The Reality-Based Community

Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune sends GWB a Christmas card the President could have done without:

Beyond the imperial presidency

What we have now is not a robust executive but a reckless one. At times like this, it's apparent that Cheney and Bush want more power not because they need it to protect the nation, but because they want more power. Another paradox: In their conduct of the war on terror, they expect our trust, but they can't be bothered to earn it.

Ouch!

I'm not sure Chapman has it right on all the details of the NSA warrantless-wiretapping question. It's quite possible both that the program has real value and that it involves technology that can't be squared with the particularity requirement of a warrant. But the revelation of the program by the New York Times and the nature of the claims the Administration has made in defending that program have helped to precipitate the super-saturated solution of distrust created by five long years of continual abuse of power.

I said at the time it sounded like a stray story from The Onion that had made its way into the real newspapers, but I have to admit being completely taken in by the student at UMass Dartmouth who claimed to have been visited at home by DHS agents after checking Quotations from Chairman Mao out of the university library. It turns out to have been a complete fabrication.

My apologies for credulously relaying what turned out to be false information.

Footnote All I can say in my own defense is: Who would have expected an undergraduate to be as inventively mendacious as George W. Bush or Bill O'Reilly? If that boy will just move hard right and learn to stick with his story rather than backing off when it's exposed as untrue, I see a great career for him in politics or journalism.

Before his execution, I made some unflattering references to Stanley "Tookie" Williams and the people demanding that he be spared. It seemed to me then, and seems to me now, that as the reputed co-founder, and certainly an early leader, of the Crips, Williams was in effect a serial killer and a purveyor of domestic terror, even though law enforcement couldn't tie him directly to any of the hundreds (at least) of murders and the uncounted acts of violence and intimidation conducted by his followers.

(Someone from the NAACP demanded rhetorically why, if gang leadership was such an awful thing, the government wasn't going after the leadership of the KKK. To that I have two answers: 1) Making cases against the leadership of violent organizations is hard. 2) Over the past quarter-century, the Crips have killed at least a hundred times as many African-Americans as the Klan.)

So Williams, despite his post-conviction spiritual enlightenment and good works, was not the poster child I would have chosen for the anti-death-penalty movement.

All that said, I was grossly unfair to at least some of Williams's defenders, who were asserting not his redemption but his innocence: not in general, since his role with the Crips is undeniable, but his innocence of the four murders of which he was convicted.

Williams was convicted largely on the word of a jailhouse informant who bargained his way out of his own potential trip to Death Row by asserting that Williams had confessed to him. Such testimony is, of course, inherently unreliable.

If we're considering the question of whether Williams was guilty of the specific murders he died for, rather than the question of whether in some non-legal sense he deserved to die, then his role as the co-founder of the Crips cuts for him rather than against him. His notoriety could only have increased the pressure on the LA Sheriff's Department and the LA DA's Office to cut corners in order to convict him. That the prosecutor in fact used peremptory challenges to remove all blacks from the jury pool is undisputed; nor is there any question that he used strongly racist language (e.g., "jungle") in seeking the death penalty. Is it implausible that a prosecutor willing to do that might also offer perjured testimony and suppress exculpatory evidence? Hardly.

It goes without saying that, in a government under law, people should be punished only for crimes they actually committed. So, insofar as the fuss about Williams was about his innocence of those particular crimes -- and by extension about law enforcement and prosecutorial misconduct -- the people making that fuss were doing worthy work, and deserve respect for it.

I have nothing original to add to the discussion about the NSA warrantless wiretapping program. (Substantively, I doubt that the program itself represents a major threat to civil liberty.) But, not wanting to remain entirely silent, let me try to sum up in one sentence what seems to be the central question of principle posed by the case:

Does the President have the Constitutional authority to violate criminal laws whenever he judges, in his sole discretion, that those laws might interfere with defending the country?

It is logically possible to answer that question in the affirmative. But no one who does so can properly call himself "conservative."

Hilzoy has a post to which the only rational response is a wordless scream of anger and despair.

Having made that initial response in private, I offer the following angry and desperate words:

Of course, the lack of power in the court to order a remedy for the Uigurs' wrongs shouldn't matter. When court of competent jurisdiction finds that an act of the executive branch is illegal, the President, having taken an oath to "faithfully execute" an office whose chief duty is to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed," is oath-bound to order that the illegal activity cease. His failure to do so is grounds for impeachment.

