No Problemo

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George Will denying global climate change:

This illustrates what I’ve observed about how Democrats and Republicans deal with critical issues. Let’s say there’s a big honking Issue looming in the future — global warming, health care, whatever. Republicans will deny the problem exists until it bites their butts, then they blame Democrats for not having solved the problem sooner. The exception to this involves opportunities to undo some progressive program they hate, like Social Security; then they exaggerate the problem so they can spin their particular “solution.”

Democrats in general are better at recognizing an impending problem, and some of them can demonstrate considerable insight into what is causing the problem. They’ll make stirring speeches about how the problem needs to be addressed. But for the past several years, once they get to Washington their big ideas evaporate. An issue might cry out for a massive overhaul, and the Dems will offer band-aids.

Politicians of both parties are being influenced by Big Money, of course. They can’t do anything that will piss off big campaign contributors. So, nothing gets done.

But what’s Will’s excuse?

What They’re Not Telling Us

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I read in the Guardian that there has been a sharp drop in U.S. productivity growth since 2003. John Schmitt and Dean Baker write,

All the bad news about the bursting of the US housing bubble and the related meltdown in US share markets has deflected the world’s attention from what is arguably an even more fundamental problem facing the US economy: the sharp deceleration in productivity growth since the middle of 2004.

For Americans, the long-run implications of this little-discussed slowdown, if sustained, are actually more important to future living standards than any of the other events currently worrying world markets. For Europeans, long-encouraged to see the United States as the flexible economic ideal, the productivity slowdown sounds another note of caution about the US model. Europeans already know that the US economy generates substantial inequality. The last three years of slow productivity growth now suggest that all that inequality apparently doesn’t even guarantee faster growth.

Notice that this is not a decrease in productivity itself, but in productivity growth.

Economists define “productivity” as the value of goods and services produced per hour by an economy’s average worker, and agree that the growth rate of productivity is the single most important determinant of the long-run prospects for a country’s standard of living.

The deceleration in US productivity growth since the second half of 2004 is striking by historical standards. Between 1947 and 1973, the golden age of postwar capitalism, productivity growth averaged about 2.8% per year in the United States. At that pace, the output of the average worker was set to double about every 25 years, allowing roughly comparable increases in national living standards. From 1973 through 1995, however, productivity growth took a nosedive, with the average rate dropping to just 1.4%. At this lower rate, average worker output would take about 50 years to double, implying far slower progress in living standards.

From the mid-1990s on, however, official productivity growth again accelerated rapidly, returning to a 2.9% rate reminiscent of the golden age. Quite suddenly, though, in the second half of 2004, productivity growth dropped sharply. From the third quarter of 2004, productivity growth rate, at 1.3% per year, has not even managed to match the 1.4% growth rate of the productivity bust of 1973-1995.

But we’re still beating lazy ol’ socialist Yurp, right?

Meanwhile, how has Europe been faring? According to internationally comparable data from the Groningen Growth and Development Centre, between 1995 and 2004, the United States outperformed most of Europe, with productivity growing about 2.5% per year in the United States, compared to 1.7% in Germany, 2.0% in France, and 2.2% in the United Kingdom.

Between 2004 and 2006, however, the US lead all but evaporated. The US rate fell to 1.7%, not much different from the rates in Germany (1.7%), France (1.4%), and the United Kingdom (1.4%). If current trends continue, US growth rates may soon be trailing those of Europe (as was the case for almost the entire postwar period before 1995).

Well, damn.

I’m not an economist, but let me speculate anyway: Perhaps companies are not reinvesting in facilities and technology and “growing their people” as they did in the 1990s. “The driving force behind the 1996-2004 productivity acceleration … was massive investment in computers, software and related high-tech machinery, all of which become obsolete much faster than earlier generations of capital goods.” Now companies may be upgrading and replacing technology, but it’s not like in the 1990s, when PCs appeared on every office desk for the first time.

