John Lennon (1940 - 1980)

John Lennon died at age 40, 40 years ago today.

I did this blog post 12 years ago, linking to both of my parents' memories of being in the same city where he died on December 8, 1980.

Both of their posts mention that they named me John when I was born 99 days later. Now I'm almost 40 and I'm living on the Upper West Side, not far from where it happened on West 72nd Street by Central Park. I've walked by there many times, always thinking about it, never quite believing it really happened here.

(Photo from John Lennon's Instagram.)

Does society allow men but not women to have comebacks?

This New York Times article argues that women don't "get comebacks like Tiger Woods" because "society" doesn't "allow . . . women to get high enough to fall." Ann Althouse (my mom) responds:

It seems to me, there's no one to compare to Tiger Woods — the ascent, the crash, the long time in the wilderness, the perfection of the big comeback win. You can't generalize to: Men can do that, women can't. . . .

There are a lot of people who only care about golf to the extent that it's about Tiger. Who else has done that with a sport — made millions of people care about it only because of him (or her)? . . .

Getting that high means beating everybody else. There's no way for the rest of us to "allow" that. Women already enjoy the allowance of playing in separated women's sports. . . .

[The article] really does undercut women by insisting proactively that women be given something no man was given.

This is a pet peeve of mine: gender/race articles that claim men (or white men) "get" to do something or are "allowed" to do something while other people aren't. That kind of framing makes it sound like the writer is boldly announcing a discovery about how society's rules are discriminatory. But the supposed rule isn't real; it was created by the writer, not by society.

Right under the Tiger Woods piece is a New York Times article about Martha Stewart, which says she recently joked at a roast "about surviving the five months she spent in prison beginning in 2004 after being convicted of lying to investigators about a stock trade," and the joke "was a hit." The article goes on to say that she's "still a competitive business woman" and "still expanding her empire." Apparently women are "allowed" to make comebacks.

Does moderating comments lead to more and better comments?

The Wall Street Journal spent 5 months studying online comments and reached these conclusions (via Althouse):

Heavy commenters are often not reading much of the articles they comment on. They go to the headline, sometimes scan a small part of the story, and skip right on down to the comment box. In a sense, some have more interest in having a place to post their thoughts than in engaging with the journalism. . . .

Light commenters are more likely to say that moderation improves comment quality. . . .

One of the concepts you learn in Economics 101 is opportunity cost — which means that when you do one thing, you’re missing out on doing something else. The thing you are missing out on is the opportunity cost. In the case of commenting, we have concluded that overly focusing on the small subset of users who comment frequently and want no one intervening at all in their comments is costing us the opportunity of engaging with our much larger, growing, and diversifying audience.

Indeed, when we looked at the demographics of our heavy commenters, we found they don’t represent the Journal as a whole. That led us to focus on the people who are not commenting as much. Women and younger people have been less represented among our commenters than they are among our subscribers, so we took a look at what was keeping them away. What we heard was they want to feel safe from bullying and share their comments in a forum in which they won’t be attacked. . . .

Our standards for posts remain the same — and they can be found here — but they will be enforced more than they were. We owe it to our readers and our journalists to lead the way with thoughtful discourse.

Ann Althouse (my mom) responds: "To me, the WSJ's observations seem pretty obvious. The trick is what to do about it. Comments are great and comments are horrible. To me, it's an endless struggle."

Why are adults freaking out about a smiling kid?

In the novel 1984, George Orwell wrote about a dystopian future where “to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for instance) was itself a punishable offense.” It was called a "facecrime."

Julie Irwin Zimmerman writes in the Atlantic:

I watched with indignation Saturday morning as stories began appearing about a confrontation near the Lincoln Memorial between students from Covington Catholic High School and American Indians from the Indigenous Peoples March. The story felt personal to me; I live a few miles from the high school, and my son attends a nearby all-boys Catholic high school. I texted him right away, ready with a lesson on what the students had done wrong.

“They were menacing a man much older than them,” I told him, “and chanting ‘Build the wall!’ And this smirking kid blocked his path and wouldn’t let him leave.” The short video, the subject of at least two-thirds of my Twitter feed on Saturday, made me cringe, and the smirking kid in particular got to me. . . .

“Where were they chanting about building the wall?” my son asked. His friends had begun weighing in, and their take was decidedly more sympathetic than mine. He wasn’t sure what to think, as he was hearing starkly different accounts from people he trusted. I doubled down, quoting from the profile of Nathan Phillips that The Washington Post had quickly published online, in which he said he’d been trying to defuse a tense situation. I was all-in on the outrage. How could the students parade around in those hats, harassing a man old enough to be their grandfather—a Vietnam veteran, no less?

Reason magazine has details based on about two hours of videos:

One student did not get out of Phillips['] way as he marched, and gave the man a hard stare and a smile that many have described as creepy. This moment received the most media coverage: The teen has been called the product of a "hate factory" and likened to a school shooter, segregation-era racist, and member of the Ku Klux Klan. I have no idea what he was thinking, but portraying this as an example of obvious, racially-motivated hate is a stretch. Maybe he simply had no idea why this man was drumming in his face, and couldn't quite figure out the best response? It bears repeating that Phillips approached him, not the other way around.

And that's all there is to it. Phillips walked away after several minutes, the Black Hebrew Israelites continued to insult the crowd, and nothing else happened. . . .

Far from engaging in racially motivated harassment, the group of mostly white, MAGA-hat-wearing male teenagers remained relatively calm and restrained despite being subjected to incessant racist, homophobic, and bigoted verbal abuse by members of the bizarre religious sect Black Hebrew Israelites, who were lurking nearby. . . .

Phillips enters the picture around the 1:12 mark, but if you skip to that part, you miss an hour of the Black Hebrew Israelites hurling obscenities at the students. They call them crackers, faggots, and pedophiles. At the 1:20 mark (which comes after the Phillips incident) they call one of the few black students the n-word and tell him that his friends are going to murder him and steal his organs. At the 1:25 mark, they complain that "you give faggots rights," which prompted booing from the students. Throughout the video they threaten the kids with violence, and attempt to goad them into attacking first. The students resisted these taunts admirably: They laughed at the hecklers, and they perform a few of their school's sports cheers.

