Plucky Political Predictions

Barack Obama won't reveal a secret plan to turn the country into a Marxist state. He won't organize gangs of "civilian national security force" goons to beat up anybody who criticizes him. He won't even appoint Jesse Jackson as Secretary of State. He won't do any of the scary things I've heard right-wing radio talk show hosts claim he will do.

Sarah Palin will co-author, with a ghost writer, two books, which will sell well on conservative web sites and in bible book stores.

The Proposition 1A high-speed rail project will not be completed by 2030, as promised. There will be at least two more ballot initiatives asking for more funds.

Same-sex couples will eventually win the right to marry in California. Sometime in the next two-hundred years, we will elect the first gay President. Well, openly gay President -- James Buchanan will always be the first gay President.

Nate's First Vote

Nate helped Daddy vote this morning. Best of all, our polling place was at a fire station, so we got to see a FIRE TRUCK.

You can't see it clearly in the photo, but Nate thinks it is important to bring along a helium balloon when one votes.

Walking home, I was thinking about how he's going to be the kid who keeps getting in trouble at school because he has a contrarian libertarian nut for a dad:

"Today we are going to learn about an important civic duty -- voting. When you all get older, you will have a sacred responsibility to participate in our democratic form of government. Yes, Nate?"

"My daddy says that each California voter gets roughly an 80-millionth share in the decision of who becomes President of the United States. And that the President in turn gets to exercise vast emperor-like powers that impact every one of those voters lives."

Yes, my wife agreed. He is going to be that kid. And she's going to be the one that gets all the phone calls from the principal.

Hurray for the House, Part 2

The mainstream press' coverage of the bailout has been what I have recently heard described as an "echo chamber". Mere repetition of the talking points coming from the politicians, with no follow-up questioning or skepticism. I image a lot of reporters don't feel qualified to question confident declarations from experts.

A few days ago, I read an article (wish I could remember where) about a psychological experiment where it was shown that most test subjects would not dissent from the unanimous opinion expressed by a test group. However, as soon as one other person expressed a dissenting opinion, many test subjects would feel freed to express their own doubts. This is hardly a shocking scientific finding; we all know the story of the "Emperor's New Clothes."

I'm hoping that one of the best effects of today's No vote will be that the press will start presenting more dissenting points of view on the idea that we need a huge, hurried bailout.

Hurray for the House!

The House did the right thing by voting down the bailout plan today. The hasty, ill-conceived plan (has Bush ever met a hasty, ill-conceived plan he didn't love?) was built around two bad ideas:

First, that we can mitigate the effect this credit crisis will have on "Main Street" Americans by having the government borrow an amount of money, in one mind-blowing orgy of spending, equal to the on-the-books cost of the Iraq War. (The actual cost of the Iraq War is a few hundred billion more than the figures Republicans like to quote.) This is money on credit that will have to be repaid, with interest, either through inflation or higher taxes -- either way, "Main Street" Americans would suffer.

The plan has been sold with a bit of intentional misinformation: a claim that the mortgage-backed securities would be bought up at a deep discount. Not necessarily so. Paulson's original write-up proposed to buy up the assets at their maturity price. Furthermore, one of the factors making this mess such a huge mess is that nobody knows what the securities are worth. They are very difficult to value.

Second, the misconception that the $700 billion asking price is based on some kind of in-depth analysis of the economy. The truth is that the $700 billion figure is arbitrary. Paulson took the value of all mortgages held by U.S. banks, then multiplied by 0.05. Why 5%? No particular reason. Paulson has never claimed otherwise, and has never claimed by the way, that he knows whether the plan will work or not.

It's unlikely that he came up with just the right plan or the right amount. You can make a pretty good case that the economy will bounce back after its own after a downturn, in which case the bailout isn't really needed. At least not a bailout of this size. You can also make a pretty good case that we're heading towards another depression, in which case the bailout isn't going to prevent it.

