Look who's "Nailin' Palin" now

Schadenfreude
Function: Noun
Definition: enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others
Example: Does it make me a bad person that news of Sarah Palin's ignorance and immaturity elicits such Schadenfreude?



I'm probably going to Hell, but I'm enjoying myself right now.

...and I guess I'm a socialist, too

I know, I know. I need to spend less time writing about stuff Sarah Palin says. But I swear, I can quit any time I want.

Sarah Palin recently criticized Obama's tax plan, saying, "this is no time to experiment with socialism". But is a little more income redistribution really "socialism"? Economists for Obama weigh in:

1. The definition of socialism to which most economists, poli sci types, etc, adhere is that socialism is that form of economic organization in which the state controls the means of production.
   
2. While there are some examples of this sort of thing in just about any market-based economy (geez, the government controls the military!), the idea that redistribution per se implies socialism is ridiculous. Hell, the second welfare theorem states that in a perfectly competitive economy (I bet that got the attention of all those neoclassical macro fans!), you can get to any desired (Pareto) efficient allocation with laissez-faire marginal tax policy and the right set of lump-sum...wait for it...redistributions! I guess in current parlance you might call that socialism the Arrow-DeBreu complete-markets way.

Trade theory works the same way. The idea is that there are winners and losers, but the winners win more than the losers lose, so they can compensate them.

For those of you who don't know, the Arrow-DeBreu model is the foundation of neo-classical microeconomics. While people typically think of economists as advocates of completely unfettered markets, a stroll through standard economic theory paints a more complicated picture.

And while we're on the topic of redistribution, would Sarah Palin like to explain why Alaska receives more federal revenue than any other state?

So I guess that makes me lazy, profane and un-American, right?

Like both my parents, and 3 out of 4 of my grandparents, I was born in the United States. I pay taxes, watch baseball and vote. Plus, I've held a US passport for years. So I was a bit surprised when I found out that (according to Sarah Palin) I wasn't a "real American". At a recent rally, she remarked:

"We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C... We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation. This is where we find the kindness and the goodness and the courage of everyday Americans. Those who are running our factories and teaching our kids and growing our food and are fighting our wars for us. Those who are protecting us in uniform. Those who are protecting the virtues of freedom."

Now I have to assume that Palin was making an empirical statement and not reciting vague platitudes to stir up the Republican base. So I thought we could go through the charges*:

Small-town Americans fight our wars:
This is a bit misleading. According to research at the conservative Heritage Foundation, rural areas are slightly overrepresented in the military. Specifically, as the rural concentration of an area rises, so does the proportion of military recruits. However, most Americans live in suburban/urban areas. As a result, 80% of military recruits come from areas where at least half the population is urbanized. This means that there are lots of soldiers from big towns and cities who ought to be offended by Palin's comments.

Tim Kane, the author of the study, has an interesting explanation for why this is. Since military recruits are actually slightly better** educated than the general population they have more to gain from the technical job training the military has to offer. This would be particularly attractive to rural recruits, as Kane explains:

Rural areas generally offer a less flexible, thinner job market. The military extends job opportunities into these areas, with technical training that is usually unavailable otherwise.

Small-town Americans run our factories:
Again, this is a bit misleading. Research from John Quigley at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City looks at the differences between urban and rural employment. A higher proportion of rural workers are employed in the manufacturing sector (1 in 5 vs 1 in 8). However, since urban workers account for a much larger percentage of total employment in the US, there are more urban manufacturing workers than rural ones.

People in small-towns are more virtuous:
Most people buy this one. After all, small-town folk are decent and pure, and avoid the vice that's common in the big city, right? Fortunately Reason Magazine is there to set the record straight:

Illicit drugs are nearly as common out there as they are in cities and suburbs. In 2007, a survey of 8th graders by the Monitoring the Future project at the University of Michigan found that country kids were 26 percent more likely to experiment with drugs than middle-schoolers elsewhere. Overall methamphetamine consumption among adults and teens is more than 50 percent higher in the country.

