Sweaters are not bad
I want to like Maureen Dowd. I know a lot of bloggers want to bash her as just another media whore, but I’m inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt. As a regular reader of the New York Times op-ed page, I enjoy her as a breath of fresh air among the solid, pontificating, testosterone-laden males that dominate that page. So I find her latest column about Wesley Clark’s sweaters a bit disappointing. She could have taken a fresh angle on this piece or she could have repeated the Oh-my-God-Al-Gore-wears-brown silliness from 2000. She chose the latter. In case we missed the point, she even repeated the Gore canard, “Al Gore sprouted earth tones in 2000, hoping heathery brown sweaters and khakis would warm him up.” Sigh.

This could have been a very pleasant story about a man who hasn’t had to dress himself since he left his mother, learning how to be a civilian. The current inhabitant of the White House dressed in a uniform he is not entitled to, in order to disrupt the home coming of an entire aircraft carrier full of honorable service members on their way back to their families, for an embarrassingly premature victory dance and photo op. Gen. Clark exposed himself to the intrusive glare of the press while he sheepishly tried to learn the dress of the most honored rank of all: citizen of the republic. He should get credit for this effort, not snide scorn.

Lucky stupidity isn’t a crime
Jeralyn over at TalkLeft has this little goodie:

DENVER (AP) - A 24-year-old Army sergeant was removed from an American Airlines flight after an inert land mine was found in his checked baggage, the Transportation Safety Administration said.

TSA screeners noticed the land mine Friday, pulled the bag from the luggage system at Denver International Airport and confiscated the mine, TSA spokesman Mike Fierberg said. No flights were delayed. The soldier, whose name was not released, could face civil penalties for trying to put a prohibited item aboard a flight, Fierberg said. No criminal charges would be filed, he said. The man was released by police, but the airline refused to allow him aboard his flight to Dallas, Fierberg said.

For lack of more details, I’ll have to make a few assumptions here. I’m guessing that the term “inert” in the first paragraph means nonfunctional and that the land mine was rendered nonfunctional by removing the explosive charge. In other words, he was carrying the empty shell of a land mine home as a souvenir. At least that’s what I hope it means based on the fact that no criminal charges were made. I can’t imagine the authorities not bringing criminal charges against someone who tried to bring a functional explosive device, or any kind of explosive substance, on board a commercial flight. “Victor,” in the comments at TalkLeft suggests that this is the case and the civil charge the sergeant is for not declaring such an item.

What was the good sergeant thinking? Hasn’t he heard that there is a war on and that some people, especially around airplanes, are a wee bit paranoid? Actually, I do know what he was thinking; I’ve known too many people like that. He managed to rationalize his way around to talking himself into something really stupid. Oh, it’s not a real mine and they don’t check all of the baggage so they probably won’t even notice. He just doesn’t take that next step in his chain of thought: but what if they do notice? The sergeant is lacking in plain common sense. I hope his superiors give him a firm talking to when he gets back to the base.

Why libertarians hate us, why they shouldn’t, and what we can do about it
I spend a lot of time thinking about the nature of the American Political spectrum. Over the years I have oppressed my wife and friends with long pedantic expositions on the subject and have produced a few posts on it since I took up blogging.

Jim Abrams of the Associated Press had an excellent piece last week on how thoroughly the Republicans have abandoned their states’ rights and libertarian and embraced the exercise of coercive power from the federal center. He doesn’t present much analysis, but he lists a large number of lesser-known usurpations by the federal government now that it is in Republican hands. We should all keep a copy on hand to produce during debates with libertarians.

He wasn’t the only one to discover how much the Republican leadership has abandoned some of the GOP’s core issues and core constituencies. Sheryl Gay Stolberg had a piece in the Sunday New York Times. She has some more analysis and focuses on some of the unhappy fiscal conservatives in the party.

Does this sudden love of the Federal government mean that the Republicans were lying hypocrites to begin with or that temptations of power are too strong for any of us to resist (except Gandalf)? Have they abandoned those issues and constituencies because the party has been taken over by a band of zealots pursuing some other agenda or because their leaders care about nothing but short-term political advantage and nothing? All of the above or none of the above?

As interesting as it may be to sort out the ideological evolution of the upper reaches of the Republican Party or trace the history of recent factional struggles in the same, for the moment I’m going to say it doesn’t matter. What matters for the purpose of this post is the simple fact that the Republican leadership and Bush administration have abandoned a core constituency. I want to use that observation for two purposes: first, to make some observation on the current state of the American political spectrum and second, to point out an opportunity for the Democratic nominee in the coming election.

