Entries for September 2005

I quit reading the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, and the Washington Post's Book World some years ago, because I got tired of reading tiresome left-wing bilge and long, indulgent reviews of the 19th volume of Virginia Woolf's diaries. I read the Times Literary Supplement instead, which is more politically balanced and whose recent editors, Ferdinand Mount and now Peter Stothard, have a gift for choosing fine reviewers. Case in point is the great historian of the British Navy N. A. M. Rodger, who in the September 23 issue reviews several books on Adm. Horatio Nelson issued this year, which is the 200th anniversary of his great victory at Trafalgar. Rodger starts off by dismissing previous biographies of Nelson:

A man who has already received roughly one biography for every year which has elapsed since his death is obviously in need of some more. This is not a cynical remark, for the Nelson biographical canon, though very large, is very unsatisfactory. The great majority of the lives were written from the same limited range of printed sources. Until recently there had been no work substantially based on manuscript evidence since Carola Oman's of 1947–and her attitude to references was distinctly casual for the daughter of an Oxford professor. All too many of the biographers belonged to one or both of two classes: those who knew nothing about naval warfare and those who knew nothing about anything else. Without exception, the wells of inspiration were poisoned by James Stanier Clarke and John McArthur's official biography of 1809, with its deadly combination of dishonesty and credulity: Their sententious anecdotes figure everywhere in the biographies and nowhere in the sources.

But read the whole thing: www.the-tls.co.uk

Note to readers: I'm off on a long weekend and may not be blogging again until Tuesday.

Pollster Scott Rasmussen, who had an excellent record in the 2004 cycle and who asks interesting and innovative questions, asked respondents if they consider themselves part of the antiwar movement.

Some 23 percent said they did, and 61 percent said they did not. Among Democrats, 36 percent said they were part of the antiwar movement and 40 percent said they were not. Among Republicans, only 7 percent said they were part of the antiwar movement and 84 percent said they were not. So Democrats are closely divided and Republicans are clearly united on this question, as is the case on questions Rasmussen asked last year—like whether this is basically a fair and decent country—that tested Americans' belief in American exceptionalism, the idea that this country is different and special. The Democrats' division poses a problem for Democratic politicians; the Republicans' unity makes handling the antiwar movement easier for them.

Amrit Dhillon of the National Low Income Housing Coalition has called to say that my posting on that organization's support for the housing vouchers proposed by the Bush administration was misleading. Dhillon says that NLIHC has backed housing vouchers since the 1970s. I actually specifically referred to NLIHC's consistent support of housing vouchers and then noted that two or three generations ago liberals supported large public housing projects. I guess the folks at NLIHC thought I was implying that their organization supported public housing projects rather than housing vouchers "two or three generations ago." I referred specifically to liberals rather than the NLIHC, which was founded in 1974 (as stated on the linked press release), which seems to me at least less than two generations ago—maybe much longer ago than I would like! But if readers were misled, I'm sorry, and I'm happy to forward Dhillon's assurance that the organization has backed housing vouchers since the 1970s. My larger point was that we see the convergence here of liberals and conservatives in support of the same policy: a notable development in these polarized times. Here's my posting; I'll let you decide if the criticism is warranted.

Let me also take this opportunity to make another point. The NLIHC has opposed many Bush administration policies, but they also took the trouble to applaud a Bush administration policy they supported. This is a good example of putting intellectual integrity ahead of politics. Another such example was the National Resources Defense Council's endorsement of the Bush administration's new regulations on diesel fuel, which seem likely to reduce particulate emissions more than any new policy in years. Many environmental organizations criticized or minimized the Bush policy. Many liberal (and conservative) organizations take stands consistently critical of (or praising) Bush administration policies in order to keep their left-wing (or right-wing) direct-mail list constituencies happy and ready to send more money in. The NRDC on this issue, like the NLIHC on hurricane housing vouchers, took an intellectually honest position. I know I'll pay more respectful attention to the NLIHC's and NRDC's pronouncements in the future than I do to the pronouncements of many other organizations because these two groups have shown that they are more interested in advancing their stated policy goals than in scoring cheap political shots.

