Michael Barone's cocoon: Just for liberals?

Michael Barone says that liberals only listen to liberal arguments, but conservatives have a more varied diet of ideas because they're forced to be exposed to liberal media culture. The result is that liberals only know how to preach to the choir.

Liberals can protect themselves better against assaults from outside their cocoon. They can stay out of megachurches and make sure their remote controls never click on Fox News. They can stay off the AM radio dial so they will never hear Rush Limbaugh. 

The problem is that this leaves them unprepared to make the best case for their side in public debate. They are too often not aware of holes in arguments that sound plausible when bandied between confreres entirely disposed to agree.

I'm not sure that liberals are uniquely vulnerable to the malady of ideological isolation. Conor Friedersdorf notes the topics that dominate conservative media these days:

In addition to taxes and spending, the rank and file currently spends a lot of time obsessing over trivial nonsense: for example, an imaginary race war against white people; The New Black Panther Party; and a liberal schoolteacher abusing her position somewhere in America. Those are but three stories in conservative news right now, alongside the constant obsessions with liberal media bias, anything involving "God, guns, and gays," statements by Janeane Garofalo-style celebrities, and ginned-up kerfuffles we can't even presently imagine.

 I'm not sure this really helps conservatives make better arguments than liberals, but if Barone wants to think so, perhaps he's indulging in a little cocooning himself.

Politics makes hypocrites of us all

In this week's Scripps column, I argue that Mitt Romney's religious beliefs have some bearing on the presidential campaign—and Ben argues that the issues are more important. Four years ago, we staked out almost precisely the opposite territory:

Ben then:

Yet Obama still insists that what he heard from Wright this week was unlike anything he heard over the past two decades. That simply defies belief. Obama chose Wright. His choice was unwise. His choice should tell voters something important about Obama that his position papers on the Iraq war and health care cannot.

Me then:

But the job of the next president will not be to pick a national clergyman. Instead, the president will have to decide what to do about Iraq, health care and the economy, among other issues. Barack Obama has an argument to make that he'll end the war, extend care to more Americans and save a few of their homes from foreclosure. Given the mood of Americans these days, that could well be a winning argument.

I'm not entirely sure what to do with this; I'm really not interested in being a hack—but there's some evidence here that maybe I am. The only way I can mitigate it is to acknowledge it.

Does Mitt Romney's Mormonism matter?

That's the the topic of my column with Ben Boychuk for Scripps Howard this week. I answer in the kind-of-affirmative:

Let's give thanks for progress: A black man and a Mormon will compete for the presidency this November. More people from more backgrounds than ever can fully participate in our politics -- thanks largely to the efforts of American liberals. 

Romney doesn't get a free pass for his faith, however. 

Don't misunderstand: If you vote for a candidate based on the Nicene Creed, say, then you're being silly and maybe a little un-American. We're electing a president, not a pope. 

But a candidate's policies are fair game, as is the worldview that shapes those policies. Faith often shapes a candidate's worldview. Romney's opposition to abortion reportedly springs from the teachings of his church: That's a topic that can't and shouldn't be avoided in a presidential campaign. 

Other issues in which Romney's faith may be a factor: 

-- Race: Until 1978, the Mormon church refused to ordain black men into the priesthood. Romney was a 31-year-old adviser to the leader of the Boston church when the policy changed: What was his view of it, and how might it affect how he governs a multiracial America? 

-- Feminism: The church long discouraged mothers from working outside the home -- and Romney reportedly refused to help a couple adopt a child until the mother was able to quit her job. How would that viewpoint affect Romney policies on workplace discrimination or child-care tax credits? 

-- Same-sex marriage: Romney's opposition to marriage equality reportedly springs from his faith, and Mormons were big contributors to the campaign for California's Proposition 8 banning gay marriages. Now there are questions about whether Romney would even permit gays to adopt. 

Church membership isn't an immutable characteristic. It's a choice. 

Certainly, Republicans feel that way when the church is led by Jeremiah Wright. The election isn't about Romney's theology -- but it is about his beliefs. Americans deserve a chance to understand them.

Ben, in his response, says that presidents don't set adoption policies, which are the province of the state. True, but only so true: The federal government offers adoption tax credits that gay couples already have a hard time claiming. For better or worse, the feds have a role in the issue—which makes Romney's recent waffling all the more troubling.

This is the song in my head today

Ah, early 1980s country music.....

What's wrong with private equity? Debt. What Mitt Romney and Sam Zell have in common.

A lot of the debate over Mitt Romney's time at Bain Capital has been focused on how many jobs he did or didn't create, did or didn't destroy. That's understandable, given that we're in a time of sustained high unemployment, but I'm not sure that tallying lost jobs really gets to the heart of what might be objectionable about Romney's business practices.

The problem is debt.

In the case of the shuttered Kansas City steel mill at the center of the debate, the chain of events is pretty clear:

• Bain Capital bought the steel mill in October 1993, putting up just $8 million of its own money to gain majority control—even though the total purchase price was $75 million. 

• The next year, Bain had the company issue $125 million in bonds—debt used to pay Bain itself a dividend of $36 million in 1994. Understand again: Bain made a quick profit on its investment, but it wasn't by helping the steel mill earn greater profits—but by having the mill take on a chunk of debt.  

• Now: It's true that Bain used $16 million to buy another steel mill the next year—it's not as though executives were using all the cash to light cigars with $100 bills—but this is also true: The Kansas City mill took on another $125 million in debt to pay for the acquisition and merger. 

• All of which means that the Kansas City steel mill in 1995 had $378 million in debt. Its profit that year was $32 million. You can see where this is headed.  

• When it finally filed for bankruptcy in 2001, the combined company had debts exceeding $500 million. The plant's workers lost their jobs, and ended up with reduced pensions because the retirement funds had been under-funded.

In the wake of the bank bailout, there was a lot of talk about our economy privatizing profit and socializing risk. The problem here is just a bit different: Bain Capital kept the profits to itself, but largely externalized the risks of its business practices. That's smart, on one level, but it certainly belies talk of investors being "risk-takers" and "job creators."

I think I'm a little sensitive on this topic because journalists have been hurt by this kind of activity. Sam Zell bought the Tribune Company a few years back by investing $315 million of his own money—not chump change, I suppose, but a pittance compared to the overall $8 billion purchase price, most of the money borrowed from the employee pension fund. The company went into bankruptcy soon after, and the workers were screwed.

It's a little bit like me buying from you the car your son uses to get around, forcing your son to lend me the money to make the purchase, crashing the car, and getting to keep the insurance check without repaying your son the money he lent in the first place.

The steel industry in America has been dying for years. But Bain's practices hastened the Kansas City mill's demise—and it wasn't Mitt Romney nor Bain Capital that got stuck with the fallout from those practices.

Romney is running for office based largely on his business acumen. So let's be clear: Finance is a necessary component of a market economy, and while a market economy isn't necessarily utopia, it's often the best way of raising the living standards of the most people. Not everything done in the name of the market economy is wise or even good, however, and criticism of those bad acts and bad actors isn't—as some would have you believe—socialist.

There's a problem—for society, for morality—when a company can profit from its bad decisions while sticking the little guy with the consequences. It's wrong, plain and simple.

Say, whatever happened to Strom Thurmond anyway?

Jonathan Chait has a pretty excellent takedown of Kevin Williamson's "the Republican Party has always been the party of civil rights" piece at National Review. Two points I'd like to add:

• Chait doesn't frame it in quite these terms, but Williamson's piece is heavily dependent on him ignoring the history of his own magazine and its founder, William F. Buckley, who opposed civil rights legislation on frankly white supremacist grounds:

The central question that emerges—and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal—is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. … 

National Review believes that the South's premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority. Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way; and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence.

Emphasis added. Buckley, it's worth noting, later recanted his opposition to civil rights.

Williamson doesn't mention this history because it disrupts his thesis, to say the least. (I imagine he might respond by noting that National Review is a conservative publication, not a Republican one, but—as Chait suggests—that would then undermine his efforts to pin racism on the Democrats, and liberals by extension.)

