And so are a number of other countries (perhaps every last one, in their own way).

Steven Taylor* posts excerpts from and a link to an interview with an American political operative who has done some work in Israeli elections. He comments:

This struck me on a couple of levels. First, this is fundamentally what comparative political inquiry is: the systematic understanding of similarities and differences across cases to help produce a broader understanding of the political. Second, it is a good example of how groups of people like to think that they are somehow exceptional or unique when, in fact, they only think that because they don’t know all that much about other places. This is a mistake that Americans writ large make all time. Of course, everybody thinks that they, or their group, is exceptional (and maybe sometimes they are), but often our view of how special we are is derived from the fact that we only know one thing and we just assume that it has to be special.

There’s not much to disagree with there, that we can learn from other countries and they can learn from us. As Americans, we are often more enthusiastic about the latter than the former.

That said, when we do so, I think that there are ways in which we do have to consider that we are different (just as we should consider ways in which other countries are different from us). To use an example of international comparison that conservatives make, for instance, I don’t think that there is a whole lot that we can learn from Switzerland’s high rates of gun ownership and low rates of gun crimes. And when I take a position against learning from Scandinavian experience, it’s not political rhetoric. Even things that Scandinavian countries do that I like - such as Sweden’s voucher system - are mostly transferable to the US in my mind and imagination. Not that it wouldn’t work, or that it would, but it’s speculation. Ditto Finland.

A lot of my thirties has been spend learning the notion of context-dependent. While I am generally a supporter of gun rights here, if I were in Singapore or Japan, I’d likely not support a second amendment there. I used to glibly state “any nation that needs a draft to staff an army is probably not worth protecting,” but having learned more about the situations in some other countries (like Israel), I’ve learned it’s remarkably context-dependent. And my argument comes across like “any country that has to pressure people to get vaccinations deserves to be struck with polio.

Now, when I talk about the US as being exceptional, one thing I am not willing to argue is that we are exceptional in our exceptionalism. Being the ugly American that I am, there aren’t many countries I actually know enough about to know how alike or different they are than we are. That’s not to say I sink into absolute relativism and decline to make judgments, though I try to be less judgmental of them than I am of US.

In many ways, I don’t worry about when we are out of sync with the rest of the world. I mean, I look at our health care system and the fact that it’s different than elsewhere nearly isn’t as troublesome as the fact that it’s expensive and inefficient. I oppose the death penalty, but the fact that it is banned elsewhere doesn’t play much of a role, and so on. I have a not-admirable tendency to get irked when internationalists look at how we are out of step and seem to imply that such should be an indication that we are deficient. We are us. Exasperating, chaotic, diverse, gargantuan us. Unique, for better or worse.

To one of the points that Taylor specifically points to, I don’t really look at multi-party systems like what Israel has and envy it. I believe that there are definite advantages to the American two-party system. Which sometimes gets me looks like I am the American who is closed off to other options. Truthfully, there are some aspects of other systems I do like (the National/Liberal distinction in Australia, for example), though I am not sure how we would get from here to there. I do like New York’s fusion ticket… but the party apparatus destroyed that. So to an extent, it is very much the sort of status quo bias that Taylor has criticized. But I suppose it’s the small-c conservative in me that is skeptical of widespread electoral reform.

Which all brings me back to my general support for federalism, where it becomes easier to try things on our shores with our people to then start expanding as they prove effective or limiting exposure when they prove not to be. I am far more comfortable taking something that is working in New York and California and rolling it out nationally than I am taking something that is working for Japan or even Australia. (Some of this emanating from a view not typically associated with what Taylor is talking about: My belief that Americans can screw just about anything up, no matter how well it works elsewhere.)

* - I should note that I have a history is misinterpreting a lot of what he says, and niggling at it. Even though I am not sure we are even all that far apart politically, there is just a bit of a disconnect at times and I am sure it’s my fault. This post is not a case where I think I am rebutting what he says, merely tracing my own thoughts of my own reaction. There is a good chance that we disagree only a little, or not at all.

Of the (apparently failed) attempt to rig the electoral college in Virginia, Burt Likko writes:

Forgive me if I’m less than impressed with the notion that this would completely de-legitimize any Presidential election in which a Republican happened to win. After all, I can foresee that district-level allocation would result in fewer campaign resources being put in to a state certain to be divided — Virginia could be diminishing rather than enhancing its role as a key player in Presidential politics by splitting its 13 electoral votes roughly down the middle — if the Republican is going to get not fewer than 5 votes and the Democrat not fewer than 4, then only 4 and not 13 votes are in play, so it’s not as much of a prize.

You see, the fear on the part of Democrats, and the hope on the part of Republicans, comes from the fact that by virtue of controlling a majority of state legislatures at the point in the electoral cycle when redistricting happens, Republicans have gerrymandered themselves into a majority of Congressional districts. The assumption is that election results on a district-by-district basis will roughly parallel elections to the House. Which means Republicans will have a “locked in” advantage of thirty-three votes because the 2012 Congressional elections returned 234 Republicans and 201 Democrats.

In 2012, Barack Obama won 27 jurisdictions (26 states and D.C.) and Mitt Romney won 24, so that means that the Electoral College results of 255 votes for Obama and 282 votes for Romney, notwithstanding that the popular vote was very much in Obama’s favor. And that will be how every election for the remaining duration of the Republic will turn out. (There, I just spared you reading the article on Larry Sabato’s blog.)

The danger, it seems to me, is the redefining of the acceptable. No, Maine and Nebraska don’t make much of a difference. No, Virginia on its own won’t make much of a difference. But once the precedent is set, it’s really hard to take back. Perhaps the most optimistic things that can be said about it are that (a) it won’t spread or (b) that it will lead to a collapse of the electoral college as a whole. The former is hardly a ringing endorsement because the possibility that it might be wrong far could be catastrophic to the system. The latter depends on much to come to fruition, and supposes that the electoral college is so bad that it’s worth getting worse for the possibility of it getting better.

