Friday, October 10, 2008

Before I “Go West, Old Man”…

...here are a few links, thoughts, and heads-ups to distract you from what might otherwise be a productive Friday.

***

1. Links

First, don't miss this brilliant analytical exploration of the credit-market crisis by Jeff Medcalf. Among Eternity Road's Co-Conspirators, there are no sharper minds; we are uniquely privileged to have him. Jeff's old blog Caerdroia might no longer be a busy place, but I treasure every syllable he posts here.

Second, while World Net Daily, as we churchly types like to say, is nobody's prayer book, this report by Bob Unruh is absolutely accurate, and terrifying in its implications for American public schooling. If you're a young parent facing the decision about whether to put your chidren in a state-run school, think long and hard over the material here.

Third, the evidence continues to accumulate that the Old Media are overtly partisan. Recent years and developments have apparently caused the barons of print and broadcast "journalism" to cast off all pretense. The dethroning of Dan Rather over the "TexANG memos" forgeries probably has something to do with it, but were that entirely uninvolved, I think we'd still be seeing what we see at the link above. "Journalism" is an emotion-oriented trade -- tears and fears are what sell air time and column-inches -- and emotion is always more easily stirred by appeals from -- and to -- the Left.

Consider these your mandatory reading for the day.

***

2. Thoughts.

Politically, economically, and socially, America is in serious trouble -- and given the state of things, where America goes, so goes the world. If it did nothing else, the credit crisis has educated us to America's power to turn the world on a dime.

The election campaign has given us many reasons to fear for the future. There's a single bright spot in the political landscape: Governor Sarah Palin. But a lone Alaskan cannot be expected to rescue us from the multitude of our sins, especially from a perch in the Naval Observatory. Anyway, she's up against the same thing the rest of us must battle: "democracy."

"Democracy" has always been a false god. "Democracy" is untrammeled majority rule unconstrained by principle; it sanctifies whatever the majority might demand, even lynching, Nazism, and Communism. In a "democracy," once you've succeeded in defining the bounds of the electorate to your satisfaction, you're guaranteed to get your way. That's why so many persons are so anxious to have us bend to "international opinion" come November 4. Dare anyone suggest seriously that the legions of Obamatrons abroad, inexplicably caught up in the worship of this wholly fictitious political idol, know better how to restore America to health and strength than those of us at close range?

We had a choice between a matchless Constitution, the most freedom-affirming document ever to become a nation's foundation, and "democracy." For nearly a century, we've placed our faith in "democracy." Dare anyone contend that it has served us well?

You had faith, and now you don't have it anymore? No, my son, democracy is losing its followers. In our country everything is weakening. The money is weak. Democracy is weak and the politicians are very weak. Everything that is weak dies one day. -- Carolina Maria de Jesus

There is still time to reverse our choice.

***

3. A Heads-Up.

There is time, but perhaps not much of it.

"There is a deal of ruin in a nation," wrote Adam Smith, but that "deal" is nevertheless finite. Just as a plot of land can be exhausted of nutrients by over-cultivation, a nation's psyche and pocketbook can be spent bare by too-frequent extension. Our federal debt approaches our annual Gross Domestic Product. The Treasury is about to double the money supply, thereby halving the purchasing power of the dollar. Our enemies abroad are multiplying. Our economy is teetering due to unwise political intervention in our credit market. Our native-born citizens are disaffiliating from the future by declining to have children, Brooke Shields's clever commercials about "German engineering" notwithstanding. Immigrants hostile to everything the country was premised on are swarming over our walls and refusing to assimilate. Our military is under intense pressure. Our politicians are almost all villains, poltroons and fools.

If there's a rescuer anywhere in sight, that rescuer is not a politician, or a financier, or a diplomat, or a foreign potentate, or a novelist, or a commentator, or a double-income-no-kids urban couple alarmed by the price of arugula. We must redirect our eyes.

We must rediscover America. America is the sole watchtower of freedom and justice remaining to Mankind. If she falls, or is traduced from within, the renascence of those things will become unimaginable.

If there's a rescuer in sight, that rescuer is us.

"No reason to get excited," the thief, he kindly spoke,
"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate,
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."

[Bob Dylan, "All Along The Watchtower"]

Man the battlements. Make yourselves ready.

Thursday, October 09, 2008

Handling the Economic Crisis

I started to write this as a comment on Mike Gerson’s response to this Transterrestrial Musings post on the stock market’s continued slide. Mike asked what a conservative would do about the crisis, and my response got so long that I decided to move it here.

If by a conservative Mike means the Hamiltonian kind, such a one would do exactly what President Bush tried to do: pump massive amounts of money into large financial businesses. If by a conservative Mike means the small government/free market kind, he would use whatever levers the government had (including large amounts of money, if needed) to ensure liquidity in commercial paper and overnight bank loans, and would let the companies with bad investments fail.

Let me expand on that. All of these problems arise out of two fundamental issues. First, very, very bad loans for homes became a normal part of home lending. Second, financial businesses attempted both to cover the risks they had taken on and to hide those risks in increasingly poorly-understood and novel ways.

First things first: the bad home loans. These included loans to people based on their word as to what their income was, deliberately fraudulent loans which hid their true costs, loans designed so that the borrower could meet current payments (but not future payments unless the borrower got a significant raise) and loans designed so that the borrower could make the payments, but not gain any equity. (The last is essentially identical to renting the house you “bought” from your mortgage lender, while still being responsible for the taxes, maintenance and so forth. Ugh.) In terms of the financial crisis, it does not matter whether these loans took advantage of the easily pressured or economically ignorant, or if they were fraudulent in some way, or if they were otherwise predatory. All that matters is that they happened, and that they became an increasingly large part of the mortgage pool. (Had they been maintained at the level of, say, FHA loans, there wouldn’t have been much problem, but attempting to loan large amounts of money to increasing numbers of people means that you must reach deeper into the pool of those whose ability (and willingness) to repay is lower than that of people getting conventional loans. Hence, “sub-prime.” Cumulatively, the potential default rate was rising with the increasing amount of shaky home loans, and any small economic crisis could have set it off earlier — eventually, the lending got so out of control that it didn’t even require a crisis, just the end of a bubble’s expansion period, to set it off.) The profit potential of these loans was predicated on the indefinite continuation of the housing bubble; they were in effect a Ponzi scheme.