• It's also fascinating to me that Williamson's piece has exactly one mention of the late, great Strom Thurmond:

In Congress, (Lyndon) Johnson had consistently and repeatedly voted against legislation to protect black Americans from lynching. As a leader in the Senate, Johnson did his best to cripple the Civil Rights Act of 1957; not having votes sufficient to stop it, he managed to reduce it to an act of mere symbolism by excising the enforcement provisions before sending it to the desk of President Eisenhower. Johnson’s Democratic colleague Strom Thurmond nonetheless went to the trouble of staging the longest filibuster in history up to that point, speaking for 24 hours in a futile attempt to block the bill. The reformers came back in 1960 with an act to remedy the deficiencies of the 1957 act, and Johnson’s Senate Democrats again staged a record-setting filibuster.

Well, say. Whatever happened to Strom Thurmond anyway?

Well, he didn't stay a Democrat. He jumped to the Republican Party on Sept. 16, 1964.  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been enacted two months earlier, a resounding defeat—by a coalition of Democrats and Republicans, yes—of legislation Thurmond had spent a career opposing.

Of course, correlation doesn't equal causation. Why did Thurmond switch parties at that point?

According to the New York Times' contemporaneous coverage, Thurmond's move was widely seen as leaving the Democratic Party for passing the Civil Rights bill—and as the beginning of an effort by Southern Republicans to woo Democrats disaffected over the issue.

Thurmond officially came out at a Barry Goldwater rally. The New York Times noted this:

Leander Perez, the ultraconservative Louisiana political leader who was excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church for his violent opposition to integration of schools, attended the rally. 

Mr. Perez sat with Senator Thurmond throughout the speech applauding frequently.

Put it this way: Thurmond—whose political career was built on a defense of segregation and white supremacy—didn't leave the Democrats because he thought the Republican Party was a vigorous supporter of civil rights.

Williamson never deals with this—the only mention of Thurmond is to call him a "Democrat." He never deals with Jesse Helms and his conversion to the Republican Party.

I don't think being a Republican makes you racist—certainly not in the 21st century. But I think it's beyond factual dispute that the Republican Party made electoral hay out of Southern racial resentments in the first few decades following the 1964 bill. Williamson usually strikes me as one of National Review's smarter, more intellectually honest writers. But his failure to deal with some key issues—and even some misdirection, in the case of Thurmond—is contrary to that reputation.

Dennis Prager, Big Business, and Big Government

At National Review today, Dennis Prager says that the left is dangerous because it craves power instead of money—and power in the service of Big Government leads to the Holocaust, Mao, and Stalin. Sure, some big corporations may not always "play by the rules," but they don't have the power to send you to a concentration camp.

Key graph:

There is yet another reason to fear big government far more than big corporations. ExxonMobil has no police force, no IRS, no ability to arrest you, no ability to shut you up, and certainly no ability to kill you. ExxonMobil can’t knock on your door in the middle of the night and legally take you away. Apple Computer cannot take your money away without your consent, and it runs no prisons. The government does all of these things.

Prager's diagnosis, of course, misses the concern that most liberals have about Big Business—which is that money and power are not separate things: Money purchases power, which can give (oh hell, let's use the phrase) "moneyed interests" an outsize influence in the lives of individuals.

Sometimes, that even translates into the ability to arrest you, shut you up, and kill you. Shell, the oil company, has been accused of funneling payments to militants in Nigeria, for example. In the United States, doctors in Pennsylvania are prohibited from telling patients about the "fracking" chemicals that might be poisoning them. The list of examples is endless.

A smart conservative friend often says the problem is bigness itself—a problem that exists whether that bigness is in government or in the business sector. That sounds right, or close to it anyway. It's certainly much closer to right than Prager, whose hatred of Big Government leads him to make pronouncements about benign activities of Big Business that make him either extremely naive or simply a shill.

Is it 'bigoted' to oppose gay marriage?

Ben and I debate gay marriage in this week's column for Scripps. Rather than give you my take in this space, I want to offer Ben's—because I find it somewhat troubling:

At a certain point -- long before the president concluded that the political benefits of supporting gay marriage this election cycle outweighed the disadvantages -- millions of Americans concluded that it's important affirm that marriage is exclusively a union between one man and one woman. 

Those people are called bigots, and worse. 

Be wary of those national polls showing a majority now supporting a redefinition of marriage. People who don't like being called bigots might just lie to pollsters. Pre-election polls in North Carolina predicted the vote on that state's constitutional amendment would be closer than the 20-point blowout it turned out to be. 

For the partisans of gay marriage, North Carolina's vote was an expression of bigotry and hatred, plain and simple. No other explanation could possibly suffice. 

Only bigotry -- and nothing else -- could explain similar votes in 29 other states. 

Only bigotry -- and nothing else -- could explain how six in 10 black voters in California voted in favor of Proposition 8, the 2008 constitutional amendment reaffirming the traditional definition of marriage, and cast their ballot for Obama at the same time. 

Maybe "bigotry" isn't the sole property of one side of this argument.

What Ben's argument does this week is replace any debate about the merits of gay marriage with familiar-if-tired conservative martyrdom-making. "They're calling us bigots!" doesn't really tell us why heterosexuals should get to exclude homosexuals from the legal right to civil marriage. (To be fair: This kind of martyrdom isn't usually Ben's rhetorical style, and he has made more substantive arguments about this in our previous debates on the issue.)

I myself think opposition to same-sex marriage comes from too many sources to reduce simply to "bigotry"—though that certainly is the motivation of some opponents. But I do think that many opponents of same-sex marriage have justified their religious opposition to a civil right by creating a counter-narrative of victimology.

Rights aren't a zero-sum affair: I myself would be content to live in a country where my gay friends could get married and my Christian friends express their disapproval. And contra Ben's statistics, the ability to get millions of people to vote against rights doesn't really tell us much about the legitimacy of those rights.

About the Philadelphia Inquirer's augmented reality app

I missed the debut of the Philadelphia Inquirer's "augmented reality" app over the weekend—you point your mobile device at the newspaper, and the device starts playing a video linked to that particular story in the newspaper—but the Daily News' Janathan Takiff says it's getting an "undeservedly bad rap." But it sure doesn't sound like it. Listen to Takiff's explanation:

The naysayers clearly didn't read the instructions (spelled out in the Inky yesterday but not in the app) about how the Aurasma AR technology works in practice. This ain't rocket science. Once you've installed the free Inquirer AR app on your camera-equipped iPhone or iPad, you look for a photo or advertisement in the paper that has a little gothic "I" symbol in the corner. You then point your Apple device's camera lens at the same image. A few seconds later a companion video starts playing on the Apple screen and speakers. Here comes the HARD part. You have to TAP TWICE on the screen, AFTER the video starts to play, so you can then move your iPhone or iPad away from the page and continue to watch the mini-production. If you DON'T tap twice, the video stops as soon as you move the device's lens away from the coded image. Oh, and to then get the video to stop running, you DOUBLE TAP on the screen again. There's also the option with some of the triggered mini-videos/commercials to then jump to a connected website - like the busy home page of the National Constitution Center. To perform this feat, tap just ONCE on the website bar in the corner of the video. Tap twice and the magic trick doesn't work.

Oh sure, that's easy then.

 I'm dubious about a mobile app whose main purpose is to get you to read the newspaper. But I'm even more dubious of an app that's complicated and doesn't come with in-app instructions of how it should be used. That's unlikely to bring mobile users to the newspaper, but it might bring newspaper readers to their mobile devices. Is that what the Inky was aiming for?

 As it happens, there are three reviews of the app at iTunes. Two of the reviews are one star. The third is five stars—posted by "ScribeJT." I'm guessing that's Takiff himself (a writer with the initials "JT"?)which seems a little cheesy—since this app he's reviewing was created by his employer.

As I've said before, the Inquirer needs to keep experimenting. Experiments are often going to end in failure. And the idea here is kind of cool. But if the audience is giving you a bad rap, Takiff, it's most likely deserved. Telling them they're wrong probably won't fix your problems.

Obama: It could be worse

I was at a neighborhood festival over the weekend when a Democratic activist approached and asked if he could count on my vote for President Obama this November. "Well," I said, "I haven't been too thrilled with him on the civil liberties front." "Nobody's perfect," the man shot back. "The other guys would be worse." In today's Boston Globe, John McCain steps forward with a reminder that my activist friend was probably right:

“How is it that Assad is still in power?” Wiesel said. “How is it that the Holocaust’s number one denier, [Iran’s Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, is still a president? He who threatens to use nuclear weapons to destroy the Jewish state. Have we not learned? We must. We must know that when evil has power, it is almost too late.”

