Quote of the Day

Lee Habeeb on Hugh Hewitt, December 1, 2011:

I don’t buy the idea that Newt’s not conservative because he sat on the couch with Nancy Pelosi.  He sat on the couch with Nancy Pelosi at the moment because he wanted to say at the moment, hey, I am not a Republican, I am not a conservative, I am an American, and yeah, let’s talk about global warming … what can we do to reduce our carbon footprint anyway, aside from Kyoto and aside from these other things?  I don’t want to ever be a conservative who says we can’t be better stewards. 

My Dog Died Today

Thx in advance for your sympathies, all.

Of course, we weren’t lucky enough she died in her sleep. That was wishful thinking, that the decision would be taken out of our hands.

Middie the Wonder Dog was 15 afterall, and that’s stretching it even in dog years. To explain, she’d suddenly stopped eating her usual food a month ago, and even though we came up with a new formulation that kept her eating, eating had become her last and only pleasure.

She was going away from us.

Yesterday, she had her second attack of vestibular syndrome, which makes ’em dizzy as hell. Recovering from a second bout at age 15 is clinically contraindicated. It was time.

She couldn’t sleep last night; she was sitting up because laying down made her dizzy. We got up together around dawn although I never get up at dawn, and we went outside together. I held her up so she could pee at my feet.

Good dog, as she’s always been. She held it until the proper time.

Woke Mrs. TVD after making an appointment at the vet, said she should come this time. She knew what I meant.

They spent time together in the back seat of the car while the vet got ready. And we were ready, me, the missus, and Middie. Help me, said Middie. So we did help Middie, over what pet lovers call the Rainbow Bridge.

C.S. Lewis said that heaven is perfect, and if that means we need Middie there for it to be perfect, then yes, dogs go to heaven and she will be waiting for us there.

I think there’s a reason dogs only live 15 years or so. Their love for us is perfect, and so is our love for them.

And when they are gone, we humans have to look to each other, and none of us is perfect. It’s so much harder for us to love each other than it is to love what is perfect.

That’s my lesson for today anyway, why Middie the Wonder Dog was given to us, and why she had to be taken away. If she could have lived forever, everything would have been perfect. But that’s not what this life is for.

Liberalism: Means and Ends

Yuval Levin:

The other, and more common, view argues that liberal institutions were the result of a discovery of new political principles in the Enlightenment — principles that pointed toward new ideals and institutions, and toward an ideal society. Liberalism, in this view, is the pursuit of that ideal society. Thus one view understands liberalism as an accomplishment to be preserved and enhanced, while another sees it as a discovery that points beyond the existing arrangements of society. One holds that the prudent forms of liberal institutions are what matter most, while the other holds that the utopian goals of liberal politics are paramount. One is conservative while the other is progressive.

This seems right to me.  It puts the thumb on “pragmatism,” which suffers no overindulgence in formalities when sensible ends are at stake.  This is some distance from Elihu Root’s observation in 1911 that we merely “forget,” from time to time, the limits of government: 

Law cannot give to depravity the rewards of virtue, to indolence the rewards of industry, to indifference the rewards of ambition, or to ignorance the rewards of learning. The utmost that government can do is measurably to protect men, not against the wrong they do themselves but against wrong done by others and to promote the long, slow process of educating mind and character to a better knowledge and nobler standards of life and conduct. We know all this, but when we see how much misery there is in the world and instinctively cry out against it, and when we see some things that government may do to mitigate it, we are apt to forget how little after all it is possible for any government to do, and to hold the particular government of the time and place to a standard of responsibility which no government can possibly meet.

Towards Mending a “Total Disconnect”

My daughter turned four months old yesterday, and I realized that since her birth, it is still getting more difficult, not less, to find time to write here.  For a while, she was taking extended naps and encouraging my wife and me with indications she might be one of those low maintenance babies you sometimes hear about.  She’s been disabusing us of that notion over the past month or so, unfortunately. 

