Getting Loose in the Goose*

As far as military coups go, the one in Honduras was pretty mild. President Zelaya was pushing on with a referendum, which although nonbinding, is explicitly not allowed by the constitution. When the military refused to distribute ballots, he fired the head general and the Court reinstalled him. Eventually, the court ordered the military to arrest him, so they put him on a plane to Costa Rica and now the constitutional next in line is in power. They are even saying that they will have regular elections.

On face, these is a plausible argument that all the parties in Honduras that supported the coup were at least trying to protect democracy from Zelaya’s extreme ambition, and just went too far. But that doesn’t explain how recalcitrant the new president and the new military has been since then. They were indigant when the OAS voted to remove them and impose sanctions. And now they’ve redirected President Zelaya’s plane to El Salvador — even though the President of the General Assembly and Cristina Kirchner were rolling with him.

But the WSJ article about the flight reports that the de facto government has “signaled a new willingness to negotiate a solution.” My best guess is that they want Zelaya to come back after they negotiate some sort of agreement, or at least that he doesn’t come back on his own terms.

Also, I think the US really has a big role to play here. The OAS and Honduras’ Latin American neighbors seem to be taking an uncritical pro-Zelaya line, while the US seems less concerned with uncritically defending Zelaya and more worried about maintaining democratic norms in the region. And since the current government — and most of Honduras’s poltical actors — appear to be more anti-Zelaya than anything else, I think they would be amenable to some sort of deal that ensures his leaving office in a timely fashion.

*From now on, all posts about Honduras will have this title.

More MJ, Forever

As I’m sure everyone’s noticed, a lot of establishments that mostly play contemporary pop/dance music have been putting a lot of Michael Jackson in the rotation. And, at least anecdotally, people have been responding.

And not just the types that love to dance to catchy dance songs, but everyone. This shouldn’t be all that surprising, Jackson did sell 750 million albums after all. But I’m afraid that restaurants, night clubs, bars etc will stop playing so much classic MJ once the mourning/remembrance period ends. But they shouldn’t! Billie Jean is still — apart from any nostalgia or news hook — a much better song than whatever Lady Gaga, Rihanna or Justin Timberlake is putting out there. This is not just a purely aesthetic or artistic judgment on my part. They songs are amazingly danceable, and most importantly, everyone knows them. And I say this as someone who really likes Rihanna and Justin Timberlake. So please, DJs of the world, keep up the MJ!

The Personal, The Political, The Palin

As I’ve emphasized before, anyone who talks about Sarah Palin’s future without dwelling on the sheer craziness of her resignation speech is doing a disservice to their readers. How anyone can talk about this paranoid, senseless narcissist having a canny, rational plan to ascend to higher office is beyond me. I think a lot of political reporters are using the “standard politician” model to Palin’s actions, and are refusing to acknowledge all the evidence that she is clearly a strange, possibly even delusional figure.

And this is where Maureen Dowd comes in. Dowd takes a lot of shit for focusing on the personalities of political figures, instead of the actualy policies they promote or implement. But Dowd has, to my mind, one of the best takes on Palin’s resignation. She almost entirely focuses on the craziness and incomprehensibility of the speech and how it’s indicative of Palin’s overall mindset. And the cute, adjective-heavy writing that can be so annoying really works when it comes to describing a figure as shallow as Alaska’s former governor.  ”Nutty puppy” “caribou barbie” “exquisite battiness” “solipsistic meltdown” “incoherent, breathless and prickly stream of consciousness” “classic casuistry”…that’s certainly something you’re not seeing in Adam Nagourney’s otherwise smart, if restrained, analysis.

Of course, very few politicians are as driven and defined by their personalities as Palin is, but when they are, someone like Dowd, who takes an almost literary approach to looking at political figures, can be extremely insightful and entertaining.

Go Back to The Tape

When the news first broke that Palin was resigning, some assumed that she was setting herself up for presidential run. Now, resigning before ones first term as governor is pretty obviously a bad way to go about getting a nomination for president, but no one said Sarah Palin was a conventional politician. And especially considering that everything else she’s done since the end of the campaign could easily be interpreted as part of a possible presidential run, it made sense to look at her resignation in that light.

