Polygon, the Dancing Bear

Occasional notes on politics, history, technology, architecture,
and the life of a county clerk

2002:
May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2003:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2004:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2005:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2006:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2007:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2008:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July

Current entries

Sunday, June 29, 2003, 11:42 pm

A Blogger Comes To Visit. Last Wednesday, I had the opportunity to meet Rick Heller, a Massachusetts blogger who writes SmartGenes. He's a centrist, and given the polarization of political bloggers, he finds it a bit lonely in the middle of the road. Why there are few blogs written about politics from a centrist perspective is a question which remains unanswered.

Rick is a brilliant guy and had many interesting things to say; I wish I had let him get more than a few words in edgewise. He has now posted a very kind account of our meeting.

My fear that we'd spend the entire evening arguing about the University of Michigan admissions cases turned out to be completely unfounded: the topic didn't come up at all.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Friday, June 27, 2003, 2:32 pm

Thoughts on Thurmond. Slate magazine posted a brief item today, noting Strom Thurmond's death, and linking to four earlier articles about him — including the Jacob Weisberg March 2001 piece Why Strom Won't Die, which drew on the data I published in The Political Graveyard.

At first, Slate's obituary was titled "Good Riddance", but the editors must have thought better of it — a few minutes ago, it was changed to "The Passing Strom". During today's outcry over the title, and Strom's career, I wrote the following in the "Fray" reader comments section:

I can't help but agree that the "Good Riddance" headline was tasteless and over the top, even for someone with Strom's record as being, at times, the nation's leading spokesman of racism.

I'm not at ALL in sympathy with Strom politically (I'm a Democratic politico in Ann Arbor), but I must say, Strom did accomplish many good things in his long career. He was evidently less racist in word and deed than many other Southern politicians of his generation. His rigorous push to prosecute the perpetrators of a 1947 lynching is thought to have put an end to lynchings in South Carolina. He led the effort to abolish the poll tax in South Carolina. He fought and openly denounced the Ku Klux Klan. He quietly worked to pass compromise civil rights legislation in the 1950s (though he filibustered against a stronger law in the 1960s). And, of course, in 1971, he was the first South Carolina member of Congress to hire a black staff member.

What we hear about Strom, in retrospect, echoes what we heard about George Wallace, about J. William Fulbright, about Lyndon Johnson, and other sometime-opponents of civil rights who showed little evidence of deep-seated racism in private life. The electorate of the Southern states before about 1970 was militantly pro-segregation, and politicians who failed to signal their sympathy with those feelings were rejected at the ballot box. Had any of those figures expressed views then which would be even minimally acceptable today, they would have been discredited, defeated and forgotten, and a whole different and probably much more virulent group of Southern politicians would have taken their place.

I'm not saying that political morality is relative and all should now be forgiven. Indeed, the politicians who mouthed segregationist rhetoric in the 1960s surely made things worse. But we can't really damn Strom and his colleagues without an understanding that, arguably, they were doing their jobs, representing the constituency they had at the time. By focusing on the evil in Strom's soul, we tend to forget the pathology of mass hatred that infected much of the white South at the time.

Update. One Fray participant disputed the inclusion of Lyndon Johnson in the above, saying that he was always an advocate for civil rights. I'm dubious about that, but agreed that maybe I shouldn't have listed him as a "sometime opponent". Another interpreted my comments above as saying that Strom was "the best of a bad lot." In response, I wrote as follows:

By no means did I say that Strom was "the best", and I pointed out that he was, for a time, the most visible national proponent of racism and segregation. Many other Southern politicos managed to support Truman in 1948; Thurmond led the ticket for the opposition. And long afterward, he remained the standard bearer for resistance to change in the South. He didn't need to say a word; he had proven his loyalty to Jim Crow.

Nor do I entertain the thought that, during the decades up to 1965, he was privately or in any way an integrationist. Plainly, he accepted and enjoyed living in the segregated world. And his public statements during that time, even if not as virulent as others, helped to intensify Southern rage and to unleash acts of racist violence.

What redeems him, if at all, is that for him, segregationism did not equal demonic hatred. As much as South Carolina blacks may have been oppressed by the system he supported, some lives were surely saved by his hard line he took against the KKK and lynching. And his quick turnaround in 1971 (albeit without any public disavowal or apology, as Timothy Noah points out) helped signal to other white Southerners that it was time to forget about segregation, and maybe even prejudice.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Tuesday, June 24, 2003, 5:54 am

Political Graveyard Testing. My political biography website, The Political Graveyard, is periodically re-generated from a database. Periodically, I say, but the last time was August 2002, so a new version is long overdue.

Finally, a test version of the new biographical files is online, via a raw directory of some 2700 alphabetical segments: http://potifos.com/TEST-VERSION/bio/

Please let me know if you find any programming bugs I need to fix before generating the final version.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum.

Thursday, June 19, 2003, 10:19 am

Giant Microbes. Cute plush toys shaped like disease micoroorganisms: Giant Microbes! (Via Vituperation.com)

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Wednesday, June 18, 2003, 7:02 pm

Health care realities. In another forum, a discussion of Hillary Clinton's new book quickly got into the politics and economics of health care, including the alleged horrors of government involvement. I wrote the following, none of which should be news to anyone who follows this debate:

Just about every industrialized country has worked out a way to provide health care for everyone in a reasonable way.