On the other hand, I have been simultaneously working on two substantial and heavily-researched posts—one on the legal and political legacy of the baby boomers, and another reviewing Lawrence Lessig’s Republic, Lost.  These efforts, too, have contributed to the slow rate of posts of late.

In the meantime, I’ve long been meaning post a response to something Tod Kelly wrote in his “Confession” back in August:

I’ve always been somewhat suspicious of the entire business of capital “P” Philosophy, and at different times in my life have found it pretentious, distracting, purposefully exclusionary, and a linguistic tool to reshape reality when your belief system is proven to be wrong.  Mostly though, my problem with Philosophy is its reliance on combat rather than collaboration.  An example:  In Jason’s recent post on the FOX Facebook page where thousands of Christians called for the death, rape and beating of atheists, I had what can best be described as a total disconnect with Tim Kowal.  Tim’s initial assertion was that in order for my beliefs to count, I needed to come up with an entire system of epistemology, ethics and metaphysics that other atheists and agnostics could agree to*.  Until I did this, Tim argued, we couldn’t debate and find a winner as to whose belief was correct.  And while I grant that Tim’s approach to personal belief is quite common, I nonetheless find it an astoundingly bizarre way to approach a subject that is in turns a source of both communal connection and self-identity, deeply personal and often private.

. . . .

*For what it’s worth, I totally reject this supposition.  If we are standing in my front yard and you insist there is a dragon across the street that we can’t detect, you might well need to use linguistic gymnastics to define “reality,” declare how we know things to be True, and create an entire metaphysical system whereby your assertion that a dragon no one can detect is really there is “proven.”  I reject that I have to do the same to reject your proposition.  You might say you’re just being intellectually honest, and I might say that you’re using cleverness to be intellectually dishonest.  You say to-may-to…

Reading back through the comments in the post Tod is referring to here, perhaps there’s not much left to say.  Besides, Tod’s “total disconnect” might not be with me only, but with Jason as well, evidenced when Tod asked, “Why do I have to create an entire metaphysical philosophy, just to say ‘no thank you” to you[r religion]?” and Jason answered, “ “You don’t have to. But if you want to be rigorous, to be philosophical about it, you should.”  This certainly does not mean one’s beliefs “don’t count” short of meeting this intellectual burden.  It just means that arguments in a debate about epistemology and metaphysics that lack intellectual rigor don’t count, or, at least, don’t count for much.

But given that Tod regards the topic as “deeply personal and often private,” it doesn’t feel right to press  the point.  Still, I do not like the thought of a “total disconnect.”  As Tod raises the issue of “tribalism,” I can’t help but conclude he feels our respective tribes are positively unfriendly with one another.  Granted, the “Christian tribe” is not going to be particularly friendly toward the “atheist tribe.”  But certainly these two tribes are not monolithic.  And Tod strikes me as the sort of person who relishes in finding commonalities between otherwise inapposite groups.  (I like to think this describes me as well. For example, my last post concluded the Occupy movement and the Tea Party have some common ground.) 

Establishing commonalities, however, requires careful scrutiny of each side’s presuppositions, metaphysics, world views, or first principles, whatever you like.  Thus, I was disappointed that Tod apparently took me as being obstreperous or intentionally abstruse when I said “It is a precondition—if not directed by logic then certainly by the standards of fair and honest discourse—that if one is going to criticize another’s epistemology he reveal the terms of his own epistemology that make the criticism intelligible in the first place.”  The point of this observation, after all, was to bridge the “total disconnect” between the two sides of the debate, not to create one. 

I was encouraged, at least, that Mr. Likko took my statements in the spirit in which they were intended by recognizing that rejecting the existence of God is something quite other than rejecting the existence of “a dragon across the street” or “virgins in Newport Beach,” and offered the possible beginnings of an atheistic metaphysics based on Platonic Forms.  Again, I grant that finding common ground here is exceptionally difficult.  In all my years having this debate, I have found exactly one other person like Burt who was willing to engage the metaphysical problems at issue.  But I am gratified to know that, even here, lightning can strike twice.