But anyone who actually watches the full video of speech will realize that whatever Palin is doing, it isn’t part of some long-term plan (part 2 is where things get really crazy). Obviously, you should just go watch, but if you don’t, this is a speech of someone who hasn’t prepared in any meaningful way and probably hasn’t really thought through the consequences of what she’s doing. She rambles, talks incredibly fast,utters non sequiter after non sequiter followed by analogies and comparisons that don’t make any sense. She seems nervous, close to tears and agitated.

The thing is, I don’t know how many people will get the full Palin experience. Cable news tends not to show 18 minute speeches.  Sure, there are choice sound-bites and moments that are indicative of just how weird the entire thing was, but the full experience is something else. The other problem is that the Palin story is going to be written up by political writers, who may not be the best to describe an idiosyncratic trainwreck.

An Appreciation of the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum

The Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum is a horrible baseball stadium and a mediocre football stadium. It’s been permanently disfigured by Mount Davis, the extra upper deck seats that totally enclosed the stadium and obstructed the view of the Oakland Hills that was one of the stadium’s few charms.* Because it was built for football, there is way too much foul territory, which not only makes the game more boring, but also means that there are fewer great seats.

That and much more at Deadspin, which has a great roundup of the oddly lovable, yet objectively completly atrocious, stadium

*This happened when I was six, so I’m just assuming that seeing the Oakland Hills was cool.

Thoughts on Honduras

The US and international reaction to the removal of Manuel Zelaya from office has been pretty interesting from an international relations perspective.

The United States is very much enmeshed in Honduran politics. We are its local great power, we give it foreign aid, we have a Joint Task Force stationed there that, among other things, helps train the Honduras military and we have a long history of economic and political meddling there. Also, Honduras is part of a supranational organization, the OAS, which is supposed to put a strong emphasis on democracy.

And, refreshingly, both the OAS and the US have spoken out very strongly against the coup. The US has suspended military relations with the new government and tried to forestall the removal of Zelaya before the coup. But, surprisingly or not, it’s not the US that has taken a leading role in getting Zelaya back in office. It’s been the OAS.

The AP story on the US reaction says that “The administration appeared to be counting on the threat of Honduras having its OAS membership suspended as leverage in getting Zelaya back in power.” Moreover, the head of the OAS is going to Honduras to demand that Zelaya return as president. Most importantly, several OAS countries have withdrawn ambassadors and the organization is even threatening sanctions.

An ideal response would be, I think, quick, harsh sanctions that really damage the new government and even briefly put some hurt on the Honduran people. The argument for this response would be that the new government does not seem particularly illiberal or anti-democratic. The rightful sucessor to Zelaya is in power, they are still planning on having elections and the coup was ordered by the Supreme Court and Congress. So, if they are really as benign as they claim to be, they shouldn’t be too easy to coerce into reversing the coup. Also, a coordinated, damaging response might deter potential overthrowers who, like the crew in Honduras, aren’t so much power hungry and dictatorial, but instead don’t show much fealty to the weak democratic norms that are prevalent in so much of Latin America.

No matter how this plays out, this really seems like a defining moment for both the OAS and the US to say that this type of behavior is unacceptable and will not be excused. If the OAS can show itself to be a credible advocate for and enforcer of democracy, then hopefully democratic norms in Latin America will shore up and become stronger.

One last thing: the US’ general entanglement with Honduras — through aid, immigration and proximity — is making it a much more credible and effective actor in the situation. Compare to Iran.

NYT Wants More of the Same On College Drinking

I’m not of the view that lowering the drinking age would bring about any great improvements in public health, especially on college campuses.

Best I can tell, college students binge drink for pretty simple reasons. There is a culture built up around drinking in college, alcohol is easily available and the general lack of responsibilities and rules that are the hallmark of life as an undergradute significantly alter the typical cost-benefit calculations of engaging in risky behavior. Policies that explicilty deal with harm reduction, like amnesty policies for students who seek medical help because of alcohol usage, could probably work, but the idea that one can make college drinking safer by regulating it or bringing it into the fold seems rather farfetched. Binge drinking is dangerous, and students do it because they want to.

