Republicans not buying Hillary hurts Dems down ticket and Obama doesn’t meme.

On another issue, I want to believe that Jeremiah Wright’s egomaniacal world tour this week was choreographed by the Obama campaign to give Obama a chance to Sister Soljah him, but I’m not sure I do.

While I continue to believe that Obama sealed the nomination on February 5, the separate and distinct question of how his campaign has been run the last several weeks, I believe is answered differently. It’s been bad.

A lot of the buzz has worn off. And perhaps the press’s love afair has chilled a little. The numbers are mostly stable, and his base support is still energized. But there is a palpable reduction in the energy.

Arguably, that’s Hillary’s fault: she needs to get out of the race so Obama can get on with it. But since it has now been long established that she’s not doing that, the failure of anyone else to do anything about it has to be in the mix too.

It’s time for Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, et al. to end this.

From one of the members of the intellectual vanguard of Neo-classical economics, “law & economics”, and, in a sense, the whole late 20th century conservative movement, Judge Richard Posner:

I no longer believe that deregulation has been a complete, an unqualified, success. As I indicated in my posting of last week, deregulation of the airline industry appears to be a factor in the serious deterioration of service, which I believe has imposed substantial costs on travelers, particularly but not only business travelers; and the partial deregulation of electricity supply may have been a factor in the western energy crisis of 2000 to 2001 and the ensuing Enron debacle. The deregulation of trucking, natural gas, and pipelines has, in contrast, probably been an unqualified success, and likewise the deregulation of the long-distance telecommunications and telecommunications terminal equipment markets, achieved by a combination of deregulatory moves by the Federal Communications Commission beginning in 1968 and the government antitrust suit that culminated in the breakup of AT&T in 1983.

First, considering the source this is shocking. Second, there is a very simple distinguishing feature between successful deregulation industries and others: the services can easily be “unbundled.” By limiting regulation to the natural monopolies, they are freer to let competition work in the other parts.

For example, natural gas can come from quite a few places. Not infinite, but many. And it can be stored. There’s a fine line, but I think gas falls on the side of the line that lets it be free, as long as the natural monopoly pipelines are not.

The same applies to the tons of trucks out there. There’s not really a natural monopoly the way there is with, say, trains. Telecommunications is the same thing. The “pipe” can be regulated as long as the contents can go from point A to point B mostly freely. This is especially possible in the era of packet-switched inter-networks.

Electricity, on the other hand, is always going to be an oligopoly. It’s also too essential to everything else to just leave the regulation to the power lines. Sure, like in Texas, you could unbundle, but at the end of the day there’s only going to be a handful of providers and a handful of power plants, and electricity is virtually impossible to store efficiently.

Same with airlines. Unless you just had a regulated fleet of cargo planes that carried service modules from different companies in them, it’s more or less impossible to unbundle the medium and the cargo. There is also a finite number of routes that can be flown, resulting in natural oligopolies.

Any true champion of the free market doesn’t want monopolies or ologipolies, whether natural or not, whether government or not, interfering in their markets unregulated. This is why we don’t have private ownership of roads or bridges.

This all goes back to the way these issues were understood in the 1800s, arguably in a free market era, but without the same degree of fundamentalism or concentration of political power, which has become a natural monopoly (duopoly?) of its own.

With relation to banking, there is simply no compelling argument for the level of deregulation that we have. It’s too fundamental to everything else, it’s too disaster prone, and that’s been shown again and again, but we keep forgetting.

P.S. How many times have I lamented the repeal of Glass-Steagall as the single worst act of the Clinton administration? That act was responsible for Enron and the current subprime crisis (an expert cited in this Bloomberg.com article agrees). It’s Bush’s fault for not doing anything, but this was made possible by 90s “New Economy” triumphalism and forgetting not just the Great Depression but the recent history of Long Term Capital Management’s meltdown in the mid 90s, and the S&L crisis in the 80s.

Solve global warming, overfishing, soil destruction, pollution, and a great deal of poverty in one fell swoop over 30 years:

Cost: $2T. Pay 1 billion people $1,000 to get sterilized, and use the other half to pay for the operations.

