Matt Yglesias

HMC FAIL

When I was in college, people used to joke about Harvard being a gigantic hedge fund that just happened to run a university as a sideline. These days, the university still has its faculty, its students, and (most importantly of all) its reputation, but the hedge fund seems to have run into a ton of trouble. It’s not only—or even especially—that they’ve lost money in the downturn. Rather, the crux of the matter is that some of their more exotic investments seem to have got them stuck in a nasty liquidity squeeze that’s forcing budget cuts.

Felix Salmon remarks:

And maybe Harvard’s alumni might start giving a lot more now than they have in the past. After all, until recently, any giving from alumni was dwarfed by the investment gains of the endowment, and so the incentive to add another drop to the bucket was greatly reduced. Now, by contrast, cash from alumni is desperately needed to meet the university’s annual liquidity requirements. It might even feel better, giving money when you know it’s going to actually be spent, rather than giving money simply to augment some gargantuan endowment.

My advice to my fellow alumni would be: Don’t.

If you want to give money to an educational institution, do some research and find a charter school in your metropolitan area that’s obtaining good results with a demographically unfavorable group of kids. Or find help our a regional public college of little repute that provides valuable educational services and could really use the money. Sure, if your checkbook is fat enough to finance a research endeavor that could make a major contribution to discovering an HIV vaccine or something it might make sense to invest in a world-famous university. But as a general matter, fancy schools that are already rich and famous and overwhelming serve students from privileged backgrounds are not a good target of charitable giving.

Ricci and “Activism”

This is hardly an original-to-me point, but you don’t need to look any further than conservatives’ fury at Sonia Sotomayor’s participation in the Ricci appellate decision to see how hollow their complaints about “judicial activism” are. Conservatives just really don’t like Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and they think the situation in New Haven illustrates the injustice of the law as written. So they want the judiciary to reverse its earlier precedents and change things around.

Maybe they’re right or maybe they’re wrong. But this is what judicial activism just is. They could be mounting a campaign in congress to change the law. But instead they’re trying to get the courts to do it for them. You saw the same thing in the other big conservative judicial outrage of recent years, the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Kelo eminent domain case. Here, again, what happened was that some lawyers had dreamed up a fairly clever and somewhat plausible argument as to why the court ought to step in and overrule the policy decisions of some elected officials. And what the court did was decline to step in and do that. In response, many jurisdictions passed some different laws putting more restrictions on the use of eminent domain.

In both Ricci and Kelo, in other words, you have courts acting how conservatives say they want courts to act—applying the law-as-written and not inventing new constitutional doctrines to justify wading into political controversies.

A Kind of Terrorism that Works

Bad news:

George Tiller, the Wichita doctor who became a national lightning rod in the debate over abortion, was shot to death this morning as he walked into church services.

Tiller, 67, was shot just after 10 a.m. at Reformation Lutheran Church at 7601 E. 13th, where he was a member of the congregation. Witnesses and a police source confirmed Tiller was the victim.

Random murder of civilians in order to coerce political concessions doesn’t have a great track-record. But direct action terrorist violence against abortion providers has, I think, proven to be a fairly successful tactic. Every time you murder a doctor, you create a disincentive for other medical professionals to provide these services. What’s more, you create a need for additional security at facilities around the country. In addition, the anti-abortion protestors who frequently gather near clinics are made to seem much more intimidating by the fact that the occurrence of these sorts of acts of violence.

In general, I think people tend to overestimate the efficacy of violence as a political tactic. But in this particular case, I think people tend to understate it.

Ahmadenijad Opponents Slam His Foreign Policy Stance

I would say that this counts as a more conciliatory posture from our side starting to bear fruit:

With campaigns for the June 12 presidential election in full swing, none of the three challengers have shied away from publicly criticizing Ahmadinejad on topics long considered off-limits for debate in Iran, such as his stance on the country’s nuclear program and his vitriol for Israel. Reformist challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi accused the president of so sullying the nation that Iranian passports are now on par with those of Somalia, the African state that has become a hub of poverty, piracy and terrorism. [...]

Mehdi Karroubi, another liberal challenger, took on the president’s handling of the nuclear program, which Iran says is aimed at civilian energy production but the West believes is meant to eventually produce weapons. Karroubi said Tehran needed to be more transparent and rational in pursuing its goals abroad.

This is one of the virtues of expressing a clear desire for an improved relationship with Iran. Doing so lowers the temperature over there and opens up political space for disagreement about foreign policy objectives. It also clarifies that there’s a real upside to responsible behavior, and a real downside to pushing the envelope on nuclear issues.

