I read reports this week of Colin Powell being heckled for criticizing Mugabe with frank disbelief. But I have no reason to doubt that the coverage was inaccurate. Here's the key sentence from the Guardian story:

Dissent filled the hall when Mr Powell criticised the government of Zimbabwe for exacerbating the food crisis in that country and pushing "millions of people to the brink of starvation".

I honestly don't understand these people. I don't think that it's hyperbole to say that the world is watching another Stalin work in real time. He's a racist murderer, deliberately engineering the mass deaths of his own people. He's turned a productive, self-sustaining country into a basket case, and is running all of its productive assets into the ground. Why in the hell would anyone support this man?

The New York Times printed a story today that helped their audience understand how anyone can stand behind him. I can't say that I understand them, but at least I know their reasons a little better.

By doing so, (hell, just by daring to publish a paper in the morning) the Times left themselves open for yet another attack from Andrew Sullivan. I've gotten in a bad habit of criticizing Andrew Sullivan, but this takes the cake. Sullivan has started resembling Captain Ahab, eager to toss overboard any shred of credibility for the chance to score points against the Great Grey Lady. This assault is so offensively unfair that I'm left speechless. I just can't trust Sully, or take him seriously. You can read the Times piece yourself. Here's Sully's reaction.

It seems the brutal tyrant in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, has lost his head p.r. guy. Never mind. With puff-pieces like this one, who needs p.r.? "A Hero To Many!" Whoever Rachel Swarns is, she's clearly a Rainesian. I love this paragraph:

Mr. Mugabe is criticized in the West for encouraging blacks to invade white-owned farms, for hounding journalists and judges, and for jailing opposition party leaders. But to some leaders, particularly in Africa, he is a hero. To them, he is the guerrilla who ended white rule here in 1980, the statesman who expanded access to education and health care and the revolutionary who is returning land stolen from blacks during the British colonial era.

"Criticized in the West." This is a man who jails his opponents, rigs elections and is fomenting a famine in his country by brutal evictions of the only productive farmers. He's viciously homophobic and reviled by any serious African analyst as a menace to any democratic trends in the region. But the Times sees his good side. Of course they do.

This is a puff piece? The piece states that:

"Prominent politicians loyal to Mr. Mugabe now control scores of fertile farms while many poor blacks are stranded on stretches without adequate water or sanitation. (Farmers have accused Mr. Mugabe's wife, Grace, of seizing a farm, too.)

American and European officials, along with some Africans, have accused Mr. Mugabe of rigging the presidential elections in March. And last month, the government ordered nearly 3,000 white farmers to leave their properties, despite shortages caused by severe drought and disruptions.

"His violent land-reform program is about entrenching his political power and rewarding his cronies and not about addressing historical injustices," said Tendai Biti, a senior member of the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change."

Still, the main thrust of the piece is not "why is Mugabe a criminal", but "why does anyone support him." Is this inherently unacceptable? For a lot of people, we know why he's criminal; we don't know why anyone supported him. Sullivan seems to fall into a common, if juvenile, line of argument- "Why are you so interested in gays/ Communists/ Mugabe supporters... unless you're gay YOURSELF!/ a Communist YOURSELF!/ a Mugabe supporter YOURSELF!" (I personally get the gay one directed at me every once in a while.) To be fair, I doubt that Sullivan actually believes this. However, I also doubt that he'd even think to criticize this piece if it had appeared anywhere else.

Sullivan can't be bothered to research the woman he's smearing, so I guess I'll have to do it. Who is this Mugabe apologist, Rachel Swarns? A little Googling tells me that Rachel Swarns is the Johannesburg bureau chief of the New York Times. She was the co-winner of a first-place award for Best International Coverage (150,000+ readers) from the National Association of Black Journalists. The winning series, "Death and Denial", humanizes the impact of AIDS in Africa. Looking through her publications, she's written a lot about AIDS in South Africa.

I don't have NEXIS. So I just went to the New York Times page and searched for stories by Rachel Swarns. Let's look at some of the titles of some of the other "puff pieces" she's written to prop up Mugabe:

August 17, 2002
Zimbabwe Starts Arresting White Farmers Defying Eviction
August 14, 2002
World Briefing | Africa: Zimbabwe: A Pledge To Withdraw From Congo
August 13, 2002
Mugabe Remains Unyielding On Eviction of White Farmers
August 12, 2002
Thousands of Whites Defying Zimbabwe Over Farm Evictions
August 9, 2002
World Briefing | Africa: Zimbabwe: Eviction Deadline
August 4, 2002
For Zimbabwe White Farmers, Time to Move On
June 18, 2002
World Briefing | Africa: Zimbabwe: Opposition Members Arrested
June 5, 2002
World Briefing | Africa: Zimbabwe: Leading Lawyer Arrested
June 1, 2002
Government and Media Spar in Zimbabwe
June 1, 2002
World Briefing | Africa: Zimbabwe: Mugabe Tells Rival To Accept Defeat
May 17, 2002
World Briefing | Africa: Zimbabwe: Black Squatters Face Eviction
May 9, 2002
World Briefing | Africa: Zimbabwe: Another Journalist Arrested
May 2, 2002
World Briefing | Africa: Zimbabwe: Three Journalists Arrested
April 24, 2002
World Briefing | Africa: Zimbabwe: Police Thwart Protest
March 29, 2002
World Briefing: Africa; ZIMBABWE: JOURNALIST'S ARREST CONDEMNED
March 22, 2002
World Briefing | Africa: Zimbabwe: Workers Ignore Strike Call
March 21, 2002
An Isolated Zimbabwe Tightens Strictures on Opposition Leader
March 20, 2002
Mugabe's Opponent Hints At Possible Reconciliation
March 19, 2002
Presidents Rush to Zimbabwe To Plead for Political Unity
March 17, 2002
The World; An Election, Yes. But Free and Fair?
March 14, 2002
Mugabe's Aides Declare Him Winner of Zimbabwe Vote
March 12, 2002
Official Arrested as Zimbabwe Election Ends
March 7, 2002
New Rules In Zimbabwe Likely to Aid Mugabe's Side
February 28, 2002
World Briefing | Africa: Zimbabwe: Court Doesn't Faze Government
February 26, 2002
Zimbabwe Candidate Charged With Treason
February 24, 2002
Desperation Drives a Zimbabwean Exodus South

You know, to read those titles all together like that, you'd almost think that Rachel Swarns has been a tireless critic of Mugabe. You'd almost think that the Times has done a great public service, publishing highly critical stories about his murderous regime several times a week. (And this is just from one journalist, mind you.) You'd almost think that Andrew Sullivan owes somebody a big apology.

Maybe, eventually, Sully will start to realize that the decline in his freelancing income isn't because his media criticism is bravely speaking truth to power. It's because his media criticism is formulaic (open Times, insult Times, rinse, repeat), it's dishonest, and it's boring.

Naah.

(NOTE: Edited slightly after sleeping on it.)

If I blog for a thousand years, I may never find a better link than this.

(via Mind Over What Matters)

UPDATE: It's gone! It's only on DVD now!

A few days ago, there was an article about how Bush might do better if the Republicans lost control of Congress. I didn't have anything to say about it, but Charles Murtaugh has me saying, "Why didn't I think of that?" It's short; go read it.

The LA Times has a big story about the murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls. According to the story, Biggie offered to pay the Crips $1 million to shoot Tupac with his own gun. When he only paid $50,000, the Crips killed him. I don't know what to think about this story, but it seemed worth passing on.

Tonight, I'm sharing the love. A few shout-outs to my homies:

- I just got a link from a new blogger who seems pretty conservative, Steve Roper. I've got to admit that I find links from right-wingers especially sweet.

- Norah Vincent has come in for a bit of a pile-on. Here's some commentary from three sharp examples of bottom-feeding riffraff.

Alex Frantz at Public Nuisance has got the knives out:

Ms Vincent wants to have it both ways. Although she makes regular appearances on the editorial pages of the largest and most respected paper west of Chicago, she likes to think of herself as an oppressed Conservative rebelling against the overwhelming power of the ominpresent Liberal Media Establishment. At she same time, she is insistent on the privileges of her position. As a paid journalist, her opinions Matter. Insignificant amateur bloggers are permitted to admire, but only if they have the decency to know their place and not insult their betters. Clearly, Vincent's only regret for the nasty attacks she makes on bloggers who dare to criticize her is that she has been forced into the unpleasant position of publicly acknowledging their existence, an act which she vows not to repeat.

Wim Fitzpatrick, via Matthew Yglesias:

In the end, though, I think Norah needs to grow a tougher hide. None of the criticism she's receiving is that harsh. People are going to bash you, and if your first taste of overblown criticism causes you to post a harsh "fuck you" to your critics, you're in the wrong line of work. Just wait until someone gets the idea to start NorahVincentWatch.

And, the irreplaceable Jeanne D'Arc:

You've got to hand it to Norah Vincent. She managed to say two utterly contradictory and irreconcilable things and both of them were stupid. That does, I must admit, take "a certain degree of talent."

- Gary Farber just runs an excellent, funny, skeptical blog that deserves every bit of praise that it gets.

- Uggabugga is a better Kauswatcher than we deserve.

- I think that I'd continue doing this blog if I lost all of my readers except Rob Lyman. If you read the comments on this site, you may have noticed his smart, critical, insightful commentary that keeps me on my toes. Thanks, man.

Fact-check Andrew Sullivan Part II:

Tapped (specific link not working) points out what I should have caught: You can't trust Sullivan when he paraphrases a liberal.

Here's Sully:

It appears I was wrong to hope for a long-term improvement in the New York Times' front-page polemics against the war against terror in Iraq. In his remarks on the Newshour, Howell Raines clearly explained that he sees this as another Vietnam. It's his gut feeling. So he wants to use the Times' front-page to campaign.

Here's Raines:

I think we're going to see some interesting revisitations of journalistic history. For example, as the Iraq debate plays out of a war, I'm hearing a lot of echoes of the early '60s, when people were saying it was unpatriotic to report the debate over Vietnam... [O]ne of the lessons of Vietnam is that it's important to ask the questions at the front end of the war, not afterwards.

