– I love the fact that The Stranger are trying to bring down Frank Chopp with a Socialist candidate.

– Last year I paid 22.6 percent in federal taxes after all the special deductions afforded me. That’s a pretty darn low effective rate by historical standards, and it’s low for all I receive from this country. My business depends on a country that continues to make savvy investments in its infrastructure, in its oversight of industry and in its people. Those public investments are instrumental to private market growth.

– He just said in public what these conservative fiends say behind closed doors after refusing to allow a vote on legislation that would establish a consistent standard of care in emergency rooms that includes information about emergency contraception.

– But one thing to keep in mind is there is no real penalty for respectable lying in our world of intellectual discourse.

– Want [h/t]

– This is the best headline I’ve seen in a while.

The ordinance that passed last year will officially be the city law on September 1. But the law is only as good as the people working and employing people in Seattle know about it. In that vein, Council Member Bagshaw has a post on her blog with details. Who is and isn’t covered, and what the law actually does. There are also 3 workshops open to the public.

• Tuesday, August 21, 12 noon: North Seattle (Ballard Campus Swedish Medical Center, 5300 Tallman Ave. NW)
• Tuesday, August 28, 5:30 pm: West Seattle (Neighborhood House, 6400 Sylvan Way SW)
• Wednesday, August 29, 3 pm: Capitol Hill (Century Ballroom, 915 E. Pine Street)

– The real solution to streets like this involve engineering: road diets, curb bulbs, striped crosswalks, and/or crossing signals. But for now, I recommend crossing with a camera.

– This is a horrible story, but it did get respectable news organizations to say “Pussy Riot.”

– On the one hand, I don’t care about the Republicans on a junket in the Sea of Galilee boozing it up and skinny dipping. On the other hand, if it were a bunch of Democrats.

– Pro life

– Taylor Bridge fire is 47% contained.

– The ghost of Ayn Rand

[I’m reading and doing some metacommentary on Mitt Romney’s book. Enjoy, or skip over it: it’s a free country.]

I don’t know if Mitt Romney still thinks global warming is a thing. But whenever his ghost writer ghost wrote this chapter, they acknowledged at least that public opinion moved in that direction. This is good, and hopefully he still believes it. But since half of my notes in the margins in these sections are about how maybe he could look into global warming, I wish he’d have stated it earlier instead of almost at the end. But, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Now we’re at the section “Common Causes?” and the question mark is because even Romney isn’t sure he can get anything useful out of the bare sketches he wrote about nations and empires collapsing. He starts off saying that both cultural and economic isolation lead to the collapse of empires. “China, Spain, Britain, and the Ottomans expressly or effectively retreated behind barriers to foreign trade, each convinced that competition had made them weaker. Their retreat from the marketplace of ideas and their retreat from the marketplace of goods inevitably led to their retreat from the pinnacle of leadership.”

(a) I think we can all agree that Britain was best known for its economic isolation. Who doesn’t remember that stirring line, “Rule Britannia, Britannia, stay home because the waves might be choppy”? (b) There’s no evidence in this book to suggest that empires that isolated themselves did it because they were losing ground or if they had already lost ground and their isolationism was a way to stave off/slow down the process.

“This is a lesson that shouldn’t be lost on us. When we face challenge, there will always be cries for protection”. I know: those cries of we shouldn’t have to compete with prepubescent girls paid almost nothing for factory work. Don’t they know that they’re the ones destroying the country?

“They will be heartfelt and not entirely illogical. Foreign competition will seem unfair — after all, if foreign products and services are more desirable to consumers, it must be due to some form of advantage. And if one’s competitor has an advantage, that doesn’t feel fair.” So what if it actually isn’t fair? It’s tough to quantify how much of China’s advantage is due to unfair things like child labor, shit environmental laws, currency manipulation, intellectual property theft, and trade barriers, and how much is due to fair competition. But calls to not have to compete with those unfair things aren’t in and of themselves shutting down legit trade or calls to close off all ties.

“The only successful way to overcome foreign advantage, however, is to create an advantage of one’s own — to innovate.” There’s no evidence that you can’t innovate and have certain trade restrictions. The US had plenty of trade barriers for most of our history, and we did a fine job innovating. In large measure it helped build our manufacturing base. China is doing the same thing now and out competing us at the moment.

