I buy a lottery ticket twice a year. This week is one of those times.

The Mega Millions lottery annuity jackpot jumped to $237 million ($150.8 million cash) today after Tuesday night's drawing produced no top prize winner.

The jackpot is the biggest on offer since June in either the Mega Millions of Powerball games when one ticket had all the numbers in $261.6 million Powerball drawing.

via philly.com

I know and fully agree with all the arguments against the existence of a lottery -- it amounts to a tax on the poor, one that encourages them to spend money on hopeless dreams instead of productive purposes here and now. And I know the odds against winning the lottery: I'm almost certainly not the person who will win it if I play.

On the other hand: *Somebody's* going to win this money. $1 won't make my son go without a meal. So -- completely irrationally -- I will buy a single Mega Millions ticket this week.

About those Predator drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan

These attacks by unmanned aircraft may have succeeded in eliminating hundreds of dangerous militants, but the truth is that they also kill innocent civilians indiscriminately and in large numbers. According to the New America Foundation, one in four of those killed by drones since 2004 has been an innocent. The Brookings Institute, however, has calculated a much higher civilian-to-militant ratio of 10:1. Meanwhile, figures compiled by the Pakistani authorities suggest US strikes killed 701 people between January 2006 and April 2009, of which 14 were al-Qaida militants and 687 were civilians. That produces a hit rate of just 2% – or 50 civilians dead for every militant killed.

via guardian.co.uk

Obviously, the numbers are all over the place. But if the United States really is killing civilians in significant numbers in Afghanistan and Iraq, it could hardly do more to spread the ideologies of terrorism.

The Wall Street Journal has its death panel cake, eats it too

Here's the WSJ headline on its editorial about the revival of government-sponsored, voluntary end-of-life counseling sessions for seniors:

headline.png.png on Aviary.

Remember Sarah Palin's point? It was that the government was going to set up a bureaucracy that forced seniors to commit suicide so they wouldn't spend our precious health care resources. That was never, ever, ever true. It was either a lie or a gross misunderstanding on Palin's part, but it was never, ever true.

And the Wall Street Journal, once you get past the inflammatory headline, admits this!

Certain quarters on the political right are following the media's imagination and blasting Dr. Berwick's decision as the tangible institution of death panels. But the rule-making is not coercive and gives seniors more autonomy, not less.

In this case, fully a fifth of the U.S. population will be over age 65 inside of two decades, and whatever the other marvels of modern medicine, the mortality rate remains 100%. Advance care planning lays out the options and allows patients, in consultation with their providers and family members, to ensure that their future treatment is consistent with their wishes and moral values should they become too sick to decide for themselves.

So, wait: If end-of-life counseling sessions aren't anything like death panels, then how does can the WSJ headline say Palin "had a point"?

We wrote at the time that Sarah Palin's coinage was sensationalistic, but it was meant to illustrate a larger truth about a world of finite resources and infinite entitlement wants.

Hmm. I'm not sure that "larger truths" can be well-illustrated by fat, whopping mistruths compounded by sensationalistic headlines contradicted by the articles they lead. But maybe that's how the WSJ editorial board does business. 

Income inequality: Rein in the rich or lift up the poor?

In his post on income inequality, Mickey Kaus gets at another question that I want to get answered during my year of immersion reading: Is it better to restrain the income of the rich or to lift the incomes of the poor:

The question is then what makes Brazil Brazil. Is it wild riches at the top, or extreme poverty at the bottom? It seems pretty obvious, from what little I know of Brazil, that the problem is the bottom, not the top. We worry about Brazil because of the favelas, the huge impoverished shantytowns, and the crime coming out of them. 

I think Kaus is mostly right about this: I don't feel class-envy need to keep Bill Gates from earning another billion dollars or so. 

But...

The evidence suggests that -- recent circumstances notwithstanding -- the amount of actual wealth in America grew during the last 30 years. And that the people who were already rich did pretty much all of the accumulating of that wealth, while incomes for the rest of us stagnated during that time. But I have a hard time believing that the people in the Top 1 Percent who accumulated all that additional wealth did all the creating of all that additional wealth. I suspect that additional wealth was created, in part, on the labor and ideas and sweat of people further down the food chain who might not've shared proportionately in the rewards. (Although perhaps I'll be disabused of that notion as I keep up my reading.)

