Random Thoughts

The FDA has decided to ban flavored cigarettes.  The question many are asking is does the ban cover flavored cigars too?  Here’s how the FDA handled that question:

The distinction between cigarettes and cigars has long revolved around the wrapping. Cigarettes are made of tobacco wrapped in paper, and cigars are made of tobacco wrapped in tobacco or paper constituted from tobacco. The tobacco inside the products also generally differs.

…

Dr. Deyton was asked several times if Tuesday’s ban applied to any little cigars or cigarillos. “According to the law, if something is wrapped in a tobacco leaf, that would not be considered,” he said and then stopped and added: “Hold on just a second.”

After a delay, Catherine Lorraine, a lawyer in the agency’s tobacco center, got on the call and said that if consumers believe a product is a cigarette, then the law defines it as a cigarette no matter how it is wrapped or labeled.

“We will be looking at products on an individual basis to determine if it meets that aspect of the legislation,” Ms. Lorraine said.

That’s right folks: the FDA lawyers are saying that subjective consumer impressions — and not the objective characteristics of the product — determine whether sale is legal.

It really is whiplash inducing to go from reading the Wall Street Journal as my daily paper to occasionally picking up the New York Times at the BART station.

From a Times story on Acorn:

WASHINGTON — The House voted Thursday to deny federal money to the community-organizing group Acorn after a video emerged in which employees of the group gave advice to two conservative activists posing as a prostitute and a pimp who said they wanted buy a house in Baltimore and start a brothel.

…

Bolstered by conservative media outlets, Republicans have been on a crusade against the organization for months, accusing it of improperly influencing elections and being protected by Democrats who were the beneficiaries of the group’s political activities. Matters came to a head in the past week after the Acorn workers were videotaped.

Of course, the article contains no mention of the fact that the Baltimore Acorn office continued to provide advice even after it became clear that the “pimp” was looking to house child prostitutes.

From an article on a new Marine recruiting ad:

[The ad] also makes no effort to show the emotional or mental challenges involved in being a Marine, like coping with combat stress or death.

I guess you just couldn’t resist, could you?

The piece is unnecessarily sympathetic to the Administration’s case, but it’s still encouraging to see the Times come out against their union buddies.

President Obama, at the behest of the United Steelworkers union, will be adding a 35 percent tariff on tires imported from China.

The basic idea behind trade is that certain countries are better at certain things; international trade allows each country to specialize in what it’s best at.  Alternately — and this is what we’re choosing here — you can prop up industries where your nation is non-competitive instead of trying to spread into industries where you have a competitive advantage.

Here’s a great quote from the article:

Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat who had pressed for the tariffs, also praised the decision.

He said in a statement, “If American workers and manufacturers are going to compete in the global market, they need to have a government that uses trade enforcement tools.”

Allow me to translate:  “Because American companies and workers are inherently inferior to foreign companies and foreign workers, they require a crutch from their government.”

Thanks guys!  Now not only will my tires cost more, but China will likely impose retaliatory tariffs that target an industry where we do have a competitive advantage.  Those guys, of course, don’t deserve protection because they didn’t pay their congressman enough money.

Is it acceptable to holler “YOU LIE” at the President of the United States during a joint session of Congress?  No folks, it is not.  Not shouting like a jackass at people in the middle of their speech, especially when they’re the President, is simply part of being raised properly.

There’s a significant group that has discovered you can make fistfuls of cash by marketing outrage as a from of entertainment (read: Fox “News”).  These people, for the sake of padding their bank accounts, have chosen to identify themselves as Republicans and play on some very justified conservative disillusionment.  We should not make the mistake of believing that they have they best interest of this country at heart, and we certainly should not copy their behavior and bring it to our nation’s capital.

If the current health care plan passes it will have a significant negative impact, especially in the area of health care innovation.  We should not, however, make the mistake of believing that the significant portion of the country that is passionately advocating such are proposal is doing so in anything other than good faith.

I’ll close with a quote by C. S. Lewis from Mere Christianity:

Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils.

The health care debate has been just horrible, with both sides playing to the lowest common denominator, and making all sorts of bad-faith accusations against the other side.  Megan McArdle says it quite well:

I’m sad that libertarians and conservatives are casting this as some sort of massive conspiracy of power-mad idiots, when there’s obviously a very large left-wing policy apparatus built up around health care that knows a thing or two, and virtually all of the progressives advocating this are for it because they are worried about people who can’t get basic health care.  I’m sad that liberals are casting their opposition as being mostly about racism and hatred of the poor.