Second, the covering and hiding of risks. Mortgage lenders knew that they were taking increasing risks. Indeed, a whole new market cropped up of companies that would make a mortgage loan, particularly on refinancing existing loans, often knowing ahead of time that the borrower couldn’t afford to pay it off, then sell the loan for a small immediate profit (usually just the points and maybe a tiny bit of interest, just that paid during the few months it took to package and sell the loans). The couple portrayed recently on Saturday Night Live (the Sandlers) were apparently of this kind. In any case, in order to sell off these bad mortgages, the lenders would bundle thousands of mortgages together, some good and some bad. They would then divide the total pool into “tranches.” So let’s say that a pool contained 1000 mortgages, of which 750 were to credit-worthy borrowers who had placed large down payments, 200 were to somewhat suspect borrowers who would be OK as long as the market value of the house continued to rise or their income rose dramatically over a period of a few years, and 50 were to people who would almost certainly default within a year or two. Let’s further make up a metric, that the first category of loan has a repayment chance of 100%, the second of 80%, and the third of 50%. Then if the total amount of money lent to create the pool was P, the total value of the pool of mortgages can be approximated to 100% * 75% * P + 20% * 80% * P + 5% * 50% * P, which works out to 0.75 + 0.16 + 0.025 or 93.5% of P. That is a 6.5% expected default rate. But now divide the pool into 1000 slices, and sell a slice of the pool (that’s what the tranches are), and you can make the argument that, because these pool slices are combined with other pool slices, even if a few people do default, the value of the pool is still sound, because the person buying the tranche only loses 1/1000 of the defaulted amount. Why, at that point, you are back up to a rock solid investment. If done once. Done millions of times, you still have an overwhelming risk, arguably a much larger risk since you can guarantee that each of your tranches will lose some of their value, but that’s been hidden by the practice of pooling the mortgages and selling slices of the pools. Then, because the buyers (investment banks, money market funds and the like) realized that they were effectively gambling, and had lost some insight into exactly what their risks were, they tried to cover these risks with credit default swaps, which I don’t entirely understand. Effectively, CDS’s are a kind of hedge against risk. Except that they are so arcane that apparently even those making them didn’t understand them very well, and the result was that risks were not covered, but deepened.

Now, as long as the housing prices were rising, this was not a problem. As ARMs came due and one’s income wasn’t sufficient, one could refinance. Similarly, an interest-only loan didn’t pose a problem when you sold your house, because you were still getting equity (from the rising house price, rather than from a combination of the rising house price and paying down the principal balance of the loan). But the availability of easy credit, even for those who couldn’t repay the loans, resulted in a building boom, raising the housing supply dramatically. Demand over supply is directly proportional to price: as the supply begins to exceed the demand, the price begins to drop. In other words, the natural market forces worked predictably (so predictably that we sold our house one month after the peak of the market, and have rented since), and the housing prices started to fall. But uh oh, that means that you couldn’t refinance your ARM because you had negative equity, and you couldn’t sell your house with a principal only loan because you had no equity. (OK, in reality, this was only true on the margin, but that was enough.) The resulting rise in mortgage defaults, followed as night follows day by home foreclosures (which, tragically, increased the supply of available housing still further — instant vicious cycle), meant that the investment banks, money markets and pension funds suddenly had to calculate their real risk. But because they had sliced up, sold and resold, and covered their mortgage investments with CDS’s and other, even shakier, hedges, they could not do so. That is to say, they could not value their assets.

When a company cannot value its assets, it’s not quite the same as when an individual cannot do so. Individuals generally operate on a cash basis; companies generally operate on an accrual basis, recognizing both revenue and expenses as they are incurred, not as they are satisfied. So if a vast proportion of your assets are of unknown value, and the rules require you to mark to market, how do you value your assets? How do you know if your assets plus equity exceeds your liabilities? In other words, how do you know if you are bankrupt? Well, the truth is, you don’t. And so when Fannie and Freddie failed, Lehman realized that it was bankrupt. It had been for some time, but hadn’t known. But now that it knew, it had to (as a public company) declare it, and that triggered all kinds of mechanisms to protect the remaining assets to pay off creditors and (if money was left) shareholders. But the creditors included companies like other investments banks and insurers, so there were several high profile failures in a very short period of time.

And because companies that held mortgages couldn’t value their assets, and thus didn’t know if they were bankrupt, prudent institutions stopped lending money. If you make an overnight bank loan of $200 million, and the bank goes under, you are out $200 million. The same goes with commercial paper (overnight loans to companies). And so the credit markets froze, not solid, but bad enough to panic investment bankers, one of which happens to be our current treasury secretary.

So up to this point, I don’t think you’d get much disagreement except on details and expansion of unclear points. All sides pretty much agree on the sequence of events and the proximate causes. The disagreement is over root causes, and specifically whether this was due to deregulation, or Congress insisting on ever riskier loans, or greed. All of these are actually implicated (though it’s not so much deregulation as failure to regulate something that wasn’t regulated before in any case). And they’re also fairly irrelevant to solving the current crisis (though not to preventing future crises).

So how to solve the crisis? The Hamiltonians look at the last link in the chain: the investment banks and other large financial institutions that are failing. And their preferred solution is to pump massive amounts of money into those institutions (both through the bailout package, and through the massive inflation that the world’s central banks are currently causing by lowering interest rates), so as to ensure that they aren’t bankrupt, so as to ensure that the credit markets (both overnight bank loans and commercial paper) keep moving. An aside, by the way, the horror stories about not being able to buy a car miss the point: individuals don’t have a problem valuing their assets and liabilities, so it’s always possible to calculate the risk inherent in lending to them; it’s only the institutional lending that is at issue (bad though that is). The socialists look at theory, and say to nationalize the financial industry. The social democrats (which is where most Democrats, at least in the national party leadership, fall) and populists (including McCain) look at the first link in the chain, and want to refinance people’s mortgages through the government, end the distasteful practices of the large institutions, and want to punish their executives. Ironically, those last are closest to the mark, of those groups that have a chance at making policy on the matter.

But a libertarian/small government/free market type of conservative looks at the problem a little differently. Given how the problem came about, the reason that loans aren’t being made is because financial companies cannot value themselves. But value is fundamentally just what someone is willing to give up to get the thing being valued. If you offered me a thousand risky mortgages and I only had to invest $100, I’d take them right now, cash. Because if only one paid anything, I’d be OK, and if none of them paid off, I’d be out only $100. If you offered me those same mortgages at more than a few tens of thousands of dollars, I’d refuse, because I couldn’t afford the potential loss. So in order to value the mortgages, and, more importantly to the issue at hand, the various securities based in some way on mortgages, you have to be able to sell them. But no one is selling them, because they think the government might just come in and buy them up (the populists’ view) or insure them (the Hamiltonians’ view) such that the institutions can make more money from the government than they could selling the securities on the civilian market. Once the securities start selling, to anyone, the market can value the assets, and thus value the financial companies holding the assets, and thus evaluate risks, and thus the credit will start flowing again naturally.

