I’m in DC and attended Julian’s annual halloween party. This year’s theme was the “The Party of Death,” but although Ramesh Ponuru was invited, he was, alas, not able to make it. You can see pictures here.

I was Waldo. You can also see a snowflake baby and a dead stem cell, two Steve Irwins, and Hugo Chavez high-fiving Mahmoud Ahmadenijad. The most tasteless costume of the evening–the dead Amish girl–appears not to have been captured on film. Which is good, because that would probably prove Ponuru’s point about liberals.

I think it’s really cool how Flickr makes the photos page I linked to above possible. Julian just suggested that everyone tag their photos “partyofdeath,” and a bunch of people who attended the party did so. As a result, we automagically get a single page that displays everyone’s pictures in one place.

I’m reading a pamphlet by Paul Marshall from the John Jay Institute about the motivations of Osama bin Laden and his confederates. Marshall documents how Islamic empires expanded steadily for about a thousand years, only to suffer a series of setbacks since about 1700. One of the interesting points that Marshall makes is that Bin Laden believes these setbacks are the result of Muslims falling away from the true Muslim faith. God, presumably, has decided that overly secular or decadent Muslim regimes don’t deserve his assistance and so he’s let them be conquered by the infidels.

This is a familiar theme in Western culture. Jerry Falwell famously blamed America’s increasing secularization for the September 11 attacks. And every Christian (and, I presume, Jewish) child is taught in Sunday school about the way that the Jews won militarily when they were faithful to God, but began to lose wars if they drifted too far from God’s teaching.

It occurs to me that this is the pundit’s fallacy in a religious context. Just as political pundits argue that political party X is doing poorly because it hasn’t adopted the pundit’s preferred political platform, so religious adherents tend to believe that harms have befallen society X because they haven’t conformed the adherent’s preferred religious beliefs.

Am I the only one who finds this “scandal” ridiculous?

The controversy erupted over one of the people featured: an attractive white woman, bare-shouldered, who declares that she met Mr. Ford at a “Playboy party,” and closes the commercial by looking into the camera and saying, with a wink, “Harold, call me.”

A spokeswoman for Mr. Ford, who is single, said he was one of 3,000 people who attended a Playboy party at the Super Bowl last year in Jacksonville, Fla.

Critics asserted that the advertisement was a clear effort to play to racial stereotypes and fears, essentially, playing the race card in an election where Mr. Ford is trying to break a century of history and become the first black senator from the South since Reconstruction…

The furor puts Mr. Mehlman in a difficult position. He has spent considerable time as the national chairman preaching the inclusiveness of the Republican Party and its openness to black candidates and black voters. He said in an interview Wednesday night that he did not believe that this would damage his Republican outreach efforts.

Now, it’s conceivable that the RNC crafted the ad in question with an eye to inflaming bigots who will be bothered by the notion of Mr. Ford being romantically interested in white women. But it’s also conceivable that they were simply making the more mundane charge that he didn’t share Tennessee’s conservative values when it comes to sex. I mean, look, the vast majority of women in America are white. It’s hardly conclusive proof of ulterior motives that they chose a white woman.

This reminds me of the ridiculous “RATS” controversy in 2000. Then, as now, there was no evidence of ulterior motives. As Matt says, this sort of thing just makes the Democrats look whiney.

How would we describe this re-branding of the war effort. Is it, perhaps, a flip flop? Maybe a prelude to cutting and running?

Unfortunately, it appears that all they’ve decided to do is to stop using the phrase “stay the course,” presumably because the focus groups say it’s not popular any more. God forbid the White House actually change its policies.

The ruling party of Hungary, apparently. Even to my untutored eye, tear-gassing marching citizens on the 50th anniversary of their brutal suppression by Soviet troops seems like… maybe not such a good idea. Especially perhaps when, since you’re a bunch of Socialists, you are seen as the direct heirs of the government that was propped up by the Soviets. Again, I’m no expert, but it just seems like this might bring up some bad memories.

I found this story about Latino remittances to their home countries, heartwarming. Latino immigrants to the United States will send $45 billion dollars to friends and family back home. That’s about four percent of the entire Mexican economy and (I believe, although I can’t find the figure) on par with our government’s foreign aid budget to the entire world.