Innovative Texas Admissions Program Being Scaled Back

Texas had been running an interesting experiment in an alternative to old fashioned affirmation action. The way it worked was that instead of using an explicitly race-conscious admissions formula, instead the University of Texas just guaranteed that the top ten percent of performers from any high school in Texas could gain admission to a UT campus of their choice. I think that struck a lot of people as a reasonable-sounding alternative to race-based formulae that a lot of folks are uncomfortable with. And above all, it accomplished the goal of ensuring that talented students who simply had the misfortune to grow up in a community with a low performing high school didn’t suffer additional penalties for their bad luck over and above the intrinsic disadvantages caused by attending a low performing school.

But now it seems Texas is going to curb this program, too leaving the state with little in the way of remedial admissions efforts.

This, in turn, highlights the extent to which college admissions in this country is often thought about in a backwards way. Our general understanding is that the most resources ought to flow to the “best” schools and the “best” schools ought to serve the “best” students who “deserve” to be able to go there. Under this framework, any departure from a strict scheme of “merit” looks suspicious. But another way to look at things would be to say that of course relatively able students from relatively privileged backgrounds deserve a higher education, but a larger amount of resources ought to flow to the students with more problems. After all, it’s the worse-prepared kids—typically from less privileged backgrounds—who have the most in the way of educational needs. The marginal dollar of either the taxpayer or the charitable donor will do a lot more for society when spent on people who aren’t already the best students.

The Monument Myth

You often hear that the height limit for buildings in Washington, DC has something to do with the Washington Monument or the dome of the Capitol Building. As this We Love DC post explains that’s wrong. The actual rule is that a building can be no more than 20 feet taller than the width of the street it’s on. Given that DC folks both seem very attached to the policy and also mistaken as to what the policy is, I’ve often wanted to propose that we actually adopt the rule that people think we have, limiting buildings to the height of the Washington Monument. This would approximately triple the permitted density in the central business district.

The We Love DC Folks say they like the short buildings where the are, citing aesthetic considerations. As I’ve said before, I’m sympathetic to this, but folks who want to cite this idea owe it to us to account honestly for the facts. If I were to tell folks in my neighborhood that it would be nice to see a park nearby, I’m sure they all agreed. But if I followed up that the cost of the park was going to be billions of dollars in new taxes, support would probably vanish. The cost of the severe restriction on building height in the central business district and near Metro stations throughout the city is hidden from view, but that makes the lost tax revenue, reduced job opportunities for low income Washingtonians, increased job sprawl and air pollution, etc. all no less real.

The Hard Cases Are Hard

Ramesh Ponnuru takes issue with what I think is a fairly banal David Brooks point about how judges’ background and experience will probably alter their thinking about cases:

Without wishing to take issue with the abstract point Kahan is making—surely it’s true that different judges come to different conclusions because they assign different weights to the various facts involved—couldn’t a third judge “perceive” that the Constitution, properly interpreted, doesn’t actually empower him to balance, or say anything at all about, the schools’ concerns about security and the girl’s psychic needs? And wouldn’t Brooks’s observations about judicial psychology apply a lot less to a justice with that mental “model”?

I appreciate that the rhetoric of embattled conservative judges waging a lonely battle on behalf of “the law” against a cohort of subjectivists is politically useful, but I wonder if folks on the right really believe this stuff.

The whole essence of controversial appellate decisions is that the constitutional or statutory provisions at issue aren’t clear. The super-clear issues don’t get litigated at all. Congress isn’t going to pass a bill saying “Christianity is now the established religion of the United States.” But questions arise that people disagree about because legal standards are full of abstract terms. There are protections from “unreasonable” searches. Thanks to the existence of precedent, judges don’t start de novo asking individually weather or not any given search is reasonable. But new, difficult cases arise when circumstances arise that aren’t covered by the precedents in an unambiguous way. What “the Constitution” says is going to turn on how a judge balances the different considerations in play.

Health and Taxes

Most of the early public skirmishing over health care issues has centered around nebulous fears of a “government takeover” of the health care sector. My sense of the state of play in congress, however, is that the votes almost certainly exist for the kind of regulatory overhaul that will change the nature of our health care system for the better. The sticking point is that ensuring the availability of affordable health care involves a substantial up-front expenditure of funds. As Peter Orszag explains, health reform is the best chance to put costs on a sustainable path over the long term. But over the short term, it takes money. And there’s no clear congressional consensus over where to find the money.