Rep. Thomas Massie wrote:

Would you have remained that composed at that age under those circumstances? . . . Even when taunted by homophobic bigots . . . they insulted no one.

In the context of everything that was going on (which the media hasn’t shown) the parents and mentors of these boys should be proud, not ashamed, of their kids’ behavior. It is my honor to represent them.

The Atlantic writer now realizes that her son was right to question the outrage. She says:

Take away Twitter and Facebook and explain why total strangers cared so much about people they didn’t know in a confrontation they didn’t witness. Why are we all so primed for outrage, and what if the thousands of words and countless hours spent on this had been directed toward something consequential? If the Covington Catholic incident was a test, it’s one I failed. . . .

Will we learn from it, or will we continue to roam social media, looking for the next outrage fix? Next time a story like this surfaces, I’ll try to sit it out until more facts have emerged.

An update to that Reason article quotes the student's public statement about the event, which says: "I would caution everyone passing judgement based on a few seconds of video to watch the longer video clips that are on the internet, as they show a much different story than is being portrayed by people with agendas."

A couple months ago, I wrote this in response to a different viral video that left out crucial context:

I generally don’t watch this kind of online video that supposedly shows everyday discrimination. Video isn’t reliable. Video is a thin slice of a much larger thing. Video leaves out so much. Video can leave out context that would completely change your view of what you’re seeing. Getting outraged by video alone, without knowing the full story, isn’t the best use of my time.

Yet many adults have been harassing this kid online. I can't believe some of the things people are willing to say in public! Some journalists have been deleting their earlier reactions to the incident:

Recode editor and New York Times contributing op-ed writer Kara Swisher, for instance, deleted one tweet saying she was thinking of “finding every one of these shitty kids and giving them a very large piece of my mind,” and other tweets throwing slurs like “Nazi” and “nationalist.” . . .

The New Republic’s Jeet Heer deleted a tweet arguing the MAGA hat-wearing teens were “racist.”

CNN’s Bakari Sellers deleted a tweet suggesting the kids should be “punched in the face.”

But Reza Aslan still hasn't deleted this tweet, along with a photo of the kid:

Honest question. Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s?

Aslan is a prominent commentator on religion who's written a book about Jesus, but his tweet is the opposite of "Turn the other cheek." Instead, he's trying to incite people to hit a kid who had a nonviolent response to hate.

Some have defended the outrage against the kids by pointing out their "Make America Great Again" hats. But it shouldn't be a national news story that some teenagers have political views that are different from yours. No matter how strongly you disagree with their politics, attacking kids for being politically active is cowardly. I'm against Trump and I support a legal right to abortion, but I'm not going to express my political views at the expense of a random kid who I don't know.

It seems like most of the people who are doubling down on the initial outrage have been focusing on the young person's smile. How is it OK to make a national news story out of not liking someone's smile? Mocking someone's smile is as bad as telling someone they have to smile more, and we're all supposed to think the latter is blatantly offensive, right?

As an extreme example, a Facebook post by Slate calls the kid's facial expression "the smirk of evil." Think about it: adults going online to type out that a random kid — not a famous person and not someone who's even being accused of a crime (as far as I know) — is "evil." And his full name, image, and school have been made public. I don't know how adults can sleep at night after going to work and trashing a kid who isn't even alleged to have done anything seriously wrong.

I've used the word "smile," not "smirk," but many people are calling it a "smirk." Why that word choice? Ann Althouse (my mom) writes:

When is a smile a "smirk"? The dictionary says, when it's affected or simpering or silly and conceited looking.

But I'd like a deeper psychological explanation of what is supposed to be in the mind of the smirker and how observers of smiles decide they have a window into that mind. My hypothesis is: People see what they want to see. That means: When people tell you what they think they see about the inside of another person's head, they are opening a window for us to peer into their head.

And, of course, that means that if we talk about what we think we see in the mind of the observer of another person, we too reveal ourselves. We express misunderstandings and expose ourselves to being misunderstood.

Just think how different the reaction would have been if the media had framed the story differently — if they had focused on other people hurling homophobic and racist slurs, instead of focusing on the kid's smile.

The day after the incident, Slate ran a piece saying the "new footage doesn’t exonerate the kids in the red caps." But "exonerate" them from what? Standing around and smiling?

The onslaught against these kids has been a Kafka-esque farce. They were summarily pronounced guilty (not in the legal sense, of course, but in the media) . . . without the charges even being specified.

We need to resist this kind of online bullying. If it's allowed to be done against people who are on the other side of you politically, it will happen to people on your side too.

Mama Cass

"Mama" Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas was born Ellen Naomi Cohen on September 19, 1941. She would have turned 75 today. She died in 1974 at age 32.

Here's "Monday Monday":




"California Dreaming":




My mom, Ann Althouse, comments on the "Monday Monday" video:

I remember how it felt to see them on TV like that -- looking so different from other groups of the time. The men were like the other men, but the women were different, because of Cass and because of her contrast with Michelle [Phillips], who would have stood out as phenomenally pretty anyway, but standing there next to Cass, she made a fantastic contrast, and there were many people who were suddenly discovering that the fat one was even more attractive. It was kind of like with The Beatles, the way many girls thought Ringo was the most attractive, when, by conventional standards, he was the only ugly one. Back in the 60s... when everything was a revolution.

I respond:

Now it's hard to imagine anything being a revolution!

I rarely think any Beatles cover is an improvement on the original, but one exception is the Mamas and the Papas doing "I Call Your Name" (by John Lennon):




Mama Cass and Johnny Cash were charming together:




And here's Mama Cass on her own, singing her signature song, "Dream a Little Dream of Me."

Live-blogging the Republican debate on the economy

I'll be live-blogging tonight's debate, which is supposed to focus on the economy. This is the first 2016 Republican debate without Scott Walker, so there should be more of a clear-cut opposition between Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush.

As always, I'll be writing down quotes on the fly, so they might not be exactly verbatim, but I'll try to make them reasonably accurate (and I might go back and correct some of them later).

For other live-blogging, check out National Review, TPM, Althouse (my mom), and Alex Knepper.

[Watch the debate here.]

[Here's the transcript.]

[Added later:] The debate took forever to start. Nicholas Kristof quips:

The presidential debate is starting at 8 pm, CNBC time.

8:17 — It's finally starting.