Moreover, remittances are far more likely to make their way to people who actually need them. American aid tends to be received by governments, which in most third world countries are not especially honest. So the majority of American foreign aid never makes it to actual poor people in the developing world. In contrast, Latino immigrants are wiring money directly to their mothers. They know exactly who’s getting the money, and they’d hear about it if the government stole it from them. It probably even has foreign policy benefits, as the remitters are likely to have a generally positive impression of America and to transmit that impression along with their remittances.

And the best part about all this is that it doesn’t cost us a dime! All we have to do is let them scrub our toilets and pick our strawberries. We get lower prices on the goods and services we buy and we get the warm, fuzzy feeling of knowing we’re helping to alleviate Latin American poverty. It’s such an incredible win-win arrangement that I find it rather depressing that it’s considered controversial in American politics. Increased immigration is a cause that should unite liberals (with their concern for social justice) and conservatives (with their belief in hard work and entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, that’s not how the issue has played out in the real world.

One of the strangest alliances in modern American politics is the left-right coalition against pornography. Bob Herbert has a column arguing that the recent school shootings of girls were the result of increasing sexualization of women in American culture:

We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that violence against females is more or less to be expected. Stories about the rape, murder and mutilation of women and girls are staples of the news, as familiar to us as weather forecasts. The startling aspect of the Pennsylvania attack was that this terrible thing happened at a school in Amish country, not that it happened to girls.

The disrespectful, degrading, contemptuous treatment of women is so pervasive and so mainstream that it has just about lost its ability to shock. Guys at sporting events and other public venues have shown no qualms about raising an insistent chant to nearby women to show their breasts. An ad for a major long-distance telephone carrier shows three apparently naked women holding a billing statement from a competitor. The text asks, “When was the last time you got screwed?”

I actually agree with Herbert that the trend toward ever more sexualization of women at ever-younger women in ever-more public fora is cause for concern. I worry about 12-year-olds feeling the need to make themselves sexier to measure up to societal expectations. I really liked Ariel Levy’s book on the subject.

I think pornography is less problematic than the sexualization of more mundane parts of day-to-day life like magazine covers and billboard ads. Porn isn’t constantly in the face of children, and when children are exposed to it, I think most of them will realize that a porn star is not a good role model. Restaurants like Hooters, in contrast, are potentially harmful precisely because they sexualize aspects of our lives that are otherwise unsexual and help to convey the message that wherever they go, women are judged on their appearance, not their character or accomplishments.

So I’m sort of sympathetic to Bob Herbert’s distaste for sexualization of culture, although I think his version is a bit over the top. But what I ind absolutely baffling is his assertion that this sexualization is somehow responsible for violence against women. I’ve read Herbert’s article twice now, and I have yet to see anything that resembles an argument. This is the closest he gets:

A girl or woman is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so in the U.S. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count. We’re all implicated in this carnage because the relentless violence against women and girls is linked at its core to the wider society’s casual willingness to dehumanize women and girls, to see them first and foremost as sexual vessels — objects — and never, ever as the equals of men.

So sexual violence is “linked to” the sexualization of women in our popular culture because… well, I’m not sure why. He doesn’t provide an argument, to say nothing of evidence, for a causal link. And it’s particularly goofy given that one of these incidents occurred in an Amish community–if any society is sheltered from the corrosive effects of popular culture, it would be the Amish.

It’s just a goofy and nonsensical argument. If anything, I would think that pornography would reduce violence against women by giving potentially violent men a harmless outlet for their sexual urges. Sure, I don’t have any evidence for my theory, and barely more than a guess at a causal mechanism. But neither does Herbert–and that didn’t stop him from putting his theory on the op-ed page of the New York Times.

There’s an interesting article (complete with the typically bizarre and unnecessarily provocative Slate title: “The Economic Case Against Philanthropy”) by Tim Harford and a related Tyler Cowen post that discuss the economics of charitable giving. We have long known (and experimental economists have more recently provided supporting evidence) that much of what we would typically call “altruism” is really a kind of reciprocal transaction that is sensitive to circumstances of the giving. This sort of ulterior motivation has always been recognized, if generally discouraged:

Matthew 6:1: Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.
2: Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
3: But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth:

Of course, God understands human psychology, and isn’t above sweetening the pot a bit.