But I think this New York Times editorial on binge drinking isn’t particularly insightful. It points out that raising the drinking age has reduced binge drinking among young people — except for college students. The Times suggests that “Whatever the causes, the solutions almost certainly lie mostly within the colleges — perhaps with better counseling or stronger bans on under-age drinking — not by lowering the legal drinking age.” Well, maybe. Perhaps this research shows that trying to reduce drinking at colleges may not be worth the hassle. If the law isn’t doing enough to deter students from engaging in illegal, risky behavior, than “better counseling” probably won’t help more and “stronger bans” may end up costing a school more in ill will and mistrust than what they gain from a marginal decrease in binge drinking

I Only Approve of Potential Trade Wars

So, there was a big econblogosphere throwdown when Obama said that he was wary of a provision in Waxman-Markey which would require the President, in 2020, to  tariffs on some goods from countries that didn’t have caps on carbon emissions.

As Paul Krugman and Eric Posner point out, this kind of policy makes total sense on purely economic grounds. The point of putting a cap on carbon is to raise the price of goods whose production involves carbon emissions to something approximating the negative externality that is all this carbon warming the planet. So, a tariff which incorporates this cost would seem to make a lot of sense. Otherwise, production of carbon intensive goods will shift from the US to foreign countries that don’t cap emissions and we’ll have gotten approximately nowhere.

On the other hand, starting a trade war with China over this would be A. economically damaging and B. wouldn’t help anyone reduce emissions. Moreover, even if we do manage to pass and implement the fairly weak Waxman-Markey bill, we’ll still have next to know  There are also all sorts of other practical objections to actually implementing this policy.

Even if we manage to pass and implement this fairly weak Waxman-Markey bill, we’ll still have next to no moral capital in 2020 to browbeat countries that are still poor and have low per-capita carbon emissions into doing something about warming.

The best case scenario is that the tariff provision acts like the EPA claiming authority to regulate carbon dioxide. During the House debate on Waxman Markey, some Democrats justified their support for the bill on the grounds that EPA regulation of carbon would be too horrible to bear. As John Dingell put it, “”If you want something to shudder about, take a look at that.” Hopefully the possibility of tariffs will act in a similar way — as a harsh, unilateral and unappealing way of dealing with a problem that will be rendered unnecessary if the parties just get their act together.

And much of this debate is academic. Obama can sign a bill with the tariffs and says he opposes them, which would cool down any countries that are worried about protectionism from his administration. His opposition would be pure signalling because the tariffs wouldn’t go into effect until four years after he left office.

” I live in Northern California and I really don’t give a s— about that stuff”

Steve Schmidt is the man.

The GOP Makes Middle School Girls Look Like Supreme Court Justices

You should just read Jonathan Martin’s Politico article for the sheer amount of gossipy, bitchy hate brought out by Todd Purdum’s Sarah Palin piece in Vanity Fair. Basically, Steve Schmidt and Bill Kristol hate each other. And Randy Scheunemann  isn’t the biggest Schmidt fan either. The entire piece is full of great little nuggets, but this one, about  Expensive Clothing Gate and accusations that Nicole Wallace bought Palin all those clothes and then tried to blame the Alaska Governor, is simply amazing:

But Scheunemann said the clothes controversy was an entirely separate issue and one which he made no mention of in his email to Kristol.

Asked directly if he accused Nicolle Wallace of being the source behind the “diva” leak in his message to Kristol, Scheunemann said: “My e-mail did not accuse Nicolle Wallace. It said something very disparaging about Nicolle but it did not accuse her of being the leak.”

A source familiar with the contents of the email said that Scheunemann actually accused Nicolle Wallace’s husband, Mark Wallace, of being the source of the leak.

When Kristol questioned the likelihood of a male like Mark Wallace using such a gossipy term as diva, this source said, Scheunemann wrote back that Mark Wallace knows something about divas because he’s married to a diva.

So yeah, it basically went down like this:

The King of Pop

This is obviously absurdly late, but I really think anyone who tries to underplay Michael Jackson’s death has to realize that the the argument that his death and life weren’t hugely signifigant relies on fairly contestable premises.

Namely, that pop culture doesn’t amtter at all.

Arguably, Michael Jackson was the most famous celebrity in the world. And even if he wasn’t the most recognizable face, he was certainly the most beloved musician ever, in terms of sheer numbers. I don’t need to regale you with the facts. Well, maybe I do so one can understand the scale of his fame.

