Steve Reads

That video is a really beautiful and educational bit by Bill Moyers on what Lyndon Johnson did for black people with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It’s via Talking Points Memo. It’s exactly the kind of perspective we need more of. People forget what good LBJ did for black people, which is why it’s so easy for tempers to flare over a line like Hillary Clinton’s (which is included in the Moyers video). Moyers doesn’t downplay either the struggles of black Americans, or the importance of LBJ’s legislation; his is a perfectly balanced voice of calm.

Here again I urge you to listen to Johnson’s address to a joint session of Congress, introducing the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It brings tears to my eyes every time I listen to it. This section, in particular, always gets me:

To those who seek to avoid action by their National Government in their own communities, who want to and who seek to maintain purely local control over elections, the answer is simple: open your polling places to all your people.

Allow men and women to register and vote whatever the color of their skin.

Extend the rights of citizenship to every citizen of this land.

There is no constitutional issue here. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong — deadly wrong — to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States’ rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights. I have not the slightest doubt what will be your answer.

But the last time a President sent a civil rights bill to the Congress, it contained a provision to protect voting rights in Federal elections. That civil rights bill was passed after eight long months of debate. And when that bill came to my desk from the Congress for my signature, the heart of the voting provision had been eliminated. This time, on this issue, there must be no delay, or no hesitation, or no compromise with our purpose.

I can’t wait for the fourth volume of Robert Caro’s LBJ bio to come out. This will be the volume dealing with (one assumes) everything from the end of Johnson’s Senate tenure to the end of his life. So it will contain the presidential race in 1960, LBJ’s vice presidency, everything that happened during JFK’s presidency (the Cuban Missile Crisis, Bay of Pigs), Vietnam, the fight for civil rights, and Johnson’s abandonment of his erstwhile Southern colleagues — leading, as that did, to 40 years in which the GOP owned the South. It will either be a massive volume, or a brilliantly concise one. Either that, or Caro is wrong and he’ll need a fifth volume to do the story justice. I can’t wait to see what he decides.

I’m normally happy that the New Yorker exists. It has exactly a week’s worth of perspective, which is a substantial improvement on the 24-hour news cycle and is even an improvement on Time and Newsweek, which should both ostensibly also have a week’s perspective. (My favorite headline from one of those two — I wanna say Newsweek — was “Why she outed him,” next to a photo of Dumbledore. If there could be a less interesting subject for an article, I would like to know what it is.)

Something is wrong with this week’s issue, though. The perspective is still wider than that of most blogs, but I also get the distinct feeling that more knowledgeable folks will be calling The New Yorker out for peddling errors. For instance, I’m pretty sure that the Balkinization folks would call bullshit on Lawrence Wright’s interview with Mitch McConnell. If most newspapers are guilty of playing “he said, she said,” that interview is guilty of only playing “he said”: they interview McConell, Robert Gates, and a few others similarly positioned; that’s it. Lawrence Wright seems like a well-seasoned sort of guy, but it’s not clear that he’s the guy I want explaining the finer points of FISA. I’d like a lawyer to do that. Barring that, I’d like a lawyer to explain FISA to Lawrence Wright.

This week’s issue is also peculiar in that it talks superciliously about the media, which calls all the more attention to whatever The New Yorker itself might be saying. See in particular their article on “the MySpace suicide”. The premise is that the media are about to leave and The New Yorker come around to clean up the mess and clarify things. Which only makes me pay more attention to The New Yorker‘s own failings. Not only is the emperor unclothed, but he’s begging me to observe his nakedness.

In the world of the 24-hour news cycle, The New Yorker‘s perspective is valuable, but as time goes on I want even longer perspectives. I want the kind of scope that only (the right kind of) books can provide. I want peer review; whether that peer review is formally a part of the magazine itself (say, “The Spymaster”, followed by “The Spymaster: A Reply” and finally “The Spymaster: A Rejoinder”), or is just part of the informal structure around the magazine isn’t especially important; what is important is that people feel no particular rush to publish. Take the time necessary to get the whole story out and interview everyone who might be able to help sketch a clearer picture. And wait a while. If you can publish something profound that takes two months, or something weak that takes a couple weeks, wait the two months.

