Friday, January 27, 2006

Howell's Washington Post piece

I've been following the dust-up over Deborah Howell's biased reporting in the Washington Post. She wrote that Abramoff contributed to both Dem and Repub representatives, as if the wrongs were equal, and when the Post blog got tons of angry comments, she give an insipid and misleading "correction." Recently there was a discussion by bloggers and the Post's editor, Jim Brady, about the Post's shutting down its blog to get rid of obscenity. In all this discussion, the whole point of the brouhaha has been lost: namely, Howell's biased reporting! Amazing to me. If her reporting had been on the Fox network or in some other overtly partisan place, nobody would have objected. But when, like Judith Miller's, it comes as a factual piece in a liberal medium, her falsifications and misleading statements have a lot of malign impact.

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Moral Majority

The WSJ this morning has an article about how China, the Islamic world, and other parts of the world are developing new internets. The reason these are gaining some traction, rather than being technological toys, is the world's distrust of American control over the internet through ICANN, a distrust based on its hatred of Bush. In other words, out of a world population of, say, 5 billion people, 150 million support Bush, and the other 97% hate and fear him.

I do not think the hatred of the world, the nearly universal view of the Bush people as villains, derives from their policies per se. Of much greater importance, and danger to human well-being, is their systematic distortion of humanity's core moral values. That they often do so in the name of Christianity is simply hypocritical icing on their stinking cake. The distortions I am talking about consist of a publicly asserted and defended moral relativism that turns values like truth, charity, and justice into propaganda tools, to be used or betrayed as necessary to advance the user's personal agenda. They speak contemptuously of the "reality-based community," proclaim actions compassionate that injure the people they affect, and assert the right of the President to ignore the laws and Constitution when it suits him. These statements openly trivialize and debase the values they purport to use.

Even Richard Nixon, the last truly villainous Republican President, did not go so far. He tried to conceal or deny doing the wrong and immoral things that were eventually proven, but he never tried to deny that those things were in fact wrong or immoral. In other words, when he abused the powers of the Presidency his defense was that he didn't do it. Bush, by contrast, admits that he did it, and claims that it was right and proper for him to do so.

It cannot be truthfully said that terrible people like Bush et al reliably meet their comeuppance. More often than not they prosper from their behavior (except to the extent that they must live with themselves and their ilk), and when such people run political units, they create hell on earth for everyone caught in their web. Often these hells then last for decades or centuries. The good news is that we are still a democracy, with the power to stop and reverse the horrible policies these people are imposing on us and the world at large. The bad news is that every new day makes their impact more indelible.

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Health care reform

Yesterday's WSJ contained discussions of health care reform that I found simultaneously interesting and obscure. It was interesting because of intelligent reader comments and some good comments about the limited value of making consumers pay for their medical care. But it was obscure because the writers were throwing around supposed facts that were not placed in context, and were used as debating props, rather than aids to reasoned discussion. In general, advocates don't seem to work from a common database, and many of the supposed "facts" people cite are either falsehoods or distortions. For example, wingnuts claim that malpractice law is a major culprit, but all available data suggests that malpractice cases are rare, hard to win, and barely touch the hundreds of thousands of actual malpractice.

Nobody seems to mention, any more, the carefully crafted approach worked out by Hilary Clinton and Ira Messenger in 1993, yet as far as I can tell it was the closest thing to a comprehensive and intelligent solution that we have ever had. It was defeated by partisan politics, special interest activity, and clumsy advocacy, not on its merits. I find it hard to take health care reform proposals seriously if they don't build on that proposal, or explain convincingly why not.

Monday, January 09, 2006

Alito

I am sorry to see so many ill-informed comments on Judge Alito's decisions. The fundamental distinction between good judges and bad ones is whether they proceed by choosing the result they desire first and then chopping logic to get there (Scalia, Rehnquist), or by following careful legal reasoning to either the result required or the discretion that the law allows (Harlan, Frankfurter). In my reading of Alito's controversial decisions, he has consistently followed the latter approach. Even where the discretion he exercises is not what I might have chosen, I respect how he got there. Whether Alito now holds the personal views he held in the Reagan years is another matter. But even if he does, I do not see him as an idealogue. Many Supreme Court justices have changed over the years, and given Alito's temperament it seems likely that he comes from the "reality-based" community, and will grow more liberal over time as he considers the consequences of his decisions.

Friday, January 06, 2006

Who I am

I'm a lawyer by training and inclination, have been a business entrepreneur most of my life, and consider myself to be fairly conservative on economic policy, while favoring social policies based on fairness, kindness, and community. I have lived in three cities: Boston, San Francisco, and for some time now, NY. I divide my time between managing investments, arbitrating and mediating legal disputes, working for improved legal systems, serving as chairman of the board of a cosmetic company, and writing a history of the origins of business. I have published articles about antitrust problems in the newspaper industry, Harvard's investment policies, the cost-benefit evaluation of water development in California, and energy policies from an environmental point of view.

Casino corruption is a sideshow

Casino corruption is a sideshow. The main event is far more serious: a full-scale attack on the structures and values that have made America the closest nation to paradise on earth for the last two centuries. This is corruption of a grand order, and responses that merely criticize this or that practice or policy are inadequate. Kerry laid out very well and very clearly what was wrong with Bush's policies in a host of areas, and most Americans consistently agreed with him, but he still lost because he failed to nail the rot from which those policies spring. The basic problem is that the Bush people are fundamentally un-American and immoral. It is not just that they engage in torture, murder, lying, deception, and unlawful conduct. Even worse, I think, is that they openly argue in favor of such behaviors, which were formerly regarded as so shameful that even inveterate crooks like Nixon felt it necessary to deny engaging in such conduct.