If put to referendum, I would vote to do away with the Electoral College tomorrow. But… I don’t consider it to be evil. I consider the cons to outweigh the pros. There are advantages insofar as it prevents a Republican from winning by running up extreme victories in the south and it prevents Democrats from winning by running up high totals in urban areas. It also forces candidates to spend time away from urban and suburban areas, which I do not altogether consider to be a bad thing. But the breaking down of an election to a select number of states has a distorting effect that outweighs those advantages.

There is also something to be said for election-by-district. There is nothing, in theory wrong with splitting votes by legislative districts. The parliamentary system works with a similar dynamic (a candidate can lose the “popular vote” but still wind up being Prime Minister). However, the totality of events and factors relating to Virginia in particular make their actions nothing short of reprehensible. It’s indefensible. I can come up with rationales for a lot of things, but not this. Gerrymandering may be old hat, and district-based allocation are nothing new, and holding a vote based on who is and is not in the state is not unheard of… but this is all of those things and more.

I am less skeptical than Burt is that the Electoral College is now and always. Because it sometimes advantages one party and sometimes the other, a couple rapid-succession flipped votes could lead to a consensus. Because one party is more predisposed to support it than another, if the supporting party is on the losing end and the opposing party has a long enough view to know that it won’t be to their benefit forever - or if they are given something in return (such as DC statehood), I could see it happening. And lastly, if few enough states become competitive, you might get the 3/4 of states you need right there. Or the NPV initiative could work and you’d only need enough states to get to 270 and large states Republican and Democrat have incentives here. All of this is unlikely, but not impossible. (We’re pretty much debating between a 0% likelihood and a 3% likelihood, but what are blogs for if not debating this sort of thing?)

The last thing I wanted to mention is that even if you put gerrymandering aside, district-based voting favors Republicans and will for the foreseeable future. The reason being that rural voters are not as Republican as core urban voters are Democratic. There are only a couple counties in the entire country that vote as Republican as DC does Democratic. I am relatively certain that if you look at individual precincts, you’d see more Republican ones, but wider margins in the Democratic ones (including some with no Republican voters, it turns out). So because of this, even without gerrymandering, there is a stacking of the deck in favor of Republicans. This is something that we should keep in mind: gerrymandering isn’t the only problem here. This is an area where the Republicans can act and the Democrats are simply incapable of responding in kind.

There are a number of ways to skin a deer. Debating between them is a rivalry of concepts of fairness, for which there is no singular, objective answer. But I struggle to come up with a single manner in which what Virginia is doing can be justified. The best we can hope for is that it fails. The next best thing is trying to keep it as contained as possible.

Sperm donor, or father?

Topekan William Marotta sought only to become a sperm donor — but now the state of Kansas is trying to have him declared a father.

Nearly four years ago, Marotta donated sperm in a plastic cup to a lesbian couple after responding to an ad they had placed on Craigslist.

Marotta and the women, Topekans Angela Bauer and Jennifer Schreiner, signed an agreement holding him harmless for support of the child, a daughter Schreiner bore after being artificially inseminated.

But the Kansas Department for Children and Families is now trying to have Marotta declared the 3-year-old girl’s father and forced to pay child support. The case is scheduled for a Jan. 8 hearing in Shawnee County District Court.

Hannah Schroller, the attorney defending Marotta, said the case has intriguing social and reproductive rights implications.

She said Marotta, a mechanic who has taken care of foster children with his wife, Kimberly, answered a Craigslist ad placed by Bauer and Schreiner seeking a sperm donor in March 2009.

The law in the only state in which I am familiar with the law is that it all depends on marital status. A donor who is married to the mother automatically becomes the father, but a donor who is not married to the mother has to adopt the child if he wants any parental rights and the concomitant obligations.

That strikes me as a much better criteria than the one that Kansas is apparently using (though I think all such contracts should be enforceable). Though I do understand the state’s interest here, this sort of thing is toxic to the extent that we want to encourage alternative paths to pregnancy. I’ve commented in the past that one of the main reason I would never become a donor - including an anonymous one with a clinic - is that some judge somewhere will come to the decision that such arrangements are not in the best interest of the child. This isn’t that, but it would still put me ill-at-ease. (more…)

From Ross Douthat:

It wasn’t so much that LaPierre’s performance made no concession whatsoever on gun restrictions or gun safety — that was to be expected. It was that he launched into a rambling diatribe against an absurdly wide array of targets, blaming everything from media sensationalism to “gun-free schools” signs to ’90s-vintage nihilism like “Natural Born Killers” for the Newtown tragedy. Then he proposed, as an alternative to the liberal heavy-handedness of gun control, something equally heavy-handed — a cop in every school, to be paid for by that right-wing old reliable, cuts to foreign aid.

Unfortunately for our country, the Bloomberg versus LaPierre contrast is basically all of American politics today. Our society is divided between an ascendant center-left that’s far too confident in its own rigor and righteousness and a conservatism that’s marched into an ideological cul-de-sac and is currently battering its head against the wall.

The entire Obama era has been shaped by this conflict, and not for the good. On issue after issue, debate after debate, there is a near-unified establishment view of what the government should do, and then a furious right-wing reaction to this consensus that offers no real policy alternative at all.

I don’t agree with the entire piece, but it broadly explains my discontent quite well. Less about the gun debate specifically, more about the larger dynamic.

I believe in one sense that this election is closer than a lot of folks around here, in that those arguing that it was never close cause the state polls and projections persistently leaned in Obama’s favor were off-base. It’s moot now because I agree with the projections insofar as Romney never sealed the deal and the last-minute national movement appears to be in Obama’s direction. I consider the likelihood of a reverse-verdict to be greater, but I consider the greatest likelihood to be an Obama win that will not come down to the wire.

