Oz economist John Quiggin (note the corrected spelling) has a blog, where he is hosting a discussion on judging the work of philosophers in the context of their lives (inspired by Nazi-functionary philosopher Heidegger).
First, I’m a believer that philosophy influences politics.
But I’m not convinced that an author’s work cannot be greater than they are.
I need to think about this…

Kevin Drum, the alarmingly clean-cut author of CalPundit, has a damn smart post up about, of all things, tax policy. OK, where is the party leadership on this?
Oh…on the phone to their brokers…

So in my obsessive search through my referrer logs, I discover The Bitch Girls, a multiauthor blog from a secret location at a haughty northeastern university…and they’re bright. interesting, and funny as hell.
…so do any of you guys ever make it down to VA where the Biggest Guy is in school?…
…and what does it mean that I’m trolling for my son rather than myself?? It’s some weird sign of aging or something…
…during the post-divorce Dating Flurry(tm), I happened to go out with a few of the young dot-commies that I’d met on projects.
That ended when I was at a bar with one who, when asked, explained that she was almost twenty-five. I started thinking, “Hmmm, she and Biggest Guy would get along…she’s a little old for him, but…” and immediately started feeling like a very creepy old guy…you know, the ones you see in ‘decent’ restaurants with young overdressed women who are obviously not their daughters.
Sigh. Now I’m not sure if I should feel highly moral or depressed.

TAPPED thinks Terry McAuliffe is doing just fine:

DUMP TERRY MCAULIFFE? That’s what Arianna Huffington, along with lots of other people, has begun to say. We’re not so sure. Look, McAuliffe is the Democrats’ party chairman. His main jobs are to raise money, support candidates, repair the party’s grassroots machinery and rebuild the Dems’ small-donor program. He’s done a pretty fair job on all counts; in fact, by those measures, he’s a pretty good chairman. Yes, his job is also to help win elections. But Terry McAuliffe is not the Democrats’ problem. The Democrats are the Democrats problem. They’re timid, disorganized and bereft of energy and ideas. Tapped is not sure how to fix the Democratic Party, but firing Terry McAullife is surely a band-aid at best

No, dipshits, Terry “Eighteen Million from pre-IPO Global Crossing Friends and Family Shares” McAuliffe is exactly the problem the Democrats face. How seriously can he speak out in opposition to corporate interests when it’s clear as hell where his interests are aligned.

Commenter Michael Ladd pointed me at this article … “From Citizens To Customers, Losing Our Collective Voice” … in the Washington Post.

Now our government no longer needs us. The citizen-soldiers have given way to the professional all-volunteer military and its armada of smart bombs and drone aircraft. The citizen-administrators have disappeared, too, replaced long ago by professional bureaucrats. Americans may still regard each other as fellow citizens with common causes and commitments. But the candidates seeking votes on Tuesday see us as something less: not a coherent public with a collective identity but a swarm of disconnected individuals out to satisfy our personal needs in the political marketplace. We see them, in turn, as boring commercials to be tuned out.
It would be a mistake to conclude, as many commentators do, that Americans are apathetic citizens gone AWOL. But there’s no question that the fundamental relationship between citizen and government has changed. Increasingly, public officials regard us as “customers” rather than as citizens, and there are crucial differences between the two. Citizens own the government. Customers just receive services from it. Citizens belong to a political community with a collective existence and public purposes. Customers are individual purchasers seeking the best deal. Customers may receive courteous service, but they do not own the store.

Michael chastised me for using the term ‘customers’ instead of citizens, and he was exactly right.
The problem is that the politicians and investors in politics think of us as customers, and we’re buying that presumption.

Great stuff today:
Here:

The new “International Classification of Diseases, 9th Revision, Clinical Modification” for 2003 (or ICD-9-CM, for short), the federally mandated bible of medical diagnosis and treatment codes, includes a rather regrettable new category: Section E979, which describes deaths from terrorist acts, including nuclear attacks.

and here

Those who put together the APHA Guiding Principles, which were, in part, meant to help spark interest in increased funding for public health interventions, saw these as the top 3 public health priorities (at least, that’s how they numbered them in the report):

1) Address poverty, social injustice and health disparities that may contribute to the development of terrorism.
2) Provide humanitarian assistance to, and protect the human rights of, the civilian populations of all nations that are directly or indirectly affected by terrorism.
3) Advocate the speedy end of the armed conflict in Afghanistan and promote non-violent means of conflict resolution.

#4 was strengthening the public health infrastructure, workforce, and other components of the public health system.
Do I think the public health community can serve as a voice for issues 1 through 3? Sure. But I would argue that, when the foundation of our own house needs to be completely refurbished, that describing those three priorities as our top 3 priorities will not only hinder our effectiveness in taking care of what needs to be done in case of a bioterror attack, but also may hamper our efforts to advocate for, acquire and maintain funding for other non-terror-related core functions of public health.

All the soccer moms and dads who thankfully voted “yes” on B and took a step toward saving the trauma system didn’t vote to support airy generalizations about social justice and conflict resolution.
Those issues are certainly damn important, but in a world where institutions are failing to deliver on their basic goals, and more importantly where their legitimacy is compromised by their failure to deliver, this is a awfully stupid thing to do.