It's just not the same thing.

I didn't make it onto Altercation. Dammit. There's always next year...

Good article in Fortune about "The Return of Big Government." Key paragraphs:

Of the programs that Congress and the President control directly, spending is up a whopping 13.9% this fiscal year. And that's not a new phenomenon. Soon after Bill Clinton declared, "The era of big government is over" in 1996, expenditures started to zoom. Such spending is rising so briskly that, for the first time since the late 1960s, annually appropriated programs have been growing faster than formula-driven entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.

Sept. 11 is merely a blip in that trajectory. Despite all the hoopla, only about $30 billion has been spent on homeland security and national defense programs directly related to the antiterror campaign. About $10 billion of that went to the fight in Afghanistan and $20 billion to rebuild New York City, prevent bioterrorism, improve transportation security, and the like. Overall, however, Uncle Sam has spewed out an extra $91 billion in appropriated funds this fiscal year for matters that range from highway construction to medical research.

In other words, the war on terror is being used as a ruse to justify all sorts of spending. President Bush lifted the veil on this deception by withholding $5.1 billion in extraneous expenditures that were buried in a homeland defense bill. But analysts worry that the pattern will become a fixture. Says Bob Bixby of the Concord Coalition, a fiscal watchdog group: "Packaging all manner of spending under the banner of homeland security will become a permanent addition."

Then again, lawmakers don't need much prodding to spend more. Nondefense spending has been increasing so rapidly lately that 2000-03 would still represent the largest four-year spending spree in a generation even if military expenditures hadn't gone up a penny. During that period farm subsidies doubled; unemployment compensation and health programs (other than Medicare and Medicaid) jumped 50%; education outlays rose by a third.

I recently had two posts on rent control (here and here). As is so often the case on this site, the comments are more interesting than the original posts, so go read them.

(Side note: Paul Orwin asks if the planting of the "Golden Girls" lyrics was a sly reference to the Norah Vincent mini-flap. Not really- it's more of an inside joke with my lovely fiancee- but let me address it here. I quote song lyrics and whatnot all the time, on the blog and in real life. If someone started calling us on it, I'd be screwed. So I'll be the last one to throw stones.)

I got a nice email about Boston's experience in lifting rent control from Bob Caceres. He included a Boston Globe story that seemed relevant and unlinkable, so I'm going to post it. Thanks, Bob.

-----------------------------

Rent debate centers on impact of decontrol

By Sarah Schweitzer, Globe Staff, 7/29/2002

Eight years have passed since voters killed rent control in Massachusetts, and nearly five since Boston phased out the final vestiges of its regulation.

Rents have continued a skyward march, with the median price of a two-bedroom apartment recently pegged at $1,700 per month, up from $740 a decade ago. As supporters gear up for a battle this fall to return rent control to Boston, the rallying cry will be the city's high rents - a direct result, advocates say, of an unregulated market.

''How could decontrolling 80,000 units not have impacted the market?'' said Kathy Brown, coordinator of the Boston Tenant Coalition, a principal organizer in the effort to revive rent control. ''Rising rents had everything to do with the end of rent control.''

Yet it's far from clear what impact removing controls from an estimated 50 percent of the rental housing stock had on the larger market. No comprehensive study has documented the connection; and both sides claim the same empirical data for their causes.

Still some evidence suggests that the link between decontrol and rising rental prices is not as solid as regulation advocates argue. Advertised rents in Boston since deregulation have kept pace with home sale prices - a signal the entire housing market was affected by the upward pressure of the strong economy.

Put another way, the economy drove rental prices at least as forcefully as the end of rent control.

''It's always the economy,'' said Lenore Schloming, president of the Small Property Owners Association, which helped spearhead the move to end rent control in the 1990s. ''The economy affects everything. This is no exception.''

Others read the numbers more cautiously, saying the loss of rent control was the equivalent of solvent, stripping away the layers of renters' protection and allowing the hot real estate market to more dramatically take hold of tenants' and landlords' pocketbooks.

''What the end of rent control did was allow the market to work unrestricted, and what we saw was the full effects of that market,'' said Michael Stone, a University of Massachusetts at Boston professor of community planning and public policy who has studied the city's rental property structure.

The question of cause and effect will be at the forefront of debate this fall when supporters introduce a home-rule petition, which is being crafted now in consultation with city officials. The measure must be approved by both the Boston City Council and state Legislature, where it is expected to face an uphill battle by legislators loath to upend the 1994 statewide voter referendum that tossed out regulation in the three controlled Massachusetts communities.

Brookline and Cambridge so far are not pushing the Legislature to return rent control.

House Speaker Thomas M. Finneran declined to comment on Boston's situation, saying through a spokesman that he first wants to see the proposed legislation.

Mayor Thomas M. Menino last week reiterated his support for a return of some sort of regulation. ''I'm not a big fan of rent control,'' Menino said. ''But something has to be done.''

Menino said that despite the city's efforts to maintain affordability, Boston's apartment dwellers have become wealthier.