And then there’s the fatigue factor. Workers are worn out and stressed out. They’ve skipped vacations and worked way too much underpaid and unpaid overtime. They are not being rewarded. Their wages are stagnant, even as the cost of living rises. So workers subsidize their employer’s profits by going deeper into personal debt, struggling to maintain a “normal” middle-class lifestyle. (See also “Spherion Study Shows Less Than Half of U.S. Workers Are Satisfied With Their Jobs; Benefits and Compensation Inadequate to Retain Employees.“)

Back in the days of the Cold War we patriotic Americans were told, over and over again, that Communism is a bad system because it doesn’t provide a personal incentive for people to work. If everyone is going to be taken care of by the state, whether they work hard or not, then why bother? And I think that’s a valid criticism. You can’t deny that Communist countries produce piss-poor economies in the long run.

But I think King Capitalism is making the same mistake. If everyone is going to be pissed on by their employer whether they work hard or not, then why bother? What’s the incentive?

See especially “Our Sub-prime Economy” by Rick Wolff:

From 1973 to 2005, this is what happened to the 80 percent of US workers in non-supervisory jobs. Their hourly wages — adjusted for inflation — rose from $15.76 to $16.11. That is, over a 32 year period, most US workers enjoyed a stunning 2 percent increase in what their hourly pay could buy. Because their work weeks shortened over those years, their real weekly pay — what they could actually afford for a week’s pay — actually fell from $581.67 to $543.65, a decline of 6.5 percent. This means that workers’ wages could buy less in 2005 than in 1973.

Over the same thirty years, US workers produced 75 percent more. In the language of economics, that’s how much output per worker — “productivity” — rose. Corporations got 75 percent more goods and services produced per worker. They sold that extra output and thus got much more revenue and profit per worker employed. Yet what they paid those workers did not rise. Stagnant wages did not allow the workers to buy any of the extra output they produced.

Americans measure success by levels of consumption, Wolff writes. As the bumper stickers say, Whoever Dies with the Most Toys Wins. So as wages flattened, American workers compensated to maintain the lifestyle to which they had become accustomed. First, in the 1970s, women entered the workforce in large numbers. This of course was partly because of second-wave feminism, but it also corresponded with the slowdown of the economy that occurred after 1972. Second, people got used to carrying larger and larger chunks of debt to pay for the stuff they believed middle-class people were supposed to have, but which they couldn’t afford. As I said, they’re subsidizing their employers’ profits by going into debt.

Wolff also makes this observation:

The numbers on productivity and real wages before then — from 1945 to 1975 — were very different. Productivity rose much faster then than afterward. But the big difference is what happened to real wages: hourly, they rose 75 percent from 1947 to 1972, while weekly they rose 61 percent. In other words, US workers wages then rose with their higher productivity — exactly what stopped happening after the mid-1970s.

The welfare state economy of 1945 to 1975 was driven by two interconnected fears: of lapsing back into the Great Depression and of succumbing to socialism. History reduced those fears enough so that, after 1975, business could undo the New Deal and go back to the pre-1929 gaps between rich and poor. Most paid commentators cheer the business reaction as if it were good for everyone, but workers suffering the new sub-prime economy may reckon differently. The explosion of workers’ debts has postponed that reckoning. So too have fundamentalism, escapism, and the noise from all those commentators.

I’ve finally gotten around to reading Dear Hunting With Jesus by Joe Bageant, which expounds on this theme big-time, but more colorfully. However, Bageant’s subjects are so used to being pissed on by The System that they don’t even question it.

Those of us who were children in the 1950s and 1960s got so used to economic times getting better and better that we assumed that was the way the world would always be. Any slowdowns were just temporary glitches. In the early 1980s, when mortgage rates went through the roof, lots of my contemporaries cheerfully took out balloon mortgages because of course in five years they’d be making a lot more money. But, as a rule, they didn’t. Now I think most people have stopped expecting. They’re just hoping to hang on to what they have.

