Put Up Or Shut Up

I will take conservative complaints about Planned Parenthood seriously the moment someone shows me a conservative pro-life organization that does half the work it does to provide birth control, test for STDs, and generally provide for reproductive health.

This should be an easy way for social conservatives to try and seize the high-ground. Undercut Planned Parenthood by taking away its lock on the uncontroversially good things that it does, and see if public opinion prefers an organization just like Planned Parenthood but without abortion.

But as far as I know, there’s no comparable organization. Which tells me that the people complaining about Planned Parenthood are either in the grips of bizzaro-world anti-feminist arguments against birth control, or simply don’t give a damn about people getting sick from STDs.

And for that reason, not just pro-choice people like me, but also pro-life people should see the attacks on Planned Parenthood as cynical and callous.

What You Can Say While Being Objective

What would an objective article on waterboarding have looked like during the Bush administration? A history of the practice would have to state that the US government considered it torture for several decades and that this status was essentially unquestioned until after September 11th. It would also record that the US had hanged Japanese soldiers for waterboarding US POWs, and perhaps that as Governor of Texas, Bush had imprisoned a sheriff for waterboarding a prisoner. It would describe the experience of being waterboarded as essentially like the experience of being drowned, and record that there were often lingering psychological effects. Against that, such an article would have to report that legal memoranda had argued that waterboarding was not torture and was legal. It might also report that some people responded to the September 11th attacks by arguing that even torture should be justified as a response to terrorism.

That article would have been objective in even the restrictive sense that the American media uses. Every claim is not only true, but unambiguous and part of the public record.

And I don’t recall seeing anything like that during the Bush era. Individual claims might appear in an article about the waterboarding debate, but I never remember seeing a single article that would give the  full picture. 

Journalists are sometimes criticized for treating both sides of any disagreement as equally respectable, even if the facts are squarely on one side. But we can see that it’s not just that–the media won’t even collect and report facts that aren’t in dispute, if the net effect would be to undermine the claims of one side.

Ron Paul The Conservative

Will Wilkinson’s article on Ron Paul’s reactionary nationalistic libertarianism is great stuff.  So long as Paul stands no chance of being elected, he’s a welcome piece of resistance to certain evils of the Republican party, but he’s not much of a libertarian and he’d make a terrible president.

We’ve Already Paid

Older people often say that any changes to Social Security benefits should exempt them from cuts “because they have already paid for their benefits.”  You’ll hear versions of this argument from politicians and pundits but especially from people who are concerned about their own Social Security income. It also just so happens that it’s obviously wrong, for reasons which I’d never noticed until last month.

The idea is that you can’t cut the benefits of someone who is 60 because they have already paid, but since I’m 27 and have only been paying Social Security for less than a decade, you can cut mine.

This doesn’t make a bit of sense, because if you cut my future Social Security benefits, I still go on paying taxes at the same rate for the rest of my working life. Actually, I’ll pay higher taxes because the Social Security tax rates increased sharply throughout the 70s and 80s.  So I will pay for 40 some years of my working life, just like a member of my parents’ generation.¹ If all those years of taxes guaranteed them benefits that can’t be cut, why don’t I get the same thing on the basis of the taxes that we all know I’m going to be paying? There’s no conceivable difference.

That said, there is a different reason that if Social Security is cut, it should fall more heavily on people my age (that’s a big if because there are decent arguments that Social Security is the wrong place to make cuts).  If I had to, I could start doubling my cat food purchases and put away enough money to fund all of my retirement without a cent from Social Security.  In contrast, someone who is 60 or 65 has extremely limited flexibility.  If you are a year away from retirement you can’t make major changes to how much you have saved regardless of what you do for that year.  People about to retire have made plans incorporating current Social Security payments, and you can’t fault them for doing that.  So you really can’t make large, disruptive cuts to their payments.  That’s not an absolute ban–responsible retirement planning involves preparing for uncertainty–but it sets pretty substantial limits on what we can do the older generation’s pensions.  It also happens to be entirely separate from the argument set out at the beginning.

¹ Who were, admittedly, walking uphill both ways in the snow at the ages when I sat here blogging.  I should’ve ditched the first person and talked about a hypothetical member of my generation who’s had a less cushy life and who has consequently spent more of his teens and twenties paying payroll taxes.  Oh well.

Deep Thoughts About Federal Finances

A constitutional amendment that automatically raised taxes when there was a revenue shortfall would also be a balanced budget amendment.

Saint Patrick’s Day

I love Saint Patrick’s day.  Every year, conservatives dutifully stick to their principles and explain that Saint Patrick’s day is un-American because we don’t have hyphenated identities, and everyone just needs to assimilate.  It’s refreshing to note that they don’t just apply these ideas to people with darker skin.

