WHERE ARE SADDAM'S CARGO SHIPS?

Am I the only one who remembers the creepy story floated in the run-up to the Iraq war, about Saddam having shadowy cargo ships that might already contain WMD's, waiting for a chance to strike U.S. shores? The NPR report I heard stated that the ships had been in radio silence but that authorities were tracking them. I haven't been able to find much about these supposed terrorism ships since then, and I'm beginning to think that I was tripping from a bad veggie burger. But it seems to me to be another spectacular case of fearmongering. . .

Unless, of course, they're still out there, waiting to strike when we least expect it. . .

Um, yeah. Hmmm.

MORE: Found some stuff. The story broke in mid-February but then nobody seems to have followed up on it. Here's the Guardian article, and, for something a little different, a CBN article with a nifty graphic and "White House" in the by-line. Here's one skeptical blogger's take as well.

People really should have ripped this story to shreds, but I suppose they were otherwise occupied. Now we can look back with embarrassment at how all of those stories influenced our views. . .

MORE: This is just one instance of the general problem of the missing Iraqi WMD's, but I have to admit that it's the most comical. The original reports claimed that these ships could be the "smoking gun," and that the reason why British and U.S. officials hadn't boarded the ships was because they feared environmental damage: so you had the severe but mysterious threat (linked to well-publicized fears about the danger emanating from cargo ships), you had the claim that this could be the missing piece of information that would prove the administration right, and you had a popular social concern (the environment) that could make Bush look greener than he ever has been or ever will be. And, most importantly, perhaps, you had a press corps that ATE IT UP and then FAILED TO FOLLOW UP ON THE STORY, dag nabbit !!!!. The best recent on line commentary on the missing WMD's can be found at: Calpundit, Daily Kos, TAPPED,The Agonist, Jane Finch, and, of course, Whiskey Bar.

PUBLIC GOODS, THE FCC, CANDY AND GUNS.

The FCC is planning to relax restrictions on ownership of multiple media in the same market. You can read about the details in a WaPo article here. For an excellent back-and-forth between duelling experts -- Harold Feld and Bruce Fein -- you should clear an hour of your schedule and listen to today's Diane Rehm show (should be available through this link). Syracuse University professor Robert Tompson had an excellent editorial on this issue in WaPo this weekend as well, here. See also this link at Amy Campbell's weblog for links to an online petition.

The details of the proposal are important. Equally important, however, is how one approaches the issue of civic knowledge. In particular, it seems to me useful to think of the issue as primarily a question of whether or not you believe that an informed citizenry is a public good, and if you do believe this, how the provision of this public good can best be accomplished. It's pretty standard in some political science literature to look at an informed citizenry as a public good -- democracy cannot function well if people are uninformed, and a more informed citizenry is likely to make better voting and advocacy decisions, and the benefits of an informed citizenry accrue to all. But there are serious problems with respect to the incentives that any individual has to become well informed on political matters. Entry costs can be high, people lead busy lives, the marginal benefit of an additional hour spent learning about politics is generally negligible, and the temptations to free ride are ubiquitous. Legislatures know about these problems in the provision of the public good of an informed citizenry, and that is why they put introduction to American government courses on the core curriculum and essentially force students to listen to professors like me.

The structure of the good is interesting, though. Imagine, if you will, a defense industry that was structured so that its technology had dual use and could produce only the following two products: candy and big guns. And let's imagine that someone proposed that we let market forces determine whether or not defense companies produced one or the other and the precise mix that they would produce them in. And let's further imagine that someone had the idea that defense is either not a public good and hence should be produced in the market (and the nasty state should get off the backs of the defense industry already!), or that it may be a public good but should be produced wholly through market forces nonetheless, perhaps because we "believe in a free market," or because the defense industry "has made the investments and should be free to make its own business decisions," or something like that. And let's also imagine that candy is much more profitable to produce than big guns.

In such a fanciful world, there will be pressure to produce candy over big guns and big guns will be underproduced.