I’ve believed for a long time that much of America’s prosperity — whatever’s left of it, anyway — has been floating on the wealth created in the postwar years. That’s when all those veterans got college degrees on the GI Bill and went out and started businesses or created new products. That’s when all those middle-class couples, booming with babies, bought their first houses with mortgages subsidized by the U.S. government. That left with them income to buy new refrigerators and cars and television sets, growing the refrigerator and car and television set industries in America. It was win/win for everybody.

Well, those days are gone, huh? And if you want to get really depressed, take a look at this episode of Bill Moyers Journal.

Also, this guy says that people who are even worse off than we are, are subsidizing us — “a good many developing countries are actually subsidizing U.S. consumers indirectly (by keeping their currency undervalued).” Face it; the world’s economy isn’t “trickle down”; it’s “trickle up.” American workers are middle men, passing the world’s wealth up the chain after taking our little cut.

I don’t know what the solution is. I understand that old-style protectionism isn’t workable any more. On the other hand, Ian Welsh keeps patiently explaining to me that globalization is not inevitable. He understands economic stuff much better than I do, so I’ll take his word on that.

I do think that we must begin to think in terms of investing in ourselves again. If workers and business were relieved of the burden of health care costs, wouldn’t that help the economy (except for the insurance industry, of course)? If a college education were a lot more affordable, wouldn’t that (in the long run) help the economy, as it did in the 1950s and 1960s? And if workers felt that their hard work was actually being compensated, that there was a reason to work hard beside not getting fired, wouldn’t that put a spring in their step, so to speak?

The “I got mine, so the heck with you” attitude is not just unfair; it’s strangling all of us.

Mighty Links

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What every loyal American should read today:

Frank Rich, “The ‘Good Germans’ Among Us.”

Rod Nordland and Mark Hosenball, “Blackwater Is Soaked.”

Kagro X, “Congress suckered on surveillance. Telco immunity, next?“; Glenn Greenwald, “The Beltway Establishment’s contempt for the rule of law“; and a New York Times editorial, “Spies, Lies and FISA.”

Rosa Brooks, “Too Much Cloak and Swagger.”

The new and improved Tom Friedman takes another tenuous step into Reality World — “Who Will Succeed Al Gore?”

On the other hand, George Will is still stupid after all these years — he complains in “Code of Coercion” that colleges of social work are dominated by liberals determined to promote “social and economic justice” as a response to “the conservative trends of the past three decades.” Even worse, George says, students are required to learn to recognize “oppression and discrimination.” Wow, I’m so … not outraged. This column demonstrates why “conservative social work” is an oxymoron.

For more on why contemporary conservatism and the good of society don’t mix, see Christopher Lee, “Vote Nearing in Battle Over Kids’ Health Care.” See also Mark Trahant, “A subsidy so workers can start ‘winning.'”

Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin, “Untraceable e-mails spread Obama rumor.” This could be subtitled “Debbie Schlussel is the reincarnation of Joe McCarthy.”

This headline belongs in the “Irony Is Dead” department — “Rice Worried by Putin’s Broad Powers.” See also The Carpetbagger.

Something I didn’t know — the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize was Theodore Roosevelt.

Update: After you’ve read Frank Rich’s “Good Germans” column, read this right-wing rebuttal. Rich talks about Americans sitting idly by while our government embarks on a pattern of torture similar to that of the Gestapo. Rich presents several paragraphs of examples, with links.

So what’s the rebuttal? The rightie takes offense at the comparison to Nazis, then says,

I believe that when the history of this war is written, it will be seen that our nation waged it in accordance with some of the highest ethical standards ever observed in a major conflict. Yet Frank Rich paints our government as adopting Nazi tactics, and average Americans as akin to passive supporters of Hitler’s regime. Were it not ever-so-gauche to do so, you might call that unpatriotic.