The story with alcohol is worse still. "Relative to their urban counterparts, rural youth ages 12 to 17 are significantly more likely to report consuming alcohol," says a 2006 study by the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire. Excessive boozing among adults, it noted, appears to be no less widespread in Mayberry than in Metropolis.

Nor is the countryside exempt from social problems often associated with the inner city—such as, if you'll forgive me, out-of-wedlock births. The federal government apparently doesn't tabulate these births according to whether they occur in urban or rural areas. But it does break them down by state, and wide-open spaces are no guarantee of responsible sexual behavior.

The highest rates of births to unwed mothers are in Mississippi and New Mexico, both of which have high rural populations. The most urban states, New Jersey and California, do better than the average in out-of-wedlock births.

What about the unspoken charge leveled by Palin? Her comments clearly suggest that big-city "fake" Americans leach off of small-town folk who grow their food, protect them from hard, and manufacture their sex toys. Unfortunately for Palin, the data suggest otherwise. According to John Quigley, transfer payments (government payment such as tax rebates, welfare, etc) are a much larger proportion of total income in rural areas (19% in 1999 vs 12% in urban areas) and have been growing since 1983.

So yes, I was offended my Palin's remarks. But I wasn't the only one:




*Throughout this piece I will use the terms "urban" and "rural" according to the definitions used by the US Census department

**98 percent of all enlisted recruits who enter the military have an education level of high school graduate or higher, compared to the national aver­age of 75 percent (see study link above)

WWMD (What Would a Maverick Do?)

If Sarah Palin had one word to describe John McCain it would be "maverick":



In the actual debate (I know, it's hard to tell the difference), she used the word "maverick" 6 times. The message is that John McCain doesn't run with the herd; he ruffles feathers in both parties in order to get the job done. Is this reputation deserved? Fortunately, this is something that can be measured.

Brendan Nyhan points us to work by Kieth Poole and Howard Rosenthal of UC-San Diego. According to them:

There are, to be sure, occasional mavericks in Congress... John McCain (R-AZ), normally one of the very most conservative members of the Senate, has been the worst fitting member of the Senate in each of his eight Senates, most notably the 103rd (2001-02), where he frequently voted with the Democrats, perhaps in pique over losing the race for the presidential nomination in 2000.

They go on to note, however, that McCain's "maverick-status" has changed over the years:

In our dynamic model, very rapid shifts are foreclosed by our imposition of the restriction that individual movement can only be linear in time. This restriction fails to capture a few cases. For example, John McCain (R-AZ) started as a conservative, became a moderate after losing the Republican nomination to George Bush in 2000, and recently reemerged as very conservative.

So according to the data, McCain (on average) is very conservative, but his voting is highly variable. Poole and Rosenthal accurately describe him as an "occasional maverick". More cynically, Bryan Caplan suggests that this has been a long-term strategic decision on McCain's part:

Is this just coincidence? Is being an outlier a smart way to get national attention? My guess is that being an outlier is just a high-variance strategy that happened to pay off.

So where does the term "maverick" come from, anyway? According to John Schwartz, writing in the New York Times:

In the 1800s, Samuel Augustus Maverick went to Texas and became known for not branding his cattle. He was more interested in keeping track of the land he owned than the livestock on it, Ms. Maverick said; unbranded cattle, then, were called “Maverick’s.” The name came to mean anyone who didn’t bear another’s brand.

What's more interesting is the Maverick family's legacy:

Sam Maverick’s grandson, Fontaine Maury Maverick, was a two-term congressman and a mayor of San Antonio who lost his mayoral re-election bid when conservatives labeled him a Communist. He served in the Roosevelt administration on the Smaller War Plants Corporation and is best known for another coinage. He came up with the term “gobbledygook” in frustration at the convoluted language of bureaucrats.