Steve Benen observes that the latest CNN polling indicates a similar issue in public opinion. 63 percent say “they would favor an increase in the federal government’s influence over their own health-care plans in an attempt to lower costs and provide coverage to more Americans,” indicating that scare stories about bureaucracy aren’t a key stumbling block. But then they asked:

“Would you prefer a health care reform plan that raises taxes in order to provide health insurance to all Americans, or a plan that does not provide health insurance to all Americans but keeps taxes at current levels?”

The split was 47-47. That’s not deadly. Indeed, I think it suggests that politicians who want to do the right thing have plenty of wiggle room. But the problem is that even if you have a senator who’s willing to raise “taxes” in the face of 47-47 public opinion, you have an additional hurdle when the subject turns to any particular tax.

The Growth/Oil Hammer

I find the debate about whether or not we’re seeing “green shoots” to be a bit confused. Moreover, I don’t believe I can see the future. What I can see is the present, where markets react to any sign of good economic news with a big jump in oil prices. And the news in question is of the “things aren’t getting bad quite as quickly as we feared” genre of good news. What if six months ago, the economy is actually growing? Not growing rapidly. But just growing. Like, the number is above zero rather than below it.

Well it seems to me that we’ll be right back where we were in the summer of 2008 where sky-high gas prices were clobbering everything. And we haven’t really done anything over the past year to leave ourselves better-prepared for that situation.

Meanwhile, over the past six months the rising unemployment rate and falling asset values have been partially offset by the fact that thanks to energy price declines, real incomes for the employed majority have actually been rising. A spike in oil prices will put a stop to that and further hammer consumption. And the ensuing rise in inflation, though it’ll be non-core inflation, will probably make the Fed queasy about expansionary monetary policy.

Which is to say that if the recession ends, then it seems likely that we’ll slip right back into a new recession. I wish that weren’t the case, and that everyone would just react to an oil price spike by biking to work, but realistically we don’t seem to have made nearly the scale of adjustments that would be necessary to let the country shrug off a return to oil that costs over $4 a gallon.

Preferential Treatment

A couple of more points on the allegedly “preferential treatment” that Michael Goldfarb thinks Sonia Sotomayor received during her Princeton years. First, as Michael O’Hare says:

I remember arriving at Harvard (a decade before SS went to college) from the Bronx HS of Science, whence Harvard had admitted eleven students a year since forever, out of a graduating class of about 800- of whom, we learned, none had ever graduated less than magna. There I found many things of interest to a New York kid, for example (1) Protestants! (2) …who seemed to be in charge of everything! My social justice gland went into overdrive as I started to meet the thirty-odd Pomfret students (a third of their graduates) in my class through my roommate, and compare them just on general smarts to the BHSS students who hadn’t made the cut with me.

Right. When I was at Harvard in the early days of the 21st Century, it seemed that there was very little year-to-year variance in the number of kids admitted from Dalton to each class. Similarly, there was very little year-to-year variance in the number of kids admitted from Stuyvesant to each class. These were two very good high schools in New York City. One was very expensive, one was free. Admission to Dalton was competitive, but only a minority of families could afford the tuition, and many of the students had been admitted in kindergarden. Admission to Stuyvesant was done via a standardized test administered to eighth graders. Naturally, the more-or-less fixed formula had Harvard take in a higher proportion of any given Dalton graduating class than any given Stuyvesant graduating class. Consequently, while the Dalton kids were considerably worldlier and in some ways more sophisticated, on average the Stuyvesant kids were smarter.

Which is to say that, as everyone knows, the main affirmative action at fancy private colleges is for the well-to-do in general and legacies in particular. Read about the “z list” (see also) and then complain about preferential treatment.

Meanwhile, it turns out that the specific innuendo Goldfarb was peddling about Sotomayor was false in all its key particulars. he didn’t get “preferential treatment” by being allowed to teach her own class

Mankiw, Redistribution, Height Taxes, and Utilitiarianism

Via a distraught Conor Clarke, I see that not only did Greg Mankiw once write a cheeky paper arguing that maybe we should impose a height tax, he also goes in for some odd philosophical claims. To try to reconstruct his argument, he believes:

1. The main arguments in favor of redistributive taxation are grounded in utilitarianism.
2. Utilitarian theory supports taxing tall people more heavily than short people (this is the thesis of the paper).
3. Therefore, people should either sign on for the height tax or else abandon their support for redistribution.

