Month: August 2007

It looks like none of us guest bloggers are Romney fans. Liz has been picking the guy apart in several posts (scroll down a ways). That quote Eric found, however, takes the cake.

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney on Wednesday defended his five sons’ decision not to enlist in the military, saying they’re showing their support for the country by "helping me get elected."

I’m not saying his kids should have served. I’m saying that to equate serving in the military with helping out in a political campaign is the sort of thing only a guy dumb enough to strap his dog to the roof of his station wagon for a 12 hour trip would say. It’s incredibly demeaning to those who serve to compare the heroism of those who serve in Iraq (whatever one makes of the cause) to stuffing envelopes in Ames or whatever Mitt’s kids are doing.

Since this again raises questions about Mitt’s judgment, let’s go back and take a look at what two of my favorite political commentators had to say about the dog incident.

Update: About the same time I posted this, Eric posted that:

Romney’s campaign has released full audio and a transcript of his remarks today about his sons’ support for their country. So did he actually liken campaigning for him to the sacrifices shown by our men and women in uniform? Well, yes and no. … I don’t think Mitt Romney is so insensitive that he would intentionally compare the service of our troops to people working for his campaign. But I do think he did a great job of putting his foot in his mouth this time.

Fair enough. It doesn’t change the fact that Romney’s a flip-flopping, dog abusing opportunist whose favorite novel is Battlefield Earth, of which it has been said:

For those of you who didn’t study it in school, Battlefield Earth takes place in the year 3000, when the human race is nearly extinct and the planet stripped of its natural resources. Mankind has been enslaved by evil aliens with very bad breath that explodes when it comes into contact with radioactive material. A young slave wielding lasers and draped in a tennis cardigan leads a rebellion and retakes Earth, only to be attacked again by a series of foes including a race of interstellar bankers trying to collect on bad debts. (There may be kung-fu fights and a championship football game, too; I confess that I haven’t read it all.)

Everything about the book is bad. Just a few sentences into the first page, you’re confronted by this sentence: "Terl could not have produced a more profound effect had he thrown a meat-girl naked into the middle of the room." (A clothed meat-girl apparently gets a big yawn.) Hubbard’s soundtrack for the book, when played, either attracts mice or repels dogs, or both. The movie, which starred John Travolta, is what therapists show to the producers of Ishtar and Glitter to help them feel good.

The whole tumbling horror of the Battlefield Earth experience is so profound it nearly comes out the other side and achieves a kind of perfection of awfulness.

To be sure, as the Economist observes, Romney "has several appealing qualities." Or, more precisely, good resume lines. Bain Capital. The Olympics. A stable marriage (have you noticed that the GOP’s other leading candidates all have one or more divorces while all the leading Democrats have only been married once?).

The problem is, as the Economist also observes:

[Romney’s] positions are too good to be true. Or rather, they have but recently come to fit almost perfectly with what a plurality of Republican primary voters believe. For example, when trying to unseat Ted Kennedy from the Senate in 1994, he said he would “provide more effective leadership” than Mr Kennedy in promoting “full equality” for gays. He said he personally opposed gay marriage, but thought the matter best left to the states. Now he says he wants a federal constitutional amendment banning it. The campaign has barely begun, and his rivals are already gleefully hammering his flip-flops. Sam Brownback’s people pushed a flier calling his pro-life conversion “false” under your correspondent’s door in Kansas City, and a man in a dolphin suit stood outside the hotel claiming to be “Flip Romney”.

This is an issue I’ve been pointing out since 7/2005:

I am deeply suspicious of politicians whose views on abortion, stem cells, and the rest of the culture of life issues "evolve" just in time for them to run for higher office.

Romney’s campaign has released full audio and a transcript of his remarks today about his sons’ support for their country. So did he actually liken campaigning for him to the sacrifices shown by our men and women in uniform? Well, yes and no.

I don’t think the transcript actually makes this look much better for him. The best help he gets is that the two paragraphs of talk until he got to that interesting comparison make it clear that he was speaking off the cuff, and by the end it apparently just came out by accident while he was innocently trying to say what hard-working and good people his sons are.

I don’t think Mitt Romney is so insensitive that he would intentionally compare the service of our troops to people working for his campaign. But I do think he did a great job of putting his foot in his mouth this time.

"We’re gonna need a bigger boat." Jaws.