I have written in the past that Republicans have certain structural advantages in our nearly equally divided American politics. George W. Bush carried 31 states that elect 62 of 100 senators, and he carried 255 of 435 congressional districts while winning the popular vote by only 51 to 48 percent. But the indictment yesterday of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay points to a structural advantage for the Democrats: They have majorities in most of the counties containing the state capitals of our largest states. That means that political corruption cases are likely to be handled by prosecutors, judges, and juries that are largely Democratic.

Thus District Attorney Ronnie Earle, whose indictment of Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison was thrown out of court in 1994, is reliably re-elected in heavily Democratic Travis County in Texas. And as we saw in the 2000 Florida controversy, the judges in Tallahassee's heavily Democratic Leon County tend to be Democrats. Albany County, N.Y. (Albany), Ingham County, Mich. (Lansing), and Mercer County, N.J. (Trenton) are also heavily Democratic. Historically Democratic but now less so is Sacramento County, Calif. (Sacramento), but historically Republican Sangamon County, Ill. (Springfield), and Franklin County, Ohio (Columbus) are now trending Democratic. Exception: Dauphin County, Pa. (Harrisburg).

Emily Litella, as you may recall, was the character on Saturday Night Live who delivered stirring diatribes until she realized that she had totally misunderstood the issue and then said squeakily, "Never mind." Today's Emily Litella is NASA Administrator Daniel Griffin, who, according to USA Today, "said that NASA lost its way in the 1970s, when the agency ended the Apollo moon missions in favor of developing the shuttle and space station, which can only orbit Earth. 'It is now commonly accepted that was not the right path,' Griffin said. 'We are now trying to change the path while doing as little damage as we can.' "

I'm no expert on space, but this rings true to me. We're using 1970s technology and materials science to put up a manned vehicle on which highly talented people conduct not very important experiments. I mention materials science becausethe space shuttle has proved to be vulnerable as a result of the tiles on its underside that must after every flight be replaced and repaired by hand (!). That's Renaissance-era technology; I'll bet that materials science today could produce better and more easily repaired heat shields. But this is not a conclusion I've come to recently: It's the result of reading Gregg Easterbrook's prescient article on the space shuttle in the Charles Peters-era Washington Monthly. Key paragraph:

"The main cause of delay is currently the shuttle's refractory tiles, which disperse the heat of re-entry from the ship's nose and fuselage. Columbia must be fitted out with 33,000 of these tiles, each to be applied individually, each unique in shape. The inch-thick tiles, made of pyrolized carbon, are amazing in two respects. They can be several hundred degrees hot on one side while remaining cool to the touch on the other. They do not boil away like the ablative heat shieldings of capsules and modules; they can be used indefinitely. But they're also a bit of a letdown in another respect–they're so fragile you can hardly touch them without shattering them."

We should have listened to Easterbrook 25 years ago.

Tom DeLay has been indicted in Travis County, Texas, for conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws. Two DeLay political associates had previously been indicted. Under House Republican Party rules, DeLay immediately lost his position as majority leader, and the Associated Press has reported that Speaker Dennis Hastert has chosen Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier to replace him.

This is very bad news for House Republicans. DeLay has been astonishingly effective in rounding up majorities for legislation supported by the Republican leadership and the Bush administration. He is well liked by many members. I don't know how this case will turn out and cannot assess the validity of the charges. The Associated Press reports that "DeLay has denied committing any crime and accused the Democratic district attorney leading the investigation, Ronnie Earle, of pursuing the case for political motives." I don't think that possibility can be dismissed. Earle is a liberal Democrat, and in 1993 he brought criminal charges against Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, then comptroller and now U.S. senator; most of the charges were dismissed by the judge before trial, and the remaining charges were withdrawn. The case was summarized as follows by the Austin Review: "Earle's politically motivated indictment of Senator Hutchinson on charges that she used state funds to run her senatorial campaign made even his own supporters cringe. The charges were dismissed when Earle refused to present evidence at trial." The quotation is from the Captain's Quarters blog; the original is apparently no longer available online.

Democrats will surely charge that DeLay's indictment, that of White House procurement official David Safavian, and that of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff show that George W. Bush's Republican Party is laced with corruption. I think that's obviously a stretch–both parties at various times have been much more scandal smirched than today's Republicans–and I think that the DeLay indictment in time may prove to be no more valid than that of Senator Hutchison, who has been re-elected by wide margins twice since the case against her was dismissed. But in the meantime, this is bad news for the Republican Party and gives every Democratic House challenger a talking point.