The American Muslim Success Story

Every couple of weeks since it was published, something has made me wish that everyone in America would read Radley Balko’s article, The American Muslim Success Story. I forget the most recent provocation, but the article continues to be relevant. Everyone should read the article, and if you can twist the arm of one Palinite Republican into reading it, so much the better.

Obama Started Killing Americans, But I Mean…I Had Healthcare

The Obama administration has filed a brief arguing that no one can legally challenge their order for the assassination of Anwar al-Aulaqi because it would compromise “state secrets” (Washington Post, Glenn Greenwald). To review: Anwar al-Aulaqi is an American citizen living in Yemen. While he is suspected of aiding Al-Qaeda, he has never been convicted or even charged with a crime in the US courts. It is probable that he is guilty of crimes, and possible that he could be convicted, but Obama has pre-empted that by ordering his assassination, which can be carried out even if he is located outside of a combat-zone.

Claiming the power to assassinate Americans is odious enough, but the Obama administration has raised the stakes by claiming the courts cannot hear the case. Given the way the state secrets claim is made, does anyone imagine that the administration would ever allow a legal challenge to any assassination without crying about state secrets?

In effect, the administration is trying to lay the groundwork for a right to kill Americans that is not subject to real judicial oversight. So long as the legislature is cowed, the constraints on the President would be extremely weak. I suppose it’s nice to think that Obama isn’t the type to abuse this–though I hope you’re asking yourself what kind of man asserts this power–but does that change all that much? What matters are the powers themselves, not the man holding them.  Obama is not a tyrant, but he is repeatedly demanding tyrannical powers.  Not only may future Presidents be less trustworthy, the powers themselves are abhorrent.

I would not want to slander the majority of Democrats by saying that they’ll support this decision just because it’s Obama. That would be unfair, as most Democrats have the good sense to say that this kind of decision is really just awful, before pivoting and talking about healthcare. With this unpleasant business forgotten, they can get on to explaining how the “professional left” is full of people who “need to be drug tested”, see the glass as “half full”, and act petulant when the President doesn’t give us “world peace.”

There’s too many accomplices out there.

We’ll Enforce The Law, But We Don’t Know What It Is

This is an a noteworthy story about a man who refused to answer the Border patrol agents’ questions about the details of his overseas trip, and was held for 90 minutes as he spoke to various officials. His refusal to answer questions is perfectly legal–absent reason to arrest or otherwise interrogate him in relation to some crime, a US Citizen has an unconditional right to reenter the US. Note that he did make an adequate customs declaration, without false statements, and allowed them to perform all searches they asked to do.

There’s a lot of points that can be said, but one lesson fits with what we already know–an enormous number of law enforcement officers do not know what they need to about citizens’ rights. This is amply demonstrated every time a citizen or journalist is arrested for exercising their right to record the police.* While I vacillate on whether Lucaks’ action was worthwhile, that it pressures law-enforcement to learn about their legal responsibilities can only be a good thing. It is simply unacceptable for law-enforcement officers to be ignorant in this fashion.

* Just in case you want legal advice, there is a patchwork of local and state laws. In some places, many forms of recording may be illegal. But in a majority of places, it is legal and there are hundreds, if not-thousands of arrests for citizens exercising their rights to record police in jurisdictions that allow them to do so.

False Confessions In The NYT

A New York Times article discusses the phenomenon of innocent suspects confessing to crimes. In some ways, I don’t think the article is that good. While it describes a few false confessions and notes how police may feed information to the suspect to make a confession look accurate, what’s needed is the kind of vivid description that will make people understand how someone could feel hopeless enough to confess to a crime they didn’t commit.

The upshot, which is mentioned in the article, is that recording police interrogations is essential. Even with recorded interrogations, defense lawyers would face a huge task in defending an innocent client who’d confessed, but without them, it would be almost impossible, even where there’s a great deal of other evidence at hand. Sadly, I think no amount of reporting will change that dynamic.

By Definition, Schmibertarians Aren’t Libertarians

Will Wilkinson and Brink Lindsey, two notable “liberaltarian” voices, have just left the Cato Institute.  John Quiggin responds, saying it means that Cato will lose any independence from the Republican party.  I’m not comfortable to judge that particular claim about Cato, though I’ll note that the two names I’m most familiar with don’t fit the picture: Gene Healy and Julian Sanchez.  Of course there’s a selection bias there: the Cato figures I’m most likely to know about are the ones who spend the most time making trenchant critiques of Republicans or the Tea Party.

The point I’d like to make is that there is no logical reason why an ideological shift to doctrinaire libertarianism should move Cato towards the Republican party.  Someone like Brink Lindsey reaches out to liberals and thinks that libertarians should focus more on economic freedom than small government.  But even a libertarian who has no time for liberals can be a fervent critic of the Republican party.

