Who cares about Bill Frist?

In the aftermath of the filibuster deal, I heard lots of people crowing about how it was trouble for Frist's presidential chances. It's obvious that this hurts him as a Senate leader, but I'm willing to take Dobson's pro-Frist language at face value, and say that some on the theocratic right will see Frist as their man in opposition to the traitorous McCain.

But the real question is, who cares about Frist? Why do people want to hurt his chances of getting the nomination? I don't like him, but I don't see why we should be happy about pushing him aside and helping, say, George Allen get it instead. I'm happy about damaging McCain, because his media profile makes him a fearsome opponent and he signed up to be a tool of evil, but I don't see that Frist was necessarily our most dangerous foe.

"Martini"

What's with the overapplication of the term "Martini"? Here's what goes into a martini -- at least enough vermouth to coat the container, and then some gin. Maybe some olives or lemon peel. You leave out the vermouth entirely, and you're drinking gin. The phrase "vodka martini" is to be understood like "toy gun", "counterfeit money", or "nonalcoholic beer." Random fluids do not become martinis by being poured into a Y-shaped glass. (They may still be good to drink.)

The conventional option

I have to say that my reaction here is pretty much the same as Matt's. They get their three awful judges and we don't get to send the GOP legislative agenda to a nuclear winter wonderland. Reid's proposals for how we'd force votes on lots of stuff we liked that the GOP wouldn't swallow would've been fun to watch. In retrospect, I would've liked to see the Democrats make the substantive case against the judges themselves more. Why didn't we hear more about how Priscilla Owen let poor Willie Searcy die? Or about how Janice Brown more or less thought the New Deal was unconstitutional? Making the substantive case against the nominees probably would've done more to rally public opinion than institutionalist arguments about Senate procedure.

Everyone is talking about how this hurts Bill Frist. Here's what I'm thinking: it's time to declare an end to John McCain's hopes of ever becoming the GOP nominee. If you think Dobson's going to be mad at Frist for not delivering the goods, think how he'll feel about McCain robbing the train. This is one of the rare days when it's more fun to read the right-wing blogs than the left-wing ones:

So go ahead and bask in the praise, Lindsey Graham. Soak in the applause, John McCain. And all the rest of you turncoats...

Enjoy it now. We’re not going to forget this. Not now. Not ever.

And there goes your most electable future candidate. Conventional weapons are good for circular firing squads. I wonder if any of those northeastern GOP moderates will seek political asylum from Harry Reid. I leave you with words from Dobson himself:

This Senate agreement represents a complete bailout and betrayal by a cabal of Republicans and a great victory for united Democrats.

The five book game

Ezra says it's my turn to name the five books I really need to read. I hope it's not cheating to include two of his books on my list, since I've only read the parts I needed for doing my TA work here at Texas, and I need to read more of them...

The first thing I need to read is Rawls' Theory of Justice. Now, I'm not much into stuff that calls itself political philosophy, because I think you just need to find the correct general theory of value (I think it's utilitarianism) and apply that directly to public policy without worrying about any stereotypically political-philosophy considerations. But this is the biggest political philosophy book of the last century, and I'm told that it calls the method I've described above into question. Some of it is also really fun to teach! Showing Texas undergrads with strong libertarian intuitions the argument for why we only deserve what we'd be apportioned behind the Veil of Ignorance was a wondrous experience. It was one of the moments when the kids are like, "I can't figure out why this is wrong, but if it's right, my world is upside-down!" The whole class stayed for a few minutes after the bell to keep arguing it out. I need to read the rest of the book to do this thing properly as a professor.

Then there's Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, another victim of my disregard of political philosophy and another thing I've only read for teaching. I spend enough time arguing with libertarians that I really need to read their book. I've heard that it's an easy read, unlike Rawls, and I'll try to get to it this summer. (BTW, I've got a funny personal story about Nozick which will be shared in a future post.)

The third and final entry on the "I've taught some and I need to read the rest" is the Bible. I want to know more about Jesus, who seems to have been a pretty cool guy. Since I enjoy mythology, I'll enjoy the stuff I don't believe. I also like talking philosophy with religious people, and this'll make those conversations more fruitful. Philosophy of Religion was another great teaching experience, and this will set me up nicely to do that again.

I took an excellent normative ethics class with Left2Right's Liz Anderson last fall, and now I want to read her Value in Ethics and Economics. I've heard (from people sympathetic to economics) that the criticisms of the discipline in there are good.

Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons, which I really need to finish, will end up being one of the most-remembered philosophy books of the 20th century. The stuff on personal identity in section 3 (what makes me the same person today as I was yesterday?) will be a part of any intro-philosophy class I teach to sufficiently smart kids. One of the most beautiful moments I've ever found in analytic philosophy arrives after Parfit has established his reductionist theory of personal identity, on which the connection making someone the same person at two moments is surprisingly slight:

When I believed that my existence was such a further fact [like a soul or something existing separately from one's experiences], I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.

Now, whose reading preferences am I the most curious about? I pass the baton to battlepanda, Bunny McIntosh, and Fafnir.

(I restricted myself to relatively nontechnical stuff in this list. Some more technical books that I really need to read are Maudmarie Clark's Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy since I'm a Nietzsche scholar, Michael Bratman's Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason because I've got a sweet counterexample to the closure of rational intending under conjunction and I need to know if it hits him, Frank Jackson's From Metaphysics to Ethics because I won't give up on analyticity, and Jonathan Dancy's Practical Reality -- he's on my dissertation committee because he's the opponent I've always wanted.)

bathrooms

I mishear lyrics worse than anybody else. Here's the chorus of Rilo Kiley's "Portions for Foxes".

And it's bad news
Baby it's bad news
It's just bad news, bad news, bad news

The first time I heard this song, it was at their show in Austin. And what did I hear? "bathrooms, bathrooms, bathrooms." I was kind of into the song though I had no idea what it was about, so I googled ""Rilo Kiley" bathrooms" to find the lyrics. Of course, I didn't find anything. (Actually, there are a full 1,460 hits for that search string, but none of them are what I was looking for.)

In mishearing-unrelated news, I rather like the title lyrics. People talking about their deaths in terms of becoming food for scavengers always seemed really powerful to me.

In lyrics-unrelated news, lead singer Jenny Lewis is really cute.

As the moon gets big

I turn into one of my role models:

Social Security never dies

Could someone tell me why we're allowing the GOP to claim that Social Security will pay smaller benefits in 2041 or whenever the money in the trust fund runs out? (If it ever does run out.)

I'm thinking that if the trust fund runs out, Social Security keeps paying out benefits just as it used to. It just becomes a drain on the rest of the budget. The program is too loved for us to stop paying the benefits. I mean, there isn't any requirement that we send only payroll tax receipts to the old folks, is there? We can send them income tax receipts and T-bond sale proceeds too. So we don't have a localized Social Security problem. We just have a general budget problem.

Ahead in the red

Ed Kilgore has data on the surprising popularity of red-state Democratic governors. It's a good thing for the present, and I wonder how many Senators we eventually get out of this!

The worst thing in Hume's Treatise

I've defended the view that David Hume was the greatest philosopher ever, and I become slowly more convinced of it as time wears on. But now I write about the worst bit of his writing I've ever read.

It comes in Book III, Part II of his Treatise of Human Nature. In the final section of Part II, he offers a justification of why chastity is praised as a virtue for women. The explanation is as follows: It's of great social importance that men be able to confidently believe that they are the biological fathers of their wives' offspring. If they're not confident in this, they won't expend enough effort in providing for children, and future generations will be worse for it. If wives are unchaste, men won't know whether their wives' offspring are their children are not, and this will prevent men from caring for future generations. Despite the fact that it takes two to have extramarital sex, Hume claims that men's moral obligation to be chaste is not as strong. Nowhere is there any explicit mention of the immorality a man engages in when he has sex with another man's wife. The point that an emphasis on male chastity would be as effective as an emphasis on female chastity is totally lost on him. (Hume describes in detail, but refrains from criticizing, the extension of chastity norms to cover women beyond childbearing age.)

And now I come to the part that is a total betrayal of Hume's genius. I quote the last two sentences:

'Tis contrary to the interest of human society, that men should have an entire liberty of indulging their appetites in venereal enjoyment: But as this interest is weaker than in the case of the female sex, the moral obligation, arising from it, must be proportionably weaker. And to prove this we need only appeal to the practice and sentiments of all nations and ages.

