Fascinating Exchange

I came across this exchange earlier today, and have been thinking about it all morning. To recap: There was an article published stating that the Thai government, criticized for not giving much to Haiti earthquake relief, had donated several thousand bottles of skin-whitening cream. The outrage, as you might imagine, was considerable. Trouble is... it’s not true. That site is a satire site, like The Onion, only aimed pretty much primarily at satirizing a particular Thai newspaper. (it has other articles entitled, “Kim Jong Il’s Pancreas Sent To Labor Camp”, “Man Reduces Carbon Footprint By Dying Young”, and “U.S. Torture Memos: Detainee Forced To Eat At Cracker Barrel 83 Times In One Month”. Some of them I thought were pretty funny, most of them fell flat for me.)

What really stuck in my head, though, was the lengths to which the commenter had to go to persuade her friend that no, the story really was fake. The story itself is hard to believe... but if you’re ready and willing to think the worst of people, it’s not too hard to accept, especially when the story is stripped of context. Now, I like this particular exchange because, having seen many others like it, this one is sadly the most surprising because of how impressively civil these two people are to each other, even though they must have each found the other person maddening.

Money quote:

Until and unless I am proven otherwise, my stance is that the original source of that piece was either removed or corrupted due to the sentivity/controversy it could generate.

I do not know what is "legitimate" on the internet when every Dick, Tom and Harry can use the internet to publish "news."

While that last sentence is a valuable insight, it seems to me that this person makes exactly the wrong conclusions from it. Their statement appears to me to boil down to, “I will believe anything I read that confirms my personal biases.” Which does not make this person much different from most other people on the internet, just more up-front about it!

I will do my best to think about this next time I see something on the interwebs that outrages me -- do me a favor and try to do so too?

An Itemized Bill

Hey, it’s almost April 15th, and if you’re in the US, you’re probably thinking about taxes. I paid mine a while ago, and boy is the IRS quick in cashing those checks. If you’re curious what you just paid for, have a look over here. It’s a little coarse-grained, but interesting.

Update: Oh, hey, if you’re looking for something to do with that big fat refund check, here’s a fun place to spend some cash. Documentary about Japanese entomology? You know you want that.

Political Discourse

And here's the Daily Show with a remarkable description of modern political argument:

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Sentence of the Day

“War against France is inherently lawful”
        Kannon Shanmugam of Williams & Connolly, arguing on behalf of Henry V in French Civil Liberties Union v. Henry V
(H/T to C.E. Petit)

On Corporate Money

I've been thinking a lot lately about the recent Supreme Court ruling. After reading bits of the decision(s) I'm coming to the conclusion that, although the effects are likely to be nasty, it was the correct decision.

There were two arguments that I found persuasive. The argument that was made was simply that the US Government should never be in a position of determining "good speech" and "bad speech" and that political speech in particular should never, ever be regulated. If Rupert Murdoch wants Fox News to start espousing the joys of scrapping the Constitution and replacing civil rights with a pay-as-you-go system -- it should not matter whether he is doing so as a private person or doing so through his corporation. As to whether corporations can have First Amendment rights, it seems to me that they have to, otherwise it would be very easy for the government to shut down critical news sources. Giving watered-down FA rights would be worse than none at all: there would be the appearance of freedom without the ability to really use it.

Now, most people agree with this, I think, and object rather to a less-obvious logical leap: that the outlay of money is equivalent to speech. This is the bit that I've been thinking the most about, and I think that what the problem comes down to is the difference between saying "Money is not equivalent to speech" and "Money should not be equivalent to speech". I agree with the latter, but I don't think I can agree with the former: in our culture, for a variety of reasons, money has come to be considered a form of speech. Boycotts are the big thing: "I won't spend my money here" is turning a potential financial transaction into a political statement, whether you're objecting to the practices of an employer or trying to support the concept of local business or local agriculture. On the flip side, businesses and politicians frequently claim their revenues as a source of popularity, often legitimately: "If WalMart's so bad, why do they make billions of dollars?" or the breathy reports about "record-breaking" fundraising by a candidate, expressed in terms that clearly are intended to convey "$$$ == public mandate".

No, it seems plain to me that in modern America, the expenditure or donation of money is routinely treated as political speech, and the laws do need to reflect that. If and when that finally changes, the law should reflect that too.