And that’s it. He doesn’t refute a single fact presented in Rich’s column. He just says that comparing the actions of our government to the Third Reich is unpatriotic.

This is a perfect example of exactly what Rich is talking about, and also what Hannah Arendt was talking about when she referred to “the banality of evil.”

Update 2: After you’ve read today’s Tom Friedman column, you might — if you have a strong stomach — check out what that verbal pestilence known as “Jules Crittenden” says about it. Keep Pepto Bismol handy.

Among other things, Friedman wrote,

Mr. Gore and Mr. Bush each faced a crucible moment. For Mr. Gore, it was winning the popular vote and having the election taken away from him by a Republican-dominated Supreme Court. For Mr. Bush, it was the shocking terrorist attack on 9/11.

To which the pestilence replied,

Friedman ventures deep into myth and legend in his latest, suggesting Gore was deprived of his crown by a Republican Supreme Court, failing to note that objective counts have in fact conceded that, according to the rules that govern our elections, Bush won.

Um, what courts would that be? Is he saying that lower courts somehow, in some mystical manner, affirmed the SCOTUS decision? I dimly remember that the SCOTUS expressly forbade lower courts from using Bush v. Gore as a precedent for anything. Am I forgetting something?

Well, never mind. I misread “counts” for “courts.” I’m sure I’m not the only 50-something who struggles to read on a screen.

But the “counts” is an even bigger laugh. The Supreme Court stopped the counts, and subsequent investigations all pretty much concluded that Gore won.

Some Things Can’t Be Legislated Away

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This isn’t actually news — I’ve been ranting about it for years (such as here and here) — but it’s in the news. Elisabeth Rosenthal writes in yesterday’s New York Times —

A comprehensive global study of abortion has concluded that abortion rates are similar in countries where it is legal and those where it is not, suggesting that outlawing the procedure does little to deter women seeking it.

Moreover, the researchers found that abortion was safe in countries where it was legal, but dangerous in countries where it was outlawed and performed clandestinely. Globally, abortion accounts for 13 percent of women’s deaths during pregnancy and childbirth, and there are 31 abortions for every 100 live births, the study said.

The results of the study, a collaboration between scientists from the World Health Organization in Geneva and the Guttmacher Institute in New York, a reproductive rights group, are being published Friday in the journal Lancet.

Other points made in the study:

The most effective way to reduce the rate of abortion is not to make abortion illegal, but to make contraception widely available.

In Eastern Europe, where contraceptive choices have broadened since the fall of Communism, the study found that abortion rates have decreased by 50 percent, although they are still relatively high compared with those in Western Europe. “In the past we didn’t have this kind of data to draw on,” Ms. Camp said. “Contraception is often the missing element” where abortion rates are high, she said. …

… In Uganda, where abortion is illegal and sex education programs focus only on abstinence, the estimated abortion rate was 54 per 1,000 women in 2003, more than twice the rate in the United States, 21 per 1,000 in that year. The lowest rate, 12 per 1,000, was in Western Europe, with legal abortion and widely available contraception.

Where abortion is illegal, it is unsafe.

The study indicated that about 20 million abortions that would be considered unsafe are performed each year and that 67,000 women die as a result of complications from those abortions, most in countries where abortion is illegal. …

… Some countries, like South Africa, have undergone substantial transitions in abortion laws in that time. The procedure was made legal in South Africa in 1996, leading to a 90 percent decrease in mortality among women who had abortions, some studies have found.

Abortion is illegal in most of Africa, though. It is the second-leading cause of death among women admitted to hospitals in Ethiopia, its Health Ministry has said. It is the cause of 13 percent of maternal deaths at hospitals in Nigeria, recent studies have found.