Financed over 30 years at 5%, that’s about $60B per year, or 0.6% of GDP (and less than the Iraq war by far). Almost no one in the developed world would take the money, because it’s nothing to them. However, that would feed people in the developing world for about 3 years in some places, and those are the exact areas that are suffering the worst from overpopulation.

But since you’re not forcing it on anyone–they get to choose–it’s not a scary totalitarian thing.

The total world fertility rate is about 2.6. The total world replacement rate is about 2.3. At present that means a growth rate of about 13%. Reducing the fertile population by 1B would increase the replacement rate, by my amateurish calculations, to about 2.7, which would mean, on average, a population decrease of about 600m per generation. I suppose that’s about a billion in the 30 year period, assuming no countervailing increase in fertility elsewhere.

That calculation could be even greater if not spread out over the whole world. Inasmuch as the appeal of $1,000 would correlate strongly with places with higher birthrates, it might skew that number even higher, so the 1B reduction over 30 years is conservative.

Of course, a simpler and even less scary way of doing this would be to provide free of charge birth control of all kinds to everyone in the world, everywhere. It would cost much, much, much less than $1,000 per person, could arguably reach everyone in the world instead of 15%, and could work an even more drastic reduction.

All of this involves no killing.

Of course, the alternative is to wait for the earth to just choke and kill us through famine and disease.

Claire McCaskill promised on MSNBC Tuesday night that Barack Obama would “pivot” against John McCain and go on the attack after the Pennsylvania primary. Am I impatient by complaining now?

Obama has certainly addressed a lot of my concerns in the past several weeks. He seems to get through the media maelstroms with decent aplomb. One of my remaining concerns is his ability to kick some Republican ass. His campaign and surrogates are shocked—shocked!!! I tell you—that the Clintons have the temerity to use his gaffes against him, or to hit below the belt.

You can read 10 page treatises on a seemingly infinite number of lefty blogs about how Clinton’s attacks were “wrong” or whatever. Who cares? The effect in the polls is what matters. Obama’s already got the cerebral crowd, so he can stop campaigning for them. Ph.D’s everywhere are putting Obama bumper stickers on their Volvos. He’s the president of college.

But for those dominated by lower reaches of the brain, attack politics work. If you whine about them, it just makes it worse.

Time to roll up the sleeves, Barack. Time to get some of that shoe leather up where Hanoi Johnny kept his grandfather’s watch.

Despite only having the entire state Democratic establishment, sans Senator Casey, behind her, Boomer Clinton was able to defeat the incredible misogynist conspiracy again. Despite having a yap dog from her hubby’s administration and a Fox News hack trying to destroy her not white opponent, the incredible misogyny of American culture was not enough to defeat the dogged underdoggedness of Her Royal Clintoness. Clinton Patsy Ed Rendell did not legitimize the quiet racism of “small town” Pennsylvanians by saying that many of them are not ready to vote for a black person. I mean, c’mon, he’s only the Governor! After all, the Clintons are not race baiters, as far as I know.

Now it’s on to North Carolina and Indiana. Hopefully, the fact of Clinton’s vagina will not be enough to undermine her in Indiana despite having the support of Senator Bayh, the governor, and the entire state Democratic machinery. Keep on defeating that phallacracy you multi-millionaire president’s wife underdog with the mini-celebrity daughter! I never thought it would happen in my lifetime, but oh my god it is true! The Democratic Party is finally being wrested away from the iron grip of Senators Leahy and Rockefeller. If only my grandfather had lived to see this moment! I’m gonna’ cry!

McCain 254 Obama 269; ties 15 — Obama wins in House of Reps.
McCain 239 Clinton 289; Clinton wins outright
–April 23, 2008

If those polls are correct and their methodology is sound it’s either an argument for Clinton to get out because she’s hurting Obama. . . or, that the Superdelegates need to support her.

I’m not sure which it argues more for, but I’m pretty sure that the former option is more reflective of reality.

Time to take a bow, Hills.