I've stacked the deck here, of course, but I think that the analogy is accurate. The first big step in an analysis of media ownership must turn on whether or not you really believe that an informed citizenry is a public good. I certainly got the sense that Harold Feld believed that. I'm not so sure about Bruce Fein and the anti-restriction folks. Cato, for example, seems to see the issue of media ownership as one of consumer choices.

The second big step is in relating diversity of viewpoints to the production of the public good of an informed citizenry. The FCC would be wise to still be concerned about protecting diversity of ownership, given continued patterns of media consumption. Contra this opinion journal piece, as far as I understand the data, the technological revolution in information technology had not actually occured for most people yet, and even when it does, information overload will become a problem. More choices of candy does nothing to produce the public good of an informed citizenry. Given the disincentive that people have to become informed, they will predictably use shortcuts to information; we shouldn't rely on the fact of multiple channels of information if we want to produce an informed citizenry -- instead, we should reflect on what sources are already "ready-to-hand" for a majority of people. (Read also this post at Lawrence Lessig's blog.) A reliance on anti-trust laws alone skirts the underlying issue of the theoretical difference between protecting consumer choice (the reason for anti-trust) and protecting the public's ability to become politically informed, with all of the additional complexity that seeing an informed citizenry as a public good brings with it. The problem is not just that we want cheaper candy; the problem is that we want to lower the cost of consumption of big guns instead of candy, to continue my analogy.

For more views on the FCC rules, see this article at Taxing Thoughts, and interesting post on "Reading Rainbow" at Ruminate This. And see especially this Online Journalism Review article on the Canadian experiences with media consolidation.

MORE: I realize that this post doesn't really get at the issue of whether or not the proposed rule changes are a good thing. The point here is to express my frustration at the fact that the idea of an informed citizenry as a public good is not something that is very prevalent in the debate. Media ownership can't be analyzed simply from the perspective of antitrust laws (as Bruce Fein seems to think), at least from the perspective of the antitrust laws as I understand it. The problem is not simply that collusion and consolidation could lead to higher prices. The question should be approached from the issue of what sort of media structure is necessary so that citizens can be well informed. And there is a case to be made that neither extensive media consolidation nor simple reliance on new and shiny technologies will be sufficient to achieve that goal. And the First Amendment rights of broadcasters (like Clear Channel) -- in particular when these rights are tied to a profit motive -- should not be at the forefront here; not that they shouldn't be considered, but they're far from being the most important issue.

WHAT IS CONSERVATISM?

Ben Domenech is smart. He's also sharply witty and devastatingly blunt on occasion. I read his blog when I think that my blood pressure can handle it.

If you want a good statement of what a younger guy thinks conservatism means, read his post.

It is interesting that he ranks "limited government" above "free market" and "traditional values." It's not clear to me if this is supposed to be a lexical ordering.

One of the basic problems in conservative thought is the relationship between these three core principles. Conservatives often do not wish to acknowledge the severe tensions here. I was once in the company of some very smart libertarians who argued that Cass Sunstein and Stephen Holmes were "evil" to argue, in their important book The Cost of Rights, that government enforcement is necessary for the effective enjoyment of rights, and that this enforcement costs money, period. The surface reason why they claimed that this argument was evil, I recall, was that it implied that there were no natural rights, an argument that conservatives of the non-Burkean variety are also likely to find problematic. But whatever the source of rights, they still need to be enforced and institutions still need to be in place to allow and help people to enforce them against others. More fundamentally, there is a real tension between traditional values, the market, and limited government. The pressures of the modern economy put more strain on the traditional family than all the Patricia Ireland's combined (to pick one of Domenech's punching bags). And it is simply no surprise that populations in those places where market transactions more convincingly rule (in other words, big cities) also tend to be more liberal on social issues as a whole. Remember the 2000 election map?

PS

If you're in Boston tonight, check out Bajuco:

Wednesday May 28th: Ryle's Jazz Club $7 212 Hampshire Street, Inman Square, Cambridge. w/The Lola Danza Group

Here, by the way, is a draft of their website, with sound clips, pictures, and info on the band members. The handsome guy with the shaved head is my little brother.