In other words, the crisis is being deepened by the government’s actions. By declaring a vast crisis, and the need for the government to massively intervene, after already intervening heavily by taking over Fannie and Freddie and stabilizing AIG, the government shut down the market for these securities precisely at the point that the credit markets were freezing up. Had the government let these companies fail, the companies would have started selling off their securities at low enough prices to clear the market (it’s that supply/demand/price thing again), and the credit market would have started up again on its own. Now, let’s cover the downsides, because the first objection to this is going to be either, “People are going to lose their homes,” or, “People are going to lose their jobs.” Actually, both of those are net positives for the economy, though painful for the individuals caught up in it.

First, there is no reason why people with sound credit and a good payment record would lose their homes. Even if someone bought up a mortgage at a serious discount, they’d still make more money with the homeowner paying on the house than with it sitting vacant. So foreclosure would only happen for those who couldn’t make their payments, hadn’t been making their payments, and had no way out of this: they would almost certainly be bankrupted. But that clears the books: they can go on to rent, reestablish their credit within their extant means, and generally get on with life. By clearing their liabilities through bankruptcy now, those who would have gone bankrupt eventually have a head start on fixing the problem, and in the meantime have not dug themselves into a deeper hole. It’s painful, but not fatal, and arguably less painful than holding on for longer and eventually going bust in any event. [UPDATE:] If you lose your home from this, one of the problems of course is the loss of equity in the house. But by definition, you are losing the house because the equity wasn’t sufficient, or at least wasn’t sufficiently liquid, to cover your housing-related or other liabilities. It’s fun to live beyond your means, but since we no longer have debtors’ prisons (thankfully), eventually you have to either pay up by handing over assets, or pay up by going bankrupt and seeing your credit tank. Next time, buy a house that you can make the payments on.

The argument for people losing their jobs is based on companies going out of business, and that’s certainly going to happen, but this too is a good thing. Companies that were risky and greedy will get wiped out, and their assets will be bought up by companies that weren’t risky and greedy. Those companies will expand, and will need workers, and so eventually all those left unemployed will be reemployed in a more productive business. The shareholders will be wiped out, true, but that is the downside risk of investing. (The upside being the tons of money made as the stock value rises. The trick is to buy low and sell high. This requires actually understanding the companies you invest in, and not being greedy or risky yourself. Don’t tell anyone.) The thing is, a lot of the investors are money markets, mutual funds, and the like, and a lot of people’s 401k’s and IRA’s and pensions will be hit by this. Well, that’s what Social Security and similar programs were made for, a retirement income of last resort. Again, painful, but next time invest in more solid ways. (Index funds are a good bet, because they’ve never lost money over a 20 year period, and when you get close to retirement, move more of your money into even safer government bonds. Don’t tell anyone.)

[UPDATE:] Of course, the government can ensure that those who lose their jobs don’t get new ones, as they did during the 1930s, and are doing in Michigan even now. (This is one of the major reasons I left Michigan: the state government was determined to kill off any vestige of the economy by taxing heavy manufacturing equipment owned by the dying auto industry in the state, and then service companies which had managed to survive the dying auto industry, at increasing rates.)

The underlying assets, the houses, are not going anywhere, and the market, left to its own devices, will recover (someone will buy those assets when the price gets low enough) with less overall pain than if the government tries to fix things so that nobody feels pain. Bankruptcies, whether personal or corporate, are how free markets move unproductively-invested capital into productive use. Otherwise, the unproductive capital keeps being unproductive. And that — keeping unproductive, risk and greedy ventures afloat — is exactly what the government is doing to all of us right now. So bend over and prepare to take it, because it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. The last time something similar happened was the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the government’s attempts to help apparently prolonged that one by seven years.

UPDATE: Minor spelling and grammar edits, and a couple of sentences clarified slightly. Also added two points (marked in the text) in response to an email, and a link to the government prolonging the Great Depression.

The Power Of Expectation

If you happen to be a mathematics geek, like your Curmudgeon, you can't see or hear the word expectation without immediately thinking of probabilities and payoffs. That's not the subject for this evening, despite its power to send large numbers of mathematically-challenged persons to their local Quik-Stop for lottery tickets. No, tonight we explore the realm of projective expectation: that is, what we are induced to believe will come, even though it's only one possibility among others.

The power of one's unconscious mind to shape one's behavior, sometimes against the contrary inclinations of one's conscious mind, is well established. It's the power behind the placebo effect, wherein completely neutral substances are taken for powerful drugs, and the subsequent behavior of the body conforms to the belief rather than the actuality. But its scope is far larger than that...and not always to our ultimate benefit.

Expectation plays a strong hand in the game of investing. The mechanism isn't even subtle: a modest surge of purchases of Acme Industries gives rise to a wider expectation that Acme's stock is due to "break out," which moves still more investors to hazard a few coppers in that direction, which, because the number of shares of Acme is finite, will push the stock's price up independent of any and all other considerations. The increase might not last long, but it's real while it does.

Expectation is also an important influence on politics and governance. A sufficient number of persons firmly convinced that Candidate X will triumph at the polls will bring about that result, whether they're supporters of Candidate X or one of his opponents. The mindset is apparently both contagious and indifferent to the preferences of those it infects. Similarly, a sufficient expectation of government action of some sort appears capable of bringing about that action, apparently through politicians' desire to be seen "on the winning side" of an issue with a popular following. This might partly explain the mad rush to "bail out" American credit markets by making the federal treasury their guarantor, a guaranteed loser of a policy if ever there was one.

Large numbers of Americans have been expecting some dire developments for some time:

1. A stock market crash and a recession or depression;
2. A dribbling-out of the world supply of oil and natural gas;
3. Further Islamic terrorism directly against the United States;
4. An armed annexation of Taiwan by Communist China;
5. An invasion of South Korea by the nuclear-armed Communist North;
6. A third marriage for Britney Spears;
7. More movies starring Madonna.

We appear to have reaped number 1 above; the rest, so far, appear happily distant. But who knows what forces a sufficiently pessimistic mindset might loose, given time?

What's most troubled your Curmudgeon recently has been the widespread belief that the election of Barack Obama as president of these United States is "inevitable" -- that the McCain / Palin ticket is doomed no matter what it does. Inasmuch as that outcome would result in true disaster for the nation:

• International spinelessness;
• The emasculation of the American military;
• Sharply increased taxes, inflation, and (of course) federal spending;
• Further socialist incursions upon American enterprise;
• Favoritism toward unions, particularly teachers' unions and bar associations;
• Legalized infanticide -- this time, of babies already born and viable;
• The return of broadcast censorship (i.e., the "Fairness Doctrine");
• A fresh assault on the right to keep and bear arms;
• Clinton-era cronyism;
• Sufficient immigration fraud to seal the Democrats permanently into federal hegemony;

...this is something to fear. It might even inflict further Madonna movies upon us -- and if you can face that prospect with equanimity, you're a stronger man than your Curmudgeon.

