House Rpt.108-614 - MARRIAGE PROTECTION ACT OF 2004

Senator Sensenbrenner (R-Wis) submitted the `Marriage Protection Act of 2004' to the House of Representatives. The summary includes the following.

"H.R. 3313 would prevent unelected, lifetime-appointed Federal judges from striking down the protection for states Congress passed in the Defense of Marriage Act (`DOMA')"

(Apparently, this is the actual form in which it is submitted to the house. It is neat to have all this online.)

But to the point: Federal judges are lifetime-appointed, and they are unelected. That's how our system works. Part of the job of Federal judges, a job which they take an oath to fulfil, is to strike down laws that violate the constition.

For Senator Sensenbrenner to criticize them for doing exactly what they are sworn to do is to criticize the constitution for saying what it says. If any of this is a surprise to Senator Sensenbrenner perhaps he should take a refresher course on the separation of powers and how the principle of checks and balances works in our government.

Google Search: separation of powers turned up the following on the first page:

• National Constitution Center: Separation of Powers and a System of Checks and Balances
• A Glossary of Political Economy Terms
• Constitutional Topic: Separation of Powers - The U.S. Constitution Online - USConstitution.net.

Fantastic jobs?

"It is especially galling to see the governor point at a handful of school bus drivers and excoriate them as 'special interests' that he must fight before we can have a budget. ...

The governor ran for office promising 'fantastic jobs for every Californian.' But his actions are just the opposite. He wants to help a corporation to cut bus drivers' pay. This kind of policy would increase the number of working poor in our state."

Lillian Taiz, California Faculty Association Vice President, and Professor of History at California State University, Los Angeles commenting on Governor Schwarzenegger's insistence that the budget include a provision that would allow local school districts to outsource school bus-driver positions to companies that pay lower wages than those paid by the school district.

I fault Schwarzenegger for tying this issue to the state budget. It has nothing to do with the state budget, and the state should not be held hostage to settling this debate about wage levels.

More philosophically, I'm not sure what my position is on wages. Normally, if I have a choice between similar products at different prices, I'll choose the less expensive one. But what if the price differential is due entirely to a wage differential. Should I care? If I buy the more expensive product, I'm depriving the people who make the less expensive product (and who make less money doing it) of a living. (That's one of the dilemmas we face with regard to labor standards on imported goods.) If I buy the less expensive product, am I exploiting the people who produced it if they work for very low wages?

I basically do believe in market mechanisms. The low price should win over the high price. Why isn't that true for wages?

On the other hand, the growing imbalance between the pay of CEOs and the pay everyone else gets is not healthy. Our middle class is shrinking. That's not good for the country either. I don't have an answer.

Stronger unions would help. Unfortunately, unions abused their power when they had more strength.

In the interest of full disclosure, I belong to the California Faculty Association (CFA), the same faculty union that Lil does. I believe that it is a good and necessary union.

On Girlie Men and Our Manly Governor

Steve Lopez writes a terrific column for the LA Times.  Today he took on our Governor. Here are some highlights.

• Number of times Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger promised an on-time budget in the last year: Too many to count.
  
  Number of days that have passed since the budget deadline: 21.
  
  
• Total dollar amount of the 2003-04 budget signed by ex-Gov. Gray Davis: $99.1 billion.
  
  Total amount of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's first budget after promising to shrink government: $103 billion.
  
  
• Number of employees on Gov. Schwarzenegger's staff who make $100,000 or more: 14.
  
  Number of employees on Gov. Davis' staff who made $100,000 or more: 8.
  
  
• Schwarzenegger's whereabouts just hours after vowing to stay in Sacramento and fight like a warrior to end the budget stalemate: Beverly Hills fund-raiser.
  
  Amount raised at Beverly Hills fund-raiser by Schwarzenegger, who earlier promised to end fund-raising during budget season: Roughly $400,000.
  
  Amount Schwarzenegger has raised for himself and committees he controls since the day he said he doesn't need anyone's money because he has his own: $30 million.
  
