The Bush Reinvention Stalls

Mayor Bloomberg of New York hits the nail on the head:

"If George Bush came out for motherhood and apple pie, people would be against it," Mr. Bloomberg replied.

In a year where the President is trying to become a centrist (pushing immigration reform, accepting the Iraq Study Group, etc.), Bloomberg's statement is a corollary to Global Review's diagnosis: too little, too late.

Immigration Reform Loses; Everybody Wins

Why did the comprehensive immigration reform bill fail in the Senate yesterday? Moderate Dan Balz in WaPo blames it on the extremes of the two parties. Like Balz, Global Review is moderate on the issue of immigration: sympathetic to those who want to work in America; and a firm proponent of the rule of law.

I have another theory as to why the bill failed. Far from being a Pareto improvement, it actually would have made (almost) everyone worse off than under the status quo.

• Illegal immigrants would lose: either pay a fine or face increased risk of deportation.
• Legal immigrants would lose: guest workers could undercut wages.
• Businesses hiring illegals would lose: wages would be regulated, and the supply of labor would be responsive to the political climate, not market forces.
• Low-wage American workers might earn higher wages - but might earn lower wages as input costs increase. They would also face higher prices.
• High-wage and retired American workers would face higher prices and might see lower wages.
• American taxpayers would fund all the new enforcement.
• Hispanic Americans would be entrenched as an underclass for decades, like Turks and North Africans in Europe.
• American terms of trade would erode as our labor costs rose.

Winners, by contrast, would be outsourcing concerns and competing importers in Mexico, China, Canada, and elsewhere.

Taken together, this reform was comprehensively bad. Instead of addressing the social problem (an emerging Hispanic underclass) and the economic problem (an over-regulated unskilled labor market) it exacerbated both. We may be in the frying pan still, but it sure beats the fire!

Still The Ace

Curt Schilling just completed a tantalizing one-hitter against the Oakland A's; Shannon Stewart singled with two out in the bottom of the ninth inning to break up the bid. That may be for the best: if Shannon had grounded out, Schilling would have been one error - by already slumping Julio Lugo - away from a perfect game. This way, Lugo's gaffe doesn't loom as large (though, of course, Stewart never would have received a fourth at-bat in a perfect game bid).

As he will no doubt repeat on 38 Pitches tomorrow, he shook off Jason Varitek's call on the fateful pitch and will spend the rest of his life second-guessing himself. Well, hopefully not the rest of his life: he could always pitch a no-hitter later this season and put it to rest!

A lot of commentators have called Josh Beckett the true Ace of this Red Sox club; Beckett is, after all, among the top AL pitchers in wins, ERA, and WHIP, and is younger and stronger. But Schilling has had four opportunities to stop a losing streak - and he has delivered every time. Beckett has not yet had to stop a streak, and he probably could, but so far, the weighty mantle of ace-hood rests firmly on Curt Schilling's schoulders. (I couldn't resist; sorry)

Mitt Romney: Watch Your Language

Mitt Romney had the privilege of answering the first question in the GOP debate last night. In the first sentence of his answer he used the terms "Non sequitor" and "null set". Now this is a politician who speaks my language!

Global Review Explains the Mysteries of the Universe

...with the use of our favorite crystal ball: Wikipedia. Have you ever wondered what "extra virgin" means on olive oil? Or who invented paintball? Well, you could go look it up on the wiki, but Global Review beat you to it.

Extra Virgin Olive Oil. In countries belonging to the International Olive Oil Council, the following standards apply:

• Extra-virgin olive oil comes from the first pressing of the olives, contains no more than 0.8% acidity, and is judged to have a superior taste. There can be no refined oil in extra-virgin olive oil.
• Virgin olive oil has an acidity less than 2%, and judged to have a good taste. There can be no refined oil in virgin olive oil.
• Olive oil is a blend of virgin oil and refined virgin oil, containing at most 1% acidity. It commonly lacks a strong flavor.
• Olive-pomace oil is a blend of refined pomace olive oil and possibly some virgin oil. It is fit for consumption, but it may not be called olive oil. Olive-pomace oil is rarely found in a grocery store; it is often used for certain kinds of cooking in restaurants.
• Lampante oil is olive oil not used for consumption; lampante comes from olive oil's ancient use as fuel in oil-burning lamps. Lampante oil is mostly used in the industrial market.

Good to know.