Assuming they're not simply shills for rich business interests, that should concern lovers of the free market: If hard work and productivity don't actually bring you additional income -- and that seems to be the case under the prevailing ideologies of the last 30 years -- then where's the incentive to hard work and increase productivity? 

Preserving the free market aside, though, I think this is one of my concerns about growing income inequality: It suggests that most of us aren't being rewarded for our part in creating wealth for others. So I'm concerned about the runaway wealth accumulation of the Top 1 Percent because it suggests that the system is badly broken in its distribution of the wealth it creates, not because I don't want people to make more money.

Denis Dutton, Arts & Letters Daily founder, RIP

Denis Dutton in 1998 created the well-read Arts & Letters Daily, which the New Yorker's Blake Eskin today calls "the first and foremost aggregator of well-written and well-argued book reviews, essays, and other articles in the realm of ideas. Denis was the intellectual’s Matt Drudge." Dutton, a philosophy professor at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, has died after having cancer. He was the brother of the former Los Angeles booksellers Doug and Davis Dutton. The Chronicle of Higher Education, which bought Arts & Letters Daily in 2002, announced that the site will attempt to continue.

via laobserved.com

I've not much to add, except that Dutton's website was one of those places that made a guy from Kansas feel liberated by the Internet -- regular exposure to the world of ideas made my world bigger. I'm grateful to Dutton for his work. Rest in peace.

Kaus, Obama, income inequality and immigration

I think I've mentioned before that 2011 will be my year of reading about income inequality and the welfare state. I've already got a running head start with the Christmastime purchase of Paul Krugman's "The Conscience of a Liberal." My plan is to read a serious of books along the political spectrum -- William Voegeli's "Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State" is next on the list.

But the national discussion is currently outracing my attempts to build a foundation for my own contributions to the debate. Today, Mickey Kaus weighs in with his own suggestion about what President Obama can really do if he wants to address income inequality: Put a clamp on illegal immigration:

 A major enemy of tight labor markets at the bottom is also fairly clear: unchecked immigration by undocumented low-skilled workers. It's hard for a day laborer to command $18 an hour in the market if there are illegals hanging out on the corner willing to work for $7. Even experts who claim illlegal immigration is good for Americans overall admit that it's not good for Americans at the bottom. In other words, it's not good for income equality.

I suspect that there's something to this, but not in the way that Kaus thinks. Part of the reason that illegal immigrant labor is so cheap -- and thus contributes so mightily to income inequality -- is that employers hold pretty much all the power in the employer-employee relationship. They're generally content to overlook a worker's immigrant status as long as they provide cheap labor. But if those workers started agitating for higher pay or tried to unionize (options available to their naturalized colleagues), well, it's not too difficult to imagine a manager making a call to the authorities to get rid of the rabble-rouser, is it? So illegal workers keep their heads low and their hands busy, because the pay is still far better than what they'd make back at home. Otherwise, why would they be here?

Cracking down on illegal immigration might solve the supply-demand problem that affects income inequality, I suppose, but it seems to me also possible that a smart, always-talked-about-but-never-implemented guest worker program might do quite a bit to affect the dynamic as well. If illegal workers knew that they could fairly bargain their labor for pay without worrying about deportation or prison, the result might be higher pay. That would bring up the incomes of the lowest-earning workers, yes, but it might also give illegal workers less of a workplace advantage over similarly skilled American citizens who might require a bit more money to do the work. You don't have to build a high fence to address income inequality, in other words: Just make the immigration system make more sense.

Shmoogy Noir

Taken at Almaz Cafe

About Vick, Obama and prisoner rehabilitation

Dave Weigel onPresident Obama's praise of Michael Vick

The Vick/Obama is only interesting at the level Obama meant it to be interesting -- as the start of a discussion on prisoner rehabilitation. Vick will be fine, because he has several years left to play football better than almost anybody in the country. He gets a comeback, on national television, with an array of writers eager to chronicle it. How useful is the Vick situation for starting a discussion about prison reform, or the rights of felons? Does it make a discussion of felon re-enfranchisement any less toxic? It can, and it's really the only way that Democrats -- especially Barack Obama -- can start a discussion on this without coming out of the gate as soft-on-crime wimps.