So what can the government do? Just a few ideas better than what has been proposed:

1. Cut spending. A good place to start would be bringing the troops home from Iraq. Cutting spending is the only way our heavily indebted government can put real money back into the economy.

2. Require banks to hold larger reserves. A lot of the current short-term stock market crisis is driven by lack of confidence. Reform of the weak regulation that allowed the financial sector to get into this mess in the first place will help restore confidence.

3. If we must spend money, be prepared to spend it on a possible failure of FDIC guarantees. Or to help folks who are at risk of defaulting on their payments.

The best thing about today's vote-down may be that it has damaged John McCain's credibility. In this tough economic situation, the last thing we need is a war-loving President.

Three Little Book Reviews

Herman Melville, "Moby-Dick"

Despite the impression you may have gotten from the movies, Captain Ahab spends most of his time off stage, below deck, and Moby Dick doesn't appear until the last few pages. Melville once admitted that he tacked on the Ahab story so that there would be a story, and it shows.

It's best to ignore all the academic b.s. about "Moby-Dick" being the great American novel. It was panned by critics (not without good reason) when it first came out, and was nearly forgotten until the aftermath of World War I, when a novel about hubris yielded insight into the minds of the leaders who had gotten the world into such a devastating mess.

What we actually have here is a weird, rambling natural history of whales and whaling. With a subplot about a crazed, obsessive sea captain. And another subplot about a gay romanc -- err, deep friendship between an observant Yankee sailor and a cannibal harpoonist. Often fascinating, often tedious, with poetic, but sometimes incoherent, language that must be read out loud for full effect.

Eckhart Tolle, "A New Earth"

I have to apologize to my wife for marking up the margins of "A New Earth" with all my comments. I've never read a book that gave me such an overwhelming urge to talk back to the author. After reflecting on it, I realize I was reacting not to Tolle's basic message, but the tone of his writing.

Eckhart Tolle is a lot better at communicating his ideas through speaking than writing. In his series of online seminars with Oprah he comes across as a moderate thinker, humorous and likable. [Note: I don't know how to link to the archives of the online seminars, but you can find them by going to iTunes and searching for Oprah.com's Spirit Channel.]

In "A New Earth", he is often harshly judgmental, following a pattern of making a very black-and-white condemnation of some aspect of unenlightened humanity on one page, then admitting to a more moderate view a few pages later. I sometimes wondered whether the book's tone was the result of his editor over-urging him not to be wishy washy.

To give a balanced review, I have to say that Tolle's best moments in writing are the little illustrative stories he tells about zen monks or people that he has counseled. It's in these passages that the same personality he displays in the Oprah conversations shows through.

So, what is Tolle's basic message? The power of stilling one's mind of counterproductive, habitual thought patterns by learning to be in the moment. (His previous bestseller, which I haven't read, is called, "The Power of Now".) Tolle is primarily a popularizer of Buddhist thought. And I walked away from reading "A New Earth" with an intereset in reading the Buddhist source materials that influenced Tolle.

Matt Welch, "McCain: The Myth of a Maverick"

This book may seem like a hit piece on the presumptive Republican candidate, but Welch actually wrote it back when it looked like McCain's campaign was barreling towards failure.

This portrait of McCain, largely drawn from carefully reading McCain's own confessional autobiographies, shows a career politician who doesn't care about, and freely flip flops on, issues conservatives are supposed to care about: abortion, immigration, gay marriage, etc. Meanwhile, what does McCain care about? The military life, and national greatness in the vein of Teddy Roosevelt's vision of America.

I doubt this book will have much influence on the upcoming elections. Although McCain has flip flopped on all the big issues in the past, his latest positions on all the big conservative issues are "correct".

Matt Welch, the new editor of the libertarian magazine, reason, wrote "McCain: The Myth of a Maverick" while he was still on the editorial staff at the Los Angeles Times. There's a lot in the book that would turn libertarians off to voting for McCain, but few libertarians are fans of McCain or Obama, anyway.