Under John McCain, then, the United States would definitely be going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. Don't get me wrong: As The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf pointed out last week, Obama has been by any measure a hawk in office. I wasn't all that happy with his handling of Libya; but I must admit that his actions there were characterized by a level of restraint. With John McCain as president—assuming he's not just an aging blowhard, but reflecting his real policy choices—military restraint would seemingly be non-existent. I'm cynical about the accomplishments of our current president ... but the other guys would be worse.

No, really: Are the feds trying to end farm chores for kids?

Reason weighs in with round two of the debate:

Farm Bureau notes that DOL claims its “Notice of Proposed Rulemaking” will not change the “parental exemption” in the current law, but Farm Bureau says DOL’s new language would not include an exemption for farms that are incorporated or formed as family partnerships. 

“Many farm families in Pennsylvania and across the United States have incorporated or formed a family partnership for estate planning, insurance and other reasons.  They are still family farms with moms and dads making the decisions over what work duties their children have been trained to do and are capable of doing in a safe manner.  Farmers understand that there are potential dangers on the farm and they abide by existing farm labor laws,” added [PFB President Carl T.] Shaffer.

That doesn't sound right. This is what the proposed rule in the Federal Register says:

The Department interprets ``operated by'' the parent or person
standing in the place of the parent to mean that he or she exerts
active and direct control over the operation of the farm or ranch by
making day-to-day decisions affecting basic income, work assignments,
hiring and firing of employees, and exercising direct supervision of
the farm or ranch work. A ranch manager, therefore, who meets these
criteria could employ his or her own children under 16 years of age on
the ranch he or she operates without regard to the agricultural
hazardous occupations orders, even if the ranch is not owned by the
parent or a person standing in the place of the parent, provided the
work is outside school hours.

To me, that very much sounds like that if you are running a farm—even if, for legal reasons, the ownership is incorporated or in a family partnership—you can put your kid to work on the farm.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting everything I'm reading here. But everything that conservative and libertarian outlets are saying about the proposed child-labor rules for farms doesn't seem to comport with scrutiny of the actual rules.

The Daily Caller is misleading you about family farm regulations

Some of my conservative friends are angry about this story in The Daily Caller:

The Department of Labor is poised to put the finishing touches on a rule that would apply child-labor laws to children working on family farms, prohibiting them from performing a list of jobs on their own families’ land.

Well, not quite. As documentation, the Caller links to this somewhat-vague press release from the Department of Labor announcing the proposed rules. The press release then says the actual rule will be published in the Federal Register on Sept. 2. So what does the Federal Register say?

The proposed agricultural revisions would impact only hired farm workers and in no way compromise the statutory child labor parental exemption involving children working on farms owned or operated by their parents.

This is at the very outset of the rule. It's hard to miss if you're bothering to look at it directly. Which means The Daily Caller A) didn't or B) did, but chose to ignore it.

A conservative friend protests: "What about farms owned by aunts or uncles?" Well, it turns out that hasn't strictly been allowed for a few decades. As the Federal Register notes:

Accordingly, application of the parental exemption in agriculture has been for over forty years limited to the employment of children exclusively by their parent(s) on a farm owned or operated by the parent(s) or person(s) standing in their place. Any other applications would render the parental safeguard ineffective. Only the owner or operator of a farm is in a position to regulate the duties of his or her child and provide guidance.

And:

The Department has, for many years, considered that a relative, such as a grandparent or aunt or uncle, who assumes the duties and responsibilities of the parent to a child regarding all matters relating to the child's safety, rearing, support, health, and well- being, is a ``person standing in the place of'' the child's parent (see letter of Charles E. Wilson, Agricultural Safety Officer, Division of Youth Standards of April 7, 1971 to Mr. Floyd Wiedmeier). It does not matter if the assumption of the parental duties is permanent or temporary, such as a period of three months during the summer school vacation during which the youth resides with the relative (Id.). This enforcement position does not apply, however, in situations where the youth commutes to his or her relative's farm on a daily or weekend basis, or visits the farm for such short periods of time (usually less than one month) that the parental duties are not truly assumed by that relative.

Again: "None of the revisions proposed in this NPRM in any way change or diminish the statutory child labor parental exemption in agricultural employment"

In other words: If you are a farmer, and you're putting your kid to work on the farm, you can still put your kid to work on the farm. If you're a farmer and your niece comes to spend the summer with you, you can put that kid to work on the farm. According to the rules, it's been this way a very long time.

 What the rule does is make it harder to hire somebody else's under-16 kid to work on your farm. That's different. And it's worth debating the worthiness of that rule. But the idea that the Obama Administration is prohibiting kids from working on their families' farms? Not quite true.

Podcast: Timothy Noah on 'The Great Divergence' and income inequality

Ben and I have a long discussion with Tim Noah about his new book. Go here to listen to and download the podcast. It's informative! And a personal note: I haven't been blogging lately because—for me, anyway—blogging often ends up being a tribalistic "so's your old man!" exercise. I can write about why Mitt Romney's a doofus, but it's probably not going to be terribly different from the take of 100 other political bloggers. So I'm trying to figure out how to do more thoughtful and more original work. The podcast, for what it's worth, fits that goal: Rather than lining up on one side of an issue or another, we can take time with smart people to really talk through an issue. Ben and I still end up with different takes on an issue, but the distinctions seem less forced than in other formats—and in podcast form, we get to explore the distinctions a little more. I'm proud of the work we're doing on the podcast. Our hope is that it becomes a first-rate destination for authors to talk about their books on American politics, policy, and history. That's what we're trying to build. And that does feel more thoughtful and original.

Castro's 'murderous' regime

In our Scripps column about Ozzie Guillen's suspension, Ben makes the following comment about the Castro regime in Cuba:

Guillen, of course, is free to say or think anything he likes about Fidel Castro's murderous regime. (The Venezuelan native is evidently an outspoken fan of Castro wannabe Hugo Chavez, too.) This is America, after all.

Wait. Murderous?

Don't get me wrong. I don't come here to praise Fidel or Raul Castro. As I noted in my part of the column: "Fidel Castro is a bad man." He certainly oppressive of his people's rights, and as Ben noted to me offline, there are a lot of people who have tried getting off the island using little more than an innertube. Cuba may be a lot of things, but it's not a socialist paradise.

But murderous?

Here's what Human Rights Watch has to say about Cuba: "Cuba remains the only country in Latin America that represses virtually all forms of political dissent. The government enforces political conformity using harassment, invasive surveillance, threats of imprisonment, and travel restrictions."

And here is what Amnesty International said in its 2011 report on the country: "Prisoner of conscience Orlando Zapata Tamayo died on 23 February following a prolonged hunger strike. He was one of 75 people arrested during a crackdown by the authorities in March 2003, and was serving a 36-year prison term at the time of his death. A few months later, between July and December, the Cuban government released 41 prisoners of conscience following an agreement with the Spanish government and dialogue with the Catholic Church. All of those released, except one, left Cuba with their relatives."

Strikingly absent from both accounts is any real mention of executions or mass graves. Recent reports out of Cuba suggest, in fact, that when political prisoners die...it's usually the result of a hunger strike. One can respect their choice of conscience while also recognizing that it's their choice.

This doesn't mean that Fidel is to be loved, clearly. Cuba is not a democracy. Basic rights are trampled. But there's a difference between a tinpot dictator and a genocidal dictator, and the Castro regime appears to fall in the former category.

I'm long past expecting policy toward Cuba to be rational, or for conservatives to use any but the most inflammatory language about Castro. And it's easy to accept the shorthand. We don't like dictators. Dictators are often murderous. Thus, Castro must be murderous.

It's at this point I expect to hear about Castro's actions in the 1960s and 1970s, about assassinations and the like. And, fair enough. But that was then. And using "murderous" to describe a government that appears to pose little threat obscures the actual choices and options that could be available to us.

Campaign finance and rent-seeking

One of the main conservative complaints about "big government" (as I understand it) is a practice known as "rent seeking." The idea being that bigger government has more money, power, and favors to dole out—and thus will encourage individuals and businesses to bend government activities in such a way that benefits their bottom line.

But conservatives who complain about big government and rent seeking are, often, also very much in favor of loose campaign finance laws that allow big businesses and individuals to spend lots and lots of money ... trying to bend government activities in such a way that benefits their bottom line.