Of course that’s idealistic and naïve. It’s pretty clear to me, though, that it would improve the quality of discourse in this country.

(Extensions to Ph.D. theses that will be read by a handful of people in the world, then sit unread for decades gathering dust on a library shelf somewhere, are left to those with more experience in graduate education.)

A friend and I were talking tonight about the holy trinity that actually runs the Republican Party: the Grover Norquist arm that provides the ideology, the Richard Mellon Scaifes who provide the money, and the evangelicals who bring in the votes. The funny thing about Mike Huckabee is that he’s using the Republicans’ strategy against them: they co-opt evangelicals, while not actually giving them anything; they don’t actually elect evangelical candidates. That would be nonsense.

To which my friend replied, “Republicans treat evangelicals like Democrats treat black people.”

Let’s hope that this extremely sad news fixes itself soon: Toscanini’s, the beloved Cambridge ice-cream shop, has been seized by the state for nonpayment of back taxes, to the tune of $167,000. Boston Magazine says that Gus Rancatore hopes to reopen it soon. I hope so, too.

Gus has had bad luck. He bought out the Someday Café and promptly lost it, either because of his own carelessness or because of a sleazy property owner, depending on how you view it. The Someday was a classic ratty coffeeshop, with (as that link describes it) Goodwill furniture. Gus bought it and promised to keep it ratty.

There was a Tosci in Harvard Square. I asked Gus a while back why it’s gone now; he said that the rent was just too high. The shop closed for a while for renovations, and never reopened; it’s possible that there was some sort of bait-and-switch in the meantime, or it could mean that Gus’s luck gave out on him again.

Finally, there was a “Toscanini and Sons” bakery where Panini used to be, near the Wine and Cheese Cask and Dali in Somerville. I’ve not been over that way in a while, so I don’t know if it’s still there.

The Central Square Toscanini’s is fundamental to the community. It needs to stick around. I wonder what we can do to make that happen.

P.S. (21 January 2007): It’s gotten kind of silly. There’s now a Save Toscanini’s website, where you can donate to help rescue them from the claws of the state. But … they’re a for-profit company. And this is pathetic. More to the point, I get the sense that Toscanini’s has failed to pay taxes because Gus isn’t a very good businessmen. (I’m not sure, but I do wonder.) So why would I want to donate money when it may well go down the tubes?

I introduce a précis of this book with a bit of trepidation, but here goes: Bill McKibben records 24 hours worth of programming from every single one of Fairfax, Virginia’s 93 television stations. Then he watches all of them, eight hours a day, for basically a year. On another day he heads off into the mountains and writes about that. Compare and contrast.

I hesitate because this will give you at least one immediate idea, namely that McKibben is a wanker or condescending, or both. Thankfully McKibben himself was well aware of both possibilities, and avoided them studiously.

It’s a fun book, profound, and a quick read. If you’ve read David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Plurum” (collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again), you’ll have one of the threads, namely a look at TV’s involution. In “E Unibus Plurum,” Wallace noted that television shows increasingly only referred to other television shows: you don’t need to know anything about the culture of the outside world to understand all of the jokes. Wallace, at some level, thought this was cute. He was singularly unwilling to say that television is crap; instead, he took television to be a great object for scholarly study. McKibben has no problem calling out the low quality of most television.

He goes well beyond that, into a lot of thoughts about TV that never would have occurred to me — certainly not as eloquently as he put them. For instance, television has shrunk history: if it occurred before the era when things could be televised, it might as well not exist. The History Channel makes some exceptions, but they’re few and far between. We’re expected to know about as far back as the Nixon-Kennedy debate, and that’s it.

Or take nature videos. They’ve done a great deal of good for the environmental movement, but they’ve convinced people that nature is either a) cute and cuddly, b) so ugly that it wraps back around and becomes cute, or c) red in tooth and claw. Real nature is boring: lions spend most of their time sleeping, not shredding flesh. Television has made it hard for us to appreciate a quiet moment in the woods. McKibben’s time on top of a mountain is an attempt to bring some of that back.