All it takes is a bit of honesty.  Take Radley Balko for instance.  When it comes to economic matters, he’s a pure libertarian, complete with constant snark about liberals and the left.  Frankly, I find too many of his economic posts to be … But it doesn’t matter, because he’s a libertarian, and so has had ample grounds to criticize Republicans for a decade or more.  It helps that Radley’s focus is on civil liberties, police misconduct and human rights, but any honest libertarian naturally have huge problems with the Republican party.

Of course, some people will claim the mantle of libertarianism while turning a blind eye to everything the Republicans do so long as they lower taxes.  Perhaps that’s what the Koch brothers are pushing Cato to do (I genuinely don’t know).  But that has less to do with ideology, and more to do with powerful people trying to serve their own interests.

Too Broken To Fix

Jay Rosen, an NYU professor and source of many great insights about the nature of the press, has several obversations worth reading about the wikileaks dump of Afghanistan documents.  The one that most resonated with me concerns the likely effect of the leak:

8. I’ve been trying to write about this observation for a while, but haven’t found the means to express it. So I am just going to state it, in what I admit is speculative form. Here’s what I said on Twitter Sunday: “We tend to think: big revelations mean big reactions. But if the story is too big and crashes too many illusions, the exact opposite occurs.” My fear is that this will happen with the Afghanistan logs. Reaction will be unbearably lighter than we have a right to expect— not because the story isn’t sensational or troubling enough, but because it’s too troubling, a mess we cannot fix and therefore prefer to forget.

Last week, it was the Washington Post’s big series, Top Secret America, two years in the making. It reported on the massive security shadowland that has arisen since 09/11. The Post basically showed that there is no accountability, no knowledge at the center of what the system as a whole is doing, and too much “product” to make intelligent use of. We’re wasting billions upon billions of dollars on an intelligence system that does not work. It’s an explosive finding but the explosive reactions haven’t followed, not because the series didn’t do its job, but rather: the job of fixing what is broken would break the system responsible for such fixes.

The mental model on which most investigative journalism is based states that explosive revelations lead to public outcry; elites get the message and reform the system. But what if elites believe that reform is impossible because the problems are too big, the sacrifices too great, the public too distractible? What if cognitive dissonance has been insufficiently accounted for in our theories of how great journalism works… and often fails to work?

Smoking Regulations Or A Smoking Ban?

One thing I’ve yet to see from someone supporting bar and club smoking bans is a serious attempt to justify a ban as such. Even assuming that you’ve established that there’s a public interest in, say, protecting waiters from smoke, and that this interest justifies regulations, you still have to show that you can’t achieve your goal with something weaker than a ban. If incentives or regulatory “nudges” do roughly the same work, then they’re to be preferred.

In the case of smoking bans, there are a lot of replacement options, and it’s a heavy burden to argue that they wouldn’t suffice. Here are a few ideas I’ve brainstormed–someone more familiar with restaurant or OSHA regulations could surely find more:

1. Require expensive licenses for bars that allow smoking
2. Auction a limited number of smoking permits
3. Mandate a wage-supplement for servers and bartenders in smoking restaurants (perhaps this wouldn’t work because it couldn’t apply to cooks, etc).

Bear in mind that roughly a third of the American public smokes, and food service workers are presumably no exception. There’s little reason to worry about them being exposed to second-hand smoke, so even a regulatory regime that leaves a substantial fraction of bars might be compatible with protection for workers.

There’s a lot of variance in state and local smoking bans, so this challenge applies quite differenly to them. Pennsylvania, for instance, allows smoking in any establishment that makes more than a certain percent (80% maybe?) of its income from alcohol sales. Such laws are much more forgiving, and I legitimately can’t be too bothered by them. That said, I think that they could still be better. Once you’ve admitted that some bars can have smoking, why is the relevant feature the percentage of income coming from booze?

Two Parties, Few Choices

In the past, I can’t say I found Glenn Greenwald’s commentary on health care reform insightful, but when Jamelle says he shows “fundamental ignorance of how our politics and government operate” that he’s “self-righteous” and “peddling …bullshit”, count me out. The offending paragraph from Greenwald comes from The Atlantic, in an interview with Conor Friedersdorf:

…the two-party system does not work in terms of providing clear choices. No matter who wins, the same permanent factions that control Washington continue to reign. That’s true no matter which issues one considers most important. At some point, it’s going to be necessary to sacrifice some short-term political interests for longer-term considerations about how this suffocating, two-party monster can be subverted.