But we have a President whose word isn't worth the spit behind it, and a Congressional majority blinded by partisanship. So the illegal (and inhumane) action of holding innocent non-combatants prisoner will continue, forever or until we elect a better President, whichever comes first.

Any constitutional republic depends for its functioning on the practice of mutual self-restraint among officials, institutions, and parties. If everyone pushes his power and authority to its limits, the constitutional order can't hold together. (That's the Hobbesian paradox: since power can be checked only by greater power, constitutionally limited government is impossible.)

Any given individual, institution, or party can gain at least temporary advantage by exercising less self-restraint than its rivals. But that's a risky game to play, both for the system and for the entity that chooses to push its envelope. Since an un-self-restrained power center is a threat to the entire order, the other power centers will tend to gang up against the aggressor. That, of course, is the Madisonian formula: to "let ambition check ambition."

So a republican political culture has the tragic hubris-breeds-nemesis dynamic built in. As Richard Neustadt said of Nixon in what seemed to be the flush of his power, just after his re-election: "He has no sense of limits. He will be destroyed."

No Administration, not even Nixon's, has sailed closer to the wind than Bush II. That helps explain the reaction it is now facing: from the Fourth Circuit, from the FISA Court, from various parts of Capitol Hill, and even from some parts of the conservative media-intellectual complex. I make no prediction; events are inevitable only in retrospect. But I find Neustadt's words both comforting and energizing in the current darkness.

The WaPo has a second slice of what looks to be a dynamite profile of the disaster that is the Department of Homeland Security. Michael Grunwald and Susan Glasser claim that FEMA's feckless response to Katrina resulted as much from bureaucratic battles Helluva Job Brownie had earlier lost with his superiors at DHS as from his own operational incompetence.

If I were teaching a course on bureaucracy, I'd think about using this series as the opening reading.

Radley Balko is still following the Cory Maye case -- he's found, for example, evidence that the medical examiner whose testimony largely decided the verdict is a practitioner of the worst kind of courtroom junk science -- but at the moment he seems to be alone. So far, the case has completely failed to break into the mainstream media.

Under current circumstances, "blogger power" is purely derivative. All the blogs in the world can cover a story, but if it doesn't catch the attention of "real" media or participants in the electoral process, they're just moving electrons around.

By contrast, the New York Times or NBC News or Rush Limbaugh or Karl Rove or Nancy Pelosi can make something news -- force other players to attend to it and thus make their audiences aware of it -- pretty much on their own. Not every time they try it, but often enough.

Things may change. I have fantasies of a world in which keeping a blog becomes a truly mass activity, comparable to ringing doorbells or making contributions: in which anyone who thinks of himself as politically engaged has one, read mostly be that person's one-degree-of-separation circle and mostly for personal rather than political reasons. (There are plausible, but not airtight, arguments for the proposition that in such a world we would be better governed.) I'm even working, in my small way, to move toward that world by encouraging all my politicized friends to start blogging.

In that world -- assuming that mass bloggers paid attention to what other bloggers are saying -- blogger power would be a reality: an Atrios or a Hindrocket could make something news, circumventing the professional media, by mobilizing the blogosphere. (Not every time they tried it, but often enough.)

But that world, if it will ever exist, is not the world we now live in. In our world, blogging can be a moderately potent activity, but only insofar as it moves other pieces of the system.

Footnote I told you so.

Update Battlepanda has a graph of blog activity on the Maye case.

I wonder how long the Bush boosters will continue to peddle the fairytale that the Iraqi elections were a success? The folks nearer the action don't seem to think so.

Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad is trying to put a good face on the Iraqi election results, but he doesn't seem to be willing to just make stuff up. He's pointing with pride to the process:

Overall, from what we know so far, the election went very well. It's too soon to speak definitively about the results, but everyone, all the communities, participated. That was very important. That was a significant step.

but he's not happy about the outcome:

It looks like people preferred to vote for their ethnic or sectarian identity. But for Iraq to succeed, there has to be cross-sectarian and cross-ethnic cooperation. At this point, it seems sectarian and ethnic identity has played a dominant role in the vote.

