Catwoman's End Draws Nigh

If you’re looking for something to do this weekend — with the Olympics over, Obama having ascended to Olympus, and me being away in New England for various purposes through Labor Day (despite blog entries still magically appearing) — consider going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit of superhero-themed clothing, which closes after this weekend. One comics industry professional, who shall remain nameless, called it “ten pounds of gay in a five-pound bag,” but it’s cool regardless.

I saw it, and I think my favorite line from any of the explanatory plaques, from a Catwoman display, was one about how Catwoman costumes underscore “the alpha-cat/omega-kitten duality,” which sounds like the coolest episode ever. (Professional manga-hawker Ali Kokmen notes that Michael Chabon may have written that line, as he did the official exhibit book.) Actually, “Omega-kitten” also sounds like it could be a phrase from the LOLCat Bible, though the LOLCats are much less literate than Chabon, obviously.

Speaking of heroes, villains, and younglings, every time I see an ad for that tough-guy sci-fi movie Babylon A.D. with Vin Diesel, I can’t help thinking about the fact that the decidedly less tough-sounding title of the novel it’s based on is Babylon Babies. And titles certainly make a difference for marketing purposes. Would fandom be eagerly anticipating, say, Watchmen Babies?

Communism for Punks

Cretins, many residing in places like Brooklyn or Berkeley, who see resistance to capitalism as the ultimate purpose of punk or other creative impulses — not to mention the ultimate purpose of politicians — would do well to stop for a moment today and remember the plight of Gorki Aguila.  He’s the punk rocker and anti-communist scheduled to stand trial in Cuba today for criticizing the state — and still he pulls no punches in his comments, as you can see in this clip.

Kind of makes a Billy Bragg “heroically” singing about communist revolution in England or an ignorant Rage Against the Machine fan wearing a t-shirt with mass-murderer Che Guevara on it seem like a fucking joke, doesn’t it?

I cannot begin to tell you how happy I would be if this ended up being the day Cuban communism began to fall apart (sandwiched between the U.S.’s two statist political conventions, no less).  Good luck, Mr. Aguila.

(And you can get a t-shirt of that anti-Che symbol, with the slogan “Communism Kills” at Bureaucrash.com.)

Obama-Biden vs. McCain-Uhhh...

I think it would’ve been gauche for McCain to announce his running mate today, when Obama’s doing his whole Sermon on the Mount/Zeus in Clash of the Titans thing.

Worse, though, on any day, would be McCain announcing that his running mate were Lieberman or Huckabee. I expressed my dread of the former on Sunday and my dread of the latter in the comment thread of this entry on Karol Sheinin’s blog.

Then I think about ways Romney could go wrong, and it’s like the primaries all over again but more depressing this time because there’s no more time for zigzagging and uncertainty.

Then I remember I’m voting for Barr and things get brighter for a moment — then dark again.

A Time to Come Together and Hate Government

Politicians love to accuse each other of being divisive demagogues — making such claims helps them be unifying demagogues. Obama is one of the most amazing cases I’ve yet seen of someone who manages to say, in effect, “Let us stop fighting and come together (behind me), so that partisan bickering can end (and a thoroughly left-wing agenda can triumph).” It’s a measure of how exhausted Americans are by the usual right-left fighting that they’re willing to suspend disbelief and let either side triumph as long as it claims this will end the fighting.

Nothing unifies like a common enemy, though, and the left would like that designated foe in the public’s mind to be the right, while the right would like that common foe to be the left. And so we continue.

I, of course, have The Real Answer, which is to wake up and recognize the entire class of politicians — and all government — as the common enemy, to be dispensed with once and for all, like monarchy and slave ownership. To achieve that beautiful dream (together!), we should focus on examples of government being so damn stupid — yet ideologically ambiguous — that no thinks upon hearing the examples “More treachery by the other ideological side in the right-left dialectical struggle!” but rather “Government has gone full retard once again!”

Here’s an example from New Zealand I think most decent Americans of all ideological stripes can agree to find revolting: telling people what they can and cannot name their children. I wonder if they’d let people name their kids Voltaire and Groucho, as I’ve repeatedly urged friends to do, to no avail?