I believe Obama will win the popular vote by somewhere between 1.5% and 2%. If it’s closer to the latter, you can probably flip Florida into the Obama column (maybe you can anyway…).

Having said all of that, I do want to submit something else: There’s nothing wrong with a degree of poll-skepticism. They’re probably right. This year, I believe they are. But one of these years, they will be wrong. The likelihood of getting caught between shifting demographics, last-minute undecideds, cell phones*, and lower response rates will make polling increasingly difficult and the accommodations made for these realities will either fail to compensate or will create their own problems.

The polls have failed us before, and they’ll fail us again. Improved scientific technique seems likely to me to have a hard time compensating for various problems that will increasingly aggravate.

There are ways that this may favor Republicans in polling, and ways that it may favor Democrats. It depends on where the problem occurs, and how the pollsters respond to it.

My hope is that when it occurs, it will be something that brings a 9% margin down to a 5% or vice-versa and not something that flips an election. My belief that it could is one of the reasons I have been relatively uptight this cycle on the subject.

* - Yes, I am aware that cell phones are included in many polls. However, response rates from cell phones are likely to be lower and cell phone numbers are less likely to be up-to-date.

-{Okay, so this post directly addresses one of the previously forbidden subjects. “Comment with care” is hopefully assumed. As long as we avoid conversations about how terrible Mexicans and Mexican immigrants are, I think we’ll be okay. I mention Mexicans because it’s hard not to on these subjects, but there are greater abstract notions at play here.}-

Eric Liu has a worthwhile piece on global citizenship. I’d excerpt it but there’s no really good starting point that doesn’t take five paragraphs or more. He lists three kinds. First is global consciousness for one’s actions, which is laudable but not meaningfully citizenship. The second is more internationalism in the form of institutions, which is useful but limited in scope. The third is economic globalism, which is essentially the self-justification of the elites.

I find the notion of global citizenship unsettling. To be of everywhere is to be of nowhere. It’s nice to think that the world is of one, but… it’s just not true. States and populations within the US have conflicting interests, at times, but nothing compared to the US and China or even the US and Japan. Even countries with relatively friendly relations, like the US and India, are as much worlds apart figuratively as literally. There are times I wonder if the US has too much diversity (beyond checkboxes for race and religion) and too many conflicting interests to be a coherent nation. But the world? I don’t understand how you can have solidarity with everybody, which global citizenship implies.

The third kind that he refers to strikes me as the most problematic and potentially nefarious even. Or maybe what I am thinking about is a tangent off of that. There is a natural order of things with alliances and connections and associations. A stateless nation wouldn’t be the world as one. Rather, it would mean that Silicon Valley can more easily associate itself with Tokyo without being anchored to Fresno. It’s the forced association of borders that sends state tax dollars from New York City to Rochester and federal dollars from New York City to Minot. A lot of people - the sorts of people who ordinarily would think such thing tasteless - take a look at the overall money flow and thing that cutting off those ingrates would be awesome. Maybe they’d learn their place and all that.

But that’s just talk. Sometimes geared more towards scoring political points than anything else. As a practical matter, though, considering residents of Orissa no more or less in league with you than the people in Idaho is a fantastic way for neither of them to get the support they need. From a libertarian standpoint, the answer is “So?” From a liberal standpoint - and it’s more often than not liberalism from whence these attitudes come - it makes any social safety net (for instance) unworkable. We have to view ourselves as Americans, and take care of one another to a far greater extent that we take care of people from elsewhere. Global citizenship makes that impossible. On the other side of the world, it means that New Delhi has to make itself a colleague of the other world cities and that means it cannot be in league with rural Orissa in any real sense.

Which itself could be considered the point. Pull the people out of Idaho and (back) to California and the cities therein. As we all know, cities are superior anyway. Without the erection of borders - either formal or by driving up the cost of living and regulations to prevent people from living too close together and pricing them out - the same problems occur. If we can’t guarantee a certain standard of living of 113,000 Mexicans in Mexico, for instance, it is only a little bit easier of they all immigrated here en masse. One way or another, they’d be left behind. To repeat myself: Treating Mexicans and New Mexicans as equivalent (”We’re all citizens of the world”) would be the end to Navajo Nation. We can take care of them - to the minimalist extent that we do - precisely because we favor them over others.

The erection of national borders separating New Mexico from Mexico may be quite unfair in some sense. Someone from New Mexico can pick up and move to Texas and be a recognized citizen. Someone who works harder, is more ambitious, and is smarter who happens to be born in Chihuahua meanwhile can’t get here without some luck (family members already crossed over, for instance) or a whole lot more wherewithal (sneaking across). We can say that since the latter is smart and ambitious and a hard worker that he should be allowed over, but once we’re picking and choosing who we bring over, we’re recognizing the importance of borders.

We can open our borders and that may or may not be the end of the Republic. But if it’s not the end of the Republic, it is the end to virtually any guarantee of any standard of living supported by most Americans (and all but few liberals).

I am among those that thought, on the whole, Romney turned in a pretty impressive performance and Obama a lackluster one.

There are three hesitations I have, however. First, I have been wrong in the past (I got two of the three Bush-Gore debates wrong, and one of the Obama-McCain ones - twice I overestimated the Democrat and once the Republican). Romney looked positive reptilian when he wasn’t talking. I don’t know how many noticed or cared, but that is one of those minor things that can color future perceptions. Second, Romney’s domineering of Lehrer didn’t come across as good. I was cringing a bit at the beginning. I don’t know if he got better or I just got used to it.

The third thing may have worked in his favor, though. It allowed him to get words in he otherwise wouldn’t have an ultimately change the format of the discussion… for the better, in my view. This debate was made more tolerable by its freewheeling style. The “two minute answers” would have been more a hindrance than a help, viewing-wiser. Lehrer is getting some criticism, but I’m glad he did what he did (or didn’t do what he didn’t do).