Is an Obama victory really that likely? It doesn't look that way to your Curmudgeon. The more trustworthy polls are almost all within the margin of error, the Bradley Effect cannot be counted out, and the "PUMA rebellion" among supporters of Hillary Clinton is difficult to gauge. In any event, candidates who count on the polls -- Alf Landon; Thomas Dewey; Jimmy Carter -- are mostly remembered by the phrase "he also ran."

Obama can be headed off. The Old Media don't want us to think so, and it's the Old Media who are behind the selection of the polling data aired to the general public. The Old Media have all but embargoed the McCain campaign, except for those moments when their anointed one gets off a zingy riposte to an attack on his character. But the alternative media are functioning about as well as can be expected, and their cumulative assessment seems to be that this one is much too close to call.

The thing it's most important to remember is that everything counts.

Recently, a commenter to this post opined that "nobody cares" about the association between Obama and terrorists Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn. When your Curmudgeon hears such a statement, his immediate reaction is to ask, "How many nobodies are there? One percent of the electorate? Two?" Enough nobodies can swing a tight election, particularly if they're favorably distributed among the states. Besides, "nobody cares" about Obama's affiliations with convicted felon Tony Rezko, or black racist preacher Jeremiah Wright, or longtime race agitator Louis Farrakhan, or any number of other unsavory figures from his Chicago past. That could be a lot more nobodies than Obama is ready to grapple with.

What would count most heavily against us is flaccidity born of the expectation that Obama is indefeasible. This is not true. No one's victory or defeat at the polls is guaranteed before the election. It wasn't so in 1936, or 1948, or 1980. It wasn't true that the upstart Congressman from Illinois running for president on the Republican ticket had no chance to prevail in 1860, even though "received opinion" had discounted him from the start of his campaign.

Remember:

"I can't imagine how Nixon got re-elected. No one I know voted for him." -- film critic Pauline Kael, 1972

"I can't imagine how Reagan got elected. No one I know voted for him." -- Katherine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, 1980

Don't pre-defeat America with negative expectations.

***

Tomorrow morning, your Curmudgeon and the C.S.O. will be heading west, to Canandaigua, New York, on our annual fall foliage weekend. Posting is likely to be light, but drop by the site now and then; one never knows when the Muse will strike.

Wednesday, October 08, 2008

The taco: a philosophical question

I am not the taco.  This is always a good thing to know, of course, and it would have taken a great load off my mind had this been the sort of thing I spend a lot of time worrying about, but since it isn’t, it really didn’t make much of a difference one way or the other to me.  Still, it’s always nice to know.  I have to admit that I hadn’t realized that my being or not being the taco was in any way an issue until I went to lunch the other day.  There’s nothing like processed meat to bring up this sort of conundrum, as well a good healthy burst of domestic natural gas untouched by the malignant touch of greedy oil companies. 

In any case, off I went on that day of discovery from the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for the biblical mite, a not nearly as interesting a bug as the praying mantis, Gregor Samsa, or the crazy guy who comes in here every day wanting to know what the last thing on the computer is, but one merchants across the length and breadth of this our Great Republic are more likely to accept in their establishments than the hoarse fly, the shagged fly, and the open fly, unless, of course, you’re running that type of establishment, down [yes, this is the main verb; my apologies for the delay in getting to it—I left it on the kitchen table next to the car keys this morning and I had to go back inside for them both] the street to the Gnocchi Deli, there to consume an Italian Combo, which is not, despite the obviously misleading name, three guys from Aci Castello with second hand instruments interested in playing the greatest hits of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie with more or less (mostly less) no degree of skill, but a definitely non-kosher sandwich made from various and sundry Italian cold cuts made in Iowa by illegal aliens from Oaxaca.

It was a busy day at the deli; I am usually in the tail end of the lunchtime crowd, but that day the gods of lunchmeat and chronology were not kind to me, and so I was just one more body in a packed mass of bodies craving high sodium and fat.  To add to the confusion, the new girl behind the counter had not, as most new people have not, fully mastered the intricacies of operating a cash register.  But she was game, no two ways about it.  She was all hustle and bustle, cheerfully scurrying this way and that way in precisely the way that someone who knows what they are doing does not. [Yes, I am paraphrasing D.N.A., for those of you who noticed.] I did not give her my order—I figured I’d cut the kid some slack—so I gave my order to Billy Gnocchi, the owner’s son, and while he made the sandwich we did what baseball fans in this neck of the woods do at this time of the year: argue about whether the Red Sox in their current incarnation are the actual spawn of Satan or merely a small and not terribly important subset of the mentally and venereally diseased slave army of the Anti-Christ.  After he finished piling slabs of faux Italianate lunchmeat on a roll, Billy wrapped the sandwich up in some paper and left it by the cash register for her to ring up.  And it was there, by the cash register, in the bright light of an October noon, that the new girl posed the existential question.

She was confused, as well she might be, for I strongly suspect that she lied through her teeth on her application about having any experience in food service in general or in the cut-throat, dog eat dog world of retail sandwich making in particular, and because she was confused, she was well on her way to becoming flustered as well.  This is always a bad sign.  It became very clear to me very quickly that the only experience this young woman had with cash registers was in rifling the contents thereof during armed robberies, a skill useful, perhaps, for those happy few who choose a career in professional lawbreaking or Democratic politics, but one not entirely germane to her current circumstances. As she tried to figure out what to do next, her conversation yes I said I will yes became a Joycean stream of consciousness that flowed riverrun out of her mouth while Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the internal organs of beasts and fowls without any editing at all from her now allegedly conscious mind and a very good moocow it was too and pooled on the floor about her feet in brightly colored patterns of toxic flop sweat that positively shouted Parnell Parnell my vanquished king upon all the living and the dead.  Finally, at the height of her confusion, crushed between the Scylla of orders and the Charybdis of making change, she asked me, “Are you the taco?” To which query Billy Gnocchi hollered from the other end of the deli, “No, he’s the combo.”