I thought about that a bit with a recent This American Life episode on campaign finance, which demonstrates--as observers already knew--that the pursuit of campaign cash is nearly a full-time job among members of Congress. I was particularly struck by this (paraphrased) quote from former Sen. Paul Feingold, who likened the process to legalized extortion:

"CEOs don't usually call you up and say they'd like to give you a lot of money. Usually it's the other way around."

Unlimited campaign money helps create the culture of rent seeking, in other words; it encourages senators and congressmen to solicit rent-seeking. The incentives are completely skewed.

Now, I imagine the conservative response to this is: "If government is smaller, then money people can still have their First Amendment rights to give cash to candidates they like without being a problem." But the torrent of money, it seems to me, ensures that government can't really get all that smaller; it'll just get bigger and more bloated and more interest-favoring in ways that benefit the people with money. One conservative pet cause--lifting limits on campaign contributions--almost certainly works against their declared main cause of making government smaller. I wonder which is more important to them?

A Wednesday morning poem

Read this years ago in the New Yorker, and it has stayed with me since:

IF THERE IS NO GOD

If there is no God,
Not everything is permitted to man.
He is still his brother’s keeper
And he is not permitted to sadden his brother,
By saying there is no God.

~Czeslaw Milosz

Feels appropriate today.

John Derbyshire and me: A confession of failure

By now the tale of John Derbyshire's exile from National Review for racist writings is well-known and well-told. I have little to add to the discussion, except to make a confession: I interviewed John Derbyshire two years ago. I thought his work was racist, sexist, and homophobic—but offered a chance to forcefully challenge the man and his ugly views ... I tiptoed and hid. I'm not proud of this. But it's worth recognizing.

Some context: Ben Boychuk and I have been writing a column together for Scripps Howard News Service for more than four years. He's conservative, I'm liberal, and part of the point of the project is that we can be in friendly dialogue with each other even as we disagree vigorously. This is where I got a bit tripped up.

As part of our project, we also do a regular podcast. (Or, it's getting regular again: My medical travails in 2011 sidetracked us.) And in 2009, we decided to interview Derbyshire on the occasion of his then-new book. I read the book in advance of the interview, found it well-written, even entertainingly so, but drastically wrongheaded in the usual ways that Derbyshire is wrongheaded. When it came time to chat, though, I kept my foot off the pedal.

Put it this way: I asked him about poetry. I told him I enjoyed reading his stuff. And when it came to the race stuff, I ... asked about it in an overly respectful way. Go ahead and listen to the audio linked above. I did over the weekend. It's unpleasant for me to hear.

Why did I whiff so badly?

• I didn't want to be a jerk. Though Derbyshire has cheerfully--always cheerfully!--admitted to being a racist, it's still a bit of a turd in the punchbowl to directly suggest to the person that they're chatting with that, yes, you think they're a racist. I was taking the commitment to civil dialogue seriously; maybe too seriously.

• I was underprepared: Derbyshire is very good at wielding studies and reports in such a way to back up his contentions that black folks are dumber and more violent than the rest of us. I didn't take the time to delve into those studies more deeply, or to find out how they'd been challenged. That left me out of position when it came time to challenge him. Instead, I confessed discomfort with his findings in a manner that, as I listen to it now, seems to imply uncomfortable acceptance of Derbyshire's view of things.

• I was probably a bit star-struck: This is silly, I realize, given that lots of people didn't probably even know who John Derbyshire was until this past weekend. Still. I'd read National Review and its blog, The Corner, for awhile--mostly disagreeing with it, but sometimes being entertained by it. And in 2009, I was still kind of amazed at having access to national-level people whose stuff I'd read. I was a bit of a hick.

Maybe I still am.

Listen, I'm under no illusion that a more forceful showing by me in a podcast interview in 2009 would've altered the course of Derbyshire's career. My failure in this matter affects, well, pretty much only me. But Derbyshire's writings deserved a vigorous interlocutor. I failed in that function. And I regret it.

The Constitution and 'invented rights'

After this week's Scripps column in which I pooh-poohed "judicial activism," I received several responses from conservative readers suggesting it's actually very easy to spot.

Read the constitution and uphold it. Don't manufacture "rights" not mentioned in the constitution. What does the constitution say? Don't impose your opinion, or your own political philosphy. Judicial activism is manufacturing "rights" not enumerated in the constitution.

This, I think, is a fairly common conservative view. It is also--according to the Constitution itself!--dead wrong.

Here is the text of the Ninth Amendment:

"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

The Founders were worried that by creating a Bill of Rights, they would legally imply that people didn't have other rights not named in the Constitution. This is how they covered their rights-loving butts. And yet people constantly commit the very error the Founders were trying to avoid. This is very odd for a movement supposedly so devoted to preserving the Founders' wishes and vision.

I'm not sure if this was the Founders' intent--and I don't actually think that matters--but what that amendment effectively means is that we have to continue to always be in conversation about what those rights are and what they mean. Some folks would suggest that Ninth Amendment rights are frozen at what the Founders would've understood to be rights--which is why Clarence Thomas does in-depth investigations into parenting practices of the 1780s and Antonin Scalia effectively disputes the idea that women are citizens. The rest of us understand that this is silly at best and pernicious at worst.

As those examples indicate, this kind of thinking replaces the "rule of law" with a kind of "tyrannical legalism" that dispenses entirely with common sense. Conservatives like to suggest that's a liberal problem, but I don't think it's limited to the left. One example: The authors of anti-torture laws explicitly didn't ban specific techniques because they didn't want to give the impression that other coercive, pain-inflicting methods were OK. They couldn't make an exhaustive list, so they didn't make a list at all, instead crafting laws to describe the effects of torture. The result is that we have Bush Administration conservatives tell us that waterboarding isn't actually torture.

What does all of this mean? Well, it probably means that rights evolve. And that our commitment to protecting them evolves as well. It's not something that should happen willy-nilly, and it doesn't: It's a combination of society, Congress, and (yes) the courts moving in a commonly accepted direction, and that process usually takes time. The results can sometimes be messy and controversial--not everybody is on board with the right to abortion, for example--but I'll take that messiness over the clean precision of Scalia's vision that denies women the benefits of citizenship. It doesn't mean that some rights are "invented," at least not in the sense that the rights are thus artificial. It just means that they weren't named in the Constitution. That's not as big a deal as some people think.

Small government, big banks?

One reason I've never really come around to being a small-government conservative is my belief that if we put a tight leash on the feds, that will allow other large institutions--mostly big businesses, but not limited to that--to dominate me instead. Conservatives deploy the language of liberty pretty effectively, but often it's in the service of a corporatist agenda that would wouldn't necessarily feel "free" to most of us. I'm not so much sure that "big government" is as much of a problem as is bigness itself: Outsized institutions of any sort, public or private, can have outsized impacts on our lives.

So I'm intrigued by the question raised by my friend (and occasional nemesis) Steve Hayward over at Power Line. If conservatives want small government, he asks, should they also be in favor of breaking up the big banks? 

So I think I could be persuaded that the big banks should be broken up, though this requires conservatives and pro-market libertarians to set aside their cognitive dissonance over the use of centralized political power to accomplish such an end. Discuss in the comment thread.

Me? I think it's "pro-market" to actually let the market work: When banks get too big to fail, they put taxpayers on the hook for their risk-taking. You obviously can go too far in regulating the markets, but (ahem) you can also go too far in deregulating them, as well. Markets work best when they have some boundaries.

All of which has been said--including by me--a million times before. And there are plenty of other reasons I probably still won't take up the mantle of small-government conservatism: The issues that animate me seem to be ignored by or scoffed at by my conservative friends; even if liberals don't always have the right answers, I feel more comfortable with them because they're actually trying to solve the problems that look like problems to me. But small-government conservatism will be much harder for me to argue against if it doesn't leave me "liberated" to live under the tyranny of Citibank.

The GOP version of the DREAM Act is better than nothing. Just barely.

At CNN, Ruben Navarette praises an up-and-coming GOP version of the DREAM Act. The original version, promoted by Democrats, would give sons and daughters of illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, provided they go to college or serve in the military. The GOP version apparently includes the college or military part--but not the citizenship.