It goes on like this, but you get the point. Moving on to the next reason for failure:

Some of these failed powers were weakened as well by wealth and spending that exceeded their own production–in other words, by easy money. The spoils of Ottoman pillage, the gold the Spanish stole from the Americas, the tribute the Portuguese exacted from trade–all allowed each of those nations to live well in excess of their productivity. In the same way that inherited wealth can lead descendents to profligate spending and economic ruin, easy money weakened these nations’ willingness to work and invest.

Totally. People who inherited their wealth don’t know what hard work is. Excellent point, Mitt Romney. Then I’m not sure if it’s the same point or bad transitions, but culture in general makes a difference in collapse of empires. Finally we can learn from this outline of failure to avoid “the same path that has led to the great decline in the past.” His prescription is don’t save industries that were once successful and avoid protectionism.

And we’re on to “Why Nations Fiddle as they Burn” the story of Nero Mitt Romney explaining with hindsight how he would have saved various places. He has a paragraph about Spain that doesn’t really say anything new. Then because he hadn’t mentioned the Dutch up to this point, he talks about them. “The Dutch also suffered from unearned wealth. Their trade monopolies, underinvestment in productive industry, and cultural decay led this condition to be called ‘Dutch disease.’ Lack of vision, lack of awareness, is an integral part of the malady.” I think Dutch disease is generally shifting from industrialization to a resource based economy. The parts about culture and trade monopoly seem out of place to me.

This leads to a discussion of other countries that have the problems generally actually associated with “Dutch disease.” The countries who have oil wealth in particular. He tries to shoehorn the Ottoman empire into that, but it doesn’t really work. Then to us:

Our own lack of vision led to the collapse of our financial markets and our economy. It precipitated a global recession, triggered the loss of $12 trillion of our citizen’s net worth and dealt a sharp blow to freedom. We simply did not see the so-called subprime home mortgages, liar loans, and nonliquified loans had the potential to cause such destruction. I know some believe that “the powers that be” saw it all along–that the greed of Wall Street tycoons, for example, was the root cause. But I believe a lack of vision played every bit as big a role.

I agree that it wasn’t a conspiracy. Too many people lost too much money. But, we were sold for decades before the crash that these sorts of investments were American innovation. That they were part of a new ownership society. It wasn’t a lack of vision, it was a lack of oversight, and common sense with a too far reaching vision. Also, if you think nobody saw the collapse, I’d recommend The Big Short. There’s no mention of who specifically Romney would blame for lacking vision, maybe because he wants largely to go back to the policies that he says lack vision.

However, lack of vision is the exception when it comes to the decline of great powers. In most cases, there were warnings. Farsighted Ottomans warned that adherence to religious dogma and reliance on oversized bureaucracy would doom the empire.

If only Mitt Romney were in charge of the Ottoman Empire, things would have turned out differently. There are several other examples of empires not having far reaching visions of the future. Here’s where my notes say “global warming” a bunch when he says things like “we seize on the opinion of someone who tells us what we want to hear” rather than face hard truths or look to large scale change.

It goes on for several pages, but I want to mention his calling out the media’s problem reporting on the Iraq war. Now you might think getting into pointless wars would be part of why empires decline. Finding enemies to rally against instead of using that energy to solve our actual problems. Perhaps things like Friedman Units where were promised everything would turn around in 6 months every 6 months? Point is: media criticism leading up to and during the Iraq war is a target rich case study for the decline of nations. Guess what Romney’s example was?

The media elite similarly took the early view that Iraq was a hopeless quagmire. There was often thereafter a perceptible snickering in the coverage, especially when the surge was unveiled. Then, when the surge actually worked, the media coverage of Iraq noticeably fell off.

Yeah, that’s the problem. The media didn’t cheer lead enough. Christ on the Cross. Anyway, now were to an unlabeled section about countries that turn things around. He mentions the emperors after Nero without saying why they were “Five Good Emperors.” The Ottoman apparently staved off their decline for a while. He says “after an eleven-year civil war” but doesn’t put it in the context of his previous Ottoman musings. And Churchill.

