Benefits

No surprise here, but employer-provided benefits are on the wane:

Over the past two decades, companies have moved en masse away from traditional pensions in which employers pay the cost and employees get a set amount after retiring. Employer-based health care coverage has fallen as well, not just for workers in low-wage jobs, but increasingly for those in middle-class jobs. One analysis estimates that there were 5 million fewer jobs providing health insurance in 2004 than there were just three years earlier. Overall, nearly 1 in 5 full-time workers today goes without health insurance; among part-time workers, it's 1 in 4.

Those who manage to keep their benefits often must pick up their share of the higher cost. Employee contributions for family coverage were 49 percent higher in 2004 than they were in 2001, and contributions for individual coverage were 57 percent higher, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The impact?

"It's not clear how the work will change," said Peter Cappelli, a management professor at the Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania. "But any kind of security will go away."

Employers aren't willing to provide the same benefits to employees they did just a few years ago, and so far there has been little discussion about how to address this problem. It seems to me we have two choices: find a stable and sustainable way to entice employers to provide the health care and pension benefits that workers need, or find another way of doing it altogether (e.g. a single-payer healthcare system).

This problem is becoming a crisis on the Republican's watch, yet we've heard very little even in the way of acknowledgment, much less an attempt at solution, from them. Unfortunately for our labor force, this pattern of denial will continue for some time. What we are witnessing here is a failure of the market, and any solution will require a non-trivial amount of government intervention. It is extremely difficult for the modern Republican party to even admit the possibility that the free market can cause problems, much less advocate a greater role for government in managing the economy.

Thus the GOP isn't in a position to do anything for the middle class here beyond fiddling with tax policy, which just isn't going to cut it. This is a real opportunity for the Democrats, and a way for them to make some progress on the "Kansas problem" as well. Let's hope they take advantage of it.

Gillmor's Year in Tech

Dan Gillmor has put up his list of the top tech highlights of 2004: "Google, Oracle, Mars, voting". It's a good list, but I would have added shout-outs to the blogosphere and the political internet, both of which really hit their stride this year.

Payback

I missed this article when I was reading the Washington Post yesterday, but it looks like payback time for the House Ethics Committee chairman:

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert is leaning toward removing the House ethics committee chairman, who admonished House Majority Leader Tom DeLay this fall and has said he will treat DeLay like any other member, several Republican aides said yesterday.

Although Hastert (Ill.) has not made a decision, the expectation among leadership aides is that the chairman, Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Colo.), long at odds with party leaders because of his independence, will be replaced when Congress convenes next week.

Even the Post's editorial board, a relatively new addition to the right-wing media chorus, sees fit to slap the GOP's hand on this one.

But it is possible to see this move as something other than political tit-for-tat. Indeed, one might see it as part of a larger pattern. For instance, just as restricting lawsuits is the Republican's solution to the problem of bad doctors driving up the cost of healthcare, perhaps short-circuiting the ethics process is their solution to bad Representatives driving up the political costs of their majority.

Home From the Holidays

Mary and I spent the past few days down in the Carolinas for Christmas. Lots of fun, but now we're back. What I will remember most about this holiday: talking stuffed animals, Champagne at lunch, my nephew Jack's Christmas morning gift of stomach flu, a well-hit 3 iron, and listening to Caledonia complain when we walked in the door.

Merry Christmas, Senate Democrats

Bush sure gave the Senate Democrats a big steaming pile of holiday cheer yesterday:

President Bush announced yesterday his intention to renominate 20 people previously blocked by Senate Democrats for federal court seats, setting the stage for a renewal of the bitter partisan battles over the makeup of the federal judiciary.

The president's list includes seven appeals court candidates whose nominations were stalled on the Senate floor by Democrats, who said the nominees' conservative views were out of the mainstream. The other nominations never made it to the full Senate. Buoyed by his reelection and a four-seat Republican gain in the Senate, Bush said he will submit the nominees' names when the Senate returns to work next month.

