaying a child's entertainment preferences -- and that's all sports really are, right? -- the line from "fun" to "sick" has been crossed. I don't ever want my feelings about the running and jumping abilities of young men to ever affect my emotional outlook, or my parenting. Especially my parenting.

John McCain's DADT Legacy

Fred Kaplan at Slate: "The evidence, the polling data of service men and women, the testimony of senior officers, the everyday experiences of living and fighting, the imperatives of national security, as well as the obvious moral standards of contemporary life—all point to, at the very least, a shift in the burden of proof on whether DADT should be repealed. It's no longer valid, and it's clearly a pretense, to call for further studies, further surveys, closer questioning. If McCain and the others oppose repeal, they have to come up with some new reason—or fall back on the oldest, most unpalatable reason—why."

It's clear that McCain will continue to oppose the repeal of DADT. That's his right. But in doing so, he's probably cementing his legacy as the Strom Thurmond of gay civil rights.

Making It Harder To Filibuster

I like this idea:

"The public believes that filibustering senators have to hold the floor. Indeed, the public perceives the filibuster as an act of principled public courage and sacrifice. Let's make it so.

Require a specific number of Senators -- I suggest five for the first 24 hours, 10 for the second 24 hours, and 20 thereafter -- to be on the floor to sustain the filibuster. This would be required even during quorum calls. At any point, a member could call for a count of the senators on the floor who stand in opposition to the regular order, and if the count falls below the required level, the regular order prevails and a majority vote is held."

This seems like a good middle ground between the untenable status quo -- where all one senator has to do is say "filibuster" to block a bill -- and getting rid of the filibuster entirely. I don't know why it's needed, exactly: it seems to obstruct the will of the American people as expressed through their elected representatives. But senators seem loathe to let it go; perhaps they'll agree to a modification instead.

The Obama Administration's Orwellian Reaction To Wikileaks

James Fallows: "A government contractor forwards an email he received today from the Commerce Department. Its gist: just because State Department memos had been posted by Wikileaks and published in the press, that didn't mean they weren't 'classified' any more, or that there wouldn't still be penalties for quoting them. Eg: 'There has been a rumor that the information is no longer classified since it resides in the public domain. This is NOT true.'"

Fallows goes on to quote a law school official who let his students know this week that they could, someday, be deprived employment and/or security clearances with the government -- or government-related work -- if they post links to the Wikileaks material, or comment about it on social media sites. In other words: the Obama Administration's response to Wikileaks is to make sure that aspiring members of the establishment officially pretend the Wikileaks release never happened. Every day brings me one more step toward becoming a weirdo libertarian.

Is Julian Assange A Terrorist?

I was going to write about this, but TNC got there first:

"I think there actually is something talismanic about designating Assange a terrorist--politically talismanic. I think we're getting close to a point where 'terrorist' indicates a certain view of your enemies, as opposed to a statement of tactics. I have mixed feelings about the Wikileaks dump, mostly because I don't really see any great scandals, atrocities, or cover-ups being exposed. Assange oeuvre is mostly hacker, and occasionally, accidentally humanitarian. 

But in no real sense of the word is Assange a terrorist, except in the sense that 'terrorists' are people who we have come to see as belonging outside of our justice system, miscreants somewhere in the range of child molesters."