PROGRESS ON AYODHYA?

BJP President Venkaiah Naidu suggested that a mosque could be built next to a Hindu temple at the disputed site. The Times of India views this as a bid by the BJP to get muslim voters. If so, good for them! That is the way democratic politics is supposed to work: politicians try to build diverse coalitions by responding to the concerns of different subgroups. And this is certainly a welcome stance compared to recent BJP extremism in Gujarat, for example. (For more links on Ayohdya, see my posts here and here.)

REPORTS OF THEIR DEATH

. . .greatly exaggerated. All the claims about the weakness of the Democratic party (some of it served up with a heavy dose of Schadenfreude) ignore an absolutely central fact: the country is very evenly divided along partisan lines. It will not take all that much to give the Democrats control over any of the branches of government in 2004. In fact, the increased partisan shrillness is a direct result of the narrowness of the Republican party's hold on power. If (as OTB quotes Tony Blankely as saying) the Republicans had been so good at convincing Americans that huge tax cuts were the way to go, it wouldn't have taken a tie-breaking vote by Dick Cheney to pass the recent tax bill. And it should never be forgotten that a better ballot design in a few counties in Florida, or an earlier challenge to Jeb Bush's purging of the voter rolls of minority voters in FL (to pick two examples), or even just a process that was better at tracking voter intent or majority will, would have given Al Gore the Presidency, and then we would have been talking about whether the Republican resurgence of the 1990s had reached its peak.

MORE: Kim Osterwalder was inspired by the same Joe Lieberman interview that I heard the other day, even though there won't be an official free pie endorsement of Joe Lieberman unless he's the last man standing. Read the post: Lieberman is at least able to articulate several points at which the Bush administration is very vulnerable: lack of postwar planning for Iraq and the need for a multinational body for transition to civilian rule, for example. Much of the rest of Lieberman's interview was also dead on. Here are my favorite lines:

One of the things I argue here is that one of the great things about America is that we respect each other's faiths. In the same way we ought to respect the differing directions in which our faiths take us in terms of politics and public issues. There are times when this administration seems to be arguing that... if your faith matters to you, it can only take you in one direction, which is to extremely conservative politicalky values or positions. I think that's not only not right, it's not consistent with our history where faith has been a great source of progress -- abolitionist movements, civil rights, etc., movements that were considered liberal or progressive in their day. But it's also not tolerant and it's not unifying... the Bush social agenda has really taken us so far to the right that I believe that it's separated the American people at a time, because of all the threats we have, when we really most need to be united.

Historically this view has its problems: abolitionism was most assuredly not a unifying force, nor was the civil rights movement, really. But it would have been nice if they had been, and it certainly is in the best tradition of political rhetoric to try to incorporate such movements into the national self-understanding, however much it might blind us to the difficulties of social change.

GERMANY AND THE IRAQ WAR

Michael Mertes, former advisor to Helmut Kohl, gives his take on the effects of German opposition to the U.S. in the run-up to the Iraq war. (Link from my friend Parley) According to Mertes, Germany has lost the trust of the U.S. and has also harmed the multilateral institutions that provided political, economic, and military security for Europe since WWII. The article is worth a read, particularly for the conclusion: Germany needs to beef up its military spending while convincing the rest of the world that it is not becoming militaristic:

Besides abandoning any Gaullist pretensions, the other lesson Germany must learn is that influence is based not only on soft "civilian power," but also on hard military capabilities that are adapted to the exigencies of the post-Cold War world. If Germany wants to increase its diplomatic weight, it must increase its defense spending. Only an enhanced German relevance in European and world politics will convince America that it is time to bury the hatchet.

