Another window into the soul

Sometimes I feel like the Google search bar that most folks have embedded in their Firefox browser is a secondary window into the soul. For instance, I'm now reaching the end of my humdrum work day, and yet, glimpsing up at my trusty search bar, I see where my heart truly was all this time:

Did you know that his beats, to quote one YouTube commenter, "know no species boundary"?

How it must feel

I was perusing the TimesOnline today during lunch, and was stopped short by a link to an article called, "Who started the 'Barack Obama is a Muslim' smear?" Now, I'm no political correctness maven, but to regard alleged Muslimness as a smear is, I think, extraordinarily insulting to Muslims. Could you imagine if people spoke of a "'John Kerry is a Jew' smear"? Hey--it's not a smear! And yet, day in and day out, we hear indignant denials that Obama is a Muslim, the very thought dismissed as a scurrilous rumor without so much as a Seinfeldian "not that there's anything wrong with that" to follow it up.

Most noticeably, Obama himself studiously avoids giving any indication whatsoever that there is, in fact, nothing inherently wrong with being a Muslim. Maybe asking him to do the decent thing and speak up about it is asking too much of a half-Kenyan presidential candidate in the process of ingratiating himself with working-class whites in the South and Midwest. On the other hand, maybe risking electoral success to do right by a beleaguered minority is the sort of long-term investment in one's political character that can pay dividends years down the road.

In any case, I can only imagine what it must feel like to be a Muslim in this political environment--not only voiceless, but disrespected and insulted, too.

EDIT: After actually reading the article I linked to, it turns out that the author is explicitly addressing the issue of Obama's alleged Muslimness being considered a "smear", so--bad example. But I think the general thrust of the post still stands.

You know it, you tell the story...

Re: Flat tax

An email I sent to the Sullivan blog with regards to the flat tax issue. I don't know if anyone will ever read it, but whatevs.

Hi Andrew,

You write that you want government to raise money "as equally as possible", and that you disagree with the idea that "tax policy should really be about redistributing wealth, and engineering substantive economic outcomes." This is all well and good. However, it is not clear to me that nominal equality in the tax code--i.e., everyone being taxed by the same numerical percentage--necessarily translates to the sort of "equality" that you are interested in. Certainly, if minimizing the impact of taxation on society is your goal, you will favor a scheme that imposes as few burdens as possible on society, and imposes them as equally as possible across all members, thereby making the government's presence in our lives as neutral as possible vis-a-vis our situation in life--our level of wealth, our ambitions, etc.. But to speak of a burden is to speak of a subjective state of the individual, a felt cost. Because a flat tax ignores the fact of diminishing returns on income--the fact that my 100,000th dollar earned means less to me, is worth less to me than my 1,000th dollar earned--it thereby imposes a very uneven burden on society, causing there to be a proportionately greater felt cost to the less wealthy.

So the question is: what is the more meaningful interpretation of "equal taxation"? Does it mean taxation that, while nominally equal for everyone, imposes a far greater burden (as subjectively evaluated by the individual) on the less wealthy? Or does it mean taxation that, while not nominally equal for everyone, makes some attempt to equalize the felt cost of taxation across all members of society?

Flat tax

Andrew Sullivan recently mentioned in an offhand way that he favors a flat tax, which I suppose triggered a big reaction, because he has followed it up with a longer post defending his position. He says:

So yes: a flat tax so far as possible for as many as possible and no deductions. That's my goal. How that differentially impacts the lives of citizens should not be government's primary concern.

Government's primary concern is to raise money as efficiently and as leanly and as equally as possible. I'm happy with the government then setting up programs to assist the poor, to provide better education for those at the bottom, safety-net healthcare and better policing. i.e. to gear spending toward social ends that might help the poor the most. These are measurable, practical goods. What I'm not happy with is the assumption that tax policy should really be about redistributing wealth, and engineering substantive economic outcomes. Yes, of course, at lower income levels, a 20 percent flat income tax will be more onerous proportionally than at higher incomes. So what? Why should that even concern a government that is not aiming to socially engineer more substantive equality? and the alternative - skewing taxes to target success - is an absurd set of incentives to put into a growing society.

So Sullivan wants the government to raise money "as equally as possible", and does not want the government to redistribute wealth. But why does a flat tax accomplish this any more than a progressive tax? The law of diminishing returns states that the 100,oooth dollar you earn is less valuable to you than the 10,000th dollar you earn, and that the 10,000th dollar you earn is less valuable to you than the 1,oooth. Given this, it makes sense that the government should tax at the lowest rates for the first dollars you earn and gradually raise that rate for successive dollars earned. Since the same progressive rate is applied to everyone, money is raised "as equally as possible".

Yes, of course, at higher income levels, a progressive tax structure will be nominally higher than at lower incomes. So what? Why should that even concern a government that is not aiming to socially engineer more substantive equality? And the alternative - skewing taxes to target poverty - is an absurd set of arbitrary penalties to put into a fair society.