No, I am not the taco, but this does not mean that I, or any other human being, for that matter, can, in light of the tanking economy, avoid the question for very long.  For who is and who is not the taco is ultimately a philosophical question, perhaps one of the great philosophical questions of our time, along with what is the meaning of life, how to be just in an unjust world, and why is an old guy like Hugh Hefner getting all the hot babes? The question of who is the taco is not an easy one to ask or to answer, which renders it unpopular in our glib era, where what we want from philosophy is a thirty-second sound bite that explains all of creation and has a snappy punch line too. 

It was not always thus, however.  Heraclitus, the greatest of the pre-Socratic philosophers, held that war and tacos were the father of us all, a position many Greeks of his time shared.  Centuries later, Diogenes the Cynic held that Heraclitus was a dope and a dolt whose position on tacos would only make sense to a Theban, a noticeably not bright group of people much given to marrying their mothers and walling their daughters up in the rec room in order to avoid paying for a prom dress. Socrates himself had no position on tacos other than Xanthippe, whom he loathed, and Plato found the matter uninteresting to the nth degree. Archimedes the Syracusan, on the other hand, proved mathematically that the best way to eat a taco was while wearing a green t-shirt and boxer shorts, and Thucydides devotes a chapter of The Peloponnesian War to the Athenian attack on the polis of Burpus in upper Attica, which the Athenians did in order to get control of the taco traffic in central Greece.

But none of this mostly unnecessary verbiage really addresses the central issue: who is the taco? What is the role of the taco in modern life, and how can I fulfill my taco destiny, assuming that I even have a taco destiny?  Is there a life after tacos and if there is, how can I achieve this life, and will I have to supply my own Rolaids once I get there?  Will the professional doubters like Christopher Hitchens undermine our society’s deepest held beliefs in the efficacy of ordering tacos? Difficult questions, all of them, and I see no desire among today’s young people to even spend the slightest amount of time considering them.  We must, I fear, wait for a more reflective age than this one before we can even begin to think deeply about the question. It will be a long wait, I think. 

A wide of selection of faux lunch meat is available here

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Concerning The CNN Report On Obama And Ayres…

...linked here, all the comments so far have addressed whether the report was particularly good for McCain or particularly damaging for Obama. No Eternity Road reader has yet commented on its wider significance for American politics.

Has everyone forgotten Hillary Clinton? Has everyone forgotten how often, these past sixteen years, CNN has been disparagingly called the Clinton News Network?

CNN is riddled with Clinton partisans. The network's regular reportage and commentary during primary season was decidedly in Mrs. Clinton's favor. It would be shortsighted to imagine that what CNN is reporting on today has significance only for November 4, 2008. That would require the assumption that the Clintons have surrendered their ambition to return to power.

Mrs. Clinton still wants to be president. The principal obstacle to her goal is Barack Obama. Keeping Obama out of the Oval Office this coming term would greatly increase Mrs. Clinton's prospects for getting herself into it in 2012. If Obama prevails on November 4, then unless he's caught in flagrante delicto with an aardvark -- a male aardvark -- he'll be the Democrats' nominee for 2012. That would relegate Mrs. Clinton to 2016, when she'd be 69 years old and the Clinton machine would be all but rusted out.

Bill Clinton has stumped against Barack Obama for months, sometimes subtly, sometimes not. It's not reasonable to think he's the only person from his wife's camp who's carrying a torch for her campaign. Her allies in the Old Media are mobilizing in her interest as well -- and the CNN report on Obama's association with Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn is only the first of the salvoes they'll fire under her colors.

Mrs. Clinton's media allies must walk a tighrope. They can't appear obviously committed to defeating Obama; that would cost them access to national Democrats, and to Obama himself should he win despite all. But they can help to propagate stories that show Obama in a questionable light, as long as the facts reported are unimpeachable. If those stories originate as McCain / Palin accusations, the Old Media outlets that cover them can always point backward at their Republican origins. "We didn't start this," they can say in self-exculpation, "we're just fulfilling our role as fact-checkers and journalists."

It's foolish to think the Clintons, the most political people in America if not the world, are thinking only about the election four weeks from today. It's even more foolish to think they'd refrain from playing all the cards they still hold against the Chicago upstart who denied them the triumphant return to the White House they regard as their due. Enough media moguls and major figures in journalism owe the Clintons favors to mount quite an assault on The Anointed One -- perhaps enough to change eight to ten percent of the vote.

We won't know whether the timing is right until the election itself. But the Clintons' allegiants include some of the sharpest political analysts and operators in the game. Stay tuned!

A Defining Moment For The Presidential Campaign

Courtesy of Wizbang’s Lorie Byrd comes a devastatingly accurate and complete report on the Obama-Ayres-Dohrn connection—from CNN!

There’s more here than is revealed to a casual glance. I’ll be back to this later today. For now: reflect!

Sunday, October 05, 2008

Eternity Road On The Air

The next segment of this adventure will air this evening, Sunday, October 5, 2008, at 7:00 PM New York time. It will be a fifteen-minute show, followed by text chat for those interested in commenting. Tonight’s topics are money and the crisis in the credit market. Click the button below:

...to link to the program. If you miss it in “real time,” it will be available from the BlogTalkRadio archive shortly afterward.

REMEMBER:

From now to the end of the year, Eternity Road On The Air will air Sunday evenings at 7:00 PM New York time, not the original 6:30 PM time at which the first few segments aired.

Fran’s Sunday Ruminations: Partitions

Among the more elusive truths, this one might be supreme: Reality is a single, continuous entity. Of course, we're given many reasons to doubt that: the episodic nature of human life, the seeming separations that divide the objects and individuals around us, even the quantization of fundamental physical particles. These are appearances, nothing more; each one can be dispelled by recurring to a higher viewpoint, by putting a thousand feet more beneath the eagle's wings.

The universe is one thing. It's we who partition it.

Please don't mistake me: we do what we must. Our perception of patterns and comprehension of causal connections is finite. To grapple with the world around us with some degree of success, we must focus, nominate relevancies and irrelevancies, and in general act as if the separations we think we see are in some sense real.

"Real" might be the slipperiest word in any language. Anyone who's studied relativity or hallucinations must come to grips with its ambiguity. Its core meaning is empirical: if a thing or an event is independent of our notions about it, then it is "real." But as with all empirical definitions, this one imbeds a circularity that's difficult to escape.

Yes, there is an objective reality. Yes, it is knowable: topically, transiently, imperfectly knowable -- but no more than that, for our perception is partial, and our cognition is finite. And as always when we seek absolute truths guaranteed never to falter, the matter is made problematic by the passage of time.

***

Human life and the functioning of human reason are made possible by the imposition of partitions: useful separations of this from that, of these from those, which enable us to study and cope with the behavior of reality one slice at a time. But all partitions are mental operations. As Robert Pirsig noted in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, they're fundamentally arbitrary, useful but inexact gropings at the objective reality in which we're imbedded. Physicists have understood this for at least a century. That's why a Unified Field Theory, that embraces all the laws of physics in a single intellectual formulation, is sought as the Holy Grail of physics.

