Ted

Indeed.

(This is probably unfair; as Dead Parrots notes, USA Next cares as little for copyright as they do for their own dignity. It is funny, though.)

Good point from Mark Schmitt:

Back when the Medicare bill was on the floor and I was just starting this blog, I argued that the Democrats, rather than proposing a $1 trillion prescription drug benefit, should have proposed something that cost less and did much more, such as the Clinton bill of 2000, which at the time cost $253 billion and even three years later would certainly not have cost more than the $400 billion claimed cost of the Bush bill, while doing much more. Such an alternative would have put the handful of real conservatives, who were being told by their leaders that if they didn’t vote for the Republican bill, the Democrats would sweep in with something even bigger, in a very awkward position. But now that the real cost of the Bush bill is $1.2 trillion, I realize that I was wrong: the Democrats were perfectly responsible, and did propose a bill that cost less and did more than the Bush bill. And because it contained some real cost controls, its cost was not likely to escalate much beyond that.

(Background on the $253 billion bill here.) And I haven’t excerpted any of the David Brooks-bashing! Come on, you’ve got to click over for that!

One of the nice thing about being an amateur blogger is that, as soon as I’m five feet away from the computer, none of it matters anymore. Would that all troubles were this simple.

I’m sure that I speak for everyone at Crooked Timber in extending our best wishes to Glenn Reynolds and his wife. May her recovery be speedy, and may they spend many more happy years together.

Glenn Reynolds has responded to this post, and explicitly stated that he doesn’t believe that American liberals or Democrats are treasonous. As I mentioned below, I’ll resist a few opportunities for point-scoring and just accept that. (The one point I’d really like to make is laid out here at Finnegan’s Wake.)

However, he still believes that it’s appropriate and accurate to argue that European leftists are supporting terrorists in the hopes of destroying the United States. More specifically, he believes that Europeans (especially the French) are fighting a “proxy war” with Americans in the Middle East

While I don’t take this charge quite as personally (“Oh, you mean the other Timberites? Well then, never mind”), I don’t think that the argument has improved tremendously. Let’s look at the evidence that Reynolds brings to the table. (This sounds like an attackblogging post, but it really isn’t. It’s about Israel and Palestine, so I’ll have the flame retardant up.)

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Letters are what we get:

Regarding destroying the sun and all–you missed a good one. Power Line’s “Hindrocket” finished off a pessimistic quote on the Iraqi elections from Jimmy Carter by noting: “Jimmy Carter isn’t just misguided or ill-informed. He’s on the other side.”

I gotta say, I’m a conservative and all (of the old-fashioned, pre-Bush type), and I dislike Carter as much as the next conservative, but openly accusing an ex-president of treason is way, way, way, way, way out of @#$@#ing line.

Why, oh why, do left-wing blogs not keep this kind of odious insanity ever before the public eye, like right-wing blogs with their Democratic Underground posts and their Ward Churchill obsession? The past year’s worth of John Derbyshire’s commentary alone would be enough to tar all of wingerdom with the taint of racist, xenophobic idiocy from now until the midterm elections. And this is from the so-called “in-flight magazine of Air Force One.”

The sooner you guys take a breather from pointy-headed debates over “issues” and devote some time to good, old-fashioned propaganda, the quicker we can crush the caricature of conservatism that is the “right-wing movement’ and get back to real left-right debate in this country.

J

I should note that (1) I’ve got to disagree about taking a breather from pointy-headed debates. Personally, I’d like a little from Column A, and a little from Column B; I think that folks like Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum are having a real effect in the debate about Social Security privatization. (2) I don’t know J, and can’t personally vouch for his conservative credentials, and (3) I think we do a reasonable job with the odious insanity. But, “reasonable” doesn’t mean “effective”.

Related post from Digby.

UPDATE: Here’s a good collection from MyDD.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Discover the Network! I’ve been wondering about the connection between the well-known liberals Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Ayatollah Khomeini and Barak Obama. Now I know!

