Bipartisanship should be an effect, not a cause

Apparently, Congress and pundits favor "bipartisan" legislation, that is, bills you can get members of both parties to sign on to. Rhetorically I ask, but why? Surely we can all dispense with the naïve notion that the best solution, or the one most desired by the people, lies at the mean between the party positions. There are at least three reasons off the top of my head proving the preposterousness of that notion, and you can probably come up with more than me.

Really, bipartisanship is supposed to be a reflection of the value of a bill. The bill's not good because it's bipartisan; rather, the bill's inherently good, so good that people want to publicly support it, even if it's not what their party came up with. A bill might be bipartisan because a priori it's good.

Lack of bipartisanship is generally framed as a negative for the bill's originator: "Obama has failed to deliver on the promise of bipartisanship for his agenda." But there's a perfectly good converse view. If a bill's good, or popular -- the health care public option, for example -- opponents of the bill would be right to fear the lack of bipartisanship. If they're too dumb or stubborn to back what's good, then they're useless to their constituents.

An agenda setter should put good legislation out there, with no compromises solely to garner support from across the aisle. If it's good enough, and popular enough, then all the Congresscritters in vulnerable seats are under pressure to back it. Bipartisanship is an indicator that the bill was good in the first place; but it is only a correlated side-effect, not a necessary (or sufficient) condition for good legislation.

TNC cannot stop talking about slavery

If you read only 200 things Ta-Nehisi Coates writes this year, this should be one of them. Also, you will only have read about a fifth of the great stuff he writes.

Insightful, as always, but I don't think TNC is quite right here. Or perhaps he is overall, but some nuance is in order.


Specifically, I think there's a historical line that goes like TNC says "We tend to think", namely that slavery was kind of this regrettable cruelty that the world in general was tolerant of, until we got civilized and disavowed it.

But there is at least an acknowledgment, in the historical line I was taught, that America (like always) was exceptional. That line says, what with the explosion of cotton (which Eli Whitney's invention contributed to), the economy of the South became completely dependent on slavery as an economic fuel, kind of like we talk about being dependent on oil today. And that dependence shifted the culture, both toward a vigorous defense of the economic interests in slavery and toward dehumanization of slaves on a scale and to a degree beyond whatever the barbaric practices of yesteryear had been.

But that's just my impression from my history classes. I'm not sure there's a shared "American" conventional point of view on this.

Where I feel TNC has it right is that "we have never grappled with this," `this' being that most of the culture of America is formed from the fractious and unresolved shards that remain from centuries of dehumanizing black people, and the struggles both violent and nonviolent to erode and destroy them.

Again, referring to my own education, the mythology of America is the "melting pot" notion of disparate cultures coming together and peacefully sharing the opportunities of a new land. But this, it seems to me, is a gloss, a "and they all lived happily ever after" resolution of the unresolved issue that defines America. We (which of course is not really "we", since we weren't there, but the imagined "we" of this country) invented a new kind of racism, and have never been able to put that dire genie back into the bottle.

Click here to see the rest of this post...

New names for "Soft Power"

In reply to the third in the series of Matt Yglesias talking about the term "soft power":

El Cid's #20 also describes the potential downside to "influence", which otherwise enjoys popularity as being accurate and already used commonly in this context.  Influence contrasts with control: it sounds weaker because it implies you _might_ affect behavior, or you might not.  "Power" suggests a guarantee of the result you want (if you've got enough).

I'm stunned that "non-military power" and "civilian power" have come up but no one's mentioned "peaceful power" or a variation.  Maybe other people think "peace" sounds too weak also, but I think it's got rhetorical weight.  No one calls himself a warmonger; no one says they're against peace.  Opponents could imply "peaceful" means unwilling to use military force, but I don't see that gaining traction. 

I think Matt's second notion -- the "appeal of the brand" -- can be summed up as "Respect".  Respect, like "political capital", can be thought of as an element of peaceful power (look!  it's catching on!).  However, it's a cleric in the Peace Power party: respect doesn't make other nations do what you want directly, but it makes the diplomatic resources, development aid, etc. more effective.  (Curse you, pseudonymous in nc at #24, for planting the RPG analogy seed!)

uncertainty in voting results

In a comment to this post from the Citizens about the Minnesota senate race:

I'm not a statistician, but "margin of error" refers to the likelihood of a survey not accurately reflecting the population the survey is taken from.

Since the votes are what decide the election (we don't care what the population who doesn't vote thinks), the vote is a census, not a survey, and doesn't have any margin of error in the statistical sense.

But, as Florida 2000 demonstrated, you are right in thinking there will be "a different tally every time they are tallied."  This isn't a mathematical issue, but a practical one.  Out of three million ballots, some are going to be weird, subject to interpretation, of imperfect provenance, etc.