Anti-abortion activists are full of crap:

[Randall K. O’Bannon, director of education and research at the National Right to Life Educational Trust Fund in Washington] said that the major reason women die in the developing world is that hospitals and health systems lack good doctors and medicines. “They have equated the word ‘safe’ with ‘legal’ and ‘unsafe’ with ‘illegal,’ which gives you the illusion that to deal with serious medical system problems you just make abortion legal,” he said.

Let’s repeat one example from above: “The procedure was made legal in South Africa in 1996, leading to a 90 percent decrease in mortality among women who had abortions, some studies have found.”

Guttmacher has been tracking the correlation between illegal abortion and high rates of death and medical complication from abortion for many years. And one would think even an idiot would understand that where women are trying to abort by flushing themselves with corrosive chemicals or sticking sharp and unsterilized objects into themselves, it is likely to be dangerous. But one cannot underestimate the abject brainlessness of Fetus People.

The researchers used national data for 2003 from countries where abortion was legal and therefore tallied. W.H.O. scientists estimated abortion rates from countries where it was outlawed, using data on hospital admissions for abortion complications, interviews with local family planning experts and surveys of women in those countries.

In other words, if women are showing up in hospitals because they are septic or mutilated from a back-alley abortion, it’s not too much of a stretch to conclude that women are getting back-alley abortions. Unless you are one of the Fetus People; in that case, you will likely conclude something utterly off the wall and unrelated.

However, outlawing abortion can have the effect of driving it so far underground that many people (unless they work in hospital emergency rooms) can pretend it isn’t happening, even though it is. And pretending is better than reality for righties. Of course, there is also the daughter effect — having a daughter of reproductive age tends to have a liberalizing effect on a man’s views on reproductive rights. (See also “Oh, the Humanity” — the anti-abortion rights position is based on an assumption that women aren’t real people — especially women who get abortions.)

As Scott Lemieux says,

If the goal of abortion [law] is to protect fetal life, criminalization is at best an ineffective and grossly inequitable means of achieving this goal, and the bundle of policies favoring reproductive freedom (including legal abortion) generally produces lower abortion rates than the illegal abortion-no rational sex ed-limited access to contraception-threadbare welfare state usually favored by the American forced pregnancy lobby. If, on the other hand, you’re in it more for the injuring women than for the protection of fetal life, then criminalizing abortion makes good sense.

Finally, from the New York Times article,

The Bush administration’s multibillion-dollar campaign against H.I.V./AIDS in Africa has directed money to programs that promote abstinence before marriage, and to condoms only as a last resort. It has prohibited the use of American money to support overseas family planning groups that provide abortions or promote abortion as a method of family planning.

Which means we might as well be flushing those multibillion dollars down a toilet.

Good SCHIP

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OK, folks, here’s the House target list. If any of the congress critters on this list below is yours, please be sure to nag him or her mercilessly (but politely) to override the S-CHIP veto next week.

GOPers who voted NO

AL Robert Aderholt
AR John Boozman
CA Brian Bilbray
CA John Doolittle
CO Marilyn Musgrave
FL Gus Bilirakis
FL Ginny Brown-Waite
FL Tom Feeney
FL Rick Keller
IA Tom Latham
ID Bill Sali
IL Judy Biggert
IL Tim Johnson
IL Peter Roskam
IL Jerry Weller
LA Rodney Alexander
MD Roscoe Bartlett
MI Joseph Knollenberg
MI Thaddeus McCotter
MI Tim Walberg
MN Michelle Bachmann
MO Sam Graves
MO Kenny Hulshoff
NC Robin Hayes
NJ Rodney Frelinghuysen
NJ Scott Garrett
NJ Jim Saxton
NV Dean Heller
NY Thomas Reynolds
NY Randy Kuhl
OH Steve Chabot
OR Greg Walden
PA John Peterson
TX Kay Granger
VA Thelma Drake
VA Randy Forbes

GOPers who didn’t vote last time

CA Wally Herger
WY Barbara Cubin

Dems who voted NO
MS Gene Taylor
NC Bob Etheridge
NC Mike McIntrye

The Right Blogosphere is still in denial mode. This guy actually claims “Democrats are being attacked, not the Frost family.”