But unlike the earlier version, it would not include a path to citizenship. Students could become citizens later. It's not like they'd be barred from the citizenship process. But they would have to take the initiative. It would be on them, as it should be.

As I understand it, then, all the GOP version really does is tell the sons and daughters of illegal immigrants that they won't be deported.  "We'd like to send you to Afghanistan, and if you're not killed or mutilated, maybe we'll think about making our relationship permanent." My concern is that this legislation essentially creates a permanent class of legal sub-citizens--folks who are welcome to do our dirty work and pay taxes, so long as they don't do something extreme like vote. Navarette says the only reason to oppose this is "ugly partisan politics," but one can actually object in principle to this policy.

And yet, given the immigrant-unfriendly politics of the GOP, this may be the only way to actually resolve the status of millions of young people who A) didn't come here under their own power but B) may not necessarily fit in their own home countries: Many are already, in a very real cultural sense, Americans. Removing the unlikely but still real threat of deportation would help them get scholarships, train for jobs, and contribute to our communities in ways that are denied them at the moment. If they really are eligible for citizenship after attaining legal status, then this legislation would achieve a very real good. It's not as good as the original DREAM Act. But it's better than nothing.

I, for one, would like to know much, much more about Gene Marks' private life

Gene Marks--remember him?--says employers are within their rights to ask job candidates for their Facebook info:

I don’t want your “password.” I don’t want to be able to go onto Facebook and be you. I don’t even want to monitor your activities on Facebook once you’re hired. All I want is to be “friended” for a short period of time while I’m evaluating you as a prospective employee.

He needs this, you see, because as an employer he has to feel really, really comfortable that he knows enough about you. Well screw that.

Listen: Employers have the right to know everything that's publicly knowable about you. If you have a felony record, for example, or if you've appeared in the local newspapers advocating for the Nazi Party. I've got no problem with that. But they don't have a right to your private life.

And for me, Facebook is relatively private. Not totally: I have a few hundred "friends," so I can't fool myself that the walls of privacy are high and impenetrable. Nonetheless, the people who are allowed inside those walls are carefully chosen, and my privacy settings arranged so that you can't look inside without my permission.

Gene Marks is welcome to drive by my house and see if I'm flying a freak flag from the front porch. He is not welcome to barge inside and start rummaging through my bathroom closets, trying to decide if I'm a good fit for his company. How I conduct myself in public will have a bearing on his business; what I do behind virtual or real closed doors is, simply put, none of his goddamned business.

In fact, there's one set of circumstances under which I might be tempted to let Marks in to view my Facebook page and take a look at my photo albums, status updates, notes, and the rest: If he lets me do the same with him.

Because some bosses are jerks. Some have unreasonable expectations, or are comfortable with harassing environments. Some are just no good. I, as an employee, have every right to evaluate Marks to see if I accept him as a boss. My livelihood and overall well-being are on the line.

Marks approaches this topic as though the employee owes an employer more of his or her life than the employer should reciprocate. Not so.

We've made it a few thousand years of civilization without employers entering the bedrooms of prospective employees. Despite Marks' desires, capitalism and small businesses will probably survive if he's denied entry now.

Bill Donohue and the Catholic League don't like my advice to Archbishop Chaput

Well, I guess I didn't expect this:

There's a database connection problem at the site, currently, but luckily the Catholic League e-mailed me a press release chastising ... me.

ARCHBISHOP CHAPUT WILL NOT BE SILENCED

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on an article that appears today as a post on the Philadelphia magazine blog site by Joel Mathis:

Joel Mathis isn’t Catholic, but that doesn’t stop him from giving some heady advice to Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput: just tend to the problems in the archdiocese and drop your criticisms of the Obama administration. Mathis is angry that Chaput has a new e-book coming out tomorrow, A Heart on Fire: Catholic Witness and the Next America, that addresses recent attacks on religious liberty. Mathis counsels Chaput to “concentrate on fixing the Catholic Church in Philadelphia,” adding that the archbishop’s alleged “anti-Obama crusade” amounts to “a distraction.”

Catholics like to lecture the outspoken archbishop as well. Last September, no sooner had Archbishop Chaput taken over in Philly when Catholic attorney Nicholas Cafardi offered his instructions. Noting that Chaput likes to comment on the big issues of the day, he said, “Chaput would be well-advised to leave politics aside.”

But Archbishop Chaput will have none of it: he will not be silenced. Indeed, he is delightfully insubordinate—nothing will stop him from opining on anything he wants, and nothing will stop him from faithfully serving his archdiocese. That’s precisely why the Catholic League loves him—he’s a man of steely determination and incredible fortitude.

This, of course, being a response to my column today at The Philly Post. I suggested that Chaput's priorities—which seem to come down mostly to "making war" on Obama—probably weren't doing much to fix a diocese afflicted with pedophile scandals and lawsuits, massively declining enrollment in the parochial schools, and declining attendance at mass. That still seems true to me.

I wasn't really trying to silence the archbishop—I doubt, in fact, that I have any ability to do so. That said: "Delightfully insubordinate?" To whom is Chaput actually subordinate and cheeky? Is he sassing the pope? No? Maybe Donohue's comments are a bit outlandish.

Then again, it's Bill Donohue, last seen in the New York Times urging bishops to treat the victims of priest sex abuse as enemies of the Catholic Church. “The church has been too quick to write a check, and I think they’ve realized it would be a lot less expensive in the long run if we fought them one by one,” Mr. Donohue said. That's a Christ-like ethic, no? If I've irritated Bill Donohue, then it's frankly a happy day.

About the Constitution, divinity, and Mennonites

The latest edition of The Ben and Joel Podcast is, well, kind of weird. In it, we interview Larry Arnn about his new book, "The Founders' Key: The Divine and Natural Connection Between the Declaration and the Constitution and What We Risk by Losing It." Arnn's main point is that the Declaration and the Constitution don't have opposing philosophical foundations—despite what some scholars say—but I got hung up on the "divine and natural part" and you can hear so in the podcast.

The word "God" appears in Arnn's text 64 times. He references the Declaration's appeal to "the laws of nature and of nature's God" 21 times. And so, for me, the book reads much like a theological declaration as much—or more—as it is a work of history or political science. Is there room for a secular-minded person in a "divine" understanding of government? What's wrong with believing the Founders were a group of smart men—but also human and imperfect, people whose work was great but still leaves room for improvement? You can hear Arnn's answers in the podcast.

You can also hear him, jokingly, refer to me as a "defector" from the principles of my alma mater, Tabor College. And, well, guilty as charged. Tabor is a largely conservative, evangelical Christian college. I fit none of those descriptions anymore.

But after we finished recording, as I continued to digest Arnn's work and the podcast, I realized I'd still find his constant invocation of the divine troubling, even if I were not a "defector."

The Mennonites I grew up around had an interesting history. They were pacifists, believing that the example of Jesus precluded them from taking up arms. Because of that theology, the fled as a group from Germany, their original home, to Russia. And then from Russia, in the late 1800s, to Kansas, where I grew up.

The mix of theology and experience—recent enough that churches in my hometown were still worshipping in a Russian-inflected version of German into the 1950s—led many of the Mennonites to be skeptical of nationalism, in particular, but certainly any brand of patriotism that seemed to claim God on its side. As Christians, the felt duty-bound to be respectful of the authority of government--but I'm dubious they'd spend much time reflecting on the "divine" foundations of man-made government. Even when that argument is made, as Arnn does, in the service of limited government.

The problem with invoking "divinity" as the source of a form of government is that it really ends the discussion. You can't argue with God, usually. But there are plenty of arguments to be had, as evidenced by our discussion. Arnn seems like a good and pleasant man; I've no wish to quarrel with him! And he's right that the Founders referenced God quite a bit in their discussions; what that proves is that ... they referenced God quite a bit in their discussions. It doesn't mean the Constitution is marked with divinity.

John McCain never wants to leave Afghanistan

I feel like most of today’s McCain-Lieberman-Graham op-ed about the need to stay the course in Afghanistan could’ve been written four or five or six years ago. But I really want to focus on this particular paragraph:

At the strategic level, our effort continues to be undermined by the perception that the United States will again abandon Afghanistan. This suspicion makes everything our troops are trying to achieve significantly harder. It creates perverse incentives for the Taliban to keep fighting, for the Pakistani army to hedge its bets by providing support to the Taliban, and for our Afghan allies to make counterproductive decisions based on fears of a post-American future.