He concludes with this:

A moral and political philosophy is not like a smorgasbord, where you get to pick and choose the offerings you like and leave the others behind without explanation. It is more like your mother telling you to clean everything on your plate. If you are a Utilitarian redistributionist, the height tax is like that awful tasting vegetable your mother served up because it is good for you. No matter how hard you might wish it wasn’t there sitting on your plate, it just won’t go away.

I think there are a ton of mistakes being made here. This goes back to a point I was making a while ago about how dangerous it is that the public discourse is so dominated by low-quality freelance philosophy done by people with PhDs in economics. I’m fairly certain that if Mankiw were to walk over to Emerson Hall he could find some folks (possibly T.M. Scanlon who I know sometimes reads this blog) who could explain to him that there’s little grounds for the belief that a commitment to utilitarianism is the main justification for redistributive taxation.

So point one is factually wrong.

But that aside, I think the “smorgasboard” argument is a confused way of thinking about moral reasoning. A great many crucially important questions in normative ethics are easy. Is it okay to murder Greg Mankiw to steal the money in his pocket? No, it isn’t. But a lot of foundational questions in ethical theory are hard. And a lot of meta-ethical questions are hard. Normal people don’t even understand what all of these questions are. And those of us who’ve thought a little bit about them, but decided not to go into the professional philosophy game may be aware that there are issues in these areas about which we’re uncertain. There’s a certain hyper-literal sense in which these questions all form a hierarchy. First I must decide where I stand on meta-ethics. Am I a reductive moral realist? A quasi-realist? A practical reasons theorist? An old-school “moral facts are facts too, damnit” moral realist? Are there theological issues in play? Then I need to decide if I’m a utilitarian (and if so, what kind of utilitarian!) or maybe some other kind of consequentialist or maybe I have a more Kantian view. So then depending on those answers, I can say “killing Greg Mankiw to steal the money in his pocket is wrong because…” and then lay the whole thing out.

I think what Mankiw is implying with the “smorgasboard” argument is that this is how people should actually engage in moral reasoning. So if I find myself uncertain about a broad question in ethical theory, this uncertainty must logically inflict my first-order moral judgments. Maybe killing Greg Mankiw really is okay? And if I’m not uncertain, if I say “the reason it’s wrong to kill Greg Mankiw and steal his money is that the murder would reduce net utility” then the murderer can counter with “well, if you believe in utilitarianism, you ought to believe in a height tax.” Then I say “well that sounds wrong!” And then, having debunked utilitarianism, Mankiw gets shot and everyone agrees that justice has been done.

Something’s gone wrong there. We don’t abandon considered convictions about normative issues that quickly. Murder is wrong. If forced to contemplate the alleged contradiction, there are a bunch of things we might want to consider. Maybe the analysis of the height issue has gotten something wrong, utility-wise. After all, though the paper is clever, it’s hardly a comprehensive review of all of the hedonic issues in play. Or maybe utilitarianism isn’t the best theoretical grounding for the conviction that murder is wrong. Or, maybe the height tax thing actually is a good idea, albeit an unrealistic one. But since this isn’t a “live” subject of political controversy, and since there seem to be a lot of other more clear-cut policy issues, we decide to spend our time and energy thinking about less outlandish policy suggestions.

Losing the Crucial “White People With Spanish Last Names” Vote

My friend Julian Sanchez, another not-especially-Hispanic blogger/pundit, has an excellent post on Sonia Sotomayor and the baffling tactics of the conservative movement. I’ll just quote the conclusion:

Look, it’s not racist to oppose a Latina judicial nominee, or to oppose affirmative action, or to point out genuine evidence of ethnic bias on the part of minorities. What we’re seeing here, though, is people clinging to the belief that Sotomayor has to be some mediocrity who struck the ethnic jackpot, that whatever benefit she got from affirmative action must be vastly more significant than her own qualities, that she’s got to be a harpy boiling with hatred for whitey, however overwhelming the evidence against all these propositions is. This is really profoundly ugly. Like Yglesias, I don’t think I’m especially sensitive to stuff like this, or particularly easily moved to anger, but I’m angry. I don’t think Republican pundits really appreciate the kind of damage they’re probably doing, for no reason I can discern given the slim odds of actually blocking the nomination. Which, perhaps, goes to Sotomayor’s point: They really have no idea how they sound to anyone else.