I hope this announcement ends any lingering feeling on the part of Senate Democrats that Bush is willing to pursue anything but a scorched-earth agenda. Red-state Democrats with elections in 2006 should pay particular attention to recent history: if you fight Bush, he will attack you, but if you try to work constructively with Bush, he will attack you, too. Bush chose Christmas to declare war on the Democratic Party in the new year, and it would be a mistake to believe that any appeasement is possible.

On the other hand, these do-over nominations do give Democrats an opportunity to define the field of combat for the next two years. Frist has made it clear that he will move to declare filibusters of judicial nominees unconstitutional, so let's make him do it sooner rather than later. Delaying the inevitable helps Democrats not at all, so it's best if we get this process piece out of the way.

Christmas Eve Cat Blogging

Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a good nap!

Victims

Over at Tapped, Matthew Yglesias asks the right question:

What should one feel besides anger when faced with an injustice as grave as America's systematic repression of Christians?

Read the whole thing and find out the answer.

Good News and Bad News

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll on Social Security is out, and the results are decidedly mixed. First, the bad news:

A strong majority of respondents, 63 percent, do not think Social Security will have enough money to pay the benefits they are entitled to, and 74 percent think the system faces either major problems or is in crisis — as Bush has asserted. The president also has at least general support from 53 percent of the public for the concept of letting people control some of their contributions to invest in the market.

It looks like the members of the reality-based community have work to do. Objectively, Social Security is not in crisis, and we need to push this fact much harder in the media if we're going to move these numbers. Saving the program will prove to be much more difficult if most people think it is already dead.

But there is some good news:

It is on the specifics that Bush faces problems. Support dropped to an even split when people were told that the cost of the transition to a new program could reach $2 trillion over time, as some forecasts project. And 62 percent said they would not participate in such a program if it meant their retirement income would go up or down depending on the performance of their stock picks — which is the essence of Bush's plan.

One thing to note is that the questions don't specifically mention the guaranteed benefit cuts in the traditional program that the privatization plans assume. As they read, one would think that benefit levels under privatization would only vary based on stock market performance, and might possibly be higher than under the current program if the market does well. But that's just not the case. If these benefit cuts were noted more clearly, support for privatization would be even lower.

The trend data is also somewhat encouraging, since the numbers on the health of the system and the support for privatization have been moving in the right direction for a while now. Of course, the big media campaign from Bush & Co. hasn't begun in earnest yet, which will no doubt have an effect. Again, we have work to do.

Crisis Mode

Richard Cohen today draws the inevitable comparison:

I do not want to belabor the analogy to WMD, but really it is almost impossible to do so. The same exaggerations, false claims of crisis and ideological fantasies — $2 trillion in additional debt simply not mattering is the functional equivalent of U.S. troops being welcomed by ecstatic Iraqis — are being seen once again. A president who wanted war with Iraq no matter what now wants to overhaul the Social Security system no matter what. Last time, I raised my hand and enlisted. This time, it's staying on my wallet.

Bush is now in permanent crisis mode. When ideology demands a course of action, a convenient crisis is announced and the big push begins. We saw this with Iraq, and we're seeing it again with Social Security. In contrast, if Bush is flummoxed on an issue, then ipso facto, there can be no crisis: witness the administration's reaction to the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea.

Bush's method is not just duplicitous, it's disastrous — it means he gets his crises all wrong. Social Security isn't in crisis, but nuclear proliferation is a huge threat that has never been solidly addressed by this White House. But what should we expect? Working within the confines of reality is hard work, and we all know how Bush feels about that.

Tao Perl Ching

Like many other kids in college, I went through a phase where I immersed myself in Asian philosophies, searching for a better Way. As it turned out, I was a little too much enamored of ego and excess to make much of a go of it, but reading the Tao Perl Ching — The Scripture of the Way of Perl has led me to rethink a few things. What doesn't work for me as a person might indeed work for me and my software.

Style vs. Substance

In today's New York Times we're told that Democrats are divided over the issue of whether Defense Secretary Rumsfeld should stay or go:

On Sunday, Democrats also seemed divided over Mr. Rumsfeld. Senators Carl Levin of Michigan and Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, who are the senior Democrats on, respectively, the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees, blamed the White House for problems in Iraq, saying they saw no need to remove the defense secretary if the president's policies remained the same.