I suspect that this discussion won't get too far with Vick as its leading example. "Rehaibilitation" is relatively easy to come by when A) you're likely to secure a multi-million dollar contract upon your release from prison and B) employers are motivated to give you that contract because of the possibility you'll help them generate millions of dollars more in ticket sales, team paraphernalia (if, as is happening with Vick right now, you take a team to the playoffs) and other opportunities. But Michael Vick is the only recent felon to whom those conditions apply. There are incentives out there for employers who hire recently released convicts, but lots of companies remain skittish about those prospects. I'm not sure how Michael Vick's example serves as a good starting point to fixing those problems.

Dennis Prager answers the question: What do women want?

I'm on record as having a fair amount of contempt for the relationship writings of conservative radio host Dennis Prager, so I braced myself when he started writing a series of columns -- posted at National Review -- about what men and women most want in the world. His column today on the second part of that question (what women want) turned out to be not as awful as I feared, but still off-target. 

What a woman most wants is to be loved by a man she admires.

The notion that a woman most wants a man, admirable or not, has been scoffed at. This was encapsulated by the famous feminist slogan, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” Even feminism that did not agree with the fish-bicycle metaphor communicated to young women that an “authentic” woman would not have as her greatest desire to bond with a man.

It is problematic enough to say that a woman most wants a man. But that pales compared to the claim that she most wants man whom she admires. That seems to affirm gender inequality. The image it conjures up is of a woman looking up to her man as if he were some sort of lord and she his serf.

Yet any woman who believes that she is married to an admirable man would laugh at such a dismissal. Admiring one’s husband doesn’t render a woman a serf. It renders her fortunate.

I have no doubt that some women, many women, want most to be loved by a man they admire. Furthermore, I have little doubt that in the conservative circles Prager runs in, there are many, many women who profess as much. (I went to an evangelical Mennonite college in the Midwest where women regularly said they were seeking a husband who could provide "Christian leadership." I know that lots of folks like this exist.) Where Prager goes wrong, I think, is in his apparent implication that he could pluck any woman out of a crowd and know that's what she wants most -- or if she doesn't, she's clearly been brainwashed by feminism.

First of all: Not every women wants to be loved by a man. 

Second: Love isn't necessarily the highest goal of every remaining straight woman. Different people prioritize things differently.

Third: Prager is right that the word "admires" does conjure some of the cognitive trouble he expected. If he'd used the word "respects" -- and I think it would've covered many the aspects he intends by the word -- I might not quibble. Much. 

But all of this, as I said, is incidental to Prager's foundational problem: His belief that he knows what women want. Modern conservatism, as a political tradition, tends to very strongly emphasize individual rights and responsibilities -- rhetorically, at least, it recognizes that different people want different things, and wants them to be free to pursue those different things in their own way. Prager doesn't seem to really belong to this tradition, though. Instead -- whether he realizes it or not -- he's the reason that feminism came into being in the first place: Because some women wanted the freedom to make and pursue different choices than the ones expected of them in a male-dominated society.

It may be that many women want what Prager believes they want; but his framing doesn't allow for the possibility that healthy women may make other choices, may want other things. Indeed, he pretty clearly holds such differing ideas in contempt. So while some of his advice might seem sound -- dudes, work hard to improve your lot in life! -- it's founded in a worldview that seems to deny women their individuality. Because of that, I'm not really interested in taking his relationship advice.

Netflix Queue: 'Restrepo'

Three thoughts about 'Restrepo,' coming up after the trailer:

• This movie is a documentary about the life of an American Army platoon stationed in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley in 2007. Americans weren't paying as much attention to Afghanistan at that point: Iraq was consuming most of our attention. But the war there was every bit as real and intense for these soldiers; the combat footage is some of the most harrowing I've ever seen -- not unflinching, exactly, because we're not shown much of actual death or wounds, but it does walk right up to the line of what American viewers will find acceptable in depicting combat deaths. It is devastating.