Penn State vs. Nebraska Today

I grew up in Philly, and since we have no decent college f’ball team in the area, we go for Penn State, even though it’s closer to Pittsburgh, which we hate.

So I dig Joe Paterno, the graduate-my-boys legend, age 84 and the winningest coach in college f’ball history, who got fired after 68 million years before today’s game, even though he offered to step down at the end of the season and graciously head out to pasture.

Sounded fair after his righteous record, but it really wasn’t, so they unceremoniously fired him anyway.

But that was the easy part. It wasn’t just Joe Paterno’s feet of clay, it was everybody at Penn State, from president to underclassman.

The only proper penance for this abomination would have been to cancel and forfeit this big game against Nebraska and ruin the weekend plans of some 100,000 Penn St. fans. To convey the gravity of the situation, to share the shame.

Now that would truly say “we’re sorry,” rather than just booting the old man as scapegoat.

I’ve sorta rooted for Penn State over the years as a Philadelphian with not much else choice. No more, until they do a proper penance. This stinks too much, from head to tail from the top brass to the kids making a minor riot in the streets over Joe Pa’s sacking.

College, welcome to the real world. You’ve got some heavy dues to pay.

Isquith on Lucky Mitt

Up on the LOOG mainpage, Elias Isquith asks “Is Mitt Romney the luckiest guy in the country?

romney68

Well, Romney’s been the frontrunner since 2009 [if not 1968], so all this is really no surprise. Texas Gov. Rick Perry was the wild card, but it wasn’t even certain he’d get in: good record and exp on paper, but few had even heard him speak. And when he did, even before the debates, it was like, ewwww! His best day as a candidate was his first, and that was that.

We also forget that it was Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels who was the shoe-in: not much to look at, but a popular and successful 2-term governor, moderate enough for the general, articulate as hell, and according to even The New York Times, “a fiscally focused, budget-cutting, pragmatic-thinking conservative.”

But as we see from the Cain thing [and we’ve always suspected there was something in 1992 Dem shoe-in Mario Cuomo’s closet as well, haven’t we?], Daniels made the right decision to keep his family’s troubles away from the public enema. [If you haven’t heard that sad sad story, well, that’s exactly why and because Daniels didn’t run.]

[Look for him as VP, though; it’s been a custom to go easier on VP candidates.]

Newt still has a snowball’s chance, if the GOP would rather go down in a blaze of glory than nominate and lose with a passionless technocrat instead. Newt Gingrich would dismantle Barack Obama in debate, although I doubt that even so, he could not overcome the poisoned well that is his past [most, but not all his own fault] to win the general election.

[Then again, it would be nigh impossible to have calculated the constellation of forces that put the even more unappetizing Dick Nixon into the White House in 1968. I still marvel at that one, even knowing what we know now.]

Mr. Isquith further muses that Barack Obama might be the luckiest guy in the country, to face such pale opposition. I think he’s probably right, but for different reasons:

What were the odds that long-buried evidence of a domestic abuse incident would surface and fell his shoe-in Democratic primary opponent in 2004?

What were the odds that long-buried evidence of a marital sex scandal would fell his shoe-in Republican opponent in 2004 too, all enabling a successful presidential run a scant 4 years later?

And now, the GOP’s Only Black Guy tripped up in much the same fashion? No, he wasn’t getting the nomination, but either as a VP, a campaign soldier or merely as a beard against the GOP/racism slime, Herman Cain is an asset to the Republican Party.

Or at least, Herman Cain was an asset to the Republican Party: not no more, he ain’t. A one-way ticket to Palookaville now, and a drag on the GOP. If they bail on him, they’re the Mandingo racists they always were, threatened by “black sexuality.” If they do get his back, they’re just tribalist partisan robot idiots.

The Cain Factor has been zeroed out, and worse: the GOP is screwed coming or going. If not for the presidency itself, Herman Cain was a contender for the Republican Party, he could have been somebody. Instead of a bum, which let’s face it, he now is.

