Really, those senators should have known better.

We all remember the arguments they made at the time: the government has no role in people’s bedrooms. Family bonds are too important for government meddling. Heads of households everywhere live in constant fear of meddling bureaucracies. As a result, Americans on both the right and the left found their reasons to support the new law; is it any wonder that the bill won 90-8 in the Senate, and with a 300 vote majority in the House?

So the Ramm-Bleech-Lyin bill passed in 1999, effectively decriminalizing incest between consenting adults—and more importantly, “near-adults”. Oh, sure, some sexual practices remained illegal and prosecutable: children under the age of 13 were right out, and most Northern states looked upon the practice unkindly if either party ended up worse than bruised. But by and large, the law seemed to be a boon for all, supported by pro-family groups and civil libertarians alike.

Reports of sex crimes and rape dropped precipitously in all states, which was clear evidence that actual crimes had dropped—what better data could we have had? And when Jamie, the pseudonymous 17-year-old, became a national media sensation with the publication of her memoir in 2005, all of us enjoyed the humorous debate which ensued. Can anyone forget the national argument we had to redefine “jailbait”? Only the most extreme feminists and fundamentalists had trouble with her story of trading oral favors with her stepfather for her shiny new car. She even made a brief career out of her notoriety.

Who could have guessed that, ten years later, a wave of revelations would hit the news, telling us—well, more like alleging, really—that so many of these sex acts with teenagers over the past several years were really not consensual? That, in fact, we had made changes to the law which were damaging to America’s children and families?

Most of us, of course, are quick to refute this allegation—who among us has not benefited, at least indirectly, from the new legal regime? Hence the national outpouring of sympathy for “John”, the unfortunate Connecticut man who has become the poster child for retroactive criminalization:

I know that many people think that I should have stayed away from my daughters. But after my wife left a few years ago, after she found me with Stephanie, what else was I supposed to do? I’m a man, for Christ’s sake. It’s only natural to be attracted to young people. So I can go out looking for it elsewhere, or I can get it at home. What would you do?

And, after all, can we blame John? What he did wasn’t illegal, and had immediate short-term benefits for all concerned… or at least, John can be excused for thinking so.

We all know we are a nation of laws, not men. That’s because, obviously, if the law doesn’t criminalize the behavior, we can expect no better of each other than to act like beasts.

This was inspired by this NPR debate, after which 60% of the audience of New Yorkers voted in favor of the premise that Washington is more to blame than Wall Street for the financial crisis, on the grounds that the regulations had been repealed, and therefore no one should expect anyone to have acted any differently.

Following up on my earlier post about legislative transparency. Had the occasion to track down a bill passed today in the House, and this was the process:

1. Review various news articles about the bill, which also covered several competing versions of the bill. Amazingly, reputable political news sites–ABC, Washington Post, New York Times–neglected to actually say which of the bills had been passed, making it a search engine issue to figure out what was actually becoming law.
2. Finally found a link on the New York Times article which led to a voting report on the bill, and that page deigned to tell me the bill number. But it didn’t link to the bill’s text.
3. So I Google the bill number–and up comes a completely different bill, introduced in the last legislative session.
4. Then I look up the bill in OpenCongress.org, which gives a great overview of the legislative action, but doesn’t (yet) link to full text.
5. Finally, I find the bill in THOMAS. And am then absolutely flummoxed when some AJAX flummery prevents me from actually copying the text off the damn page.

This is ridiculous. We deserve better.

Doing some work with The Twentysomething Guide to Creative Self-Employment, a fine book which I wrote waaaaaay back in 1996. Just came across the following passage which shows that I was a few years ahead of my time.

But really, I’m sharing this because 1996 just seems so damned obsolete:

Let’s take a hypothetical example involving the worst possible activity, and try to turn it into a business. Our friend Joe has spent the last six months watching television. His apartment is unfurnished, with the exception of a twenty-seven-inch television set, a four-head VCR, and an eight-year-old futon that has seen better days. His job search went nowhere, partially because he spent too much time slacking off and partially because he didn’t hear about anything good.

Joe is reading the newspaper one day and comes across a blurb in the Style section about people hating their VCRs. One person interviewed says, “I’ve never been able to figure the thing out. I have it turned around to face the wall so I don’t have to stare at that blinking 12:00 all the time.” Someone else mentioned, “I can tape shows until the cows come home, but I never have time to watch them anyway, so what’s the point?” A third goes on, “Between cable and satellite and all of those high-tech features, I’m ready to just junk everything except my five-inch black-and-white set.”

Joe’s been thinking about trying to get some money to supplement the Kraft macaroni-and-cheese diet he’s been on, and his wheels start turning. If Joe’s not particularly bright, at this point he might think, “Hey, I can start a service where I set people’s VCR clocks for them, so they don’t flash 12:00!” Thanks to daylight saving time, Joe might get repeat business twice a year, but it’s questionable whether people would be willing to pay for this.

If Joe is a little bit smarter, he might think, “I can tape shows for people who can’t program their VCRs, so they don’t worry about missing their shows. I can even chop out the commercials for them, so they don’t have to fast-forward all the time.” Now Joe may or may not be on to something—it depends on how many people would be interested in this kind of service.