The second argument is that this does not change the amount of influence that corporations have in the slightest, only the form that it takes. Where there is a will, there has traditionally been a way: Are you seriously telling me that News Corp has been hamstrung in supporting political candidates up until now? Has George Soros been frustrated in his desire to spend money in support of his favored candidates? Of course not. The current laws have merely distorted political speech by corporations, not suppressed it. Instead of direct endorsements, we've seen issue ads that dance around the issue of who is being promoted. We've seen executives fund-raising among their subordinates. Advertising during news coverage of certain political rallies (I'm still waiting for a story to break where it's alleged that advertisers pushed CNN or NBC to spend more time covering Palin rallies or something of the sort) or threats to pull advertising over "unfair" coverage of a favored politico. Make no mistake, any company that advertises during Glen Beck's show is making a political statement. Heck, sometimes direct support is the least effective option available, particularly if the corporation in question is hoping for the election of a week-willed feckless puppet.

Now, simply saying "nothing will change" is no reason to make large changes to the law -- however, in this case I think that removing the distortions from the political landscape could be a very good thing. Having already taught corporations to use the afore-mentioned tricks, I think they will continue to use them. But some at least will be more forthright and simply say "We support this candidate for this reason".

More than that, I wonder if the problem with money in politics is not that there is so much, but rather that there is so little. Political candidates don't just need to outspend each other to get attention, they have to outspend the latest round of advertising for the newest XBox or the theatrical release of Sudden Explosions 5: The Revenge. Politicians spend so much time raising money that its importance becomes elevated in their minds, they become convinced that they owe their donors more than they really do. Perhaps -- just perhaps -- the actual solution to the problem of money in politics is to have so much of it sloshing around that politicians feel that they can take it (and the donors) for granted.

The Power of a Dollar

Here's a fun little video (h/t to Marginal Revolution) that goes a long way toward explaining the sheer amount of money pouring into politics. The question at hand: How do I sell a dollar for more than a dollar?

eReaders and subscription services

I am getting to a stage in my life where I am willing to pay extra for less clutter. I have come to the point where lack of space is more of a constraint than lack of funds, at least as far as books are concerned. I am therefore an enthusiastic user of my electronic reader, my Kindle 1. But at the same time I share a lot of the concern about DRM that other people have. If I buy a copy of a book, I should own that copy: I should be able to lend it out, I should be able to make a print copy for my personal use. Current DRM regimes appear to me an unseemly mixture of panic and greed.

I think part of the issue is that the current eReader situation is somewhat bizarre. The devices are being sold and supported by booksellers rather than by publishers or groups of authors. I think that this is what is leading to the artificiality of the situation. I've been thinking a lot about what I think the reading industry is going to look like in the coming years.

The easiest way for me to think about it is in terms of the question, "Who adds value (that I find valuable)? What value?" There are several kinds of value. First, the text itself: is it good at what it does? For fiction, does it tell a good story? For non-fiction, is it well-written and factual? For fictitious non-fiction, does it ... provide whatever the hell it's supposed to provide? (Don't look at me, I don't read that kind of thing) There's a lot of value too, though, in guiding selection, value that's increasing all the time. Every minute I spend looking through lists of books is a minute I spend not reading. The cost of missing a book I'd enjoy or find useful is difficult to quantify, but I'm reminded of the 20-odd years of my life spent not knowing that Terry Pratchett existed, and that cost can seem pretty high. That selection applies not only to finding books for yourself, but in finding books to give as gifts.

So, who adds that value? Authors, of course, create the text, and frequently are wonderfully consistent: once you find authors you like, coming back to their work is a great way to skip a lot of searching. Editors and agents help weed out sub-par work, but also work with the author to improve the text. They are less consistent than individual authors, as they work with many more texts, but that can be a very good thing (I'll touch on that again later). Printers (and now device manufacturers) add a lot of value, perhaps not to the text itself, but in producing a comfortable, appropriately-durable reading experience. Marketers perform a needed service, usually badly. (Any occupation that shoves Dan Brown's books in my face and practically hides Charlie Stross's books is irredeemably lost) Libraries, book clubs, and book stores perform similar tasks, of helping you find books that you're likely to find useful or enjoy.