• Watching 'Restrepo,' though, I realized how much of my understanding of war is generally shaped by war movies, and because of that by the language of Hollywood generally. There were several moments throughout the documentary that I thought were foreshadowing an imminent violent death -- because that's how those moments would've been used in a Hollywood production. 'Restrepo' eschewed such tricks, for the most part: If violent death was coming, it used its narrators -- soldiers from the unit, reflecting on their experiences months later in studio interviews, from the relative safety of an Army base in Italy -- to tell us precisely what was coming. Only then were we shown. 

• The movie's most emblematic character is Capt. Dan Kearney, leader of the squad that we follow. He arrives in Afghanistan looking a bit dim but well-intentioned -- he tells viewers he read nothing about the Korengal Valley before deploying there, because he wanted to approach the problems there "with an open mind" -- intending to do the "nice guy" work of counterinsurgency: meeting weekly with local elders, promising jobs and building projects in exchange for their help. By the end, though, the intentions have gone awry: He tells the gathering of elders he doesn't give a fuck about their protests of the arrest of a local man they say is innocent of anti-American activity. He can't claim any real victories during his time in Afghanistan, so he talks about "changing the dynamics" of what is clearly still a deadly place for American troops.

And one can't help feel, as Kearney makes regular promises of future "progress" to Afghan elders, that the elders aren't all that interested in the kind of progress he clearly intends to be an enticement to their cooperation. There's a memorable line in "Full Metal Jacket" -- there's Hollywood war again -- that inside every enemy fighter is an American trying to scratch its way out. Forty years have passed since the war depicted in that movie, but there are moments in 'Restrepo' that suggest American hubris hasn't been tempered too much in the decades since. That's not what 'Restrepo' is about, though: It's about the daily horror experienced by the men who serve that hubris. Perhaps fittingly, the movie's happy ending is when our soldiers finally get to leave Afghanistan.

A note about Mitch McConnell's last-ditch effort to block the DADT repeal

A last-ditch effort by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to complicate the repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy was blocked Tuesday night after Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) objected, Senate aides said.

McConnell attempted to add an amendment to the so-called stripped-down defense authorization bill that would have required the consent of the military service chiefs to proceed with "don't ask" repeal. Under legislation passed by the Senate last week, certifications are required from the president, the secretary of defense and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. All the incumbents in those positions support repeal.

"It was a McConnell proposal," a GOP aide confirmed. "There was an attempted to get unanimous consent for it to be included in the defense bill and someone objected."

via politico.com

Perhaps I'm missing something here, but it appears Sen. McConnell tried to amend the law to give the military service chiefs veto power over the decisions of their civilian superiors. He lost this round, but isn't the effort itself Constitutionally suspect?

America is a little more American today

President Obama signed the landmark repeal of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy Wednesday morning, handing a major victory to advocates of gay rights and fulfilling a campaign promise to do away with a practice that he has called discriminatory.

Casting the repeal in terms of past civil rights struggles, Obama said he was proud to sign a law that "will strengthen our national security and uphold the ideals that our fighting men and women risk their lives to defend."

He added: "No longer will our country be denied the service of thousands of patriotic Americans who are forced to leave the military - regardless of their skills, no matter their bravery or their zeal, no matter their years of exemplary performance - because they happen to be gay. No longer will tens of thousands of Americans in uniform be asked to live a lie, or look over their shoulder in order to serve the country that they love."

via washingtonpost.com

Howard Kurtz is really wrong about Haley Barbour

At the Daily Beast, Howard Kurtz seems to think that the blowup about Haley Barbour's comments about the Concerned Citizens Councils represents unwarranted digging into Barbour's attitudes from 1962, saying the brouhaha is the press getting "worked into a lather over what Barbour did and thought when he was a teenager."

When you contemplate running for president, your life becomes an open book. Barbour should certainly be held accountable for the insensitive way he talked about the bad old days of officially sanctioned racial prejudice. His statement today is an acknowledgement of how badly he bobbled the question. But at some point you have to ask: Shouldn’t there be a statute of limitations on this stuff?

