Despite what it says on the right there, I don’t read Robert Reich that much. The reason is that generally I agree too much with him. We see politics very similarly. But given that he isn’t a blogger, he doesn’t have to write about things that aren’t his focus. Plus, he never writes about music, film, or literature. Nonetheless, I try to keep up on what is on his mind. And yesterday, he wrote, Tuesday’s State of the Union’s Economy.

There are lot of political issues that I care about a little. It is important that same sex couples be given the right to marry. But we have to have our priorities. And my biggest complain about the Democratic Party is that they celebrate minor policy victories while not even fighting for the really big issues. Consider the gun control debate. If things go well, we will end up with an assault weapon and high-capacity magazine ban. But this legislation will not get rid of the tens of millions of these things already around. And even if it did, the legislation really only attacks the margins of the problem. But you can depend upon Rachel Maddow and company proclaiming this as a great liberal victory. Food stamps can be taken away from kids. Adults can’t find jobs. Income inequality continues to skyrocket. But 30-round magazines can’t be bought at gun stores! It’s party time in liberal land!

Robert Reich agrees with me, although he puts it in a more staid manner:

There is a more cynical take on Democratic priorities, of course. I’m not quite ready to go there, but more and more I think that when it comes to economic issues, the two parties are the same. They are both dependent on the same donor class. It is certainly the case that the main difference between the parties is in social issues. I still think there is some difference between the parties on economic issues, but it isn’t nearly as big as it ought to be.

I’m proud that now gay people can serve openly in the armed forces. But that doesn’t compensate for my fear that soon gay people will have to serve in the military, because there are no other employment options.

I don’t have much occasion to watch Fox News, and that’s probably a bad thing. Just like shingles, it is easy to forget just how bad it is if you aren’t actively suffering from it. Luckily, Media Matters suffers for us all by continuously monitoring this vile institution. Most of the articles they provide are of the “no comment” form: just a video that speaks for itself. On Thursday, Max Greenberg presented a video that could have gone without comment, Fox Cedes Solar Industry To Germany.

He focuses on the remarkable statement by Fox Business reporter Shibani Joshi that Germany has a better solar energy industry because “they’ve got a lot more sun than we do.” Then she seems to realize that a claim that outrageous mightn’t even fly with the idiots on Fox & Friends, so she adds, “In California, it’s a great solution, but here on the East Coast it’s just not going to work.” Just on its face, this makes no sense. If California (not to mention Arizona and New Mexico) is such a great place for solar, why don’t we have booming solar industries there?

But it is far worse than that. On the East Coast where “it’s just not going to work” they get about 1500 kWhr per square meter per year. In Germany, they get about two-thirds of that: 1000 kWhr per square meter per year. Here is the video:

What I found even more distressing in this clip is the claim that solar has not proven that it can take the “training wheels off.” The truth is that solar has gotten more and more cost effective over the years. In fact, according to Scientific American:

In addition to this, after over 50 years of nuclear power facilities in the United States, it is far from clear that they are cost effective. And if externalities were included in the price of coal and other fossil fuels, solar would be competitive now. The conservative hatred of solar power really shows how much political ideology comes down to culture. There is no reason to dislike solar power, except that it is associated with those long hairs. And as a result, you get the Fox News treatment of the issue that has no content and a lot of ridicule, because, hey, everyone knows solar is a joke—at least everyone at Fox.

H/T: The Brad Blog

A political scientist at Florida International University, Kevin Evans explains, Why the Obama Administration Has Issued Fewer Signing Statements. It’s quite interesting, because I actually didn’t know anything about Obama’s signing statements. I remember being really mad about Bush’s. But Obama just hasn’t gotten much press on this issue.

There are different kinds of signing statements, of course. In fact, most are not harmful at all. Some of them are nothing more than, “This is important legislation and if it weren’t for the fact that the United States currently has pretty much the Platonic Ideal of a president, this would never have become law.” As we all know, President Bush was the king of the most pernicious form of signing statements, the constitutional challenges: “I’m signing this bill, but there are details that I don’t feel I have to abide by.” This would be like the anti-torture legislation which Bush signed by noted that he didn’t accept that minor bit about not torturing people.

Bush filed twice as many of these signing statements than all other presidents combined! I couldn’t believe that a president with a congress that gave him every damned thing he wanted would be so picky in his signing statements. It was the best illustration (and maybe my first) that the Republicans had become a proto-fascist political party. Even the smallest limitation of executive power had to resisted and resisted in the strongest possible terms. But that was then. How is the current president who gets just about nothing he ever wanted doing?

Well, it turns out that that is part of what makes him look pretty good. As Evans explains, “You cannot have signing statements without a bill signing and there has not been much bill signing lately.” But it is more than that. The biggest issue is that after Bush’s gluttony fest, people are very aware of them and they get a lot of attention. What’s more, Obama promised that he would not follow in Bush’s footsteps. But note: neither of those facts would have changed Bush’s behavior—Bush was pretty much the first Revolutionary Republican. Evans also mentions the fact that increased signing statements tend to push congress into action. That certainly would have been a much bigger deal for Obama.