So, thinking in those terms, how do I think things are likely to shake out?

I strongly expect something like the following scheme to surface in the next five years, having seen bits and pieces of it floated in various articles. I think that publishers (particularly strong genre publishers like Tor) and author groups like the Authors Guild or SFWA will begin offering subscription services. A subscriber to this service will pay, say, $50 a year for unlimited digital access to an online catalog. [1] This access would entail unlimited downloads to mobile devices like Kindle, Nook, iPhone, and Microsoft's inevitable me-too eReader (I'm guessing six months until that announcement, BTW), and probably a PC-based reader with search and limited print capability -- you can print to any printer, but it'll be heavily watermarked. The files would probably DRM'd, because let's face it, you're renting, not owning. There will be grumbling, but I don't think much, especially if they let you buy DRM-free copies of books you particularly like. I mean digital by that, though the savvy services will probably work out exclusivity deals for discounts on pre-printed dead tree versions (with all sort of additional enticement, such as exclusive artwork, leather binding, authors' signatures, gold leaf, charity profit-splitting, a sprinkling of cocaine, etc.)

Now, I've been focusing on eReaders above, but that's not the end of the story by any means. Print on Demand services will come into play here in a big way. If the subscription services are smart, they'll embrace it, as will brick-and-mortar stores. Your corner bookstore (or library or coffeehouse) could very well wind up being basically a front end for a couple POD machines and subscriptions to a lot of different services. You walk in, and use either their subscription or yours or print out a copy of a book you'd like to read, paying an appropriate surcharge. I'm guessing that coffeehouses will wind up with a nice big bookshelf full of "donated" used books (read: left behind, not too soaked in coffee) and that libraries will be willing to eat the cost of a book in exchange for keeping it on the shelves when the user is done.

That suggests to me that the regular BaM stores are likely to keep stocks primarily of nicely-bound books (for gifts, particularly beloved books, or to have signed), books that don't do well as POD (coffee table books, books for small children), and very popular books for which people won't want to wait for the machine (and which can be sold more cheaply pre-printed). As today, they'll probably increasingly try to be combination bookstores/something else -- who wants to bet that Barnes and Noble will be thought of primarily as a coffee chain in 20 years?

As to remuneration: The subscription services would likely be ostentatiously fair to authors, since I wouldn't be surprised to see certain books available from multiple groups, and they will live and die by continued customer trust/support, as well as being dependent on links from authorial blogs. I'm guessing that it'll boil down to most publishers taking a certain % off the top, then distributing the yearly earnings proportionately among the authors whose books are downloaded. And while that seems fair, it's likely to be hotly debated. For one thing, it will basically pit authors against each other. Second, it creates a financial incentive to split books up. The readers won't care (unless it causes an outbreak of Dickens Syndrome), but fellow authors will likely get very angry when they see that happening. I'm confident that something reasonably equitable will get worked out, probably something slightly different for each service. (Authors will likely figure out which service gives them the best deal and steer people that way, much as they currently do with Amazon links)

It would be interesting to see what this does to the short fiction market. Right now it seems that novels rule the roost, and for genres like fantasy, serial novels are giants. [2] I wonder whether, with something like this, short fiction and novellas will become more popular. As John Scalzi recently pointed out, short fiction used to be a much more reliable income stream for authors. I wouldn't be surprised to see that happen again. Nor would I be surprised if manga/comics become more popular when digital readers become appropriate for displaying them.

One more prediction, by the way: as metadata becomes more important to people trying to skim through thousands of works, I think we're going to see the re-rise of the celebrity editor. There are already editors known for being associated with good work (The name "Neilsen Hayden" springs to mind) after all, and any decent matching algorithm will surely take editor into account when matching readers to new books. I would not be at all surprised if the author's agent also becomes a useful piece of metadata. Moreover, I'm betting that if "editor" and "publisher" are searchable pieces of metadata, then "editor != none & publisher != none" will become a very common search criterion.