But nobody's getting mad at Barbour for being a Mississippian in 1962. They're getting mad at his contemporary adult understanding and presentation of what that era was like. He suggested in December 2010 -- despite decades of historical research based on accounts of the time -- that the CCCs were benign community groups when, in reallity, they were working in the service of white supremacy. I don't blame Barbour for his youth. I do blame him for whitewashing racism as an adult. The statute of limitations has barely even started on that stuff. 

 

Jonah Goldberg does that thing where he pretends that words don't have plain meanings so that he can pretend liberals are confusing things

Jonah Goldberg defends Stanley Kurtz's new book about President Obama's socialism-drenched past. A couple of paragraphs need some attention:

Here’s my problem. Socialism isn’t the scare word Weigel and others (David Frum comes to mind) say it is. I will be honest and admit that I wish it was more of a scare word than it is, but it’s really not one. I don’t think Americans think of gulags, bread lines and Red Dawn when they hear the word “socialist.”  They think of those things when they hear the word “Communist,” which is a different thing than socialism (or at least that’s what every book on the subject and every sincere democratic socialist I’ve ever spoken to says).

This is an example of Goldberg being hyperliteral when he chooses to be. Yes, socialism is different from communism -- even if the two are related. But as used by much of the right, the "socialist" charge against Obama is clearly, unambiguous effort to conflate the two concepts and paint the president as a bit of a stealth Stalinist. That's why if you do a Google image search for "Obama socialism" you end up with lots and lots and lots of pictures like this. It's not liberals who are making those pictures, so Goldberg is being either A) naive to the point of stupidity or B) willfully disingenuous when he suggests that the conflation of socialism and communism, with regard to Obama, is because of liberal misunderstandings.

But now things are a bit mixed up. So even though leading liberals have talked openly about the possibility that Obama is a “liberal socialist” or might usher in a socialist era, when conservatives take these arguments at face value or make similar ones themselves, it isliberals like Weigel who insist that socialism must be seen as synonymous with Communism, the gulag, Red Dawn etc.

Er... which leading liberals have talked openly about the possibility of Obama being a "liberal socialist"? I'm open to the possibility it's happened, though I'd be surprised. I just want to know Goldberg's documentation for that assertion. But here's the capper:

For example, I’ve just been dipping in and out of Stan’s book, but nowhere I’ve seen does he call Obama a Communist. I’m sure Dave understands the distinction and he might have simply found the word-play irresistible, but it’s worth noting that the Hammer and Sickle are not symbols of socialism but of Communism.

Who is seeing Hammer and Sickles everywhere now?

Ladies and gentlemen: I give you the cover of Stanley Kurtz's book:

Right. Now, granted, there's no "hammer and sickle" on the front of Kurtz's book, but a red star is generally accepted as the next-best symbol of Soviet-style communism.  And granted, a book cover isn't a book's argument. What's more, I understand this book is well-researched, even if its arguments fall flat. But for Goldberg to suggest that there's no red-baiting going on by conservatives who charge Obama with socialism, well, that's literally unbelievable.

Yup.

Deep Thought

Dems have been (finally) moving major legislation so well during the lame duck session that perhaps we'd all benefit if they lost by historic margins in every election. Losing is apparently the only way to motivate them. Health care wasn't passed until Scott Brown won Kennedy's seat, after all.

Coffee and an ebook

Taken at Almaz Cafe

More on Haley Barbour and race revisionism

Like I said, Barbour is not dumb. If he's being a revisionist about race in Mississippi, he's not alone, and he's fighting back against a media standard that all conservatives hate -- this idea that Southerners and conservatives can never stop atoning for Jim Crow. Why should he have to apologize for this, after all? He wasn't in a Citizens Council. With the exception of some people, like Howell Raines -- who covered Barbour's 1986 Senate bid -- how many of these reporters know what they're talking about, anyway? And there are few things conservative voters hate more than being told they were on the wrong side of the Civil Rights movement.