But here’s the thing: Eventually the United States will leave Afghanistan. The Afghans will remain, and Pakistan will be next door. Everybody knows this.

Now, I don’t know how long it will be before that exit takes place. It might be next year, 10 years from now, or even another 100 years. But history seems to suggest that America will not occupy another country halfway around the world from its own soil infinitely into the future. At some point we will withdraw.

The wisest thing to do is to figure out the best way to withdraw, a manner that best mitigates the possibility of future attacks on America originating from Afghanistan. To hope that we can guarantee 100 percent safety is futile—but there’s a cost-benefit ratio to these things, and if a cash-strapped America has decided that ratio is out of whack after nearly 11 years, well, that’s not unreasonable.

McCain, in particular, would have more credibility if he’d ever demonstrate that there was a war he didn’t want, or want more of. But he’s always urging more, more, more. I get frustrated with President Obama often, but McCain does his best to remind me that we avoided a much worse president, one with a propensity to over-commit American troops to never-ending action.

Is Obama the 'affirmative action president?'

Though his politics are not mine, I'm friendly with and very much like Steve Hayward, a prolific conservative writer who these days blogs at Power Line. Ben and I had him on our podcast this weekend to discuss his new book, "The Politically Incorrect Guide To Presidents," in which Hayward gives each president from Woodrow Wilson on a letter grade for their constitutional fealty. Democrats, as you might surmise, don't do well.

I let myself sound a bit exasperated at one main point during the discussion. In the book, Hayward says that President Obama can be fairly called the nation's first "affirmative action president." He suggests that Obama had a thin resume, and benefited from the nation's desire to elect a black man to the country's highest office.

Today, at Power Line, Steve affirms that stance by quoting Jim Geraghty at National Review:

It ties to a theory I’ve had for a while, that most apolitical voters desperately want to avoid concluding that the first African-American president of the United States is a failure, on par with a second term for Jimmy Carter. As a result, they will give Obama until the very last minute to demonstrate an ability to get the job done, to demonstrate that he can generate tangible improvements in their lives. But, if around October 2012, people don’t see tangible improvements in their lives, well, the bottom may fall out of his numbers. He’ll still have his loyal base, but the vast majority of independents will decide he just can’t get the job done.

There's an interesting discussion to be had about the role of Obama's race in his political fortune. But labeling him an "affirmative action president" is loaded terminology, suggesting that Obama's accomplishment in being elected is somehow tainted. Steve, I suspect, knows that. Interestingly, it doesn't just insult the president—it also insults the voters, who are presumably so fuzzy-headed with political correctness that they'll ride a sinking ship until it's too late. Obama's approval numbers over the last two years, I think, indicate otherwise.

In any case, the underlying conceit here is that Obama only benefits politically from his race. That's probably not the case: One study suggested the president lost as much as 5 percent of the 2008 vote based purely on his race. Certainly, the desperate attempts by Breitbart-style conservatives to link the president to the most obnoxious sorts of black nationalism—despite no real hint of such leanings in the president's actual governing record—suggest they're aware of the dynamic.

Like lots of black men, Obama had to overcome a racial headwind to achieve what he has, politically. (We have, thankfully, arrived at a point in our nation's history where that headwind was not determinative.) And like lots of black men, there are a few whites who tend to attribute those accomplishments to coddling and bleeding hearts rather than smarts and hard work. But it's a strange idea that a black man can only win politically, and almost never lose, because of his race. We haven't come that far, yet.

Bluegrass in West Philadelphia

How I spent my Friday evening:

Rendell and Iran: Why no mention of his media activities?

Over the last month, former Philadelphia Mayor/Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell has mostly been in the news for leading a group of investors trying to buy the Philadelphia Daily News, Inquirer, and Philly.com. Late last week, though, he abruptly dropped out of the group bidding on those news properties.

And then it became public that Rendell was under investigation by the feds for taking speaking fees from an Iranian (alleged) terrorist group.

Since then, we've had several stories in the Inquirer and one today in the Daily News about Rendell's troubles with the feds ... and not one of them mentions that he was just days ago the leader of the group trying to buy those newspapers.

I don't mean to impugn the hard-working reporters at either newspaper, some of whom I'm Twitter-friendly with. But it's an odd omission—particularly in light of the very public in-house battles about those papers' coverage of their own sale. It's perhaps a minor thing, but it doesn't really create confidence in those papers, does it?

CORRECTION: There is a mention at the end of this story. But most of the coverage has omitted such mentions.

When Does Adulthood Begin?

One possible byproduct of the economic challenges today's young adults face may be shifting societal norms about when adulthood begins. When asked what age children should be financially independent from their parents in a 1993 survey, 80% of parents said children should be self-reliant by age 22. In a survey conducted in December 2011, only 67% of parents (with children age 16 or under) say their children have to be financially independent by age 22.

via pewresearch.org

America's future workforce

Daily Number: Hispanics Will Account for an Increasingly Large Share of Labor Force Growth - Pew Research Center: "Between 2010 and 2020, Hispanics are expected to add 7.7 million workers to the labor force. In contrast, the number of non-Hispanic whites in the labor force is projected to decrease by 1.6 million.

As a result, Hispanics will account for the vast majority -- 74% -- of the 10.5 million workers to be added to the labor force in this ten-year period. Hispanics accounted for a much lower share -- 36% -- of the total labor force increase from 1990 to 2000 and between 2000 and 2010 (54%)."

'via Blog this'

More on Rush Limbaugh and crybaby politics

Over at The Philly Post yesterday, I lamented "The Era of Martyrdom Politics" in which we try to advance our cause by being offended by what our rivals have to say about us. I mentioned the whole Rush Limbaugh/Sandra Fluke thing, writing: "Suddenly we weren’t talking about contraceptive policy anymore, but about how a man who made his career two decades ago by coining the term 'feminazi' and crossing numerous other lines is, no kidding, really, a very obnoxious sexist and this time we mean it."

In other words, Rush has always been a jerk—there's nothing new to see here! And I think Gawker probably gets at this point a little better than I did:

So here comes Rush Limbaugh—a media entity who has repeatedly, almost monthly, reveled in a transparent strategy of uttering whatever racist, sexist, homophobic slur comes to mind for the explicit purposes of riling his antagonists—to utter a sexist slur for the explicit purposes of riling his antagonists. And his antagonists got riled! This dynamic is very, very old. (And I have certainly fallen for it). It used to be a somewhat sloppy process. Limbaugh would say things, and maybe some people would notice and write an angry newspaper column. Over the years the calumnies would build up until Al Franken cataloged them in book form.

Limbaugh claims that he does not hate women. But his critics know that he does. So when he lets slip a "slut," it can become valuable evidence in proving your case. ("He claims that he doesn't hate women, but look! He calls them sluts.") The trouble here is that Rush Limbaugh obviously and unambiguously hates women. His utterance of the word slut in the present context adds no new information about Limbaugh or his beliefs. Pre-"slut" and post-"slut" Limbaugh are identical in all respects.

I think that's right. I think Sandra Fluke was right to be very offended by Rush Limbaugh. It's the difference between the generalized bigotry of the term "feminazi" and a specific accusation leveled at a specific person.

But there's still an element of kabuki to the whole cycle of offense and umbrage, and, well, meh. Making a big deal about Rush won't make Georgetown University offer Sandra Fluke health insurance that covers contraceptives—I'm not sure it will even push the needle very far. And that's what the debate is supposed to be about.

Netflix, Amazon, and the 'problem' of streaming movie choice

At The AV Club, Tasha Robinson makes the case for continuing with physical media instead of relying on cloud-based streaming services like Netflix. Some of what she says makes sense, but not this:

And then there’s the fact that DVD/Blu-ray selection is still far greater than streaming selection. For example, check out this comparison list from September 2011, showing that only about a fifth of the movies on the IMDB top 250 are available via Netflix streaming—a percentage that dropped recently with the lapse of the Starz deal. Or consider Netflix’s Alfred Hitchcock library: More than 40 films available on disc, but only six available on Netflix Instant, and only two of those (The Lady Vanishes and The Man Who Knew Too Much) among his classics. Not only is any given film still far more likely to be available in disc form, those discs are still more likely to have options like subtitles, alternative languages, and disc extras.