[1] This is not new, by the way. O'Reilly already has something very like this, and it works very well. It is, however, prohibitively expensive for many people. And of course professional societies like IEEE have been doing this for journal papers for years, but they skip over the difficulty of compensation by simply not compensating any of their authors -- indeed, we are charged for membership and conference admission.
[2] My take on it is that this is a consequence of a couple things. First, readers strive for consistency, and finding a prolific author you like is much more valuable than finding one who isn't. This is not only true for readers but for agents and publishers. Second, world-building is a time-consuming task, and setting multiple stories in the same world saves a lot of time. Moreover, once the world is built, it becomes easier to think of stories in that world than in another. In some ways, this results in better stories set in richer worlds. People like Jim Butcher who are very good at planning things out way in advance gain a lot of natural advantages

Eyes on the Prize

I'm somewhat puzzled by the selection of President Obama for the Nobel Peace Prize. I like the guy, I voted for him, but is he really the person who's done the most to further the cause of peace in the last year? I appreciate that his nuclear disarmament work is important, but it's still in progress -- and anyway, a lot of the progress I don't think was his doing. Iran is desperate for international legitimacy right now, and North Korea is almost certainly being strong-armed by their Chinese patrons. That leaves the Russia/missile defense fiasco, and the best that can be said there is that he undid one of Bush's dumber international moves. More to the point, the botched Afghan election was under Obama's watch, and I'm still quite unhappy not to hear him make a clearer stand on the vote-rigging allegations. What, it's not OK when it happens in Iran, but we wink at it when our puppet government does it?

There are plenty of people who could have been selected either for their work or for the symbol of the award. I think they missed a serious opportunity in not selecting Mir-Hossein Moussavi, personally, but they could also have selected Iftikhar Chaudhry (the Pakistani Chief Justice whose dismissal and campaign for reinstatement played a large role in restoring that country's democracy), Aung-San Suu Kyi (who was yet again denied release from house arrest this past year), or the Dalai Lama (who showed impressive restraint during the riots in Tibet, and it seems to me had a significant role in preventing a bloodbath). Heck, they could have picked Bill and Melinda Gates for the work of their Foundation.

It seems to me that the classiest thing Obama could do at this point would be to decline the prize and say, "Thank you, but you ain't seen nothing yet."

A Big Step

I am deeply impressed by the Japanese election -- they've thrown out the LDP[1], which has been in power almost continuously since 1955, the end of the American occupation. It's funny -- I started studying Japanese in 1997, a mere three years since the "interregnum" (1993-1994) so to me it has always vaguely seemed plausible, and yet, having just screwed up their first chance at power, the DPJ has always seemed vaguely comical to me: they're the ultimate "those other guys," who it seems to me served as the stick half of the LDP's carrot-and-stick approach to the voters.

The "carrot" of course is the large-scale spending programs, particularly road construction. Japan has a lot of concrete. There are a lot of "bridges to nowhere" -- and even entire new towns on the other ends of those bridges. (Ghost towns are also not uncommon.) People who are better economists than I am have alternately railed against the construction regime as a drag, and hailed it as keeping the Japanese economy afloat, though I gather that the former opinion has more currency. Either way, the DPJ is surely going to put a halt to it, as they have said they intend to focus on the social safety net, and find ways to encourage Japanese people to have more children.

I'll be watching with a lot of curiosity. I still have a soft spot for Japan after my semester there, and I do hope the country does well. I suspect that the DPJ will have an easier time organizing itself this time around (it basically fell apart in 1994, like a dog that never expected to catch its car) but it's not clear that they actually have a mandate. They have an outright majority in the legislature, which is nothing to sneeze at, but they're going to face an entrenched bureaucracy that the LDP will surely try to make use of: after all, it's going to look to them that the shortest path back to power will be to make the DPJ look just as incompetent as they are. (And hey: Better the fool you know, right?)

[1] Note, by the way, that I don't bother to spell out the party names, as I consider them meaningless. They seem to be not so much descriptive as the result of that particular East Asian combination of eagerness and earnestness that can sometimes be very hard to describe. If you've ever met a South Korean Evangelical Christian, or seen a Japanese rapper, you probably know what I mean.

Is Pluto a planet?

No, because Pluto is a [expletive].

A giant leap for self-absorbed apathy

I'm getting very tired of the recent Apollo 11 navel-gazing. "It was wonderful", goes the chorus, "it's such a shame that we haven't gone back!" It is a shame, yes -- in the original sense, of being shameful.