2008 vs. “2012”

Watching this week’s Democratic convention tie itself into politically-correct knots trying to make the whole production “green” (not to mention all-union) has of course been hilarious — but it should never be forgotten that these uptight, rule-making, obsessive nitwits want desperately to govern us all in the same Kafkaesque fashion. The Democrats are not freedom-lovers. They are petty totalitarians. If you want to be green on your own hippie commune, I have no quarrel with you. Use fines and taxes and ultimately threats of jail time for non-compliance (it has happened) to make the rest of us green, and you’re a thug — likely one who isn’t having much impact on the Earth anyway.

A perfect example of how doomsday-environmentalism has become interchangeable with mystical apocalypse predictions is the fact that Roland Emmerich (himself hardly all that green, given his notoriously gaudy house full of stuffed zebra heads and the like), who directed the laughable (but Al Gore-praised) climate-change thriller The Day After Tomorrow — not to mention the goofy prehistoric adventure 10,000 B.C. — is next doing the mystical-apocalypse, Mayan-“prophecy”-inspired 2012, about the world ending in 2012, with even more disasters in it than in The Day After Tomorrow.

I guess you could say 10,000 + the day after tomorrow = 2012 = box office gold!

The Best Argument for Obama, in Two Sentences

(As a goodwill gesture on the first day of the Democrats’ convention in Denver.)

Pragmatically speaking, is Obama the only alternative to the U.S. fighting simultaneous, arguably unnecessary wars in Eastern Europe, Afghanistan, Iraq, and even Iran?

I’d be willing to limp along with higher taxes and a weakened economy for a few years to avoid all that, I have to admit.

(Much as I might wish Bob Barr, who I plan to vote for, were higher in the polls so that we didn’t have to choose, once again, between peace and prosperity, to oversimplify things radically — and I realize it isn’t clear we’ll get either of those things no matter which major-party candidate wins.)

Vice Presidential Choices: Biden, Lieberman, Edwards

Well, Obama and his running mate, Biden, have one thing in common: Neither of them likes Clarence Thomas.

Obama picked Thomas when asked the one Supreme Court Justice he wouldn’t have appointed.  Back at Thomas’s confirmation hearings in 1991, Biden was rivaled only by Paul Simon (the Senator, alas, not the singer) in his utter dumbfoundedness over Thomas’s cautiously-expressed sympathies for libertarianism and slender ties to Reason magazine.  I’m afraid Biden’s furrowed brow, as he expressed his horror at the thought of trying to downsize any federal agencies (!?!?!), is furrowed permanently right into my memory.  That’s one more reason to hope Obama-Biden doesn’t win in November — though that doesn’t make the thought of a McCain victory pleasant.

By contrast, if Obama had picked Midwestern and somewhat fiscally conservative Evan Bayh, not only would I be happier, but McCain might well have felt obliged to pick Midwestern and somewhat fiscally conservative Pawlenty, and the whole world would be a bit less scary (I say McCain might have felt obliged to counter the Midwest move since half the toss-up states are in the Midwest).

•••

As it stands, maybe McCain will decide that the best way to counter two Senators is by adding another Senator to his own ticket — Independent Joe Lieberman (who he’s supposedly mulling).  Nice guy though Lieberman seems, this would be a disaster from my political perspective.  Lieberman would be the absolute, clinching proof — almost a living reductio ad absurdum — of the fact that Republicans have ceased to care about anything besides war and that conservatism as we knew it in the second half of the twentieth century is dead.

Lieberman has almost no conservative or free-market credentials to speak of besides war (and, like many Senators of both parties, sympathy for some global trade accords), unless you count the fact that he, like McCain (and David Brooks, the useless goon), shares the Teddy Roosevelt paternalist/reformer spirit that leads to things like wanting government to restrict violent videogames and go on other secular-yet-moralistic crusades to clean up the culture (McCain promoted state-level bans on ultimate fighting, for example).

And to those neocons who think that shrinking government’s not important anymore, just ensuring that government has a “conservative” tone — especially that it’s spending on security purposes — I can only say: You mean the same government that created a Department of Homeland Security that now funds anti-Zionist protests against hawkish Middle East analyst Daniel Pipes?  That’s the big government that will supposedly execute your cultural agenda?  Good luck with that.  (And that’s Commentary noting the DHS irony, not me — here’s hoping the staff draws some non-statist conclusions from the example.)

The crowning absurdity, if we ended up seeing conservatives put Lieberman in office in November, of course, would be the fact that he was Al Gore’s running mate in 2000.  (Remember 2000, the year that came before 2001?)  If McCain dies in office and has Lieberman for a v.p., maybe President Lieberman could then summon his old running mate Gore to be part of his administration (I’ll bet he’d take EPA administrator — it’d be too embarrassing to pass up the chance, after being a hot air expert for so many years).