But that's physics -- science -- the partition of the animate from the inanimate. It's important -- trust a former physicist to admit that -- but for most of us it's irrelevant to the flow of life. Even those who've made it their life's work have to come home from the lab every evening and confront the irritable spouse, the unruly kids, and the intransigence of the blockage in the kitchen sink. No man can permanently and impenetrably partition this away from that. No man can completely escape the continuity of existence.

No doubt there've been times in your life, Gentle Reader, when you've wished desperately that you could slice away some perennial cross to bear, some unending irritation with Things As They Are, and thrust it an infinite distance from you. I certainly have; you could confirm that with a single glance at my closets. We often kid ourselves about having done exactly that when we "solve" a "problem," be it occupational or personal, temporal or spiritual. What we forget is that the "problem" and the "solution" are indissolubly connected. As we are connected to the "solution," through origination and maintenance, the "problem" remains concatenatively connected to us.

Ask any recovering alcoholic.

***

The great problems of human life are the ethical ones: the ones that address how we must treat one another. For this reason, we deem the truly great philosophers to be those who have helped us to formulate ethical codes of demonstrable soundness, codes whose imposition leads to a decrease in conflict and an increase in overall well-being. Nearly everyone, theist or atheist, believes that an optimal ethical code exists. That is, we believe that the laws of reality imply such a code, and that once all persons are aware of it and pledge themselves to it, there will come a permanent end to strife among men. In our several ways, we continue to seek it today.

What fools we are. Such a code has been known for two millennia:

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" He said to him, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." [Matthew 22:34-40]

The multifarious uses and distortions of the word "love" have occluded the significance of the Second Great Commandment for persons of our time. Jesus did not speak here of erotic love, nor of the "love" of some greatly favored enjoyment. "Love" in this connection is more properly expressed by the Latin word caritas: the concern for others that arises from the sense of connection. Adam Smith expressed it as "fellow-feeling" in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. Christ had hinted, as was His way, at the unity of all things, the essential inseparability of all lives.

But if our lives are inseparable from one another, then it follows that our ethical standards must be continuously maintained -- that we can't legitimately "take a vacation" from being good, or at least non-noxious, toward one another. There is no warrant for having different ethical standards for work, home, and the public streets.

***

Ultimately, our lives are inseparable from one another because no true partitions exist. It's a tough lesson to internalize; we separate and classify so regularly, and so ruthlessly, that the notion that our connections to one another are too deep for us to sever strikes us as a denial of our powers. We want to hate the villains and thugs we see. We want to separate ourselves from the troubles of others. Above all, we want to imagine that we've risen above the tendency to sin -- that whatever we "must" do to gain advancement at work or to insulate ourselves from the ills around us, nevertheless our "ethics" will protect us from transgression.

In every case, to the extent we allow ourselves to believe these things, we're deluding ourselves. The demands of a wholesome ethic are as continuous as the universe itself. The desire to write exceptions for various contexts and circumstances, if impossible to effectuate, is understandable, as is the urge to partition oneself away from the things that disturb us. But there's a higher connection, unbreachable by Man, that makes sense of it all.

As Orson Scott Card wrote in his "Alvin Maker" series, "A Maker is part of what he makes." A part of our Maker inheres in each of us. That connection transcends time and space; he who opens himself to it feels the current that unifies all things everlastingly.

May God bless and keep you all.

"Deus caritas est" -- Pope Benedict XVI

Friday, October 03, 2008

Overlooked Tidbits from the Biden/Palin Debate

There were a couple of things I saw in last night’s debate that were really interesting, and which weren’t covered much if at all today. (I will skip any commentary about the media “fact checking” this morning, which was remarkably one-sided, or attempts to correct it, as well as passing over the inarticulate nature of extemporaneous, or nearly so, speech. What I am interested in is specific policy points.)

First, I have not often come across politicians who say that part of the problem is our own fault. It’s just not done; it interferes with the pandering when you are trying to correct those you are pandering to. As such, I was happy to see this from Palin, after commenting about predatory lending:

One thing that Americans do at this time, also, though, is let’s commit ourselves just every day American people, Joe Six Pack, hockey moms across the nation, I think we need to band together and say never again. Never will we be exploited and taken advantage of again by those who are managing our money and loaning us these dollars. We need to make sure that we demand from the federal government strict oversight of those entities in charge of our investments and our savings and we need also to not get ourselves in debt. Let’s do what our parents told us before we probably even got that first credit card. Don’t live outside of our means. We need to make sure that as individuals we’re taking personal responsibility through all of this. It’s not the American peoples fault that the economy is hurting like it is, but we have an opportunity to learn a heck of a lot of good lessons through this and say never again will we be taken advantage of.

Heck, yeah. See, I had a subprime mortgage briefly. We bought a house in Texas in 1998, when we had just had our second son, on an FHA 3% 30-year fixed mortgage. In 1995, when we were looking at moving to Michigan for a contract, we realized that (now that we had four sons, and growing quite big at that) that the house was just going to be too small to come back to, and we needed to sell it and buy a new (larger) house later. But the problem was, we had been raising four boys in the house, and it was 7 years old when we bought it, so we needed to do some work on it, and didn’t have the money saved up that we would need. We refinanced our mortgage, and it was a subprime loan (I didn’t realize it at the time, not even knowing the term then). The idea was to get an ARM, knowing that we’d be selling out from under it. I did a poor job of comparison shopping, and got worse terms than I could have gotten (less equity out, higher rate, more points to refinance). In part, this was because of deception and pressure by the lender, but mostly it was because I wasn’t very vigilant in my research or forceful in my bargaining. My bad. But here’s the deal: I wasn’t trying to buy a house like that, just get equity out of it. And I did so, got the house fixed up, and sold it about a month after the market peaked in early 2006. As a consequence, we did just fine, though not as well as we could have. And since we’re still waiting for the market to bottom out, we haven’t bought a replacement.

Because of this history, I have little sympathy for those who did an even worse job than I did, buying houses at rates that they couldn’t afford under time pressure and with unreadable contracts (I’m sorry, but a 3 inch thick stack of legal documents requires way more than a next day turnaround.) Sure, they were taken advantage of, but only because they were even dumber than me. And guess what? They are going to get bailed out with money I pay as a net taxpayer. Me? Not so much, no. It was nice to hear Palin noting that the people taking out the subprime loans were part of the problem.

Palin talked later about health care, and said this:

IFILL: Governor, are you interested in defending Sen. McCain’s health care plan?