Census numbers do not yet reflect detailed income patterns in the city, but rent now accounts for a smaller percent of renters' income, which some say indicates that tenants are now a wealthier group and that poorer tenants have been forced to leave the city. And more renters are paying premium prices. The number of apartments with rent over $1,000 a month increased from 12 percent in 1990 to 30 percent in 2000, the census shows.

Meanwhile, evictions, which advocates say spiked after the removal of rent control, have stabilized over the past five years. Boston Housing Court figures show that evictions climbed to 7,000 in fiscal 1995, a 60 percent increase from 1991. Evictions dipped to 6,200 by 2000 and have continued to decline slightly since.

Opponents of rent control say shrinking government assistance is behind the growing number of weathier tenants. Federal subsidies for low-income housing have shrunk while high-rise public housing has been demolished.

If the government wants to keep low-income residents in the city, the opponents argue, it should front the money rather than regulate from a distance.

''That's how the market works,'' said Edward Hudgins, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, a libertarian group in Washington. ''You don't have some God-given right to have a landlord give you cheap rent.''

Rent control advocates agree that more government assistance is needed. But, they say, that alone cannot right Boston's lopsided rental market.

''We've been working on the supply, and we will keep working,'' said Brown of the Boston Tenant Coalition. ''But even 10,000 more units won't meet the need.''

Boston was among dozens of communities in the Northeast and California that adopted rent control in response to rapidly rising inflation in the 1970s. The city's initial policy was broad and tightly controlled, allowing rent increases only with the permission of the Boston Rent Equity Board and only then based on a landlord's costs. Amendments in 1976 muted it with the adoption of ''vacancy decontrol,'' which permitted landlords to raise rent upon turnover, and then annually on most units within a range set by the city, usually 10 percent.

On Nov. 8, 1994, in a referendum spurred by Cambridge landlords, state residents voted 51 percent to 49 percent to end rent regulation, although residents of Boston, Brookline, and Cambridge overwhelmingly voted to keep it.

In Boston, vacancy-decontrol units - totaling 57,000 apartments, or 38 percent of the total rental stock - lost protection in 1995. The remaining 21,000 units under rent control, which represented 14 percent of the rental housing market, lost protection in 1996 and 1997.

To ease the transition back to a market system, the Legislature provided one- to two-year extensions for the elderly or disabled.

According to a study by MIT professor Henry Pollakowski, only 1,065 Boston tenants qualified for transitional extensions - a finding he said undercut the long-held view that rent controlled tenants were largely poor or elderly.

Boston stands alone as the only major city to have completely surrendered rent control in recent years. New York and Washington, D.C., have debated the issue, but ultimately opted to keep regulation. Smaller cities, like Santa Monica, Calif., have loosened rent control, but retained portions of the regulation.

As such, there are few studies documenting the effects of rent control's end. In Boston, there have been no comprehensive studies. A 1998 Cambridge report found that decontrol had caused rents to rise, forcing an exodus of the working class, minorities, and the elderly. It also found the number of building permits and renovations has increased.

Yet Cambridge had a stricter form of rent control than Boston, one that could be expected to create a more dramatic effect when eliminated.

Stephen Malpezzi, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has studied rent control in cities across the country and the world. He said there are only two universal conclusions he's been able to draw from Egypt to India to Washington, D.C. One is that rent control, because it limits turnover, fails to help the neediest tenants.

And two, he said, ''Rent control is very complicated.''

What's the British word for "gullible"? Andrew Sullivan today wonders at the marvelous world of the 1870s, which (an opinion columnist assures him) achieved 92 percent literacy wth no public education. Yes, those were sweet, sweet days, before the iron heel of public schooling ground the happy proles into the dirt! If only they could be recaptured!

Oh, except, according to the House of Commons UK Statistical Report on "Literacy":

The 1876 report of the Registrar General, noted that, 16% of men and 22% of women could not sign their name in the register with a mark.

Here's an estimate which seems more plausible to me:

We don't have any really good data on literacy levels in, say, the UK, for the period 1780-1830 (remember that statistics, called "political arithmetic" for a lot of the 19th century, was invented as a science in the late 1700s, and was not practiced reliably until the second half of the 19th century), but here is a swag. In 1814, there were roughly 17 million people in the UK (England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales). 1.5 million of these were either upper- or upper-middle class, where the literacy rate was 75% or better. 2.8 million were shopkeepers or small farmers, with a literacy rate of 1 in 3 to 1 in 4. Roughly 12 million were "mechanics, artisans, meanials, servants, paupers and vagrants" a class with a literacy rate of perhaps 1 in 20. By 1850, if we were to look at those same classes, we would find literacy rates of around 90% for the upper/upper-middle classes, 75% for the shop-keeping/small-farmer class, and 50% for the "lower classes". More importantly, the size of each band has grown substantially creating by 1850 or so what Wilkie Collins, the popular novelist, called "the unknown public," a reading culture that bought his books in the tens of thousands.

In other news, Instapundit shares a dispiriting story of a Northern child who learned prejudice early.

I also remember that a Northern white friend of mine told me about the first time her sister had ever seen a black infant. It occurred on their family’s only ride on public transportation, taken while their car was in the shop. Her sister, who was obviously just a child, pointed at the infant and said, “Look, Mother. A baby maid!”

