BUSH ON CIVIL UNIONS: President Bush said today that he favors civil unions for gays, or at least that he doesn’t agree with the Republican Party platform that opposes them. This is news to me. How can he be in favor of civil unions and also back the Federal Marriage Amendment? He can’t, at least not consistently. The FMA would ban civil unions as well as gay marriage. This is a flip I’ll take, as long as he doesn’t flop back on it.

UPDATE: Okay, so this isn’t the first time Bush has mentioned this. Carl Fenley emails a link to this CNN article from February 2004 which quotes Bush as saying the states should be allowed to define “legal arrangements other than marriage.” Bush has tried to have it both ways, even so. The FMA states “Neither this constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.” [Emphasis added.]

SECOND UPDATE: Eugene Volokh thinks Bush is being consistent. Perhaps so. Read his whole argument, but here is his conclusion:

So if the FMA is enacted (and note that, as I’ve blogged before, I do not support its enactment), the result will be almost exactly what Bush suggests: A state could still “choose to” recognize “a civil union” as “a legal arrangement.” It would have to do so via a statute — just as most family law is defined by statute — not via a court decision or (probably) a constitutional amendment. But it would indeed be free to make such a choice.

STICKER SHOCK The article I linked below contains some cost comparisons:

Yale University economist William D. Nordhaus estimated that in inflation-adjusted terms, World War I cost just under $200 billion for the United States. The Vietnam War cost about $500 billion from 1964 to 1972, Nordhaus said. The cost of the Iraq war could reach nearly half that number by next fall, 2 1/2 years after it began.

How could that be? World War I and Vietnam were both much, much larger efforts than the current conflict, so how come this one costs so much? The answer is that we’re substituting capital for labor: we use a lot more equipment, and a lot fewer men. Since destroyed equipment is a lot easier to replace than destroyed people, it’s a price I’m very glad to pay.

Update A reader emails the following:

Sorry, but your theory isn’t the answer. It’s much simpler: Nordhaus isn’t being straight with the American people. The missing element is that the American economy is much larger today than it was in 1918. Inflation doesn’t account for real economic growth. That’s why it’s real economic growth. Working backwards, $200 billion in 2003 dollars is $20.4 billion in 1918 dollars. But the GDP in 1918 in 1918 dollars was $69.35 billion. That means the cost of WWI was over 29% of GDP at the time, spread out over only about 18 months. By comparison, the cost of the Iraq war will be less than 3% of GDP. We budget about 3.5% a year on defense. The cost of the Iraq war, then, spread out over three years, represents about a 30% excess per year over peacetime spending. That seems trifling in comparion, doesn’t it?

I agree that in GDP terms, the cost of the current war looks trivial compared to earlier wars. But absolute figures matter too, and it’s striking that our ancestors managed to fight much larger conflicts–there were over 2 million men in the American Expeditionary Force that was sent to fight World War I–with so little money.

The reason they could is that back then, life was cheaper, so they used more of it, and less of everything else. The typical soldier’s kit of World War I would hardly do the modern military man for an overnight camping trip with his buddies.

A HEARTENING SIGN FOR HAWKS The administration is apparently planning to ask for $70 billion more for the war in Iraq, which will bring the total price tag to about $225 billion. Yes, that’s a lot of money, but on the other hand, remember when folks like Eric Alterman were telling us it was going to cost trillions?

The war has cost more than I think I thought it would (I don’t remember ever assigning it an exact price tag), but if it succeeds in building a democracy in the middle east, it will be well worth the cost. And the administration’s willingness to throw around a big figure like this the week before the election shows me that they’re taking it seriously–and compares very favourably to John Kerry’s political opportunism on the issue.

THEY WON’T TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER! The Democratic get-out-the-vote effort seems to have kicked it up a notch: when I walked out of the house this morning, I saw the neighborhood festooned with signs reading “Vote or Die!” This on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, which is so reliably Democratic that the Republicans often don’t bother to run candidates for local elections. It makes me wonder what they’re up to in the swing states–“Vote or we’ll not only kill you, we’ll torture your family!”