Even if I am right about Romney’s performance and Obama’s, I don’t think this is a gamechanger. If the press gives Romney some good headlines, it mostly serves to keep him alive. The progress made in establishing himself as something other than a right-wing caricature has to be capitalized on. I’m not sure how much faith I’d have in Romney not to screw it up.

I placed the odds of an Obama victory at 20% before the debate, and I’d place it the same now. A bad performance, though, would have shifted things possibly irrevocably in the other direction.

A part of me wonders what conversations went on behind closed doors in the Romney campaign. There was some talk at the Leaguecast of whether his apparent shift will hurt him among conservative voters. I actually wonder if the goal of the campaign now is not to convince those voters (or more specifically, the donors) that he’s in their corner, but to convince them that he can win. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were pleased with what they saw, if it pans out.

Scotch helps presidential debates go down.

Of the churches within the United States, one of the most gay-friendly is The Episcopal Church, the American branch of the Church of England. Though it varies from region to region, The Episcopal Church allows its priests to perform gay marriages, allows them and their bishops to be gay. So it’s interesting that, across the pond, the Church of England is taking the opposite stand:

Responding to a consultation in England and Wales, the Church of England said government proposals to allow same-sex marriages by 2015 would “alter the intrinsic nature of marriage as the union of a man and a woman, as enshrined in human institutions throughout history”.

It said marriage acknowledged “an underlying biological complementarity which, for many, includes the possibility of procreation”.

Justice Minister Crispin Blunt: “We’re seeking to protect… religious organisations”

The Church claims that plans to exempt religious organisations from performing gay marriages would be unlikely to survive legal challenges in domestic and European courts.

As such, the government’s consultation exercise, which closes on Thursday, was “flawed, conceptually and legally”, it added.

Concerns over forcing churches to participate in ceremonies have been raised over here. If the day ever came where this was seriously proposed, I would stand arm-in-arm with the likes of the Southern Baptist Church, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and Catholic Church in opposition. This, to me, stands at the core of what Freedom of Religion is about. I think such a day is unlikely, though, because I don’t think even a liberal court would allow it, much less force it. Churches have always had great latitude over who they have and have not allowed to marry under their steeples.

The European Union, of course, does not have the same First Amendment history that we do. That creates a whole different set of concerns. I honestly take the Church of England’s concerns in this area a lot more seriously, even though I wish they had the willingness to perform these ceremonies that their American counterparts do (and maybe they do, they just have some hold-outs).

It’s one of the things that points to the Constitution as being a valuable safeguard that, ironically, can allow the government a little more latitude in my view. When we know where there is a limit (at least currently), we feel more free to move a little closer to that limit.

I know that my view on Second Amendment Issues has been greatly effected by Heller v DC and McDonald v Chicago. Prior to that, I would have opposed any sort of gun registration tooth-and-nail in large part because I would fear it be a step along the way to confiscation. Knowing that there are indeed limits to the extent the government can ban guns makes me less likely to oppose some measures that I would otherwise see on a more slope-like surface. Not that I am entirely sanguine on the topic. The confiscations in New Orleans gives me some pause. They had to give the guns back, but there is something quite disconcerting about governments being willing to take the guns when you arguably need them most.

In a comment on a post about anti-discrimination law over at NaPP, Jaybird asks:

Here’s a question that may clarify some things (while it muddies others):

What are the limits to our jurisdiction when it comes to setting things right?

If any, of course.

In the modern day in age, the answer is “nowhere that isn’t expressly forbidden by the Constitution and modern interpretations thereof.” The Constitution is interpreted relatively broadly in some cases, and narrowly in others. Outside certain specific parameters, though, The Commerce Clause covers just about everything this side of a mandate and there’s nothing stopping mandates or anti-discrimination law on the state level which doesn’t even need a paper clause.

It is partially because the government can grab this much power in theory that I think we should sometimes take a step back and say that even though the government can do this and is perfectly within its rights to try to right this particular wrong, is this something we want the government involving itself in? At least a little skepticism in the notion that a wrong that we think might can be righted ought to actually be righted.

I believe that the vast majority of people who cite the possibility of churches having to perform ceremonies would argue against gay marriage in an equal amount if this were completely and entirely not a concern. I do think the CoE does demonstrate, though, that the more open-ended the willingness of the government to right wrongs, though, the more likely you might see some resistance on the basis of slippery-slope arguments. This makes it exceptionally important that when we run across stories like this, that we do not talk of stripping churches that do things we disagree with of tax-exempt status.

Longtime readers of mine know that I am not particular concerned with the representation inequalities of the US Senate. One of the weak spots with it, though, are the great plains. The confluence of interests creates a degree of solidarity among its representatives that does not exist as much among the lowpop states that are separated by mountains, national parks, and culture. The population centers of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and (to a lesser extent) Kansas are all along a single freeway. There are some exceptions, like Wichita and Rapid City, but it’s really quite notable. They are also farming states with a lot of travel between them. To a much greater extent than Idaho and Montana (or even Eastern Idaho vs Northern Idaho), what’s good for South Dakota is good for North Dakota, and vice-versa.

There are a lot of oddities in how the states were drawn. There was a lot of chance involved (the border between Montana and Idaho was the product of a disgruntled judge). In some of them, there’s the question of what exactly they were supposed to do. Like Idaho, Nevada probably shouldn’t be a state because you have two cities more economically tied to their California brethren than one another, and a lot of open space. There’s no easy answer there. Combining Wyoming with Colorado or Montana would have been problematic, so what the heck are you going to do with Wyoming? Montana is kind of a mishmash of places, a confederation of small cities and country that create their own balance (assisted by the fact that the largest city is sort of removed from all of the others).

