A quick note about e-reading "The Federalist Papers"

I didn't plan to take a year-and-a-half to read "The Federalist Papers," but I got distracted along the way. But I finished them tonight on my brand-new Kindle. In fact, I read the entirety of them using the Kindle app on a variety of machines. For the record, these are the devices upon which I read the book:

• An HP netbook.
• An iMac desktop computer.
• My iPhone.
• An iPad 1.
• An iPad 2.
• The Kindle.

Remember when we used to pick up a book and just read the book? I love today's flexibility, though, and I use it.

What kind of president would Ron Paul be?

This year, for instance, Paul has sponsored 47 bills, including measures to withdraw from the United Nations, repeal the federal law banning guns in school zones and let private groups coin their own money.
None has moved, and 32 have failed to attract a single co-sponsor.
“He’s somewhat of an introvert [and] a little quirky, so he doesn’t work the legislative process like most do,” said former congressman Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.), who served with Paul from 1997 to 2010. But Wamp said Paul, as president, might succeed where Paul the legislator had not.
“When you’re president, they can’t just ignore you,” Wamp said. “Because you have a mandate.”

via washingtonpost.com

I had a period of about four hours a few weeks ago in which I considered whether supporting Ron Paul was the right way to go: The performance of the president on civil liberties issues has frustrated me that much.

But Paul has too easily lent his name—if not his mind—to racist sentiments and crank conspiracy theorizing. And as the above article suggests, he's wholly ineffectual at operating within the system. And that's probably for the best! But the president *runs the system.* He's not quite Lyndon LaRouche with a portfolio, but he's not far off that mark either.

UPDATE: My Philly Post column is about Ron Paul's appeal to racist voters.

Congress is getting wealthier, faster than you

Between 1984 and 2009, the median net worth of a member of the House more than doubled, according to the analysis of financial disclosures, from $280,000 to $725,000 in inflation-adjusted 2009 dollars, excluding home ­equity.

Over the same period, the wealth of an American family has declined slightly, with the comparable median figure sliding from $20,600 to $20,500, according to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from the University of Michigan.

via washingtonpost.com

The death of public universities

At the University of Virginia, state support has dwindled in two decades from 26 percent of the operating budget to 7 percent. At the University of Michigan, it has declined from 48 percent to 17 percent.

Not even the nation’s finest public university is immune. The University of California at Berkeley — birthplace of the free-speech movement, home to nine living Nobel laureates — subsists now in perpetual austerity. Star faculty take mandatory furloughs. Classes grow perceptibly larger each year. Roofs leak; e-mail crashes. One employee mows the entire campus. Wastebaskets are emptied once a week. Some professors lack telephones.

Behind these indignities lie deeper problems. The state share of Berkeley’s operating budget has slipped since 1991 from 47 percent to 11 percent. Tuition has doubled in six years, and the university is admitting more students from out of state willing to pay a premium for a Berkeley degree. This year, for the first time, the university collected more money from students than from California.

via washingtonpost.com

As an individual matter, I despair of getting my son a top-flight college education some 15 or so years from now.

As a societal matter, two points:

First, a lot of parents are going to despair of getting top-flight educations for their children. The death of public universities is going to mean the death of opportunity for a lot of smart kids—and, to some extent, the death of merit in this country. Talent will still out, on occasion, but this exacerbates income inequality by robbing young people of proving grounds where they could demonstrate their ability to climb the social ladder. If you can afford a great public university, good for you. And if not, too bad.

Second: The research done at those public universities has helped spur innovation that, in turn, has helped drive the American economy. We're robbing ourselves of our future.

Holiday homophobia

Somebody took part of their Christmas Day to post these comments to my blog, and I thought the were worth sharing with the wider community, without comment:

Dude you and your article on gay rights is a total load of crap. The backlash against Gay Filth in AMERICA is building daily, The people of Hawaii will have a Statewide Day of Shame to show their anger and disgust for allowing civil rights to be allowed by a wacko governor in direct opposition to the 70% of voters who are opposed to the encroachment of homosexual perversion.

What type of article will you write when the first homosexual military member is brought up on charges for sexually harassing a straight fellow soldier or when a straight soldier kills a homosexual that can't take no for an answer. Then we will see if you are so elated over the end of DADT

Christmas in the country has begun.

Taken at Valley Township

Don't trade away unemployment benefits, Mr. President

This inability to connect economic policy to the larger problem of joblessness is a real problem with the debate over the payroll tax cut. This disconnect explains why the unemployment insurance extension bundled with the payroll tax cut have attracted so much less attention. After all, if all that matters is the first tranche of money, the payroll tax cut will affect many more households than the UI extension. But all serious economists agree that the extension of unemployment insurance is a far more efficient fiscal support – providing about 50 to 100 percent more jobs per dollar added to the deficit.