BUT WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? If you’re a born-and-bred political junkie like me (my father’s the head of a trade association), you’re checking the polls with a frequency to shame those lab rats they train to push levers so they can dose themselves up with crack. Polling Report, <a href=”http://www.electoral-vote.comthe electoral vote map, Real Clear Politics, Slate’s Election Scorecard . . . it’s a wonder I get any sleep at all.

But what does it mean for the election when Hawaii suddenly, and astonishingly, trends Bush? How come none of the polls agree? And why can’t they invent a really good fat free ice cream so I won’t gain thirty pounds waiting for the results to come in? A good place to start is this handy list of electoral votes from the Federal Elections Commission. And Mystery Pollster has lengthy explanations of all the Big Questions in polling, like “Aren’t there, maybe, please God, a lot of extra Democratic voters the polls are missing because they only have cell phones?” (Answer: Probably not.)

If you’re a Republican and want to tweak your Democratic friends, send them the FEC list and point out that, contrary to the arguments of Ruy Teixera and John Judis in The Emerging Democratic Majority, states that went for Bush in 2000 had a net gain of electoral votes (and thus population) after the last census, while states that went for Gore lost population and seats in the electoral college.

Update Doctor Weevil has more on political vices:

All in all, I feel a bit like the friend of a friend, who tried to cure his alcholism by taking up cocaine. He thought he could use the drug to wean him from liquor and then quit it, too, but ended up as a cocaine-addicted alcoholic. (I wrote a bit more about him here.) I want my blogs and my polls! Now! Please? A drink would be nice, too, but not for a few hours.

CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST’S CANCER TREATMENT provokes some thoughts by Dahlia Lithwick over on Slate. She predicts that the Chief Justice “will hang around as long as he possibly can.” Her theory is that he sees his work as unfinished, in part because the “federalism revolution” that “[h]e framed and launched” has “stalled out in recent years.” Court commentators have put a lot of effort into selling the story that the Court is in the midst of “federalism revolution,” an absurd overstatement, considering the handful of cases that recognize some small measure of judicially enforceable reserved power for the states. If you think Chief Justice Rehnquist is fired up about states’ rights, please tell me why he wrote the majority opinion in Nevada v. Hibbs, making the states suable for violations of the Family and Medical Leave Act. He may have “framed and launched” whatever it is the Court has been doing with federalism over the last three decades – surely not a revolution – but if this federalism you envision as some sort of moving vehicle has “stalled,” the Chief Justice himself seems to have been driving when that happened too.

HE WAS FOR IT BEFORE HE WAS AGAINST IT Mickey Kaus points out that a McLaughlin group transcript from October of ’01 shows Kerry saying:

I have no doubt, I’ve never had any doubt — and I’ve said this publicly — about our ability to be successful in Afghanistan. We are and we will be. The larger issue, John, is what happens afterwards. How do we now turn attention ultimately to Saddam Hussein? How do we deal with the larger Muslim world? What is our foreign policy going to be to drain the swamp of terrorism on a global basis?

But wait, there’s more! This transcript is actually being pushed by the Kerry campaign, as proof that he called for more troops in Afghanistan. But if you look at the section where he’s supposedly calling for more troops, you’ll find that it’s been rather creatively trimmed by the Kerry team. The good senator was actually referring to his past calls for more “boots on the ground”, but reported himself satisfied with troop levels by the time of the interview, on October 16th, 2001.

Don’t Kerry’s people know about the internet yet?

CLOSING IN ON ZARQAWI? The U.S. military reports that one of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s aides was killed by an airstrike in Fallujah.

HIDEOUS HOMES: James Lileks was too modest to bleat about it, but his new book Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes from the Horrible 70s was released by Crown Books today. If it’s half as good as his hilarious Gallery of Regrettable Food it will be worth every penny and then some. I bought several copies of Regrettable Food as gifts (you’re welcome, James!) and it’s always a smash hit.

QUESTION BUSH DECLINES TO ANSWER in his interview with Sean Hannity (on “Hannity and Colmes” tonight): “If John Kerry were President, would he make this country more vulnerable, more susceptible to terror attacks?” Bush, perhaps not wanting to have any Cheneyesque harsh words come from his own mouth, says: “That’s ultimately the decision that the people are going to have to decide in this campaign.” To be fair to Bush — and note that I support Bush! — he does go on to list many reasons why Kerry would do a worse job with the war on terrorism, and he does have to be hyper-aware that any given phrase of his might be turned against him, but really, how are we supposed to know the answer to this question better than he does?

