Month: July 2010

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

Regardless of my views on the moral or evolutionary arguments, I was struck by the egocentrism and entitlement in your reader's post about his wife's changed sexual responses. I certainly empathize with his frustration, but the reality is that his wife bore the burden of birth control, and the physical consequences of that choice. Now she's faced with the possibility of a lifetime of painful and/or unsatisfying sex. His "getting it elsewhere" would mean she bears that burden on her own, too.

She likely thinks about and wants satisfying sex, too; but she doesn't have the option of exploring less "laborious" pastures.

Non-monogamy increases the stereotypical gender gaps – the female is responsible for the childbearing – and "suffers" all of the ramifications of that – before (risking her health with birth control choices), during (obviously it's all on her), and after birth (not only in changes to her body's physical "beauty" as defined by cultural norms, but in this case – and many – in terms of her sexual responsiveness, as well). Meanwhile, the male continues on his merry way, physically un-impacted by the whole inconvenient biological process of adding to his family – looks intact, health intact, sex drive intact.

Men cannot, physiologically, share all of this "burden" with their partners, but at least in a monogamous relationship they're committed to sharing some of the emotional and relational ramifications. I think it's naive to believe that a "temporary" extra-relational sexual encounter – that was satisfying and fun – would not lead to increased dissatisfaction with the current state of the marriage. I think we can just look to all of the affairs that lead to divorces and new marriages to recognize the enticement of a new and exciting relationship.

And, would most men honestly think it was OK if their wives found sexual satisfaction elsewhere if THEY were the ones whose sex drive/ability had changed (ex. as a result of injury or illness)? And if not, why not? What would they want from their wives in this situation? Perhaps if they reflected on a "shoe on the other foot" scenario, they'd be less likely to bemoan their "entitlement" to good sex.

Monogamy takes work and commitment, and sometimes sacrifice. And, I would suggest that relationships in which each partner knows that the other willingly and lovingly accepts them as they are (that whole sickness and health thing!), and is eager to work within the relationship to create happiness and satisfaction (sexual and otherwise) for both of them  are the most stable and joy-filled over the long run.

Your reader feels like a demon (I truly sympathize with his desires and his guilt), and I'd wager that his wife feels guilty and inadequate for her inability to satisfy her husband. These are two people who are hurting, and it is sad for both of them. I hardly think, though, that non-monogamy would resolve those negative emotions for either of them – perhaps replace them with other negative feelings.

Monogamy should not mean let's stay together and exclusive no matter how miserable we are. The power and grace of monogamy  is realized when both partners are committed to finding ways to overcome that misery WITHIN the relationship – when they actively and creatively work TOGETHER through the inevitable small and big crises that are a part of life.

I don't think your reader's fantasies of non-monogamy in any way help him improve his marriage; and I definitely don't think acting on those fantasies would be helpful, either. I hope – for his sake, his wife's, and his son's – that he and his wife can work together to develop a satisfying sex life within their marriage, and that their relationship becomes stronger and more joyful and fulfilling – not just because of improved sex, but because they experience the shared satisfaction and pride in knowing they defied the odds and made monogamy really work.

Many excellent points.  But I should point out one key detail from the previous reader: he and his wife were already on the edge of divorce before he even considered non-monogamy. So perhaps some sort of open arrangement could salvage the marriage if it gets close to divorce again. (Then again, such an arrangement could make a inevitable divorce that much more painful and spiteful, particularly now that there is a kid in the picture.)

by Patrick Appel

Julian Sanchez chews over "liberaltarianism":

Yeah, there doesn’t seem to be much interest on the left in any kind of broad self-conscious “Liberaltarian Alliance”—but practical political coalitions don’t actually spring from New Republic essays, any more than real-world friendships arise from a formal declaration of an intent to be friends. They’re a function of actually getting out there and doing the work, issue by issue, bill by bill, election by election.  Given my own pattern of interests, I end up mostly working on issues where I agree with civil libertarians on the left. And pretty much without exception, they’re happy to work with me on those issues, and for that limited purpose indifferent to whatever disagreements we might have over optimal levels of federal taxation and spending.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

The post about "A Thousand Cuts" showed a stunning lack of understanding of what it will take to cut the budget. I am very familiar with the budget process in state government and the federal government works the same way.

In the first place, it IS Congress and the various Administrations that have put us where we are. Expecting the bureaucracy to make cuts ignores the fact that the bureaucracy exists to implement and administer laws, not interpret and adjust the impact of them. No bureaucrat, at the federal or state level, has any flexibility to make cuts in programs, and any law that gave them that authority would probably be ruled unconstitutional. No one has elected the bureaucrats and they are not really accountable to the people, they are only accountable to the specific agency or department for which they work, and then only to the extent that existing law gives them any discretion within certain parameters. No bureaucrat has the authority to slash whole programs. You assume they have more power than they actually have.

 

The reason it is so hard to cut the budget, especially nowadays, is every single government expenditure has a constituency, and groups and even individuals who may be impacted by the budget cuts all know how to contact their legislator and will fight to the death to save their piece of the pie. Once a program is created, it gets rolled over year after year because the money to pay for it has become part of an agency base budget.

The real changes that are required need a level of commitment that is hard to sustain in what is really a two year election cycle for all but the Senate. Somebody needs to engage in a process to re-engineer the services provided, and have the authority and guts to actually implement those changes. Why are we still funding the Rural Electrification program? The Energy Department was created in the 1970's to address the oil shortage. 50,000 employees and 40 years later, and how closer are we to energy independence? But the department is "baked into" the federal budget, and I'll bet a dollar that no one has gone back and revisited the original purpose for the department and asked "is this still a goal that we should pursue"? I don't mean that no on in the Energy Department does any work, but the value added work for which they were created has shifted over the years because the original goal was not attainable, or no one was willing to push towards that goal, or both.

So the answer is to really step back and consider what services the federal government should provide, what it can provide, and at what level, but laying the responsibility for doing that at the foot of the bureaucrat is not going to get us anywhere.

I take some of these points, but Canada is doing something similar to what I proposed, so I'm not convinced it's crazy. We still need Congress to address big ticket items and locate ineffective programs; giving bureaucrats the power and a reason to save money would be a compliment, not a replacement, to the sort of restructuring this reader describes. I'm not sure how this would be unconstitutional given Congress would be giving this power to bureaucrats and could take it away. Congress is accountable even if it is not making the decisions directly.

Another reader:

Regarding "A Thousand Cuts" you write that "if the department doesn't spend its full budget the budget might get clipped the next year."  I've spent enough time working in government offices (local & state) to say you should change the phrase "might get clipped" to "will get clipped".  Department heads make sure that every cent of an annual budget is spent – often at then end of a fiscal year such spending is in haste and on completely superfluous exercises.  A conversation along these lines is long overdue – and  – if it can be conducted without the ever-present cynicism of party politics we might actually begin to make some positive changes to how government operates.  I say this with the personal belief (and my own level of cynicism) that the last thing the right wants to do is make government more efficient and responsive – that would make their "all government is bad government" mantra look as foolish as it actually is.

by Patrick Appel

Poulos doubts Kazin's theory:

For it to happen, the GOP would have to (1) produce a leading contender for the nomination who is both (2) unacceptable to Palinites and (3) a man Palin doesn't like personally, doesn't owe any favors, and can't promote to her advantage (let's not kid ourselves: Palin wouldn't veto a woman even if she could). I just don't see that narrow, complex scenario playing out in any event. Palin's ability to shape the party from its margins will likely remain significant but marginal. McCarthy made his impact from deep within his party; Wallace made his (and these are not my preferred Palin analogues, not by a longshot) from far outside it. Palin is a woman who endorsed Carly Fiorina and supported John McCain — and not out of weakness, either. For me, not even Kazin's fear of a kingmaking Mama Bear carries much weight.

by Dave Weigel

UNALASKA, AK — So here's a question that no one has asked me.

"What's it like to blog from a remote location like historic Dutch Harbor/Unalaska, America's largest fishing port?"

Well, I'll tell you. It's rife with difficulties! In previous posts I've mentioned that everyone on this island gets Internet access from a satellite, and I have now learned that the mountain the satellite pickup rests on is called "Haystack." So it's slow. It's also hard to finesse. I'd like to work closer to the girlfriend I came out here to visit when I'm at her radio studio. But the connection is slow near her office and, relatively, fast in an adjacent room where a bunch of high schoolers are recording a radio show that, for reasons that elude me, makes frequent use of a dance remix of Air Supply's soft-rock classic "All Out of Love."

We are used to blogging quickly. That means more than posting; that means opening multiple windows to find links and insert YouTube videos into posts. That means catching e-mails and chats quickly and following up with them as you write. None of that's really possible here, and the result is, well, the sort of blogging we used to do in 2000 or so — the blogging I read at AndrewSullivan.com when I was loading it on an ethernet connection at college. It's slow. It's full of lag time to re-think and over-think ideas.

For the news blogging I'm accustomed to, this is unsustainable. When I work I try to get things first, get quotes first, get numbers first. I use my cell phone — which doesn't work here — and I meet with sources — who don't live here. You also realize how much trash code, and how many useless widgets, exist on sites now built for the broadband world that covers basically everywhere you aren't. But for 2000/2001-style muse-blogging, this might be ideal. Plus, if you're up for it, you get local news alerts like this.

07/05/10  Mon 1055 Theft – A man reported his white Ford truck, in which he had left his keys, was missing from the area of the APL dock. Responding officers found that a crewman on a boat docked there had been told to take a white Ford truck with keys in it to the grocery store. He did exactly that, not realizing he had taken the wrong white Ford truck. No charges were filed.

by Patrick Appel

Ryan Avent has an important follow-up on manufacturing and outsourcing that should be read in full:

This sounds horribly dehumanizing and generally terrible, but it’s how the world got rich — by moving workers from wretched jobs to merely crappy jobs, then kicking them out of the crappy jobs and forcing them to find merely cruddy jobs, then kicking them out of the cruddy jobs and forcing them to find merely unpleasant jobs.

by Chris Bodenner

Is here – and amazing:

by Chris Bodenner

Ta-Nehisi, who has been critical of the NAACP in the past, can't side with me, Weigel, and others exasperated with the group's Tea Party resolution:

Racism tends to attract attention when its flagrant and filled with invective. But like all bigotry, the most potent component of racism is frame-flipping–positioning the bigot as the actual victim. So the gays do not simply want to marry, they want to convert our children into sin. The Jews do not merely want to be left in peace, they actually are plotting world take-over. And the blacks are not actually victims of American power, but beneficiaries of the war against hard-working whites. This is a respectable, more sensible, bigotry, one that does not seek to name-call, preferring instead change the subject and strawman.

TNC goes on to chronicle such rhetoric from a number of mainstream pundits and politicians embraced by the Tea Party movement. I agree with him that a subtler and perhaps more insidious form of racism has seeped into many of the TPM chapters. But for me the issue is a practical matter; was the NAACP resolution helpful for race relations?  Based on the immediate and inflammatory backlash showcased in the MSM, I think not. 

Perhaps the NAACP could have approached TPM leaders in private first, offering to help with a PR strategy to purge the racist elements of the movement from its core, small government message. That would have been the Obama-esque approach.  But publicly shaming the TPM into doing so doesn't seem smart or pragmatic.

(One minor quibble: TNC correctly notes that I favored the Tea Party over the NAACP based on the news of the day. But my hat tip to the TPM was specifically for its silence on the DOMA ruling. For what it's worth, I called out Tea Party Express spokesman Mark Williams for his ignorant and hate-filled response to the NAACP the following day.)

by Dave Weigel

Buried in a classic Politico VandeHarris Big-Thinker on how Obama's Democrats are more or less doomed at the polls, we find this:

The liberal blogs cheer the fact that Stan McChrystal’s scalp has been replaced with David Petraeus’s, even though both men are equally hawkish on Afghanistan, but barely clapped for the passage of health care. They treat the firing of a blogger from the Washington Post as an event of historic significance, while largely averting their gaze from the fact that major losses for Democrats in the fall elections would virtually kill hopes for progressive legislation over the next couple years.

First: This doesn't at all describe liberal blog content, does it? I remember fireworks in many colors when health care passed and plenty of knowing commentary on the McChrystal flap, although liberal blogs basically reflect the Democratic base in their fingers-crossed approach to Afghanistan.

Second: Most liberal blogs wrote about my resignation from the Post once, maybe twice. Politico published five articles about my resignation and my work since then — on June 25, June 28, June 29, and (twice) July 9. Politico also analyzed the meaning of the JournoList leak and reported on a disagreement about that leak between Andrew Brietbart and Andrew Sullivan. And it was Politico's excellent Keach Hagey who broke the news that while I was at the Post the Media Research Center was running a blacklist campaign against me. So I disagree with Vandehei and Harris — I think Politico did a good job covering this story.

Via Sargent.

by Patrick Appel

Andrew Gelman checks the political incentives:

I suspect the Obama team knows about the research on the economy and election outcomes, and, more importantly, I think they knew about this in 2009 as well. That’s one reason they did the big stimulus last year, no? To put the economy on a better footing in the 2010 election year. And, according to many economists, the stimulus worked in that regard; in the absence of a stimulus, we might very well be in much worse economic shape (at least in the short term). But does Obama gain much by jump-starting the economy now, in July, 2010? At this point it might take too long for an additional stimulus to make much of a difference. And the last thing Obama wants is for a big improvement to come in 2011! On the contrary, the political logic suggested by the political-business-cycle work of Hibbs, Bartels, and others is to keep things mellow in 2011 and save the boom for 2012. Of course, the Republicans know this too . . .

I'm not sure this holds up to scrutiny. If Obama could create a "big improvement" in 2011, I'm pretty sure he'd do it.