I _think_ the error rate associated with this sort of thing varies a lot based on the exact situation.  Different voting machine types (and different voting machines) will produce ambiguous results at different rates; different jurisdictions will have different judges who consider different proportions of provisional ballots to fall into the category of "subject to legal interpretation."

If, after the error-checking of the recount, the difference is still only a couple hundred, the chances are good that there's enough "fuzziness" in some of the votes that the result will come down to luck -- who has the higher tally when the courts (or the election laws) say "enough".  But not necessarily -- it's possible that even a very small margin is demonstrably genuine in the eyes of the law, if the voting machines are so good they don't produce many ambiguous results.  (This is the point of electronic voting machines, although optical scanning offers a clearer paper trail to check results against.)

I say "in the eyes of the law" because there's no way to determine beyond the shadow of <i>any</i> doubt that every voter's intent has really been accurately captured.  This boils down to the impossibility of absolute certainty -- at some point we draw the line and say "yes, it's possible that this electronic voting machine switched the vote of every 10,000th voter and we didn't happen to catch it with comparison to exit poll data, but that possibility isn't worth pursuing."

In a comment to this Matt Yglesias post:

It's like the song says: you've got to be carefully taught.

Hearing that ("You've Got to be Carefully Taught") from the Wee Kids on the Kid Power album is surely before Matt's time.  (To be fair, I never saw the show on television, since it was a little before _my_ time too.  Still have the album though.)

And that seems like a harsh reminder that progress is won only inch by inch.  The same sentiment that was an indictment of racism in 1949, and bore repeating in 1974, is equally appropriate regarding homophobia in 2008.

The more things change, the more ... we must fight for change.

Bob Gets Sentimental

Here's Ta-Nehisi Coates, contemplating "Obama's campaign and the values of parenting:"

Obama's mother, a relatively young woman when he was born, will not be here to see him inaugurated, should he win. Whenever, I think of that I just get sad--mostly because she did know the rewards of parenting and threw herself at her kids. There's something unjust in the fact that she won't get to see the results of all her work.

Here's the thing, and I hope it offers Ta-Nehisi some solace -- I disagree. I think she did see the results of all her work. Her son grew up to be a good and mighty man. That we are electing him to be President is just our recognition of what she already knew.

In comment to Ta-Nehisi Coates

A comment to this right here:

I cannot express how excited I would be at the opportunity to be
your white spokesperson. Resume available upon request. Email me!

Either this idea of class-criticism is just strawmanship, or I'm
blind to the intricate folkways of white people. I, frankly, suspect
that it's both.

And, in my opinion, your suspicions are entirely correct. There is
quite a bit of strawmanship going on, as your original citation
evidences. (No one actually ridicules anyone for being a "rube", except
maybe carnies. Otherwise, "rube" is only used in accusations -- "he
thinks you're a rube!")

This purposely confuses _everyone's_ understanding of the intricate
folkways. Matt was right to point out that eating moose isn't white
ghetto-equivalent ("whetto?"), but it's being purposely confused with
shooting and eating squirrel or possum, which is. (Although this
indicator is a stereotype that rarely occurs in the wild.) Snowmobiling
is whetto when it's competing with cross-country skiing, but in the
wider context (competitive snowmobile racing?) it's comparable with
Ski-doos and ATVs, which are on the expensive side to really indicate
whetto (we're getting into nouveau riche tacky territory -- if you're
snooty about ATVs, you're snootifying against how those rich people are
spending their money indulging their whetto tastes, which introduces
new social dynamic twists -- but more on this in a moment.)

"She supports drilling!" and "...where did she go to school?" are
what the author imagines cartoons of ecofascists and bluebloods would
exclaim, and nothing more.

A point worth pointing out, vaguely related to this post by Matt,
is that what actual lower class whites do is only peripherally related
to the classist notion of whetto. Predominantly, the class tension is
between white people who spend their disposable income within some
cultural norm structure, and white people who spend their disposable
income in some other cultural norm structure that the first group
thinks is how dumb poor people would spend their money if they had any.

I'm serious about that spokesperson gig. And I can be more concise
than this -- more words, fewer words, using "trailer trash" instead of
"whetto", whatever you want. I aim to please.

In comment to Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman has a nice description of how the bailout of bad mortgage securities would get paid for. In response, I commented:

In this description, is "the Public" predominantly the Chinese government and sovereign funds I keep hearing about, or is that hyperbolic xenophobia?

I've heard both that the bailout would be paid by the taxpayers (who would be "on the hook" for the assets, in case they have no value), and that the feds could actually make money by buying low and selling high.

Both of these seem to be ignoring that the bailout will be paid for with borrowed (or soon-to-be-borrowed) money, so even if the feds did sell off the toxic paper for more than they bought it for, the net effect might still increase the deficit.