ON A ROLL: David Horowitz, you’ve done it again! So I clicked on Katrina vanden Heuvel, an unambigious liberal and presumably a juicy target. Here’s the beginning of the profile:

· Editor and co-owner of the leftwing magazine The Nation
· Limousine leftwing daughter of William J. vanden Heuvel, who worked for the founder of the CIA and for Robert F. Kennedy, and Jean Stein, whose father founded MCA-Universal.
· Married to New York University Russian scholar and Gorbachev enthusiast Stephen F. Cohen
· Fluent in Russian. Worked as reporter for state-run Moscow Times in U.S.S.R.

AAAH! Teh foregin language knowledge! RUN!

(Incidentally, the Moscow Times is a private English-language newspaper that started in 1992.)

AAAND: Commentor abb1 made the reasonable point that the Moscow Times might have existed in a different incarnation prior to 1992. To confirm, I spoke to Katrina vanden Heuvel, who told me that she worked for a few months in 1989 for the Moscow News covering the first multiparty elections.

My beloved fiancee received two hermit crabs for Christmas. Due to pressures both foreign and domestic, she has not named the crabs yet, and has consistently (cruelly, some would say) rejected my suggestions.

(pictured: a very similar hermit crab)

Luckily, I have the wisdom of crowds on my side. If any commentor suggests a pair of names for two hermit crabs which are adopted by my fiancee, I’ll donate $20 to Habitat for Humanity in his or her name.

The eminently reasonable Jack O’Toole has been driven to despair by this one-two punch.

This newly ever-growing Western left, not only in Europe, but in Latin America and even in the US itself, has a clear goal: the destruction of the country and society that vanquished its dreams fifteen years ago. But it does not have, as in the old days of the Soviet Union, the hard power to accomplish this by itself. Thanks to this, all our leftist friends’ bets are now on radical Islam. (emphasis added) What can they do to help it? Answer: tie down America’s superior strength with a million Liliputian ropes: legal ones, political ones, with propaganda and disinformation etc. Anything and everything will do.

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A little off-topic, but this is a promotional photo from the off-Broadway show COOKIN’!

They’re all playing cooks. In the show, they’re cooking a big Korean dinner, rhythmically. (Contain your excitement. CONTAIN IT!) And they put the woman in a chef’s coat with the belly cut out. You know, where the burners are.

I can’t even begin to express how stupid that is.

Heavy blog readers know that Glenn Reynolds has picked an obscure wanker and dubbed him “The Authentic Face of the Left”. I can scarcely imagine a more dignified and convincing form of argument; not since a particularly devastating eighth grade game of “That’s Your Girlfriend” have I been so ashamed. (Hilzoy is not so contrite, for some reason.)

But has Reynolds picked the right target? It takes a very particular individual to represent the authentic face of roughly 40% of all Americans. I think that we can do better.

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Since Crooked Timber’s first publication in 1953, “Ask a Nineteenth-Century Whaling Expert” has consistently been one of its most popular features. We are pleased to bring you the novelist Kenneth Gardner, author of Rich Man’s Coffin.

I’m baffled at the economics of nineteenth-century whaling. In Moby-Dick, Herman Melville says that a whaling expedition would be a success if a crew of 40 men captured the oil from 40 whales in 48 months. Each whale produced about 40-50 barrels of oil. Presumably this oil had to be cover the approximate costs of four years’ labor, plus the costs of operating the ship, plus a sizeable profit for the investors in these risky ventures.

How could whale-oil have been so valuable? I understand that it was scarce, that illumination is highly desirable, and apparently it smelled nice. But there were substitutes, weren’t there?

Ted B., Houston, TX

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– The biggest news today, the election in Iraq, seems to have gone better than I would have dreamed. It’s no secret that I don’t think that the Bush administration has much to be proud of. But they deserve credit, along with the courageous Iraqi voters, for the first real elections in half a century. When Bush said that the terrorist hostility to the elections showed the emptiness of their vision, he was exactly right.

Iraq isn’t out of the woods. There may come a time when we look back and see how the elections made inevitable the Iraqi civil war/ next brutal strongman/ rise of our robot overlords. However, let the record show that, as of 1/30/05, I certainly didn’t have any better ideas.