"If I thought a change at the top of the Pentagon would change the policy of this administration, I'd be all for it," Mr. Levin said on "Meet the Press."

But Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a Democrat who serves on the Armed Services Committee, said Mr. Rumsfeld should go. He complained that the defense secretary's "management style is more corrosive than constructive," and said Mr. Rumsfeld's remarks to the guardsman were emblematic of his "disdainful, dismissive" style.

But I don't see why we have to choose — both sides are right. Getting rid of Rumsfeld won't alter the Bush administration's policies on Iraq or anything else; on a substantive level, nothing will change. And I have to admit that I'm enjoying watching Rumsfeld squirm a little as his stylistics, much vaunted a couple of years ago, are revealed to be nothing less than gross insensitivity. But style does matter, and our troops deserve better than to be led by such an obviously incompetent jerk.

Capital Christmas Trees

Mary and I went downtown last night to look at the Christmas trees on the Mall. We took pictures. It was a lovely night for walking around DC — just cold enough to remind you it was winter but with very little wind. We had a good dinner at Red Sage, and finished off the evening with a couple of glasses of port at one of our favorite stops: 701 on Pennsylvania Avenue. With their live jazz, it's a nice place to relax at the end of a night out.

Happy Holidays

I'm getting a little tired of hearing how Christmas is under attack. Apparently, a small number of marketing folks have decided to replace greetings of "Merry Christmas" with more neutral seasonal sentiments, but so what? If people really want something to worry about, perhaps that should be how a solemn religious holiday has turned into a six-week-long super-sale. The greatest threat to the "true meaning of Christmas" is Christmas itself.

But this teacup tempest isn't about the meaning of Christmas. What's really at work here is the pathological need of some people to have their beliefs and values validated at every turn. Like Fox News viewers who require a continuous affirmation of their own political views regardless of the facts, these Christmas defenders have decided to take offense at anyone isn't promoting their religious views with sufficient enthusiasm. Instead of enjoying the season, they fill it with outrage against the infidels.

We've seen this kind of religious intolerance before, and it's not pretty. Is this really what we want Christmas to represent?

Friday Cat Blogging

I like to play with the balls, but sometimes that makes me all sleepy.

Anti-Social Security

Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research has an article in a recent issue of The Nation about the benefit cuts that will form a part of Bush's Social Security reform plan. Bush wants us to believe that payouts from private accounts will make up for these rather steep cuts, but the evidence doesn't point that way:

The President's main pitch is that these accounts will yield higher returns than Social Security does. The pitch also includes rhetoric about the accounts being "your money," and giving every worker a stake in the "ownership society." These claims are mostly bad math, faulty logic and deception. Advocates of private accounts assume that the stock market will give the same returns in the future as it has in the past, even though price-to-earnings ratios in the stock market are far higher now than in the past, and the Social Security trustees project that profits will grow at about half the rate they did in the past. None of the proponents of privatization have yet passed the "no economist left behind test," which asks them to show the set of dividend yields and stock price increases that add up to the stock returns they assume in their analysis.

Elsewhere, Baker and David Rosnik quantify the shortfall that workers can expect with Bush's plan:

The proposal that President Bush is using as the basis for his plan phases in cuts over time. A worker who is 45 today can expect to see a cut in guaranteed benefits of around 15 percent. A worker who is age 35 can expect to see a cut in the guaranteed benefit of approximately 25 percent. A 15 year old who is just entering the work force can expect a benefit cut of close to 40 percent. For a 15 year old, this cut would mean a loss of close to $160,000 in Social Security benefits over the course of their retirement.

Private accounts will allow workers to earn back only a small fraction of this amount. For example, a 15 year-old can expect to make back approximately $50,000 from the $160,000 cut with the earnings on a private account. If this worker retires when the market is in a slump, then it could make their loss even bigger.

Anyone who claims that Bush's plan will "save Social Security" just isn't paying attention. Josh Marshall is right: Bush's plan only makes sense if your goal is the destruction of the program.

Faith-Based Missile Defense

Things didn't go so well out on the test range yesterday.

The Bush administration's effort to build a system for defending the country against ballistic missile attack suffered an embarrassing setback yesterday when an interceptor missile failed to launch during the first flight test of the system in two years.

