Archive for 2010
January 5, 2010
VERONIQUE DE RUGY on economists and inflation.
ANOTHER TSA EMBARRASSMENT: Comedy Of Errors: Cameras Didn’t Work At Newark. Sources Tell CBS 2 That TSA Surveillance Cameras Were Inoperable At Time Of Terminal C Security Breach. “It’s a tale of shocking ineptitude: CBS 2 has learned a series of missteps unnecessarily added to the mayhem at Newark Liberty International Airport on Sunday. The six-hour delay stranded thousands of people, creating extreme crowding and chaos.”
UPDATE: Col. Douglas Mortimer writes: “All together now, children: ‘But don’t worry, we’ll do just fine running the health care system.'”
ANOTHER UPDATE: More here.
BAILOUT BENEFITS: Ford sales surge as GM’s fall.
UPDATE: From the comments:
I was in a Ford dealership last week, and saw a car on display with a big “NO BAILOUT NEEDED” sign in the windshield. Sounds like they realize it resonates well with customers.
Lots of people have decided to be sand in the gears.
THEN: “Adams Can Write, Jackson Can Fight.”
Now: “We Need ‘A Commander-in-Chief, Not a Law Professor’.” Don’t be silly. We always need more law professors in positions of power. Because law professors are smarter than you. And professors of Constitutional Law are the smartest professors of all.
WILL COLLIER DISAGREES WITH ME ON DAVID BROOKS. Well, you know, I do try to give people the benefit of the doubt.
UPDATE: Beyond Brooks & Collier: Eric S. Raymond: Escalating Complexity and the Collapse of Elite Authority. “When I look at the pattern of failures, I am reminded of something I learned from software engineering: planning fails when the complexity of the problem exceeds the capacity of the planners to reason about it.”
ANOTHER OPEN SEAT FOR THE DEMOCRATS: BYRON DORGAN WON’T RUN FOR REELECTION.
UPDATE: ABC News: Democrats Are Dropping Like Flies: “It is not shaping up to be a pretty week for the Democrats.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Colorado.
MORE ON Michael Yon’s detention at Sea-Tac.
UPDATE: Stewart Baker is unsympathetic, but his commenters aren’t buying it.
FBI LINGUIST LEAKED TO BLOGGER, may get two years.
SEEKING COMMON GROUND: An Open Letter To Jane Hamsher.
KILLER OF SHEEP: A Cautionary Music Rights Tale.
MEGAN MCARDLE ON MORTGAGE MODIFICATIONS: “We might start by trying to make it easier to get out of houses, as well as stay in them. Instead of encouraging people to throw their savings into hopeless modifications, maybe the government should be trying to streamline the process of arranging for a short sale so that people can walk away with a little savings in the bank (and on their credit report) to help them get a fresh start.”
SECRETS OF STAYING MARRIED.
UPDATE: Reader Duane Oyen isn’t crazy about this article:
It is 100% from a female perspective, no matter who does the commentary. Almost no one out there will speak the real secrets, which are short and simple, and politically incorrect:
1) Advice for her: a) Laura Schlessinger said it- “If he’s not horny, give him a sandwich”- in other words, willingly screw his brains out several times a week, whether you are in the mood or not (most of the time you won’t be, so if you rely on your moods, you will be in trouble- he will be miserable but he won’t tell you why because that will make it worse); b) don’t become a *itch; c) don’t double in size
2) Advice for him: a) converse with her every day about subjects SHE wants to talk about, and that means YOU LISTEN; b) don’t become a jerk; c) don’t turn into a lazy slob with a beer belly.
3) For both: if you take the plunge, plan on staying married, don’t give yourself an easy out.
That won’t work for 100% of the couples- nothing can- but I bet it would, if meticulously followed, cut the divorce rate by 75%. BTW, we have been married for 36 years, and succeed at about 70% of the list.
Whatever works.
A DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY BATTLE IN NEW HAMPSHIRE? As Dem divisions grow, some wonder if Shea-Porter is rethinking Senate race.
FLORIDA: Rep. Alan Grayson draws a “top-tier challenger.”