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8:05 AM, Milwaukee

“This is bad,” said Mayor Barnett. “I don’t know what went wrong in this election, but something did. There were more than 1200 votes cast from invalid addresses. We’ve got 300 people listed as voting twice from the same address. The papers are eating us alive; they’re reporting an 8000-ballot gap between the number of ballots cast and the number of recorded voters. We’ve got to check this out; this can’t happen again.”

“Listen, we’ve got a lot of resources we can throw at this,” said Milwuakee District Attorney E. Michael McCann. “I’ve got a commitment from Steve Biskupic, the US Attorney, Chief Hegerty, and the local FBI. There’s a million and six pieces of paper to review, but we’ll have a lot of manpower to draw from.”

“That’s good. But we don’t want this to look partisan. You’re a Democrat, right?”

“That’s right,” said McCann. “But Biskupic is a Republican. In any case, we don’t know yet if the erroneous votes skewed one way or another. The heads of the election commission are blaming glitches and honest errors, as you might imagine. Their systems have awfully weak safeguards. At first glance, it seems to have a lot in common with the problems in Ohio.”

“Hmmm. Just in case, I’ve called a representative from the PowerLine Detective Agency to join us. McCann, have you met Inspector Hindraker?” A well-groomed man stepped out from the side of the room, inconspicuously fanning himself with an old copy of Time Magazine.

McCann shook hands with Inspector Hindraker. “Can I confirm something with you?” asked Hindraker. “Milwaukee went for John Kerry in the last election, didn’t it?”

“That’s correct, Inspector Hindraker. Kerry won Milwaukee by 123,000 votes. We’ve got a hell of a job ahead of us-”

“Gentlemen, please,” sighed Inspector Hindraker. “It’s perfectly clear what went on here. This is a case of massive Democratic Party fraud!”

(How did Inspector Hinderaker know to blame this on Democratic fraud? Turn to page 154 to find out!)

Something’s been bugging me about private accounts. Correct me where I’m wrong here.

It’s difficult for me to imagine that any version of Social Security private accounts would offer account holders complete flexibility with their assets. Managing and ensuring the safety of millions of small accounts will be expensive under the rosiest assumptions. The fees don’t have to look like Chile’s, but they’re going to be considerable[1]. It seems reasonable to assume that any sensible administration would limit costs by limiting investment options to a small number of funds, something like a 401K plan.

The most appropriate investment vehicle would be a broad-based index fund such as the Wilshire 5000, which invests in pretty much every public company in the US, weighted for market capitalization. Index funds have a history of better returns than actively managed funds, and the broad footprint of the investment would minimize market distortions from the impact of (eventually) trillions in new investments. Most importantly, it keeps the government out of the business of picking winners and losers. The temptation to misuse trillions of investment dollars for political leverage will be awesome. A blind investment strategy also minimizes the reciprocal pressure on businesses to scramble to please the current administration in order to get under the umbrella of investments in a managed SS fund.

As an investment strategy, this would work pretty well for most Americans. However, a mandatory savings program isn’t for most Americans, it’s for all Americans. Since it’s a forced program, administrators will have to answer the question, “Why is my money being taken out of my paycheck to support X?”[2]

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I was just looking around Tim Lambert’s Deltoid in a slow moment, when I came across this priceless story from BoffoBlog about a presentation from “More Guns, Less Crime” author John Lott. In this episode, the hapless AEI scholar gave a presentation arguing that elections have become more expensive because of growth in big government:

His evidence consisted of a correlation between growth in federal spending and growth in campaign spending, and from that he concluded that Big Government caused expensive campaigns. Two lines trending upwards, and he claims with perfect seriousness — and without performing any of the necessary tests — that the one causes the other. When we pressed him on his analysis, not only had he not performed any appropriate tests, but he seemed wholly unfamiliar with the relevant econometrics literature…

It made for a very uncomfortable ninety minutes. Afterward, we agreed that it was the worst presentation any of us had ever seen at the workshop, worse than any first-year grad student’s. Then, when he gained his notoriety it did not surprise me in the slightest that his other research turned out to be as shoddy as it was. When he continued to get backing by organizations like AEI in spite of the astonishingly poor quality of his work, it only confirmed my impression that the “idea factory” of the right is less concerned about the quality of those ideas than whether it can make the most noise.