But if Joe’s neurons are really in a frenzy, he’d say, “I live in Washington, D.C. (or New York, or Los Angeles), where people are totally news-fixated. I can tape all of the newsshows, prepare a list of what stories were aired, fax it to a list of clients, and give them tapes upon request of only what they want to see, saving them time and keeping them informed!”

Or he might take another tack and say, “I’ll hire myself out to wealthy people who want to buy great home-entertainment systems but don’t know what to get. I’ll be the informed third party, more trusted than a salesman, who picks out the best package for the client and sets it all up for them.”

Unfortunately, Joe’s a typical untrepreneur, so he sits on his butt and eventually forgets about his ideas halfway through his third bag of microwave popcorn.

A chart that I came up with earlier this year. Blue line is the Dow close at the end of each calendar year. Curves are simple geometric plots, increasing at a rate such that it will intersect with the actual Dow as of the year indicated in the legend.

If you want to figure out where the Dow “should” be, you pick the rate of growth that makes the most sense to you, extrapolate to the present day, and you’re done—provided you have a talent for oversimplification.

I’m certainly no expert in finance, but I’m trying to apply a few lessons I learned in anthropology back in grad school. Namely:

1. People don’t change much, even when their cultures do.
2. We’re no different.

So it seems to me that if you want to believe that the years 1930-1980 have any particular relevance to us, then you come to one of two conclusions about any major delta in the rate of increase of the Dow:

1. We are different.
2. It’s a temporary aberration.

There are all sorts of reasons why we can call ourselves different; our grandparents didn’t spend their evenings Twittering about the lovely upgrades they made to their Hoovervilles. But most of the time, when we think we’re different, we’re kidding ourselves.

I’m perfectly comfortable with the idea that things changed after 1980; computers were arriving on people’s desks, and whether we knew it or not, the Cold War was about to end. As I understand it, that means all sorts of things about international capital flows and other financial voodoo, all of which is designed to make money too complicated for mere mortals. Hence my oversimplification: yes, the 1980s and early 1990s were different enough to account for that curve.

As for the second bend in 1994, well, sure. The Internet was becoming a major force right around then, and again, whether we knew it or not, economic forces were starting to realign.

The third bend ending in 1999, though, is clearly batshit. Even our massive housing bubble in 2006 couldn’t peak us anywhere near that growth curve.

I can see all sorts of logical fallacies in this kind of thinking, any one of which would mean that I wasted around 18 hours teaching myself how to use iWork Numbers well enough to do this chart. I’m especially unhappy with the timing; I don’t know where to intersect those curves in order to capture a hockey stick change, rather than merely intersect at its endpoints.

That said, here are the numbers at the end of each curve for 12/31/2009, in case they turn out to be illuminating or prophetic someday: 1980: Dow 1,848.40; 1990: Dow 5,124.81; 1994: Dow 6,842.23.

Dear God, I actually agree with Rush Limbaugh. From the CPAC conference, thanks to the clipping skills of Jon Stewart:

To us, bipartisanship is them being forced to agree with us after we have politically cleaned their clocks and beaten them. [standing ovation]

Yes, Rush, that’s exactly it. When your side wins, it’s slash-and-burn to Atlanta, and the opinions of anyone who disagrees with you is so much salted earth. When my side wins, we’re expected to be bipartisan and gentle, and it’s not “really” a political victory unless everybody comes to the table singing Kumbayah.

The hell with that, and the hell with you. Those of us who see Obama as having the potential to be this century’s FDR believe in him precisely because of the breadth of his agenda. To the extent that your side or conservative Democrats convince him to aim low, to nibble at the edges of our systemic problems and the unholy debacles of the last eight years, to horse-trade principles, he will be a failed president and important to history only for his race. He was elected to be something better than that.

So I say, let’s adopt Rush’s idea as our own. We have three times the House majority that the Gingrich “revolution” had. We are two short of a filibuster-proof majority; one short if the Senate and Democrats get serious about seating Mr. Franken; seven more than we need if we stop this polite fiction of needing a supermajority for every bill, and force the Republicans to take the political hit of actually filibustering popular legislation.

Enough. Basta. Dayenu. I have seen the light, and that is to generate populist fury that allows the Democrats to grow a spine and begin bending their opponents over backwards. A message to those timid Congressional leaders: you don’t have to be nice to them. As soon as they get the chance, they’ll do it to you. Again.

None of my regular readers will be surprised to hear that I’m in favor of Barack Obama’s call to reform earmarked expenditures, rather than banishing them entirely. Using a Congressional vote as leverage to fund a pet program, and bring federal money home to your district, is as old as the Republic, and it’s a vitally important way of doing business. The problem is that it can mean sending money to private companies and causes, without much transparency, which doesn’t have a great deal of public interest bang for the buck.

Obama hasn’t announced his plan for doing this yet, but I’ll suggest a very simple method of reforming not only earmarks, but all legislation passed by Congress and signed into law. Our problem isn’t just earmarks: it’s also laws written by lobbyists, bought and paid for with private money. Or all-around bad laws tacked onto otherwise good bills.