This Maverick’s son, Maury Jr., was a firebrand civil libertarian and lawyer who defended draft resisters, atheists and others scorned by society. He served in the Texas Legislature during the McCarthy era and wrote fiery columns for The San Antonio Express-News. His final column, published on Feb. 2, 2003, just after he died at 82, was an attack on the coming war in Iraq.

For roughly 400 years, the Maverick family name has been synonomous with American liberalism and progressive ideals. And unsurprisingly, Terrellita Maverick (Murry Maverick Jr.'s sister) is unhappy with her family's name being used to describe John McCain:

Considering the family’s long history of association with liberalism and progressive ideals, it should come as no surprise that Ms. Maverick insists that John McCain, who has voted so often with his party, “is in no way a maverick, in uppercase or lowercase.”

“It’s just incredible — the nerve! — to suggest that he’s not part of that Republican herd. Every time we hear it, all my children and I and all my family shrink a little and say, ‘Oh, my God, he said it again.’ ”

“He’s a Republican,” she said. “He’s branded.”

You can't make this stuff up.

Sarah Palin vs. Logic (cause and effect, without the cause)

I wasn't going to post this, but she repeated this argument at the debate last night.

Andrew Revkin at the "Dot Earth" blog, has some analysis on Palin's views on global warming and their potential effects on policy.

If you disagree with the mainstream-liberal position on global warming (global warming is real, is caused by man-made CO2 emissions, and requires urgent public action), there are three positions you can take:

• The scientific evidence linking CO2 emissions to warming is weak, thus reducing CO2 emissions would have no benefit
• Global warming is real and is man-made, but we are already too far down the path to stop it now, thus reducing CO2 emissions would be too costly without actually mitigating the negative effects of climate change
• Global warming is real and is man-made, but it is more cost effective to raise living-standards in the areas that will be hardest-hit (particularly in the developing world) so people are better equipped to handle the effects of climate change (for more on this position, check out the Copenhagen Consensus)

Palin takes a different line of "reasoning":

Couric: Is [global warming] man-made in your opinion?

Palin: You know … there are man’s activities that can be contributed to … the issues that we’re dealing with now with these impacts. I’m not going to solely blame all of man’s activities on changes in climate. Because the world’s weather patterns … are cyclical. And over history we have seen changes there. But kind of doesn’t matter at this point, as we debate what caused it. The point is it’s real, we need to do something about it. And like … Tony Blair had said … when he was in leadership position, he said, “Let’s all consider the fact that it is real.” So instead of pointing fingers … at different sides of the argument as to who is to blame, and if nature just to blame, let’s do something about it. Let’s clean up our world. Let’s reduce emissions. And let’s go with reality.

I don't know if the last sentence is meant to be ironic. There's more to the interview (it's on the Dot Earth post cited above) and it's worth reading. But it's amazing to me that she has staked out a position that doesn't make any sense. She won't acknowledge that man-made CO2 emissions are contributing to global warming. But, as she says, it doesn't matter. Obviously, it does matter. You can't solve a problem if you have no idea what's causing it. That seems self-evident. But just to make this clear, I wrote a short, one-act play to illustrate the point. I call it, "Dr. Palin":

Scene opens in a doctor's office decorated with "Jesus is Lord" and "Hang in there Kitty" posters. A middle-aged man enters.

Man: "Dr. Palin, I've been experiencing chest pains."

Dr. Palin: "Oh, well we can all agree that something needs to be done about that."

Man: "So what do you think it is? Am I having a heart attack or is this just heart-burn?"

Dr. Palin: "Well, it doesn't really matter what's causing your heart pain. What matters is that we both want to treat it."

Man: "You're certainly a maverick, Dr. Palin, and your folksy, hockey-mom nature has really put me at ease."

Curtain opens on a darkened stage.

Narrator: Two days later the man died from a heart attack. Dr. Palin tells herself, "at least I didn't blink."