8:19 — The moderator asks all the candidates: "What is your biggest weakness, and what are you doing to address it?" John Kasich says "Good question," but doesn't answer the question — instead, he just attacks the other candidates and argues that he's better.

8:20 — Mike Huckabee's biggest weakness: "I try to live by the rules."

8:20 — Jeb Bush: "I am by my nature impatient, and this is not an endeavor that rewards that." Also, he "can't fake anger," but this process "rewards" it.

8:21 — Rubio's biggest weakness is "optimism."

8:21 — Donald Trump: "I trust people too much . . . and if they let me down, I find it hard to forgive."

8:22 — Ben Carson's biggest weakness was that he didn't see himself as president until lots of people told him he should be president.

8:22 — Fiorina says, with a big smile, that what other people said was her weakness in the last debate was that she didn't "smile" enough. [VIDEO.]

8:23 — Ted Cruz sarcastically says: "I'm too easy-going."

8:23 — Chris Christie brushes off the question and says he doesn't see much weakness on that stage — then he pivots to criticizes each of the three top Democratic candidates for separate reasons.

8:26 — Moderator John Harwood lists what he apparently considers to be some of Trump's more ridiculous proposals, including that he'd "make Americans better off because your greatness would replace the stupidity and incompetence of others." Trump agrees with that last point: "Right!" Then Harwood asks if this is "a comic-book version of a presidential campaign." Trump says: "It's not a comic book, and it's not a very nicely asked question." [VIDEO.]

8:31 — Kasich calls out Carson and Trump for their trite, implausible promises to make up for lost tax revenues by cutting "waste, fraud, and abuse."

8:31 — Trump comes back: "[Kasich] got lucky with a wonderful thing called fracking . . . and that's why Ohio is doing well." Trump also takes a shot at Kasich over being on the board of Lehman Brothers, the big bank which failed at the outset of the financial collapse of 2008. Kasich simply denies it: "I wasn't on the board of Lehman Brothers!" [VIDEO.] [Fact check.]

8:36 — Carly Fiorina says she'll reduce the federal tax code from 70,000 to 3 pages. The moderator looks and sounds incredulous: "Using really small type?!"

8:37 — Rubio is asked about how he's missing more votes than any other Senate running for president. He characterizes this as what "the Republican establishment" says: "Why don't you wait in line?" His response: "We're running out of time!" The moderator bluntly follows up: "Do you hate your job?" Rubio says this shows the liberal media's bias, since the media didn't question Barack Obama about missing most of his Senate votes when he was running for president in 2008.

8:39 — Bush finally attacks his former protege, Rubio: "Marco, . . . you should be showin' up to work. What is it, like, a French work week?" [VIDEO.]

8:43 — Question to Fiorina: "Your board fired you. I'm just wondering why we should hire you now?" Fiorina says her company was a "bloated, inept bureaucracy" before she showed up as "an outsider" and "saved 80,000 jobs." "I was fired over politics in the board room." She notes that CEOs are held "accountable" and even "criminally liable" — imagine if politicians were!

8:46 — The moderator asks Cruz about the debt limit, but instead of answering, he criticizes the questions for not being "substantive" and just "trying to get the candidates to tear into each other." He uses up all of his time, so he never gets to the substantive question. This seems like a contrived attempt by Cruz to have a "debate moment." [VIDEO.]

8:50 — The question about the debt limit goes to Paul, since Cruz missed his chance to answer it. Paul isn't worried about keeping the government open; he's worried about "bankrupting the American people."

8:53 — Huckabee says the government's fiscal attitude is "like a 400-pound man saying: I'm going to go on a diet but I'm going to eat a sack of Krispy Kremes before I do."

9:00 — Trump is asked about the bankruptcies of his Atlantic City casinos. "Bankruptcy is a broken promise. Why should the voters believe you now?" Trump gives the same answer he gave in the last debate when this was brought up: "I used the laws of the country to my benefit."

9:02 — Moderator Jim Cramer asks Carson about profiteering drug companies. Carson says they've "gone overboard," but says the solution is less regulation of businesses.

9:04 — Cramer asks Christie about GM's faulty ignition switch, which killed over 100 people; no one went to jail over it. Christie says he'd prosecute people over it. He also says he'd enforce laws against price gouging, which would be better than "Hillary Clinton's price controls" on pharmaceuticals.

9:08 — Fiorina on "crony capitalism": "This is how socialism starts: government starts a problem, so government tries to fix it. . . . The big and powerful use big and powerful government to their advantage."

9:10 — Rubio is asked about his personal financial problems, and whether he has "the maturity and the wisdom to lead this country." Rubio shoots down the moderator: "You just listed the Democrats' discredited attacks, and I'm not going to waste my 60 seconds going through them all."

9:14 — Cruz is asked about the lie that women earn 77 cents for every dollar men earn.

9:16 — Fiorina says: "It is the height of hypocrisy for Hillary Clinton talking about being the first woman president when every policy she espouses, and every single policy of President Obama, has been demonstrably bad for women." [VIDEO.]

My mom says:

This debate is so stressful and ugly. The moderators are so disrespectful and the candidates are all yelling. Almost all. Carson will never yell.

9:26 — Rubio: "For the life of me, I do not understand why we stopped doing vocational training in America."

9:28 — Moderator Becky Quick asks Trump about his supposed criticisms of Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, but Trump says he's never been critical of Zuckerberg. Quick haplessly asks: "Where did I read that you were critical of him?" Trump says: "I don't know, you folks write this stuff! . . . Somebody's really doing some bad fact-checking." [Here's your fact check!]

9:30 — Rubio: "The Democrats have the ultimate super PAC — it's called the mainstream media." He says the media has been saying last week was a great week for Hillary Clinton. "It was the week she got exposed as a liar" for telling the public that the Benghazi attack was sparked by a video, while privately saying it was a planned terrorist attack. [VIDEO of 9:28 and 9:30.]

9:31 — Cruz says the Federal Reserve's role should be more limited, and we should switch to the gold standard. Paul agrees: "We shouldn't have controls on the price of money."

9:33 — Carson is asked if he's been inconsistent on subsidies, but he admits "I was wrong" about oil subsidies. "All this stuff about picking winners and losers — this is a bunch of crap!" It hurts the poor and middle class, not the rich, who "don't care if a bar of soap goes up 10¢."