So what do the numbers look like? Well, Bush created roughly 1200 of these constitutional challenges in 162 total signing statements (112 in the first term). Obama has created a total of 22 signing statements. (Evans does not provide the total number constitutional challenges, and I have been unable to find the data elsewhere; it is probably on the order of 100.) This is all good. Of course, you may remember that the Clinton administration made a big push to unclassify documents. Once Bush got into office, his administration proceeded to re-classify most of those documents. So the next Republican administration will likely continue on with the Bush approach to signing statements.

A couple of days ago, Ylan Q. Mui at the Washington Post wrote a curious article, Virginia Coin Moves Closer to Reality. I say “curious” because she takes this threat seriously. And this is just plain crazy: every bit as crazy as secession and a whole lot more crazy than requiring ultrasounds before allowing abortions.

The push is coming from Robert G. Marshall, a Republican member of the Virginia House of Delegates. And he is just brimming over with fatuous statements of the libertarian “The Fed is printing money!” and “Zimbabwe, I tell you!” variety. See, for example, any speech by Ron Paul.

But the problem with the article is that there are very few direct quotes from Marshall. Instead, Mui will make an outrageous statement and then end it with, “according to Marshall.” For example, “And those are only the problems that the Fed might create. Who knows what other threats may be lurking in the shadowy world of cyberattacks, Marshall said.”

People like Marshall (and apparently also Mui) just don’t understand how the monetary system works. Value of currency is not determined by dividing the total amount of cash by the total amount of assets. If it were, then we would have already had runaway inflation as the Fed has tripled the monetary base over the last five years. Instead, we have ridiculously low (Too low!) inflation.

There are a lot of people like Robert Marshall out there in the conservative world. I tend to see them as traitors. They are always eager to see that the United States doing it all wrong. They don’t do even the most basic of research before going on tilt with their crazy ideas. But the real problem is that we have reporters like Ylan Mui and papers like the Washington Post that take cranks like Marshall seriously.

Jonathan Bernstein has some good advice for Republicans wishing to take the crazy out of their party. He starts by noting that throwing money at the problem will not help. The truth is that a lot of their most stunning crazy failures won primaries will little money. In some cases, this fact helped their candidacy—giving them that whole “outsider” appeal. Bernstein suggests two things. First, stop allowing the crazy rhetoric. He mentions the inevitable conspiracy theories whenever a Democrat is in the White House, “Not to mention ‘San Francisco Democrats’ and ‘Taxachusetts’ and ‘Chicago politics’ and ‘real America.’ Republicans have been training their audiences, and now their audiences respond.” Second, Bernstein says that the Republicans should stop focusing on symbolic issues and propose things that have real value. “The drawback to relying on symbolic issues is that sane candidates are at a disadvantage. After all, they tend to be constrained by reality, and so they’re less likely to outbid the nuts when it comes to who loves the flag the most or who hates the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ the most.”

Bernstein is a smart—maybe even brilliant—political observer. And there is much to what he mentions. But I think he is missing a big point: the crazy is pretty much all the Republican Party is anymore. Look back on the Republican Party 30 or 40 or 50 years ago. Its policies were more liberal. But were the people really more liberal than they are now? I don’t think so. Any political movement is constrained by the time in which it exists. The truth is that the Republicans have been fantastically successful over the last 30 years in moving the debate to the right. The center of gravity is now such that Democrats are in favor of the policies that would have been conservative only a few decades ago. That means that in order to be a modern day conservative, your ideas have to be so extreme that they are simply unreasonable.

It’s even worse than that. In most areas, there simply are no ideas to be had. I’ve written about this before regarding healthcare reform. The one decent, somewhat workable idea conservatives had for healthcare reform was what became Obamacare. Once it became the Democratic idea, the Republicans turned on it as though it were sent through the ether straight from Stalin. And then the Republicans were left with… What? Allowing insurance to be bought across state lines? Tort “reform”? To call these ideas fiddling around the edges is to give them undeserved airs.

So where does that leave the Republican Party? It leaves it with conspiracy theories and symbolic gestures. The party is not in its current state for no reason. They are in this state because there really isn’t anything else to do. Except, of course, my new idea: join the Democratic Party and let that party divide into a true liberal party and a reasonable conservative party. But that would require the current Republicans to be reasonable. And why would they want to do that? Especially when the Democratic Party is effectively the reasonable conservative party they would end up with anyway?

Afterword

That cartoon above is from 2009. We’ve been talking about this for a long, long time!

I was making dinner and I caught the end of The Ed Show. I want to be clear: I think Ed Schultz is an idiot. He is as rigidly partisan as you find in a liberal and he’s a blowhard. And we need a lot more of him. We need liberals who can talk to regular guys. Effete intellectuals like me are what people hate about liberalism. I am a big part of why people with liberal views still call themselves conservatives!

One of the most annoying things about Schultz is his daily call-in poll. Usually, it is something stupid like, “Do you think the Republicans will start being honest brokers with the president?” And the results are almost always what you would expect: 98% say no. The 2% who say yes are probably just people like me who hate the question!