One thing conservatives might want to ask themselves is what would they be saying about Sotomayor if she had the exact same background and record but was a middle class white woman from Riverdale instead of a poor Latina from the projects. Of course, they still wouldn’t like her but they’d find a non-offensive way to express that. They’d say things like “she’ll probably vote with Ginsburg and Breyer whereas I would prefer a justice likely to vote with Scalia and Roberts.” That’s a perfectly good reason to be unhappy with a judicial nominee. Instead, they’re freaking out about her name, about Puerto Rican food, about the idea that she’s bitchy, that she’s benefited from “preferential treatment,” that she must secretly be stupid, that she’s a Klan member, and all kinds of other nonsense that’s only explicable as a hostile reaction to her ethnic background.

Conservatives ought to picture an anti-abortion, gun-owning, married, male, prosperous, Cuban-American small businessman living in the suburbs of Miami. Picture him reacting to the news of Sotomayor’s nomination. Perhaps he’s happy in some sense to contemplate a Latina on the bench, but perhaps not. Either way, the guy’s still a solid conservative. Now picture him listening to G. Gordon Liddy say “I understand that they found out today that Miss Sotomayor is a member of La Raza, which means in illegal alien, ‘the race.’” That’s not going to play well.

The New GM Europe

The new General Motors is going to be a strange enough entity—a state-owned automaker with its own union and the government of Canada on board as major junior partners. But the situation in the new GM Europe, which is mostly composed of Opel, is even odder. It initially looked like Opel was going to be sold to Fiat, which is also buying Chrysler, as part of Fiat’s campaign to become a legitimate first-tier player in the auto market. But Magna, a Canadian car parts company (that’s also to some extent Austrian), was also interested in Opel. And the German government seems to have decided that a Magna-owned Opel would preserve more German jobs than a Fiat-owned Opel would. So the Germans helped stitch together a deal also involving Sberbank, a very large state-owned Russian bank.

And part of the appeal of that to the Russian government is that GAZ, Russia’s number-two car manufacturer, will now start building Opel cars on its assembly lines rather than terrible, terrible GAZ cars. Thus, jobs will also be saved in Russia.

In other words, the Russians and the Germans appear to have taken action to guarantee even more overcapacity in automobile production. And with essentially all global automakers operating with some level of government support, it’s hard to see how anyone can stay in the game without continuing government support. At some point, aren’t we going to have to start unraveling this?

More Risk or Less

Gary Gorton wrote a 20,000 word paper I’d been meaning to read since Ben Bernanke represented it. Ezra Klein did a summary, though, so I didn’t actually read it. Gorton’s main contention is that moving forward we need to make the “shadow banking system” more like the regular banking system, in which there are explicit government guarantees paired with regulation.

I totally follow the logic of this, but I think it’s dead wrong for the reasons Felix Salmon lays out:

In my view of the crisis, it’s precisely the demand for informationally-insensitive assets which is the problem. And we need to get individuals, companies, and institutional investors out of the mindset that they can do an elegant little two-step around the inescapable fact that anybody with money to invest perforce must take a certain amount of risk. If you have a world where people are all looking for risk-free assets, you end up shunting all that risk into the tails. And the way to reduce tail risk is to get everybody to accept a small amount of risk on an everyday basis. We don’t need more informationally-insensitive assets, we need less of them.

That seems right to me. The combination of FDIC insured bank accounts and treasury bonds seems to me like an adequate supply of safe savings vehicles for the people who need them. People sitting on huge pots of money have perfectly good reason not to want to accept the low interest rates involved in those vehicles. But the price you pay for higher returns is more risk. But more risk should be acceptable to people with larger pots of money. What’s needed is for more time and energy to be put into people thinking about what kind of risks are worth bearing, instead of all this time and energy being put into trying to “engineer” the risk away. I think Gorton’s proposal would amount to basically shifting the engineering function out of the private sector and onto regulators, but this seems much more likely to wind up concentrating the risk at the tale (what if the regulators massively screw up?) than to actually make it go away.

If You Take a Poll that Shows Sotomayor is More Popular than Alito, and Compare it to a Different Poll, then Alito Looks More Popular

So Gallup did a poll of people’s initial views of Sonia Sotomayor and compared them to people’s initial views of other recent SCOTUS nominees. The conclusion, she’s less popular than Roberts but more popular than Alito:

That’s pretty straightforward. But over at the innumerate Weekly Standard they think a good way to do the comparison is to compare the ratings Sotomayor gets in a Rasmussen poll (49-36) to the numbers Alito got from Gallup (44-19) even though the questions were worded different. The 2005 Gallup report on Alito also includes the interesting tidbit that the only way to get the public to approve of conservative justices is to dissemble about their philosophy:

The public is evenly divided as to whether Alito probably would or would not vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Thirty-eight percent believe he would, and an equal percentage think he would not, with the rest offering no opinion. If it becomes clear Alito would vote to reverse Roe v. Wade, Americans would not want the Senate to confirm him, by 53% to 37%.