But when did the practice and sentiments of all nations and ages ever matter to you? David, you were the one who argued (against the most deeply held beliefs of all ages!) that causes don't necessitate their effects. You offered a reduction of causation to constant conjunction which eliminated the causal necessity that everyone believed in. In doing so, you offered an error theory of causal necessity -- do you think that causal necessity is less fundamental than the moral belief in chastity as a virtue? If you do, you're blind. You know that unfortunate features of our psychology dispose us to make false judgments on so many things. And what could've made you forget that here? Despite your hours in the brothels of Edinburgh, did you not regard the whores as unfortunate creatures unfairly condemned? If you failed to do so, natural sympathy is lacking in you, and in that you are vicious.

One might try an excuse for Hume here -- he lived in a time before feminism, so he didn't know how the interests of powerful men could've led accepted views about sexual morality into error. But if we respect Hume's capacity to identify processes that lead us into error, there's not much we can feel here but disappointment. Maybe we could accept it from somone who worked to codify all his intuitions into philosophy. But among Hume's gifts were his willingness to tell everyone that they were wrong, and his skill in finding psychological explanations of error. Where we see that these gifts failed him, there is cause for disappointment and sadness.

incipit Calvinball

Since the Republicans have their finger on the trigger as we speak, let's get clear on exactly what the nuclear option is. Matt explains:

the nuclear option isn't just ending judicial filibusters, it's ending them by breaking the rules of the Senate. That's unacceptable.

Or, to be more specific about how the rules of the Senate will be broken, here's The Hill:

A Congressional Research Service report on the subject, updated this month, leaves little doubt that moves being contemplated by Republicans — specifically a ruling that a supermajority requirement to cut off debate is not in order — would not be based on previous precedents of the Senate.

The rules say you need 60 votes to cut off debate. So the Chair will claim, over the objections of the parliamentarian, that the rules actually say you need 50. That's the point where you've abandoned the idea of a fixed system of rules. You're making them up as you go along. Basically, you're playing Calvinball.


If you're wondering who came up with the term "nuclear option", the answer is: Trent Lott. The current GOP term -- "constitutional option" was arrived at when the Republicans discovered that "nuclear option" didn't poll well. I'm not sure who first pointed out the similarity to Calvinball, but "Calvinball option" would've been a much more accurate term.

Ohhyeahh

I got seriously interested in politics again about the time of the Iowa primaries, so I didn't really have time to get caught up in the Howard Dean excitement. But after watching the George Galloway video -- however much I'd disagree with Galloway on other things -- I get a sense of how the Deaniacs must've felt when their man was hammering Bush on Iraq.

Via Bunny McIntosh.

Cartoon of the day

Actually, it was on I Drew This a couple weeks ago, but I got it from Occultatio today.

When dadahead attacks

I believe that blogs should be tools for reasoned political debate and discussion rather than weapons with which to inflict devastation. On this, dadahead and I have some difference of opinion.

It's still fun to watch, though.

I prefer eoboks

If you've got a lot of weird emails linking to German websites in the last day or so, they're probably from a neo-Nazi group that's trying to influence a regional election by circulating a virus that spams people with anti-immigrant magazine articles. I haven't been affected, probably because I don't use an address book.

Personally, I'll take ads for Sceert eoboks over neo-Nazi spam. While the eobok featured in my ad was about how to have a great sex instantly, I see that eoboks on such exotic topics as "g-sopt" and "wonems pleasure map" are also available.

The Hillary obsession

Brendan Nyhan ventures into the Townhall abyss and returns us this bit of Novak:

Members of the inner circle of high-ranking House Republicans privately agree that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York is an absolute lock for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination and will not be easy to defeat in the general election.

I know that conservatives obsess over Hillary Clinton and Michael Moore while the real liberal heroes are Barack Obama and Jon Stewart, but I didn't know that the House GOP leadership had gone that crazy. I mean, "absolute lock"? Maybe Novak is making things up, but I don't see what would motivate that. Personally, I think Hillary's chances of winning the nomination, especially given uncertainty about whether she's running, are behind those of Kerry, Edwards, and Clark. (I was thinking Feingold too, but I'm guessing that Hillary has lots more fundraising power.)

Why are the House Republicans so confused? I think it's sort of like what happened to us back when we lost the election and some flimsy exit polling data got everyone thinking that gay marriage did it. My theory on that was that we were quick to blame the enemies who most haunt our thoughts -- theocratic conservatives -- for our defeat. All the things that cause conservatives to hate Hillary, from feminism to universal health care to transferred Bill Clinton hatred, cause them to think about her way too much and see her in all sorts of unlikely places. There might be some wishful thinking too -- the operative wish being to get another crack at Bill Clinton and finally beat him in an election.