Thriller is highest selling album  of all time. Bad had five number one singles. He was the first black man regularly to be on MTV. In Gabon, he was crowned a tribal king. Pop music can be split into two eras, pre Jackson and post Jackson. Oh yeah, he wrote nearly all of his big hits. He was the greatest dancer who could sing and the greatest singer who could dance. News of his death almost broke the internet.

If you care a whit about culture, if you care at all about the fact that other people care about culture, then yes, Michael Jackson’s death probably was the biggest story of the day, if not the week. Oh yeah, and that’s not mentioning all that weird stuff he did.

Some argue that Jackson’s celebrity — the changing appearence, the strangeness, the alienation, the accusations, the chimpanzees — surpassed the reasons anyone initially cared about this eccentric pop star. And in the minds of many, especially those who were only conscious during the weird years, he was just Wacko Jacko. But notice how the coverage of him, the remembrances have mostly been about the music. We’ve seen more footage of his first moonwalk than him dancing on the car at his second trial. This may be painfully anecdotal, but I’ve heard people my age talking about how they just realized how good his music actually is.

While it’s certainly true that the biggest victim of the celebrity saturated culture was Michael’s own sense of self, there is also the sad fact that, for so long, people only chose to focus on what wasn’t particularly exceptional. How many mentally and physically sick child stars who were beaten by their fathers and were worldwide celebrities since the age of 11 were at all normal? His music, his influence and his cultural legacy, on the other, were truely miraculous. Hopefully that’s what we will remember.

Count This, Count That

Republican intransigence in approving Obama nominees has been absurd on two levels. First, in general, the President should get to appoint his own people, unless they’re massively incompetent, corrupt or crazy. And second, when Republicans have made a stand against particular nominees, their reasons haven’t made much sense.

Case in point: Robert Groves. The background is the Republicans are making a big stink about ACORN being one of many groups that are signed up to be a 2010 census partner. Which means, according to the Wall Street Journal story by Jake Sherman, ACORN will be “identifying job candidates, encouraging its members to participate in the count and distributing literature explaining the importance of the census.” Other groups doing this include “Target Corp., Goodwill Industries and Telemundo.” Now, I understand why Republicans are worried about ACORN and Telemundo being involved in the census. It’s not that their involvement will lead to fradulent results, but that they will encourage and facillitate an accurate counting of minority, urban and poor populations. These groups, of course, are much more likely to be Democrats, and inasmuch as the census affects the apportioning of congressional districts and the distribution of federal funds, Republicans are right to be concerned. But they should at least be honest about the fact that their political fortunes are directly tied to counting as few poor minorities as possible.

That the GOP’s griping about the census is a mere pretense is most evident in their obstructing the appointment of Robert Groves, who happens to be one of the premier statisticians in the area of survey methodology. He’s exactly the type of person you want running the census. But because “he is an expert in statistical sampling and conservatives say the Constitution bars sampling for the decennial count”– they’ve managed to extract from him a promise that he won’t use sampling techniques and are still holding up his nomination. And while the Court — incorrectly in my view — ruled that sampling could not be used in apportioning congressional districts, conservatives are clearly deploying a convenient interpretation of the Constitution so they can make sure that the Census does not count the whole population.

Now, the Obama administration and the Census Bureau need to do a better job justifying why we have a census that goes beyond simply recording how where everyone lives, but still, this Republican intransigence is contrived and dishonest and should be called out as such.

Breaking: Hunter Gatherer Societies Were Incredibly Violent

Best I can tell, a key part of being a serious, interesting liberal thinker is to take some outdated shibboleths of the Left, and then criticize them very vociferously. The original way of doing this was to say all sorts of horrible things about communism — this just meant telling the truth. Then you would criticize the New Left, and then later you would say that America was afflicted by a Vietnam Syndrome that burdened us with unnecessary doubt when it came time to intervene in Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo or Iraq.