Years ago, there was a silly movie called "Rollover." The premise of it, as best I can recall from wasting two hours watching this absurdity once, was a conspiracy by Arab countries to wreck the U.S. economy by selling all of their dollars at once. Although fanciful even by Hollywood standards, the idea that our creditors can somehow ruin us through this sort of action lives on among the conspiracy-minded.

The latest version of the Rollover scenario comes from Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in this morning’s London Daily Telegraph. Says Evans-Pritchard, whom some may remember for his lurid tales of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s wrongdoing back in the 1990s, the Chinese are getting ready to dump their dollars if Congress enacts legislation restricting Chinese imports.

Of course it would be bad policy to impose tariffs on Chinese goods. But the idea that China would retaliate by causing the dollar to crash is absurd. For one thing, it is extremely difficult to target imports from only one country when they can easily be rerouted through other countries. Also, there would be an immediate backlash against those politicians who just made many popular goods more expensive with new tariffs, which are, of course, a form of taxation–one that falls most heavily on the poor.

But the most important reason why China will not retaliate the way conspiracy-mongers like Evans-Pritchard think is because the Chinese would suffer a massive capital loss if they tried to hurt us by dumping their dollars. That is because their dollars are not sitting around in wads of $100 bills, but fully invested in U.S. Treasury bonds. Bond prices go down when interest rates rise or there is a threat of inflation that would erode the value of the bond’s principal.

If China started heavily selling its bonds, the added supply on the world market would cause interest rates to spike. If investors started to become concerned about our ability to finance our debts, it could cause the dollar to plummet, which would further depress bond prices. How much bond prices might fall under such a scenario cannot be estimated. But China would certainly suffer capital losses on its bond portfolio of tens of billions of dollars and possibly much more.

The fact is that the more dollar-denominated assets China holds, the less likely it will do anything stupid like Evans-Pritchard suggests. They will work around any trade restrictions we impose just as the Japanese did in the 1980s. But the Chinese will not risk destroying one of their largest economic assets: their portfolio of Treasury bonds.

As economist John Maynard Keynes once explained, "Owe your banker 1,000 pounds and you are at his mercy; owe him one million pounds and the position is reversed" (Collected Writings, vol. 24, p. 258). In short, the more money we owe the Chinese, the more power we have over them. Evans-Pritchard has the whole relationship exactly backwards.

These days it seems like we politicize just about anything, so what do we make of Nancy Pelosi’s statement on Barry "Balco" Bonds’ breaking the home run record:

"Tonight, Barry Bonds etched his name into baseball’s history books and took his rightful place among sport’s immortals," Pelosi said. "It was a great night for baseball and a great night for San Francisco — the crowd went wild. It was particular exciting to see Willie Mays embrace him on the field and see Hank Aaron congratulate him on the Jumbotron. As a season ticket holder, I am particularly glad it happened on the Giants’ Italian night."

Just a typical politician playing to the locals to get reelected or further evidence of the moral decline of modern liberalism? Also, why does being a "season ticket holder" make her glad it happened on Italian night? I don’t see the relevance, especially since she wasn’t at the game. Why not just admit that she’s glad because she’s Italian-American?

Actually, in fairness to Pelosi, I find it very difficult to work up a lot of moral outrage over the whole Bonds business. I once wrote on my blog that:

As fans, why does it matter whether a player is on the juice or not? So Barry Bonds hits a few more homers than he otherwise would? Who cares? Indeed, since baseball is otherwise one of the most boring games known to man, isn’t that a good thing?

The only rationales for caring I’ve ever been able to see are (1) paternalism to protect players from themselves and (2) drug use by some creates a market for lemons. I’m somewhat persuaded by the latter, but at the end of the day it’s just not much of an issue for me. I wouldn’t watch baseball or cycling whether the players were juiced or not, while I would watch football and basketball whether the players were juiced or not.

Mitt Romney says it’s okay that none of his sons serve in the military because they’re helping their country in a different way: by working for his campaign.

Tigard, Oregon, 2 pm.

For a newly updated, global gallery of Dish readers’ window views, click here.