But then they go on to say that the moon program was a victim of its own success, that it had served its purpose of beating the Russians and so our government closed it down. People like Tom Wolfe confidently say that "everybody from Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson on down looked upon the so-called space race as just one thing: a military contest." It was politicians, they say, who didn't see re-election opportunities in continuing to support an expensive space program.

You want to know who to blame for the US not being on the moon or Mars today? Every single American who says today "I remember Neil Armstrong walking on the moon". These are the people who had their opportunity to make this an election issue, who could have written to their Congresscritters, who could have, y'know, bothered to tune in to the telecasts of the later Apollo missions. And maybe they had good reasons for getting distracted: Vietnam looms large in their memories too. But when it comes down to it, a generation of Americans lost interest and changed the channel, and their government obliged them.

That's what's happening now too. For all the handwringing and "It's a shame" mantras, this generation seems to have also convinced itself that space exploration is a luxury, something that can be done tomorrow. After all, we have so many other things to do, and Michael Jackson is so much more interesting.

Education

The Senate confirmation hearings for a Supreme Court Justice play an important role in a new Justice's education: they underscore, for the good of the nation, the fact that Congress is chock full of idiots and assholes who like nothing better than to hear their own voices. They divide the world neatly into good guys, to be supported at all cost (but tested rigorously for ideological purity!) and bad guys, to be torn down at all costs.

This is important, because otherwise Supreme Court Justices might be tempted to respect Congress, to consider Congressional approval a thing of consequence, not to be overturned lightly. Thank goodness the Senate takes the time and effort to disabuse any crazy ideas of Congressional competence or good faith before those assumptions might do damage!

Iran

I'm a bit perplexed by the reactions from a lot of people whose blogs I read, or on my Facebook friends page. They seem utterly, absolutely convinced that the Iranian election was stolen, and as far as I can tell, based on absolutely zero knowledge. Yes, the guy everyone wanted to win is alleging irregularities, and sure the Ayatollah is acting defensive. Ahmadinejad is certainly following the first rule of avoiding a coup detat (To wit, "Don't leave the country")

But let's look at this clear-eyed here. Sometimes the good guys (or less-bad) really do lose fairly. Is there really much evidence that Ahmadinejad doesn't have the support of 63% of the population? Mousavi's a good guy, and it sounds like he ran a very smart, very technically sophisticated campaign - just like Howard Dean. And it's the technical sophistication that makes me suspicious: Iran is not a technically sophisticated country, much of it is dirt-poor. It's not unreasonable to think that he simply didn't have access to large swathes of the population, swathes that Ahmadinejad spent the last four years busily bribing and pandering to with his "death to Israel" crap: and don't think for a minute that that doesn't play well back home. The English-speaking blogging Iranians may not like it, but they're a teeny, tiny minority in that country - and reading what they say, I get the feeling that it's more embarrassment over delivery than content.

Meanwhile, believing that this 63% win is a deliberate move requires one to simultaneously believe that Ahmadinejad is simultaneously a political genius and a dribbling moron. (Wile E. Coyote: Super Genius) Seriously: you're positing that he has the brass balls and political skill to manage a freaking 13+% cheat AND be dumb enough to think that that would fly? But more than that, this isn't Diebold bit-flipping here, this is pretty low-tech voting: you know, secure. You need organization to cheat a vote like that, boots on the ground and a lot of people willing (or eager) to look the other way. In order to believe that he could do such a thing, you have to believe that a large part of the country is too backwater and uneducated to prevent it... and yet not backwater and uneducated enough to actually vote for him in the first place? I don't buy it.

The way I see it, most of the country is poor and uneducated, which is exactly the way the Ayatollah likes them. They've been bribed and pandered to for years, came to identify with the guy. On top of that, it looks like Mousavi pulled an Al Gore: he let it be clear that he considers Ahmadinejad to be a stupid hick, and that just didn't play well with all the folks who thought he was just plain old folk.

Now, I'm not saying that old Ahmadinejad didn't try to pad the numbers. But given all this, what's more likely: that he padded and cheated 5-6% extra and got surprised by doing better than he expected, or knew he was going down, and bilked em for more than 13%, probably much more?

Nah. As far as I can tell, the primary basis that we Americans have for decrying this election as a sham is the refusal to believe that Ahmadinejad can win a fair election. It reflects well on you all to think that highly of humanity, but you've seen the kind of assholes who can win legitimate votes even in Western countries.