9:35 — Huckabee says today's runaway blimp is "a perfect analogy" for government: a "giant bag of gas" that we "couldn't get rid of . . . because we had too much money invested in it."

9:39 — Rubio is asked about an analysis by the (conservative) Tax Foundation, which said his tax plan saves twice as much for people at the high end than the low end. Rubio denies it and says the opposite. [Added later:] On Twitter, Harwood had said he was "CORRECTING" his "earlier tweet" about the Tax Foundation's analysis of Rubio's tax plan. Harwood's correction said: "Tax Foundation says Rubio benefits lowest 10% proportionally more (55.9) than top 1% (27.9%)." Then Harwood asked Rubio a question that said the opposite of that correction, and when Rubio correctly pointed out that Harwood's incorrect post had to be corrected, Harwood flatly denied it!

[Correction, added after the debate:] This was more complicated than I thought. They were actually both right; they were just talking about different things. Let's go to the transcript:

HARWOOD: Senator Rubio, . . . [t]he Tax Foundation . . . scored your tax plan and concluded that you give nearly twice as much of a gain in after-tax income to the top 1 percent as to people in the middle of the income scale. Since you’re the champion of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, don’t you have that backward?

RUBIO: No, that’s — you’re wrong. In fact, the largest after-tax gains is for the people at the lower end of the tax spectrum under my plan. . . .

HARWOOD: The Tax Foundation — just to be clear, they said the —

RUBIO: You wrote a story on it, and you had to go back and correct it.

HARWOOD: No, I did not.

RUBIO: You did. No, you did.

HARWOOD: Senator, the Tax Foundation said after-tax income for the top 1 percent under your plan would go up 27.9 percent. And people in the middle of the income spectrum, about 15 percent. . . .

RUBIO: Yeah, but that — because the math is, if you — 5 percent of a million is a lot more than 5 percent of a thousand. So yeah, someone who makes more money, numerically, it’s gonna be higher. But the greatest gains, percentage-wise, for people, are gonna be at the lower end of our plan, and here’s why: because in addition to a general personal exemption, we are increasing the per-child tax credit for working families.

See the problem? Harwood said Rubio's plan would lead to "twice as much of a gain in after-tax income to the top 1 percent as to people in the middle of the income scale." Rubio responded that "the largest after-tax gains is [sic] for the people at the lower end of the tax spectrum." As Jon Chait and Jon Cohn point out, both of those claims are accurate reflections of the Tax Foundation's analysis. Here's the relevant graph from the Tax Foundation:

(The Tax Foundation used both "static" and "dynamic" models of how Rubio's plan would affect after-tax income. The "dynamic" model, shown in blue, includes predictions about how the tax plan would affect the economy as a whole; the "static" model, shown in red, assumes the plan would have no effect on the economy.)

So, I regret that I originally assumed Rubio and Harwood were talking about the same thing; ideally, I should have looked at the transcript, noticed what Cohn calls Rubio's "sleight of hand" in shifting the discussion further down the income scale, and looked up the Tax Foundation's analysis to see that they were both apparently right about different things.

Now back to my original live-blog:

9:40 — Paul awkwardly asks what the rules are on when candidates can jump in to talk, and Quick says: "It's at the moderators' discretion." So Paul jumps in to say he's the only candidate who'd repeal payroll taxes.

9:42 — Kasich is asked whether we should legalize marijuana to get more tax revenues (which non-marijuana-using conservatives should want, since they won't have to pay as much in taxes). Kasich says no, because it would be "sending mixed signals to kids about drugs," and his state of Ohio is doing so well it doesn't need the extra revenue.

9:49 — The moderator points out that Trump has criticized "gun-free school zones," and is asked if he'd feel more comfortable if his employees showed up carrying guns. He says he "might." Then he cleverly pivots to an attack an President Obama: Trump says he carries a gun only some of the time, because he wants to be "unpredictable," unlike Obama, who broadcasts what he's going to do in advance, which empowers ISIL.

9:51 — The moderator shamelessly asks Huckabee if he'll attack Trump. Huckabee doesn't take the bait: "I love Donald Trump. He is a good man. I'm wearing a Trump tie tonight." Someone else chimes in: "Was it made in China or Mexico?" Trump says: "Such a nasty question! But thank you, Governor." [VIDEO.]

9:54 — Fiorina is asked if the government should "do more" to encourage employer-sponsored 401(k) retirement plans. "No. . . . Every time the government gets engaged in something, it gets worse. And then the government steps in to solve the problem. And we get a little closer to that progressive vision that Hillary Clinton is talking about."

9:59 — Bush is asked if he'd crack down on "fantasy sports." Bush says: "There needs to be some regulation." Christie is aghast: "Are we really talking about getting the government involved in fantasy football?! We've got ISIS attacking us . . . and we're talking about fantasy football?!" Moderator John Harwood interrupts Christie's answer, and Christie goes after him: "Do you want to answer, or do you want to let me answer? Even in New Jersey, what you're doing is called rude!"

10:02 — Paul admits we should have "some safety net" — "but you oughta acknowledge that government doesn't do a very good job of it." The entitlement crisis is "your grandparents' fault for having too many kids!"

10:08 — Trump says he'll make the economy so "dynamic" that we won't need any specific entitlement reform. Bush says that's naive — we can't just "grow our way out of it"; we need to do things like means testing for Social Security.

10:13 — We're at the point where the candidates have run out of things to say, so everyone (Christie, Rubio, Fiorina) has resorted to blandly saying there are a lot of "good ideas" on the stage.

10:17 — In her closing statement, Fiorina admits: "I may not be your dream candidate just yet, but I can assure you: I'm Hillary Clinton's worst nightmare, and in your heart of hearts, you can't wait to see a debate between Hillary Clinton and Carly Fiorina." [VIDEO.]

10:17 — Carson: "I just want to thank all of my colleagues here for being civil and not falling in the traps."

10:20 — Trump uses his closing statement to point out how he and Carson "renegotiated" the debate down from 3 hours to 2 hours "so we can get the hell out of here!" John Harwood says, contrary to what everyone was reporting, that the debate "was always going to be 2 hours." Trump points his finger at Harwood and shouts: "You know that that is not right!" [VIDEO.]