CHANGE: Home Sales Fell 16% In November.
FORGET THE GOOGLEPHONE OR THE APPLE TABLET: New stuff from Lego.
WILL COLLIER has a bone to pick with David Brooks. “What Brooks, with his touching faith in ‘pragmatic federal leaders with professional expertise’ doesn’t want to talk about, of course, is just how badly the Ivy League class has failed over the past couple of decades. All those rows of degrees from Harvard didn’t keep a pack of Brooksian elites–mostly members of the Democratic Party–from running Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac straight into the toilet, and taking the private economy with them. Hiring out of the Ivies also didn’t save Lehman Brothers or AIG from doing remarkably stupid things with other people’s money. And as for ‘professional expertise…’ just what profession does the Obama cabinet posses expertise in, other than hardball politics?” And George W. Bush went to Yale and had a graduate degree from Harvard — though, somehow, that didn’t seem to qualify him for membership in the educated classes.
UPDATE: More on Brooks: “Curiously absent from the Brooks column is any sense of what caused all of this. Primarily, it is caused by the real and perceived failures of the educated class, from Wall Street to Pennsylvania Avenue and Capitol Hill. There has never been much political momentum on the issue of global warming (the Senate pre-emptively rejected the Kyoto treaty on a 95-0 vote) because of economic concerns. Thus, it is not surprising that the public becomes less interested in such action amid a serious recession. If the public has become more pro-life, it may be that the now commonplace technology of sonography has graphically brought the reality of the issue into more and more families, while the supposedly educated class adheres to old dogma. If the public is more concerned about their Second Amendment rights, it may be a reaction to the fact the party in power tends to infringe on them. Indeed, the public reaction on all of these issues may be seen as a reaction against an agenda that lacks a mandate (more on that below).”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Okay, I went and reread that Brooks column. When I posted a link this morning, I didn’t see it as being as objectionable as these responses suggest, and on rereading I still don’t. Yes, there’s the air of Brooksian condescenscion toward the great unwashed, but that’s practically required for the NYT columnist gig, and remember, he’s trying to explain this stuff to the Upper West Side crowd. And I’m not so sure he’s using “educated class” in a positive way. See, e.g., “The tea party movement is a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against. They are against the concentrated power of the educated class. They believe big government, big business, big media and the affluent professionals are merging to form self-serving oligarchy — with bloated government, unsustainable deficits, high taxes and intrusive regulation.” So cut Brooks at least a little slack, here.
And reader David Marcus writes: “When Brooks refers to the educated class, which your other commentators equated with Ivy League, I think he really is referring to the New Class as set out by Herman Kahn in the late 1970’s.” Yes, the New Class idea originally appeared as a critique of the Soviet nomenklatura apparatchiks by Milovan Djilas, but Kahn noted that it applies elsewhere, too. I believe that John Kenneth Galbraith noted this, too, only with approval.
MORE: Prof. Kenneth Anderson writes:
New Class analysis needs to be reset into an American context – once place that does that is the great social theory journal Telos. And I try to do that in a law review essay on lawyers, therapeutic authoritarianism, and the New Class, in the Columbia Law Review.
Here’s a bit from the conclusion:
The old elites wanted to be the top of the communities in which they had grown up; whether to lead or dominate, to serve communities or exploit them, at least they understood themselves as having a place in them. The new elites, by contrast, want no connection; they understand that power is elsewhere, money is elsewhere, and mobility is everything; if indeed they have to live somewhere, it will be if at all possible in a wholly private, gated community. Yet simultaneously they want to dominate.
The New Class pushes its mobility to absolute limits, launching itself into what it imagines is a global society conducted in the jet stream, made weightless by the complete mobility of capital, but with devastating consequences for those left behind on the ground. For those who cannot fly, there is first, the administration of life by these same elites and their hirelings, the authoritarian, bureaucratic formations which, to be sure, express themselves alternately in soothingly therapeutic psycho-babble or communitarian slogans of the common good or assertions of new and endless rights and, second, economic insecurity in the midst of being urged to greater self-esteem …
In this unforgiving light, the unhappiness of lawyers looks rather less like professionals experiencing the loss of fulfillment that accompanies losing “ownership” of the social ends of the legal profession and rather more like the unhappiness of experts who, having established to their own satisfaction the certainty of ends not open for argument by non-experts, wonder why they are not also loved.