  Nickname that best applies to ex-Gov. Davis when comparing his fund-raising prowess to Schwarzenegger's: Girlie man.

Read the whole column.

"There was no way Bush could have won."

That's what everyone will be saying November 3 after Kerry wins 40 states. Given

• Bush's record of converting a $200 billion surplus into a $500 billion deficit while simultaneous arranging an outrageous tax giveaway to his rich supporters,
• his phony but expensive war,
• his squandering of American respect around the world,
• his so-called Patriot act that has begun to move this country toward a dictatorship,
• his lack of respect for and apparent failure even to understand the fundamental rights written into the constitution, a failure so profound that even the Supreme court, the court that put him in power, had to reign him in -- something it rarely does during a real war,
• his prison scandals,
• his Halliburton scandals,
• his broken promises ("no child left behind," indeed; plenty of money for a phony missile shield but none for firefighters) and his bait-and-switch approach to government ("The Healthy Forest Loggers Act"),
• his blatant hypocrisy in which he panders to special interests at the expense of the overall economy (the imposition of shrimp and illegal steel tariffs while claiming to believe in free trade) for short -term political gain,
• his record of being the first president during whose administration the number of jobs has shrunk,
• his pompous dishonesty and promotion of bigotry, "defend the sanctity of marriage,"
• his attempt to censor government sponsored science and economic reporting,
• the torrent of well documented, highly credible anti-Bush books:
  • American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush, by Kevin Phillips,
  • The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, by Ron Suskind,
  • Against All Enemies, by Richard Clarke,
  • Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush, by John W. Dean,
  • Plan of Attack, by Bob Woodward,
  • House of Bush, House of Saud, by Craig Unger,
  • America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order, by Jonathan Clarke and Stefan Halper
  • The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity: A Diplomat's Memoir, by Joseph C. Wilson,
• his simple arrogance. He is the man who told Bob Woodward,

  "I'm the commander. See, I don't have to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."

Given that Bush is

• the man who will almost certainly be judged as one of the worst Presidents in history,
  
  
• the man who, when asked how he responded to the August 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB)  entitled 'Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US,' said
  

  "My response was exactly like then [sic] as it is today, that I asked for the Central Intelligence Agency to give me an update on any terrorist threats. And the PDB was no indication of a terrorist threat. There was not a time and place of an attack. [emphasis added] It said Osama bin Laden had designs on America. Well, I knew that. What I wanted to know was, is there anything specifically going to take place in America that we needed to react to?"

  In other words, since bin Laden hadn't sent him a telegram explaining how and when he intended to attack, there was nothing to do,
  
  
• the man on whose watch 9/11 occurred.

How could he possibly have won a second term? Of course he lost by a landslide.

That's what we'll all be saying on November 3.

So why am I so worried now?

Why tyrants rule Arabs

Gwynne Dyer writes

"It was just a random statistic, but a telling one: Only 300 books were translated into Arabic last year. That is about one foreign title per million Arabs. For comparison's sake, Greece translated 1,500 foreign-language books, or about 150 titles per million Greeks. Why is the Arab world so far behind, not only in this but in practically all the arts and sciences?"

This is an interesting statistic on its own. Dyer goes on to blame it on the west for supporting Arab dictatorships. I think that's a bit too much of playing the victim.

Dyer does seem to have intersting things to say, though. I quoted her once before: It's not always about you. In both cases, I saw her stuff in Radio Free USA.

Saying No to Killers

The genocide in Sudan is not over. Nicholas Kristof continues to be our conscience and to remind us that we are doing nothing to stop it.

Colin Powell's visit to Sudan was an excellent first step, but President Bush has remained passive. As for John Kerry, he averted his eyes from Darfur for months, but last week he finally demanded action against what he termed genocide. ...

If readers want to help, I've listed some actions they can take on www.nytimes.com/kristofresponds Posting 520 (but please don't send money to me). Moral choices lie not only with those who, like Carl Wilkens, risk death to help others, but also with the millions of ordinary people who are spared the risks but still face a basic decision: Do we try to save lives, or do we simply turn away?