He makes a rather disturbing claim midway through: for all our economic progress, that progress has changed almost nothing in the lives of Americans in the last 40 years. At the beginning of the 20th century,

People learned to talk across long distances on telephones, to travel easily and routinely. School became standard, even in remote areas. The occupations divided and specialized, replacing self-sufficient ways of life. Appliances transformed the home. Birth control allowed limits on reproduction. Easy refrigeration changed the way we thought about food. Most people’s bathrooms moved indoors. People washed their bodies daily, not weekly. Medicine eliminated most childhood deaths, and made all lives healthier and more secure. Radio and then television spread a universal culture. Farming mechanized to the point where most people were freed from the soil.

What are the big life-changing innovations from the 1960′s to now? We’ve been reduced to little technological fixes and excessive convenience:

An ad, endlessly repeated, touts Glassmates, which makes it easier to remove fingerprints on glass and spots on mirrors. “Every day I clean them. Spray on the cleaner, scrub with one paper towel, dry with another. Three messy steps,” overcome with a single blow — these are the kind of dragons we have left to slay.

Yet this is, again, what our economic logic forces: companies must grow, even if there’s really nothing we need to buy. The stock market demands a rate of growth that exceeds the mere rate of births. Advertising tells you that you need a larger car, more stuff in your house, a smaller, blacker iPod to replace the one you bought a year ago, and Glassmates. Or “Frank ‘n’ Stuff”:

“While developing Frank ‘n’ Stuff we designed, built and patented a system where we could put a perfect tunnel of chili or cheese in every wiener….”

I don’t know if McKibben is right that we’ve reached a point where valuable technological innovation is rare, but it’s certainly a compelling point. In fact, the biggest innovation that’s arrived since Missing Information came out is the Internet, and it’s not clear that the net fundamentally alters McKibben’s story. Certainly there are those of us who believe that the net is a force for great good and great social change, and that it differs fundamentally from television. Really what this book calls for, though, is silence. McKibben thinks that we should spend more time building meaningful lives and meaningful communities. That involves unplugging. Whether it’s unplugging the TV or the computer seems immaterial to the argument.

(Many thanks to Jessamyn West for recommending this book to me, back in 2005 or 2006.)

This is pretty much the final word on keeping your network open. Yes, there are drawbacks. Schneier talks to the lawyers to figure out exactly what those drawbacks are. I think he pretty well covers all the arguments for and against openness. Others have apparently replied to him; if you read any of those and they seem valuable, let me know.

Schneier’s article included below.

(more…)

It used to be (starting maybe 18 months or 2 years ago) that when a T train was about to arrive, they’d announce, “Attention passengers: the next [color]-line train to [destination] is now arriving.” Starting a few weeks ago, they’ve replaced this with two announcements: first that the train is “now approaching,” and next that the train is “now arriving.” The second one normally airs 15 or 20 seconds before the train actually comes into the station.

I think I get why they use this new announcement. It used to be that every now and again, when they’d say that the train was “now arriving,” it would take several minutes for it to actually arrive. I gather that the new “now approaching” replaces the old “now arriving,” and the new “now arriving” means “no seriously, we mean it this time — it’s actually here, you guys.”

Like a lot of things in Boston, and on the T in particular, the new system (if I read it correctly) is a hack to replace a bad earlier decision. Rather than start over, they decide to add on to an earlier mess. So someone decided that two announcements is better than one. Doesn’t it seem to you that one announcement, 30 or so seconds before the train arrives, would work better?

First movie in a long time that I’ve left before it finished.

If you don’t know Bob Dylan’s discography inside and out, you’ve not already steeped yourself in Dylan Lore, and you’ve not seen Don't Look Back, this movie will be incomprehensible.

If you have done all those things, it will still be unenjoyable.

It tries to fill in some of the mysteries of Dylan’s life. In this, it is substantially less useful than spending a few hours in the company of the albums, listening very hard to the lyrics. If you don’t want to spend that much time thinking about Dylan’s music, then what’s the point of going to this movie in the first place?