Fin

How about Morgan Freeman for the role of the Narrator?

Politicians say the dumbest things...

Obviously liberals were never going to like Sarah Palin. She's a feisty, devout Christian who hates reproductive rights almost as much as she hates polar bears. And looking a lot like Tina Fey only makes it easier to parody her:



But then again, she hasn't done herself any favors. Compare this SNL skit to the transcript from her actual interview with Katie Couric, which was cited in a scathing piece by Fareed Zakaria:

COURIC: Why isn't it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families who are struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries; allow them to spend more and put more money into the economy instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?

PALIN: That's why I say I, like every American I'm speaking with, were ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health-care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, helping the--it's got to be all about job creation, too, shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So health-care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans. And trade, we've got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, scary thing. But one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today, we've got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that.

Wow. And this was after weeks of prepping from senior McCain advisors and consultants. You're better off asking Paris Hilton for policy analysis.

Unfortunately for Palin, the right-wing is also starting to notice her, let's say, "shortcomings". Writing in the conservative National Review, Kathleen Parker says:

"Palin’s narrative is fun, inspiring and all-American in that frontier way we seem to admire. When Palin first emerged as John McCain’s running mate, I confess I was delighted. She was the antithesis and nemesis of the hirsute, Birkenstock-wearing sisterhood — a refreshing feminist of a different order who personified the modern successful working mother...

It was fun while it lasted.

Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League...

If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself."

But before we're too hard on Palin (and trust me, no one has less respect for her intellect than me) Paul Krugman reminds us that John McCain isn't exactly a great mind himself, especially when it comes to the economy:

"We’ve known for a long time, of course, that Mr. McCain doesn’t know much about economics — he’s said so himself, although he’s also denied having said it. That wouldn’t matter too much if he had good taste in advisers — but he doesn’t."

This, of course, is the same John McCain who once said interest rates should always be set at 0%. So when McCain and Palin get together, it's not exactly a MENSA meeting.

In the interest of fairness, however, Don Boudreaux provides a uniquely libertarian perspective on the issue:

"Mr. Zakaria is incorrect to suppose that these traits separate Gov. Palin from other candidates for high political office. Calls by Senators McCain and Obama for cracking down on "speculators" are full of classic and wrongheaded catchphrases, as is Sen. Obama's vocal skepticism about free trade. Gov. Palin is merely less skilled in passing off inanities and claptrap as profundities."

This is true on some level. But Governor Palin is working really hard to distinguish herself.

What's a feminist to do?

By now the news of John McCain's nomination of Sarah Palin for his running mate is well known and the Republican camp is touting it as an enlightened pick that furthers the cause of the feminist movement. I've hear several right-wing pundits declare that although Palin is pro-life and a former beauty queen, as the mother of five and a female governor, she is a role model on par with Hillary Clinton for the "average female voter."

So far, I have seen no record that Palin's history of leadership has supported women in America. Particularly not to the extent that Clinton's investments in Head Start, healthcare, prenatal care and sexual health education supported women for nearly two decades. Palin's views on the choice movement alone suggest she is intolerant of the rights of women who disagree with her views on reproduction and morality. In fact this nomination has also been criticized as an insult to women.

What I have seen in the media is in-depth coverage of Palin's personal life. Reports that her 17-year old daughter is expecting and will marry the father of her unborn child surfaced today. The choices that teens make about their sexuality and their fertility are often debated (I'm recalling the media circus that Jaime Lynn Spears faced recently) in American culture. However, speculation around how Palin handles her own daughter's pregnancy has no place in speculation on how she will lead and advise our country's political policy. One would hope that faced with this public scrutiny she would understand the need for privacy and personal choice in reproductive matters.

More importantly, this is a chance for pro-choice feminists to use the incident as a platform to judge Palin not as a mother or a soon-to be grandmother, but respect her right to choose and advice her own daughter privately --judging her own her own record as a politician, which up until now is fairly unimpressive.