Friday, July 25, 2003 :::
Here's something you don't see every day, one hopes.
WASHINGTON, July 22 (Reuters) - A U.S. lawmaker on Tuesday subjected the chief financial officer of Freddie Mac (NYSE:FRE - News) to a withering parody of the mortgage finance company's results restatement set to the jazz standard "Mac the Knife".
"When those earnings rise on your balance sheet and you want them out of sight, just do a swaps deal, says old Mac's execs and defer them with all your might," crooned [Congressman Ed] Markey (D-MA) to Freddie Mac CFO Martin Baumann.
::: posted by Steven at 7:23 PM
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Lileks today makes a point:[I]f someone accuses a judge of being unable to uphold the law because they hold a personal belief that conflicts with the law - even though that belief has nothing to do with the specifics of the case - then the accuser might be giving us a window into their own souls. The accuser might be suggesting that they would overturn a law to fit their personal morality, regardless of the fitness of the statute. Where he's leading, I think, is that it doesn't matter what a judicial candidate's views are, it only matters whether it matters what his views are. If it matters what his views are, deny him promotion, impeach him from any current position he holds, expel him from the bar, and have him excommunicated, regardless of what those views actually are.
::: posted by dWj at 3:31 PM
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I heard the recall was going forward, but I hadn't heard that it has a date."Remember, there's a lot more people willing to vote against the recall than there are who think I'm doing a good job," said Davis That's the spirit.
::: posted by dWj at 10:51 AM
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Could my own brother please refer to Howard Dean with his first name?
::: posted by dWj at 9:59 AM
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Happy Birthday to my mother, whom I believe has a sufficiently high judgment-to-time ratio that she doesn't read this blog.
Coincidentally, Dean's mother's birthday is also today.
::: posted by Steven at 1:16 AM
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Lily Malcolm points us to a New Republic column saying, essentially, that the Democrats should avoid picking Dean because he's too liberal. The conclusion, though:
Indeed, while Dean's personal style apes McCain, his candidacy structurally resembles that of another insurgent: Steve Forbes. Both Forbes and Dean were the opposition party's ideal nominee. (The GOP equivalent of an antiwar liberal from Vermont is a right-wing millionaire from horse country.) Forbes, like Dean, took advantage of his outside-Washington status to batter more electable opponents for their inevitable compromises. (GOP nominee Bob Dole blamed his 1996 general-election defeat on the pounding he endured from Forbes in the primaries.) Like the Forbes campaign, the primary effect of Dean's insurgent run will be to make it harder for his party's eventual nominee to adopt a broadly popular platform without disappointing the activist base. And, without doing that, no Democrat can deny George W. Bush another--potentially catastrophic--four years. No wonder Karl Rove is chortling.
The flip-side of this, of course, is that if Dean does win the nomination, he can spend the general election going after the center -- emphasizing his opposition to budget deficits and gun control, while downplaying some of his liberal ideas and selling the others -- without worrying about his base. As long as he doesn't flat-out contradict what he told them during the primary, they'll remember that he's one of them. His position on the war in Iraq, and national security in general, might sink him, but it seems entirely possible either that people will no longer place as much importance on the matter, or that he'll be able to convince them that he's right (or some of each).
I haven't actually seen the man in action, but I worry that he's not so much a McCain of the left or a Forbes of the left, but a Reagan of the left. I'm not certain of it, but I'd be a lot more comfortable if I were certain of the opposite.