4: That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly…6: But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

Harford notes that people generally give to an assortment of charities, and he takes this as evidence against the hypothesis that individuals are attempting to maximize the altruistic benefits they provide. Cowen points out some difficulties with this inference, but he forgets the general equilibrium and doesn’t mention one obvious flaw: if everyone is giving so as to maximize charitable impact, it doesn’t matter where you donate. I could pick charities out of a hat and give them random amounts of cash – since the marginal benefit of an additional dollar is equal across charities (presumably an implication of the equilibrium under most simple assumptions), I am not in a position to get “more than the market return” on my charity dollar.

Update: I could have been clearer on the last point. My argument was that mixed charitable giving doesn’t necessarily imply that altruistic motives are impure. If enough individuals are trying to maximize their charitable impact, then the marginal return to all charities would be equal, i.e., you won’t be able to find a charity that (on the margin) outperforms any other charity. Imagine this isn’t the case: if any charity does offer higher marginal returns, then people would have donated them away.  This assumes, among other things, rising marginal costs within charities (a reasonable assumption – if it wasn’t true, then one charity would perform all philanthropic work in the world).  In any event, you may find this to be an implausible description of the situation, but it isn’t meant as a stand-alone assertion; rather, it’s an attempt to undermine the inference Harford makes.

Julian notes a brutal James Walcott review of Dinesh D’Souza’s ridiculous new book, blaming the cultural left for Muslim anger toward the United States. Amanda points out that not only is D’Souza’s thesis pernicious nonsense, it’s derivative pernicious nonsense. Jerry Falwell blamed the cultural left for 9/11 just days after the attacks.

Claire McCaskill is the Democratic candidate to represent Missouri in the United States Senate. One of the charges being leveled at her is that she was guilty of drug use:

McCaskill’s response: “You know, I will tell you honestly that back in the 70s, I did some stupid things, along with most people in my generation. But that would be the extent of it.”

Under the laws on the books in Missouri–which as a county prosecutor, McCaskill was charged with enforcing–drug use is a lot more than “stupid.” When people without McCaskill’s connections are caught using drugs, they don’t get to shrug it off as a youthful indiscretion. Often they end up with jail sentences that put their lives on hold and ruin their career prospects.

McCaskill is a perfect example of the fact that people can experiment with drugs when they’re young and go on to lead productive (well, as much as being a politician counts as being productive, anyway) lives. This, it seems to me, ought to prompt her to speak out against the injustice of poor kids getting thrown in jail for their youthful indiscretions. Instead, we learn that she “received national recognition as a leader in the war on drugs after creating one of America’s first Drug Courts. In 1993, President Clinton picked McCaskill to serve on the Commission on Drug Free Communities.”

I have a feeling that those “drug courts” don’t treat 20-something drug use as a trivial youthful indiscretion to be shrugged off. I’m perfectly willing to forgive McCaskill for her youthful indiscretions, but I think she ought to pay the same courtesy to the less-privileged kids who are targeted by the drug laws she has so vigorously supported.

[Hi, I'm Militant Skeptic, an anonymous grad student that recently joined the Angry Blog. Thanks for reading.]

Lew Rockwell is bashing the latest Nobel Peace Prize winner, Muhammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank. He relies on a 1999 article by Jeff Tucker, who criticizes the microfinance institution:

What about Grameen’s low default rate of less than 3 percent? That sounds great until you look at precisely how the Grameen “Bank” goes about collecting the money (which its lends at 20 percent interest). Peer pressure is their phrase. Coercion is closer to the truth. Employees engage in weekly, door-to-door monitoring of the lives of all borrowers. Borrowers attend weekly physical training classes, are indoctrinated in collectivist ideology, and are told to be 100 percent obedient to the ideals of the bank, or else lose their borrowing privileges. On the whole, it is a process that has more in common with a cult than sound finance.