I think it’s pretty clear to anyone who’s paying attention that all of the organizations backing Alito were doing so under the impression that he would, in fact, vote to overturn Roe.

Endgame

TGIF:

— Will the recession lead to better political science.

— Eric Kleefeld makes a joke.

— The truth about Rick Scott.

— Marty Peretz’s long-winded defense of continued Israeli land grabs.

— Mark McKinnon is making sense.

— Arne Duncan says states should lift their charter caps. He’s right.

You should really watch that Duncan video.

Making Performance Parking Politically Appealing

This has nothing to do with Sonia Sotomayor, but parking guru Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking (your must read guide to parking policy), spoke today at a briefing for DC City Council staff. His basic message was, you know, that parking shouldn’t be underpriced and we shouldn’t think of “cheaper” parking as “better” parking.

Listening to him, it occurred to me that it’s weird that this is such a revolutionary concept. When I took economics, we had a little squib in there about price controls. But it was about something nobody would actually think to do these days . . . mandatory cheap bread or something. It was a historical example. At any rate, it’s overwhelming conventional wisdom in the United States that price controls are bad. If I suggested that the city implement price controls on Diet Coke, people would say that it would lead to shortages. And if I proposed dealing with the ensuring shortages by saying that anyone who wants to build a new building needs to also provide millions of dollars worth of Diet Coke to people in the neighborhood, people would look at me as if I were insane. Creating the Diet Coke shortages is not a favor to anyone—neither fans nor haters of Diet Coke benefit—and the regulatory mandate is an absurd subsidy to Diet Coke drinkers with no conceivable policy justification. It’s bizarre. But people have a strong bias toward the status quo, so they tend to assume that status quo policy just must be non-bizarre, no matter how at odds it is with everything else. Which is a long-winded way of saying that economists should probably talk more about these kind of everyday examples of weird market-distortions that nobody ever thinks about.

The other thing is that in some of the ensuing discussion, a twist emerged on how to grease the political wheels for this policy. When you price street parking properly—which is to say a price that’s high enough so that there’s almost always a space or two free on every block, but low enough so that there’s not more than a space or two free on any given block—you’re creating a surplus. That surplus takes the form of more customers for local businesses, less hassle for parkers, less traffic for everyone (almost 30 percent of traffic in crowded urban areas is people circling for parking), etc. But some of it takes the form of higher revenue from parking meters. In principle, that revenue could be used to fund all kinds of things. But politically speaking, the best way to make change appealing is probably to earmark the revenue specifically for use in the area getting the performance parking. That way instead of just having the argument about the correct pricing of space on the street, you can sell it to the neighborhood by saying “performance parking is going to repair the sidewalk, refurbish the bus shelter, spruce up this park, and then provide ongoing revenues necessary to keep everything spic and span going forward.”

Newt Gingrich Thinks Auschwitz is a Good Venue for Partisan Political Attacks

I’ve never been to Auschwitz. I did, however, visit the lesser-known Terezín concentration camp back in 1997. The experience didn’t inspire me to Twitter a bunch of cheap partisan political attacks. But, hey, I’m not Newt Gingrich. He went and tweeted:

Auschwitz is a horrifying experience which reminded me of thee vil of kim jong I’ll and dangers of al qaeda hamas and hezbollah

And:

Auschwitz is also a reminder that evil men often do what they threaten. An iranian nuclear bomb could lead to a second holocaust

Another fellow named Josh Daws took the bait:

@newtgingrich Silly Newt. Don’t you know that by talking to them they’ll put down their weapons and participate in giant group hug.

And Newt tweeted back:

@JoshDaws I knew you would understand. Chamberlain tried the group hug with hitler and it didn’t work

Haha, dumb liberals. I know this chest-pounding about Iran is supposed to help get more Jewish support, but I think normal Jewish people (or, indeed, normal people of all backgrounds) are going to find this choice of venue a bit distasteful.