Now, that's not to say that I wouldn't like to see how far Mousavi can run with this, maybe even bring down Khameini. But let's not kid ourselves that he's a virtuous aggrieved party: plenty of good has been done by sore losers, after all.

Edit:
I should admit that there are (at least) two scenarios that brush aside my objections:
First, if Khameini set up the vote-rigging but handed over the operation to Ahmadinejad, that would be a whole new ballgame. In that case, he doesn't have to be brilliant to have the machine, and he can easily be dumb enough to misuse it, thinking that 63% is totally reasonable. That would explain Khameini's performance: first seizing the moment so as to try to bulldoze his way through it and treat it as a fait accompli, then (potentially) stepping back and realizing that Ahmadinejad had either a) been a total idiot in a way that did not bode well, or (more intriguingly) b) been more reckless than stupid and had double-crossed him and grabbed for power. After all, Khameini can't just admit to being party to this and so HAS to do everything he can to make it stick, but at the same time a 63% majority gives Ahmadinejad unprecedented clout in his new government. It's an interesting idea, and I admit that I'm fascinated by the possibility that Ahmadinejad may have just made Khameini his bitch, but I still don't think it likely, and that level of recklessness really doesn't square with Ahmadinejad working alone.

Second, this could be a combination of multiple attempts to rig the vote such that the right hand didn't know what the left was doing, and possibly also combined with an unexpectedly strong showing in the vote. End result: a series of supposedly easily-covered boosts (possibly intended just to force a runoff) turns into an obvious error. Occam is shaking his head gravely as I type this.

Know yourself, and know your enemy

The New York Times Magazine has an excellent piece this weekend. I only decided to link to it when I got to this point:

“Most Republicans are not entrepreneurial[.] They’re corporatists. They like the security and the comfort of a well-thought-out, highly boring boardroom meeting in which they do a PowerPoint once. And it worries them to have ideas, because ideas have edges, and they’re not totally formed, and you’ve got to prove them, and they sound strange because they’re new, and if it’s new how do you know it’s any good, because, after all, it’s new and you’ve never heard it before.”

The gentleman who is speaking is referred to consistently as an "idea factory" or similar. I've known a few of those over the years; they tend to do exceedingly well in academia. Outside of academia, though, they tend to rise or fall not on their own merits, but according to the ability of others to focus and harness them. The idea that the engine keeps running even when the wheels fall off captures the phenomenon well - as well as the difficulty in reattaching wheels.

Surfing the Stimulus

Now that the damned thing is signed, the White House has finally set up its Simulus-tracking website. I have to say, I'm unimpressed.

In order to get to the text of the thing, you have to click through to at least two external sites, each click popping up an obnoxious "You're leaving our precious site!" window, and the last (promising the actual text) is overloaded and is timing out.

So I'm left to look through the handful of things on the site. First thing that grabs me: numbers! And hey, tax breaks are the top item... right? What's the asterisk say? "* Tax Relief - includes $15 B for Infrastructure and Science, $61 B for Protecting the Vulnerable, $25 B for Education and Training and $22 B for Energy, so total funds are $126 B for Infrastructure and Science, $142 B for Protecting the Vulnerable, $78 B for Education and Training, and $65 B for Energy." So, does that mean that there's not actually as much "tax relief" as the number more than implies? Or merely that they tried to be as multi-purpose with it as possible? This ambiguity strikes me as dishonest and lazy. The technology and bandwidth both exist to explain this, in text and visually, in an intelligible way. When an administration that has proven to be adept at communicating suddenly falls down like that, I get suspicious.

OK, whatever. Hey, a timeline! I don't know why, but I'm irritated that they didn't do this as a Gantt chart.

Well, it's plainly a work in progress, and I'm gratified that the FAQ mentions that they might eventually have actual user-readable data on the site instead of pre-digested mush. I would love to get my hands on the text itself, but that'll have to wait until they get their act in gear bandwidth-wise. (Oh, and it's not an "unprecedented effort". The oft-repeated precedent would be the New Deal.)