This is a horrible story. But please forgive me my skepticism, because it sounded awfully familiar...

Audre Lorde can perhaps be forgiven for her intemperate accusation at the feminist conference mentioned above when we consider an experience she had in 1967: "I wheel my two-year old daughter in a shopping cart through a supermarket . . . and a little white girl riding past in her mother's cart calls out excitedly, 'Oh look, Mommy, a baby maid.'

And...

In the New York Times, Phyllis Katz tells of the 3-year old White girl who says to her mother upon seeing a Black infant, “Look mom, a baby maid.”

I'll easily believe that it happened, but did it happen to all of them?

Huh. That was fairly painless, but I can't pretend that I did great honor to the liberal cause. I suspect that any future appearances will also be on short notice, so I'd better learn how to record them.

I'm going to be on the Hugh Hewitt show in about 20 minutes. You can listen here. If anyone knows how to record it electronically and send it to me, I'd certainly appreciate it.

I haven't had any good news on the blog in a while. Do you remember the Masai village that donated 14 cows to the US in sympathy for the September 11th attacks?

I was wondering what happened to them, so I got a'Googling. Here's a good story about it.

Brencick later told the gathering that, "it is not easy to take these cows to New York across the sea." The cows instead will be sold and the proceed used to buy beadwork from the village, possible an American flag that will hang in a public place in New York, and other items. "The world has not been divided by this tragedy," Brencick said. "You and we are helping to bring it together."

Not exactly a storybook ending, but that's life, I suppose.

This story made me choke up a little bit. It's probably foolish- I don't know what the Masai will do with a Scrabble game- but these kids get it.

At 10 a.m. today, Naiyoman - flown here at National Youth Sports Program expense - and Tom Amolo, deputy Kenyan ambassador to the United States, will accept a collection of heartfelt donations from the program's children and staff for the Masai of Enoosaen.

There are stuffed animals aplenty, from Tweety Birds to teddy bears to elephants. And there are at least two Bibles, a tennis racket, shorts, shirts - and even a Scrabble game.

Nicky Young, 13, of Richmond Hill, Queens, donated her baby blanket. "It is very special to me. It kept me warm and made me feel safe," Nicky said in one of the short notes that accompanied each gift.

Rolans Alphonse, 12, gave a teddy bear ("because you can play and sleep with it") and a math book ("to help you with your math").

Nicholas Grandison, 13, handed over the mountain bike he won at the program's camp two years ago. "I wanted someone else to enjoy it as much as I did," Nicholas said. "My mother didn't want me to give it at first, but then she said I could if I wanted to.

"The Masai gave something that meant a lot to them to our country," Nicholas said. "I wanted to give them something that meant a lot to me."

Miller donated a photo album of World Trade Center pictures "showing it before it was hit, while it was on fire and of it falling. I wanted them to see what they missed."

Heartfelt was the name of the game. A camp counselor donated the medal he won when he played in the public school basketball championships at Madison Square Garden. Another child gave a jean outfit, one of two her grandfather bought her just days before he died.

The Daily Kos has a stunning comparison- while the Bush administration is deliberately underfunding outreach efforts at veteran's hospitals, it's spending money on outreach to teach 5000 religious groups how to grab federal funds. You may remember that his "faith-based initiative" program did not pass Congress, so he's just making an end run, encouraging them to apply for federal dollars, apparently by gaming the rules:

Towey, a lawyer who spent a year working with Mother Teresa, already has begun traveling the country to give Christian, Jewish and Muslim organizations advice on how to aggressively compete for funds without breaking the law. He advises groups, for example, that government money must not be used to buy Bibles or to proselytize. A federally funded program may be conducted, however, in a meeting hall with a cross or a Star of David on the wall. And he points out that many organizations avoid bureaucratic hostility by forming separate affiliates with neutral-sounding names to apply for federal funds administered by states and cities. Some churches, for instance, call themselves "renewal centers."

"If you run into an official who's an armchair First Amendment person," Towey said yesterday, "if you're 'John's Shelter,' you can go after the money but if you're 'St. John's Shelter,' you can't."

These federal dollars are too scarce to spend on (say) veterans, or firemen, or Afghan women, or retrieving fucking plutonium from decaying nuclear facilities in the Second and Third World. But they're not too scarce to pay for a dog-and-pony-show to churches around the country to encourage them to grab more government funds.

If I were a veteran, I'd just be tempted to spit and throw things. As a blogger, I'm biting my fingers to keep in the swear words, so I'll defer to Kos:

Ultimately, this is symptomatic of Bush's skewed priorities. Bush expects its armed forces to do the dying in pursuit of his 2004 re-election effort. Yet, when it comes to their health care, Bush would rather they suffer in silence rather than jeopordize his faith-based initiative or precious tax cuts.

A Miss America contender is fighting to retain her crown after nude pictures of her have come up. She's saying they were taken against her will.

Poor woman. Gosh, remember how those nude pics absolutely ruined poor Vanessa Williams? If only she hadn't posed for them, she might have had the wildly successful career of other Miss Americas, such as... um...

