Ezra Klein Is Impressed by Boehner

See here. Reactions against type such as this make me value both the commenter and the commentee more highly.

How To Cut Crime

Dirk Beauregarde on Beyonce and how to cut crime, at least the crime of burning cars, which is an old French tradition at New Years.

Implications of a Government Shutdown

Charles Peters in the Washington Monthly used to have fun with bureaucratic techniques to avoid budget cuts.  I think he called one tactic: "closing the Washington Monument".  In other words, try to cut an agency's budget and the wise bureaucrat will make sure the cut shows up in the most painful way possible. That's sort of what will happen if history repeats itself and the government is shutdown.  If I remember the Gingrich days, there very quickly was some triage.  Congress decided that things like defense had to continue (and we weren't involved in one war in Afghanistan then and one (something) in Iraq).  And Social Security checks had to go out.  And other critical activities had to happen.

One little-realized fact is that some agencies, or some activities within some agencies, are not financed by the budget and appropriations, but by user fees. So presumably passports will continue to be issued and meat inspections will continue. 

But I'm probably confusing two issues: a possible Republican refusal to increase the debt ceiling; and a refusal to fund the government by passing a continuing resolution or appropriations bills.  If I recall, Secretary Rubin used some financial manipulation to get around the first for a while, like raiding various trust funds by putting Treasury IOU's in place of the fund assets.  The Republicans howled, but the tactic worked.  There's a limit to how long that can go on.  The second issue causes parts of the government to shut down.  Because the Democrats didn't pass any 2011 appropriations bills, if and when the current continuing resolution expires the whole government would shut down.  That's when you'll see some bipartisan agreement on funding things like DOD, VA, IRS, SSA with appropriations.  What happens next we don't know.

Sen, Grassley Has a Failing Memory

Chris Clayton at DTN posts on Sen. Grassley's views, which are that direct payments may be challenged.  He includes this quote:

"I think the principle behind direct payments when it was established in '96 was sound, but I think now reflecting upon two or three years where there hasn't been any loan programs, target payments, very little counter-cyclical payments made, that it stands out as just a hand out to farmers as opposed to a safety-net approach that was the motive behind direct payments."

My memory is that Freedom to Farm was intended to transition farmers to a free market economy, with the payments used as a bridge to the future, not as a safety-net.  From a NYTimes summary on Pat Roberts:

Roberts fashioned a Freedom to Farm bill designed to phase out subsidies over seven years. In September 1995 his bill failed in committee when Southern Republicans voted against it. But in November 1995, Roberts persuaded Agriculture conferees to include most of his bill in the 1996 budget reconciliation bill, which Bill Clinton vetoed.

Blogging Metrics

I want to compliment GovBookTalk.gpo.gov for its post providing its metrics for the year. I've commented in some places, and possibly posted here, about my belief government websites should have a page devoted to their metrics, just so citizens, management, and the website creators could all see what's happening.  GovBookTalk is the first .gov site I've seen which has published any metrics.  Of course, now I've complimented them, I need to eat my own medicine and publish my own metrics...

Huckleberry Finn

Kevin Drum posts  on a plan to publish a version of Huckleberry Finn with "nigger" replaced by "slave". He goes with a lesser of two evils: better to have the book taught in high school even bowdlerized than restricted to college.  I disagree.

[Updated: interesting comment thread  at Ta-Nehisi Coates on this issue. University Diaries also has a post.]

Scholarly Citations and Page Numbers in Kindle

Matt Yglesias endorses a complaint by John Holbo: Kindle doesn't show page number so it complicates the job of creating footnotes for scholarly articles.  Seems to me there's a simple cure: adopt a standard which adheres to the following format: [version of publications--Kindle, Google Book, etc.][search by Google, Kindle, whatever][date searched][number of result].

The point is, after all, not to specify the page number, but to allow someone coming after the writer to reproduce the writer's results, just as a scientific experiment needs to be specified in enough detail to allow reproduction. So if you specify a search engine and a text, and the terms you used to reach the material, that should be quite adequate.

Why China Is More Powerful Than the US

Short answer: it's not, I'm just polluting the Internet with more disinformation.  Dan Drezner debunks the myth in Foreign Policy.

Lord Acton Was Right

Barking Up the Wrong Tree has a post, on a study which asked whether power makes us dehumanize people. The answer is "yes". Whether it's childhood bullying, or soldiers and civilians, the wealthy and the poor, whenever there's an imbalance of power it's going to be abused.  Not always, but enough of the time any moral person should be concerned and work to change the situation.

[Updated: On second thought, that might be my definition of the difference between conservatism and liberalism: liberalism thinks governmental action can be rational and improve balances of power; conservatism thinks government action will mostly make things worse.]

An Interesting Life

A local heiress died at 70, and her obit in the Post was one of the more interesting I've ever read.  For one thing, in reference to her second husband:

"About the kindest things that witnesses could say of Carmichael were that he was a pretentious, scheming, self-infatuated, manipulative dilettante."