While Jamelle responds as if this is ludicrous, I think it’s more right than not when it comes to describing our politics. Where in the two party system do you find opposition to farm subsidies, endless war, police misconduct or indefinite detention? If you’re concerned about the drug war, the bloated defense budget, or unconditional support for Israeli actions, you can at least get scraps from the Democrats.

It’s quite clear that there are many issues where there is no meaningful choice between the two parties. On many others, we are left with only marginal differences. True, Greenwald errs by saying that there his point stands regardless of the issues you’re concerned about–he’s just wrong about most of the issues that Jamelle cites (healthcare, labor and environmental law). But that’s no reason to dismiss him out of hand. It’s a reason to qualify his point, and arguably a reason to support the Democrats. But if it’s a reason to support them, it’s a reason to do it through gritted teeth.

I’m not a third party worshipper–I’ve always held to the depressing thought that our political process does well at representing the mainstream of American political opinion, and that more parties would just mean marginally more representation for views that would still never influence legislation. That opinion is open for debate, however, and the claim that we need to look to third parties is ultimately a question of tactics and priorities. It might be wrong. To decide, we’d have to weigh the impact of the real differences between the parties against the many issues where there is no difference.  But let’s not pretend that the desire to restructure politics is out of bounds or absurd. So long as we accept that dogma, we’ll be left with the same conventional wisdom that renders crazy and evil ideas impervious to criticism.

So when someone says there’s no meaningful choice in our two party system, I find it far more notable how many issues they are right about than to criticize them for overgeneralizing.

A Boycott Won’t Hurt BP Much

The NYTimes has published a bit of unwelcome information for anyone who is boycotting BP service stations–there’s almost no connection between the oil that BP pumps out of the ground and the gas that is sold at BP franchises. Refineries buy and process oil from multiple companies, then sell gasoline that is not derived from any single company’s oil (updated for clarity). BP eventually adds some additives, but they are a small portion of the cost per gallon, and don’t give BP a ton of profit. Lastly, the service stations are primarily franchises, and BP would prefer to sell the few that it owns.

What If Political Scientists Wrote The News?

Slate answers that question. Of course, internalizing the message is the hard part.

Oklahoma’s Abortion Law

Under a new law in Oklahoma, if you are a pregnant woman and your doctor provides false information during the pregnancy, you no longer have the legal right to sue.

What is sick about this law is that while passed by wingnuts who hope to prevent abortions by keeping women in the dark, it will harm many families who would have carried their babies to term regardless. Even a woman who has no intention of having an abortion regardless of fetal abnormalities might benefit from the ability to prepare for the task of raising a child with a disability.

I am relatively pro-choice, so my judgment may be clouded here, but I think that even someone who is anti-abortion should view this law as a step too far. For the implicit principle authorizing this law seems to be that if the government has an interest in deterring abortions, then anything is permitted to achieve that goal. This logic is all too common in American political discourse, but we must recover the capacity to deliberate about means as well as ends. Outside of thought experiments and casuistry, what justification is there for a doctor to lie so that he can manipulate his patient’s behavior?

I can only hope that there are few doctors who would take it upon themselves to deceive their patients in this way.

Surprise, BP Took Excessive Risks

This Wall Street Journal article makes a convincing case that BP’s negligence was to blame for the oil spill. When I first heard that people were boycotting BP, I had the neurotic worry that offshore drilling might be so intrinsically dangerous that all companies doing it are equally culpable and BP was just the one to lose its gamble.  That wouldn’t necessarily make punishing BP a bad decision, but knowing that BP took on unnecessary extra risks makes everything more straightforward.

Update: And BP has a history of terrible safety. (via Daring Fireball)

Bank Simple

BankSimple is an easy, intuitive, and social bank for people who appreciate simple online services. Unlike other banks, we don’t trap you with confusing products nor do we charge any hidden fees. No overdraft fees. We use sophisticated analytics to help you better manage your finances by providing you an individualized service, catered to your needs and goals. (About Bank Simple)

I could be wrong, but based on a minute’s thought, I would be willing to make a low-stakes bet that that their actual approach is to cherry pick the good (low-cost) customers who’d read and be attracted to this pitch.  (From kottke)

Catherine Mohr’s Talk About Energy Costs

My friend Michael mentioned a talk by Catherine Mohr in which she discusses how complex it is to judge the environmental costs of your actions (TED talk; video podcast on iTunes).  Her specific concern is energy use, and she analyzes a few examples in frightening detail.  It’s frightening because by the end, you might despair of ever getting these decisions right yourself.

Recommended viewing if you’ve ever asked yourself “exactly how far would I have to drive these batteries before I’d be better off tossing them in the trash?”

I know most of you have never asked yourself that question, but watch the talk anyway.  It’s just 10 minutes.