The Dakotas, however, were an unforced error. Combining them would have left a state that would have remained reasonably governable, and the separation of them left four senate seats where two might have been more appropriate. It would be large, but not too large. North Dakota and South Dakota each are population-centric in Fargo and Sioux Falls respectively, which is often problematic (having the capital removed helps, though, and SD does have Rapid City) and having the two of them live under the same tent, the same way that Montana balances its larger (small) cities with others, strikes me as beneficial.

We also might be looking at Kansas and Nebraska for potential consolidation, though the population imbalance might be a problem. I consider this less of a problem for the Dakotas. Though South Dakota is more populated by 140k or so, it is also the more geographically diverse and therefore might be less likely to vote as a single unit in the same way that Kansas might.

Note: I could be way off on this one. I sort of feel the same way about some of those northeastern statelets and have been told, by more than one person, that they couldn’t possibly live together under a single tent. They’ve got a lot of history under their belt. So, too, do the Dakotas, which would make a merger rather difficult.

Yahoo recently hired a pregnant woman to be their new CEO. This is generating a fair amount of discussion on the subject. The best so far is from Forbes.

[Marissa Mayer]’s a CEO and can give herself work-from-home days if she needs to. She can hire a nanny, a nurse, a courier, a cook. She can set her company policy so that infants are allowed in the workplace (which has benefits like higher morale in the office!). Her hot-ass husband is a venture capitalist with a flexible schedule who can take the kid to doctor appointments and whatnot.

You know who’s not a CEO? Almost everyone else. Marissa Mayer is an outlier, and while her actions may make splashy headlines, her situation doesn’t apply to the rest of us. […]

Things have improved immensely since the early ‘70s for college-educated women like me: In 1971, 27% of working women with B.A.s were able to take paid maternity leave; by 2006, that figure was 66%.

For women whose education topped out at high school, though, 16% had paid maternity leave in 1971. And these days? Why, would you look at that: The number hasn’t improved at all.

The vast majority of women going back to work after two weeks have nothing in common with Marissa Mayer. They’re dragging their weary butts back to work, and wrapping up their boobs because there’s no place to pump at work. They’re getting paid by the hour.

Clancy has quite a bit of vacation and sick leave saved up, so we’re not going to be taking as much of a financial hit as a lot of people do when it comes to maternity leave. Even so, it’d be nice if Clancy had been able to take her vacation days and get some time to take care of the baby after it is born. A lot of other countries apparently manage this, but not ours.

Having said that, there are some real concerns that would come along with it. The Forbes author gives an anecdote about how she declined to take advantage of something she was legally entitled to. Similarly, I know a pregnant woman who is under a degree of pressure not to take advantage of her due maternity leave. She talked of taking eight weeks of leave, and the response was along the lines of “We’ll see.” She was legally entitled to it, but an uncooperative employer can make life difficult for you if you take advantage of it. And if you force, force, force it upon them and go after them for anything that merely sniffs like a punitive response, you have essentially added a asymmetrical cost to hiring women.

Another female acquaintance, in response to Mayer’s hiring at Yahoo, mentioned on Facebook that she got her current job while pregnant. She said during the interview “I don’t know if you realize I’m pregnant or think I’m just a porker, but I’m only somewhat porker and very pregnant.” (You’d have to know her to believe as I do that yes, she would actually say this in a job interview.) She got the job. Would she have gotten the job if it meant that she would be gone for 12 weeks and that they’d have to pay her and a replacement? I don’t see employers as being that far-sighted.

So where does that leave us? The government could take care of paying the parents. A social evolution where men were just as likely to take the time off as women could negate any discriminatory effect. Alternately, if you had generous leave that was so limited that men would almost have to take the time off, you could relieve the discriminatory effect. Of course, then you would be discriminating against one-parent households. Unless you said that a single parent gets twice the leave, which then penalizes women who married their child’s father.

One other possibility, I suppose, would be tax credits to corporations with family-friendly policies. That would encourage more companies to offer paid maternity leave, but would let those that are worried about it off the hook. That would, of course, be yet another line in the tax code. There would also likely be some employers that would take the credits and then apply pressure on employees not to use them. Intuitively, it seems like the abuse would be less than simply by demanding maternity leave for everyone. Of course, you’d have to strike the right balance between “enough of a tax credit to encourage employers to do it” and “not too much of a tax credit to where they have to do it whether they intend to comply or not.”

Theoretically, science is science and political motivations should be set aside. In reality, it almost never works that way. Whether we accept scientific conclusions or not depends, in good part, on whether the results conform to how Americans should or should not live.

Global Warming wasn’t the imminent catastrophe when I was growing up than it is now. Yet, almost everything we’re talking about doing because of global warming, were things that we were taught to do before global warming was the primary ecological threat of our lifetime (or was framed as such). I do not consider this a coincidence.

A long while back, I was advancing my theory that increased gasoline costs might actually lead to a solidifying in the suburbs if employers end up relocating closer to employees rather than vice-versa. She exclaimed “That would defeat the purpose of global warming!”

The purpose of global warming, in her mind, being a rationale through which we should be rearranging society. I’m not arguing that’s what global warming is about for all or even most of those who are saying that we need to combat it. I do think, however, it is a lot easier to accept the science when the result is people living in a way that you think they ought to. I do not find it to be a coincidence that those who believe in the imminent disaster of global warming are also inclined to believe that Peak Oil is right around the corner. One way or another, we’re going to get them out of their SUVs dagnabbit, our of their suburbs, and living the way they ought.

Not a single word of the above has any effect on whether (a) AGW is occuring and will continue to do so or (b) whether we need to do something about it. It is or it isn’t, we should or we shouldn’t. It does, however, complicate the discussion. It prevents us from approaching global warming as a thing and outside of the political lens.