Comment on Alaskan budget

In response to this post at the Citizens:

Just in case you're curious, although I wasn't able to exactly match up the data from RbR's reference and US West's, it certainly seems (within a percentage point or so) that the tax breakdown corresponds to oil revenue this way:

Property tax (1.9%): this corresponds to the $65.6M paid entirely by the oil companies.
Select sales (6.4%): this corresponds to $218M paid (presumably) by consumers.
Corporate Income Tax (23.6%): this corresponds to $771.3M, of which 77% ($594.4M) is paid by oil companies.
Other (68.1%): this corresponds to $2,396.4M, of which 96% ($2,292.3M) is the production tax paid by oil companies.

I
should point out that the percentages don't match the numbers exactly,
and there's a little leftover taxes ($28.2M "Fish Tax", $16M
"Commercial Passenger Vessel Tax") that I didn't know how to
characterize. Together, these are less than 1.3% of Alaska's tax
revenue.

Summing up, that big "Other" chunk of the Alaskan tax
pie is almost entirely oil production tax. The purple Corporate Income
tax is mostly oil company taxes also.

Percentage of tax
revenue paid directly by oil companies is about 84%. Percentage of the
entire Alaskan budget paid directly by oil companies is about 43%, paid
by federal money is about 12%, and paid by interest on investments is
about 31%. About 10% is paid by Alaskan citizens in the form of select
sales taxes, fines, etc. The remaining bit (4%, though this is also
where the rounding error lives) is from other corporate sources, like
mining.

--------------

Palin's big triumph as governor
was getting a new oil and gas tax passed that increased the tax rate on
the oil companies. So, when you hear she "took on the oil companies",
this is what it's about. Strangely, the Republicans never describe it
as "raising taxes on businesses", which I'm pretty sure Fred Thompson
told me was equivalent to raising my taxes. Also, it increases unemployment and stifles the economy, I am led to believe.

If,
as RbR quoted, Palin said she "protected the tax payers", that demands
clarification. The tax payers in Alaska are clearly the oil companies,
and she's raised their taxes. I doubt they think that's protection. :)

Matthew Yglesias describes my own puzzlement as well.

My mostly unhelpful take, which echoes some of the comments on Matt's page (especially mine), is that the counterpoint to the conventional wisdom about Watergate ("it's not the crime that brings you down, it's the coverup"), the unconventional wisdom if you will, is that you can get away with murder if you really stick to the coverup story.

Empirically, Bush &amp; company saw this work with Iran-Contra (which gave birth to "plausible deniability"), and just took that ball and ran with it.

More abstractly, the whole idea of adversarial debate (political parties, litigation, etc.) is that there's some arbiter that'll decide that one side or the other has the better argument, or makes the valid point. In politics, this role might be filled by the rationality of the opponent (who concedes the point), or the media (the journalists report the point with supporting facts), or the elites (the pundits concede the point), or "the people" (the opinion polls convince the politicians to concede the point).

If all those potential arbiters are impugned, indecisive, or unwise, whoever's in power can do whatever they want. Any outcry or opposition can be met with sheer stubbornness, and there's no authority to make you submit to reason or punish your transgressions.

The first and last potential arbiters (the opponent's fair thinking and the public) are pretty idealistic concepts, and have been ignored routinely by politicians throughout history, usually without repercussion. (Note, however, that even though he knew it would be disastrous, Nixon &lt;i&amp;gt;didn't&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt; burn the tapes. Maybe even &lt;i&amp;gt;his&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt; understanding that there &lt;i&amp;gt;was&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt; the rule of law, or at least no justifiable reason not to turn over the tapes, was what led to the truth coming out and the requisite consequences. Have some politicians concluded from this that they need to ignore their reason in the pursuit of power?)

In my opinion, a large part of the "difference" between 1974 and now is due to the failures of the other two arbiters (reporters and pundits). If every news network were running McClatchy's stories, and Broder and his peers were agitating for impeachment...

The failures of the media (reportage and commentary) are ample fodder for the blogosphere, but my notions about &lt;i&amp;gt;why&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt; they're failing so spectacularly &lt;i&amp;gt;now&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt; are ill-formed and naive. Clearly the qualification process for punditry (and journalism) has broken down, and most importantly, wrongheaded thinking and/or meaningless coverage isn't resulting in loss of audience, at least not enough to provide economic pressure to get rid of lousy news &amp; opinion.

But I don't know why that is, or why it hasn't been such a problem until now. Maybe James Watt put stupid juice in the water supply under Reagan, and their brilliant plan has finally come to fruition. (I did say "ill-formed and naive", right?)

Click here to see the rest of this post...