The really bad sign is that the losers aren't taking the results at all cheerfully. Here's Salah Mutlak, who ran an independent slate against the religiously-dominated coalition that took must of the Sunni Arab votes:

I don't think there is any practical point for us for being in this National Assembly if things stay like this. This election is completely false. It insults democracy everywhere. Everything was based on fraud, cheating, frightening people and using religion to frighten the people. It is terrorism more than democracy.

Of course it's impossible to tell, at this distance, how valid his complaints are. But valid or not, his language is not the language of a politician in a country where democracy is likely to work.

Footnote "Fraud, cheating, frightening people, and using religion to frighten people." Sound familiar? Hey, I didn't know Karl Rove had even visited Iraq.

Great! We now have an official Department of Homeland Security typeface and color scheme, but no actual organizational capacity to protect us from anything in particular.

Someone needs to tell the Bush Administration that "marketing" is a complement to actually doing the work, not a substitute for it. Of course, any idea started by Joe Lieberman and staffed out in a process run by Andy Card figured to be a disaster. And of course having five WH staff guys who don't seem to have known anything about the actual operations of the agencies involved make key decisions didn't help.

For example, the Gang of Five decided to move the Immigration and Naturalization Service, but not the Executive Office of Immigration Review, which housed the immigration judges, out of Justice and into DHS. Why? They didn't know that there were officials called "immigration judges." And of course they couldn't ask any of the people who do the actual work of running the government, because the whole deal had to be kept secret from the rest of the Executive Branch so Tom Ridge and Andy Card could "bamboozle" the Cabinet secretaries by presenting them with a done deal.

Richard Clarke wanted to include a Department-level policy shop; as he said, that's just Bureaucracy 101. But Mitch Daniels at OMB didn't want to spend trivial amount of money that would have been needed to staff such a shop.

No, I'm not making this up. Read the damned story, complete with quotes from the people involved.

GWB isn't stupid. But the Bush II Administration -- except for its mastery of partisan politics, its capacity to keep the Republicans on the Hill in lockstep, and its brilliant media control -- is an idiot studying to be a moron, and not studying nearly hard enough.

Abramoff may be about to roll over. (The Washington Post has substantially the same story, adding that Abramoff would be expected to testify against "numerous" members of Congress.)

It would be sad, of course, if Abramoff got off lightly just because he has the most to give the prosecutors in the way of information about other malefactors. But that's the way conspiracy prosecutions work.

And of course Abramoff is still potentially on the hook in the Boulis murder case, which is a state rather than a Federal prosecution. (The fraud case involving the same set of players is Federal.) If the hit-men talk, and if they know anything about Abramoff, he could mostly skate on the Federal charges and still wind up doing time at Raiford, which is very hard time indeed.

But the good news is that it's hard to imagine the prosecutors giving Abramoff a deal unless he can give them -- DAH-de-dah-dah DAAAAAAAAA -- Tom DeLay.

The White House may yet regret its support for DeLay. I noticed that in his Jim Lehrer interview GWB tried to back away from his earlier avowal of DeLay's "innocence" by saying that he'd only meant that DeLay was presumed innocent until proven guilty. But that doesn't change the fact that Dick Cheney just went down to Texas to speak at a DeLay fundraiser.

On the other hand, Bush and his cronies may not have any choice. Say Abramoff rolls over on DeLay, and DeLay is suddenly looking at some serious prison time of his own. He'd be trying to think of someone that he could roll over on in his turn. If Abramoff had already provided the information on the rest of the Congressional scum, DeLay could only get a break from the prosecutors by giving them someone even more important than he is.

And who in the world is more important than the House Majority Leader?

DAH-de-dah-dah DAAAAAAAAA ...

Some friends and I have decided to start a blog devoted entirely to the Valerie Plame affair and related scandals. The idea is lots of aggregation of Plame-related material from both conventional media and blogs, plus a little original analysis and opinion. We need someone to help on the technical side: both designing the page and putting in filters for a newswire feed and various blog feeds.

Time is of the essence; we'd like to have the page up and running before the New Year (or the Rove indictment, whichever comes first). If you're interested in doing some work over the next couple of weeks, please email me.