Tucker seems to have forgotten the definition of coercion usually used by Mises Institute scholars. Courtesy of Murray Rothbard:

Unfortunately, the fundamental and grievous flaw in Hayek’s system appears when he proceeds to define “coercion.” For instead of defining coercion as is done in the present volume, as the invasive use of physical violence or the threat thereof against someone else’s person or (just) property, Hayek defines coercion far more fuzzily and inchoately: e.g., as “control of the environment or circumstances of a person by another (so) that, in order to avoid greater evil, he is forced to act not according to a coherent plan of his own but to serve the ends of another.”

Moreover, Grameen Bank doesn’t use the coercive power of the state to collect debts:

Conventional banks do not lend money to the poor because they do not consider them creditworthy. We demonstrated that there is nothing wrong with the poor. Bank rules procedures and concepts are at fault. We created a bank based on completely new set of premises and procedures. Unlike conventional banks, this bank is based on trust. We have no legal instruments between lender and the borrower.

Mr. Tucker resorted to labeling practices he doesn’t like “coercive,” even though in any other discussion he would adhere to Rothbard’s stricter definition and disagree with anyone that claimed the “economic power” of a corporation or organization was a form of coercion. The poor of Bangladesh choose to borrow money from Grameen Bank in exchange for adhering to the conditions attached to the loan. The fact that those conditions involve peer monitoring and promotion of a particular work ethic doesn’t make them coercive, according to the definition that Mises Institute scholars almost always defend. Tucker’s lack of consistency in this regard is disappointing.

I don’t know what to think about this.

Hat tip: Marginal Revolution.

ringtones converting mp3s to

iMelody: Most new phones that don’t do Nokia’s Smart Messaging are using this format.

Oh, I didn’t actually comment on Kos’s notion of libertarian Democrats. On the one hand, I think the essay is great. I think the thesis is basically right: as the Republicans abandon their limited government principles, more libertarians are likely to pull the lever for Democrats.

The problem I see is that Kos has a mighty tenuous grasp of why libertarians believe what we believe. The centerpiece of his argument is that corporations are becoming a bigger threat to freedom than government. He points to this Daily Kos diary entry in which “hekebolos” says:

The NSA can only conduct its spying because of the cooperation of telecom companies.

Defense contractors have a larger influence than government about what weapons systems are built for our military.

As of today, friends of various energy industries control nearly every important position in the current administration.

Our publicly held national debt used to be primarily controlled by foreign central banks–governments, in short. Now, our public debt is held ever increasingly in hedge funds, over which relationships between governments have no control.

Unless they are stopped and regulated, corporations will go on polluting until they change forever the very nature of life on earth.

This list, I’m sure, could be added to. Oil and oil services companies can even dictate when and how the most powerful nation on earth decides to go to war. A cabal of major corporate industry is, in fact, more powerful than the government of the most powerful nation on earth–and government is the only thing that can stop them from recklessly exploiting the people and destroying their freedom.

Here’s the funny thing: each and every one of those problems involves corporations gaining power via government. (This is true even of the environment, given that a lot of the despoiling happens on government-owned lands) Hence, it makes no sense to say that corporations have more power than governments. Corporations have a lot of power, and the reason is that they’ve captured the powers that we’d previously given to governments. That’s the problem we need to solve. We need to figure out how to limit the influence of corporations over the government, so that the government will serve the public interest rather than special interests.

Hence, it’s a complete non-sequitur to argue that the government is “the only thing that can stop” corporations from doing bad things. As long as governments are primarily controlled by corporations, government isn’t going to stop them. And if we can prevent corporations from controlling government, that will take away their power. Either way, giving the government more power isn’t going to help matters.

This is not, of course, a new insight. It’s the argument lefties and libertarians have been having for decades. So it’s not surprising that Kos would take the traditional leftist position on it. What’s surprising is that he’d be so oblivious to libertarian views on the subject that he’d make it the centerpiece of an article on libertarian Democrats. It makes me think that a libertarian Democrat is just a Democrat who focuses more on civil liberties than the typical Democrat. Don’t get me wrong–I think that’s great. But I think calling it “libertarian” is a stretch.