Avram Grumer blows the lid off of Tony Woodlief's lack of loving kindness and pro-murder stance, just like Tony uncovered the Democratic plan to raise taxes to 99%. Seriously, this is a good post.

An interesting letter posted in the Slate fraywatch ends with, "Ironically, the only good blog is a irrelevant one."

My ears are burning...

I've got to get back to work, but Alex Frantz at Public Nuisance has the "zing!" of the week. Good show.

You know what's a good blog? Chad Orzel's Uncertain Principles. Three posts worth highlighting:

- This post, with his list of "perfect albums", inspired me to buy the Afghan Whigs' 1965. I'm loving it. It's a fun, gorgeous, soul-influenced album that should have made the Afghan Whigs rock stars.

- This post about how lame it is to argue that the left is more boring than the right.

The "blogosphere" sometimes bears a stronger resemblance to a game of "Telephone" than an actual discussion of ideas. You remember how it works from summer camp and all that, right? John Powers starts off talking about how The Nation isn't as much fun as The Weekly Standard, which Jack Shafer turns into an indictment of the journalistic left as more interested in "policing the movement" than trying to "persuade and entertain," then Glenn Reynolds turns it into an indictment of leftists in general as being no fun at all. By the time Ginger Stampley responds (and also Arthur Stock commenting on Matthew Yglesias's thoughts on the matter), we've gotten all the way from a comparison of two political magazines to an argument against the idea that there are no leftists anywhere who have any fun at all. After seeing Ginger's post, I looked up the original piece, and now I'm sort of scratching my head, asking how did we end up here? (Cue Johnny Dangerously clip...)...

What's going on here is the usual game of defining the political left as the sum of all its most extreme members, while conveniently excluding the lunatic religious element from the definition of the political right. The religious prudes of the right are, if anything, less savory than the Dworkin/ MacKinnon variety on the left-- if you're going to hold everyone left of Limbaugh accountable for the views of Dworkin and MacKinnon, then the right bears responsibility for Jack Chick and Focus on the Family, and they're a real laugh riot.

- And this post, about what it takes to teach physics nowadays. I hadn't thought about the fact that my academic physics experience puts me at the forefront of 19th century science, but I'm sure he's right.

Yesterday, I posted on rent control, and nice poster Gregg mentioned how bad it is in London. It got me thinking. In my self-centered experience, the recent story of London real estate wasn't rising rents (although I knew that they were rising), but rapidly rising real estate prices. Of course, they go hand in hand- excess demand caused by rent control feeds the fires of housing prices. This makes moving into the city very tough for first time buyers and people with lower incomes. In fact, London is increasingly in trouble because essential workers simply can't afford to live in the city. People like nurses, teachers, bus drivers and so on have to live in crappy subsidized housing or commute for hours. In the medium to long term, this is unsustainable, and I think that everyone knows it.

But in the short term, homeowners are delighted at the rapid growth in housing prices. I certainly was; I'll probably never make a better investment than a house in London in 1999. It's not uncommon to meet people who tell you that their house made more than they did in a year.

When I had been thinking about the political difficulties of eliminating rent control, I thought about the people who are living in rent-controlled apartments, and basically thought, fuck 'em. They're being subsidized by everyone else, and there are fewer of them than there are non-rent controlled renters. Some of them are poor and won't be able to afford the new housing proces, but some of them are doing just swell. None of them did anything to deserve a massive subsidy to their rent.

But if I'm thinking correctly, then the political problem of removing rent control is much, much harder. If I'm thinking correctly, then cities which remove rent control will quickly see a fall in the value of their homes as excess demand is sopped up. Furthermore, the days of rapidly rising housing prices would be over. This means that self-interested homeowners who already own their own homes have as much of a vested interest in rent control as people enjoying rent-controlled apartments. Homeowners (especially condo owners, who pay into a well-organized condo association) are likely to have money, connections, and organization on their side. This would make fantasy Bloomberg's job much, much harder.

Am I wrong?

P.S. I had another nice poster say that Boston has had a terrible experience with abolishing rent control (I can't get to it now; comments are bugging out.) If the person who wrote that would email me, or post any articles or support in the comments, I'd be very, very interested to see the other side. I can't read my email until about 7:00 at night, so comments are much faster.

I'm sorry, but isn't this typical? Slate publishes a Eric Liu article about how "the left" wants "a psychobabbly, America-is-to-blame-because-of-its-own-racism approach to teaching 9/11," while "the right" wants "a moralizing, absolutist approach that emphasizes America's virtue above all else." Slate, of course, will find its way to the sensible center! Gosh, thanks, guys!

To their credit, their weekly "fraywatch" column admits that the assertion about the left is provably, unambiguously wrong. Pretty embarassing. So where's the Eric Liu article now? You can't miss it; it's front and center, with the big yellow cartoon above the list of stories. Jebus, man, if the butcher tried putting the meat that he knew had gone bad at the front of the counter, he wouldn't get much repeat business.