I don't believe this for a minute, but it should have happened:

As the El Al plane settled down at Ben Gurion airport, the voice of the captain came on: "Please remain seated with your seat belts fastened until this plane is at a complete standstill and the seat belt signs have been turned off. We also wish to remind you that using cell phones on board this aircraft is strictly prohibited.

"To those who are seated, we wish you a Merry Christmas, and hope that you enjoy your stay.....and to those of you standing in the aisles and talking on your cell phones, we wish you a Happy Chanukah, and welcome back home."

Andy Sabl writes (under the heading "Holly Paganism, Batman"):

You're right about the general superiority of classic Christian carols to classic secular ones (though the comparison is a bit unfair in that the former have been around a lot longer for inferior ones to be weeded out).

And then there's "the Boar's Head Carol," which is a pure Yule feast song as well, I think.

Andy is surely right about pagan origins. And the idea that traditional music tends to be better than current music because it's had a longer time to get winnowed out is certainly plausible. But to my ear, at least, the current shlock isn't a sample from the same distribution that produced the Yule classics. So I think there's more at work.

As we look back at the history of any art, what we see is mostly a vast wasteland, with very small islands (in time and space) of high creativity. More great plays were written in fifth-century Athens (pop. 20,000) than in 19th-century America.

So, although (as Mike O'Hare has pointed out) population growth means that there are more potential musical geniuses alive today than were born, cumulatively, before 1900, it's quite plausible that the actual level of music-making here and now is simply much lower than it was in some earlier times and places, either because our musical culture is less healthy or because some of those natural musical geniuses are writing software instead.

And it's also possible that Christianity as a social organism has much poorer musical taste today than it used to.

Yep. That about sums up the "Intelligent Design" hoax. I very much doubt that Sir Thomas More (now St. Thomas More) would approve of the antics of the "Thomas More Law Center."

Full text of the judge's opinion. Note that the judge is a staunch conservative, a Bush II appointee and a possible Republican candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania.

Hat tip: PZ Meyers at Pharyngula, via Kevin Drum.

Of course, anyone who thinks that the Bushite version of "homeland security" in general, and the Patriot Act library-snooping provision in particular, represents a threat to civil liberty is crazy. This, for example, could never happen in real life.

I mean, why would HSA bother to track down a student who ordered a copy of the Quotations from Chairman Mao (the "Little Red Book") from his university library for a paper in a course on totalitarianism? The explanation is obvious: Once again, the editors of The Onion have managed to plant a story in the supposedly serious press.

I regret to say that Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon was taken in, and provided the usual display of what the right-bloggers call "Bush Derangement Syndrome." She's not really pro-civil-libeties; she's on the other side.

(Amanda credits Mediagirl; I found the Pandagon item through Salon's Daou report.)

Have you noticed that all the happy talk from the White House and its friends about the Iraqi elections have been about the mere process of holding elections, as if who actually, y'know, won was some sort of minor detail?

Well, the results are starting to come in, and they ain't pretty. The religious parties, most of them more or less anti-American, just about swept the boards in Arab Iraq, and the secularists -- Allawi's list among the Sunni Arabs and Chalabi's among the Shi'a -- got pretty badly croaked. (Allawi is claiming fraud, perhaps accurately. But since his opponents control the machinery, I doubt it will matter.)

Yes, I too find it hard to wrap my head around the idea that something bad for Ahmed Chalabi could also be bad for the world. But given that the Shi'a religious coalition that whomped Chalabi's party includes Moqtada al-Sadr as a full partner, even Chalabi starts to look good by contrast.

No doubt most of the Iraqi political class would rather have us hang around for a while, to keep them from gobbling one another up. But we may be facing a situation in which no one dares to anger public opinion (and the Iranians) by standing up for that point of view. What are we going to do if the new government politely asks us to make sure the door doesn't hit us in the ass on our way out?

Dell sold Jane Galt a computer, charged her credit card for it, stalled for a few weeks until it was too late to get another in time for Christmas, and then decided to stop manufacturing the model they'd sold her and unilaterally cancelled her order.

It seems to me, as a non-lawyer, that this is a pretty clear breach of contract, and that Jane is entitled to damages. So are the other customers who were the victims of the same shabby trick. But of course none of them is in a position to sue.