I’ve been meaning to comment on this month’s Cato Unbound subject, the “Libertarian Democrats” for a week now. Matt Yglesias’s comments provide a good excuse to do so:

I don’t see any reason to believe it would be smart for a major political party to deliberately aim at the votes of some libertarian constituency. The reason is that, to a decent first approximation, about zero percent of the electorate is primarily motivated by a principled opposition to state coercion. We’re not literally talking about zero people, I know some of them, and some write blogs, but it’s genuinely a rounding error in the scheme of things. You do have some people who adhere to the Economist-style center-right politics of the American elite consensus, and this view has some similarities with libertarianism, but this genuinely is an elite consensus voting bloc rather than a libertarian one. It’s also not seriously accessible to the Democrats over the long-run because a core element of the consensus is a fairly deep-seated loathing of progressive activism and progressive activists. It’s worth understanding that, at the end of the day, there’s much less libertarianism in American society than people sometimes think.

I should start by noting the dangers of the pundit fallacy are almost overwhelming here. With that said, however, I think Matt’s being rather unfair. In the first place, he’s absolutely right that the constituency for principled libertarianism is pretty close to zero. But the same is true of principled anything. Walter Mondale went down in flames by staking out the principled position that he would raise taxes if elected. So asking how many principled libertarians there are is the wrong question.

The right question is how many voters are inclined toward rhetoric and policies that move things in a libertarian direction–i.e. they find anti-government rhetoric compelling and support things like tax cuts, civil liberties, deregulation, free trade, etc. There’s all sorts of evidence that the number isn’t zero. Let’s start with a guy named Ronald Reagan. If Matt hasn’t listened to Reagan’s 1980 Republican convention speech and his 1981 inaugural address, I suggest he do so. It’s 200 proof libertarianism, and it won him two elections (three if you count George H.W. Bush who largely ran on Reagan’s legacy). Obviously, Reagan wasn’t a perfectly principled libertarian, but libertarian themes formed the centerpiece of his governing philosophy, and it didn’t seem to hurt him in the polls.

That was 25 years ago. What about today? The Cato Institute today released a study showing that about 13 percent of the electorate has libertarian leanings. And they’ve been shifting towards Democrats lately. They split 80-20 for Bush in 2000, but only 60-40 for Bush in 2004. My guess is that this trend will continue in 2006, given that George W. Bush hasn’t done anything libertarian since getting re-elected.

Matt concedes that there’s an “elite consensus block” with libertarian leanings, but he argues that the Democrats are never going to win their support because “a core element of the consensus is a fairly deep-seated loathing of progressive activism and progressive activists.” But this is silly. It’s equally true that much of that block has a deep-seated loathing of the religious right. Yet that hasn’t stopped them from pulling the lever for Republicans. Politics, by its nature, involves compromises and trade-offs. During the second half of the 20th Century politics tended to break down over lines of economic policy, with free marketeers on one side and advocates for activist government on the other. Libertarians held their noses and voted for Republicans with views on social issues they found repugnant because they thought that economic issues were more pressing. But there’s nothing pre-ordained about this. This libertarian, at least, is most interested in voting for a party that won’t shred the Bill of Rights or start World War III, even if it means voting for a candidate whose views on economics are a bit to the left of center.

This is particularly true because a centrist Democrat could easily paint the GOP as the party of reckless over-spending without committing himself to reducing the size of government. At this point, I’ll gladly throw in my lot with a Democrat who campaigns on the Clinton legacy of balanced budgets and moderate spending growth if it’s coupled with libertarian views on social issues and opposition to preemptive war. A Democrat who campaigned as a deficit hawk could attract a significant number of libertarian votes without alienating any of the traditional Democratic constituencies. That seems to me like something that the Democratic leadership ought to seriously consider.

Wow.

More than half — 54% — said Republican leaders who knew about Foley’s actions for months or years did not act against him earlier “for political reasons.” By 43%-36%, they said House Speaker Dennis Hastert should resign. One-third said the scandal would make them less likely to vote for a Republican; 53% said it would make no difference.

On the question of which party’s candidate would receive their vote if the election were held today, Democrats held a 23-point lead over Republicans among every type of person questioned — likely voters, registered voters and adults. That’s the largest lead Democrats have held among registered voters since 1978 and a jump from last month’s 48%-48% split among likely voters.

Government corruption, Iraq and terrorism were the three most important issues to poll respondents. They said Democrats would do a better job on all three. The party had a 21-point advantage on handling corruption and a 17-point advantage on Iraq. A longstanding GOP advantage on terrorism vanished; Democrats had a 5-point edge.