Another interesting point from the New Yorker:

And there are more than a million cigarette smokers of voting age in this city. This is a figure that might be expected to give pause even to a politician as unconventional as our billionaire Republicrat mayor. It's about the same as the number of rent-controlled and rent-stabilized apartments, and although these programs have their own equivalent of secondhand smoke—to wit, the fact that everybody else's rent is a little bit higher on account of them—rent control and rent stabilization are sacred cows. Ciggies are oxen to be gored at will.

Hertzberg throws away this point, but it's conceivable that Bloomberg really could be the guy to kill rent control in New York. He's not a career politician, so he doesn't have to worry about ruining his chances in 2012 or whatever. If he did, I think I'd throw a party, and invite everyone I knew. And he would see, the biggest gift would be from me, and the card attached would say "Thank you for being a friend."

Rent control must be shortlisted for Worst Policy Ever. It's one issue where I greet the Cato Institute with a smile; they've got a great, long paper about it. It deserves a complete reading, but here are some quotes:

Although rent controls are widely believed to lower rents, data I have collected from eighteen North American cities show that the advertised rents of available apartments in rent-regulated cities are dramatically higher than they are in cities without rent control. In cities without rent control, the available units are almost evenly distributed above and below the census median. In rent-controlled cities most available units are priced well above the median. In other words, inhabitants in cities without rent control have a far easier time finding moderately priced rental units than do inhabitants in rent-controlled cities...

Santa Monica is a beach community near Los Angeles that was discovered by urban professionals after the construction of the Santa Monica Freeway in 1972. These newcomers, many originally from New York, immediately set about trying to limit new construction, pulling up the ladder to keep out those that would follow them. In particular, they opposed a series of high-rise apartments proposed for the beachfront. The newcomers soon discovered that imposing rent control not only guaranteed themselves cheap apartments but hampered further development as well.

The result has been a virtually closed community. It is almost impossible for newcomers to find apartments in Santa Monica. As Mark Kann, a Los Angeles newspaper columnist, reported in Middle Class Radicalism in Santa Monica, a book that celebrated rent control, "I knew one professional woman who tried to get a Santa Monica apartment for more than a year without success, but she broke into the city, finally, by marrying someone who already had an apartment there." [8] The city is also famous for its homeless population and is often called "The Homeless Capital of the West."...

Unfortunately, the strategy of exempting new units often backfires. Sooner or later, tenants in the new buildings will realize their position relative to rent-controlled neighbors and seek controls on the rents of their own dwellings. This happened in New York in 1969, when Mayor John Lindsay was forced to adopt "rent stabilization" to cope with the excessive rent in "post-war" housing, that is, housing built after 1947 that was originally exempt from regulation. Lindsay promised that all post-1969 housing would remain outside rent stabilization. But inflationary pressures forced the New York State Legislature to break this pledge within five years with the Emergency Tenant Protection Act of 1974. Since then, builders have learned that, sooner or later, any new housing in New York risks being "recaptured," the term used by city officials, that is, brought under regulations. Consequently, little new rental housing is ever built.

Toronto also repealed a new-construction exemption in 1989 and now "recaptures" all new housing after five years. Thus little is built. And San Francisco continues to exempt new housing, but does so much to discourage construction through zoning and no-growth ordinances that, with a 1 percent vacancy rate, the city still adds only 500 residential units a year.

Here's the story in a nutshell:

What is going on in these markets? The explanation seems fairly straightforward. Rent control splits the housing market into two sectors, the regulated segment and the shadow market. As prices in the regulated sector are forced lower, prices in the shadow market go higher. At a certain point, the differential between the two markets becomes so stark that tenants in the regulated sector begin hoarding their apartments. They hardly ever move. In New York, 88 percent of tenants living in pre-war, rent-controlled apartments have not moved in more than 25 years.

If they do abandon their apartments, regulated tenants pass them on to friends or relatives, or sell them to strangers through "key money" that reflects their true market value. As a consequence, regulated apartments are essentially withdrawn from the market. In New York, where regulated apartments make up 63 percent of the market, only 85 or 3 percent of the 2,800 listings in the New York Times, Daily News, and New York Post, were identified or identifiable as rent regulated.

One more quote:

Fellow Swedish economist (and socialist) Assar Lindbeck, asserted, "In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing."

Abandoning rent control would (a) sharply reduce rents in New York City, (b) significantly ease the homelessness epidemic, (c) make it easier for NY businesses to bring in labor, (d) make the housing market more perfectly reflect libertarian ideals of free markets, (e) make moving to New York much, much easier for newcomers without connections.

Liberals, conservatives, libertarians, socialists- there's something for everyone!

A two-fer of Bush-bashing economics articles:

From the Atlantic:

On closer inspection, however, the Bush tax cuts have barely begun to kick in. When they do they are likely, William Gale argues in an exhaustive Brookings Institution paper, to shrink, not expand, the economy. They will achieve this perverse effect by throwing the federal budget into chronic deficit, which will force the government into the capital markets to finance it, crowding private borrowers out. Worse, fiscal and monetary policy will part company. If it follows past practice, the Fed will move to raise interest rates to stem the inflationary pressures generated by deficit spending and to attract foreign capital to finance the deficit. Already the $5.6 trillion surplus Bush inherited on taking office has fallen by $ 5.2 trillion, and if we were not raiding the Social Security trust fund, Gerard Baker writes in The Financial Times, "we would be looking at a ten year deficit of about $2 trillion, which is about the same as the tax cut." As for the stimulatory effect of the Bush spending increases, it is being offset by the contraction in spending by state governments due to falling tax receipts from the drop in economic activity. Nor can consumers be counted on for stimulus. The telecom bubble and the corporate auto-da-fé combined have cost Americans more than $5 trillion since 1998. The "wealth effect" that buoyed the economy in the Clinton years is vanishing with the wealth.