If pursued, this course will be a difficult tightrope, especially given the hardline Bush administration worries about a resurgent military power in Europe. And it seems to me that Mertes overestimates the significance of the "personal betrayal" that Bush is supposed to have felt toward Schroeder; perhaps Schroeder should have been more careful in his opposition to U.S. policy, but the blame also lies squarely with Bush, who refused to engage multilateral institutions to the same degree that Clinton did. Mertes admits this point, however. He is more concerned with how to repair the damage -- to both U.S. / German relations as well as common European aspirations -- caused by what he calls Schroeder's "fecklessness." Mertes underestimates how much the split with Germany was an opportunity for a "divide and conquer" strategy to be pushed by those in the administration who were already suspicious of European power. I find it hard to believe that anything short of total German cooperation (a pipe dream) would have been acceptable to the Bush administration.

1,000,000,000,000

PS: That's a TRILLION. Twelve zeroes. A million million. One thousand billion.

ONE **TRILLION** DOLLARS, TWO **TRILLION** DOLLARS

Democrats need to start using this word -- TRILLION -- more often. The Republican tax cut plan is a tax cut close to ONE TRILLION DOLLARS if one factors in all of the cuts that eventually Bush will argue need to be made permanent. ONE TRILLION DOLLARS. ONE TRILLION DOLLARS. You don't even HAVE to say it in your Doctor Evil voice for it to sound creepy and wrong.

And House Republicans are not satisfied:

"House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) said Republicans are just beginning. He said the House will send more than a trillion dollars in additional tax cuts to the Senate "in the very near future".

Can you say TWO TRILLION DOLLARS?

And at a time in which states and localities are in financial free fall, and feeling the weight of additional security measures?

And I'm not surprised that some folks argue that the price tag doesn't matter. That's because the sticker shock of this tax bill will floor most people.

Just say it: trillion trillion trillion. Kind of rolls off the tongue. Give it a chance to sink in.

MORE: Jim at OTB wants to parry and thrust his way to a criticism of Demcratic wastefulness here, as in, that two trillion dollars would have been wrested from the hands of hardworking Americans and piddled away if Republicans hadn't stepped in. But Jim omits my real criticism: size matters because there are higher priorities than tax cuts (i.e., homeland security). States are getting the fiscal crap kicked out of them already, and instead of helping them out, the President pushes a tax cut plan. Brilliant. But Jim also omits the same word that Republicans have consistently omitted in the whole discussion: deficits. Call it the "D-word." Too bad it isn't spelled with four letters.

For a good take on the whole tax cut thing, see the transcript of the online interview with Brookings economist William Gale. One nibble:

Cape Town, South Africa: To what extent are columnists such as Paul Krugman exaggerating the "fiscal crisis" that could result from the tax cut, as well as the claim that 'radicals' have hijacked domestic fiscal planning in an attempt to cut social spending programs that otherwise would be politically untouchable?

William Gale: I think Krugman has been not only right on the money but even prescient in his analysis.

The nuts and bolts of his analysis are important as well.

LFO? WHAT LFO?

Amid ongoing negotiations over the LFO (as this Dawn article and this article in the Daily Times note, opposition forces are now apparently calling upon Musharraf to leave his military post), the major U.S. papers have nary a word about the LFO. Instead, WaPo carries a story on islamist attempts to impose shariah in a northwest province.

HA! AND DOUBLE HA!

RAAAH-JEH. . .RAAAH-JEH. (sound it out and imagine it being screamed by about 36,000 Sox fans).

#300, DENIED.

I'm not bitter or anything.

RAAAH-JEH. . .RAAAH-JEH

HOUSECLEANING

I'm back in the wild woods of CNY after a fantastic weekend in the metro DC area with Anita, Bailey, Anita's parents, and a whole additional cast of characters including a radio/TV announcer from Albany, a staffer for a prominent conservative Senator, and David Beckham. Well, the last wasn't in person (saw this movie, which is very cute and a good escapist couple of hours worth your nine bucks), but the rest were. And it was all good, clean fun. For the most part.

At any rate, thought I'd just answer some of the mail that's been accumulating in my hotmail account:

To "Alyssa C. Graham": No, I never did "notice that." And I prefer getting my prescription drugs at my local pharmacy, thank you very much.