It’s funny how long it took me to see that there’s really a very straightforward economic logic in corporate behavior, and that its consequences are obvious if you know to look for them.

The latest one that Marion Nestle points out in What To Eat is a continuation of how she covered breast feeding and infant formula in Food Politics. She put the case against infant formula straightforwardly there:

To understand the larger significance of this campaign, we need to start with three undeniable premises: (1) breast milk is superior to any other food for infants, (2) nearly all mothers are fully capable of breast-feeding, and (3) even the slightest effort to promote use of formula undermines the ability to breast-feed.

Here in What To Eat, we have what looks like an equally clear-cut case. I love how Nestle starts:

Underlying the controversy is the unpleasant reality for the companies that make infant formulas and baby foods: the market for these products is severely limited. For these products, the usual methods for corporate growth do not work. The companies that make infant formulas and baby foods cannot easily attract new customers or persuade old customers to buy more and eat more. For formulas, the size of the market depends entirely on the number of babies born each year and the proportion that are not breast-fed. But formula companies have no control over how many babies are born, so the only way they can increase sales is to discourage breast-feeding (hence the need for an international code of ethics). Sales of baby foods also depend on the number of babies born. But older infants and toddlers eat those foods just for a year or two, so the only way baby food companies can increase sales is by promoting use of their products for longer time periods. With these kinds of constraints, the companies that make formulas and baby foods compete fiercely to hold or increase their share of an extremely restricted market.

Nestle describes another huge constraint later on: all baby formulas are nutritionally identical, by law.

Because formulas (if used in place of breast milk) are the only source of nutrition for infants, they have to contain everything babies need to grow. If they lack even one essential nutrient, as happens on occasion, babies can become ill and die. To make sure that formulas are complete, the FDA closely regulates and monitors their contents. The result is that all brands of infant formulas must have a virtually identical nutritional composition. The nutritional similarity of infant formulas poses another marketing problem for their makers. If the products are all the same, it makes no difference which brand you buy.

It would be interesting to figure out which activities society judges too important for market allocation. The defense industry and blood donation come to mind. Baby formula is somewhere on the spectrum between pure free-market allocation and purely centralized allocation. It would be interesting to ask why society considers baby formula too risky to leave to the market. If you have more faith in the market, you’ll trust companies to develop a brand identity, and trust mothers to be extremely brand-sensitive. Why mandate nutrients? Why not just assume that mothers and markets will converge to the right solution? It’s not a ridiculous question. In all likelihood, society had this very debate at one point and answered the question.

(Relevant cites here, from What To Eat : “Infant Formula: Evaluating the Safety of New Ingredients” and Mothers and Medicine: A Social History of Infant Feeding, 1890-1950. The latter, at least, is on its way to me.)

As the years go by, buying formula rather than breastfeeding seems like a more and more terrible idea. First, it’s nutritionally deficient. Second, I can’t imagine that mother and child develop nearly the bond when she sticks a bottle in her baby’s mouth as when the baby is drawing nourishment directly from her body. And third, infant formula is another instance where industrial capitalism pushes its own “solutions” on humanity, replacing a perfectly good natural solution with one that either immediately or eventually proves to be harmful. Why not skip the factory altogether and give your baby what nature gave you? If I ever have kids, that’s surely what my wife and I will do.

This is a variant of the precautionary principle. I got in a debate a few years back on Professor Larry Solum’s blog about this question. I’ve not refreshed my memory very intensely about how that debate went, but I remember that he basically thought I was downplaying the upside potential: why not adopt a new technology if it might bring great benefits to the world’s food supply?

The answer seems clearer now than it did then: these developments all help companies, and very rarely help us. They make food cheaper, but we in the U.S. have all the food we need. If anything, we need to teach people to eat less. Genetic engineering, pesticides on plants, and antibiotics in cattle feed all look like they’ll be great boons, but they’re mostly boons for Monsanto. I want beef that’s beef, tomatoes that are tomatoes, and nothing but breast milk for my baby. I don’t need food from factories.