Pentagon officials could not immediately explain the reason for the failure. They said some kind of anomaly prompted the automatic shutdown of the launch sequence just 23 seconds before the interceptor was due to take off from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. Plans had called for the interceptor to soar into space and knock down a mock warhead fired from Kodiak Island in Alaska about 16 minutes earlier.

Let's cut to the chase. The interceptor system is fundamentally flawed and subject to simple and effective countermeasures. The system has been unable to pass a series of tests that are so dumbed down that even a passing grade would give us little reason to believe that the system would actually work in the real world. Yesterday's test was delayed for months while the Missile Defense Agency tweaked the system, and even that wasn't enough to insure success. In the end, missile defense costs us $10 billion per year, and after decades of research and development, we have almost nothing to show for it.

Faced with these facts, you might expect that policy makers would just scrap the whole thing. You'd be wrong: missile defense is getting an increase in appropriations next year. Maybe you would expect the installation of the system would be delayed until all the bugs were worked out and it was sufficiently tested. You'd be wrong again: the system was installed earlier this year, just in time for Bush to take credit for it before the election. You might then expect that yesterday's failed test would delay the decision to make the system operational. Wrong again:

For weeks, Pentagon officials have described the facility as going through a "shakedown" phase and have insisted that the decision to declare it operational would be made independent of the outcome of the flight test. Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon's top spokesman, reiterated yesterday that "the test was not connected to any decisions about operational capability."

This is our faith-based administration at work: it's decisions are made "independent" of the facts. We could be buying a lot of reality-based security each year with those billions of dollars. As it is, we're just wasting money and ignoring opportunities.

Managing Risk

Josh Marshall has written a rather long but absolutely essential post about the upcoming debate on Social Security and how the Democrats should approach it. You should go read the whole thing. I do want to make one comment, though.

Marshall argues that Democrats should not make this a fight about the virtues of the market or about risk. That's what the GOP wants, he says, and they'll win if that's how the debate is framed. Instead, Democrats need to stress that Social Security is a different kind of program: it's a guaranteed insurance system, not just a big collective 401(k).

The issue is balance and commonsense. A breadwinner with dependents who gets a lump sum salary at the beginning of the year and invests it all in a few hot start-ups doesn't believe in the market; he or she is just a fool. A wise investment portfolio is balanced between riskier and more conservative investments. The best way to make this argument (and the most valid one) is to make it clear that Democrats want people to be able to invest. That really is the path to wealth. But Social Security is different. It is, among other things, a baseline of guaranteed retirement security and income for everyone. You get it whether you retire in boom times or bust times, whether life has dealt you good cards or bad cards. The two things are simply different.

I don't think Marshall goes far enough here. Social Security isn't just different, it's essential — the guaranteed portion of a retirement package that makes riskier investing a rational thing to do. By preserving Social Security, we maximize the power of the market. Without a social safety net, the more aggressive investments that we want to enable people to make for the long term just aren't sensible.

Thus, contra Marshall, I think that part of the Democratic argument has to be about risk. As Kevin Drum has been arguing for a while now, individuals are assuming more and more of the economic risk under the GOP. The Republican laissez-faire ideal does indeed increase personal risk, but it doesn't allow individuals to manage that risk. Democrats need to offer the vision of an economy where individuals can make relatively accurate predictions and manage their own level of risk accordingly. Social Security is part of that vision and proves to be a program that empowers both individuals and markets.

Bunnies!

The title says it all: "It's a Wonderful Life" in 30 seconds, re-enacted by bunnies. It hits all the high points of the bunny-less original, and unlike the version shown on TV each year, you can watch it as many times as you want.

Poetic Injustice

Ever since I heard that Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin, I've wondered why his would-be assassin would use that particular chemical. Its use as a poison is extremely rare, it leaves a rather obvious mark on the victim, it's detectable months after ingestion, and in this case, it didn't kill the victim. An odd choice indeed, especially considering that it was likely administered by people with a broad arsenal of better poisons at their disposal.