Then he talks about the Clinton era as a time of decline for America. Because peace and prosperity: ick. Then 9/11 and “America changed course” without mentioning why a decade stuck in Afghanistan is good for America. He has four reasons some countries can turn things around and why some can’t:

“The first is the occurrence of a catastrophic event that is alarming enough to spur action but not so large that it dooms the nation.” He mentions Sputnik and Pearl Harbor. I guess America was in decline before Sputnik? I don’t know.

“The second catalyst is the presence of a great leader.” He says they should be persuasive and a great statesman. Then without expanding on those qualities, he just lists a bunch of leaders.

“A third condition is national consensus.” He says usually national consensus comes from the top, but sometimes it’s from the bottom. “Lech Walesa galvanized a movement that brought down the Iron Curtain first in Poland and then across Eastern Europe.” Great, but not exactly how nations stay strong. And then he fucks with me: “Scientists, concerned citizens and* the world media succeeded in convincing the public that global warming is a real and present danger.” I haven’t finished the book, or the presidential campaign, but I look forward to his addressing global warming head on.

“The final conducive condition for turnaround is when a nation enjoys deep, broad-based national strength.” This seems like question begging to me. Why are nations able to stay strong? Because of their national strength!

There’s another small section, but it’s just recapping and setting up the next chapter, so we’ll end this here.

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I’m a bit surprised that the National Organization for Marriage hasn’t come through (first point) with their promise of a huge pile of money to people who primary Republicans who voted for the marriage equality bill. They both advance, but having lost almost 2-1 in the primary, it’s tough to make the case that the general will be anything different. Maybe NOM wanted to spend the money in the general election so it’s a force multiplier for their opposition to R-74.

The National Organization for Marriage, the D.C.-based anti-gay marriage group, pledged to donate $250,000 to any Republican primary candidate that stepped up to run against a Republican in Washington State who “crosses the party platform and votes for gay marriage.”

[…]

Litzow does not have a Republican challenger, but Walsh does—staunch gay-marriage opponent Mary Edwards. While Walsh has raised $62,000, including big donations from gay rights advocates such as Lambda Legal board member Eric Nilson ($900) from Cleveland, Ohio, Edwards has raised $3,633—and no check from NOM.

Obviously a primary challenge means something different in Washington than elsewhere, and their goal was to unseat Walsh not to make a show of it in August. But by starting so late (if they start at all) they’ve made that difficult.

Not that I’m complaining. I’d rather the seat go to a Democrat, but if there are intramural fights between the Republicans, I’d rather it go to ones who are at least decent people in this one area.

For fuck’s sake, the Libertarian Party.

Today the Libertarian Party of Washington State filed suit (PDF) to have Romney’s name removed from the November ballot:

The suit seeks an order declaring that the Washington State Republican Party is “minor party” for purposes of the 2012 general election and directing the Secretary of State to issue ballots for the November election that do not contain the printed name of any Republican Party nominee.

The only statewide race in the last even numbered year was Cantwell in 2010, and the GOP didn’t endorse because they wanted to wait it out. So fine, they might technically be a minor party and thus too late to nominate someone. But really, fuck that.

This isn’t the sort of thing that needs suing over. The injustice here would be if the Libertarians won their suit and Romney wasn’t on the ballot. He’ll be the nominee of the Republican party, and if people are dumb enough to vote for him, they deserve the right to do so.

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– People pointed out a year ago that Ryan’s plan will destroy Medicare. The Washington Post, the paper that brought down Nixon, responded by awarding that fact four cartoon Pinnochio heads. Journalism.

– The Greenwood food bank is running low.

– There are a lot of questions about the Chicks for Rob button. Not the least is how it got through whatever campaign bureaucracy there should be to stop this sort of thing.

– The supposedly liberal Seattle City Council can’t even support the tiniest bit of campaign finance reform. O’Brien’s proposal isn’t perfect, but it’s better than the status quo.

– And honestly, I’m surprised and impressed that the White House seems to have strengthened its spine and is resisting the silly demands of Republicans and their media abettors for apologies and denunciations when none are needed.