Of course the label is already out there: those who insist on a more natural food supply are snobs. If you want organic food, you’re a spoiled yuppie.

I don’t think that argument even deserves a response. The ones who have some explaining to do are the ones who’ve made most urban rivers unswimmable, and who’ve turned the Gulf of Mexico into a massive dead zone. Until they convince me that these are sensible tradeoffs for cheap food, I’m going to buy organic. And I’m going to do what I can to help poor people afford it, too.

Marion Nestle’s earlier Food Politics was a magisterial tour through exactly how badly the food industry is lying to you. They do exactly what you would expect them to do: first they maximize their profits at your expense, then they use some of those profits to lobby Congress to make sure that no one regulates them. Every time the FDA tries to clamp down, the industry’s lobbyists fire back. They usually win. Food Politics is not a happy book. It’s deeply enlightening, and every American who eats food should read it. But it’s not the most uplifting read. It left me desperate to know who in the world (other than Marion Nestle) will tell me the truth. Fortunately there are a number of disinterested organizations that will do so. The Center for Science in the Public Interest comes out of Food Politics looking great: they fill in the gaps that the meat industry, among others, have left in FDA regulations. (The food industries have successfully painted CSPI as “professional scolds.”) Then there’s Consumer’s Union and any number of companies that do right by their customers. Good guys, though, are few and far between in Food Politics.

What To Eat looked like it would be somewhat more of a guidebook: head into the grocery store with What To Eat in your hand and quickly find the best foods for you — the ones that don’t inject harsh chemicals into your body, don’t emerge from laboratories, don’t leave the soil worse than they found it, etc. Nestle’s introduction sets up this hope; after Food Politics, she says, lots of people come up to her with desperation in their eyes. What To Eat was her attempt to help them. Much of the nutritional confusion that we experience when we go to the grocery store, she says, has been put there by food companies.

First of all, no food company will tolerate an “eat less” message. That’s why a clear message like “eat less meat” gets muddled to “eat lean cuts of meat.” That’s why the old food pyramid, which was very clear about eat more grains, more vegetables and less meat became the new food pyramid, which is less clear and emphasizes “more exercise” messages over “less food” ones. The new one, not to put too fine a point on it, is garbage.

Second and for the same reason, food companies hate the “organic” label, and have done all they can to weaken it. They hate that it would suggest some foods are better than others. So first they plant the message that “organic” means nothing. Nestle is very clear: “organic” means a lot. The food companies’ endless attempts to weaken it suggest that it means something important. But then food companies also have tried to weaken the regulations surrounding the “organic” label — for instance, they’ve fought to allow sewage sludge to be used as a crop fertilizer. They lost that battle, and thus far “organic” means a lot. If Nestle is right, it will require constant vigilance to defend the meaning of the word; the food companies, and their allies in the USDA, will do all they can to weaken it. I wonder whether the increasing size of companies like Whole Foods will help offset the conventional-food companies’ power. Nestle doesn’t go into much detail about that.

Her nutritional lessons are often fairly straightforward:

• Eat more vegetables and less meat
• Eat organic where possible
• Organic agriculture hardly increases production costs at all. The increased costs are offset by lower costs for fuel and pesticides. And of course the long-term savings are enormous: the soil will last longer, the Gulf of Mexico may eventually get cleaner, your children’s bodies will be filled with fewer pesticides, and you won’t be speeding the immunity of bacteria and insects to antibiotics and pesticides.
• Organic beef, while it does exist, is a negligible fraction of the total U.S. beef market, and is apparently very hard to find.
• Fish that are higher in the food chain, like salmon, will have higher concentrations of PCBs. So eat fish that are lower down. And be careful to limit your total fish intake, because the PCB problem is everywhere.
• Farm-raised fish are worse for you, and worse for the environment, than wild fish.
• By the time What To Eat had gone to print, the government had not agreed on what “organic” means in the context of fish.
• In general, knowledge really is power. Labeling foods by their country of origin would help, but food companies oppose it (because you might not buy fish from the more-polluted waters of Northern Europe). Implementing nutrition programs in schools really does make kids eat better. The most powerful food companies (say, Coke) oppose that too.
• Yogurt is good for you, but only the plain kind. Danimals and Go-gurt are candy that free-ride on the healthful reputation of yogurt even while they’re packed with sugar.