CAFE standards are not a particular effective way to combat global warming, in my view, because it focuses on one aspect at the expense of another. The mileage your car gets only matters if you hold the number of miles driven as a constant. The end result is that we punish people who have low-mileage cars who drive short distances while we let skate people who have high-mileage cars but actually burn more fuel. I went through far, far more fuel in my compact than I presently do in my crossover SUV. I say all this to say that when I say all this, it comes across as “I don’t care about the environment.” It’s a political issue that I am on the wrong side of. The goal - at least for some - is not just to get people to use less gas (though I agree that’s a big part of it) but also to drive the right kind of car.

I support carbon taxes. Or rather, I support the right carbon taxes. Ideally, comparatively revenue-neutral ones. Ones that take the money raised and disperse it back. Not put aside for grants, not going to education. Not going to health care. Not going to toxic waste clean-up. Winners and losers should be picked precisely on how much carbon they are responsible for. In one hand, out the other (more or less). From there, let people drive whatever car they want, live in whatever kind of neighborhood they want, and make choices on that basis.

This, to me, is far preferable than using global warming as a rationale to change our lives or push is in specific ways. Not only because the freedom of personal choice, but because it’s most conducive to finding a way to cut emissions while living the way we want to live, which in turn means it will more likely be successful. And in turn, I will have more confidence that it is about reducing emissions than it is about the appropriate cosmetics and living the “right way.”

Given the stakes, we simply shouldn’t care if it’s nuclear power or renewable. We shouldn’t care if people reduce emissions by getting a more fuel-efficient car or by driving less. We shouldn’t care all that much whether they drive less because they moved to the city or because their employer relocated to the suburbs. The degree to which all of these things continue to matter… it becomes apparent as a political rather than purely scientific issue.

Australia recently passed a carbon tax to go into effect. I will be interested to see how it works out. Hopefully that, rather than CAFE, Cash-for-Clunkers, and light bulb bans, will provide the most useful blueprint.

Amanda Marcotte says thus:

I think Goodman actually happened on a couple that’s a great illustration of another, more real phenomenon, which is the impact marriage has on women’s voting patterns. We know that married women are far more conservative voters than unmarried women, and we also know that single men are more conservative generally than single women. One part of this, therefore, might be that in the battle over whose values are going to “win” in a relationship, men tend to dominate and that women are adopting their husbands’ political views alongside taking their husbands’ names. The woman Goodman profiles openly admits that her husband’s views have persuaded her over to the dark side. Since women her age aren’t liberals who married libertarians, I question using her as an example of anything typical to young voters today, much less young female voters who we can still say confidently will turn out in greater numbers at the polls than young men their age.

I was actually thinking about the bolded part the other day. It’s commonly known that married women - and mothers in marriages - tend to be more conservative than single women. It’s hard, however, to tease out why. Some of it would be self-selection, conservative women being more likely to marry and all. There is also the conservatism that more generally occurs with marriage and family, the change of worldview and all that. There are people like my sister-in-law who start attending church when they have kids and religiosity coincides with conservatism.

But I think that there is also what Marcotte herself is observing. It’s something I have noticed in my peers. More have shifted to the left, but those who have shifted to the right are Julianne (who is single) and women who have married more conservative men. My ex-roommate’s wife went from apolitical to his liberalish political preferences almost immediately. I can only think of one case, really, where there as a husband interest piqued or whose politics shifted due to that of his wife.

The real way to test it, though, is to look at what happens when a liberal man marries a conservative woman. Who typically “wins” when there is a winner? If it’s the man, then you’ve really made your case since that accounts for most variables.

In the Himmelreich-Truman household, it’s been… interesting. We were both right of center when we met (indeed, we met through a mutual friend who is a Republican activist), though not necessarily for the same reasons. I am a bit wonky and she is more of an intuitive voter. Over time, we’ve both moved at least somewhat to the left, though there again moving for somewhat different reasons (excluding the gay marriage factor, which we both adamantly support and which is becoming much more of a forefront issue). It may not be a coincidence that we are both looking at the real possibility of not voting for the GOP nominee for the first time in over a decade (well, ever for her - I voted for Clinton).

This is part of a series of recommendations for western states. The recommendations range from serious to more of a rant than anything serious. In the case of Montana and the penny, it’s more serious than not.

Montana should do away with the penny. Unilaterally. Of course, Montana can’t exactly do away with the penny unilaterally, but they can and should be the first state to render it useless. Or, at least, I don’t see why they can’t.

Montana, you see, has no sales tax. Like Oregon and other states, it lacks a statewide sales tax. Unlike Oregon, though, it does not generally have local sales taxes, either. You might think that this means that this obviates the need to do away with the penny, but in reality it only makes the problem more pronounced. In Montana, as with everywhere else, prices are set to ninety-nine cents. You know what this means? Lots of pennies. LOTS OF PENNIES. The take-a-penny-leave-a-penny bins overflow with them. Buy something, get a penny back. Buy two somethings, get two pennies back. You have to buy things in increments of five not do deal with pennies back.

How does this differ from states that have a sales tax? There are, after all, a lot of pennies exchanged there, too! Here’s the deal, though: If you’re in Idaho, and you give a penny here and take a penny there and it all evens out in the end. In Montana, however, the exchanges are asymmetrical. You get a lot more pennies than you give, because when you buy something, you have to count out four pennies (three pennies for two somethings) in order to get rid of them. A good portion of the time, you don’t bother. They keep the penny, you put it in the overflowing penny bin. Whatever. You’re not going to mess with it.

On its face, this exposes the problem with pennies in general and why we should do away with them nationally. But nowhere is this more pronounced than in no-sales-tax-states.

So what should Montana do? Montana should require that all transactions within its state be priced to the nearest five cents. Vendors should be required to round down, or alternatively if they round up they should have to post the rounded price on all single-purchase items (a gallon of gasoline, for instance, would be immune because few ever buy a single gallon).