– RIP Johnny Pesky

King Felix pitches a perfect game. At Safeco. On a glorious afternoon for baseball. Sad to say, I missed it at work, and didn’t know until after.*

I know it’s a meaningless thing. A W is a W, and how you get there won’t change the standings. And the Mariners’ season is still shot. But there is something magical. Especially with Felix. He’s home grown. I have a friend who went to Tacoma specifically to see him pitch a year before he broke into the majors. And since he’s been up, it always felt like it was just a matter of time before at least a no-no; he has been that good.

* For serious, someone text me or someone I work with if this is going on. Like in the 7th.

There was a shooting at the Family Research Council this morning. A security guard was shot and is in the hospital. Like these LGBT organizations, I don’t know if it was politically motivated. Still, when anything like this happens to a political organization, you have to assume their politics was part of what made them a target.

I condemn political violence of any stripe, and I hope the guard makes a full recovery. I’m saddened that we live in a country where this sort of thing is common. I don’t agree with anything the Family Research Council stands for, but nobody deserves this for their political beliefs. Nobody.

The story of Romney claiming bipartisan cred for Paul Ryan over the fact that he once wrote a policy paper with Ron Wyden is strange on a few levels. First, what? It’s not a bipartisan accomplishment to write a paper. A bipartisan accomplishment would be turning that paper into actual legislation. And Wyden handled that pretty well.

Governor Romney is talking nonsense. Bipartisanship requires that you not make up the facts.

I did not “co-lead a piece of legislation.” I wrote a policy paper on options for Medicare. Several months after the paper came out I spoke and voted against the Medicare provisions in the Ryan budget.

I mean Romney had to know that Wyden would respond. And that he’d do it in a partisan manner. It’s sloppy campaigning.

The other thing is he didn’t pick him as the VP nominee for his bipartisanship. Ryan is a partisan ideologue on budget issues and on social issues. He fires up the base. He gives them something to vote for instead of just against Obama.

– RIP Kathi Goertzen.

– The financial impact of November’s initiatives.

– I’m not the only one who noticed that Mitt Romney’s shitty book is shitty.

– may the masses vote like their Medicare depends on it!

– Flyover Feminism

– Who needs local jobs maintaining the lines, trimming the trees, restoring the power? Just ship the profits to a struggling international bank and buy a generator set.

– Fast moving wild fire in Eastern Washington

– Denied religious freedom at Chick-fil-A.

The shootings at Texas A&M today come after a long line of this shit. Auorra, Cafe Racer. The list goes on and on. And those are only the ones that gain large scale attention. There are plenty of other acts of gun violence that don’t get reported, or don’t get reported outside the region where they happen.

Of course there are other reasons that these sorts of things happen. And we should work to deal with all of them. But one of those reasons, that we never deal with, that we’re going in the wrong direction on, is the country is awash in guns.

People will point to the Second Amendment when any attempt at gun control no matter how minimum is raised. Now, I think the Second Amendment was intended to be about well regulated militias, hence the first clause. But even if you think it’s about private ownership of all firearms, surely this wasn’t what Madison intended when he wrote it. Surely they didn’t mean that these sorts of shootings should be inevitable as they are common. I don’t know what the solution is, but I can’t imagine the Constitution makes it intractable.

– Koster and DelBene should really listen closely to what the Seattle Times says the district’s voters want. And then do the opposite.

– Phyllis Schlafly lies about Obama as night remains dark.

– Support the Sisters

– I’d have mentioned this last week if I wasn’t on vacation, but my endorsements went 2 for 2 in the primary.

– Oh, Romney has a VP selection.

– In a twist, Ryan isn’t the deficit hawk he claims to be.

– The fact that Democrats have oppo research on him proves he’s great.

– Shaun has a good question about the vetting process.

[I’m on vacation this week, but I’m reading and doing some metacommentary on Mitt Romney’s book. Enjoy, or skip over it: it’s a free country.]

Another short one today. Just to let you know that the Chinese and British Empires fell. Since the last one was just called “The Ottomans” these two subchapters are simply a summary in a few words. Consistency is the hobgoblin of good writing, someone must have told him.