If you’ve read this blog at all, you’ve noted my disdain for what I call the “SkyBox” political culture we’ve created.
Moxie saw a taste of it Tuesday night, at the victory party for Gray Davis:

Davis’ speech was really very gracious and all the poor homeless folks they let into the hotel really seemed to enjoy the balloon drop and ice sculptures.
But really — while I had a good time — I wasn’t overly impressed.
What *would* have impressed me is if the Dems had said, “oh no….we’ll forego the 15 ice sculptures of the California bear.”
One would have been more than enough to satiate the public’s craving for an out-of-style yet opulent party decoration. Seeing more than a few on every floor of the Democratic HQ’s really bothered me. I would have been very impressed indeed had Gray Davis said, “Take that money and donate it to a social service. If we can’t find one of those have your assistants round up some homeless guys. Take them for dinner at Sizzler and put ’em up at a Holiday Inn for a night. We’re for the poor after all.”
And that’s what struck me most.

My first job out of grad school was as a legislative aide in Sacramento. It was just what I thought I wanted to do, and to be sure I learned a lot and actually got to do some cool stuff. There are several laws in CA that are there because I thought them up and made them happen.
I’d pretty much planned on politics as a career through most of college; I speak well, people seem to like me, and I desperately wanted to make the world a better place.
Oh, and I wanted to have my name written on that better place as well.
Working in politics was exhilarating. Powerful people would take my call … me, a young, inexperienced kid right out of grad school. I got to sit in front of legislative committees and argue with older, powerful people, and sometimes win.
And I was immersed in a community of people just like me. I had a team, even if we were sometimes rivals and even opponents.
And I could have stayed there in all the intervening time, going from administration to administration, from legislator to legislator, occasionally stepping out to work in a think tank or lobbying firm, and maybe, if I was good at it and played my card right, stepped up and ran for office myself.
And many of my peers did just that.
Thomas Kuhn wrote a groundbreaking book a number of years ago…The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in which he examined the sociology of science; the ways in which ideas propagate as groups within the scientific community gain prestige and power.
What we need to do is to look at politics and policy in a similar light; a number of books have, and I’ll list some titles (and would be interested in seeing more). But here’s the short, Armed Liberal version:
Politics in the U.S. has always been interest-group driven. The power of the interest groups was checked, in part by the inefficiency and limited scope of government, which made very few fights worth taking on, and the cost of taking those fight on relatively high. For the most part, rational investors looked elsewhere.
But in the post-WW2 world, we began to see the scope of government expand; first in the military sector, and then in infrastructure, and then in healthcare, and so on until regulation began to interpenetrate the economy pervasively.
That made investment in government extremely profitable, and legal, in that instead of influencing procurement decisions (obviously illegal), businesses could profit by influencing policy and regulation.
The increasing complexity of laws, policies, and regulations meant that you needed a group of people who knew them and who could navigate the process of creating and interpreting them. They became professionals, and more so began to see themselves as professionals.
Socially, they became increasingly isolated, as professionals often do, because the work is involving and demanding and to a large extent social – it demands interaction with others, so your social and professional lives begin to blend and become indistinguishable.
And suddenly we have a political class, often self-selected as college students or younger, who have structured their entire adult lives around the demands of this system and their hopes to succeed on its terms.
Please note that what I’m describing is ‘content-neutral’; it applies to Rockefeller Republicans, Blue Dog Democrats, and everyone in between. The investments may be made by individuals…Howard Hughes was a huge investor in this sphere, and profited from it…or by corporations, here ADM is a good current example…or by labor unions or environmental groups.
But you need to think of our government as investor-driven, and management-driven. Obviously, we the customers can force change. But while our power is great, it’s channelled by the managers and investors, who…among other things…manage us by choosing who we get to vote for.
I’ll add more later today, in two broad areas:
So what’s the problem with this?
So what can we do about it?

My first thoughts on looking at the election results this morning:
“Damn, Davis is still going to be Governor…it wasn’t a bad dream…” I’m working on two post-election posts this morning, one an open letter to Davis on what he can do to salvage his reputation, and one a look at what this means for party politics.
I’ll give you the lede for the party politics one:
There is only one political party today. It is the party of SkyBoxes, limos, and private planes.
I choose those as symbols…and they are both real manifestations of how the politically powerful live today as well as powerful symbols of what is wrong with the political system that empowers them. They manifest the continued isolation from anything resembling the real life lived by the rest of us.
Hillary Clinton’s limo can run toll booths and her entourage can bypass airport security, where they wait in VIP lounges. Bush Senior can’t run a supermarket scanner, because he hasn’t been to a grocery store in most of his adult life.
The issue isn’t simply one of social class and stratification…it is one in which the political class in this country, which has often run against and been a check on the economic upper classes, has been bought by them, and has been a good investment because as has been true for much of American history, and as Prop 50 shows, the course of government action is often diverted to put our cash in someone’s pocket.
This is as true of the Democrats as it is of the Republicans.
And the answer isn’t as simple as the class warriors would make it.

in case you don’t have better data yet…obviously I don’t have good data on which precincts have reported, hence what the projected outcome would be…but this is a lot closer than I predicted, and the GOP is doing much better than I anticipated.
Davis – 44.7
Simon – 46.9
Bustamente – 46.3
McPherson – 46.5
Shelley – 43.0
Olberg – 47.4
Westley – 41.7
McClintock – 50.5
Angelides – 46.3
Conlon – 45.5
Lockyer – 48.1
Ackerman – 45.3
Garamendi – 43.7
Mendoza – 45.9
O’Connell – 59.6
Smith – 40.4
46 – 54.7/45.3
47 – 54.0/46.0
48 – 75.1/24.9
49 – 53.9/46.1
50 – 50.6/49.4
51 – 43.1/56.9
52 – 38.3/61.7

New blogger ‘Martial’ is running a poll: How do you know a legitimate authority when you see one?
I can’t think of a more appropriate election-eve activity than to respond.
What is legitimacy to you? On what basis can the government legitmately make demands of you, or is the only demand that can be made @gun — at the point of a gun, as James Fallows once said.
I’d like to know how this comes out.