What makes unemployment insurance so much more efficient? It is laser-targeted at families in genuine distress, meaning that the recipients will spend every marginal dollar that comes in the door. This also makes the extension better targeted at alleviating actual economic misery.

via epi.org

Read the whole thing.

2011: A great year for gay rights

The advancement of gay civil rights is the best thing that happened this year, I argue in the Scripps Howard column.

The best event of 2011? The gains made for gay civil rights.

Other good things happened -- most notably, the Iraq war came to a close for the United States, ending a disastrously dumb conflict that never should have happened. But the end of a huge negative isn't really a positive. So instead, it was in the arena of gay rights where two big events took place that could wonderfully alter the landscape for future generations.

First was repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." The law itself passed late last year as Congress was closing out its session, but the law was implemented this year. Despite the hysterical cries of opposition from anti-gay forces, the military seems to have weathered the transition pretty well.

Second was the legalization, in New York State, of gay marriage. This was important for two reasons: New York is one of the most populated states, and the law was passed by an act of the state legislature. There were no "judicial activists" imposing a "gay agenda" on the state; the representatives of the people did the people's business.

Simply put: In 2011, gay Americans took a huge step toward attaining full citizenship in this country.

There is much work to be done, and some of it may be done in 2012: There are court challenges both to the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which prevents the federal government from recognizing those legal marriages in New York, and to California's Proposition 8, which made same-sex marriage illegal there. And outside the courtroom, support for gay rights continues to spread among the citizenry.

There will always be opponents to gay equality. Time, however, is on the side of those who favor civil rights. In 2011, we found out we might not have to wait much longer.

Ben's favorite development? The emergence of Occupy Wall Street. Yes, he's being cynical.

How did the guy who was president in 1979 end up doing?

Throughout 2011, an average of 17% of Americans said they were satisfied with the way things are going in the United States. That is the second-lowest annual average in the more than 30-year history of the question, after the 15% from 2008. Satisfaction has averaged as high as 60% in 1986, 1998, and 2000.

via gallup.com

1979 was a comparable year, according to Gallup. But Jimmy Carter fared pretty well in the next year's election, right?

Is Bill Conlin innocent?

Over at The Philly Post (where I contribute weekly) Victor Fiorillo has a provocatively titled column: "Bill Conlin is innocent." Conlin, of course, is the legendary sportswriter who retired this week after 40-year-old child molestation accusations surfaced.

You’re well aware of this concept: that the accused is innocent until proven guilty, that the accused has no obligation to produce evidence, that the accused has no obligation to make an argument or say anything, for that matter, and that the government has the obligation to prove guilt—beyond a reasonable doubt—and to get 12 people to agree to it, too. You “know it” like you read about it in school. But you sure are quick to forget about it in cases like this.

Well, we probably forget about it because the presumption of innocence is only applicable in a court of law—we in the public are under no requirement to make a similar presumption. That doesn't excuse us from wisely weighing the evidence in public, though.

And the evidence is that three women and one man have told stories about being molested by Conlin in the early 1970s. What's more, there's evidence that they aired those accusations to parents and relatives at the time—thus, these aren't just stories that are being created now.

For the public to continue to offer Conlin the presumption of innocence, then, one must believe that three women, one man and their parents have all conspired to devastatingly besmirch his reputation. That's not unimaginable, but it seems unlikely. Who gains what in this scenario?

I don't favor media-driven witch-hunts. But as Fiorillo notes, Conlin will never face a criminal trial on these allegations because the statute of limitations has passed. (If Conlin is innocent, though, he might consider legal action of his own, in the form of a civil case against his accusers.) Fiorillo's suggestion seems to be that we in the public thus suspend our judgment of the case in perpetuity. That's unlikely, to say the least. All we can do is weigh the evidence before us and use our common sense.

Fiorillo is wise to warn us against a rush to judgment. Given what we've been told, though, it's difficult to see the scales tipping in Conlin's favor.

Why we shouldn't cut unemployment benefits right now

From EPI:

Things appear to be improving, but honestly: We're not anywhere close to having enough jobs for job-seekers. Cutting unemployment benefits right now could be a real disaster.

The best of Netflix Instant for 2011

Looking back at my viewing logs, it's amazing to me how much I used Netflix to watch old TV shows this year. There are two reasons for it: A) Again, the three surgeries really killed my concentration and steered me to "comfort food." B) My son, now 3, is old enough to understand stuff I don't want him to be exposed to. So that means grownup movies often wait until he goes to sleep. Which is often too late to start a movie.