The subchapter “The Great Wall” has the advantage of just being about China and not some random collection of China like empires as the Ottoman section was. Of course since the unofficial name of this chapter is Mitt Romney paraphrases the Wikipedia Entries on the Printing Press and since that’s actually a legit thing to write for China, it gets several mentions in this short but still rambling section.

Advances in astronomy, physics, chemistry, meteorology, seismology, engineering, and mathematics came to the West from China. In the first century, China was the first to manufacture paper–a huge improvement over papyrus or and parchment. They published the first book, and they invented moveable type around 1041–four hundred years before a German named Johannes Gutenberg developed similar technology.

Several more paragraphs about how China was number one a thousand years ago. They had the best weapons and the best ships. “And then China declined” is a paragraph in itself. Useful. Useful information. Very specific. But is there more information about printing presses* is what I’d like to know.

The Chinese rejected not only all things foreign but even technology that they had devised themselves. For the Ottomans the Qur’an contained everything that life required; for the Chinese, it was their ancient culture that was to be revered and sustained, even at the cost of abandoning innovations like the printing press.

So, like, when Romney says in the intro how we need to go back to how the founding generation left America for us, I guess he’s imitating the Chinese who failed. I don’t know. The point is people getting stuck on something from the past will get them in trouble. Now we’re at The Sun Sets on the British Empire.

“England is just a small island.” Well, England is part of an island that also has Scotland and Wales. It’s not that small of an island. The UK also has part of another island, and some other possessions around the globe. It’s complex. You know what it doesn’t matter.

“With few exceptions, it doesn’t make things that people in the rest of the world want to buy.” I really like their fruit and nut bars. The ones Cadbury sell in the US are fine, but it’s not the same. Seriously, if you’re ever in the UK or Ireland, bring me back some. I’m not kidding about this, people who know me and are reading this. Also, they have a thriving culture. Some of the best comedy and drama get exported all around the globe.

“And if it hadn’t been separated from the continent by water, it almost certainly would have been lost to Hitler’s ambitions.” Yeah, I’m sure they would have planned their defenses the exact same way if there was a land bridge between Portsmouth and Normandy. Also, would history have been the same up to the war? Would this land have a lot of people on it? Would it be fertile land? I guess what I’m saying is the British Channel was kind of part of their defenses, and both sides in that war would have acted differently if it hadn’t been there.

“Yet only two lifetimes ago, Britain ruled the largest and wealthiest empire in the history of humankind. Britain controlled a quarter of the earth’s land and a quarter of the earth’s population.” And now they’re still a great country. Their empire pushed many of my ancestors here. People were boarded up and sent to Canada or Australia. And nonwhite people fared much worse. While the British Empire eventually went to the right side of things like the slave trade and moved toward democracy, it was still brutal for the people who lived under it.

So Romney says the British had the industrial revolution and it paid for the best navy in ever. “But maintaining leadership proved more difficult than achieving it” because they have a class system. They weren’t able to go beyond the status quo. No mention on how come their class system didn’t stop the industrial revolution in the first place. Then they had to pay for World War Two, so now they aren’t an empire. No mention if life is better for the average Briton now that they don’t have to pay to maintain an empire. Personally, I’d rather have the BBC and universal health care than know that the queen was also in charge of India. But that’s not my decision to make.

That’s the decline of the British Empire for you. I’m not sure who this book is written for. I doubt that Romney knows either. These brief overviews don’t tell us enough to learn anything. Anyone who picks up the book of a presidential candidate surely knows the barest outlines of past empires. Yet he felt the need to include three (or 5 if you include Spain and Portugal). Is it just he thinks nobody will actually read it, and it seems more presidential to have written something so he pulled an all nighter and wrote the damn thing once?

We’ve got half of this chapter to go, and I’m not writing for the weekends. So I think I’ll just do it sometime next week. I had fun writing these, so I’ll probably continue even after that. Not every day, because that’s brutal if I’m writing other things. Would you guys be interested in a half a chapter a week or so? Maybe make it a Wednesday thing?

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[I’m on vacation this week, but I’m reading and doing some metacommentary on Mitt Romney’s book. Enjoy, or skip over it: it’s a free country.]

