April 15, 2003
Calling Uday: (via Kathleen): So
Calling Uday:
(via Kathleen): So Uday's email address was according to Time Magazine udaysaddamhussein@yahoo.com. I emailed it and it is dead now, though yahoo won't let anybody else take it.
All of this reminds me of a story I read in the papers sometime during the 2000 presidential campaign (which I can't now find on Lexis) about George W Bush-- supposedly he had an email address (something like gb43@aol.com) that he cancelled on the advice of his lawyers; the idea was to have something so common that it would be guaranteed to get lost in the shuffle.
TrackBack URL for this entry:
Quibbling: Supreme Court Transcripts for
Quibbling:
Supreme Court Transcripts for Oral Arguments through March 24th are now available. In particular, you can now read the transcript for the Lawrence v. Texas case. And it looks like I was right on this minor score.
TrackBack URL for this entry:
Spend it: Matthew Yglesias is
Spend it:
Matthew Yglesias is skeptical of the idea of "Political Capital" and I'm not quite sure why. It's not quite that political popularity is something you can spend like money, but here's the idea: Nearly everybody who votes for the president doesn't support all of his policies, but rather supports some subset of them, with varying degrees of importance. When the president does something that make a lot of people likely to vote for him anyway (like Republicans) and on the margin (like "moderates") then that means that he can afford to do more things that are relatively unpopular without sabotaging his re-election chances.
Is this a metaphor run-awry? I don't think so. If you "earn" lots of political capital by doing something popular (say, winning a major war, or effectively diffusing a serious national crisis) then a lot of people will vote for you even if you "spend" some of that political capital later by doing things that they don't like so much, like regulating stem-cell research, fixing prices, or receiving oral sex from a White House intern. Conversely, you can also borrow on political capital (once you're elected) by doing things unpopular with a lot (but not all) of your constituency, (like appointing an extremely right-wing Attorney General) so long as you make sure to pay off the debt later (by, for example, providing lots of tax cuts to upper-middle-class families). That seems like a reasonably accurate (if painfully oversimplified) description of a political process.
The only time the metaphor is truly mis-used is when people mistakenly think that political capital can be transferred among different groups (which happens only in rare circumstances). Political capital "earned" with a Republican constituency can't be "spent" with a Democratic Congress very readily (though sometimes it can when a president has attracted significant support from those voters who often vote for the other party; this explains the "100-day" grace period sometimes given to popular new presidents). But that's part of the reason we use a "capital" metaphor rather than a "money" metaphor.
UPDATE: I in no way support or affirm the other comments on "political capital" in Matthew Yglesias's blog, some of which seem to be examples of exactly the sort of "pop" usage he was complaining about.
TrackBack URL for this entry:
Sex Redux: And in a
Sex Redux:
And in a continuation of the vibrator debate, Amy challenges the conclusion that Eugene Volokh and I reached. She writes:
I am unconvinced . . if masturbation alone is enough to signal lack of sexual success, why doesn't porn viewing (also a masturbatory aid) draw forth the same gut reaction(?)
Honestly, I think it does, albeit to a lesser degree-- that intuition was the reasoning behind my rationale. The strength of this reaction is increased by the bizarreness of the image.
Really, though, I think it's fairly interesting (though unrevealing) that (with our unscientific sample of 3) there is a male-female divide in the answer. Certainly Amy's second complaint seems like one far more likely to be part of a female reasoning process than a male one. I would hypothesize that the responses people mailed to the Volokh Conspiracy were gender-divided along similar lines.
UPDATE: Eugene Volokh didn't notice any such divide, but thinks he's spent too much time on this and needs to move on. I think he risks his chance at a judgeship if the Volokh Conspiracy ceases to be a family blog.
TrackBack URL for this entry:
Public Defenders: Mississippi counties are
Public Defenders:
Mississippi counties are suing the state because they are too poor to provide lawyers for their poor. This comes in the wake of Gideon v. Wainwright, which ruled that the poor have a right to a lawyer in non-capital criminal trials.
"We lost four members of our community, including two adults who were taxpayers," Mr. Scipper said. "They were murdered and their house was burned down on top of them. And we're supposed to pay for the defense?"