The issue of the New Class and its lawyers is authoritarianism. In an age when the therapeutic has appropriated rights talk, and with it lawyers, turning it and them into agents of New Class authoritarianism and social control, the real question that needs to be answered is why there exists the continued “hegemony within the public culture of an essentially indeterminate and at the same time absolutist discourse of rights.” It predominates because, far from being merely a language of individual liberty or even unbridled individual license (as, for example, the communitarians would have us believe) it is today a language of state authority, a language of therapeutic paternalism; those who actually dream of being “liberals” will not reclaim rights talk any time soon. Its appropriation is at the core of the process by which the state today controls, as Christopher Lasch wrote, “not merely [the individual’s] . . . outer but his inner life as well; not merely the public realm but the darkest corners of private life, formerly inaccessible to political domination.”
Lawyers are deeply complicit in this colonization of the language of rights by the culture of therapy. They participate because it serves the agenda of a class that, unfamiliar with democracy except as an impediment to its social engineering, is incapable of any form of discourse that is not directed from the top to the bottom. Expertise, particularly in the social sciences, is a language of hierarchy and social control, and lawyers today, as a professional formation within the New Class, deploy the language of rights to the end of making the therapeutic coercive in the public sphere.
It is not a glorious profession because it is not a glorious class, and lawyers are right to be unhappy.
Gosh, I feel kinda guilty for enjoying life so much now.
RELATED: Bad sociology.
MORE: Reader Joe Jackson writes: “You’ve probably already posted all of the give and take that you intend to post concerning the David Brooks column. But I can’t resist relating this: Back in the early 90s someone gave me an autobiography by Ben Bradlee. It was a lousy book, poorly written, in fact an embarrassment. But one little anecdote has stayed with me. When he first arrived at the Washington Post, retired Executive Editor Leonard Downie’s nickname, according to Bradlee, was ‘Land Grant Len’. Seems that Downie, unlike most of the other hot-shots at the Post, including Bradlee himself, was not an Ivy Leaguer but rather a graduate of Ohio State, a Land Grant institution. David Brooks fits right into this mind-set.”
MORE ON SCOTT BROWN, with video. There’s certainly a lot of excitement in the blogosphere.
C-SPAN TO CONGRESS: LET US IN!
When President Barack Obama was campaigning for the job in 2008, he vowed that he would bring greater transparency to government—especially when it comes to health care reform legislation:
We’ll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents, and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies.
Now C-SPAN is asking precisely for that. Its CEO, Brain Lamb, has sent a letter to House and Senate leaders, requesting that his network be permitted to broadcast the final negotiations, as the two chambers work out the differences between each body’s version of the legislation:
As your respective chambers work to reconcile the differences between the House and Senate health care bills, C-SPAN requests that you open all important negotiations, including any conference committee meetings, to electronic media coverage.
The C-SPAN networks will commit the necessary resources to covering all of these sessions LIVE and in their entirety. We will also, as we willingly do each day, provide C-SPAN’s multi-camera coverage to any interested member of the Capitol Hill broadcast pool.
The proceedings of conference committees—the House-Senate gatherings that merge and finesse different bills into a final measure—usually occur behind closed doors. And The New Republic has reported that the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate have decided in this case to skip a conference committee and hold informal negotiations instead, in order to avoid legislative procedures that Senate Republicans could use to stall the deliberations. That would make the process even more secretive.
Read the whole thing.
HOPE AND CHANGE: Mandatory money-saving furloughs at the University of Illinois. If only there had been some visionary leadership in the State Senate earlier in the decade . . . .
STRATEGYPAGE LOOKS BACK: A Decade Of Wars and the Unexpected: A roundup of what happened where since 2000.
BIG BROTHER In A Van.