Isn't this the sort of situation that justifies class-action litigation? Yes, I know that process is subject to abuse. But Dell shouldn't be able to get away with this kind of behavior anytime they're willing to take the bad publicity that results. And without a class action, I don't know of any way to hold them accountable.

Remember when the Boskin Commission magically made inflation go down and productivity and real economic growth go up by doing hedonic price adjustments? The principle is straightforward: if I get a better machine this year for the same money, that's like a price cut. But I had my doubts about some of the details.

In particular, what's the hedonic adjustment for rotten customer service? More generally, sellers have offloaded lots of cost and work onto consumers by replacing customer service with voicemail jail and incomprehensible websites. That ought to call for a hedonic price adjustment the other way, but I somehow doubt those adjustments are being made.

Steve Teles is surely right to say that it was "The New Property," not The Greening of America, that made Charles Reich's academic reputation. But I've come to doubt that the consensus at the time -- that the article was epochal and the book just silly -- was entirely correct.

I recall distinctly the anticipation my friends and I felt, back when I was a college senior, when The Greening of America came out in The New Yorker: almost as distinctly as I recall our disappointment that Reich hadn't done it again. (Josiah D. Thompson, the Kierkegaard scholar in Haverford's philosophy department, summed it up: "So the Revolution is going to consist of shifts in the demand curves?")

But it seems to me now that there was more to Reich's book than we gave it credit for at the time. He was praising what was later to be called "Bourgeois Bohemianism," rather than satirizing it, but is there actually any idea in Brooks's book that wasn't in Reich's? Reich managed to guess what Brooks would later report. And I'm not sure that big enough sifts in preference orderings don't constitute a revolution, social though not political.

By contrast -- and I write here under correrction by those who know more -- I've come to wonder how new the "new property" really was. It may have been a new idea in American public law, but aren't all the tranditional English land tenures "new property" as Reich describes it?

The case of clerical and academic benefices is even clearer. Macaulay describes how even Tory squires sympathized with the dons of Magdalen College after their expulsion by James II, because their fellowships constituted "freehold property." What's the difference between that sort of "property" and an entitlement under a public-benefit program?

On one point the defenders of "Christmas" against "the Holidays" have a clear advantage: they have much better music. Having spent part of today in LaGuardia, O'Hare, and LAX, I was subjected to the incessant drone of non-sectarian "holiday" music, and was reminded of the basic fact about it: it's unspeakably lousy.

Genuine Christmas music, by contrast, is pretty great: compare Good King Wenceslaus, The Holly and the Ivy, Adeste Fideles, Angels We have Heard on High, and God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen with Winter Wonderland, Frosty the Snowman, I'll be Home for Christmas, and (shudder) The Jingle Bell Rock. (Somehow neither Bach nor Handel ever made in onto the radio playlist.)

The line between good and bad doesn't quite track the line between secular and religious; some of the old Yule glees (the Gower Wassail is my favorite) are terrific, while The Little Drummer Boy (which I've somehow been spared so far this season) is about as bad as they come.

Still, on balance I'd rather have my Jewish sensibilities a little bit offended than my musical taste grossly insulted. Tom Lehrer may have been right to say that the problem with folk music is that it is written by the people, who by and large lack talent, but at least in this instance they're way, way better than the pros.

Update Andy Sabl comments, and I reply.

A reader writes:

So I took my older son to the Museum of Natural History today to keep him out of the way while my younger had friends over to the house.

Because he was so interested in playing a triceratops video over and over, I had more time than usual to look at the displays and examine the exhibits. The Museum is a very pro-evolution place, and the lucid explanations of fossil dating, the age of the planet, and so forth left me feeling optimistic after being depressed about the intelligent design "debate." The museum is a very popular spot, and how could anyone come in here, look at the exhibits, and not be better informed and overwhelmed by the evidence? Just then, a boy scout troop walked by. One of the scouts was telling another that "All these bones are fake. They bury them and then dig them up."

I wonder if this is official Scout doctrine now, along with the detestation of homosexuality and atheism.