Fast forward to last night, when Mary and I were watching yet another story about this episode on the news. The reporter noted that dioxin was used in Agent Orange, the deadly defoliant used by the US during the Vietnam war. And then Mary sat up and said, "Of course they would use Agent Orange — it's Yushchenko's campaign color!" That's got to be the right answer. And it looks like Yushchenko's opponents were too clever by half.

Positive Agenda

In today's Los Angeles Times, Ronald Brownstein weighs in on the debate over the Democrat's national security agenda kicked off by Peter Beinart's "Fighting Faith" article from two weeks ago. Brownstein makes a much-needed point: it's damn hard to craft a positive agenda when you don't control the White House. For evidence, we need look no farther than John Kerry, who tirelessly pushed his foreign policy proposals during the campaign without anyone much noticing.

Kerry criticized Bush's management of the Iraq war, but he resisted pressure from the left to set a date for withdrawing U.S. troops. In almost every speech, Kerry insisted that combating Islamic extremism would be his top priority. He promised to expand the military, augment the special forces, launch new efforts to safeguard nuclear materials and, above all, to cooperate more closely with allies in both pursuing terrorists and encouraging economic, social and political reform in the Arab world to defuse the tensions breeding terrorism.

It wasn't a perfect agenda, but it wasn't entirely reactive either.

Yet the campaign debate, inexorably, focused more on Bush's actual decisions — which produced tangible consequences in Iraq that Americans could see every night on television — than on Kerry's alternative ideas, which never could be more than abstractions to voters. Bush, through his actions, succeeded in defining for a slight majority of Americans what it meant to be tough and resolute against terrorism. And that allowed him to portray Kerry as unsteady or weak for proposing a different direction. That's the advantage of incumbency.

The problem really isn't that the Democrats can't come up with a national security platform of their own. The problem is that without any way to implement that policy, it's just a theory that gets overshadowed by Bush's actual policy and its real-world effects. In this context, "going positive" isn't going to be easy.

Which Values?

Following up on last week's look at the myth of the "values voter", I'll point you to this piece by Christopher Muste in the Washington Post. Looking at an array of polling data, he concludes:

So what's the picture that emerges from all these numbers? A large and fairly stable group of moral values voters, whose numbers have been largely consistent over the past three elections, who vote Republican in roughly the same or smaller proportions year after year, who provided no clear winning boost to Bush, and whose idea of what constitutes moral values is hardly uniform. This is a poor fit for the reigning image of a crucial swing vote — animated single-mindedly by cultural wedge issues — that turned out in unprecedented numbers to push Bush over the top in 2004. It's time to reel the moral values myth back down to earth.

Central to this conclusion is the exit polling data from the Los Angeles Times, which lets us look at how the moral values issue has changed in importance over the last four elections. While the results are mixed, it turns out that the Republicans do have something to worry about here:

The Los Angeles Times conducts its own national exit poll. Since 1992, it has asked voters which two issues they considered most important in deciding how they would vote. This year, 40 percent of voters the newspaper surveyed cited "moral/ethical values" as one of their two most important issues. Guess what? That's about the same proportion as in the previous two elections: 35 percent named moral values in 2000 and 40 percent did so in 1996, up from 24 percent in 1992. So this year didn't see an unprecedented surge in values voters rushing to the polls.

And while Bush strategist Karl Rove must be gratified that the 2000 dip in the turnout of values voters was reversed in 2004, he can't be entirely thrilled by how they cast their votes. The L.A. Times survey showed that moral values voters gave 70 percent of their votes to Bush this year. But that's a drop from 2000, when he won 74 percent. Put another way, 54 percent of Bush voters this year cited moral values — a decline from the Republican high-water mark in 1996, when 67 percent of Bob Dole's voters named moral values. For Democratic nominees, by contrast, the trend has been up, not down, steadily rising from a scant 9 percent of Bill Clinton supporters naming moral values in the "it's the economy" election of 1992 to 24 percent of John Kerry's voters this year.

The fact that an increasing number of "values voters" is voting Democratic should tell the party that it needs to tweak its message and put it in a more compelling frame, not abandon it altogether.

No Ethics

The House Republicans are at it again. One of their first moves after the election was to insulate their leadership from those pesky criminal indictments. And today we learn that they are trying to make it harder for complaints of ethics violations brought by House members to even be heard by the ethics committee.