With this, Montana would hopefully be setting the stage for other states to follow suit. Even though the other states have the sales tax which supplies symmetry to penny transactions, it’s still a counterproductive exercise. The states that have a sales tax can simply redesign their tax to x% plus whatever it takes to get an increment of five.

Now, there are some people who say we should do away with the nickel, too. I am not opposed. One step at a time.

North Carolina has decided that emissions tests ought to be reserved for older cars, either those more than three models years back or with more than 70,000 miles. This sounds logical, but makes me a tad uncomfortable regardless. Mostly because of who is going to be driving the old cars, and who can afford new ones. The tests may have been unnecessary, but there was at least an egalitarianism.

Of course, emissions standards are more generally going to fall on those that can’t afford the latest and greatest anyway. The same applies to safety standards. Even if the folks with new cars had been required to get their car tested, they’d have failed at much lower rates than those prayin’ to the heavens that Old Bessy makes it through another year. If anything, this change merely codifies that distinction, and further recognizes the reality of the situation.

Matthew Yglesias is complaining that too much transit is going towards rural states:

Only 16 percent of Americans live in rural areas, and the quantity is dropping, so naturally the U.S. Department of Transportation proudly announced today that “of the $500 million in TIGER 2012 funds available for grants, more than $120 million will go to critical projects in rural areas.”

This has been one of Yglesias’s ongoing things, the overspending in rural America. To be honest, in the case of transit, the Interstates out here are probably nicer than they need to be. They’re repaving the Interstate between Callie and Redstone when, to be honest, I hadn’t noticed the slightest bit of a problem. So I’m not entirely unsympathetic to his viewpoint.

He goes on…

You see this basic dynamic in all kinds of federal grant programs. Typically any kind of rational grant formula would fail to give money to rural areas in a manner that’s consistent with rural areas’ strength in the U.S. Senate. Therefore you end up with either implicit or explicit special set-asides for rural areas.

It’s an article of faith among many that because of that damnable Senate, we overspend in rural areas. There is some truth to it, but it’s actually more complicated than it appears. Per-capita spending in Montana and the Dakotas, for instance, ranges from somewhat to very high (between 12-30% more than the national average). However, public spending in Idaho is comparable to that of California (-10%) and Utah is downright cheap (-20%, only Minnesota gets less) despite the fact that they have two senators just like everywhere else (it should be noted that the Dakotas and Montana have reservations and not-insignificant military spending). Wyoming is a special case, bringing in a lot of money due on account of its natural resources and the NMLA. Take that out (and we should, since that’s merely kicking half of their money back to them) and they’re somewhere below average. If the senate were as powerful as they say in the making of donor states and beneficiary states, this would not really be the case.

He does have a point with the low unemployment rates.

On Yglesias’s other point, we don’t traditionally spend federal funds in accordance with who delivers the taxation. There are some attempts at this, with Social Security and whatnot, and there are government favors that rich people buy, but it’s not our organizing principle. We try to hand it out according to economic need, and per-capita transit (for example) is going to cost more in rural places than urban ones. Complaints that they’re not “earning their keep” are not ones liberals make when applied to people they don’t already disfavor. To be fair, it may be in our interest to invest more in economic hotspots and areas of economic growth with an eye towards spurring people to move there, but rural America does provide our food and they are going to need services that are expensive on a per-capita rate. If we want to reduce food consumption, denying infrastructure investment isn’t a good way of doing that. Eliminating farm subsidies is (which, as far as I know, Yglesias does not oppose).

Disclosure: Well duh, I live in a rural place. This not a permanent arrangement and it’s unlikely that we will end up in a place as rural as we are now.

The other day I watched a documentary about Redstone and its mining history (among other things). I’m not going to name the movie, though if you’re genuinely interested in seeing it, shoot me and email and I’ll tell you privately. I’m breaking down my observations into three or four posts. This is the third, the first is here and the second here. You (obviously) don’t need to have seen the film to understand what I’m talking about.

The Company’s execs actually lived in Redstone. Go to the downtown area and you can see their mansions. Nobody who can afford a mansion wants to live downtown anymore, and so they’ve been converted into hotels or subdivided into co-op apartments (it helps that they’re near the university).

Because of this, it was a bit of a surprise to see that they put up the smelters in the city, rather than having them located somewhere else. Smelters are, essentially, smoke-stacks used in the extraction process. They generate a lot of polution. There were a lot of them out in Redstone’s little sister town, Blackrock. Blackrock retained one of them as a monument, but they’re all gone from Redstone, so I didn’t know they had ever been there.

Anyhow, I found it strange that they would put them in town rather than moving them out to somewhere else, since the executives themselves had to breathe the air. I guess NIMBY wasn’t around yet.

The other day I watched a documentary about Redstone and its mining history (among other things). I’m not going to name the movie, though if you’re genuinely interested in seeing it, shoot me and email and I’ll tell you privately. I’m breaking down my observations into three or four posts. This is the second, the first is here. You (obviously) don’t need to have seen the film to understand what I’m talking about.

One other interesting thing about it was the evolution of Redstone’s patriotism. Redstone is one of the most flag-waiving, patriotic places I have ever seen out of the south. And when the rubber hits the road, Redstonians, and Arapahoans more generally, enter the military in pretty large numbers. I figured it had to do with the Irish heritage and career opportunities, but there was another aspect to it that I hadn’t considered.

Namely, Redstone had its patriotism beaten into it. The miners opposed World War I vociferously. This opposition did not serve them there. They went on strike and the Washington sent some folks over and forced them to continue working at gunpoint. Their popular image was sunk by their inability to get on board with the war. So, when World War II rolled around, they got ahead of that. They accepted the wage freezes with magnanimity, held parades, and pressured those who weren’t working or essential to join up. The patriotic and military culture has been with the town ever since.