If the President's legal advisers will award him the power to do whatever he thinks the national security demands, then why does it matter whether the Patriot Act is renewed or not? And as long as the President insists on taking any Congressional grant of power as a grant of unlimited power, why should the Congress grant him anything at all?

My prediction that the press wouldn't notice the contradiction between GWB's saying Friday night that talking about his warrantless-wiretap program would threaten national security and his talking about it Saturday afternoon turns out to have been wrong. I'm told Tim Russert talked about it on Meet the Press, and this morning's New York Times , mentioned it, albeit in about the twenty-fifth graf.

Glad to know that there are some actual journalists out there.

On the other hand, the Times (also this morning) had a good story about what's actually happening in Colombia, with the paramilitary warlords threatening to take over the place by "democratic" means (i.e., winning elections by threatening to shoot anyone who runs against them). But the story doesn't note that the President offered Colombia as a model for Iraq in his conversation with Jim Lehrer.

Glenn Reynolds is mostly against extending the Patriot Act. Does it bother him that the President thinks that his opposition is "irresposible" and "endangers the lives of our citizens"?

Probably not.

Alternatively, is it possible that Glenn is actually "on the other side"? Maybe he's a sleeper member of A.N.S.W.E.R.

You never can tell.

Glenn Reynolds wonders why Democratic leaders in Congress didn't give Karl Rove and his allies -- including, of course, Glenn Reynolds -- a chance to question their patriotism and charge them with abetting terrorism by making public their objections to the President's warrantless wiretaps of domestic communications.

Beats the Hell out of me. Maybe they prefer winning elections to losing them.

Mike O'Hare's riff on "Christmas" exemplifies why I invited him to join this group. I agree with just about every syllable.

One exception: Passover (Pesach) was always one of the major Jewish feasts. The Passover Seder, with its odd but satisfying combination of liturgy, colloquy, family, and gluttony, is one of the most wonderful rituals I have ever encountered, and by far the best way to introduce a non-Jew to what it means to be Jewish. (Shabbat dinner is also terrific, but only in the minority of Jewish families that make a real ritual out of it.)

If enough Christian Americans were sufficiently Christian to make Easter a major American feast*, treating Pesach as a holiday of parallel importance would be entirely appropriate, not a bit of nonsense like pretending Chanukah belongs in the same league with Christmas.

My proposed greeting for this time of year: "Happy Holidays, and to Hell with Bill O'Reilly."

* A hint of how badly things have degenerated over time in this department: In 1936, the atheist H.L. Mencken called the Abdication crisis "the greatest news story since the Resurrection." In 1969, the nominally Christian Richard Nixon said that the landing on the moon marked "the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation." If Billy Graham minded, he didn't say so.

At 6 p.m. EST Friday evening the President refused to discuss his secret orders for warrantless wiretapping because it would endanger national security to discuss intelligence sources and methods.

At noon EST Saturday the President confirmed that he had authorized warrantless wiretapping and defended that action as necessary for national security.

At no time will any mainstream journalist notice the contradiction. Winston Smith would be proud of them.

Update Wrong! Good for Tim Russert.

Of the many outrageous elements of the Beloved Leader's interview with Jim Lehrer last evening -- both the outrageous things GWB said and the outrageous way Lehrer deferred to him, even murmuring "exactly" again and again as President recited some ridiculous lie -- let me pick out one on which I perhaps have some comparative advantage as a commenter.

Mr. Bush cited the war against the FARC in Colombia as an example of a country where an insurgency had been substantially defeated, even though violence has not entirely stopped, and suggested that Iraq might tread a similar path to stability. But of course the defeat of the FARC has been accompanied by the rise to political dominance of the paramilitary militias, which are now running most of the cocaine and heroin exports to the U.S. So what the President was offering as a model of "victory" was equivalent to having the various Shi'a militias take over Iraq.

"Such another victory and we are lost."

Footnote Was the President fibbing about Colombia, and deceiving Lehrer? Or did Lehrer know that the President was fibbing and decide not to challenge him? Or was the President as ignorant of the facts on the ground as the journalist was? Truly, a post-modern Hall of Mirrors.

Who says the Supreme Court doesn't have a sense of humor?