Clinton's debt

I really don't understand this idea that Obama has some sort of obligation to Hillary Clinton to help her pay her debt from the primary campaign. Attitudes like this are completely mystifying to me:

Some Clinton supporters are grousing that Mr. Obama has yet to make the symbolic gesture of writing a check for $2,300, the maximum allowable campaign donation, to help retire her debt of over $12 million.

Am I missing something here? Clinton went into debt because she made the calculated decision to borrow money to win the primary. Why should someone else pay it off, let alone the very rival she borrowed the money to defeat? Moreover: aren't the Clintons supposed to be worth far more than $12 million? When their tax returns were released a few months ago, it was revealed that they had earned no less than "$109 million in the the last eight years". So it seems to me that Clinton ought to be more than capable of paying off her debts by herself.

WarGames

In order to better understand a recent Dinosaur Comic, I sat down and watched WarGames tonight. I must say, this film does an admirable job of exposing NORAD for the slipshod operation it apparently is. I mean, just off the top of my head I can think of a laundry list of critical security breaches and serious design flaws:

• Entire computer system that controls nuclear missiles can be accessed via six-letter password from a public phone
• Civilian tour groups are allowed to visit strategic nuclear war room even when US is at Defcon 4
  
• Imprisoned fifteen year old was able to escape from the base by eluding single misogynist guard
  
• The same fifteen year old, under arrest on suspician of espionage, was left in a room by himself with computers that could access nuclear missile computer system
• Computer system that controls nuclear missiles equipped with powerful AI that can override human-inputted commands
• Computer system able to override actual radar data with its own fabricated data

And so on and so forth. Although I must give those early 1980s government devs props for inexplicably implementing natural language capabilities in the system. Passing the Turing test must have been, like, a C feature on that project.

Habeas for Bin Laden

Via Matt Yglesias, this bit of ridiculousness from John McCain:

There was no habeas at Nuremburg and there should be no habeas for Osama bin Laden.

Ha! Can you imagine if Osama bin Laden filed for a writ of habeas corpus? He'd be all like, "Uh, why are you detaining me?" And the judge would be like, "Um, I don't know, how about because you declared war on America and fucking blew up the World Trade Center? Back to your cell!" And that would be that. The whole thing would be over in approximately two seconds, and everyone will have had a good laugh about it.

So I'm not exactly sure why McCain thinks it would be so bad if Osama bin Laden had habeas corpus rights.

The war-free evening news

An article in the Times today talks about dwindling coverage of the wars on the major networks:

According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been “massively scaled back this year.” Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007. The “CBS Evening News” has devoted the fewest minutes to Iraq, 51, versus 55 minutes on ABC’s “World News” and 74 minutes on “NBC Nightly News.” (The average evening newscast is 22 minutes long.)

It is a little surprising to me that at this point in the year the networks have devoted less than an hour to reporting on the Iraq War (the fact that I get virtually zero of my news from the evening news notwithstanding). It is very surprising to me, however, that reporters are having trouble getting their stories out. I mean, I understand that 22 minutes is not a lot of time, but it's not as though television is the only possible outlet for news. There is an invention called the internet which allows limitless content to be delivered to the viewer--why not have the reporters make their stories available online?

The thing is, you hear a lot about how the internet is causing old media to go extinct--TV news divisions are whithering, newspapers are folding or reducing staff--but what hasn't changed is the real value of original news reporting. Without reporters out in the world writing stories and giving first-person accounts, there would be no news content to blog about or analyze endlessly on television. Reporting is still the fuel that runs the news-media engine. And so I think that not distributing these news stories--if not on TV, then on the internet somehow--amounts to throwing away something valuable for no good reason.

One innovative thing TV news organizations could do is start posting their reports on YouTube and embedding advertisements into the video itself to raise revenue. That way, the video would be searchable and easily embeddable in in the blogs, and gain far more exposure than if it sat on some little-visited proprietary news site somewhere.

Another thing the news organizations could do is start desanitizing their war reporting. As it is now, there is a general aversion to showing real violence and blood and gore--especially when it is American soldiers who are bearing the brunt of it. The genteel standards of evening TV news--and TV news in general--forbids much of this, but I think the same limitations do not apply on the internet (you could simply have a disclaimer that warned the viewer of graphic content). So you could have really gritty, real reporting, with people cursing and dying and everything.

I would add also that it's not just the genteel standards of TV that bar a lot of the grittier coverage of the war--there is also the residual effect of the pseudo-patriotic self-censoring mode that causes the media to suppress "negative" images of the war. When was the last time we saw a casket on television? The last time we saw a dead American soldier? This is a war, no? These things do happen, right? Maybe one reason people aren't very interested in the war coverage is because the war coverage typically omits the most important and visceral part of the story.