UPDATE: Here‘s the transcript.

IRAQ’S MISSING EXPLOSIVES: According to an MSNBC TV news report the Pentagon says the hundreds of tons of explosives that disappeared from Iraq went missing before U.S. troops entered the country. The story is not yet posted online. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Saddam is worried.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall points to this AP article in the Jerusalem Post:

At the Pentagon, an official who monitors developments in Iraq said US-led coalition troops had searched Al-Qaqaa in the immediate aftermath of the March 2003 invasion and confirmed that the explosives, which had been under IAEA seal since 1991, were intact. Thereafter the site was not secured by U.S. forces, the official said, also speaking on condition of anonymity.

But this is flatly contradicted by NBC. (Hat tip: Robbie Port.)

NBC News: Miklaszewski: “April 10, 2003, only three weeks into the war, NBC News was embedded with troops from the Army’s 101st Airborne as they temporarily take over the Al Qakaa weapons installation south of Baghdad. But these troops never found the nearly 380 tons of some of the most powerful conventional explosives, called HMX and RDX, which is now missing. The U.S. troops did find large stockpiles of more conventional weapons, but no HMX or RDX, so powerful less than a pound brought down Pan Am 103 in 1988, and can be used to trigger a nuclear weapon. In a letter this month, the Iraqi interim government told the International Atomic Energy Agency the high explosives were lost to theft and looting due to lack of security. Critics claim there were simply not enough U.S. troops to guard hundreds of weapons stockpiles, weapons now being used by insurgents and terrorists to wage a guerrilla war in Iraq.” (NBC’s “Nightly News,” 10/25/04)

If the NBC report is wrong and the unnamed Pentagon official is right, it’s still not that big a story. The Belmont Club notes that 600,000 tons of munitions were dispersed by Saddam throughout Iraq and says worrying about a few hundred tons of RDX “is similar to worrying about a toothache after being diagnosed with AIDS and Ebola.”

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Roger L. Simon thinks this story might damage the New York Times worse than Jayson Blair.

SOUTH KOREA IS ON THE HIGHEST POSSIBLE ALERT after a hole was discovered in the fence separating it from the North.

THE BALKANIZATION OF THAILAND: Dave Rodrigues has the latest on Muslim-Buddhist clashes in the south of the country.

AN INSIDE JOB? The AP reports that the massacre of 50 unarmed Iraqi soldiers may have been an inside job. Omar at Iraq the Model said so first.

(Hat tip: Patrick Lasswell)

THIS WEEKEND’S ELECTION IN KOSOVO, after five years of U.N. rule, didn’t go over so well. It isn’t all the U.N.’s fault; Kosovo is a tough neighborhood. But it’s Belize compared with Iraq – something worth considering if you think the U.N. might ride to the rescue in Baghdad.

Wanting to get a feel of THE POLITICAL CLIMATE IN MADISON TODAY, I took a walk down Bascom Hill and up State Street. (You can see the assorted signs of political life in this photo essay on my regular blog.) There’s one poster store on State Street that has long had a near-life-size cardboard cutout photo image of President Bush in its front window, but I noticed today that they now had a matching cutout of John Kerry. Both were selling for $31, and I wondered which one was more popular. I decided to do some direct reporting for Instapundit readers. I went in and asked the young man at the front cash register which one they were selling more of.

“Well, we’ve had the Bush one a lot longer. And you know, this is Madison, so a lot of people are buying the Bush one so they can … you know …”

“What? Do things to it?”

“Umm …”

“But, so, since you’ve gotten the Kerry one, which one is selling more?”

“I hate to say.”

“I’m thinking it might be some indication of who’s going to win the election, don’t you think?”

“I hope not!”

A bit inscrutable, maybe, but I’m thinking the Kerry one isn’t selling well at all. But the poster store guy may have the right interpretation of the sales discrepancy. Don’t we all suspect most of Kerry’s support is antagonism toward Bush? But what are these people doing to those Bush cutouts?