My own interpretation of the American political spectrum rests on a few main points (some of these I’ve blogged on; some I have not). The familiar left-right or liberal-conservative political scale is an imperfect metaphor for the range of positions represented by the two main political parties. The scale is almost worthless for describing a broader world of opinions and positions not represented in the two party coalitions. The two parties are non-ideologically based; they are based on coalitions of interest groups (short digression re “special interest groups”: are there interest groups whose interest isn’t special?). There is no single objective philosophical criterion that can be applied to predict what position the parties will adopt on a new issue. The differences in the parties, and therefore the scale, are more psychological than anything else (this is point that I hope to get back to with a longer post someday). The parties periodically shift around on the scale. The scale itself periodically shifts around.

I’ve always been a little baffled by the alliance of libertarians and conservatives and by the hostility of libertarians to the Democratic Party. In their rhetoric, both the libertarians and conservatives rail at the supposed “big government” and intrusive “nanny state” tendencies of liberals and Democrats. Yet the conservatives and Republicans are have produced their own pet intrusive, bureaucratic programs—the War on Drugs has been a perennial favorite of theirs—and they have presided over the most fiscally irresponsible administrations of the last half century. During the same period of time, liberals and Democrats have been defenders of privacy and freedom in a number of spheres.

Libertarians do not fit well on the traditional political scale. In theory, at least, their position on most issues should be determined by a philosophical principle. At best, both sides of the scale have something to offer that pleases libertarians and something that annoys them. So, why do they focus their entire wrath on one end of the scale and not the other? What the hell is wrong with the libertarians?

I think the answer is that liberals and Democrats have suffered from their own successes. Generally, liberals and Democrats favor greater freedom in areas of personal conscience, morality, and artistic expression and greater regulation in the economy and property relations, while for conservatives and Republicans the stands are reversed. Libertarians favor greater freedom and less regulation in all areas. The liberals and Democrats have all ready delivered most of what they have to offer libertarians as part of their revolutions from the New Deal to the sixties. For the last thirty years, it has been the conservatives and Republicans who have had the most to offer libertarians through their attacks on government regulation and support for unfettered property rights.

This situation has clearly changed. The Bush administration is attacking many of the freedoms that the libertarians have been taking for granted. It is now the liberals and Democrats that have the most to offer the libertarians and the Republicans who are the greatest threat (at this point I have to separate the conservatives and Republicans because the Bush administration is clearly abandoning those traditional conservative issues and constituencies I mentioned above). Libertarians must now make a choice between the principles that they espouse and the alliance they have clung to for so long. In other words they need to choose which they like more, freedom or liberal bashing.

This election is the best opportunity the Democratic Party has had in a generation to peel a few Libertarian votes off from the Republican Party. It might be that this chance is only good for forging a temporary alliance of convenience, but it might be that a significant number of libertarians could be permanently convinced that the left is the better alliance. This is one of the messages that we need to cultivate this year.

Even if the libertarians can’t bring themselves to actually vote for a Democrat after demonizing them for decades, they might choose to stay home or vote for the Libertarian Party candidate next fall. It might be worthwhile for anyone who is very serious about getting Bush out of office to do what you can to see that the Libertarian Party has a place on the ballot in your state. Sign their petitions and when you talk to those friends and relatives that would rather die than vote for a Democrat convince them of the value of third party protest voting.

AWG disease
The press has had a great week and a half obsessing on the mad cow discovered scattered across eight Western states. Yet we should all try to maintain a sense of perspective in these perilous times. No cow, no matter how mad, has ever blown up a federal building, stockpiled cyanide pipe bombs, or assassinated a doctor on his way to work. In our own lives we are far more threatened by angry white guy disease (AWG) that we are by mad cow disease.

This is a test
Most of my template has vanished making archy unreadable. It goes without saying that this sucks.

Update: Well, that was unpleasant. I’m still not sure what happened. I think that sometime yesterday a large portion of my template vanished and the FTP connection between my Blogger front-end and the Blogspot server was disrupted. I discovered it this morning. Only the upper left-hand corner of my blog, with about half of my blogroll was publishing. I spent about two hours digging through Google cached pages from my site to reconstruct the template into something resembling its former glory. At that point I ran into the FTP problem. No matter what I did at Blogger, nothing changed on the published page fragment. Now it seems to be back.

I’d still like to know if this was caused by some kind of crash at Blogger/ Blogspot or if I was hacked. The latter would be kind of cool because it would mean someone actually read me and cared enough about what I wrote to get cranky. I’ve considered staging a feud with one of my fellow low-circulation bloggers as a rating stunt. The trouble is, I’m a wimpy fighter. Even faking it, I’m too polite and reasonable to produce very entertaining flames.