Even with all the bad news the GOP has endured in the last couple of weeks, this must surely be over-stating the size of the gap.

The Bush administration has come perilously close to accomplishing something I would have thought impossible 6 years ago: turn me into a partisan Democrat. Courtesy of Jim Lippard, here is a blog entry that explains why:

There are, as Matt Yglesias pointed out the other day, huge numbers of people in this country — clearly the majority of the electorate — who are not at all stupid but simply do not have the time or inclination to pay close attention to political events. In that regard, people who spend substantial time in the blogosphere are aberrational; it is not the norm to monitor political developments on a daily basis. Most people rely upon journalists and pundits, as Yglesias said, “to let them know if something goes dramatically wrong with the governance of the country.” But journalists have failed in that duty and the conservative pundits on whom many people (particularly conservatives) rely have purposely obscured what has been happening.

But for so many reasons — its relative simplicity, its crystal clarity, the involvement of emotionally-charged issues, the salacious sex aspects — this Foley scandal circumvents that whole dynamic. People are paying attention on their own. They don’t need pundits or journalists to tell them what to think about it because they are able to form deeply held opinions on their own. None of the standard obfuscation tactics used for so long by Bush followers are working here. To the contrary, their attempted use of those tactics is making things much worse for them, because people can see that Bush followers are attempting — through the use of patently dishonest and corrupt tactics — to excuse the inexcusable. And seeing that, it gives great credence to all of the accusations voiced over the last five years that this is how the Bush movement operates in every area, because people can now see it for themselves.

In that regard, this scandal is like the Cliffs’ Notes version of a more complicated treatise on how the Bush movement operates. Every one of their corrupt attributes is vividly on display here:

The absolute refusal ever to admit error. The desperate clinging to power above all else. The efforts to cloud what are clear matters of wrongdoing with irrelevant sideshows. And the parade of dishonest and just plainly inane demonization efforts to hide and distract from their wrongdoing: hence, the pages are manipulative sex vixens; a shadowy gay cabal is to blame; the real criminals are those who exposed the conduct, not those who engaged in it; liberals created the whole scandal; George Soros funded the whole thing; a Democratic Congressman did something wrong 23 years ago; one of the pages IM’d with Foley as a “hoax”, and on and on. There has been a virtual carousel — as there always is — of one pathetic, desperate attempt after the next to deflect blame and demonize those who are pointing out the wrongdoing. This is what they always do, on every issue. The difference here is that everyone can see it, and so nothing is working.

Amen.

I’m in Milwaukee for the State Policy Network’s Education Reform Summit. The Milwaukee location was chosen because the school choice experiment here is an inspiration for free-market think tanks across the country. Yesterday, I had the privilege of touring two voucher-supported schools.

The first was Saint Anthony School, a Catholic elementary school that has more than doubled in size in the last five years. The student body is 99 percent Hispanic, drawn from the poor immigrant neighborhoods that surround the school. Although it’s a little bit difficult to judge these sorts of things based on a one-day visit, I was impressed by the meticulousness with which the school was run. They have a standard curriculum which they follow very strictly, and they invest a lot of money training teachers to use the curriculum correctly.

Even more impressive was Hope Christian School. Every one of their students is black, and, again, drawn from the impoverished neighborhood around the school. It’s in its third year.

The unusual thing about the school is that they put a great deal of effort to cultivate an environment that is, well, nerdy. During study hall, they play classical music and encourage them to play chess. Each of the classrooms is named after a university. The kids are required to wear coats and ties, and the only language offered is Latin.

If I went to a high school like that, I might have found it a bit over-the-top. But that’s because I grew up in a culture suffused with a lot of those things. Most of those kids presumably haven’t encountered those things before. What I think they’re trying to do is re-create the bourgeois culture that a lot of middle-class kids take for granted. They’ve only been in business for three years, so they haven’t graduated anybody yet, but they certainly appeared to be making impressive progress.

The most impressive thing about the Milwaukee education system, though, is what choice has done to the government schools. We actually had a senior official from the Milwaukee school district come to our conference in support of school choice. He says the district has made changes that never would have happened in a pre-voucher environment. They’ve closed the worst schools, fired the worst teachers, and begun aggressively recruiting students to the good schools that remained. In cities without choice, we’re told that the districts are doing everything they can to improve education. It’s interesting how the possibility of having to close more schools suddenly focuses the minds of a city’s education bureaucracy to make real improvements.