A tidbit for bloggers out there: if you’ve ever had the experience of being “instapundited”, you’ll know that your traffic (and your bandwith bills!) go through the roof whenever Glenn links to you. I’ve just had the odd experience of instapunditing myself in my first post here, which feels a little like one of those pictures you see of someone with mirrors both in front and behind them, looking into an infinitely receding series of their face and back . . .

IS GRIDLOCK THE ANSWER TO REDUCING DOMESTIC SPENDING? There are a fairish number of people who are steeling themselves to vote for Kerry in the hope that gridlock will hold down government spending. I’ve investigated this myself, as I mulled my vote, and found that, just as conservatives have been claiming, the spending slowdown of the Clinton years seems to have been less a product of gridlock (or Clinton’s much-overhyped committment to deficit reduction) than of Newt Gingrich and the post-Cold-war peace dividend. After the Republicans got their hats handed to them in the ’98 midterms, everyone seems to have decided that the secret to popularity was to spend! spend! spend! — by Clinton’s last budget, domestic discretionary spending (which, other than defense spending, is the only thing the president or the congress has much control over year to year) was growing at 5% per-annum. So I was very sceptical that a Kerry presidency would mean, as some of my friends and correspondants have tried to convince me, a return to fiscal rectitude.

Now The Economist confirms my worries, with an elegantly written article on what we can really expect from gridlock.

David Batlle emails a story by Richard Rushfield at Slate. He goes under cover, so to speak, disguised as a Kerry voter in conservative Southern California cities and a Bush supporter in liberal Los Angeles neighborhoods. Guess where he encounters the most intolerance?

I’m voting for a Republican president for the first time ever this year. I wouldn’t dare wear a “Bush/Cheney” T-shirt around town. I’m even less likely to stick a yard sign in my lawn. Like Rushfield (who actually supports Kerry) I live in solid Blue America – in my case Portland, Oregon. And Blue America is getting twitchy this year.

The mainstream here supports John Kerry for president. If the election were held only in my neighborhood and the votes were tallied only by counting the names on yard signs, Kerry would win in a landslide that would impress Syria’s Bashar Assad. (The Assad dynasty traditionally gets only 99 percent of the “vote.”)

The “alternative” point of view around here isn’t in favor of President Bush. Those who dissent (at least publicly) reject both Bush and Kerry.

My neighborhood is a battleground, not between Democrats and Republicans but between liberals and radical leftists. Homemade political posters are stapled everywhere to telephone polls. Here’s what some of them say.

Uncle Sam wants you to kick his ass! Bush or Kerry we’re still screwed!

[…]

Hit the streets. Paint the streets. Quit paying taxes. Refuse service.

[…]

After the election it’s time to take action…Spend the day in the streets and the night writing on walls. Make a commitment to yourself and others: I’m not going to be well-behaved…Let’s be ungovernable!

That’s the kind of “discussion” my neighborhood has. Conservatives and swing-voters like me are sitting it out. Richard Rushfield’s Slate experiment suggests we are wise to do so.

This seems, at first glance, like a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea: let people have charge cards on which to borrow against their 401(k) savings. Indeed, after we heard about it on television yesterday afternoon, my ultra-libertarian boyfriend was hopping up and down shouting “there ought to be a law!”

But the article tells me that some very smart, very famous economists, such as the late Franco Modigliani, and the very current Larry Summers, are in favour of it, arguing that allowing people to borrow against their savings will increase their willingness to save in the first place. My instincts cry out against it–I know too many people who are charging their way towards bankruptcy, despite having already tapped their home equity to pay down credit card debt once or twice–but Modigliani and Summers are a lot smarter than I am, and half of the study of economics is learning that your instincts aren’t a very reliable guide to what makes people better off.

Anyone who spends any amount of time listening to arguments about political economy will end up getting an earful about the efficient markets hypothesis (briefly, the theory that market prices reflect all available information).

This is not a popular theory with many segments of the commentariat, mostly those who are unhappy with the value the markets have assigned to something–such as their labour. Thus one is always seeing stories about the death of efficient markets; such reports, like those of the death of Mark Twain, are generally greatly exaggerated.

After Vernon Smith and Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for behavioural economics (briefly, the study of ways in which market actors, a.k.a people, behave irrationally), it became the Great White Hope for finally toppling the hated edifice. There are two problems with this. The first is that even though people can be observed behaving irrationally, EMH still has pretty good predictive value. The second is nicely explained by Zimran Ahmed who, like me, is an alumnus of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, the quasi-official Home of the Efficient Markets Theory.