Oh well, back to work. I don’t think I have all of the recent additions to my blogroll restored. Remember kids, keep a back-up copy of your template code in a safe place.

Another update:I think I have everybody back on the blogroll. If you were there a few days ago and are now missing, let me know. It’s not because I hate you (unless you want me to hate you (see previous update)).

Why am I wasting my time?
Two clear messages that tell me I should give up this nonsense and take up weaving pine needle baskets. My yard would be neater and I would be happier.

First, via Atrios, Pat Robertson is on record letting us know that he was talking with God the other day and the big guy let slip that Bush will win in a landslide. I’m disappointed, but I don’t see that I have a lot of room to argue.

Even worse than that, Jim Rittenhouse reports that the Philadelphia Weekly Hip-o-meter has decided that blogs are out. Pointless and unhip, can I take this kind of judgment again? I hated discovering that about myself in high-school. I had hoped to have outgrown such a painful revelation.

What a bummer, man.

Playing with maps
Like many bloggers, I’ve been pulling out my electoral maps and handicapping the next election.

The big topic of conversation so far has been: can the Democrats win without the South. I first became aware of elections during the last days of the old “Solid South.” In those days Northern progressives and Southern racists had a devil’s deal to work together to produce Democratic majorities in congress. The price each side demanded was free reign in their territory. It was never a perfect alliance; cracks were evident from the very beginning. Once the Northern and Western Democrats embraced racial civil rights in the sixties, the only thing that kept the South from bolting immediately was a tendency to reward seniority by reelecting incumbents and the continuing effectiveness of local Democratic organizations. The decline of the Democratic South was slow. For a while, those of us who liked to play with maps could divide the south into “their South” and “our South.”

For a while a similar condition existed in the West. Although in this case the progressive West vanished overnight in 1980 when Church, Magnusen, McGovern, and Mansfield were all ousted in one night. The literature on the decline of the progressive West is nowhere as complete as that on the Solid South. There are a couple good books that need to be written here. But like the South, a clear “our West” and “their West” emerged in the eighties. In fact the trend was more definite in the West. In the South, our South shrank with each election; in the West, the inter-mountain states became more Republican with each election as the coast became more Democratic.

In the rest of the country, the Democrats gained some new strongholds. New England and the Mid-Atlantic states became more dependably Democratic. The upper-Mississippi enclave of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota stayed Democratic.

Although the Democrats lost ground in congress after 1980 they remained competitive. They lost and regained control of the Senate twice and lost the House but stayed within an election of retaking it.

Meanwhile the Republicans have behaved as if God and time are on their side. All they need to do is remain patient and all things will come their way (though even that seems like too much to ask for some). They gain strength and turf in the South with each election. Their lock on the Midwest and Mountain states just gets stronger and they think they can project that lock into Wisconsin and Minnesota in the near future. In some elections they can split New England into “ours” and “theirs.” On the West Coast, demographic trends in Washington and Oregon seem to be going their direction. They can trot out poll after poll that show young people are more conservative than their boomer parents. Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals who once sat out elections in large numbers have become increasingly politicized over the last generation and are overwhelmingly Republican. For twenty years, they have worked on establishing the Grand Old Party among Hispanic communities as firmly as Democrats are established among Blacks, confidently telling themselves that the Hispanic population is growing faster than the Black population.

But things aren’t working as smoothly as the Republicans would like. The fabled Southern Strategy not only gained them the strength that Democrats once boasted, it has gained them the same weaknesses.

Critics of science fiction often point out the self absorbed Americaness of certain plot conventions. One such convention is the space colony that is cursed to suffer the same divisions and crises as Mother Earth. The message of the book is: hatred of the other, even though he be our brother, is the original sin that we cannot escape. The critics sneer at the simplicity of this message and call it a singularly American obsession. That these critics are wrong, arrogant, and just plain annoying poop-heads is the subject for another post. The racial question, as they would have called it at the beginning of the last century, is one of the great inescapable themes of the American plot.

The success of the Southern Strategy has doomed the Hispanic Strategy. The Republicans have taken over the devil’s deal that Democrats once embraced. The old Democratic alliance of Northern progressives and Southern racists was possible in the mid-twentieth century because there was no true national news media and the reach of the central government was weaker. The party could promise one thing in one state and something else in another state and get away with it because the news media wasn’t extensive enough to call them on it and the power of the states was still strong enough to actually do one thing in one state and something else in another state. No longer. The Republicans are trying to replicate the mid-twentieth century Democratic success in a completely different environment. They cannot pander to white supremacists and immigrant bashers on one hand and expect to captivate the Hispanic vote on the other. The Hispanic Strategy has failed. After twenty years, the Republicans can only manage a majority in some Hispanic districts and still lose many.