But every once in a while, Ed asks a good question. Today, it was, “Do you agree with the policy of targeted killing of American citizens?” When I heard that one, I still thought it would be overwhelmingly in the “no” direction. Wrong again, Bob! Ed’s viewers voted “yes” 75.3% of the time.

WHAT… THE… FUCK???!!!

This is why we can’t have nice things. This is the Dirty Harry effect. You know it, right? The film shows Scorpio kidnap, rape, and bury alive a poor girl. Unlike in reality, there is no doubt. We know who Scorpio is; we know he is the bad guy; so we cheer when Harry blows him away in the sixth reel. But that ain’t Anwar al-Aulaqi.

I don’t know if Anwar al-Aulaqi was a “bad guy” who the government rightly murdered. I do, however, know that he was an American citizen. I do know that the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution requires that any person (not just citizens, although it seems to be interpreted that way) shall be deprived of life without due process of law. I don’t see any due process of law in the case of Anwar al-Aulaqi.

But 75% of Ed Schultz’s viewers think that the government must be right. I wonder how many of them would feel the same if Bush were still president? Because let’s face it, sooner or later, someone very much like Bush will be in power. And then it might be some cannabis grower in Colorado who is an imminent (government definition: not imminent) threat.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

When I first started studying physics seriously, Einsteinian relativity really bugged me. It just didn’t make sense. So I worked really hard to understand it—harder than I ever worked to understand any other kind of physics. And I never had an epiphany. Instead, I just accepted it. Relativity was just the way the world was. Things that are moving very fast relative to each other simply behave in ways that my intuition based upon things moving slowly did not prepare me to understand. Dr. Einstein or: how I learned to stop worrying and love relativity.

By the time I got to quantum mechanics, I was a Zen Master. It bothers you that reality is just a cosmic poll of individual quantum occurrences? The cow is slow but the earth is patient, Grasshopper! Or more to the point: shut up and solve your equations! And as time went on, I took some amount of solace in the belief that theories were not reality. One thing they don’t tell you in school: the very best theories might be accurate to within one part in a million. But no theory is perfect. And that makes reality a whole lot more interesting.

It also makes our place in the cosmos a lot more tenuous. As physicists bombarded atoms with more and more energy, I came to believe that we were likely just banging our metaphorical head against the box of reality that we were caught in. After all, with paradoxes in pure math, how could our physical reality be any less bizarre? At first, this led me to think that quantum mechanics must just be an outcome of our limited perception of a greater reality.

It turns out that the great physicist Hugh Everett thought much the same thing—although he did with equations because he was all smart and shit. But before getting to what he had to say, let me just say that Everett was my kind of a physicist. He over-ate, over-drank, and over-smoked. And he paid the price, dying at 51 back in 1982. He was a man of many vices and I respect that! Anyway, he claimed in a one-dimensional universe where a particle can go one way or the other, it goes both. Basically: there are two universes. And so on…

Now don’t start with me! I know the objections. It sounds like madness. It implies an ever increasing number of universes. Well, get over it! The truth is that when you get to cosmology, nothing really makes sense. Sure, the Big Bang makes sense. But as a cosmological theory, it is every bit as unhelpful as the God theory. The nature of reality has to be really strange—so strange that it doesn’t make any sense to us.

And that is why I wrote above that “at first” I thought that quantum mechanics was just our view of a larger reality. There is a problem. It implies that if we could see all of reality, it would make sense. But it wouldn’t. It would be just like relativity. We are by our nature parochial. The only stuff that makes sense is what we know from our parochial reality. But it is nice to imagine another parochial reality where all the quantum statistics broke his way, and Hugh Everett is a grand old man enjoying his retirement in Virginia.

H/T: Brad Plumer

Quinnipiac has released a poll. It shows that when you ask Americans about particular gun law policies, they are very much in favor of (for example) universal background checks and an assault weapons ban. These are positions of President Obama. The NRA, on the other hand, is against universal background checks and any limits at all on assault weapons. So it shouldn’t be surprising what result Quinnipiac gets when they ask, “Who do you think better reflects your views on guns, President Obama or the National Rifle Association?” President Obama, right?

Wrong again, Bob! Americans think that the NRA better reflects their views by 46% to 43% for President Obama. This is yet another reason why we here in America cannot have nice things: we believe in people who not only disagree with us, but who actually work against what we want.

This is nothing new, of course. Ask Americans what they think about pretty much any specific policy, and you will find that America is at worst a center left nation—and probably just a left nation. But ask those same Americans whether they are conservative or liberal and they’ll say conservative.

In the United States, we can’t have nice things because we are a nation of sleep walkers. We vote for vague concepts like “strength” and “justice” even as we get (year after year) poverty and injustice. Even after two months during which the NRA has publicly embarrassed itself time and again—when it has shown itself to be far outside the mainstream of American thought—over half of Americans still think that the NRA speaks for them.

And that, my friends, is why we can’t have nice things.