::: posted by Steven at 1:01 AM
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Thursday, July 24, 2003 :::
This turned out long and wandering, but does not, I think, get incoherent. It is subject to future editting, especially if someone disagrees with that last judgment. (Or skip this post.)One thing the market does better, it seems, than a lot of people with whom I engage in political discussion is to weigh several factors at the same time. Milton Friedman begins Free to Choose by discussing a pencil, the production of which requires materials and subcontracted construction from throughout the world. The cost of the pencil is not just the cost of the rubber that goes into it, nor the wood, but the sum of everything, and if graphite were suddenly to become scarce, millions of people would move to pens without having to know why it made sense, on a grand scale, for them to do so. More to the point, the same would happen if rubber, wood, graphite, and yellow paint each became a little, but not a lot, more scarce; even if the little steel things holding the erasers onto the pencils became plentiful, it might make sense to move to pens because the steel things are not the only factor in the decision. It seems that many people are incapable of even imagining several factors at once, let alone actually working with them. I have one friend who particularly annoys me on this count, fixating himself on one small point that to him is determinative of an issue. He also projects this thinking on others: having once argued that Hussein had an interest greater than zero in retaining weapons of mass destruction, for example, he insisted that there would thus be no deterring Hussein from maintaining such a program, no matter what consequences we created for it. (This, curiously, was an argument against the removal of the regime; I didn't follow that step, either.) I imagined this was his own monomania, and that even when people rely on rules of thumb and single-factor arguments, they are doing so with the knowledge that the results are not exact, but are manageable; I perhaps come to this line of interpretation by projecting my own identity as a modeler. Any modeler with a mind on fundamentals is constantly aware that a good model is one that is complicated enough to grasp the essence of the problem*, but simple enough to be in turn grasped by the human mind, and I tend to assume that oversimplification in political discourse is done in that spirit. It may be that I'm not listening. There are certain particularly hot-button issues that seem to foster an absolutist thinking; anything involving religion leads to it, as does war, as also does, perhaps curiously, the environment. This is why environmentalism is described by Rush Limbaugh, and perhaps more cogently by Steven Landsburg, as a religion; it is often pursued from a morally absolutist position, immune to reason. Thus does sense become nonsense. Even within an absolutist environmentalism, though, I would imagine one could make certain tradeoffs, if not between carbon dioxide emissions and transportation, at least between carbon dioxide emissions and preservation of wilderness; typically, though, it is not pursued that way. More curious — and more illustrative — is the resistance of people in the movement to systems like cap-and-trade, in which emissions are reduced in one place and increased in another place where they are more valuable; this increase bothers more than the decrease, often larger,† can mollify, thus driving environmental policy in a "keep perfectly still and don't rock the boat" direction. I've talked to someone who is quite proud that she would not give up 2,000 acres in ANWR for any price, regardless of how much of the everglades and the rainforest she could preserve with the proceeds. Recycling is a less clear issue, in that an energy cost associated with recycling anything except aluminum (for which extraction from bauxite is quite energy-intensive) is weighed against landfill usage; one then has to weigh one against the other, and find the ratio at which the tradeoff is appropriate. Scarcity is not relevant; all resources are scarce, which is why they cost money. The cost of scarcity of the item being thrown away is thus paid by the consumer; the cost of the land and other resources required by the landfill may or may not be. Environmental considerations, both at the mine and at the landfill, typically are not; if these are not considerable, then charging market costs for disposing of garbage is the complete solution. People will recycle when appropriate. We often seem to forget that everything is scarce; labor does not seem scarce if we forget that labor tomorrow is something different from labor today, and a pop-up toaster next week is not a pop-up toaster today (in particular, the former cannot make tomorrow's breakfast). This is because goods now, deployed intelligently, produce more goods later, and people prefer to consume things sooner rather than later. It may well make productive sense for oil or land to be used, either permanently or for very long periods of time; the option of a clearing in the woods for the next many years may be less than foregoing forever the opportunity to build something there now instead of next year. Because all these factors, so tedious for one to collate oneself for each decision to be made, are weighed against each other in this manner at each link in the chain, external costs should be internalized as close as possible to their entry points whenever there is not a clear market breakdown. If carbon dioxide emission has an uncaptured cost, it should be imposed on whoever's doing the emitting; if that's not sufficiently practical, it should be done in as nearly as possible in such a way as to fall on those whoevers. If building a building in one way causes more emissions than in another way, that extra cost will be passed along to the person buying the home, whether the emissions take place at the construction site itself or in the production of the construction equipment. All the costs of one procedure can be weighed against all the costs of the other, and against the benefit of building the building in the first place. In trying to take account of everything at some other level, something will invariably be missed, an opportunity to encourage the preservation of environmental goodness in one place instead of another will be missed, and, done comprehensively, a system will be built up where it's not clear what is subsidized or how much.