Well, my left-wing shibboleth, that very few people take seriously, is going to be any notion that hunter-gatherer societies were at all “better” than agricultural, civilized, centralized ones. Although there is some evidence that agriculture lead to the beginning of epidemic disease and may have, initially, decreased life expectancies, there is also the fact that hunter-gatherer societies were – and are – incredibly violent. An interesting article in New Scientist on the work of Santa Fe Institute evolutionary biologist Samuel Bowles has these intriguing bits of data:

In ancient graves excavated previously, Bowles found that up to 46 per cent of the skeletons from 15 different locations around the world showed signs of a violent death. More recently, war inflicted 30 per cent of deaths among the Ache, a hunter-gatherer population from Eastern Paraguay, 17 per cent among the Hiwi, who live in Venezuela and Colombia, while just 4 per cent among the Anbara in northern Australia.On average, warfare caused 14 per cent of the total deaths in ancient and more recent hunter-gatherers populations.

Now, this isn’t a pure inditement against hunter-gatherer society. For one, all this evidence comes from around 10,000-15,000 years ago, when agriculture was emerging and, as Bowles speculates “climactic swings that occurred between approximately 10,000 to 150,000 years ago in the late Pleistocene period may have pushed once-isolated bands of hunter-gatherers into more frequent contact with one another.” Second, any data gleaned from violent death rates among hunter-gatherer societes in Australia, Brazil or South Africa has to be treated very carefully, because those societies clearly aren’t the same as the ones that predominated in our pre-civilization days.

But the overall point that societies that exhibit very few of the hallmarks of civilization also exhibit very high rates of violent death, and moreover, that the occurence of violent death has been decreasing constantly, even including the horrible institutionalized mass death of the twentieth century.

Now, I don’t think very many on the left actually think that hunter-gatherer societies are particularly admirable or that they represent a model that we should emulate, but there is a particularly credulous school of social anthropology influenced by Franz Boas, which seems to have an almost Romantic attachment to pre-civilization societies and is willing to believe the best about them, despite evidence to the contrary.

Michael

I just found out. From about 5:30 on, I wasn’t using my blackberry because it was low on battery. It turns out that this Korean woman tried to tell me at a busstop in Fairfax, but I couldn’t understand what she was saying.

Wow. Mark Sanford and Ayatollah Khamenei must be thrilled.

In all seriousness, this is all quite sad. In fact, the entire Michael Jackson saga from the late 1980s on is really a tragedy. His ability as a performer was really on a different level.

Because The Only Type Of Promotion Is Self Promotion

Randall Terry is nuts. His nuttiness was most prevalent when I was either not alive, alive only according to pro-lifers like Randall Terry, or an infant, so the piece was informative for me. I also read the entirety of his most recent book, A Humble Plea, which was quite the trip.  Check the piece out.

Hmmm, What’s the Difference Here?

Bruce McQuain confuses VA hospitals with Army hospitals, Ezra points this out, and Megan McArdle comes in to say this:

But here’s the thing:  Army hospitals have all the advantages that single-payer advocates love about the VA.  They’re unified.  There’s no profit incentive–indeed, the doctors are on quite low salaries.  They have great incentives for preventive care.  They certainly don’t have any profit motive to provide bad care.  So why did Walter Reed suck?  And what guarantees that the VA is the system we’ll follow, rather than the multiple other dysfunctional government systems everyone hates?

Well, how about the fact that Walter Reed was dealing with a population that had been injured in war. Suffice to say, this isn’t the normal health care population. And while I’m sure the VA pool differs from the general pool, I’m also sure that the Army/Walter Reed patient pool is much, much different from any cross section of the general public. From an organizational standpoint, a lot of problems at Walter Reed had to do with problems unique to the Army bureaucracy, as well as to the fact that they were fighting two wars at the time. Also, it seems awfully pessimistic to assume that, in a world where we decide to create a VA like system, the government would emulate the bad example, as opposed to the good one.

John Derbyshire

A certain other young blogger and I were talking about how much we adore that cantankerous, racist, homophobic, charming, lovable sui generis nut that is John Derbyshire. I mean, not only did he write a book about the Reimann Hypothesis and appear in Enter the Dragon, but he may have written the greatest paragraph in the history of political commentary:

However shocking the things I am saying here may seem in this long tranquil time, I guarantee that when the first U.S. carrier is sunk by Chinese action, or the first American city is erased by a Chinese ICBM, Chinese nationals, including those who are U.S. Citizens, will be hustled into camps faster than you can say “executive order” and will stay there for the duration, whatever the ACLU– or even the Supreme Court– thinks about it. I hope the camps will not be very uncomfortable, for I shall be there too– the Derbyshires travel as a family. I also hope that I shall be able to maintain sufficient detachment to understand that a responsible U.S. government really has no choice in the matter. (emphasis mine)

Wow. Just Wow.