That said, I know people complain about the selection at Netflix Instant, but I don't usually have a hard time finding something I like to watch. Here were some of my favorite Netflix movies of 2011:

"I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK"

"Jet Li's Fearless"

Woody Allen's "Love and Death"

"A Room with a View"

"Eat Drink Man Woman"

"The Red Balloon"

"Wing Chun"

"Bodyguards and Assassins"

"The Dirty Dozen"

"The Black Stallion"

"A World Without Thieves"

"Salt"

"Patton"

"Drunken Master"

"Harvey"

"The Italian Job" (Michael Caine original)

"The Taking of Pelham One Two Three" (Walter Matthau original)

"The Bride of Frankenstein"

"Let The Right One In"

"The Twilight Samurai"

"Mean Streets"

"Kelly's Heroes"

"The Specials"

"Election" and "Triad Election"

"Hudson Hawk"

Some good TV I watched on Netflix: The entirety of "Mad Men" and "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine," as well as Season One of "Breaking Bad."

And it's worth mentioning a couple of movies I saw on Amazon Video on Demand and Vudu that were pretty good: "13 Assassins," "Rango," and "Ip Man 2."

So it was a very Chinese/Japanese movie year for me, with some World War II sprinkled in. Not too bad.

Books I read in 2011

This was a really terrible book-reading year for me. Three surgeries clouded my head enough to make sustained concentration difficult: I started a lot of books, but finished precious few. The only novels I finished were, frankly, pulpy stuff. I hope to get my game back in 2012.

Here are some of the books I read to completion this year:

"Bossypants" by Tina Fey.

"The Conscience of a Liberal" by Paul Krugman.

"Winner-Take-All Politics" by Paul Pierson and Jacob S. Hacker.

"Cooking Solves Everything" by Mark Bittman (Kindle Single).

"The Gated City" by Ryan Avent (Kindle Sngle).

"The Great Stagnation" by Tyler Cowen (Kindle Single).

"Kitchen Confidential" by Anthony Bourdain.

"Star Trek: The Lost Years" by J.M. Dillard.

"Power Wars" by Charlie Savage (Kindle Single).

"The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction" by Alan Jacobs.

"Empire of Illusion" by Chris Hedges.

"The Score" by Richard Stark.

UPDATE: "The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood" by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Surprised I forgot this one, since it unsettled me so.

It's cheating, really, to count the Kindle Singles. Like I said: It was a horrible reading year for me. I have an excuse, but it still feels like I wasted time. Grrr. 2012, excelsior!

UPDATE II: A week later, I've added Kurt Vonnegut's "Mother Night," Justin Blessinger's "The Favorite," and Founding Fathers' "The Federalist Papers" to my list of completed books for 2011. That makes the list a bit less lame.

Ditch the payroll tax cut. Keep the unemployment benefits.

I'm already on record thinking the continued payroll tax holiday is a really bad idea. I think it undermines the long-term viability of Social Security, and more than a few critics agree with me. But I'm really, really against continuing the tax holiday if the price is cutting unemployment benefits to 3 million people.

As a macroeconomic matter, which is going to have a bigger impact on the economy? Lots of workers having a few extra bucks to spend? Or 3 million workers losing all the bucks they have to spend? I very much doubt the stimulative effect of the first outweighs the recessionary effects of the latter.

The payroll tax cut is a bad idea. Achieving it by cutting a bad deal is even worse.

Are you paying for some football?

Are you ready for some football?

You are paying for it regardless.

Although “sports” never shows up as a line item on a cable or satellite bill, American television subscribers pay, on average, about $100 a year for sports programming — no matter how many games they watch. A sizable portion goes to the National Football League, which dominates sports on television and which struck an extraordinary deal this week with the major networks — $27 billion over nine years — that most likely means the average cable bill will rise again soon.

via nytimes.com

Well, I'm not paying for it: I don't have cable. (Though I do pay an Internet bill to Comcast, so it's possible a few of my dollars go to football. But only indirectly.)

There's been increased talk about a la carte cable purchasing lately, which would allow TV viewers to buy the channels they want and not pay for the channels they don't. But that's hardly even necessary anymore. Between Hulu and Netflix—along with the occasional timely purchases from iTunes or Amazon Video on Demand—I watch what I want to watch and don't worry about access to the stuff I don't. The only problem I occasionally run into is sports, but A) a surprising amount of that is legal and free online, B) I can always walk down to the tavern to see the other stuff, usually, and C) I don't watch that much sports.

We've gotten quickly used to having every bit of media ever created at our immediate disposal, but it's good to remember that (until recently) scarcity has been the rule rather than the exception. But having a little scarcity in my video consumption has saved me money and let me focus on stuff I really want to watch, instead of letting a TV drone on in the background because I'm too lazy to get up from the couch and turn it off. I'm not paying for football because I'm not paying for cable. If you don't like football, why are you paying for it?

