EVOLUTION, EGALITARIANISM, and “Machiavellian Intelligence.”

REZKO SINGING: OBAMA SWEATING? I doubt it, personally. But Rick Moran thinks it’s because I don’t understand Chicago politics.

UNDERFUNDED PUBLIC PENSIONS IN CONNECTICUT:

Nappier didn’t quite say it, but taxpayers should be more than worried; they should be freaking out. For even before the market crash the state pension fund did not have enough investment to meet its commitments, pension underfunding being a chronic scandal in Connecticut, most other states, and the federal government. And should the pension fund not cover those commitments, they would have to be met from the state’s general fund, which would mean more taxes. . . .While Governor Rell is scared too and has reduced state spending by executive order where she is authorized to do so, leaders of the Democratic majority in the General Assembly affect not to be scared at all. They say they hope that the economy will recover soon, and they want to use state government’s billion-dollar emergency fund, the “rainy-day fund,” to cover the deficit. Such a position allows the Democrats to avoid any discussion of economizing in government until after the election next month.

But the emergency fund is deceiving, since it has been amassed largely by shorting the pension fund.

Government accounting makes Enron accounting look wholesome. And this problem is huge, and under-appreciated. More on the problem in general here. And a report from California:

One thing’s for certain —- if you live in a Southern California city, your city workers’ pensions are seriously underfunded. All our cities are in that position. In addition, your county workers’ pensions are underfunded. Plus your state workers’ pensions. And that systematic underfunding was true before the market meltdown.

How did this happen? From a politician’s standpoint, it’s the perfect labor union concession —- instant, retroactive, underfunded defined benefit plan increases, where the true cost doesn’t become apparent until years later (usually after the guilty politicians have retired).

Moreover, the politicians, city managers —– everyone in the government —- benefits from these luxurious pensions. There’s no taxpayer voice in the process.

Plus, “compliant actuaries.”

THE CARNIVAL OF CARS is up!

UPDATE: Link was bad before. Fixed now. Sorry!

POLICE FORCES MOVING TOWARD more efficient cars. Makes sense.

WE’RE SEEING MORE OF THIS: “Some might consider 75 old, but to Reeta Jones of Monterey, Tenn., who will celebrate her 110th birthday Friday, 75 was back in her youth.”

IN THE MAIL: Jonathan Reed Winkler’s Nexus: Strategic Communications and American Security in World War I.

REASON TV: Fixing America’s health crisis.

MICKEY KAUS: “Psst, Republicans! The big problem with ACORN isn’t the squirrelly voter registration efforts you are making such a fuss about. It is their efforts to water down or undermine work-based welfare reform. You’d think that would trouble swing voters more too.”

MORE ON ELECTION SHENANIGANS IN OHIO.

MARK STEYN: “Mark Hemingway is right to say that free speech in Canada ‘does not exist in any meaningful way’. As the British Columbia ‘Human Rights’ Tribunal’s rambling and incoherent decision makes plain, Maclean’s and I were acquitted of “flagrant Islamophobia” for essentially political reasons – because neither the court nor its travesty of a ‘human rights’ code could withstand the heat of a guilty verdict. . . . If you have the wherewithal to stand up to these totalitarian bullies, they stampede for the exits. But, if you’re just an obscure Alberta pastor or a guy with a widely unread website or a fellow who writes a letter to his local newspaper, they’ll destroy your life.” Tar. Feathers.

Canada has done more than most to give “human rights” a bad name. Surely freedom from assault by bureaucratic pecksniffs is a human right of the first order.

ADVICE FROM PAT “DR. SANITY” SANTY ON Coping with Stress and Anxiety as the Market Melts Down.

THE NEW MOOD OF collaborative journalism.

ROGER KIMBALL on the Troopergate/Tasergate report: “Is That All They’ve Got?” Ann Althouse, on the other hand, comments: “Lots of us like Sarah Palin and have high hopes for her in this election and the next, but let’s resist the impulse to slough off this report. It means something.”

And reader Nancy Reyes writes, “Happy Domestic Violence Awareness Month! By saying Palin was at fault for her family’s repeated complaints is essentially saying that any family who is too vigorous in complaints about domestic violence can be censored.” Well, not just any family.

BITES FROM THE APPLE: A roundup of Apple computer, iPhone, etc, news, including “exuberant” speculation on the new MacBook. And why Steve Wozniak thinks the iPod is over.

JONATHAN MACEY: The Government is Contributing to the Panic. “It’s time to let markets do their messy work.”