Um, I believe I heard Keith Olbermann say the Frosts had gotten death threats.

Malkin isn’t giving up. Today she is telling us the Frosts own three cars. She illustrates this by showing photographs of recent, showroom models of the cars. We don’t know how old the Frost cars are, or if they are all working.

This is a variation on the old “Cadillac Queen” myth, of the black welfare recipient who drives to the store in a Cadillac to buy groceries with food stamps. Of course, the Cadillac might be fifteen years old and in dire need of a muffler. FYI: half the hillbillies in the Ozarks own more than one car, although rarely are they all in working condition. The time-honored practice is to keep one going by stripping parts off the others. In my old neighborhood back in the day, every third home was graced by some rusted vehicle on cinder blocks in the yard. People who cared about appearances kept the heap in the back yard, of course.

But the claim on the Right is that the Dems used Graeme Frost to avoid talking about the real issues of S-CHIP. But in fact,

1. It’s the Republicans, not the Democrats, who whipped up a phony outrage campaign to avoid talking about the real issues of S-CHIP. If the Frosts are a red herring, it’s the Right that made them so.

2. The circumstances of the Frost family perfectly exemplify the real issues surrounding S-CHIP. In a sane world, they would have provided an ideal starting point for the real-world discussion the Right claims it wants but avoids by any means handy.

E.J. Dionne:

The right is unapologetic. “The Democrats chose to outsource their airtime to a Seventh Grader,” wrote National Review’s Mark Steyn. “If a political party is desperate enough to send a boy to do a man’s job, then the boy is fair game.” …

… rather than just condemn the right-wingers as meanies, let’s take their claims seriously. Doing so makes clear that they are engaged in a perverse and incoherent form of class warfare.

The left is accused of all manner of sins related to covetousness and envy whenever it raises questions about who benefits from Bush’s tax cuts and mentions the yachts such folks might buy or the mansions they might own. But here is a family with modest possessions doing everything conservatives tell people they should do, and the right trashes them for getting help to buy health insurance for their children.

Most conservatives favor government-supported vouchers that would help Graeme attend his private school, but here they turn around and criticize him for . . . attending a private school. Federal money for private schools but not for health insurance? What’s the logic here?

Conservatives endlessly praise risk-taking by entrepreneurs and would give big tax cuts to those who are most successful. But if a small-business person is struggling, he shouldn’t even think about applying for SCHIP.

Conservatives who want to repeal the estate tax on large fortunes have cited stories — most of them don’t check out — about farmers having to sell their farms to pay inheritance taxes. But the implication of these attacks on the Frosts is that they are expected to sell their investment property to pay for health care. Why?

Oh, yes, and conservatives tell us how much they love homeownership, and then assail the Frosts for having the nerve to own a home. I suppose they should have to sell that, too.

Right you are, E.J. The Frosts have assets. They live in their biggest asset, and can’t very well take cash out of that asset without borrowing money on it or selling it and moving into a shelter, but never mind that. Their assets should have made them ineligible for assistance, the Right says.

But S-CHIP is a program for families with some means, not the truly destitute. The truly destitute qualify for Medicaid. S-CHIP is a safety net, meaning the program exists not only to provide health care for children but to prevent families from completely going under financially because of health care costs. The objections of the Right show us clearly that the Right doesn’t get it. They want a program that requires a family to hit bottom, to lose everything, to be shoved so low that getting up again is nearly impossible, before they get one red cent of taxpayer money.

Paul Krugman:

The Frosts and their four children are exactly the kind of people S-chip was intended to help: working Americans who can’t afford private health insurance.

The parents have a combined income of about $45,000, and don’t receive health insurance from employers. When they looked into buying insurance on their own before the accident, they found that it would cost $1,200 a month — a prohibitive sum given their income. After the accident, when their children needed expensive care, they couldn’t get insurance at any price.