10:22 — Bush's closing statement is flat and low-energy, as Trump would put it.

It seems like the main story from tonight is:

Moderators lose control at third GOP debate

How CNBC Lost Its Own G.O.P. Debate

The CNBC Republican Debate Was A Total Trainwreck

This was indisputably the worst-moderated debate of this young cycle, and perhaps the worst-moderated debate ever.

(Note: that last link goes to the conservative National Review, and the link before it goes to the liberal ThinkProgress — so people across the spectrum agree.)

Here's Alex Knepper's verdict:

Winners: Christie, Carson . . . , Cruz, Rubio

Losers: CNBC, Kasich, Paul, Bush

Wash: Everyone else

Awful debate, and I anticipate most of the reporting about the debate will center around how badly it was conducted.

Two Washington Post writers agree with Knepper:

The third Republican presidential debate on Wednesday evening ended with a handful of winners – Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz – and one clear loser, former Florida governor Jeb Bush. . . .

Bush was a minor presence – a night so bad for him that his campaign manager confronted CNBC producers off the stage, angry about Bush’s lack of airtime [sic — the paragraph ends without any punctuation]

Hey, at least he won over the anti-fantasy-football vote.

Erick Erikson, the conservative commentator, says:

This was the debate where Jeb Bush sealed the deal and began transitioning to “former Presidential candidate.”

Election Betting Odds shows how the candidates' odds have changed since 8:00 p.m., right before the debate. As of about 10:30 p.m., right after the debate, Rubio and Huckabee are the only Republican candidates (who were in the main debate) whose odds have improved. Rubio improved the most (2.6%), and then Cruz (1%). There was no change for Carson or Paul. The rest declined (Trump by 0.4%, Bush by 2.2%, Fiorina by 1.9%, Kasich by 0.4%, and both Christie and Huckabee by 0.3%). Rubio has by far the best odds of being the nominee: 33% (and a 15% chance of winning the presidency). Trump has 17%, Bush has 14%, Carson has 10%, Cruz has 6.5%, and the rest are in low single digits.

Fiorina spoke the most (I would have thought it was Rubio), and Bush spoke the least (I'm not surprised — he made very little impression).

[Added the next day:] An observation, after thinking more about the debate: Bush seems uncomfortable in his own skin. Rubio seems comfortable in his own skin. And voters are always going to prefer the latter kind of person.

A weird sentence from Chief Justice Roberts's dissent in the same-sex marriage case:

People denied a voice are less likely to accept the ruling of a court on an issue that does not seem to be the sort of thing courts usually decide.

My mom (Ann Althouse) responds:

But this does seem to be the sort of thing courts usually decide. And I think people will accept it quite readily. In fact, I think the overall reaction will be one of relief that we don't have to keep chewing over this issue. Let people get back to their personal relationships that were always going on anyway. The country wasn't collapsing because gay people love each other and seek the legal aspects of permanence.

What I'd like to know is: how did Roberts decide that this is not the kind of issue "courts usually decide"? That itself is a decision. What's the standard for saying the Supreme Court shouldn't decide an issue? Is it just based on whether the Justices have a bad feeling about the whole thing? And aren't issues of minority rights exactly the kinds of issues that are often very important for the Supreme Court to decide?

Now that the Supreme Court has recognized same-sex marriage as a constitutional right, does it follow that there must be a right to polygamy?

Of course, some people are quick to make that argument today — like Fredrik deBoer, who writes in Politico:

Now that we’ve defined that love and devotion and family isn’t driven by gender alone, why should it be limited to just two individuals? The most natural advance next for marriage lies in legalized polygamy . . . .

In Chief Justice John Roberts’ dissenting opinion, he remarks, “It is striking how much of the majority’s reasoning would apply with equal force to the claim of a fundamental right to plural marriage.” As is often the case with critics of polygamy, he neglects to mention why this is a fate to be feared. . . .

[P]rogressives who reject the case for legal polygamy often don’t really appear to have their hearts in it. They seem uncomfortable voicing their objections, clearly unused to being in the position of rejecting the appeals of those who would codify non-traditional relationships in law. They are, without exception, accepting of the right of consenting adults to engage in whatever sexual and romantic relationships they choose, but oppose the formal, legal recognition of those relationships. They’re trapped, I suspect, in prior opposition that they voiced from a standpoint of political pragmatism in order to advance the cause of gay marriage.

In doing so, they do real harm to real people. Marriage is not just a formal codification of informal relationships. It’s also a defensive system designed to protect the interests of people whose material, economic and emotional security depends on the marriage in question. If my liberal friends recognize the legitimacy of free people who choose to form romantic partnerships with multiple partners, how can they deny them the right to the legal protections marriage affords?

Polyamory is a fact. People are living in group relationships today. The question is not whether they will continue on in those relationships. The question is whether we will grant to them the same basic recognition we grant to other adults: that love makes marriage, and that the right to marry is exactly that, a right. . . .

Conventional arguments against polygamy fall apart with even a little examination. Appeals to traditional marriage, and the notion that child rearing is the only legitimate justification of legal marriage, have now, I hope, been exposed and discarded by all progressive people. What’s left is a series of jerry-rigged arguments that reflect no coherent moral vision of what marriage is for, and which frequently function as criticisms of traditional marriage as well.

Well, I'm sorry, deBoer, but you're missing something. Oh, I admit your argument has a certain appeal on the surface: how can we say a policy that excluded people from the institution of marriage based on their gender or sexual orientation was unconstitutional discrimination, without saying the same thing of a policy that excludes people based on their number? If it doesn't matter whether you're male or female, straight or gay, then how can it matter whether you're 2, 3, 5, 10, or 50 people?

But polygamy is significantly different — even assuming for the sake of argument that we have no concerns about coercion or power disparities within any given polygamous relationship. As my mom, Ann Althouse, explained 9 years ago:

Legal marriage isn't just about love, it's an economic arrangement. Having the state authorize your union is not the same thing as having your friends and neighbors approve of you and your religious leaders bless you. It affects taxes and employee benefits -- huge amounts of money. A gay person with a pension and a health insurance plan is incapable of extending those benefits to his (or her) partner. He (or she) can't file a joint tax return. That's not fair. A polygamous marriage, however, puts a group of persons in a position to claim more economic benefits than the traditional heterosexual couple. That doesn't appeal to our sense of fairness.