That's only true if you consider Netflix the end-all, be-all of streaming movies. That's not the case.

Just to use Robinson's example: No, Netflix doesn't offer much in the way of streaming Hitchcock flicks. But Amazon Instant Video actually has a fairly complete roster of Alfred Hitchcock movies available to rent or own in a streaming format, including biggies like "Psycho" and "Rear Window."

If you lock yourself into one service, yes your choices will be limited. But that's not really necessary for most folks. On Friday night, I used Netflix to watch "Brokeback Mountain." On Saturday, I paid $4 to rent "Hugo" from Amazon. No, cloud-based services aren't complete. But if you're willing to take a buffet approach to your movie streaming, they're a lot closer than Robinson's example suggests.

You can have your low gas prices, or you can have a nuclear Iran

It's not quite so dire as that, probably, but with Republican candidates hitting President Obama so hard on the price of gas, it's worth noting some of the factors that are driving that price up:

The Iran situation has already raised the price of crude oil as much as 20 percent, according to oil experts.

That fear is tempered by optimism — if tensions ease in the Middle East, experts predict that energy prices will fall, with gasoline at the pump potentially dropping 50 cents a gallon or more because supplies are relatively strong in many parts of the country. Some analysts say the world price of oil could fall to $80 a barrel if tensions eased.

So gas prices are at least partly the result of America's tough anti-nuke sanctions against Iran. What else?

Despite a fall in gasoline demand in the United States and Europe, global oil markets are tightening because demand for energy from Asian countries, particularly China and India, is rising at surprisingly strong rates even as output is declining from several important producing countries.

So: Gas prices are rising because of the law and supply and demand. Capitalism is doing its thing!

A cynic would suggest Republicans should be portrayed as soft on Iran and anti-markets to boot, if they continue to demagogue the gasoline issue. I'd hate to be that sort of cynic.

Santorum, Gingrich, Romney are wrong about apologizing in Afghanistan

Over at The Philly Post, today I get after the Republican candidates who are criticizing President Obama for apologizing in Afghanistan for the burning of Korans by American troops there.

The mission of U.S. troops in Afghanistan isn’t to trample upon native sensibilities—it’s to hunt terrorists and help the locals build their country so that it never again serves as the base for an attack on the United States. That involves the (tricky) winning of hearts and minds. Treating the Koran with disrespect—even if it’s an accident—actively works against achieving those goals. Apologizing isn’t just the right thing to do, in this case; it’s an act of strategic military necessity.

So the rush by Mitt, Rick, and Newt to condemn the president for apologizing isn’t just contemptible: It’s dangerous and juvenile. It signals that all three men see the world as a series of cartoon caricatures, that they are bullies who demand respect but believe that giving respect means showing weakness. Maybe Republicans won’t ever apologize for America—but all that proves is that they are very sorry, indeed.

Follow the link to read the whole thing.

The trailer for 'Battlefield America' makes me want to burn down Hollywood

No, really:



So, a movie about eight-year-olds competing in a dance competition somehow ends up turning those eight-year-olds into physically violent gang members? And their mentors declare the dance competition to be "war?"

Fuck. That. Shit.

Sorry for the language. But really. I know I'm getting old. But I do pine for the old days when the idea of eight-year-olds as gangsters was treated with as a comic idea, not as something to aspire to. Remember "Bugsy Malone?"

The end of affirmative action

That's what Ben and I talk about in this week's Scripps column, looking at the case that's headed before the Supreme Court. My take:

Should affirmative action go away? Probably not. Will it? Probably.

The Supreme Court led by Chief Justice John Roberts seems to have its knives sharpened.

So while liberals should mount a defense of affirmative action in college admissions, they must also prepare for its probable demise.

What comes after? Texas -- where the current case originates -- offers one way forward. The state's public universities offer automatic admission to the top 10 percent of graduating students from every high school in the state.

Because those schools have wildly varying economic and racial compositions, the result is that Lone Star colleges have a fairly diverse student population. That kind of creativity will be needed going forward.

Wait: Why should diversity be a goal? That's easy. America is diverse. Unless you believe that white men possess all the talent and smarts -- and some people really do believe that --it's criminal not to foster the resources and resourcefulness of all our country's citizens.

"Even right-wingers get nervous with racial homogeneity," Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy told the magazine Mother Jones. "If Patrick Buchanan were elected president of the United States, there would have been a person of color in the Cabinet."

For more than 300 years, America's culture and law enforced racial preferences -- whites, of course, were preferred. We still live with the ramifications: A few decades of affirmative action don't make up for the fact that many minority groups weren't allowed to start the 100-yard dash until whites got a 50-yard head start. Critics of affirmative action say they want the law to be colorblind and advancement based on some notion of "merit." That sounds good, but also conveniently preserves the advantages created by 300 years of slavery and Jim Crow.

Those critics appear on the verge of victory, however. But affirmative action is a battleground, not the whole war. So liberals must ask themselves: What's next?

Ben expresses his own desire to end affirmative action in his take, and you'll have to click the link to read it. I'd like to expand on my own take a bit, if I may.

It doesn't surprise me that conservatives don't like affirmative action. I think there are principled non-racist—even anti-racist—reasons for doing so. What bothers me, though, is how little I see my righty friends acknowledge that affirmative action sprung up as a response to an actual problem: That the aforementioned 300 years of slavery and Jim Crow left a lot of folks without sufficient resources—take that word however you like—to achieve and succeed on society's new colorblind terms.

Conservatives like to talk a lot about how "culture matters" and often it sounds like a bit of a dogwhistle to liberal ears, a way of suggesting that bourgeois whites really are superior to pathology-afflicted blacks, but in ways that (maybe) have less to do with genetics than the poor choices that whites as a group and blacks as a group just happened to make. And they also talk quite a bit about the distorting effects that big government can have on culture. Yet you never really hear them put two and two together when it comes to race, and acknowledge again that a longstanding legal-cultural regime enforced both by senators and sheriffs for hundreds of years might've caused damage that still needs repair. Instead—and this is giving my conservative friends the best benefit of the doubt—they seem to have believed that Martin Luther King Jr. came to save everybody, 1968 happened, everything was fair after that, and anybody who can't make it must be to blame for their own problems. This is either stunningly naive or, well, something more pernicious. Among conservatism as a whole, it's probably a bit of both.

My friend (I'll make the presumption) and sometimes vigorous critic William Voegeli has written an entire book about how liberalism doesn't have a limiting principle that makes it possible for conservatives to do welfare-state business. (That would make liberals conservatives, but that's another conversation.) But taking conservatives at their word that all they want to do is maximize liberty and opportunity for all Americans, then this issue is a huge blind spot for them: Simply put, conservatives don't seem to have an animating principle that moves them to address problems of this sort.

Maybe their answer is simply: Study hard and get married. (Or, in the case of the occasional black conservative like Thomas Sowell: Leave us alone, government.) And I'm sure there are smart folks who do see a problem here and have come up with conservative-minded solutions. But conservatism, broadly, seems to treat affirmative action as a government program meant to oppress whites—and not as a well-meaning-but-misguided attempt to offer opportunities to those who otherwise have none. I can see that, theoretically, there might be two problems: That racism made opportunity hard, but that affirmative action compounds the problem. Listening to conservatives, I get the impression that only the latter problem exists. And that, I think, is also a problem.

In which I talk about sex and try not to sound stupid

At National Review today, a pair of writers argue that contraception is bad for women—and what would be good for women is a return to "natural" family planning. That is: If you don't want to get pregnant, don't have sex when you're at you're most fertile.

The authors try to offer a "feminist" reason for doing so:

Authentic sexual equality requires that men understand with their bodies (as women do) the procreative potential of the sexual act. And this is exactly what natural methods of family planning do. By frequenting sex only during infertile times when a child is unwanted, men learn to coordinate their desires for intimacy with the natural rhythms of the female body. Feminist scholar and theologian Angela Franks notes that “[this] is unheard of in a society in which male desire appears to set the guidelines — especially in the ‘hook-up’ culture. Indeed, such a reorientation ofdesire is more revolutionary than any secular feminist project.” Those who practice this approach to family planning report that its use tends to make husbands more sensitive to the sexual and emotional needs of their wives — a sensitivity that many women have long found wanting.

I'm going to admit here that my sexual experience isn't widespread: My bachelor years weren't all that swingin'. So maybe I'm going to sound stupid here. I'll risk it.