The House Republican rule that requires indicted leaders to step down was inspired by the indictment of then Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski when Democrats still had a majority in the House. After last November's election, the Republican leadership, anticipating a possible DeLay indictment, tried to repeal the rule but after considerable protest reinstated it. I think that was a wise decision. It's not seemly to keep a top party leader in office after he has been indicted–however flimsy the indictment may ultimately turn out to be.

Is Ronnie Earle abusing his prosecutorial discretion, as he pretty clearly did in the Hutchison case? Our system of criminal justice gives a lot of discretion to prosecutors, who are chosen in partisan elections in most states or by partisan process as in the selection of United States attorneys. One of the good things about America is that the large majority of prosecutors, from both political parties, do not abuse this discretion in the pursuit of political goals. I've known a lot of prosecutors of both parties, all of whom took their responsibilities and their duty to be fair very seriously. But I've never met Ronnie Earle.

It's hard to get accurate numbers on immigration, harder than it was 100 years ago. Then almost all immigrants came across the Atlantic and arrived at ports, where they could easily be counted. No one bothered to see how many people crossed the Rio Grande and the Arizona desert, and there could not have been that many: The territory was almost entirely uninhabited. Today immigrants come from all directions and by all modes of transportation, including on foot, and many are here illegally. So no one can know the numbers for sure.

But we can try to get good estimates, and that is what Roberto Suro and Jeffrey Passel of the Pew Hispanic Trust have done in their just released report on immigration from 1992 to 2004. Here are some highlights:

Suro and Passel report that immigration remained at roughly constant levels, between 1 million and 1.25 million, between 1992 and 1997. It spiked to 1.46 million in 1998, 1.53 million in 1999, 1.55 million in 2000, and 1.39 million in 2001, the great bulk of that presumably before September 11. Then it continued at the levels of 1992–97: 1.17 million in 2002, 1.10 million in 2003, 1.22 million in 2004. In other words, when the economy heated up in the late 1990s, immigration increased significantly; when the economy cooled down, and new restrictions on entry were put into place, it went down. Nothing terribly surprising here. As Suro and Passel point out, immigration levels were highly responsive to the economic cycle in the heavy immigration years of 1840–1924, so they are responsive to the (much smaller) oscillations in the economic cycle today.

Illegal immigration continues at high levels: 38 percent of all immigrants in 1992–97, 42 percent in 1999–2000, 43 percent in 2002–04. There's a spike upward, by the way, in 2004, but the total number of illegals then was well below the levels of the immigration spike years of 1998–2000. Compared with the early 1990s, we have fewer legal permanent immigrants and legal temporary migrants and more of what Suro and Passel call "unauthorized migrants."

Where do immigrants come from? In all these years the answer is pretty much the same: about one third from Mexico, about one fifth from the rest of Latin America, about one quarter from Asia, about one fifth from the rest of the world.

Where do they go? Here there are fairly big changes. In the 1980s, by my recollection, about three quarters of immigrants headed to one of just six states: California, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey. In effect this was migration to just a few large metropolitan areas: Los Angeles and to a lesser extent San Francisco, New York, Houston, Dallas–Fort Worth, Miami, and Chicago. Now immigrants are spreading out. The percentage going to these "big six" states fell from 66 percent in 1992–97 to 59 percent in 1999–2000 to 57 percent in 2002–04. California, New York, Illinois, and New Jersey are receiving significantly fewer immigrants than in the early 1990s; Texas and Florida, significantly more. There have been even larger increases in the numbers going to several other states in the South (especially Georgia and North Carolina) and the West (especially Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado). These are all places with big metropolitan areas that are growing faster than metro Los Angeles and New York.

The policy implications? The labor market is obviously drawing far more immigrants here than are permitted by our immigration laws. We need to improve enforcement and to change our laws so they can operate more in tandem with the labor market. Immigration is flowing, as it did in the 1980s and 1990s, to the metro areas that are growing fastest. If we want rapid growth, then we probably want levels of immigration approximating what we have today. One policy recommendation that I remember someone making around 1980 that we obviously don't need: creation of a government agency to advise immigrants which metro areas were growing and creating new jobs. The immigrants figure that out better than government ever could.