Update

A reader thinks the Congress, not the Court, is to blame:

I'm not sure if you read the opinion regarding a state prisoner's
access to a law library, but the post you link to is a flatly
incorrect statement of what the Supreme Court held, and the case does
not imply that "the Supreme Court believes that criminal defendants
representing themselves in court are capable of doing so without
access to a law library."

I think it's a horrible restriction of the Great Writ, and there's a
case (also in the Ninth Circuit) now which is considering whether the
restriction is even constitutional. But that wasn't the issue in this
case. The Supreme Court's decision seems correct to me (and, clearly,
to the Court's most liberal, defendant-friendly members). The result
is bad, but the blame should fall on Congress.

This is the sort of case that makes me glad I didn't go to law school. But it appears that I and my librarian friend have done the Court an injustice. It's pretty clear that the Patriot Act, however bad it may be, is far from the most outrangeous of the many attacks on the basic principles of liberty under law.

Megan McArdle ("Jane Galt") offers sensible and much-needed advice on dealing with downward economic mobility. Actually, the advice is broadly applicable to about the bottom 95% of the income distribution: put savings first; distinguish between wants and needs; notice that the thrill of buying something new usually wears off before the debt from buying it is paid off; remember that lots of things could plunge you into financial crisis pretty quickly unless you have a substantial rainy-day fund saved up; consider how miserable old age can be if you enter it with too little money.

If more people listened to this advice, untold misery would be avoided. But if more people listened to this advice, we'd be living in a different sort of society. In particular, I doubt that following Megan's advice would help a single person's -- especially, but not only, a single man's -- chances in the courting market.

In good libertarian fashion, Megan's focus is on individual choice rather than social forces or public policies. But it's hard to read her posts, and Laura's post, and the related comments, without thinking how strongly they illustrate the arguments in Robert Frank's Luxury Fever.

We live under a social, economic, and political system focused on encouraging consumption. There's good reason to doubt, as Megan points out, that more consumption leads, on average, to better or happier lives, unless people are better than most of us now are in distinguishing expenditures with lasting benefits from expenditures that provide only transient satisfaction (and build up a baseline level of consumption under which it becomes painful to fall).

To paraphrase an old poem-paper by Herbert Gintis: in the richest society so far in the history of the world, is a way of life which makes hard savings decisions and solving complicated financial-planning problems at age 25 socially necessary capacities, and which even in the fact of parsimony and good planning leaves penury a constant threat as a result of several different kinds of possible ill luck, a socially necessary way of life? Wouldn't we be better off with a system that combines less relentless pressure to get and spend with stronger income-security measures, thus reducing the stakes in the game of personal financial management?

Could there by anything crazier, at a social level, than telling young people with the talent and determination to pursue careers in the natural sciences that doing so isn't a wise move from a personal-financial-planning perspective? It's true, of course. But think of the social waste involved in converting a potential biologist in to, say, a detail man for a pharamaceutical company. Even at an individual level, do we really want to live in a world in which most of us have to choose between work that is materially rewarding and work that is satisfying?

The other message that comes through clearly, both from Megan's post and from the comments to that post, is that even good planning and good discipline can't fully insulate most people from financial distress if they run into really bad luck: divorce, disease, bad timing in coming into the labor market, layoff in middle age. So even the prudent are left with the gnawing fear we boomers observed in our parents' generation and attributed to Depression-era upbringing. Is "Be afraid. Be very afraid" really the inevitable corollary of "enrichissez-vous"? Or wouldn't we all be better off in a world where the game of personal financial planning were played for lower stakes? And yes, I'm thinking about most of Western Europe.

Of course, this problem is connected to a different problem: the successful class warfare waged over the past quarter-centory by an on behalf of the top 1% of the income distribution -- the half-a-million-dollar-a-year crowd -- against everyone else. Taxing away some of their increased share of the national income distrubution could finance measures of income security (and not just retirement income security) for everyone.

I'm not convince that doing so would reduce the rate of GDP growth; it might well increase it. (The biologist rescued from life as a detail man might discover or invent something valuable.) But even if more security meant somewhat slower growth, wouldn't freedom from financial worry more than compensate for the somewhat slower introduction of 50" flat-panel television screens?