The law doesn't assess how much two people love each other. Two persons of opposite sexes can marry for all sorts of reasons. If there were a device that could look into their souls and measure their love, we wouldn't accept the outrageous invasion of privacy it would take for the government to use it. Excluding gay couples from marrying does generate the complaint that society does not sufficiently respect homosexual love, and by harping on this point, proponents of gay marriage activate their opponents who think that's a good thing.

But it's not all about love and who respects what. It's also about economics. And in that dimension, it's easy to distinguish polygamy.

UPDATE: My mom sees a problem with her own argument from 9 years ago, in light of the majority's reasoning in Obergefell.

ADDED: Judge Richard Posner points out another important distinction:

[P]olygamy imposes real costs, by reducing the number of marriageable women. Suppose a society contains 100 men and 100 women, but the five wealthiest men have a total of 50 wives. That leaves 95 men to compete for only 50 marriageable women.

MORE: Jonathan Rauch observes:

[T]he case for gay marriage is the case against polygamy, and the public will be smart enough to understand the difference.

Gay marriage is about extending the opportunity to marry to people who lack it; polygamy, in practice, is about exactly the opposite: withdrawing marriage opportunity from people who now have it. Gay marriage succeeded because no one could identify any plausible channels through which it might damage heterosexual marriage; with polygamy, the worries are many, the history clear, and the channels well understood.

UPDATE: My mom responds to those quotes by Posner and Rauch:

I've got a problem with that! Talk about a male perspective! What about the women who want to choose to share one man? They should be denied to preserve a pool of marriageable women for all the extra males that would otherwise have scarce pickings? Are women some kind of natural resource to be conserved for the benefit of males?

As the old saying goes: Feminism is the radical notion that women are people. If women think they are better off as multiple wives to one high-quality male, why should they be cut off from that way of life so that some less-desired male will have better odds of getting a woman for himself? Is this everybody-gets-just-one theory of marriage some kind of welfare program for undesirable males?

I can see that society fears its renegade young male and would like to tame them through marriage, leveraging the power of their sexuality lest they expend that energy in acts of violence and dissolution. I can see the idea of using women for this purpose and rejecting polygamy because it takes women out of commission in that service. . . . But if you use that as your overt argument, you're going to run up against ideas about women's autonomy and freedom. We're not society's tools.

UPDATE: Jonathan Rauch expands on his argument against polygamy.

The Supreme Court just recognized the constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

I'm disappointed that the decision was only 5-4, with a majority opinion by Justice Kennedy, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan.

Still, today is a great day in American history.

The majority concludes:

No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.

My mom, Prof. Ann Althouse, writes:

There's a distinct absence of doctrinal particularity about the levels of scrutiny. There's no discussion of the government interest to be served and how closely connected it is to the policy that's supposed to serve that interest. The focus is on the gravity of the burden imposed. . . .

It's notable that the due process analysis predominated and drove the equal protection analysis. I think the inequality is easier to explain and understand, but there are reasons to prefer to frame things in terms of fundamental liberty. Equality is, perhaps, a cooler matter than liberty. There's more passion in liberty and more to disagree about. There's no end to demands for liberty, and which liberties get to be fundamental? That question sets us up for the dissenting opinions, and for those, I'll do separate posts.

Much of Justice Kennedy's opinion is workmanlike and dull, piecing together precedents in an earnest effort to show us that the right found today was really always already there and nothing to do with feelings and political preferences. But there were some glimmers of passion. My favorite example:

"Marriage responds to the universal fear that a lonely person might call out only to find no one there."

Alex Knepper writes (on Facebook):

When I was first realizing I was gay, I was scared: I figured it would preclude me from full participation in society, and for that reason I fiercely resisted admitting my orientation to myself. It's still unbelievable that in just ten years since that time, the nation has moved from -- at best -- tolerance, but often outright hostility -- to widespread acceptance. This ruling will mean millions of people will be relieved of a part of the struggle and self-loathing that so often accompanies self-discovery and coming out, and will instead live with the awareness that same-sex relationships are viewed with legitimacy by their nation. Of course, no law can erase all of the difficulties that accompany being gay -- but gays and lesbians can rest easy knowing that now, at least, the government has done its part to secure our equal treatment under the law.

What did Hillary Clinton hide?

Ann Althouse (my mom) observes:

The evidence is limited because she limited it, and I'm forced to infer that she is hiding some very important things — important enough that it was worth destroying the evidence. You know, President Nixon did not destroy the Watergate Tapes. He considered it though . . .

Androphobia!

Case #1:

I recently assisted a young man who was subjected by administrators at his small liberal arts university in Oregon to a month-long investigation into all his campus relationships seeking information about his possible sexual misconduct in them (an immense invasion of his and his friends’ privacy), and who was ordered to stay away from a fellow student (cutting him off from his housing, his campus job, and educational opportunity) — all because he reminded her of the man who had raped her months before and thousands of miles away.

He was found to be completely innocent of any sexual misconduct and was informed of the basis of the complaint against him only by accident and off-hand. But the stay-away order remained in place, and was so broadly drawn up that he was at constant risk of violating it and coming under discipline for that. When the duty to prevent a 'sexually hostile environment' is interpreted this expansively, it is affirmatively indifferent to the restrained person’s complete and total innocence of any misconduct whatsoever.

That's from a Harvard Law Review Forum article called "Trading the Megaphone for the Gavel in Title IX Enforcement," by Professor Janet Halley, quoted by my mom, Professor Ann Althouse.


Case #2:

A UT-Arlington student who claimed she was threatened at gunpoint on campus this week admitted Friday that she’d lied, a university spokeswoman said. The student told police she hadn’t even been at the school the day she said the incident occurred....

The university had issued an alert Friday that the student told police she had been followed six miles by a man in a pickup before she reached the campus. She had reported that when she parked at the university, the man threatened her and pointed a gun at her before he left. The student also posted on social media that the man might have targeted her because she is Muslim. In a Facebook post, she referred to the killings of three Muslim students this week in Chapel Hill, N.C.