Barack Obama remains lucky—it just boggles the mind, the coincidences and all. Fate. Kismet. Or…?

Can the Occupy Movement Tackle Crony Capitalism?

In a comment on Shawn Gude’s previous post on the main page about the Occupy movement, I asked who the “1%” is and whether Occupy protesters were primarily aggrieved about “Wall Street,” or whether they were aggrieved about “wealth inequality” more generally.  Commenter Michael Drew referred me to this post at Rortybomb entitled “Who are the 1%, and what do they do for a living?” purporting to get right to the point.  Here’s the operative chart:

These numbers show that the wealth share of CEOs and other private sector executives has actually decreased almost 14% since 1979.  In contrast, the share of financiers increased more than 80%.  Yet the rest of the Rortybomb piece lumps business leaders into the same category as financiers.  Why? 

The most obvious explanation is that the Occupy movement is primarily organized around a moral commitment to a particular definition of “fairness” oriented around results rather than process.  I previously outlined the problems with drawing a necessary connection between wealth inequality and “unfairness” or “injustice.”  But I have also discussed the real problem of power inequality:

There is nothing unjust about economic inequality.  What does become unjust, however, is when those who benefit from an organized system of laws to amass wealth[ ] then use that wealth to abuse that system of laws.  What results, then, is not just wealth inequality (which I contend is no sin by itself), but power inequality.  Where power inequality exists in great enough measure, a political system can no longer sufficiently guarantee procedural fairness.  And where there is no guarantee of procedural fairness, wealth inequality suddenly becomes a real injustice—inequality of wealth is only just to the extent it is the result of free choices, and free choice cannot be presumed where there exists an inequality of power.

Pointing generally to wealth inequality fails to take into account the threshold-earner phenomenon and the clarion call of cultural critics to work less and eschew building financial fortune and to spend more time in non-economic activities. It also fails to account for the fact that, in real terms, the poor have experienced significant economic improvement in the past 30 years. The rest of us, too, get the benefit of the new technology and other cheap consumer goods that corporations invent, develop, manufacture, and distribute, many of which undeniably improve our lives. I previously made and developed these and other points on these pages in my review of Paul Krugman’s book.

If power inequality—e.g., “crony capitalism”—is the problem, does the Occupy movement have a solution?  Simply more regulation and more central control won’t get us there.  In fact, that road may wind up making matters worse.  Cronyism is a two way street.  True, the bigger an industry gets, the more resources it can devote to rent-seeking.  But that has nothing to do with the incentive to rent-seek.  A powerful interest has little reason to buy influence in a weak government.  The problem of faction and “crony capitalism” thus gets worse as government becomes more powerful and centralized. 

The controversial 2005 Supreme Court opinion in Kelo v. New London provides a worthwhile illustration.  The Supreme Court’s failure to enforce the “public use” clause of the Fifth Amendment, a structural check against the influence of factions, has led directly to more crony capitalism.  For example, corporations’ and developers’ wealth had little to do with the crony capitalism that befell Suzette Kelo when her home was taken by the city council of New London, Connecticut at the behest of the Pfizer Corporation—who later scrapped their plans and abandoned her bulldozed neighborhood as a blighted vacant lot.  Had the Court faithfully applied the Constitution according to its plain language—so as not to give near-unfettered discretion to local governments—Pfizer would have had no reason to rent-seek in the first place.  Had the law of the land clearly prohibited the taking of property from one private party to hand over to a more politically favored private party, Pfizer would not have bothered asking the town council to exercise a power it clearly didn’t have.

Fixing the damage done by Kelo is relatively straightforward because we know where the system failed.  Constitutional checks were already in place but the Supreme Court ignored them.  The Court can and at some point will reverse Kelo

The rest of our problems concerning economic and regulatory policy are more difficult because we’ve been operating off book.  Who do we blame for our financial crisis?  “Fat cats”?  “Crony capitalists”?  “Corrupt politicians”?  These are not new phenomenon.  They were baked in the cake as we evolved our federal government by way of court decisions and “Constitutional Moments.”  We got the progress and economic growth hoped for, but we failed to install structural checks against the downsides.  No wonder “class warfare” is brewing:  populist forces are rushing to fill the vacuum created by having altered the balance of governmental power that has given factions  more access to the levers. 

