Liberalism without Cynicism

is a tall order.

Name:
Location: Vancouver, B.C., Canada

I'm a PhD student in econ at UBC. For fun, I write this blog.

Thursday, October 04, 2007

Housekeeping.

Hi everyone. LWC is going dark again, at least in terms of original content, until I have submitted my thesis next year. I'll be posting occasionally over at the Galloping Beaver. I'll use this space to post the links to my posts, which of course shouldn't discourage anyone from reading my (much more prolific) GB co-bloggers.

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Too bad about the children...

Jonathan Cohn alerts me to the fact that it turns out the Democrats don't have enough votes to override Bush's veto of S-CHIP expansion in the House:

Eighteen Republicans in the Senate supported the measure when it passed, including four who face difficult challenges next year. In the House, 45 GOP lawmakers defected.

There were 265 votes in all for the measure when it passed last month. Supporters need to pick up 25 more votes to override the veto.

...But 151 Republicans opposed the bill when it passed, enough to sustain the veto, and absent numerous switches, Bush's veto seemed secure.

...The original Senate vote was 67-29, enough to override. But the House votes first, and if Bush's allies sustain his veto there, the bill dies.



The quotes in the AP piece from the Republican leadership are pretty special too. What a bunch of evil shits. Meanwhile, the head R left the flight suit at home this time:

Bush vetoed the bill in private, absent the television cameras and other media coverage that normally attend even routine presidential actions.

Fuckers. It's time for them to go.

Sunday, September 30, 2007

Compostable cutlery.

I encountered these cool things at a wedding in Ohio. Works just like a regular plastic fork!

Bonus US culture shock: The clerk who was excited about meeting someone from Canerica.

Monday, September 24, 2007

Ground Zero panders.

It's perfectly understandable that New York authorities wouldn't let Ahmadinejad visit Ground Zero to lay his wreath for "security reasons", although it frankly would have been brave and gracious to make an exception. What's galling is the outrage being ginned up over the supposed sacrilegious symbolism of Ahmadinejad paying respect to the victims of an American tragedy. Frankly, it's American cultural insecurity at its worst, and it's especially depressing to see Hillary Clinton playing along:

Several presidential candidates also condemned the requested visit. Hillary Clinton, the New York senator and Democratic front-runner, called the request "unacceptable." Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a leading Republican, called it "shockingly audacious."

A lot of things Ahmadinejad says and does are "unacceptable" and "shockingly audacious" (for example), but I really wouldn't think publicly lamenting the deaths of 2700 innocent Americans would be among them.

But of course, for stupid 911 posturing, Rudy always takes the cake:

Rudy Giuliani, who was mayor during the attacks and is now a Republican presidential candidate, branded Mr Ahmadinejad's request "outrageous" and described him as "a man who has made threats against America and Israel; is harbouring [Osama] bin Laden's son and other al-Qaida leaders; is shipping arms to Iraqi insurgents; and is pursuing the development of nuclear weapons".

...Giuliani...said that "under no circumstances" should Ahmadinejad be allowed to visit the World Trade Center site.


The idea underlying all this outrage is that Ahmadinejad's concern for the victims of 911 is hypocritical, and that's true, judging by the information in this interesting piece from just over a year ago. Ahmadinejad says he's sorry about 911 but allows al-Qaida operatives, including Saad Bin Laden (who wasn't directly involved in the 911 attacks), to run around free in his country or at best sees them as possible pawns in US-Iran relations rather as criminals whose culpability rises above his own strategic concerns.

But hypocrisy over other nations' tragedies is pretty much a fact of diplomatic life, as might be surmised from the 0.2% of GNP that the US spends on non-Iraq-based foreign aid (about a third of which goes to Israel and can't really be considered humanitarian support). Isn't it better to have objectionable world leaders publicly siding with the victims of 911 over the perpetrators? Can't US politicians take empty diplomatic gestures for what they are? America isn't weak, so what exactly does it say that the dominant American political culture turns every goddamned thing into a referendum on its weakness?

What Craig hath wrought...

In a blip on the otherwise long-term positive trend in American public opinion on homosexuality and gay rights, an affirmative answer to the question "Do you feel that homosexuality should be considered an acceptable alternative lifestyle or not?" fell nine points between May and September according to the most recent Gallop poll. I imagine a certain senator from Idaho had something to do with this. Ironically enough, the senator himself would likely claim that this is a positive fallout from his scandal...

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Ideology and temperment.

At the end of an otherwise very good, long piece on Justice Stevens and the evolution of the Supreme Court, Jeffrey Rosen gives some advice to liberals who want to perpetuate the Stevens model on the Court:

Identifying potential Stevenses in their 40s or 50s may not be easy: Stevens after all, hadn’t evolved into the justice he would become when he joined the court at age 55. But one way to identify future Stevenses may be to focus less on ideology than on temperament. Stevens’s successor should share his dedication to preserving the deeply rooted precedents of the past, and that dedication reflects his sensibility and character more than his personal politics. When we talked, I was especially impressed with Stevens’s character: his engagement, curiosity, combination of toughness and vision, strong internal compass and refusal to go along with the crowd, his decisiveness, analytical power, modesty (but not false modesty), devotion to the court as a steady institution and sense of wonder and gratitude for the remarkable opportunities that had come his way.