A necessary condition for my food is that it not be poisonous, and that I not aid in the destruction of the earth by eating it. Remarkably, this seems like a really hard goal to attain. Food along the lines of that from Polyface Farms — perfectly sustainable, “beyond organic” — is difficult to find anywhere.

Knowing where all your food comes from, and building the reputations of specific brands, would make us all safer. Most food, though, is a commodity: we buy steak, maybe specifically sirloin, and don’t pay much attention to who’s produced it. One tiny corner of the coffee world — led by brands like George Howell’s Terroir — is trying to push in the opposite direction: by attaching specific farms’ names to specific batches of coffee, the farmers are encouraged to make a name for themselves. The idea is that their quality will increase if customers seek out, say, Daterra‘s coffee.

Brands are better for customers, but I wonder whether commodification is better for the shadier companies. If you can hide your company’s filthy beef under the generic label of “sirloin,” customers won’t be able to censure you when something goes wrong. Maintaining the strength of a brand may turn out to be expensive. I’d be interested in the pressures within the food industry towards and away from branding.

Nestle’s books are remarkably eye-opening. They are rigorously documented proof that most everyone is lying to you. Fortunately we have Nestle and Michael Pollan on our side. The odds in our favor aren’t bad.

I don’t think this was really an endorsement Obama needed.

Next up: whom is Mike Dukakis endorsing?

Walter Mondale: a nation turns its lonely eyes to you. Woo woo woo.

I’m looking for

Anderson D. Americans get fatter, but refuse to die. How naughty. Wall Street J June 8, 2000:A24.

There’s a quote from it in Food Politics. The quote is hilarious. If someone has access to a good archive of Journal articles, I’d love to get a copy of the article. I’ll quote it in here, if that’s all right with whoever finds it for me.

Muchos gracias.

P.S. (11 January 2008): Likewise, What To Eat cites a hilarious quote from

Carole Sugarman, “Labeling Meat and Poultry,” The Washington Post, April 3, 1991

along the same lines (namely: food labeling implies Nazis). It seems not to be available on the webs. I could pay $4 for it on the Washington Post archives if need be.

Hillary Rodham Clinton should not be the Democrats’ nominee. She would lose in the general election. I’ve thought this for years, and I continue to think it now.

I’ll gladly accept the possibility that I’m wrong, and that she’ll win the White House in November. If I’m wrong, then at least there will be a Democrat in the White House … which is good for some reason. It’s not clear that she’d do very much at all to clean up the mess we’ve made in the world, but … maybe a Dem would be valuable. I don’t know. If it came down to a choice between Hillary and McCain, I’d have a hard time deciding what to do.

Which is to say: an abstract Democrat doesn’t do anything for me. I’m not going to vote for a party this time. I’m going to vote for the candidate who’s most likely to make things better, and I just don’t see Hillary doing that.

I submit that Hillary loses to McCain in the general election in a landslide. (Gallup says it would be close — or would have been as of June 2007.) I submit further that she’s the only Democratic candidate who could lose to Mitt Romney. That’s saying a lot. If there’s any doubt in your mind who would win in an HRC-v.-Romney race, ask yourself whether that’s a terrible harbinger. I think it is. Obama would clean the floor with Romney, and would give McCain a run for his money. (I don’t get why McCain hasn’t gone very far in previous elections.)

Since it’s now a two-person race between Obama and Clinton (for better or worse), I have to donate lots of money to Obama. I may actually go up to the Federal maximum of $1,000. I just don’t think this country can afford for Clinton to win the nomination.

Does anyone know where to look for good, detailed historical survival curves? I’m particularly looking for historical survival curves for the U.S. population. One often hears that life expectancy at birth in the 1700′s and 1800′s was, by today’s standards, very low. It occurs to me that the rate of infant mortality was very high; with that taken out, how long were people expected to survive? For instance, what was the life expectancy at age 18? That number still won’t be nearly as high as it is today, because we’ve developed a lot of technologies to prolong life. But it’s a number that we don’t hear much about, so I’d like to dig.