Responding to complaints from DeLay's lawyer, the House Rules Committee suggested in October that it might try to screen complaints against lawmakers before they reach the bipartisan ethics committee. "It may be that we need to require a vetting of ethics complaints at the start of the process … to assure that they are not pursued for partisan reasons," Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier (R-Calif.) told colleagues in a letter.

Never fear, though — if a House member dares to criticize the ethics committee for its refusal to take action, that would be a serious breach of ethics that would get prompt attention.

Meanwhile, three senior Democrats said the panel is trying to squelch free speech to protect itself from criticism. They cited a Nov. 18 ethics committee letter warning that House members could face "disciplinary action" if they "attack the integrity of this Committee or any of its members."

While the GOP likes to claim that it is the party of personal responsibility and accountability, it sure does have a funny way of showing it.

Interactive Interfaces

For too long, web interfaces have been hampered by their lack of interactivity. Because form data is only sent to the server when the user clicks the submit button, the amount of feedback the user can receive during the process of completing the form is limited. Including data with the form is possible, but it doesn't allow the full range of interactivity that seamless communication with the server would allow.

This is why Google's new auto-complete interface is so interesting. As you type in your search terms, the page queries the server to retrieve a list of popular phrases that match your input, and the page builds a drop-down menu of those phrases; as you type, the drop-down changes. This functionality is enabled via the XMLHttpRequest object, which is currently supported by most modern browsers one way or another. The Google javascript implementation is obfuscated, but a good explanation of the object and some sample code can be found here.

I see this technique used most successfully with intranet applications, where a fast network reduces latency and where browser standardization eliminates some usability considerations. But Google's sample app also shows that this technology is ready for the wild, too.

Update: Human-readable Google javascript code is here, courtesy of Server Side Guy.

Kerik's Gone

A part of me is relieved that Bernard Kerik has pulled himself out of consideration for the Homeland Security post. As I said last week, he's just not qualified for the job.

But another part of me will miss learning more about this rather interesting figure. Over the past few days, as new information trickled out from the various media investigations, it was becoming obvious that not only wasn't Kerik qualified in an objective sense, he wasn't qualified in a political sense, either. All of which raises the interesting question: how did Kerik get the nod in the first place? Is Guiliani really that powerful in White House circles? Did the White House rush the nomination to foster the appearance of efficiency and competency? Did the White House just not care what was in the man's past, thinking that they could muscle anyone they chose through a compliant Senate? Or did the people running the vet just screw up?

Any way you slice it, Kerik's confirmation would have been a fun show to watch. Now, we'll probably never learn what the real story was.

Friday Cat Blogging

Sometimes I just like to hang out at the bar.

What Crisis?

Bush & Co. are pushing Social Security privitization because they say the system is in crisis and won't survive without some radical changes. But as Paul Krugman notes in his suprise column today, the "crisis" doesn't exist.

Projections in a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office (which are probably more realistic than the very cautious projections of the Social Security Administration) say that the trust fund will run out in 2052. The system won't become "bankrupt" at that point; even after the trust fund is gone, Social Security revenues will cover 81 percent of the promised benefits. Still, there is a long-run financing problem.

Fortunately, this long-term problem isn't that hard to fix.

The report finds that extending the life of the trust fund into the 22nd century, with no change in benefits, would require additional revenues equal to only 0.54 percent of G.D.P. That's less than 3 percent of federal spending - less than we're currently spending in Iraq. And it's only about one-quarter of the revenue lost each year because of President Bush's tax cuts - roughly equal to the fraction of those cuts that goes to people with incomes over $500,000 a year.

Given these numbers, it's not at all hard to come up with fiscal packages that would secure the retirement program, with no major changes, for generations to come.

However, it would be foolish to expect the Republicans to be open to such an incremental reform, because despite their use of the word, reform isn't their goal. The GOP has made no secret of it's desire to kill Social Security. They see their chance now, so they're taking it.