That's from the Dallas Morning News, which had originally reported, before it was revealed to be a lie: "The suspect was described as a white man in his mid-30s wearing a camouflage baseball cap, a short-sleeve blue shirt and bluejeans." The paper noted that the police were investigating and asking anyone to call with information about that suspect.

What can we learn from the lawmaker who used the word "beautiful" to describe a child born from rape?

West Virginia state representative Brian Kurcaba infamously said:

For somebody to take advantage of somebody else in such a horrible and terrifying and brutal way is absolutely disgusting. But what is beautiful is the child that could come as a production of this.

My mom, Ann Althouse, has some incisive points about this:

[W]e are all descendants of rapists, aren't we? In the genetic line that led to each of us, there must be ancestors who were the product of a rape. How could it be otherwise? . . .

If every woman who was raped in all of human history and pre-history had had the ability to abort and had done so, not one single person who now lives on the face of the earth would exist. We all contain the inheritance of rape, and if life is beautiful, Kurcaba had a point. But it's a point they can kill you with in our aggressive American political discourse. That's the lesson here.

Imagine the completely different set of persons who would populate the earth instead of us if no rape-conceived child had every been born. What would they be like?!

Another perspective is: What are we like? What part of our cruelty and selfishness comes from this genetic inheritance?

A third thought experiment: If, beginning now, every woman would terminate every pregnancy caused by rape, how would humanity change?

I posted this to Facebook and one of my friends said my mom's "What are we like?" point was very interesting. I added:

Yeah, and it's the kind of interesting point that our conversations would happen upon more often if most people weren't so stifled by the prevailing political correctness.

Are energy-saving light bulbs going to be an environmental disaster?

"Approximately 90 per cent of compact fluorescent light bulbs are being tossed in the trash, potentially contaminating the environment with mercury . . ."

As my mom, Ann Althouse, wrote back in 2008:

I hate fluorescent bulbs anyway, for aesthetic reasons. I'm willing to save energy by turning off or dimming more lights. But maybe you don't feel the aesthetic problem and you don't care about my trivial suffering. Why don't you care about the mercury?

What to make of Mitt Romney's announcement that he's not going to run for president?

My mom (Ann Althouse) offers this analysis:

I've been more or less positive about Romney's running again, . . . but even though I do like him, I was concerned that he was becoming the front-runner mostly on name recognition, and that was not good for the overall competition within the GOP. I'd like to see the plausible candidates go through a process of presenting themselves to us — especially in debates — and giving us a chance to scrutinize them and maybe warm up to them, and it's appropriate for Romney to stand back and allow that to happen.

If various seemingly plausible candidates fail to get traction or crash for some reason, there's the elder statesman Romney, prepared to serve if needed. I like him there. It fits with the idea that he was going to use as his pitch: That he's a dutiful, modest man, a humble servant, who responds to a calling.

So: Don't call us, we'll call you.

Romney did just enough to put the idea in everyone’s heads that he’s still a real possibility. So if the field turns out to be weak, people will naturally think of him.

4 takes on Jonathan Gruber's remarks on Obamacare

Gruber, an MIT economics professor who's considered a key architect of Obamacare (and Romneycare), infamously said:

Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically call it the stupidity of the American voter, or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical in getting the thing to pass . . . . And I wish Mark was right, we could make it all transparent, but I'd rather have this law than not.

Howard Dean:

The problem is not that he said it. The problem is that he thinks it. The core problem with the damn law is it was put together by a bunch of elitists who don’t really, fundamentally understand the American people. That’s what the problem is.

(That's my own transcription of Dean; the quote at that link is incorrect.)

Ann Althouse (my mom):

MIT prof Jonathan Gruber is sorry he was transparent about the lack of transparency in getting Obamacare passed. . . . He wants his old lack of transparency back. He revealed what he liked so much about it. Now, why can't he have it back? Well, Professor Gruber, it just doesn't work that way. Once you've let us see that you mean to deceive us, we won't get fooled again . . . unless you're right, and we really are stupid.

Tyler Cowen:

It’s a healthy world where academics can speak their minds at conferences and the like without their words becoming political weapons in a bigger fight. . . . I’m simply not very interested in his proclamations on tape, which as far as I can tell are mostly correct albeit overly cynical. (If anything he is overrating the American voter — most people weren’t even paying close enough attention to be tricked.) Criticisms of Gruber are not criticisms of a policy, and it is policy we should focus upon and indeed there is still a great deal of health care policy we need to figure out. It’s hardly news that intellectuals who hold political power, even as advisors, very often do not speak the truth. If anything, I feel sorry for Gruber that he has subsequently felt the need to so overcompensate by actively voicing such ex post cynicism, it is perhaps the sign of a soul not at rest.

In the meantime, I’d like to see more open discourse, not less. Perhaps we should subsidize people who end up looking foolish, rather than taxing them.

Bryan Caplan responds to Tyler Cowen:

Tyler and I start at the same place yet end continents apart. We see the same facts: Lying politicians and the elite intellectuals who craftily decorate their masters' lies. But Tyler starts with a strong moral presumption that Whatever People in Our Society Routine[ly] Do is morally acceptable. Indeed, he bends over backwards to see the world from their point of view.

I, in contrast, start with a strong moral presumption in favor of scrupulous honesty. Unless you have strong reason to believe that lying will have awesome consequences, you shouldn't lie. Instead of bending over backwards to make excuses for liars, we should bend over backwards to tell the truth. The fact that most people fall short of this puritanical standard shows that most people ought to shape up and fly right.

And when people fleetingly realize that every society is ruled by liars, they are right to shudder.

Happy 10th bloggiversary to Althouse

Happy 10th birthday to Althouse, the blog of my mom, Ann Althouse.

She's blogged every day since she started the blog on January 14, 2004. As she's pointed out:

I've written . . . on the hardest work days, on the day I wrecked my car, the day I had surgery, the day I drove 1235 miles in one day, and the day I got married.

The blog was originally called Marginalia, before she quickly changed it to her last name. Her first post explained:

I'm writing from Madison, Wisconsin, and Marginalia is a fictionalized name for Madison that I thought up a long time ago when I seriously believed I would write a fictionalized account of my life in Madison, Wisconsin. There is nothing terribly marginal about Madison, really, but I do like writing in the margins of books, something I once caused a librarian to gasp by saying. Writing in a blog is both less and more permanent than writing in the margin of a book.