PALIN: I am because he’s got a good health care plan that is detailed. And I want to give you a couple details on that. He’s proposing a $5,000 tax credit for families so that they can get out there and they can purchase their own health care coverage. That’s a smart thing to do. That’s budget neutral. That doesn’t cost the government anything as opposed to Barack Obama’s plan to mandate health care coverage and have universal government run program and unless you’re pleased with the way the federal government has been running anything lately, I don’t think that it’s going to be real pleasing for Americans to consider health care being taken over by the feds. But a $5,000 health care credit through our income tax that’s budget neutral. That’s going to help. And he also wants to erase those artificial lines between states so that through competition, we can cross state lines and if there’s a better plan offered somewhere else, we would be able to purchase that. So affordability and accessibility will be the keys there with that $5,000 tax credit also being offered.

After talking about a prior point for a moment, Biden responded:

BIDEN: Now, with regard to the—to the health care plan, you know, it’s with one hand you giveth, the other you take it. You know how Barack Obama—excuse me, do you know how John McCain pays for his $5,000 tax credit you’re going to get, a family will get?

He taxes as income every one of you out there, every one of you listening who has a health care plan through your employer. That’s how he raises $3.6 trillion, on your—taxing your health care benefit to give you a $5,000 plan, which his Web site points out will go straight to the insurance company.

And then you’re going to have to replace a $12,000—that’s the average cost of the plan you get through your employer—it costs $12,000. You’re going to have to pay—replace a $12,000 plan, because 20 million of you are going to be dropped. Twenty million of you will be dropped.

So you’re going to have to place—replace a $12,000 plan with a $5,000 check you just give to the insurance company.

You know, I actually really like the basic idea there. (I am assuming Biden was exaggerating the numbers, since he was doing so in a lot of other areas.) In order for a market to work as a market, there must be a cost to the person getting the benefit. The closer the costs and benefits are to the same person, the healthier the market will be. So it makes a lot of sense to move the tax benefit for health care costs (assuming you are going to have one) away from companies and to individuals. That solves the portability problem, as well as giving a cost incentive to the health care consumer to save money. Realize that what we call health insurance isn’t insurance in the traditional sense (that is, it is not protection against an unlikely event), but rather cost averaging (you are paying more now for someone who’s sick, and later they’ll pay more when you’re sick). Given that, we’ve already diluted the power of the market, and then shifting the costs and benefits of even that to companies, so that the costs are mostly hidden from consumers, makes the problem even worse. If the plan is basically removing the corporate subsidy, and giving it instead to individuals, then what would happen is that companies would reduce their benefits and commensurately increase their pay (while also saving money by not having to employ people to manage that part of their benefits packages), presuming those people have any bargaining skill at all. In fact, I suspect that it would be written into the law that companies canceling insurance plans in the wake of this would have to make it up with a salary boost, since our legislature cannot simply let market forces work in such matters. That’s a good thing, so long as coverage is not mandated, because it allows people to buy the coverage they need, and pay commensurate with that. As someone who, as a contractor, maintained his own insurance plan for years, I assure you that that drives you to control your health care spending in reasonable ways.

Biden said two different things, a little bit apart, that are unsurprising, but telling:

The bottom line here is that we are going to, in fact, eliminate those wasteful spending that exist in the budget right now, a number of things I don’t have time, because the light is blinking, that I won’t be able to mention, but one of which is the $100 billion tax dodge that, in fact, allows people to take their post office box off- shore, avoid taxes.

I call that unpatriotic. I call that unpatriotic.

If John really wanted to eliminate them, why is he adding to his budget an additional $4 billion in tax cuts for ExxonMobils of the world that, in fact, already have made $600 billion since 2001?

Our corporate taxes are vastly high. I think that only one or two countries have higher corporate tax rates. Worse still, our excessively complicated tax code and accounting regulations make it very, very expensive for companies simply to comply with the law on how to state their earnings and what taxes to pay. The tax code needs serious reform, but even without that, the corporate tax must come down if we are to remain competitive. A large part of the reason that so much economic activity by American companies has moved offshore is specifically to benefit from lower taxes and better regulatory environments. If you want to grow the economy without creating other problems (except possibly for higher illegal immigration rates as the economy booms), cutting corporate tax rates is an exceptional way to do it. Biden does not get that. I’m quite amazed that McCain seems to.

This next moment of Biden’s ideas really, really irks me.

Number two, with regard to bankruptcy now, Gwen, what we should be doing now—and Barack Obama and I support it—we should be allowing bankruptcy courts to be able to re-adjust not just the interest rate you’re paying on your mortgage to be able to stay in your home, but be able to adjust the principal that you owe, the principal that you owe.

Whoah! What Biden is saying here is so antithetical to everything I believe in that I cannot find words. What Biden is saying here is that the government should have the ability not just to set aside contracts where people loan money, and rewrite them to favor the borrower, but also take real, not potential, money from the lender to give it to the borrower. Look at it this way: I sell you my house for $100,000. You get a loan that would have you pay the lender the $100,000 plus interest. In a traditional 30 year fixed rate mortgage you’d probably pay another $200,000 in interest. Now Biden is saying not only that he would reduce the interest (the cost of using someone else’s money), but also reduce the principal, that is the $100,000 that you borrowed in the first place. Not only would the lender be losing the value of letting someone else use his money, he’d be losing some of the money he put in up front! Now, if you want to kill lending in this country for anything, that’s the way to do it. No sane person would give any loan under those conditions, because they’d stand to lose their money even if the borrower were solvent throughout. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad Senator. No cookie. No vote.

OK, one time I will point out Biden saying something so egregiously wrong, as a matter of factual accuracy, that I can only shake my head in wonder.

Here’s what the president said when we said no. He insisted on elections on the West Bank, when I said, and others said, and Barack Obama said, “Big mistake. Hamas will win. You’ll legitimize them.” What happened? Hamas won.

When we kicked—along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, “Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don’t know—if you don’t, Hezbollah will control it.”

Now what’s happened? Hezbollah is a legitimate part of the government in the country immediately to the north of Israel.

And moving on from that head-scratcher, we come to an arguable, but important, point. Biden again:

I don’t have the stomach for genocide when it comes to Darfur. We can now impose a no-fly zone. It’s within our capacity. We can lead NATO if we’re willing to take a hard stand. We can, I’ve been in those camps in Chad. I’ve seen the suffering, thousands and tens of thousands have died and are dying. We should rally the world to act and demonstrate it by our own movement to provide the helicopters to get the 21,000 forces of the African Union in there now to stop this genocide.