In all of this, I find myself upset the most by what’s coming out of the Republican camp.  Part of that is because I think Keith Olbermann notwithstanding, there’s really no left wing equivalent to guys like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Bill O’Reily.  The bigger part, however, is because this is my team.  When the other guys act like jackasses, I think to myself “that’s why I’m not on their team.”  When major figures from the party I identify with attempt to advance their cause primarily through intellectual dishonesty, I start to get a little upset.  And worried.

This, a survey sent out by the Washington State Republican Party, pretty much sums up my point.

A survey sent out by the Washington State Republican Party.

Here’s a question to my fellow conservatives:  why is this ok?  Why do we tolerate members of our own party distributing this swill?  It’s time for a little self-policing, or the electorate will do the policing for us.  “Because we lie to your face” is not a good answer to the “why should I elect you?” question.

The Republicans have issued a Seniors’ Health Care Bill of Rights, itemizing a list of services that the government should, under all circumstances, provide to seniors.  That’s right folks:  meet the new Republican party, completely unmoored from anything resembling intellectual underpinnings, now bringing you a spirited defense of big government entitlements.

Or so says our beloved Jesse Jackson:

The Rev. Jesse Jackson became the latest public figure to offer an opinion on the future of Michael Vick. Jackson said he wondered whether there had been collusion among N.F.L. owners to keep Vick out of the league.

…

Jackson, born in 1941, has been a civil rights activist for most of his adult life. He said that in some ways, Vick’s attempt to re-enter the N.F.L. was similar to Jackie Robinson’s entering Major League Baseball.

Although their situations were drastically different, Jackson said, the challenge was the same: Which owner would have the courage to make a controversial signing?

What bothers me isn’t that Jackson is a moron — the world is full of morons — but that people still listen to him.  He is a caricature.  He warrants no more attention than the homeless man on telegraph avenue raving about aliens or the fool on Fox News insisting that Obama isn’t an American citizen.

It’s times like these that I wonder if free speech isn’t so great after all, but is only worth protecting because we can’t figure out a way to regulate speech that doesn’t involve or result in terrible abuses of power.

We all know that there are Americans out there who want health insurance, but simply can’t afford it.  How big is this problem?  From Daylight’s Mark via McArdle comes the argument that the problem is not as big as we think:

On the 47 million people without health insurance point, that too is a statistic where there is less than meets the eye. … Of that 47 million, 14 million are already eligible for existing programs (Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, SCHIP) yet have not enrolled, 9.7 million are not citizens, 9.1 million have household incomes over $75,000 and could but choose not to purchase insurance, and somewhere between 3 and 5 million are uninsured briefly(<2 months) between jobs. That leaves about 10 million Americans who are chronically without insurance. Needless to say, extending the blanket of coverage to this group should not cost $1.5 trillion and require a wholesale overhaul of all of medicine.

The post is worth reading in its entirity for his thoughtful approach to the entire healthcare question, especially the discussion of what is a right vs an earned priviledge and the fact that Americans do, overall, pay more for health care.

Richard Posner, a Reagan judicial appointee, writes:

My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.

By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.

Among the various gyrations of the Republican party over the past couple of years, and the past election in particular, the populist, anti-elitism worries me the most.  The task of governing is a difficult one, one that requires a level of mental acuity that much of the Republican party seems to despite.  Unfortunately, the majority of unsolved problems are unsolved because they are difficult and do not easily lend themselves to simple solutions that can be explained in a 30 second rant on talk radio.

However, I do feel the need to copy Stephen Bainbridge here in noting that religious discourse is not inherently anti-intellectual.  Faith provides, for many of us, an underpinning of beliefs and ideals.  That does not necessary mean we are anti-intellectual.  I think Posner is simply seeking an easy target in explaining the right’s anti-intellectualism.  Certainly the anti-evolution movement has led to some residual distrust in conservatives of science in general, but it shouldn’t.  You should be able to say “I disagree with your conclusion in this matter, but the scientific method as a whole is sound.”  The more damaging anti-intellectualism has come from the conservative media populists, who in seeking to expand and amuse their viewership, have dumbed the debate down and sought to market outrage and anger as a form of entertainment.