Freight Rail’s Anti-Trust Exemption

An alert industry observer brought to my attention legislation by Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI) aimed at revoking the anti-trust exemption the freight rail industry currently enjoys. I don’t want to claim to be an expert on all the ins-and-outs of this but my understanding is that this would be a mistake and that it’s good that Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) has switched sides and is now joining Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison, Frank Lautenberg, and John Thune in opposing this.

One of the reasons the rail situation in the United States has gotten so bad is because of a lot of infighting between the freight rail people and the passenger rail and transit people. More recently, however, the OneRail coalition has come together, which recognizes that rail advocates of all kinds have a great deal in common and can best advance their goals working together. A strong freight rail industry can and should be an important part of America’s transportation network, both because of its own intrinsic benefits (this is a very energy efficient way of moving stuff) and also as part of building a rail system that’s robust enough to also support viable passenger traffic. The fact that rail shipping rates are rising reflects the fact that rail is an appealing option under present conditions. It looks to me like an argument for increasing freight rail capacity not for harsher regulations.

G. Gordon Liddy Smears All Spanish-Speakers as Illegal Immigrants

Ali Frick catches criminal and conservative talk radio host G Gordon Liddy saying “Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when she’s menstruating or something, or just before she’s going to menstruate”. The reference, of course, is Judge Sonia Sotomayor. But don’t worry, he said racist stuff too!

LIDDY: I understand that they found out today that Miss Sotomayor is a member of La Raza, which means in illegal alien, “the race.” And that should not surprise anyone because she’s already on record with a number of racist comments.

Yes, that’s right, Liddy thinks every single Spanish-speaking person is an illegal alien. That would come as news to the population of, say, Peru. And also to the millions of Puerto Ricans who aren’t immigrants at all, to the (largely Republican!) Cuban-American population which knows that Cubans can legally immigrate to the US in unlimited quantities, to the historically Spanish-speaking populations of the Southwest who came to be American citizens after the US conquered the places where they live in the Mexican War, and of course to the many, many, many legal immigrants to this country from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America as well as to their descendants.

Will anyone on the right speak out against this bigotry? I won’t hold my breath. Only a minority of conservatives go around saying racist stuff. But it’s an article of conservative faith that “political correctness” is a huge problem and racism is not a problem at all, so it would be unbecoming to complain about Liddy.

A Hypothesis

Will Wilkinson on the Sotomayor debate:

And I really don’t get why many Republicans have taken this opportunity to reinforce the already widespread impression that they are morally odious morons.

I see two options here. One option is that a large number of people who are not odious morons have, in the past, behaved in ways that garnered them a reputation as odious morons and have, unaccountably, decided to persist in that behavior. This is a non-partisan blog, so I won’t attempt to sketch the other possibility.

Not a Parody

To be clear, when I say that the conservative movement has a lot to offer people who are convinced that poor Puerto Rican women growing up in Bronx housing projects get a lot of unfair advantages in life, I’m not kidding.

Michael Goldfarb of The Weekly Standard and Stuart Taylor of National Journal are genuinely engaged in an Ahab-like quest to smoke out examples of the “preferential treatment” of which Sotomayor has been such a beneficiary.

Beyond the simple observation that conservatives really and truly are fanatical in their defense of the prerogatives of white people, the obvious observation to make is that everyone in life has been treated preferentially by someone at some point. Sometimes if you face a lot of disadvantages in life, people recognize that and extend you an extra helping hand. Or maybe, like John Roberts, you were educated at a private boarding school before attending Harvard. Or maybe you’re Irving Kristol’s son. Or maybe because your ideology pleases Rupert Murdoch, he agrees to cover the losses of the magazine you work at. The only reasonable question to ask about someone like Sotomayor is whether or not you think it’s reasonable to conclude that, on balance, poor minority women benefit from more special advantages in life than do middle class white men. I think that would be a difficult case to make. It’s hard to look at the composition of the United States Senate, or the Washington Post and New York Times op-ed pages, or the roster of Fortune 500 CEOs and reach the conclusion that the system has been working overtime to promote underqualified Latinos into positions of prominence. Unless, that is, you want to argue that we’re so intrinsically deficient in our ability that we’re structurally underrepresented despite the massive advantages we receive in life. Maybe that’s what Goldfarb really thinks.

My guess, though, is that they haven’t thought this through at all. And that one reason they haven’t thought this through at all is that to the best of my knowledge there are no Hispanics working in high levels at The Weekly Standard and thus nobody around to point out what an ass he’s being.