(Yes, this was written some 9 years ago, but some things are just too noteworthy for timliness to be a concern)

Obama Gets It, The Public Gets It…Congress Should Get It

The health care debate is very, very weird. Obama and his advisers are doing a good job of keeping their eye on the ball by viewing health care reform as primarily a fiscal policy that is our only hope to stop the expanding health care sector from taking over our economy. It so happens that the public massively supports a so-called “public option” which is our best chance to reduce costs because it would introduce a big government supplier into the health care market, which could bargain down costs and focus on providing health care as opposed to screening out sick people so as to make as much money as possible, which is what private insurers primarily do.

Obama supports a public plan — or something close — because otherwise “health reform” just turns into the government subsidizing a bunch of people buying private health insurance without any real reforms besides expanded coverage.

And yet, the public plan is see as the Rubicon that many centrist senators — including Democrats — won’t cross, for fear of offending the interests who would lose out from a cheaper, more efficient health care system.

And while it’s depressing that there actually may be just enough senators to block  actual reforms, one would hope that the popular President and the public actively supporting a particular policy option could sway the more craven of the bunch.

What’s It Gonna Cost Ya?

Ryan Avent, Conor Clarke and Matt Ronglie all have already covered this, but the CBO released their projections for how much the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill will cost. Contrary to Republican nightmares, Waxman-Markey will probably end up cost $175 per household, instead of $1,600. So, you know, esteemed economist Martin Feldstein turned out to be wrong by nearly a factor of ten.

And while this may be outside the purview of the Congressional Budget Office, it would be nice if they could score — somehow or another — the economic benefits of the world not melting down.  Call it dynamic scoring for liberals.

UPDATE For all you coming here from Yglesias, he’s very much right that just calculating the “costs” of climate change in terms of, say, expected US GDP lost is rather silly. The “somehow or another” was meant as wiggle room for all the concerns about probabilities of total disaster or the “cost” of Bangladesh no longer existing. I was just saying that if conservatives can agitate for the CBO to score tax cuts with consideration for economic growth, then we should agitate for the scores of global warming related legislation mentioning that global warming is bad and has “costs” — economic and otherwise.

There’s A Difference Here

Dan Senor and Christine Whiton, two former Bush Administration officials, argue in Time that all previous democratic transitions happened with Western support, and so we should more explicilty support Moussavi and the protestors in Iran. This seems like a fair point, but when you look at the actual examples they give, they are clearly irrelevant to the current situation.

First they mention the Eastern Bloc. And yes, it’s true, the United States supported opposition movements in those countries, and the Eastern Bloc was  mostly sucessful in transitioning to democracy. But the difference between, say, Poland and Iran is that Poland only had a totalitarian system because it was imposed on them by the Soviet Union. So, not only were they essentially occupied by a despised foreign nation, but once that regime became impotent, overthrowing a political and military strcuture that was dependent on Soviet support became much easier. Iran’s authoritarian leadership is not a satellite of another unpopular foreign power. This strikes me as a fairly important distinction.

Their second example is just absurd — South Korea. Senor and Whitman write that “energetic bipartisan U.S. pressure peaked in 1987 when U.S. ambassador Jim Lilley hand delivered a letter from President Reagan urging against a crackdown on protesters. The advice was heeded. Two weeks later the protesters’ demands were met, and Korean democracy was born.” But can you think of any differences between Iran and South Korea? Oh yeah, South Korea was not only a strong US ally, but there have been tens of thousands of US troops stationed there since the end of the Korean War. It seems obvious why the authoritarian leadership would be more susceptible to US pressure.

What’s worse about this piece is that when they’re done dealing with the arguments against more active US involvement against the regime, they never say exactly what Obama should do differently. This seems like a fairly important question that nearly every conservative Obama critic has been oddly silent on.