Does the thought of a Jeb '08 candidacy arise the same way? I don't know, but if we couldn't beat George, wouldn't it be great to beat his brother? Oh...

Please don't call him dumb

Mark Schmitt on Virginia senator and GOP presidential hopeful George Allen:

there's something fascinating about Allen: He does not speak English. I mean that almost literally, in that he does not construct sentences made up of commonplace English words. Rather, he speaks entirely in a patois constructed of football metaphors. Absolutely everything is second down or third down, or five yards or ten yards or a Hail Mary. If you were unfamiliar with the basic jargon of American football (as many people are), his every word would be incomprehensible.

In the comments, a Neil who isn't me says:

He's as dumb as a bag of rocks, and I expect America to pick up on that.

Nooooo!!!!!

Please don't do this again. We attack the dumb guy for being dumb, he out-good-ol'-boys us, we look like effete elitists, and we lose. We've been through a world of hurt trying this strategy before, and I don't want to see it again. If we had defined Bush as a spoiled rich kid who never amounted to anything beyond what his daddy bought him, just as he was emerging in 2000, we would've been much better off. Of course, we couldn't have, because Al Gore had the wrong life story for that kind of thing.

It's probably easier to run the spoiled-rich-kid critique against the son of a president than the son of a football coach. Maybe not impossible, though. Is there a strong enough trope about the coaches' son who gets to be starting quarterback out of nepotism rather than talent? Inquiring effete elitists want to know.

(The original draft of this post contained the line, "When you go on about the dumbness of a GOP nominee, you're throwing into triple coverage, and the Republicans are going to run it back for a touchdown." While there's a temptation to follow up the mentions of football metaphor by using one, I felt that I should resist. Thoughts?)

Marist poll

The May 6 Marist poll has a few bits of interesting data. One that I like is as follows:

For the Democrats, it’s John Edwards, not either of the two marquis names of Kerry or Clinton who runs strongest against the top Republicans. Edwards is numerically three points ahead of Rudy Giuliani and three points behind John McCain. Statistically both contests are a tossup.

Unless the two Senators have acquired titles of nobility, that should be "marquee names," but you get the picture.

In other news, Clark gets 4% support in the Democratic primary, but I know it's higher than that among activist types. Clinton gets 40%, which is way above what you'll find if you poll the activists, and the Kerry/Edwards 18/16 are a bit inflated too.

Vo-mentum

Sure, it'd be nice if George Voinovich had a spine and voted against John Bolton. But, like Ezra, I'm willing to give some credit to the guy for having the third of a spine that it took to speak up, unlike some of the other unhappy Republicans on the committee. He's more or less pulled a Lieberman, and it'll help us win the Bolton media battle.

Joe Lieberman has a fairly liberal voting record, but often says nasty (and worse, inaccurate) things about the Democratic party, making life hard for us as he makes the Republicans' points for them with more authority than any Republican could. In addition to the direct impact of his attacks, he helps the GOP get generally favorable media coverage. The media tends to say nice things about one side in a debate when voices from both parties are on that side. That side isn't being motivated by mere partisan ire -- they're really considering the issues and being good conscientious bipartisan people!

Voinovich has given us some Joementum in the Bolton debate, and we should be thankful. Now our concerns can't be dismissed as just a bunch of Bush-hating Democrats complaining about Bolton. To some extent, it'll help us in the debate about judges as well. The media will be more likely to say that we're responding to serious problems with the nominees themselves, not just playing silly obstruction games. The way this sets Voinovich up as a pro-nuclear-option player is worrisome, though.

Bush's FDA rapist

The president has nominated a lot of bad people to government positions. There's the mining lobbyist who got nominated to be a federal judge, and now the incompetent jerk who's nominated to be our UN ambassador.

But this is worst of all -- a marital rapist was nominated to a FDA panel on women's health issues.

Mattombo at the United Center

Tabarrok goes to the hoop: United Airlines shows how risky big pension programs like Social Security are!

(If he was aiming to support any of the Bush plans, he would've missed anyway, since United's pension program invests in the stock market just like a privatized system does.)

Yglesias with the block: Social Security lets you diversify away from the private sector, and diversification into another asset class reduces your total risk.

(Feel free to indulge in a finger-wag.)