"Good" != "Belongs in Stimulus"

I'm seeing a lot of wailing and moaning about proposed cuts to the stimulus package, and it's starting to get ridiculous. "Oh, you can't exclude education! It's vital to our future!" "Oh, you can't cut out health programs for the poor, we need those!" Yeah, we do need those things, and you know what? We'll get those things. I think the people complaining just don't understand that the stimulus package is not the same as the federal budget. There is still plenty of room and (perhaps less than plenty of) money for these programs -- but in the regular budget, not in this separate spending bill. Just because they're important doesn't mean they have to be pushed through on an emergency basis. Nobody's starving because they didn't get money from the stimulus bill, they're just going to have to wait for the normal budget. And half the things people are screaming about aren't even remotely relevant to the purpose of the bill: I'm a strong supporter of NASA, but it doesn't bother me that they're probably not going to get any extra money in this bill. NASA itself isn't getting cut here, they're just not getting a bonus, because that bonus wouldn't be an immediate stimulant to the economy.

In a way, the problem is that Obama was a little too responsible when planning this bill. He talked a lot about spending on projects to build infrastructure. But building infrastructure is not the point of the bill -- it's just a side benefit, to help alleviate the long-term problems with spending this much money. The direct benefits are necessarily short term. It would be a BAD thing to fund NASA or Head Start or other necessary programs through a one-time funding bill like this, because all those people would have to be laid off next year. It's far, far better to pay for those things (even new projects) in the regular budget, so that you can plan to continue them after this year. I'm not sure I like using it for public transportation -- I'm a strong supporter of public transportation, but once the stimulus money runs out and we're all used to taking the bus... where do the funds to keep the buses running come from? (And do NOT start talking to me about writing long-term funding into the stimulus bill, as that would be not merely missing the point, but aggressively so)

This stimulus package is turning into the Democratic Party's PATRIOT Act -- they're using a crisis to push through a lot of stuff that might be good for the country, but is not directly related to the crisis at hand. And as you recall, the PATRIOT Act turned into a focus for anger and resentment against the Bush administration. No, the analogy isn't perfect: Obama has been good about being willing to negotiate, and despite some somewhat shrill "This has to be done quickly!" rhetoric, has appeared to be reasonably willing to tolerate delay in the name of getting it right. But it's starting to look very similar.

Pleasant Surprise

It was pointed out to me earlier that President Obama has set up a page for publishing executive orders, and has pledged to put them up.  And, just like all the middle-aged folks I'm suddenly seeing at the gym, so far he's keeping that resolution.  I'm glad, too, because there was a real gem posted yesterday.  Note that bit at the very end, noting that Executive Order 13233 is revoked, and I'm under the impression that this will mean the release of a number of Reagan-era documents -- like, say, those involved with Iran.  Note also that it explicitly refers to Vice-Presidential records now.

Illinois Politics

I have to admit: I'm fascinated by would-be Senator Burris, though I'm not sure I envy him. What must Blagojevitch have said to him to convince him to embrace this unenviable position? My guess is something along the lines of, "You'd be a good Senator [always start with the butter] but you don't have a chance in hell if you don't take my offer. Go and be squeaky-clean and make a lot of noise and you might just pull this off."

I'm a little surprised that Blagojevitch picked a Democrat at all. It seems to me that he would have been in a much better position to protect himself and achieve some legitimacy if he'd picked a moderate Republican (maybe he couldn't find one?) and then let the G.O.P, desperate to be able to filibuster, fight his battles for him.

But then, the only constant in this whole thing is that Blagojevitch never seems to think things through. His strategy so far appears to be of the greedy sort -- not in the money sense, but in the "immediate reward" sense. It results in fireworks, lots of apparent minor victories, but in the long run the best he can hope for is a stalemate.

Which brings me back to Burris. I don't know what Blagojevitch gets out of this appointment. Is it supposed to prove that he didn't sell the seat after all, and by implication never intended to? Is he just trying to reward what little personal loyalty he can still find, or trying to create some? (If the latter, creating loyalty in an irrelevent forum is a little odd) Edit: The Economist thinks that it knows: it views the appointment as a trap, and pointed out that Burris would be the only black Senator. Getting the Democrats to accept his nominee would be a symbolic victory for Blagojevitch, and might be helpful to him in court, but would not save him. At best he can embarrass those who (rightly) did not stand by him.

In summary, I still think he should have picked me. I'd be an awesome Senator, and I even know where Illinois is, now.