Fundamentalism and Values

With the post about values that I wrote yesterday still fresh in my mind, I came across an interesting article on fundamentalism, fascism, and primate behavior by Rev. Davidson Loehr. There is a lot going on in this piece, but for me the most interesting part of the argument is the notion that every time our society expands its notion of the in-group through some kind of liberal reform (women's rights in the 1920s, civil rights in the 1960s, etc.), a new social equilibrium can only be reached by casting this reform within a conservative frame. For example:

…the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used the rhetoric of a conservative vision to promote his liberal redefinition of the members of our in-group. When he defined all Americans as the children of God, those words could sound like the battle-cry of an American Taliban on the verge of putting a Bible in every school, a catechism in every legislature. Instead, King used that cry to include Americans of all colors in the sacred and protected group of "all God's children" — which was just what many white Southerners were arguing against forty years ago.

Put another way, modern American liberalism has pushed for a more expansive notion of citizenship, but it has (with notable exceptions like King) tended to frame its demands for this larger community in the language of individual rights and not in the language of community itself. The conservative impulse, which demands the subordination of the individual to the larger group, doesn't get its due, and the resulting social instability is the cause of the conservative "backlash" we see today.

I'm not entirely comfortable with what Loehr is saying here, and it's all to easy to slip into (and between) overly simplistic or misleading dichotomies given his use of evolutionary psychology. Is society's "conservative impulse" and modern political conservativism really the same thing? Is social stability really the result of a balance between left and right? And are we giving too much importance to our primate heritage in analyzing modern human behavior? But I did notice the similarities to Joe Trippi's definition of "civic virtue" and why the Democrats would do well to make this concept a rhetorical centerpiece of the next campaign. So perhaps we can find something here to take away that will help us win next time. (Via Digby.)

Share This

A new study out by the Pew Internet and American Life Project concludes that:

The first large-scale surveys of the internet’s impact on artists and musicians reveal that they are embracing the Web as a tool to improve how they make, market, and sell their creative works. They eagerly welcome new opportunities that are provided by digital technology and the internet.

…

Across the board, among those who are both successful and struggling, the artists and musicians we surveyed are more likely to say that the internet has made it possible for them to make more money from their art than they are to say it has made it harder to protect their work from piracy or unlawful use.

So here's what I want. First, I want the record companies and the RIAA to stop saying they are suing 16-year-old kids for copyright infringement in order to help the artists. It's never been about the people who actually make the music — the music industry is simply trying to protect what they (wrongly) perceive to be their long-term business interests.

Second, I want my Napster back.

Values

The conventional wisdom of the 2004 election goes something like this: A plurality of voters believed that "moral values" was the most important issue of the campaign, and they voted for Bush by a wide margin and pushed him to victory. Therefore, Democrats need to court these "value voters" by moving to the right and stop putting their elite agenda ahead of the concerns of Middle America.

Dick Meyer, however, writing in the Washington Post, says that's just a myth, a falsehood driven by a single badly-worded exit poll question and pushed by a press corp that wanted an intriguing new explanation for Bush's win. Meyers makes a good case, but I'm surprised he didn't reference what seems to me to be the strongest piece of evidence against the "value voters" thesis — the Pew Research Center's post-election poll that shows a plurality of voters will pick "moral values" as their most important issue if given a list, but a much smaller percentage will do the same if asked the question in an open-ended way. The Pew survey also notes that for many "values voters", there isn't a specific issue that determines their stance, which makes it unlikely that issue shifts by the Democrats would help them reach those voters.

Still, the perception remains that Republicans care about values, while Democrats don't. This is, I believe, in large measure due to the success that Republicans have had in framing their most powerful agenda items as matters of value, while simultaneously attacking Democrats as rudderless, politically expedient flip-floppers. There is no quick and sure way out of this well-crafted meta-narrative the GOP has constructed, but Joe Trippi offers some unsolicited advice to Hillary Clinton today in the New York Times that would seem to be something that all Democrats could take to heart:

She could counter the Republican talk of religious values by focusing on civic values and personal responsibility. When was the last time anyone running for president talked about the common good, civic virtues and the duties and responsibilities of citizens, not just their rights? That is our moral language.