Netanyahu Surprised to Learn that Obama Means What He Says on Settlements

As I said yesterday, I’ve been a bit surprised (in a good way!) by how tough and united the Obama administration has been in terms of pressing Israel to freeze settlement activity. Laura Rozen reports that Netanyahu’s surprised too, he was apparently expecting empty talk and loopholes:

Last night, shortly after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told journalists that the Obama administration “wants to see a stop to settlements — not some settlements, not outposts, not natural growth exceptions,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a confidante. Referring to Clinton’s call for a settlement freeze, Netanyahu groused, “What the hell do they want from me?” [...]

In the 10 days since Netanyahu and President Barack Obama held a meeting at the White House, the Obama administration has made clear in public and private meetings with Israeli officials that it intends to hold a firm line on Obama’s call to stop Israeli settlements. According to many observers in Washington and Israel, the Israeli prime minister, looking for loopholes and hidden agreements that have often existed in the past with Washington, has been flummoxed by an unusually united line that has come not just from Obama White House and the secretary of state, but also from pro-Israel congressmen and women who have come through Israel for meetings with him over Memorial Day recess. To Netanyahu’s dismay, Obama doesn’t appear to have a hidden policy. It is what he said it was. [...]

It’s not just the administration that’s delivering Netanyahu that message, however. Whereas in the past Israeli leaders have sometimes eased pressure from Washington on the settlements issue by going to members of Congress, this time, observers in Washington and Israel say, key pro-Israel allies in Congress have been largely reinforcing the Obama team’s message to Netanyahu. What changed? “Members of Congress have more willing to follow the leadership of the administration … because [they] believe it is in our national security interest to move toward ending the conflict and that it is not a zero sum for Israel,” the former senior Clinton administration official said.

Good on Obama. But also good on the members of congress. It seems to me that Netanyahu has been hoping to be able to get away with defying the administration by getting congressional allies to pressure the White House, thereby causing the White House to decide that they’d rather give in than jeopardize their agenda. In part, this change in congress just reflects members of congress recognizing the realities of the situation. But I also think that the advocacy of new groups like J Street — currently running a campaign to support Obama’s position on the settlemeent issue — is helping to stiffen the spines of people with the right instincts.

Improving Food Safety

I have to admit that my first thought upon reading this article was “I can’t wait to see how the Senate kills this idea!”

The bill, introduced by Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) and Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), would give the Food and Drug Administration broad new enforcement tools, including the authority to recall tainted food, the ability to “quarantine” suspect food, and the power to impose civil penalties and increased criminal sanctions on violators.

Among other things, the proposal would put greater responsibility on growers, manufacturers and food handlers by requiring them to identify contamination risks, document the steps they take to prevent them and provide those records to federal regulators. The legislation also would allow the FDA to require private laboratories used by food manufacturers to report the detection of pathogens in food products directly to the government.

That comes via Hilzoy who reminds us of Rick Perlstein’s coinage “e coli conservatism.” But even if we assume a bill along these lines can be passed and signed into law, which hopefully will happen, my understanding is that the larger issue in the background here is often regulatory capture. Too often the critical agencies charged with overseeing aspects of the nation’s food supply have come to see food producers, rather than the broad mass of people, as their agencies’ key clients. What’s needed, beyond specific new legislative matters, is some action from the top of the executive branch aimed at shaping the culture deeper in the agencies.

The Court’s Right Shift

Via Ezra Klein, a good Cass Sunstein article describing the rightward march of the Supreme Court over the past 30 years. The whole thing is worth reading, but this really sums it up:

Here is another way to demonstrate the point. In 1980 Stevens often operated as the Court’s median member; in many cases he (along with Powell) was the Justice Kennedy of that era. But Stevens is frequently described as the most liberal member of the current Court. If he qualifies for that position, it is not because of any significant change in his own approach, but because of a massive shift in the Court’s center of gravity. [. . .] A widely unknown fact: Between 1984 and 2000, the Court overruled more than 40 precedents, specifically rejecting the law as it was understood in 1980. And on many more occasions, the Court significantly reoriented the law without overruling particular decisions.

In the popular imagination, a “liberal” justice is one who, like Stevens or Breyer, thinks women have a right to abortion and generally believe congress should have leeway in deciding how it wants to regulate interstate commerce. But to legal scholars, the real judicial left is represented by the ghosts of Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan who saw the constitutional values of equality as imposing affirmative mandates on the state to provide services to poor people. Bill Clinton showed no particular interest in trying to revive that style of legal thinking in the judiciary, and nothing in Sonia Sotomayor’s record indicates that she does either.