Yes. If there is really a constitutional right to a government-appointed lawyer, then the government that pays for the lawyer should be the government doing the prosecuting (within some broad standards of sufficiency, probably less broad than the ones that currently exist). So assuming that the arson/murder charges were pressed by the county, the county ought to treat maintaining the constitutional rights of its defendants as one of the administrative costs of trial, like feeding the prisoners and sequestering the jury. It might be annoying and expensive-- it would be far cheaper and quicker, after all, to simply take them out back and lynch them. But that's not the way things are done here.
If the charges were being pressed by the state government or the federal government (and maybe they were; the article doesn't say) then they ought to pay for it. This is a simple matter of internalizing externalities. The major problem with this system is not that counties have to pay too much for the defense of their poor, but that they might not want to pay enough. Due to the pierced veil of ignorance, most citizens want to be quite hard on crime. If the Supreme Court is serious about this stuff, it ought to establish some actual minimum defense to which the poor are entitled, or give some stricter guidelines to some body capable of enforcing them.
UPDATE: The above post is in now way intended to explain what the law is, only what the policy ought to be.
TrackBack URL for this entry:
Neat: Okay; so I ostensibly
Neat:
Okay; so I ostensibly study math but I'm not taking any more math courses. All the same, it's hard not to get worked up about the potential solution of the Poincarre Conjecture.
TrackBack URL for this entry:
Give it up: I'm sure
Give it up:
I'm sure Eugene Volokh or the Oxbloggers will get to this eventually, but I think I was here first.
Slate's ongoing and ever-more-pathetic column on Bushism's of the Day is up again (and it is far from daily). Here is Bush's latest egregious mistake:
"You're free. And freedom is beautiful. And, you know, it'll take time to restore chaos and order—order out of chaos. But we will."
Okay. The guy mis-spoke. He doesn't speak flawlessly when speaking ex-temp. I'm shocked. But here's the thing. The President corrected himself instantaneously. I'm not saying the slip-up isn't vaguely amusing, but it doesn't seem even vaguely newsworthy. If this is really the worst thing he's said lately, then Karl Rove or whoever coaches him deserves a medal.
TrackBack URL for this entry:
At it again: Another post
At it again:
Another post on Diotima (if the link is bloggered, it's the April 15 post)from Shonda Werry merits comment. Ms. Werry writes:
This law would make it illegal to take minors across state lines to obtain an abortion without parental consent. Without this law, it's easy to get around parental notification and parental consent laws, which exist in many states.
Sen. Ensign has said, "A minor who is forbidden to drink alcohol, to stay out past a certain hour, or to drive a car in some states, is certainly not prepared to make a life-altering, hazardous decision, such as abortion, without the consultation or consent of at least one parent."
That seems reasonable.
Does it? Of course, the Diotimans don't believe that Roe v. Wade was rightly decided, but like it or not, it was decided. Are drinking alcohol and having an abortion at all similar? Should they be?
Here's another way to think about it, independent of the constitutional issue. Read Sen. Ensign's quote again only replace the word "abortion" with "remaining pregnant as a teenager". It, too, is a "life-altering, hazardous decisions" and frankly, it's one that I think is a lot more frightening. The problem with the drinking, driving, curfew analogy is that those activities aren't time sensitive. If I have to wait until I'm 21 to drink, I don't suffer any lasting harm as a 16-year-old; I've lost five years of drinking time, but nothing else. That is why most of us are somewhat willing to restrain minor's ability to seriously harm themselves. But if I have to wait until I'm (say) 18 to have an abortion (or to have one without the consent of my parents) that drastically alters the trajectory of my life, because by the time I turn 18, it's too late. Of course, that is exactly what many pro-Life folks are hoping for.
Put another way: The common justification for serious liberty restrictions on children and teenagers, the kind of thing we'd never let anybody do to a "mature" 25-year-old adult are usually justified under an "unforeseeable consequence" rationale; that minors shouldn't be allowed to seriously wreck their future lives. I know that abortion is a sensitive moral issue but which choice is more irreversible-- the decision to have a baby, or the decision not to?
TrackBack URL for this entry: