The Dish

Doesn’t happen very often but Richard Cohen and Tom Friedman have both written the same column about the same subject from the same place – and they’re both lame! These two workhorses of journalism have schlepped all the way out to Davos, Switzerland, for some nitty-gritty street reporting about how maddening it is for jet-setting chin-strokers to have too many high-tech gadgets to use. Each uber-hack retails their own small self-deprecating anecdote. “I still have not mastered the radio in my car,” says Cohen, or is it Friedman. “I still can’t program my VCR; how am I going to program my toaster?” bemoans Friedman, or is it Cohen. For a true self-referential moment, Friedman even mentions Cohen in his own column! “As I fumbled around trying to figure out how [my hand-held PC] worked, the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who was trying to do the same, said to me: “I have so many devices now to make my life easier that I need someone just to carry them all around for me.”” Awww. I’m sure Linda Chavez has someone to recommend for that. Or do they provide servants now for op-ed columnists, along with junkets to the Alps?

But honest, my saintly boss, Peter Beinart, editor of The New Republic, has a terrific little piece online pointing out a wrinkle in recent liberal angst. In the recent past, liberals have almost sanctified the Supreme Court as a way to push unpopular social reforms on a largely unwilling country. Likewise, during the Clinton years, liberals have come around to the undemocratic power of the Fed. Look, Bill, Eisenhower Republicanism works! But in the last couple of months, these two institutions have largely kicked liberal butt! First SCOTUS stops SCOFLA’s crazy shenanigans in the Florida recount hell; now the Fed is backing Bush’s tax cuts! What’s a good lib to do? Peter’s proposal is that liberals should return to their democratic roots, get engaged again with anti-Fed economic populism and with anti-SCOTUS democratic activism. Unfortunately, the supply-siders and pro-lifers are already there! But the more the merrier. Peter’s ahead of the curve again – Alice Rivlin in today’s New York Times also discovers that Alan Greenspan is a Randian human and not the Immaculate Misconception others seem to think he is. Of course, I don’t agree with either Peter or Rivlin. I’m a big fan of undemocratic institutions, especially if they’re in charge of the constitution and the money supply. You think the demos can deal with those?

Update on the stats behind the HIV stats. Can’t find them anywhere on the web. One of the researchers has invited me to go to San Francisco to sit down with him and go over them, but as yet, hasn’t shown me the analysis or directed me to where it can be found. A respected AIDS journalist emails to say that the timing of the announcement is suspicious: “It’s been my observation that alarming reports of HIV surges tend to pop up about a week or two before either a big AIDS Conference or a significant deadline in the federal budget process. Just so happens that the Retrovirus Conference opens in Chicago this weekend and, of course, one presumes Bush is putting his first budget together now.” The last report of this kind from San Francisco calculated HIV-transmission rates in part by analysing whether there are employment discrimination protection for gays, domestic partnership provisions, and so on, in any given area. Quite how these would help one figure out HIV transmission rates is beyond me, and I look forward to seeing the logic. But the b.s. detector bell is ringing off the hook.

Tom Shales can be a funny and tart tv critic, but his review of John Stossel’s populist take on big government strikes me as somewhat beyond the pale. The Washington Post often passes off leftist rhetoric as “Style-writing” (you should have read their description of Katherine Harris!) but this one was enough to make even me take a deep breath. Here’s a typical extract: “Many of Stossel’s revelations are … bogus unless you’re capable of being shocked by such scoops as the fact that taxes are too high. No! Say it isn’t so! … You’re unlikely to fall out of your easy chair, either, when you hear that the military establishment wastes money, that “billions slip through the cracks” every year? “Isn’t it time to try something new?” asks Stossel after ticking off more examples of government waste and error. What does he mean by “something new,” though – balkanizing the United States into a group of smaller countries? No, he’s advocating that risky old cure-all, privatization. Private enterprise thrives on competition, he says, and thus has more impetus to be efficient. The government, by contrast, is a lazy monopoly. Apparently Stossel hasn’t been following the news much lately or keeping up with the epidemic of mergers that is making giant companies into mammoth corporations into humongous conglomerates that are a virtual government unto themselves. The real government often seems powerless to oppose them, as in the debacle at the gas pump or the current power shortage in California. Would anybody but John Stossel argue for more deregulation at this point?” Er, yes, Tom. I would for one. Shales veers from saying that Stossel’s criticisms of government waste are a) old news and b) wrong. But he doesn’t show they’re wrong (in fact he implies they’re right); and he doesn’t prove that they’re not still relevant. Heck, I haven’t stopped paying taxes just because someone already did a story on government waste in 1995. And then there’s Shales’s simple political and economic illiteracy. Does he really think high gas prices are the result of “privatisation?” Does he even have a clue about why California’s half-assed deregulation of electricity failed? Or are his editors such knee-jerk liberals that they let this half-baked blather go unchecked?

You’ve probably read all about the sudden surge in HIV infection rates in San Francisco. It was all over the papers. Drudge ran it heavy. So did almost everyone else. The only problem is – none of the news stories had hard numbers in them. There’s a reason for that. There’s no mandatory name-reported HIV transmission statistics in San Francisco – so the Public Health Dept has to come up with all sorts of weird statistical analyses to arrive at some sort of number of alleged infections from an often unrepresentative sample from public health clinics. I’m going to try and dig up how these numbers were arrived at this week – and I’ll report back. But if they’re anything like as reliable as the hysterical statistics put out last summer (which were later largely retracted), I’ll be unconvinced. The latest real numbers of AIDS diagnoses and AIDS deaths in San Francisco (the only solid data we have) show an all-time low, as they do almost everywhere else. I’m sure unsafe sex is on the rise; I’m also sure that the likelihood of meeting an HIV-positive guy is higher now than in the recent past. The fact that there are new infections every year, and fewer and fewer of us are dying, means that the pool of possible infecters keeps growing. But it’s more complicated than that. The impact of our low viral loads, brought about by the powerful drug cocktails, may simultaneously make transmission harder. We have less virus in our bodies and therefore it’s harder to infect others. So an increase in unsafe sex, even between someone negative and someone positive, may not bring about the rise in HIV some fear. I got my own bloodwork back last week, for example, and the HIV in my bloodstream is officially “undetectable” even by the most powerful methods available. It’s been that way for four years now. My immune system is indistinguishable in large part from someone who’s HIV-negative. I have no intention of testing the theory, but I doubt I could infect someone easily even if I tried. So the bottom line on new HIV infections is: we just don’t know and it’s about as complicated as the Palm Beach ballot. Which is why it’s better for news organizations to provide actual statistics when declaring a new wave of AIDS, instead of relying on health departments with budgets to save and axes to grind. To be continued …

Devastating piece by Kurt Eichenwald and Michael Moss in the New York Times today, detailing exactly how sleazy Clinton was in his final days. It turns out that after he and Madame Rodham pardoned the FALN terrorists for New York votes, there was a sudden crush of slimeballs from all over the country seeking politically opportune pardons. Money was offered; lists were kept secret; the Justice Department’s own staff were completely blindsided by a new, unvetted White House list released just hours before the end of Clinton’s presidency. Many readers have expressed skepticism that this can hurt Senator Clinton in the future, given the craven support she receives from the Democratic Party establishment, whatever her misdemeanors. But the more details come out, the cheesier she looks. One hopeful sign is what just happened to Tony Blair’s right-hand man, Peter Mandelson, in Britain. He was busted a couple of years ago for taking a huge loan to buy a house (and fibbing about it). All was forgiven soon enough, and he came back to be Northern Ireland secretary. But then he goes and makes a call to expedite a passport application for a wealthy Indian businessman, denies it, and gets caught in another whopper. No-one can deny his talents or his connections, but he’s toast now. And a good friend of the Clintons, by the way. Hope springs eternal.

I have a soft spot for Matthew Parris, the political columnist for the Times of London and the Spectator in London. His recent column in the Spectator is a classic: stimulating, and, I think, spot-on. He’s talking about what now distinguishes the right from the left. His context is Britain, but it applies just as well to the U.S.: “The Tory party on the whole is in modern politics to protect and foster success and the successful. Its atavistic and ancient support for the landed and the gentry has been extended in the last century to trade, commerce and industry, too; to the professions, the bourgeoisie, to those on the make as well as those who have already made it. On the whole the forces of Conservatism are on the side of talent, of energy, of ambition, of hard work, of privilege acquired and privilege striven for. These are the red blood cells of the Conservative party; these carry the oxygen, and so many of the new ideas.” But Matthew then goes on to argue that this very support for success needs a balancing point – a liberal and pragmatic conscience that says from time to time, “‘tread carefully,’ ‘never forget the rest’, ‘gently does it’, and ‘so far and no further.'” Similarly, left-wing parties need leaders from time to time to remind their base that attacking the successful can back-fire. So a party of conservatives needs a softy like W from time to time; and a party of excuse-makers and empathizers needs a Blair or a Clinton to remind them of the need to keep the middle-classes and the aspirational types on board. It’s all a balancing act. My own two cents is that the Republicans and Tories need to tackle head-on the new populist rhetoric of the rich and the poor. They need to talk less about tax cuts for the rich and more about tax-cuts for the successful. It’s a subtle rhetorical shift, but an important one. One of Gore-Greenberg’s legacies is the re-stigmatization of success – whether it be white or Asian college students with high SATs, pioneering pharmaceutical companies, or Bill Gates. One of the tasks of the next decade is to banish this encroaching stigmatization of success – and to reward achievement more effectively. I say: drop the top rate from 39 to 33 percent. And make no apologies for it.

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From someone who works relatively near the guy at Georgetown, who just emailed me: “The office is pretty hysterically liberal, but Paul Offner seems to be one of the more balanced liberals among the faculty and staff at the institute. I can’t imagine him running around the office making up stories or spreading unfounded rumors to stop a cabinet appointment (unlike some other people there who will be talking conspiracy theories about the Bush administration for the rest of their lives).” This is just to establish the fact that a) Offner is not some lefty ideologue with an ax to grind; b) everyone who knows him believes him. There’s no way to settle this, but there’s no harm in adding data.

The Washington Post does a good job at establishing the evidence for Sullivan’s Theory, which is that Democrats can’t vote right. But the salient question is not: did more Dems try to vote for Gore than Reps for Bush in Florida? The question is: how many of those attempted votes would ever have been counted in a real recount? Over-votes are, overwhelmingly, spoiled ballots. Discerning ‘intent’ when two holes have been punched seems to me to be a metaphysical impossibility. I fear we’re going to have settlement in this one about as soon as we know for certain whether Offner or Ashcroft is lying.