Somewhere under the din of bongos, the Occupy movement has some legitimate grievances.  However, a generalized grievance of against wealth disparity will not get us the structural checks we’ve been lacking.  The movement could take up a more intellectually cohesive position by rallying against centralized economic and financial planning and restoring America to a more constitutional model.  Unless it does that, I predict we’ll see some legislative reforms pandering to the vague demands of the movement, but little in the way of serious reform. 

[Cross-posted at the main page]

Slim Pickings in California’s 47th Congressional District

The OC Register reports that among the three Republican candidates for the newly drawn 47th district, straddling southern Los Angeles and northern Orange Counties, are Los Alamitos Councilman Troy Edgar and Long Beach Councilman Gary DeLong.  You might recognize those names from this very blog: 

Last week I wrote about my recent legal victory over the City of Los Alamitos who, after three members of the council took generous donations from a trash hauler, ignored the city’s competitive bidding ordinance and awarded an exclusive $21.9 million 10-year municipal trash hauling contract to that same company.  Among the councilmembers on the take:  Troy Edgar. 

I also recently wrote about how the Long Beach City Council engaged in a thinly-veiled scheme to oust my father, Mike Kowal—the favored (and at the time, the only) candidate from Long Beach’s 8th District—from his own district, thus preventing him from running in next year’s election.  Among those voting in favor of that late-night, “substitute substitute” motion:  Gary DeLong. 

So if you’re in the 47th, give Steve Kuykendall a look.

Separation of church and football

From Joe Carter at First Things:

A few weeks ago George Weigel wrote that the Denver Bronco’s third-string quarterback Tim Tebow “draws hatred because he is an unabashed Christian, whose calmness and decency in the face of his Christophobic detractors drives them crazy.” Many sports analysts are starting to draw a similar conclusion:

“‘Inside the NFL” analyst and former Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Cris Collinsworth concluded that much of the hatred against Tebow was based on his religious beliefs. Responding to a question from fellow host James ‘JB’ Brown, Collinsworth showed his disgust for Tebow’s treatment: “It’s unbelievable, though, JB, that one of the best kids – just pure kids that’s ever come into the NFL – is hated because of his faith, because of his mission work, because of the fact that he wears it on his sleeve, because of the fact that he lives his life that he talks about.”

[. . .]

NBCsports.com commentator Jelisa Castrodale argued: “The NFL’s other backup-turned-starters don’t generate this type of negativity.” And CBS analyst and former 49ers offensive lineman Randy Cross blamed the media for anti-Tebow coverage: “‘People, especially the media, root against him because of what he stands for.”

It seems hard to argue this phenomenon has anything to do with Tebow’s particular faith, i.e., Christianity.  Collinsworth gets it right when he identifies the source of the bad vibes as “the fact that he lives his life that he talks about.”  It’s wrapped up in the same part of the brain that makes Gore Vidal’s observation true:  “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.”  Everyone talks a big game.  But then you’re supposed to go out there and be a compromising slob like the rest of us.  High ideals are fine as long as you don’t seriously aim to live up to them.

Say It Ain’t So, Joe

Biden in 2016. You’re freaking kidding me, right?

WTF?

Give me 3 points and I’ll take the spread on him being more ignorant than Michele Bachmann, favorite whipping girl of people who hate the GOP but must resort to flogging its worst instead of its best.

The difference being that Rep. Bachmann is about to return to well-earned backbencher obscurity, but Vice President Biden will again be on the Big Ticket in 2012.

This is the guy who lost his debate with Sarah Palin, a dilettante who makes Rep. Bachmann look like Bill Clinton.

The world is a strange place…