Dave Weigel, via slate.com

I for one don't need Southerners to continually atone for Jim Crow. If Haley Barbour doesn't want to have to apologize for Citizens Councils because he wasn't in one, then the best thing he can do is ... keep quiet about Citizens Councils. Publicly reimagining them as a race-neutral instrument of civic stability keeps culture wars alive, because it tells minorities and white liberals that *Southern Whites* haven't moved beyond fighting the battles of the Civil Rights era.

But I think Weigel, in his last sentence, gets at what's going on. "There are few things conservative voters hate more than being told they were on the wrong side of the Civil Rights movement." But they were! Barbour's way of telling the Citizens Council story, though, lets them feel like *they're* the real (and misunderstood) victims of racism in America -- and that's a lie.

If Republicans don't want to be tagged as racist, they shouldn't praise racist stuff

I know a number of conservatives and Republicans who get -- I think -- genuinely angry when Republicans and conservatives get smeared as racists. They tend to chalk it up as "race hustling" -- as though anybody who still complains about racism and its ongoing pernicious effects in our society is another Al Sharpton trying to make fresh hay over yesterday's grievances.

There's possibly an element of truth to that, on occasion. But if Republicans don't want to be tagged as racists, maybe a former RNC chairman, current Mississippi governor and possible presidential candidate like Haley Barbour shouldn't praise stuff that everybody knows was racist:

As Barbour recalls it in a new profile in The Weekly Standard, things weren't so bad in his hometown of Yazoo City, which took until 1970 to integrate its schools (though the final event itself is said to have gone on peacefully). For example, Barbour says that there was no problem of Ku Klux Klan activity in the town -- thanks to the Citizens Council movement, an organization that was founded on the basis of resistance to integration and the promotion of white supremacy.

"You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK," said Barbour. "Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you'd lose it. If you had a store, they'd see nobody shopped there. We didn't have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City."

The White Citizens Council movement was founded in Mississippi in 1954, shortly after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregated public schools, and was dedicated to political activities opposing civil rights -- notably boycotts of pro-civil rights individuals in Barbour's hometown, as opposed to Barbour's recollection of actions against the Klan. It was distinguished from the Klan by the public self-identification of its members, and its image of suits and ties as opposed to white robes and nooses.

Maybe there's an upside to Barbour's, er, whitewashing of history. Nobody wants to have been on the side of racists, so the racist aspects of their actions -- and their forebears' actions -- are recast into something more benign so that everybody gets to be on the side of history's winners. That reinforces our modern societal norm that racism is wrong. So that's good. 

But maybe it's also bad, because it's a lie, and everybody knows it. Mississippi didn't burn because white businessmen were running the KKK out of town during the 1950s and 1960s. The violence and anger that consumed the state came about because black people wanted civil rights and white people didn't want black people to have them. The white people who worked against those civil rights are the villain of the story, period. It doesn't matter that, perhaps, they were well-meaning community leaders who loved their families and were simply raised and indoctrinated in a different era -- because they were wrong, and in their wrongness show us how banal evil really can be. There's nothing complicated about this. 

Joe Manchin is already America's worst senator

West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin was missing in action when the Senate took two of its highest-profile votes on Saturday.

Manchin, who has been at odds with national Democrats several times since he was sworn in last month, was not present for votes on the DREAM Act and the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell".

A spokesperson for Manchin told the Charleston Gazette that the senator and his wife had "planned a holiday gathering over a year ago with all their children and grandchildren as they will not all be together on Christmas Day."

"While he regrets missing the votes, it was a family obligation that he just could not break," spokesperson Sara Payne Scarbro said. "However, he has been clear on where he stands on the issues."

Manchin did issue statements on Saturday making clear his opposition to both the DREAM Act and the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell"; his position on the latter bill made him the only Democrat to oppose repeal -- just as he was when the Senate voted on repeal last week.

The fact that Manchin was absent from the chamber while another Democrat, Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.), made it in to vote despite being recently diagnosed with prostate cancer doesn't bode well for Manchin's relationship with his caucus.

via voices.washingtonpost.com

This, after last week's first vote against the DADT repeal, which he explained by saying that he'd only been in office three weeks and didn't know what West Virginians wanted on the issue. It's starting to look like Manchin is completely unprepared for and unserious about the responsibilities of his office. Good choice, West Virginia!