The Arabian Candidate

Paul Krugman is fantastic. Read The Arabian Candidate.

Are we born dualists? And if so, should we be concerned?

I belong to a reading group. Yesterday evening we discussed Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human, by Paul Bloom, Psychology Professor at Yale. Amazon.com quotes from Publisher's Weekly,

"Bloom's central thesis is that what makes us uniquely human is our dualism: our understanding that there are [both] material objects, or bodies, and people, or souls."

No one in the reading group thought the book itself was very good. It rambled on, skipping from one point to another, without an overall coherent structure. But the issue it raises is central to how we look at the world. (By the way, Bloom does not argue that dualism is true, only that we are wired to see the world from a dualistic perspective.)

My perspective is that dualism is an exaggeration. It is an unfortunate consequence of setting in stone an explanation of real phenomena about which we have yet to develop adequate terms. Here's the problem.

When you think about someone you know, you don't think of that person in terms of his or her brute physical substance -- although you may picture that person in your mind in terms of his or her overall appearance, which is different. You don't think about hair follicles, or blood cells, or internal organs, or the partially digested food in the person's digestive tract. You think about the person in terms of his or her personality: what is it like to be with the person, what does the person like or dislike, what scares the person, how intelligent is the person, is the person outgoing or shy, what makes him or her laugh or cry. Even when we think of a person sexually, we think of how the person feels and reacts when touched in a certain way; we don't think of touching as an interaction between two (lifeless) physical substances.

This becomes especially clear when we consider how we think about corpses. We don't think about a corpse as the same as the person who died -- even if the person just died a moment ago. We tend to distinguish between a person and a person's body. We think about the substance of a person and the personality of a person as two distinct things. Try running define: personality to see a nice collection of definitions for personality. Many of these definitions capture quite well what we think of when we think of a person.

In the preceding, I used the term personality. But the term personality seems to refer to a collection of properties or characteristics of a person. We don't think of a person's personality as being the person himself or herself.

So if a person's physical substance is not the person, and the person's personality is not the person, what is the person? Certainly it is isn't a person's hair follicles or internal organs that cry when the person is sad. It doesn't even make sense to apply the notion of being sad to hair follicles and internal organs. Nor is it consistent with our use of the term to say that the personality was afraid when something frightening happened. We just don't use the term personality that way. So what was sad, or afraid, or intelligent, or angry, or happy, or reckless?

Traditionally we have used terms like soul to refer to the person and the word personality to refer to ways of describing a soul. In other words, we reify (another great word) what we think of as the person as something separate from the physical realm but something to which personality-related terms apply.

In doing so, we become dualists.

And what choice do we have? What other options are there?

The answer is a longish story, but the short version of it is this. There are lots of processes in the world that persist in a relatively constant form over an extended period of time. Think, for example, of a book club. The actual members of the book club come and go. (This is similar to the fact that the physical substance of a person's body comes and goes.) The location at which the book club meets may vary over time. The frequency with which the club meets may vary also. Yet we have no problem talking about a book club as a thing even though there is virtually nothing physical about it that is constant. (Along similar lines, do you remember "the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York" from Guys and Dolls?)

We have no trouble talking about a book club as (if it were) a thing or Nathan Detroit's crap game as (if it were) a thing; yet we don't insist that either has a soul. Each can have a personality, but you don't need a soul to have a personality. All you really need is persistence.

So it seems to me that we are indeed dualists in that we do see the world as consisting of more than just physical objects. But being dualists doesn't necessarily mean that we believe that the world is divided into two distinct realms: the physical and the spiritual.

We quite reasonably see the world as consisting of more or less static physical objects and more or less dynamic (but persistent) processes -- and that seeing the world in these terms is quite useful. There is nothing all that mysterious about it.

Fierce Blue

Former Harvard Business School Professor Blasts Bush

For what it's worth. Professor Yoshihiro Tsurumi says Bush was 'shallow,' 'flippant' in 1970s class.