Since my crystal ball was bit cloudy, and since I’m a big believer in the power of gambling prediction markets, I bopped over to Intrade to check the betting on the 2008 race. Which helped polish up the old crystal ball:

1. GOP nomination: Rudy and Fred are basically tied at the moment. Romney’s third but well back. My take: Dog lovers will keep Mitt from winning. I like Fred. I think we did pretty good the last time we elected an actor President. But for most people, Thompson is more a Rorschach ink blot than a candidate. He’ll blow up in the stretch. Rudy wins nomination. Dobsonites stay home en masse.
2. Democratic nomination: Hillary is running away with it (the last price on her contract was 54). Sounds right to me.
3. General election: The Democratic candidate is expected to win (last price was 56.6). Not that I would ever engage in any illegal activity, of course, but I’d probably buy a few contracts at that price if I were a betting man. Third party candidates could mess up key electoral college states, however. Suppose Nader and Bloomberg are both on the ballot. Do states like NY and California tip red? Would Florida go blue? This may be a case for betting on the starting price rather than ante post odds.
4. House: The Democrats are expected to retain control (last price was 81+). No way the GOP gets control back this year, especially given the way donations are breaking. But given how high the Democratic contract is right now, I might take a flyer on a cheap GOP wins contract in hopes that Tom Delay’s legacy of gerrymandering will come through.
5. Senate: The Democrats retain control contract’s last price was 78.5. There’s no gerrymandering on this side of the Capitol, of course. No bet.

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The reactions to my post on gay marriage in the courts were quite interesting. Let’s start with Liz’s comments. First, she makes the very interesting point that state courts interpreting state constitutions may be where the action is in the short term. Of course, judicial resolution at the state level inevitably implicates federal constitutional questions, most notably whether the free faith and credit clause will require, say, Alabama to recognize a same-sex marriage performed in, say, Massachusetts. Second, her point that "allowing gay partnerships in some form had popular appeal" actually gives me hope that the issue will be resolved via the political process. I think the ground is shifting on this issue faster than a lot of people realize. I’d be willing to lay a long bet that more than half the states have some form of partnership law within 5 years.

Bruce wrote:

The question of "marriage" is purely a religious one, as I see it. It’s between you and your church.  If your church does not recognize your union, then you can either try to change its mind or find a new church. As far as the government is concerned, there is no reason for it to care whether your relationship is called a "marriage" or a civil union. … I think Stephen would agree with this, but I would appreciate his thoughts since he is a legal scholar who comments often on religious matters.

I do agree, although I wonder whether the logical import of that position would be a de facto requirement of two ceremonies: a civil ceremony that the state would recognize and then a religious ceremony (for those who want one) that would have no legal import. Since that’s what France does, shouldn’t there be a rebuttable presumption against it? [insert smirk here] Seriously, my friend and fellow law professor Larry Ribstein wrote a very interesting paper on this issue entitled A Standard Form Approach to Same-Sex Marriage, in which he argued that:

This paper attempts to find a path through the recent constitutional thicket regarding same-sex marriage by analogizing marriage to a business association. This analogy provides a way to evaluate the justifications for traditional rules banning same-sex marriage – specifically, by emphasizing the advantages of providing distinct standard forms for different types of relationships. Under this approach, the same-sex marriage prohibition might be justified by the need to preserve the precise boundaries of the marriage standard form. The business association analogy also highlights what is at stake in state laws prohibiting same-sex marriage, and therefore helps determine the appropriate burden to impose on defenders of the prohibition. Like business associations, the validity of a marriage generally is governed by the law of the state in which the marriage is celebrated. This offers the potential of allowing couples, including same-sex couples, to select not only from among the standard forms in a particular state, but also from the menus of standard forms offered by various states. This analysis helps assess the infringement on liberty involved in a state’s prohibition of same-sex marriage. Moreover, as with business associations, permitting the interstate market for standard forms to operate would provide an evolutionary approach to marriage laws that is preferable to the Court’s prematurely taking sides in the marriage debate.

Finally, among Eric’s thoughtful comments, he asked re Brown:  Can you honestly say that if you could go back in time, you would prevent it from happening? Of course not. But that doesn’t solve the problem. Andrew Jackson wrote in his message vetoing the Second Bank of the United States:

If the opinion of the Supreme Court covered the whole ground of this act, it ought not to control the coordinate authorities of this Government, The Congress, the Executive, and the Court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution. Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others. It is as much the duty of the House of Representatives, of the Senate, and of the President to decide upon the constitutionality of any bill or resolution which may be presented to them for passage or approval as it is of the supreme judges when it may be brought before them for judicial decision. The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both. The authority of the Supreme Court must not, therefore, be permitted to control the Congress or the Executive when acting in their legislative capacities, but to have only such influence as the force of their reasoning may deserve.

Likewise, here is what Lincoln said about Dred Scott:

If the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.

Here then is the perennial problem: How do we decide which cases are like Brown and which cases are ones like Roe, which we all seem to agree decided an issue that should have been left to politics? I think that’s a very difficult question.