To "Amanda D. Thompson": [to answer your question,] I don't like you because you're not real. You're actually a figment of some spammer's imagination. Go away and stop bothering me -- and my sex life is just fine with my "natural equipment," thank you very much.

To betty@nic.fi: I doubt that Friday is really "time for fun," as you put it, at least in the Marston household, at least this weekend. Plus, your message consisted entirely of consonants, so I have no idea what you wanted me to do.

To brett_marston@untd.com: Stop creeping me out by using my name, you jerk.

To "Jada D. Walker": I've cc-ed you the same note I sent to Amanda D. Thompson, above. For the record, I'm doing fine.

To "Lenny Bill": I'm not actually looking for "handsome women" at the moment, thank you very much. But your website will, rest assured, be the last place I would ever look for them, you moron. What kind of an idiot do you think I am?

To "Seth T. Kelly": If I were looking for an internet dating service, I'd probably go here. Leave me alone.

Well, that should do it. Oh, more substantially, in response to this post, Chris reminds me that Tony Snow is also a Davidson grad. Argh.

FOX NEWS DEMAGOGUERY

This post will be vague, useless, and cranky.

Yesterday, listening to C-Span radio's replay of Fox News Sunday, I was surprised at how utterly ridiculous Tony Snow's final commentary was. He made two points: economic forecasts are imprecise (he called them "bunk" or something like that and counseled his audience to disregard all predictions of the economic results of the tax cut as the pronouncements of self-aggrandizing who want to play God), and "the American people" are really the source of all goodness in the country.

Tony Snow is an idiot. All forecasting is a matter of making your best guesses on the basis of available information. It's bound to be imprecise. But forecasts are also used by economic actors in order to make investment decisions (presumably Tony Snow would say that such actors are more virtuous than politicians and thus more reliable). And more fundamentally, Snow levels the difference between risk and uncertainty.

But his commentary had nothing to do with an appreciation of the weaknesses of economic forecasts, or with an understanding of the intersection between politics and economics; rather, the point of his commentary was to flatter the American public and to make it sound as if only he, Tony Snow, could pierce through the web of deceptions created by unscrupulous and power-hungry politicians. In other words, you can't trust politicians, but you can trust the news media to show where politicians are wrong.

BANNING OUTSOURCING?

The Hindustan Times reports on efforts in NY, MD, CT and WA to ban outsourcing of state data processing contracts. There is no real background for the article; the implication is that this is a protectionist measure designed to keep service jobs in the U.S. (and a similar path is being taken in the UK).

THIS IS SAD.

If you have any lingering doubts about the danger of what Cass Sunstein calls the echo chambers of the modern media, read Jack Balkin's sobering post on one of the FBI theories of the recent bomb at Yale Law School: namely, that some nutcase decided to get back at the "liberals in the academy." This is, of course, the dark side of "moral clarity."

MORE THINGS THAT AREN'T THAT DIFFERENT

On May 18th, in the NYT Week in Review section, Cass Sunstein argued that it was strange that the administration was willing to go to war because of the risk that Saddam Hussein might have WMD's and might pass them on to terrorists, but that it wasn't willing to engage in emissions regulation because global warming was still a theory. The risk of global warming isn't proven, scientifically, at least to Bush's taste. What's different about the risk of Iraqi WMD's?

Whatever.

MORE: Eric's diagnosis of my problem here: I spent too much time reading Kant. He might be right.

THINGS THAT AREN'T SO DIFFERENT

From WaPo, today:

But in reality the new tax bill is a huge triumph for President Bush and the underlying "starve the government" ideology he represents.

One of the arguments against the filibuster is that it represents a binding of future congresses, whereas the theory of democratic government that Reps rely on here (taken, strangely perhaps, from Blackstone) says that each Congress is fresh and is not bound by past Congresses.

But in fiscal policy, of course, all bets are off. Here the current Congress is perfectly allowed to tie the hands of future Congresses by engaging in a startling opening shot in what is intended to be a startling period of retrenchment.

Whatever.

PUGS INSULTED, FLASHER FLEES

Read the article here. (Anita sent this along.)