I do not believe that we should intervene in another country unless our interests are at stake, and no better choices offer. In Bosnia (which Biden was earlier touting as a humanitarian intervention of his doing), we went in when we shouldn’t have. Were anyone to intervene, it should have been the Europeans bearing the burden. Sudan is a little different. The Sudanese government is the closest thing that exists on the planet (since the Taliban were deposed) to a jihadi government; it is certainly in our interest to depose them and put in place a more tractable government. That this also has humanitarian benefits is laudable. However, it would not be a cakewalk: the logistics are worse even than in Afghanistan, and it’s entirely unclear that we would have even a somewhat clear logistical train other than by air, unless we are willing to outright take over the country (in which case we might have good SLOCs). There might be some things we can do anyway, once we free up forces from Iraq, but I don’t see any major intervention in the offing. This might be one of the few cases where NGO’s using mercenaries would be a reasonable solution, but I don’t see a military solution that provides sufficient benefit to our interests to offset the costs and risks. More importantly, though, is this later statement by Biden:

The line that should be drawn is whether we A, first of all have the capacity to do anything about it number one. And number two, certain new lines that have to be drawn internationally. When a country engages in genocide, when a country engaging in harboring terrorists and will do nothing about it, at that point that country in my view and Barack’s view forfeits their right to say you have no right to intervene at all.

This is something I’ve been saying for some time: the Westphalian era is ending. While the Left thinks it should end for humanitarian reasons, the Right thinks it should end for security reasons. In the coming world order, the biggest change in hundreds of years, there will be a presumption of sovereignty far less absolute than is true today.

The next bit I want to point out is what prompted me to write this post, both because it’s huge, and because I get to gloat a little at having called it. First, here is Palin:

Of course, we know what a vice president does. And that’s not only to preside over the Senate and will take that position very seriously also. I’m thankful the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the vice president if that vice president so chose to exert it in working with the Senate and making sure that we are supportive of the president’s policies and making sure too that our president understands what our strengths are. John McCain and I have had good conversations about where I would lead with his agenda. That is energy independence in America and reform of government over all, and then working with families of children with special needs. That’s near and dear to my heart also. In those arenas, John McCain has already tapped me and said, that’s where I want you, I want you to lead. I said, I can’t wait to get and there go to work with you.

What Palin is saying here is that she would actually preside over the Senate as Vice President. That is something that has not been done in a very long time, with the VPs limiting their involvement to just casting tie-breaking votes (as explicitly set forth in Article I, which Biden apparently needs to reread). Biden got that point, though it appears that Gwen Ifill missed it. Any person with a sinecure who sees it threatened tends to react angrily. Biden got angry.

IFILL: Governor, you mentioned a moment ago the constitution might give the vice president more power than it has in the past. Do you believe as Vice President Cheney does, that the Executive Branch does not hold complete sway over the office of the vice presidency, that it it is also a member of the Legislative Branch?

PALIN: Well, our founding fathers were very wise there in allowing through the Constitution much flexibility there in the office of the vice president. And we will do what is best for the American people in tapping into that position and ushering in an agenda that is supportive and cooperative with the president’s agenda in that position. Yeah, so I do agree with him that we have a lot of flexibility in there, and we’ll do what we have to do to administer very appropriately the plans that are needed for this nation. And it is my executive experience that is partly to be attributed to my pick as V.P. with McCain, not only as a governor, but earlier on as a mayor, as an oil and gas regulator, as a business owner. It is those years of experience on an executive level that will be put to good use in the White House also.

IFILL: Vice President Cheney’s interpretation of the vice presidency?

BIDEN: Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president we’ve had probably in American history. The idea he doesn’t realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that’s the Executive Branch. He works in the Executive Branch. He should understand that. Everyone should understand that.

And the primary role of the vice president of the United States of America is to support the president of the United States of America, give that president his or her best judgment when sought, and as vice president, to preside over the Senate, only in a time when in fact there’s a tie vote. The Constitution is explicit.

The only authority the vice president has from the legislative standpoint is the vote, only when there is a tie vote. He has no authority relative to the Congress. The idea he’s part of the Legislative Branch is a bizarre notion invented by Cheney to aggrandize the power of a unitary executive and look where it has gotten us. It has been very dangerous.

Ifill’s quote was certainly inside baseball, and I’m not surprised that Palin missed the import of it. (Basically, Cheney was claiming that he was exempt from executive reporting requirements because he was Constitutionally a legislator. He was wrong in that case. Biden’s overwrought attack on Cheney to the side, Biden was clearly right on substance in his response.) Palin reiterated that she intends to use the VP’s power to preside over the Senate to support the President’s agenda. I’m fairly sure that she will do so by taking a much stronger role not merely as a legislative advocate, but also in committee assignments and scheduling votes and the like. Here’s where I get to gloat, because less than a week after Palin was picked, I told my wife that I suspected that this was McCain’s reasoning, given her background and his interests. It would be a major, major expansion of the real, as opposed to rhetorical, power of the office, and it would step on a lot of Senators’ toes. Especially, right now, the Democratic Senators, because it is from their ranks (as the majority) that the President pro tempore of the Senate comes. Biden clearly understood that. His manner became intensely confrontation here; he was clearly angry, and asserted in no uncertain terms that the VP job is, as one prior holder of the job put it, “not worth a warm bucket of spit.” (I suspect that was misreported by one consonant.) Biden sees the threat, and it angers him a lot and probably worries him, too. On Constitutional grounds, a vast expansion of the VP’s powers in the Senate is certainly possible, and it would be a huge blow to the Democrats’ power if it were to happen.

One last statement, from Palin:

It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream; we have to fight for it and protect it, and then hand it to them so that they shall do the same, or we’re going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free.

Too late, I think. I live in the first generation of Americans that is measurably, noticeably less free than their parents. I suspect that my children will be less free still, and I fully expect to be telling my grandchildren about a time in America, back in the, when men and women were free. Absent a revolution or something equally catastrophic, the pattern is set: neither party sees freedom as more important than regulation, effectiveness as more important than good intentions, and individual rights as more important than “doing the right thing.” Go back and reread Biden’s quote on interest and principle.

I Couldn’t Resist Them…

...and I just can't resist punctuating all the recent gloom and doom with a little shoe-blogging:

Burberry above-the-ankle boots. I saw them in a shop window and immediately knew "we were meant to be." Unfortunately, I didn't ask the price until I was at the register, emotionally committed beyond all recall.

No, I'm not going to tell you what I spent on them. Just that it was too much. But to the true marriage of minds...or shoes...let no impediment enter.

How can you worry about something as trivial as elections, depressions, and wars when there are boots like these to lust for?