The way this happens now is by making it too damn hard for the American people to keep track of what’s happening to American law. For example, let’s say you’re curious about the actual legislation that was passed in the recovery bill. Look that up online, and here’s the first thing you find:

But that’s the HR1 version, not the Senate version, and it’s not immediately clear (to me, anyway) whether what you’re looking at is what passed in the House initially, or after the conference committee with the Senate over its version. Lawmakers love conference committees: it allows them to make major modifications to legislation after all the news reporting has been done on the House and Senate versions, and it’s where our system of governance runs with all the smoothness and commitment to justice as Zimbabwe’s.

If you prefer to track the changes made to legislation, you can use THOMAS, and you’ll get something like this:

which leads to this:

and finally, this:

Call me crazy, but I’m thinking that not only will maybe five Americans read through all that, but that this system is designed to ensure that only five Americans will read through all that.

There’s a much better way to do this, and we already have one example. Instead of reading through the 407 pages of the HR1 PDF, you can read any of the information that’s being posted to recovery.gov, which generally purports to explain in plain English just what the hell is going on with all that legalese.

And, importantly, we know who wrote this bill: no matter what changes were added in Congress, the perceived author is Barack Obama. But that also means he takes the credit or blame for subsection dccxlviii, paragraph 322, where Congressman Waldo added three lines which builds the Prairie Canyon Lookout Point and Sniper Range in Keokuk.

How about this, instead? We normal Americans have had the ability, since 1989 or so, to create documents that use “tables” and “comments”. So let’s pass a law—the last indecipherable one—which requires all future legislation to look like this fictitious example:

This would have the following very important impact:

1. Every paragraph (or even line) of legislation has a direct lineage. This need not be a member of Congress. If Barack Obama wrote it, he can take credit. If a Congressional staffer wrote it and the member wishes, the staffer’s authorship can be retained. If a lobbyist wrote it, he can be listed. However, the member who introduced the amendment must be appended.
2. If a lobbyist, or a very special friend, wrote it and a compliant member of Congress wants to cover up that fact, then he has to put in his own name instead. Someone always claims authorship. And if a lobbyist writes an entire bill wholesale, then either he or the member of Congress has to add that paragraph-by-paragraph statement of intent, each entry with someone’s name on it.
3. Every paragraph has a plain-text explanation of what it’s supposed to do. This need not be comprehensive, literate, or even particularly accurate. However, if the law is passed and the Intent section is incomplete, wrong, or misleading, then everyone in that member’s district can damn well know about it by the next election.

And just like that, we’re done. Every earmark is a law. You want to reform earmarks? This does that; Representative Waldo can stand or fall based on the sum total of the money he steers to Keokuk, and it’ll be easily searchable for all to see.

Here are the best things about this proposal:

1. It’s easy. Everyone who has a hand in writing legislation knows exactly what he’s trying to do when he writes it. All he has to do is write it down. In programming terms, this is simply a question of enforcing self-documenting code.
2. It’s accountable. If someone deliberately tries to obfuscate the intent entry, his name is right next to it. Or if not his name, his boss’s—the one who has to stand for re-election.
3. It’s political dynamite. Let’s say there’s a grassroots movement to pass this into law. You’re an entrenched lobbyist or member of Congress who wants to keep doing business as usual. Here’s my question: how exactly do you spin your argument in favor of collusion, opacity, and back-room dealing? I can’t imagine many elected officials of either party would love this bill—and I can’t see how they would oppose it.

This idea is all yours, Mr. Obama. Feel free to use it.

It’s still a Republican talking point that Bush kept us safe, on the theory that “we haven’t been hit again since September 11.”

Apparently, either biological terrorism no longer counts, or on the Republican calendar, September 18, 2001 comes before September 11, 2001. Like 9/11, we think we know who attacked us; like 9/11, there is controversy over whether there are other criminals who may still be dangerous who were involved; and like 9/11, the perpetrators of 9/18 were never prosecuted.

Oh, wait. My mistake. We don’t refer to the anthrax attacks by the moniker “9/18”. Perhaps because the people who popularized “9/11” as a political rallying cry for their own Machiavellian needs didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that they, in fact, had not kept us safe.

Speaking personally, the only times I’ve personally felt terrorized—which I still think is a good definition of “terrorism”—was in the weeks following 10/2. 10/2? This would be 2002 I’m referring to, which also precedes 9/11/2001 on the GOP calendar. 10/2 was the beginning of the Beltway sniper attacks, when for several weeks many residents of DC learned to walk zigzag and in a halting gait. I was one of them. I felt silly when I was doing it. But I did it.

So, please, defenders of Mr. Bush: there are hundreds of ways in which we can argue the question as to whether Iraq and Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and Dick Cheney’s personal team of assassins improved or lessened our security. But even on the specific point you wish to make, that George W. Bush magically prevented domestic terrorism between September 12, 2001, and January 20, 2009, you’re either being deceitful or suffering from dementia. We were attacked, and Americans died. Just perhaps not enough to hold your attention.