Fortunately, they received help from Maryland’s S-chip program. The state has relatively restrictive rules for eligibility: children must come from a family with an income under 200 percent of the poverty line. For families with four children that’s $55,220, so the Frosts clearly qualified.

Graeme Frost, then, is exactly the kind of child the program is intended to help. But that didn’t stop the right from mounting an all-out smear campaign against him and his family. …

… All in all, the Graeme Frost case is a perfect illustration of the modern right-wing political machine at work, and in particular its routine reliance on character assassination in place of honest debate. If service members oppose a Republican war, they’re “phony soldiers”; if Michael J. Fox opposes Bush policy on stem cells, he’s faking his Parkinson’s symptoms; if an injured 12-year-old child makes the case for a government health insurance program, he’s a fraud.

Awhile back David Brock of Media Matters wrote a book called The Republican Noise Machine. From a review by Bradford Plumer in Mother Jones (September 1, 2004):

Brock documents how right-wing groups pressure the media and spread misinformation to the public. It’s easy to see how this is done. Fringe conspiracies and stories will be kept alive by outlets like Rush Limbaugh, the Washington Times, and the Drudge Report, until they finally break into the mainstream media. Well-funded think tanks like the Heritage Foundation overwhelm news reporters with distorted statistics and conservative spin. Mainstream cable news channels employ staunchly rightwing pundits — like Pat Buchanan and Sean Hannity — to twist facts and echo Republican talking points, all under the rubric of “balance.” Meanwhile, media groups like Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center have spent 30 years convincing the public that the media is, in fact, liberal. As Brock says, it’s all a sham: “I have seen, and I know firsthand, indeed from my own pen, how the organized Right has sabotaged not only journalism but also democracy and truth.”

Most of the time, they still get away with this. But just this once their bluff was called, and the world pushed back. And they can’t stand it.

Today Mark Hemingway at NRO is sniffling that Graeme Frost suffers from Manipulated Child Syndrome and compares Dem treatment of Graeme with that of “stage mothers” pushing their kids into show business. Except there’s absolutely no evidence anyone was unkind to Graeme except the mouth-breathing Right.

And do we want to talk about Noah McCullough? From the New York Times, February 26, 2005:

The battle over Social Security has been joined by an unusual lobbyist, a 9-year-old from Texas who has agreed to travel supporting President Bush’s proposal.

The boy, Noah McCullough, made a splash with his encyclopedic command of presidential history, earning five appearances on the “Tonight” show and some unusual experiences in the presidential campaign last year. He beat Howard Dean in a trivia contest at the Democratic National Convention and wrote for his local newspaper about his trip to see the inauguration.

“He’s very patriotic and very Republican,” said Noah’s mother, Donna McCullough, a former teacher and self-described Democrat. “It’s the way he was born.”

In a sign of how far groups go to carry their message on Social Security, Progress for America has signed up Noah, a fourth grader, as a volunteer spokesman. He starts on spring break from James Williams Elementary School in Katy, Tex.

Progress for America, which spent almost $45 million backing Mr. Bush last year, plans to lay out $20 million on Social Security this year. It has spent $1 million on television commercials and is working to send experts around the country. Among them are Thomas Saving, a trustee of the Social Security Trust Fund; Rosario Marin, a former United States treasurer; and one really, really young Republican. Noah will not be eligible to collect Social Security for nearly 60 years.

Noah will travel to a handful of states ahead of visits by the president and will go on radio programs, answer trivia questions and say a few words about Social Security. Though he is obviously not an expert (and not really a lobbyist, either), officials say the effort is a lighthearted way to underline Mr. Bush’s message.

Somehow, it was OK to trot 9-year-old Noah all over the country, but having 12-year-old Graeme read one message into a radio microphone was child abuse. Jon Henke of Q and O fame points out that some leftie bloggers made snarky comments about Noah at the time (Atrios called him “Cousin Oliver”! Oh, the horror!). Let’s talk about what the Left did not do.