That's all very nice, but isn't the tendency for moderate liberals like Rosen to basically conflate good temperament with their own preferred ideology? I share Rosen's approval of Stevens' hyper-moderate and egalitarian jurisprudence. But that's because I'm also a moderate liberal.

Given how alien the view of the Court's movement conservatives, and the people who appointed them, are it's easy enough to see your own side as decent people holding out against conservative monsters like Scalia and flaky, sanctimonious divas like Kennedy. That's fine, but you ought to know that's what you're doing. A dedication to moderation on the Court, deference to legislative decisions when made within Constitutional and historical boundaries and a steadfast refusal to the let the Executive expand its own Constitutional and historical boundaries, are all part of Stevens' ideology, whether or not they're also evidence of a noble character. That ideology isn't terribly partisan, but only on the grounds that it was once associated with moderate Republicanism and is now associated with mainstream Democrats, something Stevens fairly obviously wishes were not true. Sure, tough but moderate ideology is probably highly correlated with tough but moderate temperament, but it's the former that matters, not the latter.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Yowsa.

The average life expectancy for players who make it to the NFL is 55 years, "more than two decades shorter than that of the public at large". Talk about blood sports!


Update: anonymous, in the comment(s) has an even more interesting fact:

Try rock stars:

Researchers at Liverpool John Moores University, led by Prof. Mark Bellis, studied 1064 British and American artistes who became famous between 1956 and 1999.

They compared the life spans of these rock stars to the life expectancy of the general population (matched for age, sex and ethnic background) up until 2005.

Their average life span was 35 years for European and 42 for North American stars.

Talk about blood sport :)

Happy anniversary!

The New York Times' article on the upcoming 50th anniversary of Atlas Shrugs is a pretty standard offering in the liberals-gawking-at-conservatives school of journalism. The reporter tries his or her damnedest to take seriously and be objectively respectful about this whacked-out conservative icon on the grounds that all sorts of rich people love it, and Alan Greenspan takes it seriously, and the GOP keeps winning elections. Logic dictates, then, that there must be some deep, inexplicable merit to Ayn Rand novels, much like with Nascar. And maybe, if one conducts enough interviews, one of those wealthy Rand aficionado will say something intelligible about what exactly that merit is.

Which is to say, the piece is pretty painful. Except for this part, which is just funny:

The book’s hero, John Galt, also continues to live on. The subcontractor hired to demolish the former Deutsche Bank building, which was damaged when the World Trade Center towers fell, was the John Galt Corporation. It was removed from the job last month after a fire at the building killed two firefighters.


Long live John Galt!

Monday, September 17, 2007

Hillarycare redux.

Ezra has the low-down on the Clinton health care plan unveiled today, which turns out to be quite ambitious, similar to the Edwards plan. (One minus is that it does through tax credits what Edwards' plan does through subsidies. My view is that tax credits are fantastic for middle class folks like me who've been eyeing that $400 pair of shoes and find out - yes!!! - they don't have to donate that extra cash to Stephen Harper this year. For poorer people, typically without buffer stocks of saving, there's a much higher utility gain (or smaller current utility loss from being forced to purchase health care) from not having to pay as much in the first place than from getting money back as a refundable credit at some future date.)

One thing that strikes me with all these plans though is Ezra's observation that:

And if you don't go through the newly expanded FEHBP or the public option, preferring to keep your current insurance, you'll still be dealing with a heavily-regulated and reformed insurance industry, which can no longer price discriminate based on preexisting conditions or demographic characteristics, refuse you coverage, or deny renewal of your policy -- including if you change your job. So if you like your current insurance but quit your cubicled existence at MegaCorp, your insurer can't drop you. All this matters because it keeps the private programs from having too much capacity to undercut the risk pools of the other options. It also destroys the elements of the insurance industry's business model that rely too explicitly on screwing you over.


Doesn't it basically destroy the insurance industry's business model, period? How does a private insurer who can't deny anybody coverage, or charge anybody extra for their coverage regardless of their current condition or mortality, survive? Particularly if it has to compete with a public plan that can, and should, run at a serious operating loss?

I'm not Jonathan Cohn (or Ezra Klein), but it seems to me that either the Clinton or or the Edwards plan - introducing a heavily subsidized public option to compete with a newly regulated private market - is basically the death knell for widespread private insurance. Private plans can likely still appeal to the very wealthy and to those who want insurance for non-core services. But if they pass (and as a political note, I think Edwards is probably more likely and willing to go down swinging tyring to pass his plan that Clinton is) either plan as proposed is a gateway to socialized medicine.

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