But my limited experience tells me that a woman's desire for sex often (but not always) peaks around that time of month that they're most fertile. (Evolutionarily, this makes sense, no?) And my limited experience also suggests to me that desire for sex and enjoyment of sex are somewhat related. If you're not in the mood, you're not in the mood.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying: National Review's writers apparently believe that men can best practice birth control and respect women by having sex during those periods in which women will desire and enjoy it least. "Be attentive to the sexual and emotional needs of your wife, men: And then do the opposite!"

Put aside the questions of whether the rhythm method is all that effective. A big problem here is that National Review's authors essentially remove a woman's sex drive from this equation. No surprise there, I guess. If you believe that a big problem with contraception is that it enables women to act on their own sexual desires (and the authors clearly do) this proposed solution makes a lot of sense.

Contraception and religious liberty

That's what Ben and I talk about this week in the Scripps column. My take:

Religious liberty is a paramount American value; it's even written into our Constitution. A woman's right to make her own health choices doesn't explicitly appear in the document, it's merely a common-sense human right no less deserving of protection and consideration.

So the Obama administration is right to mandate that employers include contraceptive coverage in their employee health insurance programs. And the administration is also right -- if a little late -- to offer an accommodation that ensures access to birth control while permitting religious institutions to adhere to their own teachings.

If only that were the end of the debate.

Unwilling, it seems, to ever take "yes" for an answer from President Barack Obama, Republicans are now pressing ahead with proposals to exempt any employer from having to pay for contraceptive coverage. GOP leaders say this is about "religious freedom" -- but, as other commentators have noted, they're not pushing to exempt, say, employers who are Jehovah's Witnesses from having to pay for blood transfusions.

It's easy to conclude, then, that Republicans are mostly interested in hindering women's access to birth control.

"Obamacare" is one of the administration's great achievements. But as recent developments have shown, it is imperfect and leaves most Americans at the mercy of their employers when it comes to health coverage.

That's not the system that most liberals desired. We wanted to see either a fully government-run "single-payer" health insurance system -- or, failing that, a "public option" government insurance plan to stand alongside private insurance, both to drive down costs and to give individuals a wider range of health choices.

Such a system would've allowed American women to choose (or not to choose) birth control with little hindrance. A woman's health decisions should be between her and her doctor, not her and her church, nor her and her employer. That important concept -- and not religious liberty -- is what faces the greatest threat today.

Ben says: "The argument isn't about a woman's 'access' to contraception. ... No, this is all about who pays and why it matters." But we've decided—in a law that was modeled on legislation that Republicans originally crafted, and which was passed into law by a Republican governor now running for president—that for the most part, employers will pay for employee health insurance. If that's the route we're taking, then it really does become a denial of access if the person with the wallet gets to decide you don't get birth control. Conservatives don't want the government making your health decisions—remember death panels? It's beyond me why they'd grant that power to private employers instead.

Thomas Frank got punk'd

A few years back, Thomas Frank's "What's The Matter With Kansas?" made a big splash nationally. His basic thesis was this: Republicans won votes by promising to concentrate on issues, like abortion, dear to social conservatives—but once in office focused mostly on an economic agenda of helping big corporations and giving the poor the shaft.

Maybe that was true a decade ago, but now? Republicans won a lot of elections at the state and Congressional elections in 2010 largely because people were so frustrated with the economy and wanted something done. Instead of economic turnarounds, though, we've been given...action on abortion.

That certainly seems to be the case in Pennsylvania, where the Legislature is working on a bill that would compel doctors to show women ultrasounds of their fetuses before performing an abortion. What has the Legislature—or Gov. Tom Corbett—done to advance the economy here? Beats me.

I'm not one to belittle culture war issues. But I can't help think we got bait-and-switched. I remember Tom Corbett talking (somewhat stupdly) jobs during the 2010 campaign, not abortion. And certainly exit polls in 2010 indicated that the economy was a big reason voters were turning to Republicans.

Don't get me wrong: Pennsylvania Republicans have also been hot on the trail of helping big corporations and giving the poor the shaft. Overall, though, it sure seems like we were voting for an economic agenda—and the social agenda snuck in under that cover. Time for Thomas Frank to revise his thesis.

The ACLU: Not just a bunch of liberal hacks

Clive Crook, National Review, Monday:

The ACLU’s stated mission is “to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.” Given its record, however, one would be forgiven for concluding that its copy of our charter is incomplete. Unfortunately, the ACLU appears to base its actions on the text of a tattered and torn document, from which the Second and Tenth Amendments are missing entirely, the Fourth was re-written in 1973, and the words “more or less” are appended to each paragraph along with an explicit invitation to interpret the document as broadly as humanly possible.

Emphasis added.

Randy LoBasso, Philadelphia Weekly, today:

Here’s something you weren’t expecting: The ACLU, along with the law firm of McCausland Keen and Buckman have filed a federal lawsuit today against the City of Philadelphia on behalf of Mark Fiorino, a Lansdale resident who was allegedly harassed by Philly cops for carrying a gun, despite his license to carry. Last time Philadelphia Weekly wrote about Fiorino and his ordeals with Philadelphia Police, he noted he was most offended by the officers’ not understanding their own city and state’s gun laws, which state one can obtain an unconcealed weapon license.

The lawsuit alleges Fiorino’s rights were violated when he was repeatedly detained longer than necessary to make sure he had a license to carry. His weapon was also confiscated and not returned for five months; it’s also alleged the police used excessive force against him.

Hey, the ACLU's interpretation of the Constitution is obviously to the left of National Review's. I think that's a good thing. But the ACLU also goes to work on behalf of gun-loving Second Amendment advocates. I think that's also a good thing, frankly. The ACLU frequently advocates for folks who don't necessarily line up ideologically on the left. I wonder: Would the righty ACLJ stick up for anti-gun activists using their First Amendment rights? I'm skeptical.

Charles Murray and the deepening class divide

Ben and I talk about Charles Murray's new book, "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010" in this week's Scripps column. We jointly note: "He argues that America is increasingly, dangerously divided between an out-of-touch upper class and a lower class that has abandoned the virtues of industriousness, honesty, marriage and religiosity." My take:

Here's the good news: Somebody influential on the right -- and Murray is beloved by many conservatives -- is acknowledging the growing class divide in America. That is a breakthrough.

The bad news: Murray is big into victim blaming. If life among America's working class has declined during the last 50 years, Murray says it's because its members have abandoned the habits of work and marriage that made the country great. He offers a lot of statistics to prove his point.

But there's a crucial piece missing in Murray's story.

It is most apparent when he describes the "real" Fishtown, a Philadelphia neighborhood several miles from where I live. Murray describes in great detail the rise of single motherhood and jobless men in the neighborhood.

But he never mentions Fishtown's most-defining feature: It was once a center of manufacturing and industry -- particularly the textile industry -- and now it isn't. The factories are gone. Residents can no longer walk out of the neighborhood school and into a decent job that can sustain a family.

That's precisely what happened across the country over the last 50 years: The manufacturing sector withered -- jobs went overseas -- and so did the wages of many Americans. Read The Atlantic's January cover story, "Making It In America," and you'll find many manufacturing jobs that mostly go to Americans with a costly college degree in science or math.

Simple hard work doesn't get you as far as it used to. This matters.

Murray talks about the disintegration of the working class, but not the disintegration of the work. "I focus on what happened, not why," Murray writes. Without the "why" though, he cannot and does not offer plausible solutions.

Instead, Murray urges the elites to preach more about virtue to the working class. Workers don't need a lecture, though. They need real opportunity. That can't be found in Murray's book.

Ben says "America's ruling elite has much to answer for." Mostly, they have to answer about sex. You'll have to go to the link to read his take.

UPDATE: The sex comment was kind of a cheap oversimplication on my part. I apologize to Ben.

David Frum on the contraception fight

If the audience is paying attention, for example, it will notice that Republicans are not proposing to allow employers and plans to refuse to cover blood transfusions if they conscientiously object to them (although there are religious groups that do). Or vaccinations (although there are individuals who conscientiously object to those as well). Or medicines derived from animal experimentation. (Ditto.)

No, Marco Rubio's Religious Freedom Restoration bill provides for one conscientious exemption only: contraception and sterilization. 

via thedailybeast.com