I presume we can get some decent survival curves going way back, because I presume that birth and death records will be more accurate than most.

This reminds me of two big areas in statistics that always interested me in college, but which I never got around to studying: survival analysis and the analysis of time-series data. A quick google suggests that there’s a survival-analysis textbook by Hosmer and Lemeshow, whose names I recognize from one statistic or another. Then there’s one by Klein (whom I don’t know), and a third that’s specifically marketed for “self-learning”; that might be handy.

As for time series, there appears to be a textbook by the redoubtable G.E.P. Box (coinventor of the Box-Cox Transformation, which is not nearly as important as Wiener measure). If anyone has other suggestions on these topics, I’m all ears.

What I’d like in the shorter term, though, is a good collection of survival data of all different sorts. That would also be handy for any survival-analysis studying that I end up doing.

Here’s Gloria Steinem, arguing among other things that the presidential race this year tracks American history: black people got the right to vote before women did, and it looks like a black candidate may win the nomination before a woman does.

I hope someone points out to her that just because black people technically got the right to vote in the 1800′s, they didn’t practically get it until the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Whereas women both technically and practically had it as of 1920.

I submit that Hillary is losing because she’s not a charming candidate, and she’s widely perceived as an empty suit that’s ready to be filled with whatever will help her climb the ladder of power. Obama is winning because he’s charming, because his morals seem to be in the right place, and because of his opposition to the War in Iraq.

A lot of this may be tied up with anti-feminist baggage, but that’s not the first place I’d look. And Steinem’s argument rests on a very thin reed — namely that a woman’s second-place finish to a black man is of a piece with our nation’s history. Take out that peg of her argument, and I don’t know how much is left.

This just about says it all:

(via my former coworker John Irons, as referenced in Brad DeLong’s excellent Huckabee skewer (which I’ve cached), via Cosma Shalizi’s del.icio.us feed.)

We get a flat-tax proposal every few years. Steve Forbes proposed one. I want to say that Jack Kemp proposed one. They’re all the same: meant to sound nice, and meant to benefit the very wealthy.

P.S.: John linked to the President’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform report, chapter 9. It’s a very quick, very straightforward read. For petard-hoisting purposes, few things are better than the Panel’s observation that the FairTax creates a massive new federal expense, on the order of $600 billion annually.

…Ici. This calls into question one of the central contentions in The Great Risk Shift. I wonder how Hacker will respond.

Josh Marshall, at Talking Points Memo, has had a great time of late making fun of Mitt Romney. There’s little you couldn’t make fun of. The snark-fest has to start with the words “colossal phony”; you’re off and running from there.

If you’re looking for an intro to Marshall’s Mitt-snark, just check out his liveblogging of tonight’s Republican debate.

I’m trying to ignore most of the up-and-down from this campaign (Obama’s up! Mitt’s down for the count! Giuliani’s down! Wait, Giuliani’s back! Everyone’s gunning for Hillary!), but I do very much enjoy any viciousness directed at Republicans — at Mitt in particular, whose GOP primary numbers in Massachusetts will be hilariously low.

A quick glimpse at an article about Huckabee’s “FairTax” proposal suggests a few things to me. I’m not especially well-informed (I’m no Krugman), but these seem sensible:

1. The tax system is complicated because it probably started as something simple and “flat,” and people gamed it. So the rules got more complicated to prevent gaming. This complexity is more or less ineradicable. A flat tax — or a “FairTax” — would become complicated.
2. The tax system is also complicated because it’s under political control: Congress makes the tax law. Congress responds to special interests. The way to prevent this is to take the tax system out of political control, à la the Federal Reserve. As far as I know, no one is proposing this.
3. Any just tax system has to put the heaviest burden on the people who can bear it the most, and preferably put no burden at all on the poorest.

That all seems about right, right?

Why do newspapers even bother running headlines like this one?

(a Boston Globe article)

In other news, Steve Martin informs us that winning games requires that we put some points on the board.