She's posted an average of about 10 posts a day, with a total of over 36,000. Out of those tens of thousands, my favorite Althouse post might seem very minor. But to me it shows the essence of her blog. Why? Because if you got 100 bloggers to write a post about that Washington Post editorial, no one else would have written it that way. Most would have been forgettable and abstract, where Althouse was memorable and vivid.

She's blogged about drawing in Amsterdam, things she's never done, the difference between same-sex marriage and polygamy, the problem with "larger meaning," how to teach reading (with follow-ups here and here), gender bias, and her parents meeting in a war.

She's also appeared on video, talking about the Obamas (right before she voted in the 2008 primaries), singlehood, and sexuality.

Her explanation of why she started blogging:

I love writing quickly and openly and . . . I'd spent too much time reading the newspaper passively and without making myself decide what I really thought about various things. I wanted to force myself to take one more step and say something about the stories of the day. I'm not a partisan or an ideologue, so I didn't know automatically. It was only by making myself write a sentence or 2 that I found out what I really thought.

There's a daunting amount of content, about no one clear theme. But is there any theme? I think there is an unstated theme: saying what isn't said. Let's look at what people are saying. Let's stop and think about what they're notably not saying out loud. And let's take it upon ourselves to say it out loud. That's what I call "saying what isn't said," and that's what has always distinguished the Althouse blog from other blogs that are merely effective at saying the right things to please their audience. It's easy to look at what others are saying, pick the statements that appeal to us, and repeat them. We all do that sometimes. But those who do only that are missing something.

(If you want to support Althouse for free, search for stuff on Amazon by using the box at the top of the blog, to the right. Amazon rewards her for the referrals, at no cost to you.)

A theory of the Obama presidency

"Tempting no-mess remoteness."

3 responses to Obama's "You didn't build that"

Charles Krauthammer:

The ultimate Obama fallacy . . . is the conceit that belief in the value of infrastructure — and willingness to invest in its creation and maintenance — is what divides liberals from conservatives.

. . . Infrastructure is not a liberal idea, nor is it particularly new. The Via Appia was built 2,300 years ago. The Romans built aqueducts, too. And sewers. Since forever, infrastructure has been consensually understood to be a core function of government.

The argument between left and right is about what you do beyond infrastructure.

Will Wilkinson:

Mr Obama's observation that it takes a village to make a fortune is in one respect irrelevant and in another offensive. It is irrelevant because the class of people Mr Obama wants to "give back" has already paid most of the tab, and continues to pay most of the tab, for the tax-financed public goods upon which they, and the rest of us, so crucially depend. At the federal level, the top 10% percent of the distribution paid over 70% of income taxes in 2009 . . . . Mr Obama's in-it-together point is mildly offensive in context because it is used to imply that top-earners who resist paying an even larger portion of America's tab do so only because they are in the grip of an absurd myth of self-reliance.

Together with a bit of simple democratic mathematics, the facts about the portion of tax revenue contributed by the rich plausibly suggest that they pay more than their fair share for the infrastructure of capitalism. The rich have money, which can buy political influence. But the middle class have votes, which in a democracy is influence. So it's not surprising that the public goods upon which the middle class equally depends are financed disproportionately by the wealthy. Of course, no one ever got elected by identifying middle-income voters as the free-riding class. Asking the minority who already finances rather more than most government expenditure to "give something back", as if it were currently skating by unfairly on the more open-handed spirit of the less privileged, is plain, old-fashioned demagoguery. . . .

Anyway, it's not the infrastructure of American capitalism that's busting the budget, is it? Our fiscal strain is largely a matter of buying health-care for old people. The health and longevity of America's elderly is an admirable and humane goal, but it's not part of the vital infrastructure of business.

None of this is to say that the top tax rate should not rise. There may be other, better, reasons to stick it to the rich. . . . But Mr Obama's notion that the rich get more out of our common institutions than they put in is questionable, to say the least. And his suggestion that opposition to higher top income-tax rates could only be based on by-the-bootstraps social atomism is a silly bit of bad faith.

(I made a similar point in response to Elizabeth Warren.)

Ann Althouse (my mom):

You could say if you listen sympathetically to Obama saying the quote, you could understand the quote in a way that's not ridiculous and disturbingly left-wing. And if you get that far, then Romney's use of it could be understood as "a false attack." . . . But why would Romney not use that quote for all it's worth? Since when does decency/integrity/honesty require that a politician interpret his opponent's words in a sympathetic light and give him the benefit of the doubt? The quote is a gift to Romney and he's accepted it.

It's like Romney saying "Corporations are people." That's a gift to Obama's people and they are using it. They don't feel any ethical compulsion to stop and say we understand what he really meant. I mean, I love the way the new Obama ad — trying to get us to understand — includes this additional part of the context: "We succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together."

When I heard that the first time, I said: Yeah, corporations are people. We do things together. Sometimes when people succeed doing things together, they form a corporation as a way of working together. But you'll never hear Obama say that. He will use the "Corporations are people" line for full mockery effect, never admitting that he knows why it makes sense and why it really isn't anything we disagree about.

Who's the loser after today's health-care ruling?

I don't know if today's decision upholding President Obama's health-care law was better for Obama or Mitt Romney. But there is a clear loser: almost every pundit in America.

Everyone who said the law should, or would, be held constitutional under the Commerce Clause was wrong. Everyone who said the law should, or would, be held unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause was also wrong. Almost no one got it right.

Ann Althouse (my mom) lists 3 ways that Obama is the real loser:

Romney has at least 3 big arguments:

1. Obama imposed a huge new tax on working people.

2. Obama deceived the American people by saying it was not a tax, when it was.

3. The law made it look like money would go to insurance companies — in the form of new premiums — that would keep premiums low as the companies were required to take on people with pre-existing conditions, but now we find out that the money is really going to go to the federal government.

"I don't think they understand the complex foundation upon which their own prosperity rests."

That's a very important point made by economist Glenn Loury. Loury and my mom, Ann Althouse, bemoan the fact that most voters' knowledge of economics is so shallow that not only is Mitt Romney attacked for being successful in business, but Romney doesn't even seem able to defend himself:



On this topic, a must-read is Reihan Salam's "Let Us Now Praise Private Equity."