It is true that behaviorists’ ideas have become mainstream (at least at Chicago), but this does not mean what people think it means.

Firstly, the truth is that the Chicago School of Economics was always aware of and looking for explanations for market bubbles — and obvious (in hindsight) demonstration of market irrationality. More obscure phenomena, such as a “equity risk premium” similarly eluded free market explanations. Behavioral experiments shed light on these and so provide answers to key, outstanding economic questions.

Secondly, the truth is that the cognitive biases identified by Thaler et al do not vanish once the decision moves from the market to the committee. Left-wing folks have gravitated towards behavioral economics because they see it as a way to escape the defeatest free-market prescriptions of classical economics. Unfortunately, behavioral economics says that market participants can be irrational because they are human, which is easily extended into committee members can be irrational because they are human. Behavioral economics does not allow for the benevolent central planning that seems to attractive to many.

So what is it good for? According to Thaler and U Chicago law professor, the provocatively titled Libertarian Paternalism.

What a great title.

Libertarian paternalism takes behavioral insights — such as default choices matter — and marries that with the fierce individualism at the heart of libertarianism. So, you let people do what they want, but you work hard to make sure that the defaults are right. This has the benefit of making the default choice (and there must always be a default choice) considered instead of random, but you mitigate the danger of the committee getting it wrong by letting people change the choice if they want.

I’m a libertarian who hasn’t yet decided who to vote for, and for the past week or so, I’ve been offering the commenters on my blog the chance to persuade me. Now that Daniel Drezner has gone Kerry, there aren’t many of us undecided libertarians left. The responses have ranged from thoughtful critiques of both candidates’ foreign and domestic policies, to one commenter who implied, at great length, that if I voted for Kerry I would never, ever get laid again.

This does give pause. But I’m inspired by the example of one of my most beloved friends, who has decided to vote for Bush. She was persuaded by the debate in the comments section of my blog, but that isn’t what inspires me. The truly inspirational thing is that she is gay. Does she like Bush’s position on gay marriage? Hell no. But she isn’t voting on gay marriage. She’s voting on national security.

Now, you may or may not think that Bush is the right guy, national-security-wise. You may even think that gay marriage is a more important issue to the nation than the foreign policy questions that the last four years have raised, though you’d get some pushback from me. But my friend decided her vote based on what she thought was most important for the country, even though Bush’s stand on an issue that’s important to her personally is worse than Kerry’s.

That’s why I don’t understand complaints from the left that low-income evangelicals don’t vote their economic interest, or from the right that high-income democrats are funding the party of redistribution. We should rejoice every time we see someone who is voting on ideology, rather than merely supporting the candidate who puts the most money in their pocket.

And so even if it means a lifetime of celibacy, I’ll try to take the high road, and vote my conscience, rather than my . . . er . . . well, you know what I mean. Unfortunately, that just makes the decision all the harder.

SO WHAT’S EARLY VOTING LIKE IN MADISON, WISCONSIN? The Badger Herald has this:

The effort to get students to vote early is being promoted by the College Democrats, who have chartered a shuttle to run between the Memorial Union and City Hall every weekday until the election. The van, which runs every half hour between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., is being funded by the Democratic National Committee, who pledged the money after being impressed by the field operation in Madison.

My 21-year-old son, Chris stopped by City Hall to vote, and he had this to say:

“No one ever asked for my ID, and in fact, I asked two different people if they wanted to see my ID, and they said no. So, anyone who wanted to could go in and write down somebody else’s name if they knew their address, and vote for them.”

Wouldn’t want to hassle anybody and make them feel all disenfranchised now, would you?

Don’t miss Joel Gaines’ new Iraq briefing at Winds of Change.

The Washington Post has come out with the winners of its 2004 BEST BLOGS READERS’ CHOICE AWARDS, and it’s nice to see that Instapundit won “Best Outside the Beltway” and “Most Likely to Last Beyond Election Day.” Congratulations, Glenn. Interesting that The Corner won both “Best Democratic Party Coverage” and “Best Republican Party Coverage” (as well as two other awards).