Dan Drezner links a Fukuyama post that asserts that the reason Hezbollah is more popular with people is that Hezbollah bribes them. Well, he doesn’t say that exactly, but…

What is it that leaders like Iran’s Ahmedinejad, Hezbollah’s Nasrullah, and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez have in common that vastly increases their local appeal? Anti-Americanism and an aggressive foreign policy are of course components. But what has really allowed them to win elections and cement their support is their ability to promise, and to a certain extent deliver on, social policy—things like education, health, and other social services, particularly for the poor.

Now, we can debate the efficacy or morality of this, or we can accept that it’s apparent that what Lebanese people want is cool stuff. This is the Cool Stuff Unified Field Theory ™ of modern politics — people (any people) support the party they think will get them more Cool Stuff. Therefore, in order to win the “hearts and minds” of say, the Iraqi populace, our primary goal should be the distribution of the aforementioned to them. Bribery? Yup! But if our military objectives can be fufilled through direct cash transfers to the citizens of resistant nations, then I say go for it. I have always advocated that our method, from Day One of the occupation, should have been the complete and total inundation of the average Iraq with Cool Stuff.

As much as I oppose normal redistributive policies, I support the principle of military funding. And giving each and every Iraqi a air conditioner, fridge, satellite tv and an iPod is probably a cheaper and more effective way of accomplishing our current military objectives. Al Qaida can say their recruits are fanatical soldiers dedicated to the cause, but I’ll bet that the majority of them would have been willing to postpone any future martyrdom operations if their families were happily playing with all their fancy new American Cool Stuff. It’s the modern Muslim’s attraction to peaceful secular materialism that partly motivated the rage of Al Qaida in the first place.

We carpet bombed and nuked Japan and Germany into rubble, tragically killing millions. Then we bribed them so ridiculously that they forgave us and today are some of our best allies and trading partners. Why wouldn’t this work again?

The blog has too many words, and not enough pretty pictures! So I evilly stole today’s Penny Arcade comic, because it’s politics-related and… uh, it’s a picture. It savages a proposed bill regarding the regulation of video game content based on entirely unworkable criteria. Needless to say, I agree with them, from the bottom of my nerdy, shriveled, little heart.

Basically, one point of the bill is “The ESRB (the voluntary organization that rates electronic content) must play through all games before rating them,” in an effort to avoid the controversy over the hidden content in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.  As pointed out at Penny Arcade, with online, dynamic content and user-created content, this is impossible.  And, following the tried and true method of regulatory superiority, once the target of a bill has failed to live up to its impossible standards, the reins of control will be seized from them and transferred to a federal agency, in an effort to “protect the children.”

Sorry, I cheated with the title. This post won’t be anywhere near as interesting as the title would lead you to believe. In my area (Little Rock, Arkansas), Touchstone Energy Collective runs a very interesting advertisement. Now, I have nothing against the company (I know next to zero about it), but they chose an intriguing metaphor in their tv ad.

In praise of their collective bargaining powers, a company spokesman holds a single stick and breaks it, implying that one company or individual would be ineffectual. Then, he bundles together a bunch of sticks, and shows that they are unbreakable — proving the benefit of many groups working together. A nice image — which is probably why some… other people… throughout history have chosen to use it.

Fascio (plural: fasci) is an Italian language word which was used in the late 19th century to refer to radical political groups of many different (and sometimes opposing) orientations. A number of nationalist fasci later evolved into the 20th century movement known as fascism.

During the 19th century, the bundle of rods, in Latin called fasces and in Italian fascio, came to symbolize strength through unity, the point being that whilst each independent rod was fragile, as a bundle they were strong.

So, this is a completely unjustified cheap shot at the poor company, but perhaps they should find an ad agency whose preferred method of imagery doesn’t parallel Benito Mussolini. I wish I had some far-reaching political point here, but sometimes all I’ve got is being a condescending jerk.

Pop Quiz! Who fulfilled Godwin’s Law first, the ad or me?