Man — have you ever seen such a mess of polling? I think I’ve seen everything from Clinton +16 to Obama +6. I know there were some divergences in other places, but there’s been so much time to measure Pennsylvania, you’d think they would, I don’t know, be better.

I think Obama will pull it out, and I think that’s going to mean the party leadership better get their shit together and end this.

“You cast your die when you voted to start this bloody war. When you did that you were like Moses who lost it for a moment and, because of that, was prohibited from entering the Promised Land.

How sad for a country that wanted to see the first woman elected to the White House. That day will come — but it won’t be you. We’ll have to wait for the current Democratic governor of Kansas to run in 2016 (you read it here first!).”

There are a number of things completely whacko about Moore’s statement. Almost everything, in fact, except its essence: that Hillary’s hail mary campaign has only made her look worse, not better, and its past time to get behind Obama.

I reject the notion that voting for Hillary because she would have been the first women president is valid; or that voting for Obama because he’s black is. This is a time in our history where we don’t have that luxury. It’s just luck that it will work out.

As for Kathleen Sibelius, you could have read that here in January, three months ago. In that three months, I’ve become convinced she’s not good enough for the national stage.

“If Benedict is really serious about fixing the Church’s sex scandal problems, he will let priests get married. Then they won’t be so likely to prey on little boys.”

That’s really a ridiculous homopobic contention from a respected Democratic party elder. Pedophiles are drawn to professions where interaction with children is essential. Other professions root those people out through background checks and care.

If the Catholic church really wants to fix its sex scandal it would just do a little more screening. Rooting out gays in favored of “married” priests won’t do that. Heterosexual pedophilia is quite possible, you know.

Back in school, one of my liberal professors shocked me when, after almost a full semester of agreeing with everything she said, came out in favor of government interference with polygamist sects.

We had discussed the wrongful impact of government regulation on reproductive rights, marital relations, gay marriage, miscegenation, and the long-standing gender bias in the law. But when the subject of polygamy came up, she thought the government was right to interfere.

With Passover fast approaching, my thoughts naturally turn to religious persecution. So, with the FLDS in the news again, I thought I’d throw m two cents in.

The first argument is that Polygamy is per se abuse of women. And while there are probably some women who would chose to leave those groups given the right opportunity, there isn’t a large exodus even after raids like this. These women have free will–don’t they? Do we decide for people that they must not have free will because they make bad decisions, or ones that even seem repugnant to us? It wasn’t so long ago that a strong majority opposed gay marriage.

It’s not the choice we protect, it’s ability to make choices that we protect.

Second, the children. It’s always the children, isn’t it? So, the adult women you can say have free will. But what about the brainwashing of the children? What about the alleged sexual abuse of the children? That’s illegal, right?

This is as close to the line as you can get. I would point out that not long ago, the age of consent was 14 some places. Did those 14 year olds suddenly become the victims of sexual abuse the day the legislature changed the law? Does the legislature really dictate these norms?

But this brings up a different question. Are we genuinely going against the child abuse in general, or are we finding child abuse as a tool to oppress polygamy? I suspect it’s the latter. And this bothers me.

Look, if there’s honest to god child abuse going on, stop it. If there are members of the FLDS that are breaking their own rules about young girls, then I don’t feel sorry for them. But, I hate to break it to you, but it’s hardly a unique practice to consider girls who have hit puberty to be women of proper age for child bearing.

I think this is a similar question to circumcision. Is that child abuse? It certainly is an awfully painful procedure (assuming no anesthesia is used) and the medical evidence is mostly equivocal on its benefits. Yet it is probably the most widely practiced aspect of Judaism. In America, most non-Jewish boys are circumcised too. But what if medical practice determined that boys shouldn’t be circumcised until age 18, if at all?

What would happen to the brit milah on the 8th day? Would a bunch of Orthodox rabbis be thrown in jail? In that context, I think we see that as a bit oppressive. That practice is millenia old, and doesn’t appear to have destroyed humanity.

So, as much as I find it abhorrent that young girls are forced to marry older men and bear their children, I have very strong reservations about the use of state power to change that practice.