From the New Yorker:

Almost none of the C.E.O.s on the Bush team headed competitive, entrepreneurial businesses. The majority of them, in fact, made their bones in protected or regulated industries, where success depends on personal lobbying and political maneuvering. Bush himself, of course, built a small fortune on family connections, finagling a spot on the board of Harken Energy, and securing a publicly financed stadium for the Texas Rangers. Dick Cheney, meanwhile, got the top job at Halliburton almost solely because of his political connections. His successor there, David Lesar, has said, "What Dick brought was obviously a wealth of contacts." Wealth of contacts, indeed: under Cheney, Halliburton expanded internationally, gained $1.5 billion in subsidies from the U.S. government, and added a billion dollars in government contracts...

In fact, the Bush economic policy looks a lot like what the political scientist Theodore Lowi called "interest-group liberalism." As Lowi saw it, the rise of government regulation and independent bureaucracies had turned the process of policymaking away from the pursuit of the common good—however imaginary that might be—and toward a divvying up of the spoils by politicians and interest groups. As long as the government is as big and as active as it is in the United States, the incentive for interest groups—like big oil and big steel—to seek succor from it will exist. And the Bush Administration seems especially amenable to such blandishments (at least, when they come from business, rather than, say, labor).

Mind you, there's nothing inherently corrupt here. Lobbying, fixing, finagling: it's just business, of a kind. The point is that such ways of doing business have very little to do with free-market capitalism. They have more in common with crony capitalism, in which whom you know is more important than what you do and how you do it. That's the world Bush's key policymakers come out of: they've made their careers by circumventing the free market. Why expect them suddenly to embrace it?

I went to a bookstore this weekend and saw something that I'd better get used to: a large display table overflowing with September 11th books and documentaries. I didn't count, but there were probably about 15 or 20 books.

Out of curiosity, I just went to Amazon and did a book search for "September 11". 693 items came up.

More about this later, hopefully.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Incidentally, as an illustration of how useless the five-star Amazon rating system is, "In Her Own Words: The After-death Journal of Princess Diana gets 4 ½ stars.

A little bit more about Eminem, the guy who lost a fight with a rubber dog puppet, courtesy of other blogs:

- Agenda Bender has a detailed description of the stupid shit Eminem did at the MTV Music Awards. I didn't watch, and now I can't, because it's been cut from the friggin' rebroadcasts.

- Jim Treacher covers the broadcast with wit and style. Please visit his site and vote for the Hives in the poll:

Poor feller. No word yet if he's come up with one of his patented near-rhymes for "What you need to do is step the fuck back, Triumph." What, you cross-dress, make funny faces, and otherwise show your ass in all your videos, and then you try to act all hard when the goofy dog-puppet wants to chat? Look at that, you need backup to handle Fucking Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. You're all looking at the puppet like it's actually the one doing the talking. Idiots. You could have at least called Triumph a bitch, made a joke out of it.

He's also captioned a picture of Eminem giving the finger to Moby: "Hold me back, yo! Ima get crazy on this fey, soft-spoken vegan! Hold me back!"

- Moby has a few words on the subject:

the truth is that i honestly, in all sincerity, thought that the whole eminem thing was done in some semblance of humor until eminem called me a pussy (that was off camera) and then threatened to beat me up. ah well... i think that eminem is talented and interesting but i'm kind of stunned at the anger that he has for me seeing as i'd never met him up until last night.

Last thing: It would be one thing if Eminem's label just let him say anything, saying that we're giving him complete, unfettered creative control. At least they could make some noises about freedom of expression. But he didn't have complete creative control on the Marshall Mathers LP, the album with the worst anti-gay lyrics. Interscope wouldn't let him use certain lyrics about Columbine; the subject was considered too offensive and inflammatory. Some executive listened to the lyrics and made the choice to remove the Columbine stuff and leave in the violent anti-gay stuff.

Neal Pollack has a blog. You don't need me anymore.

It has been a delightful weekend. First, I enjoyed the hospitality of my dear friend Jason Epstein and his wife, whose name I cannot remember, at their summer home on the Cape, and we stayed up until almost midnight talking about books and politics and many other topics varied and sundry. If you haven't had the opportunity to eat Jason Epstein's food, to have been invited to one of his delightful literary parties, well, then, you haven't lived. Martin Amis, who was in attendance, said, "Jason, this food is simply delightful!" Then he passed out in a pool of his own vomit. Martin, you sure showed Stalin what's what in your latest book! I'm glad someone is finally telling the truth about the Communists.

Hail, hail, spit and drool.