Poll: More concern about economy than income inequality

These data, from a Nov. 28-Dec.1 Gallup survey, show that while 46% of Americans believe it is extremely or very important that the federal government in Washington reduce the income and wealth gap between the rich and poor, 70% say it is important for the government to increase equality of opportunity, and 82% say it is important for the government to grow and expand the economy.

via gallup.com

I'm not so sure the weak economy and income inequality are discrete issues, myself, but to the extent they are this is probably the right set of priorities. You fight over your share of pie when you actually have a pie to split.

I don't think America is as worried about income inequality as I am

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Americans are now less likely to see U.S. society as divided into the "haves" and "have nots" than they were in 2008, returning to their views prior to that point. A clear majority, 58%, say they do not think of America in this way, after Americans were divided 49% to 49% in the summer of 2008.

via gallup.com

Read the whole thing. Pretty interesting.

Now I'm an anti-car-fatality bigot

Just kidding. After a week of more-than-expected heat over our column on Tim Tebow, Ben and I have finally produced another column for Scripps Howard News Service. It's about the National Transportation Safety Board's recommendation to ban cell phone use by drivers. Ben thinks it's nanny-statism run amok. I differ:

Sometimes the "live free or die" crowd takes its motto a little too seriously. When it comes to driving and cellphone use, though, that motto accurately sums up the choices.

Should drivers be free to kill two people and injure 38 others? That's what happened in Missouri in August 2010, when a pickup truck rear-ended a big rig, which slammed into a school bus, which rammed another school bus. The NTSB's investigation showed the pickup driver had sent 11 messages in the 11 minutes leading to the accident -- the last message coming "moments" before the tragedy.

Should a tractor-trailer driver be free to kill 11 other people? That happened the same year in Kentucky, where a cell phone-using driver crossed the center lane and slammed into a 15-passenger van.

Should bus drivers be free to be careless with their passengers? In 2004, such a driver was too busy talking on his phone to avoid slamming into the underside of a Virginia stone bridge -- injuring 11 of the 27 high school students on board.

Anti-nanny-state conservatives will argue such tragedies don't justify federal intrusion into state laws. But the NTSB's recommendation is just that -- right now, there is no federal requirement that states ban drivers from cellphone use. And many federal, state and even local roads are built using federal tax dollars. The emergency personnel and police that respond to disastrous events are paid for from your pocket. The NTSB isn't overstepping its proper bounds, nor are governments that adopt its recommendations.

Distracted drivers are deadly menaces that consume public resources.

There are reasons to worry about a rampant nanny state run amok. The NTSB's recommendation isn't even close to the top of the list. In this case, Americans don't have to choose: Live free. Don't die.

Tim Tebow* and 'All-American Muslim'

Defenders of Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow have responded to critics of his faith exhibitions with one consistent response: "What if he was Muslim?" The idea being that Christian-hating politically correct liberals would probably celebrate if Tebow was praying to Mecca in the end zone.

We do, of course, have examples of high-profile Muslim athletes to consider. Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul Jabbar both came in for intense criticism for their conversions to the faith—really intense criticism, which makes the "controversy" surrounding Tebow look like teatime debate by comparison. More recently—but before 9/11—Mahmoud Abdul Rauf (an NBA player) was regularly booed during the 1990s after he decided the Star Spangled Banner was an expression of "nationalistic worship" incompatible with his faith. (Some Christians think the same thing, incidentally.)

Beyond sports, though, there's been a recent example of American Muslims trying to publicly demonstrate how they intertwine their faith and lives: The TV show "All-American Muslim." And it's a useful example. Lowe's and other businesses have pulled advertising from the show under pressure from the Florida Family Association—which doesn't like the show because it depicts residents of Dearborn, Michigan as regular folks. The FFA would prefer—demands—that Muslims be shown as jihadist killers and oppressors.

And of course, we all remember the outrage that greeted the "Ground Zero Mosque" last year.

So: When Tim Tebow expresses his faith, he becomes the subject of discussion on talk shows and op-ed pages, all while making big money to promote brands like Nike. American Muslims who express their faith are lumped in with killers and concerted efforts are made not just to criticize them, but to drive them entirely from the public square.

What if Tim Tebow was Muslim? He's lucky he isn't.

* I expect this to be the last time I refer to Tebow for quite some time. For all our sakes.

According to the New York Times, Internet pirates have horrible taste in pop culture

WASHINGTON — Type “download movies for free” into Google, and up pops links to sites like the Pirate Bay, directing users to free copies of just about any entertainment   — the latest “Twilight” installment, this week’s episode of “Whitney,” the complete recordings of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

via nytimes.com