*The phrasing for this is, I believe, borrowed and reworked from Paul Krugman. Those of his writings not intended for the general public are much more interesting than his Times column, and are frequently little more condescending than this post — always less condescending than his Times column.
†In at least some of the cap-and-trade systems, an emissions franchise is reduced by 10% when traded.
::: posted by dWj at 4:45 PM
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Here's what to read today:
- Bill Kristol has a column about Gephardt's 16 words: "George Bush has left us less safe and less secure than we were four years ago."
Dean said on June 22 that "we don't know whether in the long run the Iraqi people are better off" with Hussein gone, and "we don't know whether we're better off." At the time, Gephardt demurred from Dean's agnosticism.
Now, exactly one month later, Gephardt is following in Dean's footsteps.
- George Will thinks Bush is presiding over the decline of conservatism.
- Representative John Dingell (D-MI) doesn't want carpetbaggers coming to his state to fight racism. Ward Connerly's coming anyway.
- CNN foreign bureaus are still burying negative stories about the governments of those countries.
- Over at the Fox News site, a columnist says that France is uncivilized.
- Last and probably least, the AP demonstrates its commitment to unbiased journalism.
In theory, pursuing with intent to kill violates a long-standing policy banning political assassination. It was the misfortune of Saddam Hussein's sons, Odai and Qusai, that the Bush administration has not bothered to enforce the prohibition.
Prof. Volokh responds.
And, of course, the links over to your right. And quite a ways down -- I should probably switch the archive links with the blogroll links.
Anyway, go read.
UPDATE: I've added a couple things to read, and changed the blog template such that the blog-roll comes before the archives.
::: posted by Steven at 1:54 PM
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The Charlie Rangel quoteI personally don't get any satisfaction that it takes, you know, 200,000 troops, 250,000 troops, to knock off two bums. reminds me of a joke that I stole from the internet rather than put in my own words:There was an engineer who had an exceptional gift for fixing all things mechanical. After serving his company loyally for over 30 years, he happily retired. Several years later the company contacted him regarding a seemingly impossible problem they were
having with one of their multimillion dollar machines.They had tried everything and everyone else to get the machine to work but to no avail. In desperation, they called on the retired engineer who had solved so many of their problems in the past. The engineer reluctantly took the challenge. He spent a day studying the huge machine. At the end of the day, he marked a small "x" in chalk on a particular component of the machine and stated, "This is where your problem is". The part was replaced and the machine worked perfectly again. The company received a bill for $50,000 from the engineer for
his service. They demanded an itemized accounting of his charges. The engineer responded briefly: - One chalk mark $1
- Knowing where to put it $49,999
It was paid in full and the engineer retired again in peace. (The rare Charlie Rangel comment that was not a joke would, of course, not merit response.)
::: posted by dWj at 10:22 AM
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Wednesday, July 23, 2003 :::
Lily complains that there's so much focus on Ann Coulter's appearance. Lily might be disappointed to know that I gave Ann Coulter as an example of an attractive nuisance Monday night, while hanging with my brother and his homies.
::: posted by dWj at 8:47 AM
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Derb at the corner:If Idi Amin turns in his lunch pail as expected, and those two stiffs really are U and Q, this has been a really bad week for psychotic megalomaniacs. If I were Kim Jong Il, I'd be staying home with the doors closed.
::: posted by dWj at 8:40 AM
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Monday, July 21, 2003 :::
Party at Steven's house. 8:00ish. Nothing fancy -- just drinking, chatting, and tripping horses with wires.
Be there or, you know, don't. Whatever.
::: posted by Steven at 12:46 PM
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