The other day I watched a documentary about Redstone and its mining history (among other things). A good bulk of the movie focused on the labor struggles. I’m not going to name the movie, though if you’re genuinely interested in seeing it, shoot me and email and I’ll tell you privately. I’m breaking down my observations into three or four posts. This is the first. You (obviously) don’t need to have seen the film to understand what I’m talking about.

One of the things that stuck out at me was the symbiotic relationship between The Corporation and labor. I, of course, had the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. I know what happened to Redstone when the mines shut down. Labor, of course, doesn’t know that. They only know that they’re working in dangerous conditions and breathing dangerous air, for meager wages in the shadow of The Company’s mansions. The Company’s view is not particularly well-represented in the film, but it’s not hard to tell where they were coming from (profits) and had the compulsion to keep wages minimal even though the freight ran smoother when they were able to avoid strikes every three years (if the film’s narrative is to be believed).

The Company went under due to the socialist uprisings in South America, among other things. When they suddenly lost all of their investments, they were bought out by another company. The other company looked at the labor conflicts, the increasing environmental liabilities, and decided to take a pass on most mining in Redstone. When they turned off the pumps of at the last mine, the result was water with so much mineral sludge, the mining of the lake it created is the only mining left in Redstone.

Needless to say, it wasn’t “happily ever after” for the town after that. As bad as the work was, it was still work. As bad as The Company was, they passed on things to the town that they didn’t realize were there until it was gone. The city’s economy, and population, never recovered. The employment prospects there are rather bleak outside of government work.

It’s a more peaceful place, I suppose, with not much to fight over.

As I have mentioned in the past, it’s a bit ironic that so many of the white cross arguments involve Utah. By “white cross” arguments, I mean the desire on the part of secularists to do away with the tradition of white crosses to mark the death of someone. The ironic thing about Utah is that it is the one state in the continental United States where the cross is not a symbol of the dominant religion (Mormons don’t really do crosses). In fact, it’s Utah first and foremost that I look at and actually believe that no, the cross does not have to be an establishing symbol of a specific religion (or series of religions). If that is what Utah were going for, they’d have little tooting Moronis on the site of the road. Or something.

As far as such crosses go, I can understand the objections even though I don’t actually share them. If anything, Christians themselves should be kind of anxious about their holy symbol being used for something that isn’t religious in nature. Sort of like the secularization of Christmas.

Arapaho makes extensive use of roadside crosses. And there is more of an establishment concern here than elsewhere, because they are put up by the state. There is one stretch of dangerous highway where my wife and I counted 30-something over just a few miles. They were put up by the state to underline, once twice and thirty-something times to drive carefully.

And part of the problem is that there is no other symbol that you see on the side of the road and know immediately what it means.

Which brings me to the point of this post: If crosses are really a problem, those that want to take the crosses down need to come up with a replacement. That would sell me on the issue. Instead of saying “Take down that cross” they should say “How about we use this instead.” I don’t know, and don’t really care what is used. It could be just a white stake in the ground. Something immediately recognizable and identifiable. Arapaho can put up a sign as you enter the Danger Zone saying (more concisely so that people don’t get into accidents as they try to read the sign) “Hey, you’re about to see a bunch of white stakes in the ground. This is where people died. So drive carefully!”

This post is at least partially about the new TV series, Boss. It will contain little in the way of spoilers and will also not require you to have actually seen the show.

In the beginning of the first episode, Chicago Mayor Tom Kane (Kelsey Grammer) is hit with what may be the worst medical diagnosis there is, something called Lewy Body. It’s a cross between Parkinson’s and Alzheimers. His body, and his mind, are betraying him. His time left as an independent, cognoscente person is perilously short. The show is about Grammer’s attempts to conceal his illness and reaffirm his political power in the face of various external and internal threats.

It’s not The Wire, but I thought it was a really good show. If I were Tom Kane, though, it would have likely been a very boring show. It would have been a show about using my last day’s to assure a stable and ordertly transition into quiet retirement. Kane, though, fights on. The only transition he tries to manage is to replace Governor Cullen (Francis Guinan) with young upstart State Treasurer Zajac (Jeff Hephner), and rather than backing down from politics, he throws himself further and further into it. The notion of backing down, or losing, never occurs to him even to the point where he does something that left me literally uttering “Oh, my god.” It becomes apparent, as the show progresses, that Kane has little or nothing to retire to. He is in a loveless marriage and he and his wife both disowned their only child in the name of political expediency. There are some attempts to reconcile with his daughter, but that’s about as personal as he gets.

The whole mentality is rather alien to me. That’s one reason why I would never have a successful career in politics.

Of course, I look back at some political figures in astonishment at the degree to which they went the opposite track. There was a young politician in Colosse, Alex Leventis, who had an astonishing career ahead of him. Some were saying that he could go on to become president. A moderate Democrat, he was thought highly of across party lines. Then, in an announcement that everyone assumed was going to be for a gubernatorial bid, Leventis announced his retirement from politics. Nobody had any idea why. Less than a decade later, Leventis was in prison.

The bizarre thing about the Leventis story is what it came to be apparent did happen to him. He fell in love with a stripper. Apparently, an avaricious one. And in an attempt to make her happy, he did things in his political office that he shouldn’t have done. He retired to go to the private sector (and so that he could marry a former stripper without cocking as many eyebrows) and made more money there until his past caught up with him. The guy that everybody loved suddenly had no friends. He’d burned his bridges with Democrats by being something of a maverick. He’d burned his bridges with Republicans by being a Democrat. The stripper left him while he was in prison.

Leventis and Kane represent opposite sides of the political spectrum. One who threw it all away for the woman that he loved and the other held on tight in part because he loved nothing but what he had.