While the Republicans are smug that Washington and Oregon are no longer safe for Democrats, they have failed to notice that Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and soon Colorado are no longer safe for Republicans. A large section of the West is no longer guaranteed to either party and must now be actively fought for. This is largely because the Hispanic population is growing rapidly in the Southwest and the highly touted white male population is not.

A few weeks ago I handicapped the election and figured the Democratic presidential candid ate could win without the South if we kept Wisconsin and Minnesota and won all of the Mid-Atlantic and steel belt states (except Indiana). That was a pretty big if. Things would be better if we could take a few Southern states. I considered our chances in the Southwest to be something meaningful for ’08 or ’12, but not really significant now. My first targets for a safety margin were Arkansas, West Virginia, Louisiana, and—dare I say it—Florida.

Since I made that first map, Bush handed us Pennsylvania and West Virginia on the steel tariff decision and made Ohio easier to fight for. Today it was revealed that the Ashcroft Justice Department is demanding every hotel, casino, and airline in Las Vegas hand over their personal information for all of their customers during the holiday period. That’s information on about 300,000 without a warrant. Under the current Code Ernie alert, they may have good reasons for this, but they haven’t made that case and I can bet this will get up the nose of a lot of the sagebrush rebel libertarians in Nevada. We may have just won Nevada.

Finally, Florida is not as bad as we may think. The Old Miami Cubans are as temperamental as ever; they don’t like Democrats but they periodically find reasons to want punish Bush. And even if they do rally to his flag, many younger Cubans and other Floridians are tired of their tantrums and might Democratic just to piss them off. Many of the voters who were disenfranchised in 2000 will want to make sure they vote, vote right, and are counted this year. The military absentees will not be as overwhelmingly Republican as last time. And I wonder what the effect of a couple hundred Democrats in Alabama or Georgia moving across the state line might be. Normally, such a suggestion would be a joke, but as close as the 2000 election was, a few cranky Democrats going where their votes really matter could tip the balance.

All in all this should be an entertaining election. No matter what happens, hearts will be broken. I hope mine isn’t one of them.

Just a thought
Doesn’t blogroll sound like it should be a pastry? I suppose it would have to be a soft cheese roll filled to overflowing with bologna.

From the Sarcasm-is-wasted-on-children file
Trent Duffy conducts the morning press briefing at Crawford Middle School on Tuesday.

Q Could you confirm or knock down reports out of the Middle East that the President may go to Libya next year?

MR. DUFFY: I don't have any updates on the President's schedule at this time.

Q Can you assure us he's not going this week, though?

MR. DUFFY: I don't have any updates on the President's schedule.

Q That was a joke.

Sigh.

Minimum wage
Kevin Drum and Kos have both come out in favor of linking the minimum wage to congressional pay. This is an idea that I have long been a fan of, though I don’t claim that it was an original thought for me. I wish I knew where I first heard it so I could give due credit.

I think I came across the idea during or after the ’92 election. Clinton was in favor of raising it pointing out that it hadn’t changed during the previous twelve years of Republicans in the White House. Bush Sr. was not only against raising it but actually wanted to lower it for service workers through the mechanism of his bogus “training wage.” Somewhere, among the white noise of the talking heads, I remember someone counting up how many times Congress had given itself a raise while refusing to do anything for the working poor. Their solution was to tie the two together. I thought it was a fair and elegant solution and nothing has changed my mind since. It has been a permanent and prominent plank of my if-I-ran-the-world platform for the last dozen years.

My own variation of the plan is this. I want a constitutional amendment that defines the pay for all of the elected positions defined in the constitution (President, VP, and both houses of Congress) in terms of multiples of the minimum wage. This would enshrine the minimum wage in the constitution and further limit the ability of our elected leaders to play games with their pay. I think this would be a perfect follow up to the 27th amendment, which postpones raises congress votes for itself till after the next election.

Normally, I’m against demanding constitutional amendments as a solution to every problem. The constitution should be reserved for general principles not specific legislation. And even then, the principles should be very carefully considered. Too many people want to amend the constitution to create an exception every time they find the first amendment too restrictive or too lenient (I should be able to stick my religion in your kids’ face but you shouldn’t be able to insult the flag). In fact, I pretty much have a knee jerk reaction of being against any amendments until convinced that there really is no other way around he problem.

The minimum wage is one of my two exceptions to this rule. The other exception is that I really think we need an amendment barring owners of local businesses from appearing in their own TV ads. I might be able to get a mass movement behind this. If you won’t do it for yourself, think of the children.