Here in the US, we rely heavily on private markets to provide these services, even though in many ways the whole industry is the antithesis of an Adam-Smith-style utility-maximizing resource-optimizing free market. Decisionmakers don't bear the costs; price comparison is largely precluded; the intricacy of medical tech deprives most participants from having much accurate information at all, let alone perfect knowledge. And there's the intractable problem of "moral hazard", which is to say, that the people who need health insurance the most are the ones most eager to buy it.

And middle-class American consumers have a sense of entitlement, that they should have whatever procedure they think they need, regardless of what it costs the system.

So we have tinkered with our system in an effort to remedy perceived problems. All of these attempted solutions (Medicare, Medicaid, COBRA, etc.) have done some good; many of them have also created or worsened other problems. Our mixed system turns out to be considerably more expensive than government-run systems typical in Europe, or government-paid systems like Canada's.

Our 40-some million uninsured are one reason. We don't give them access to routine care, except at steep rates they usually can't afford or aren't willing to pay; yet when their situation deteriorates, we can't deprive them of extremely costly emergency care. What could have been taken care of with a routine doctor visit becomes tens of thousands of dollars in emergency surgery, and when the patient dies or goes bankrupt, everyone else in the system bears the cost. That's why comprehensively covering everyone is a lot cheaper than covering only 85%.

If it's cheaper, why don't we do it? Because we can't bear to redo the whole system. Creating a special program for the 15% (or whatever) uninsured might be a net savings for almost everyone, but it would cost scarce tax dollars. Worse, the interaction between the Last-15% health insurance program and all other forms of health insurance would be ruinous. It would end up with all the people with super-expensive conditions that private insurers didn't want to deal with. Marginal employers could drop their health insurance benefits, at least for the lowest paid and/or most unhealthy categories of employees, and leave them to the "free" public system.

Encouraging insurance plans to compete is another idea which sounds good in theory, but in practice the most straightforward way to make money is to have an insured base of young and healthy people. And this is not difficult to do. If competing plans offer different benefit structures — and it's hard to see how they could meaningfully compete if they didn't — the ones which appeal to the sickest people would go into a high cost death spiral.

Another problem with our system is that it relies almost exclusively on employers to provide health insurance to employed people and their families. In other words, instead of paying through our taxes, as most citizens of advanced countries do, we pay indirectly through higher costs of everything. Naturally, having to manage this complicates the financial life of every enterprise: a firm could be very good at making good widgets cheaply, yet be wiped out by rapidly increasing health insurance costs. In some industries, like steel, US companies say they are paying more for employee health insurance than foreign competitors are paying in taxes.

Hillary's plan was a complicated nightmare because it attempted to juggle and compromise among all of these considerations, to patch up the private insurance system with as little change as possible, to try to make it sorta work for everyone. Maybe it wouldn't have worked very well, but it probably would have ameliorated some of the worst problems.

In the future, as the medical industry steadily grabs more and more of our resources, as the cost of even the simplest drug or medical procedure is mercilessly accelerated, as high-minded professionalism is replaced by avarice, as the ranks of those without any health insurance grow by many more millions, we will come to either a radical break (root and branch reform) or a breakdown.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Tuesday, June 10, 2003, 11:35 pm

Paducah Notes. I returned on Sunday from a week in Kentucky, a trip which took me to a high school graduation in Paducah (or, well, technically, in nearby Reidland). On Friday morning, though I was awake, I didn't notice the earthquake.

Paducah is an old Ohio River town in western Kentucky, across the river from Illinois. Everybody there seems to know all about the Flood of 1937; today downtown Paducah is separated from the river by a colossal flood wall, on which murals in a wide variety of styles have been painted.

Photographs of downtown Paducah during the 1937 flood show water up to the second story of downtown buildings, most of which still exist in good condition. Presumably after the flood waters receded, they were dried out and put back into service. See the National Trust's advice for treating flood-damaged older and historic buildings for a sobering reminder of what the flood clean-up must have been like.

Paducah sights you won't see in most places any more: ashtrays in the County Clerk's record vault, right by the old bound volumes of deeds and other records; a beverage vending machine in the public library, just a step away from the bookshelves. In the libraries and archives where I usually do research, sugary beverages and lighted cigarettes are not even allowed, let alone encouraged.

Among the special oddities of Paducah (though I didn't visit it on this trip) is the 1964-vintage City Hall, a copy of the Edward Durell Stone-designed U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, India. As it turned out, the building was poorly adapted to Paducah's climate. The awkwardly angled entrance doors are a victory of geometry over utility.

From a Jewish history perspective, Paducah was one of the cities affected by Gen. Grant's infamous General Orders No. 11, in 1862, which expelled all Jews from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi:

...Grant's order was rapidly enforced. At Paducah, Ky., 30 Jewish families were removed. That removal affected 11 businesses and shops. At least two of those removed were Union Army veterans. In one incident, Jews were so rushed as they were being forced onto a riverboat departing for Cincinnati that someone threw a baby, almost forgotten in the wake of confusion from the general's order, aboard the vessel just before the vessel sailed. More than 1,000 Jews were forcibly removed from Memphis, many having first had their personal possessions confiscated. Only two elderly Jewish women were left behind in the care of Christian neighbors.

The order was eventually countermanded by President Lincoln.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

2002:
May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2003:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December