I do think that “panic” is the right term, as in “the panic of 2008.” The system is awash with money and credit — enough so that I’m quite worried about inflation down the line — but nobody will do anything with it because they’re . . . panicked.

Plus this: “If the SEC had done half the job in ferreting out fraud and funny accounting that short-sellers have done, our capital markets would not be imploding. Now short-sellers, like other market participants, are threatened with new restrictions on their activities as Congress begins to hold hearings on the crisis in the capital markets and politicians and regulators turn their focus to the shibboleth of market manipulation.”

UPDATE: Speaking of panic: Investors’ Real Fear: A Socialist Tsunami. (Via NewsAlert).

ANOTHER UPDATE: One of my hedge-fund readers emails:

The thumbnail future market history of this month is likely to include the phrase “correctly discounting the economic fallout of an Obama presidency and hard-left Congress repeating the failed frenetic economic policies of the 1930s”. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take a re-run of the 1940s to extract us.

Ugh. Thanks for that comforting thought. And those enthusiastic for New Deal type solutions should be required to read Amity Shlaes’ book on the subject.

Or at least this: FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate.

MORE ON THE MASSACHUSETTS ANTI-INCOME TAX INITIATIVE: “It is David vs. Goliath. The good news is that we have the winning message.”

Plus, will economic problems help the initiative?

As an MBTA employee, George Glidden knows the unions want him to vote against Question 1, which would abolish the state income tax. He’s heard the fears that the ballot question would cause dramatic cuts to state and local services and probably trigger other tax increases to make up the difference.

But taking home an extra $54 or so a week – even, Glidden figures, if he has to pay half or more back in a property-tax hike later – would be worth it.

“It’s about the pocketbook. It’s about everything else going up,” said Glidden, who is 40 and lives in North Attleborough. “If you can give me an extra $20 or $25 a week, that’s a tank of gas – or part of it.”

The last time the income tax question was on the ballot, in 2002, it received little attention but stunned political observers by collecting 45 percent of the vote. At the time, a gallon of gas cost less than $1.50, home prices were soaring, and the economy, if imperfect, was not the dominant issue.

That’s a far cry from 2008. Voters for months have endured unemployment increases, flat or decreasing wages and home values, a rising cost of living, and, for the last two weeks, have watched with unease and even panic as stock prices plunged and the credit crisis spread around the world.

The proponents are styling it a “taxpayer bailout.”

CHANGING CHICAGO’S LAW ON CELLPHONES: “Chicago may revise its strictest-in-the-country ban on using cell phones while driving—but only because one of the city’s aldermen got caught breaking the law. . . . Now you see how Chicago’s aldermen could make the city one of the most paternalistic in the country. They either don’t have to abide by the laws they pass, or they can simply pass a new law exonerating themselves should they get caught.”

ARNOLD KLING: “So if a junk mortgage originator can pool loans with down payments of less than 5 percent, carve them into tranches, and get a rating agency to rate some of the tranches as AA or higher, it can make those more attractive to a bank than originating a relatively safe loan. If you want to know why securitization dominated the mortgage market, this explains it. Regulatory arbitrage, pure and simple.”

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE RESCUE PLANS: “We’re setting the stage for when we come out of this of a massive inflation holocaust.” Yeah, I’m worried about that, too.

THE TROOPERGATE/TASERGATE REPORT IS OUT, and Beldar has the scoop.

And Jules Crittenden calls it “A hasp and a hinge or two shy of a gate.”

HOW TO ruin the U.S. economy.

TOM MAGUIRE notes reading comprehension problems among members of the press.

DVDS MARKED DOWN AS LOW AS $4.99: Well, we’ve mostly all got our big-screen TVs by now. If the economy tanks and we have to cut back on entertainment expenses, I guess we can just stay home and watch ’em, and surf the Internet. Oh, wait, that’s what I do already . . . .

If you want Blu-Ray, though, you’ve got to go at least as high as $12.99.

ILYA SOMIN: “For what it’s worth, I like the idea of a black president, believe that Obama is an admirable person in many ways, and have doubts about McCain’s temperament similar to those expressed by George Will. Nonetheless, I fear that the conjunction of an Obama victory, a strongly Democratic Congress, and a major economic crisis will produce a massive and difficult to reverse expansion of government. . . . We know from past history that economic crises are a major opportunity for expansion of government power. Robert Higgs’ book Crisis and Leviathan is a good discussion of the basic dynamics. We also know that divided government tends to impede the growth of the state, while united government facilitates it. The combination of united government and a major economic crisis is likely to lead to a great expansion of government, just as it did on several previous occasions such as the 1930s.”

And read Ross Douthat, too.