Today we join Mitt Romney’s ghost writer to see Why Nations Decline. First a general commentary that nations decline and then several examples. Then he’ll have a couple annoying sections trying to tie it together. Because I’m on vacation, I’m only going to deal with the intro and the “Ottomans” section that deals with the Ottoman Empire, and somewhat surprisingly Spain and Portugal. So the intro.

America is the best, and it looks like we’ll never decline but other countries used to think that about themselves and “they’ve all been surpassed.” Of course since Romney talking about nations, what we need here is a corporate metaphor.

This kind of collapse is not unique to nations. We’ve witnessed business powerhouses lose their lead to upstarts. United Airlines was upstaged by Southwest.* Sears and Kmart were passed by Wal-Mart. Western Union and AT&T watched Verizon speed by. And look at General Motors: it was once the undisputed automotive heavyweight, the champion here and around the world. No More.

Romney worked for someone who had a mathematical model of why corporations with a head start have an advantage. But that didn’t work out. Then he remembers he’s writing a book about nations, so:

Why is it that the great fail? It’s a question America must ask, not only because we are the world’s leading nation, but because of the continuation of our lead has been called into question

So now we’re on the section called “The Ottomans” that’s also about Spain and Portugal (I know I say this like 50 times in this short for this series post, but it’s that strange). But at least it starts with the Ottoman Empire. Well, mostly it’s about him learning about the Ottoman empire in school.

But after that intro of Romney coloring in maps we learn that, the empire was great for centuries until “Christian Europeans won the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 and decimated the Ottoman navy. Rebellion and war were overwhelming.”

First off, The Ottoman Empire lasted until the end of the First World War, so the collapse didn’t really happen in 1571. A long decline would be interesting to write about. Especially if you’re worried about America being a power in the future, but not the preeminent one. But instead it’s a paragraph of mostly meaningless cliche as to why.

Highly beneficial global trade routes that had traditionally passed through Ottoman territory had been abandoned for Ocean passages, and the empire’s revenues dropped accordingly. More important, while Europe** embarked on the early stages of manufacturing, the Ottomans did not; they were confident that their pillaged wealth would sustain them indefinitely. The Ottomans’ growing isolation from the dynamic world of manufacture and trade was reinforced by the conviction that their holy scriptures provided all the knowledge that was necessary; foreign technology was infidel technology. The Empire banned the printing press for half a century.

And that’s all you need to know about the decline, er collapse, of the Ottoman Empire. In chapter of case studies of why empires and nations fail, there’s more about coloring in maps in high school than there is about his first case study. These I’m-a-deep-thinker-make-me-president books are sure serious business when they come from Republicans.

But even though the Ottoman case study is over, the section continues with Spain and Portugal. I think the point here is that they were all closed societies based on pillage. But the title is “The Ottomans” not “Empires Based on Pillage Eventually Run Out Of Shit To Pillage” or something with less swearing. So Spain and Portugal. It’s only 2 paragraphs, so I don’t want to quote too much, but I totally am going to:

“Like the Ottomans, the Spanish and Portuguese achieved wealth through plunder, and their empires fell for remarkably similar reasons.” So they plundered the rest of the world, and took the resources but didn’t build anything with them. England, France, and Germany were making things, but Spain and Portugal were buying them. And, I think Romney just found the Wikipedia entry on when the printing press was introduced to various countries, because that comes up again.

The Protestant Reformation to the north had spawned not only dissent and skepticism but also literacy and innovation. Spain and Portugal isolated themselves from such heresy. Portugal placed strict controls on printing presses. The Spanish crown banned scientific works by Protestant authors. They banned study abroad in any non-Catholic country. Spain went so far as to impose the death penalty on anyone who imported an unauthorized foreign book. Like the Ottomans, Spanish and Portuguese isolation became complete. They eschewed the manufacture and trade of goods that was sweeping the rest of Europe, and they closed their borders to outside thought.

So the guy who exported, piece by piece, American manufacturing is saying stopping making things is a problem. Ugh this book.

OK, tomorrow China, Britain, and maybe Romney’s conclusions if I’m up for it.

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