So I hope Jane converts her thoughts into a book, a lecture series, a newspaper column, or some other form in which they can reach millions of people who might benefit from them (and incidentally simplify her own financial planning problem). But I don't really think that good advice and recipes for cheap, tasty cook-at-home meals can do all of the work that needs to be done here. Some of that work needs to be done publicly. Social safety net, anyone?

Update Megan replies, thoughtfully, here and here. I agree that some income gradient is necessary to get the lousy jobs done. I'm not opposed to the free-market game. I just want it played for lower stakes.

And I'd ask Megan to look at the proportion of graduate students in the hard sciences at top U.S. universities who are U.S.-born. I'm delighted that we can still attract the smartest rising physicists and biologists in the world to come study here; I'm appalled that so few of them were born and educated here.

Light blogging today; I'm in New York for a conference on drug markets and violent crime.

Most interesting new idea: In New York City, where selling cocaine is a felony but selling cannabis or untaxed cigarettes is a misdemeanor, intentive street-level drug law enforcement has succeeded in driving the cocaine market indoors, resulting in a substantial decrease in violence. However, dealers in pot and smuggled cigarettes aren't afraid of the cops, so they have kept doing business outdoors.

Result: substantial violence around sales of pot and untaxed cigarettes. (As usual, the violence is often ascribed to "turf battles" or business disputes, but in fact turns out mostly to be routine interpersonal disputes among angry young men with guns.)

[Note to supporters of replacing drug prohibition with taxation and regulation: the untaxed-cigarette problem suggests one limit to that strategy, since a high tax can generate as nasty an illicit market as a prohibition does.]

The right policy response to the problem isn't obvious. Making it a felony to sell pot or untaxed cigarettes seems extreme. But how else can those dealers be forced to keep their heads down, thus avoiding violence and neighborhood disruption?

Looks as if they don't torture people, any more than we do. The guys taken to the hospital had just been "slapped on their faces," and were suffering from "headaches."

I guess the American soldiers who reported seeing prisoners whose fingernails had been ripped out must have been secret agents of al-Qaeda, or members of the liberal media, or John Kerry supporters, or something.

The United Blogosphere has spoken: Cory Maye must not die. (Once Atrios agrees with Instapundit, it's fair to say that the sense of the meeting has been taken.)

This is as pure a test of Blogger Power as we're likely to see. As far as I can tell, there's no active dissent on the question in Blogistan. Radley Balko isn't just jumping up and down on the question, he's doing real investigative reporting and getting results. (E.g., the search warrant in the case doesn't mention Cory Maye by name, and the affidavit submitted to obtain the search warrant is about as far short of "probable cause" as it could possibly be: it merely recites that the officer thinks someone might have drugs in that apartment.)

But so far, there is absolutely no mention of the case in any actual newspaper or other non-blog outlet indexed by Google, and as far as I can tell no statement on the case by any actual politician or any organization more powerful than the Innocence Project. If the save-Cory campaign remains confined to cyberspace, then we can confidently predict that its impact on Planet Earth will be negligible.

So now we get to see whether the combined power of the Blogosphere is sufficient to generate coverage from someone in the mainstream media, or a speech by an actual politician (Wesley Clark? Hilary Clinton? Bill Clinton? Mark Warner? Barak Obama? John McCain?) that would in turn generate mainstream-media coverage. It seems like a challenge worth taking. Personally, though, I wouldn't wager a nickel on the outcome, either way.

Tom Schelling's Nobel Prize lecture is up as a Real Media video; a text version is promised for later. This is not at all the cheerful, playful Schelling of the micromotives and climate-change work. Here Schelling is back to arms control, and he's about as cheerful and playful as a wolfpack: grimly satisfied that, surprisingly, we've gone sixty years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki without seeing nukes used in anger again, and grimly determined, though only cautiously optimistic, about keeping that record going.

The take-home point: The nuclear taboo might never have been created, but now that it exists we should all treasure it. We all need to hope that the Iranian mullahs are as wise as LBJ and not as batsh*t crazy as John Foster Dulles, and the United States has to learn what it means to be deterred.

Since the lecture, brimming though it is with wisdom and insight, is likely to leave you bummed out, I recommend visiting the Inter Press Service website or the website of the Centre for Research on Globalization for a good laugh.

(Previous thoughts on Schelling from Mike, Steve, and me.)