Exactly. The virtues of the public sphere take priority over the values of private morality, and these are the virtues that today's Republican Party would have troubling integrating into their own framework. Precisely how the Democrats can construct their own meta-narrative from these civic values that is consistent with their issues and history I'll leave as an exercise to the reader.

Not Qualified

On Friday, when Bush nominated Bernard Kerik to head up Homeland Security, I admit I didn't know much about the man. Because of this administration's rather awful record for cabinet picks, I was worried that Kerik would be par for their course. The first day's stories didn't have much to say about Kerik's record beyond "he was NYPD Commissioner on 9/11", so I've been waiting for someone to focus more on that part of the picture. If you've been waiting, too, then you have to read this story in today's Washington Post.

What emerges is a portrait of a man who just isn't qualified for the job. Beyond what one adminstration official said was an ability to bring "9/11 symbolism into the Cabinet", Kerik lacks any of the skills needed to succeed in his job.

Bring order and coordination to a large bureaucracy? Not Kerik — he was criticized by the 9/11 Commision for failing to properly coordinate with the NYFD during the rescue operation. Pick the right people to assist him? Not Kerik — he has a track record for promoting subordinates who later get indicted for corruption and fraud. See a difficult job through to the end? Not Kerik — he cut and run from his job training Iraqi police, saying only that he "needed a vacation". Free from conflicts of interest? Not Kerik — his last job was with Giuliani Partners, a homeland security consulting operation run by his political patron (and by all accounts, the man who got him the DHS job), Rudy Giuliani.

Kerik, though, has always been a loyal foot soldier, always dancing with those that brung him, and there is no reason to expect him to show any individual initiative. He is a partisan hack of the worst sort, and owes everything he is today to his political connections. Which is why it is so disappointing that people are trying to read him as an agent of change, someone who will pay more attention to large urban areas and first responders. Yes, Kerik was a New York cop, but he won't go against his boss. Bush has demonstrated over and over again that politics trumps security, and that money goes to the red states, not the blue.

In the end, though, there is one thing Kerik has said which should uneqivocally disqualify him from ever holding any political office: "Political criticism is our enemy's best friend." No, Mr. Kerik, a person who believe that free speech is tantamount to treason is.

Friday Cat Blogging

I am a very floppy cat.

Market Downturn

I got a good laugh from this story in today's Washington Post:

A campaign fund controlled by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has lost almost $460,000 in stock market investments since 2000 and now does not have enough to cover a sizable bank loan, according to federal election records and the manager of the Frist account.

The heaviest losses, totaling more than $500,000, occurred in a stock index fund in 2001 and 2002, years when the securities markets suffered a major downturn. But the Frist campaign account lost an additional $32,050 in July and August, a setback that was only partially offset by a gain of $11,472 in September, according to Linus Castignani, treasurer of "Frist 2000," which was created to finance the senator's successful campaign for a second six-year term in 2000.

Maybe it's a good thing that it's only Frist's campaign leftovers that had such poor returns, rather than, say, his private retirement account. On the other hand, if this had been his retirement account, then maybe Frist would be less gung-ho about privitizing Social Security. (Via Political Wire.)

Friedman's on a Tear

I've never had much use for Tom Friedman. Maybe it's because he's been a big cheerleader for the Iraqi war, or maybe it's because of his stylistic quirks and metaphor problems. But regardless, his last few columns have been absolutely priceless, and can only have been written by someone who bet his intellectual integrity on an administration that then betrayed him at every turn.

Take last Sunday's, for example, where he rips into Bush & Co. about their handling of Iraq, the cause nearest and dearest to his heart. And today he continues in the same vein on the domestic policy front, seemingly channeling Paul Krugman:

I feel sorry for Mr. Snow. Reading your career obituary over breakfast can't be much fun. But I feel even more sorry for the country. I can't recall a time when the Treasury Department has been so emasculated by a White House. I went by the Treasury the other day and noticed a big sign outside saying it was being remodeled. Why bother? Who would know if it was gutted? The country would get more fiscal benefit by renting out the Treasury rooms for weddings, graduations and bar mitzvahs than it's gotten in the past four years from any advice coming from there.

If Friedman keeps this up, I might start looking forward to his reading his column on a regular basis.