Chemical Wedding. If you use the words "chemical wedding" in a sentence, you certainly sound sagacious and cultured, even mystical. But what do you mean? The phrase is derived from the Rosicrucian manifesto, Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz (the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz), which is an allegory for alchemy. As C.S. Lewis writes in The Abolition of Man, "The serious magical endeavor and the serious scientific endeavor are twins: one was sickly and died, the other was strong and throve". Both owe their birth not to medieval superstition but to renaissance alchemy. So you can use the phrase "chemical wedding" to deride dogmatic empiricists and scientific utopians; e.g. "Cloning's children are born from the chemical wedding of hubristic scientists and complicit nationalists."

Aside: will your olive oil lose its extra virginity if it has a chemical wedding?

Paintball. Straight from the wiki:

The first paintballs were created by the Nelson Paint Company in the 1950s for forestry service use in marking trees from a distance, and were also used by cattlemen to mark cows.[2] Two decades later, paintballs were used in a survival game between two friends in the woods of Henniker, New Hampshire, and paintball as a sport was born. In 1976, Josef Venable, a stock trader, Bob Gurnsey, and his friend Charles Gaines, a writer, were walking home and chatting about Gaines' recent trip to Africa and his experiences hunting buffalo. Eager to recreate the adrenaline rush that came with the thrill of the hunt, and inspired by Richard Connell's The Most Dangerous Game, the two friends came up with the idea to create a game where they could stalk and hunt each other.[3]

Knowledge is a matter of comparison, not of value.

Feminist Economics. Hat tip to Harry on this one. A few economics departments proudly proclaim that they research "feminist economics". Is that the study of the production and distribution of scarce shoes? Surprisingly not. The wiki:

Feminist economics broadly refers to a developing branch of economics that applies feminist insights and critiques to economics. Research under this heading is often interdisciplinary, critical, or heterodox. It encompasses debates about the relationship between feminism and economics on many levels: from applying mainstream economic methods to under-researched "women's" areas, to questioning how mainstream economics values the reproductive sector, to deeply philosophical critiques of economic epistemology and methodology.

Deeply philosophical, eh? The article goes on to detail that feminist economics abandons the neutrality of modern economics, and takes a "specific moral position" on economic issues. That is to say, feminist economists complain that women are unappreciated.

The most useful contribution of feminist economists may be some work on measuring informal-sector GDP. Women working in the informal sector, it is true, create a great deal of unmeasured value. The same, I fear, cannot be said for these economists. More fairly: feminist economics is an approach to economic issues under the rubric of feminism, not an approach to women's issues under the rigor of economics.

Win the Battles, Lose the War

Democrats won the elections last fall going away. They could throw around the m-word (mandate) and nobody would blink. One of the key questions at the time was how long would they maintain the advantage; and could they parlay anger at Republicans in Congress into victories in 2008 and beyond.

The beginnings of the answer are emerging, in a new poll. Proponents of leaving Iraq have gone from being gung-ho about the Democratic congress to quite dissatisfied: they lead a 24-point drop in approval ratings over the past 6 weeks. Of course, that means many centrists are still alright with the Democrats.

Clearly, however, the Democratic leadership will have to show results in order to keep the trust of the American voter. Because now they 'own' the messes in Washington as much as the executive, and some of the messes overseas. It's a hard thing, leadership.

Wingman

A good friend recounted the following story recently; names are withheld to protect the innocent.

So my friend and her husband were working somewhere in Florida back in the early 1990's, scratching by with one job and a one-year-old baby. The spare room went to a spare fellow, a bachelor also in the baseball business; I'll call him "M". M was a generous housemate, but not exactly child-oriented. Thus my friend was surprised when M offered to take the baby - let's call him "DJ" - for a Sunday afternoon. Free babysitting, however, is always welcome, so my friend and her husband took the opportunity to go out on a rare date. They returned to find baby and housemate happy and healthy. So far so good; M offered to take DJ again the next Sunday, and the next. M, apparently, was enjoying his 'dates' with DJ; and the parents were presumably enjoying their dates as well.

On their way home one day, the parents stopped at a bar. The name of the bar escapes me, but my friend remembers vividly to this day. A big mirror shimmered behind the bar, a cloud of cigarette smoke floated under yellow lights, and the bartender moved amiably from customer to customer. Further down the bar, two ladies of the type who go to bars alone were leaning over a carseat on the bar. In front of the carseat sat M; in the carseat sat his wingman, DJ.