PS: It's kind of interesting to note that much of the substance for this NYT story comes from an interview on the Daily Show. Indeed, the Daily Show interview is so central to the article that it seems if it weren't for the Daily Show, the article never would have been written. I'm not sure if this means that the Times sucks or that Jon Stewart is awesome.

Total Commitment

This post from Sullivan, in which neocon Bill Kristol airs the idea that the Bush administration may launch a strike at Iran if it looks like Obama is going to win the election, reminds me of General Ripper's rationale for launching an unauthorized nuclear attack against the Soviets in Dr. Strangelove:

...a decision is being made by the President and the Joint Chiefs in the War Room at the Pentagon. And when they realize there is no possibility of recalling the Wing, there will be only one course of action open. Total commitment. (Hat tip: filmsite.org)

I doubt even the Bush administration would do something like this. Right now they have so little credibility that, short of an actual attack of some kind on the US, there is nothing they can say or do that can convince people that Iran needs to be bombed--and for Bush to take such an action without popular support would be a political disaster of the highest order. So I think this one will likely be thrown onto that heap of hare-brained historical what-ifs, along with MacArthur's invasion of China and Goldwater's nuking of Vietnam.

But on the other hand, you never know with this wily bunch. Maybe they've reached a point where they can no longer sit back and allow the radical Muslims to sap and impurify their precious bodily fluids....

Republicans win May

For all the news you hear about Obama's record-setting fundraising, you wouldn't expect the GOP to be out performing him. And yet in May McCain and the GOP quietly outraised Obama and the DNC by "some $20 million".

My guess is that the Democratic donor base is fatigued from the primary--I know I am. But once some time passes and stories about a resurgent McCain start trickling in, I'm confident The Fear will take hold and pry open Democratic wallets once again.

Stunning observation

I was reading this article, and I must say that this kind of thing is starting to bug me:

“The common assumption today is that young people are apolitical, disengaged, hedonistic and only interested in partying,” says Bart Cammaerts, a lecturer in media and communications at the London School of Economics. “This is wrong...."

I think at this point the only person guilty of a "common assumption" is Mr. Cammaerts, who assumes that people have the assumption that today's boys and girls are apolitical. But with every other article in the magazines and newspapers being a "these young people today sure are engaged" story, does anyone really think this? I would say that if anything, there is a stereotype that works in the opposite direction: that "postmillennials" are seen as latter day Benjamin Franklins who get up at the crack of dawn to get into US News and World Report top colleges and found non-profit tech startups.

Obama's Superman narrative

It's weird that this hasn't occurred to me before, but Obama could totally turn the whole he's-weird-and-foreign thing on its head by turning it into the Superman narrative: alien boy with unworldly (political) powers ends up in the care of two unassuming Kansans, and grows up to use his powers to fight against the forces of evil. Looking at this ad, how can you not see his grandparents as Ma and Pa Kent?

What Brooks is missing

David Brooks writes that Obama has sold out his support for public financing:

And then on Thursday, Fast Eddie Obama had his finest hour. Barack Obama has worked on political reform more than any other issue. He aspires to be to political reform what Bono is to fighting disease in Africa. He’s spent much of his career talking about how much he believes in public financing. In January 2007, he told Larry King that the public-financing system works. In February 2007, he challenged Republicans to limit their spending and vowed to do so along with them if he were the nominee. In February 2008, he said he would aggressively pursue spending limits. He answered a Midwest Democracy Network questionnaire by reminding everyone that he has been a longtime advocate of the public-financing system.

But Thursday, at the first breath of political inconvenience, Fast Eddie Obama threw public financing under the truck. In so doing, he probably dealt a death-blow to the cause of campaign-finance reform. And the only thing that changed between Thursday and when he lauded the system is that Obama’s got more money now.

This criticism is fair, I think, to some extent: it is true that the only difference between then and now is that now Obama has a whole bunch of money and doesn't need public financing, and that's why he has thrown the issue "under the truck". However, what matters here is the manner in which Obama has acquired all that cash. The whole public campaign financing issue is premised on the notion that the only way to rake up large sums of cash is to collect it from a select few wealthy individuals and corporations, giving these groups disproportionate influence in electoral politics. The fact that Obama has raised his millions from legions of small donors shows that this premise is false: the internet makes it possible for large numbers of ordinary people to exert a far greater influence in electoral politics than even the wealthiest individual contributors. In this new age of bottom-up fundraising, campaign finance reform has become a solution for a problem that no longer exists.

Of course, Obama rationalizing his withdrawal from the public finance system by calling it "broken" and blaming Republican 527s really is disingenuous, and he should be called out on it. But ultimately I think his move is justified: we are in a brave new world of campaign fundraising where the old rules and concerns either no longer apply or are far less significant.

Lessons learned

So, I've learned exactly two things from these NBA Finals:

• The Lakers are definitely going to need Bynum healthy if they want to be big enough and physical enough to go up against Boston next year.
• Kevin Garnett is a fucking idiot.