The Left did not invade the McCullough’s privacy, publish misinformation about their assets, publish their home address to encourage people to harass them, drive by their home to describe it to a national audience and speculate how much it was worth, call them to ask personal questions, criticize them for where they send their kids to school, or publish insinuations about them in major newspapers. (Malkin, in the New York Post — “Reid’s staff says Gemma and Graeme get tuition breaks. But it’s not clear when those scholarships were instituted and/or whether the other two receive tuition aid. …”)

The Malkin Monster will never quit. But that would make an override of the S-CHIP veto all the sweeter.

We Loves Us Some Al Gore

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I knew our Al would win the Nobel Prize. Just think — he’s won an Oscar, an Emmy, an a Nobel Prize in the same year. How cool is that?

Of course, as the Talking Dog says,

Notwithstanding that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences liked him enough to award him an Oscar, and now, the Norwegian committee charged with the prize has awarded former Vice-President Al Gore the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in publicizing the dangers of climate change, the American press corps will still tell us that Gore is stiff, wooden and boring, sighs too much, and of course (wait for it…) he’s fat. Let’s face it… notwithstanding that he is a happily married man (and a decent man) who would never dream of such a thing, with an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize in his pocket… is there any doubt that this man could get laid anywhere he wants, anywhere in the world? Well, almost anywhere, I suppose, as the Washington press corps would still tell us of his made-up inadequacies (inadequacies they made up, of course, because (1) they don’t like him, (2) their corporate masters don’t like him and (3) Mr. Scaife doesn’t like him.)

And while he could be getting laid anywhere, is there anyone (who isn’t mentally defective, such as a huge portion of the American electorate) who wouldn’t rather have a beer with this guy than, say, the current idiot who infests our White House (who purportedly doesn’t even drink!!! Hah, press corps? You’d “rather have a beer with” a MAN WHO DOESN’T DRINK? WTF kind of fun is THAT??? Hah, press corps?)

Today all the rightie bloggers are flopping around in high derision mode. Bleep ’em.

I will say that the Right has done a good job planting disinformation in the press about climate change. As Mark Lynas writes,

Where does science end and politics begin? On climate change this is a particularly thorny question. For over a decade now we have seen a heated and increasingly bitter debate between environmentalists and sceptics about to what extent the globe is warming, who is responsible, and what (if anything) we ought to do about it.

Seemingly presented with two sets of “experts” and with no idea which side is telling the truth, the lay public is left confused, as opinion polls show. The real truth – that all the major scientific questions about global warming have long been settled, and largely support the long-standing environmentalist position – remains obscured by continuing political trench warfare and media debate. This failure to reflect the political debate on global warming, despite its largely accurate portrayal of climate science, is why Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, was dismissed as “one-sided” by the high court.

That is not to say that Gore got everything 100% right. … All of these points, however, are trivial details in the context of the main argument of the film, which is unambiguously correct in its portrayal of mainstream scientific understanding of climate change.

And there is speculation whether the Nobel Prize will inspire Al to get into the presidential race. I don’t think he will, for the same reasons Eric Pooley gives at Time —

He put himself in position to win the Nobel by committing to an issue bigger than himself — the fight to save the planet. If he runs for president now, he’ll be hauling himself back up onto that dusty old pedestal, signaling that he is, after all, the most important thing in his world. Sure, he’d say he was doing it because he feels a moral obligation to intervene in a time of unparalleled crisis. But running for president is by definition an act of hubris, and Gore has spent the past couple of years defying his ego and sublimating himself to a larger goal. Running for president would mean returning to a role he’d already transcended. He’d turn into — again — just another politician, when a lot of people thought he might be something better than that.

But oh, I wish he would run. If he declared I think he’d be the front-runner overnight. I’d endorse him, anyway.