But Lieberman’s good for war purposes, some conservatives may still insist.  Yeah, and Al Gore wanted more defense spending than Bush in 2000 — one of the reasons I voted against Gore.  So maybe we should have put Gore and Lieberman in office in 2000 and saved ourselves eight years’ circuitous journey to the same location (leftist readers suddenly get happier).

Libertarian Party, anyone?

•••

One more thought about a man who might once have been a plausible v.p. choice: John Edwards.

In the highly unlikely event that it should one day turn out that he’s been duped all this time into thinking that Rielle Hunter’s baby is his own, I know one place she might have gotten the idea for the scam: She (really) had a bit part in the 1987 comedy Overboard with Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, in which Hawn plays a rich woman named Joanna who refuses to pay her working-class maintenance man Dean (Russell), so as this online summary puts it…

…when Joanna falls overboard and gets a bad case of amnesia, Dean takes advantage of the situation and, in a stroke of retributive genius, tells her that she’s his wife and the mother of his four unruly children.

That raises some complex ethical questions.

Less complex, in my opinion, is the question of whether Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer being in remission during the initial Edwards-Hunter affair makes him less appalling.  I’ve seen many writers treat the situation as if that’s obviously the case — in other words, as if it’d be far more horrible to cheat on a dying wife.

Am I the only person (and believe me, I think cheaters and liars are monstrous even when unmarried) who thinks cheating on a dying wife is slightly more excusable than cheating on a healthy wife?  I mean, if she’s dying, the cad can always say — and you mark my words, Edwards one day will — “I only wanted to keep her in the dark to spare her pain until she was gone, and now that she is I can make all this right by marrying my mistress, claiming the child that was mine all along, and asking for your vote in November.”

For more insightful political analysis, keep reading this blog this week during the Democratic convention (well, I mean, not all day long, but like once each day, maybe) — and for more sexual-ethics insights, be sure to read ToddSeavey.com during September, which will be “The Month of Sex” on this blog, starting as we’re going into Labor Day.

Leftism for Punks (plus Chinese Democracy)

+ =

I talked about Ralph Nader in yesterday’s entry, and that reminds me that I actually went to a Nader speech at Princeton three years ago — because proto-punk singer Patti Smith was opening for him. If that’s not a reminder that (a) alternative rock, obviously, leans left and (b) not everyone in the audience shares the performers’ political views, I don’t what is.

The swell and (fittingly) dreamlike documentary Patti Smith: Dream of Life, which I saw last weekend, showed a split-second glimpse of a Nader/Smith poster and lengthier footage of her reading the Declaration of Independence but climaxing it with a list of reasons Bush should be impeached.

I don’t think I’ll be converting Patti Smith to any form of conservatism — not even libertarianism, since it centers on property rights, and an article in the New York Daily News, about a book surveying some odd moments in rock history, mentions that she was apparently a shoplifter back when she worked at a New York bookstore in the hippie days (another reminder the hippies were evil, lest we forget).

•••

The article also notes that Kurt Cobain’s animosity toward Axl Rose prevented a Nirvana-Metallica-Guns N’ Roses combo tour from happening, which makes me very sad because I’m pretty sure I saw a show at RFK stadium on what would have been that tour — but instead of Nirvana, it featured Faith No More, which is hardly the same thing. That show also left me slightly sick from an oddly grey stadium hotdog and taught me that when you aren’t enthusiastic about one of the opening acts (Metallica), encores that push the band’s stage time to three hours are no cause for celebration.

(With me at that concert were future professors Christine Caldwell and Chris Nugent, the latter of whom thereby made up for missing a Guns N’ Roses concert I saw a few months earlier at Madison Square Garden that combined four of Chris’s favorite things at the time, as if the cruel fates were mocking him: G N’ R, opening act Soundgarden [CORRECTION: See Responses below], the Godfather theme song [performed solo by Slash, which was beautiful], and footage of Winona Ryder, up on the big overhead screen to distract the crowd during downtime.)

On a more positive Guns N’ Roses note, there’s once more been talk of finally releasing the fourteen-mentally-ill-years-in-the-making album Chinese Democracy. Would, though, that it had come out in time for the undemocratic Beijing Olympics.

•••

Four positive thoughts (among many) about the Patti Smith documentary, lest I make it sound like all I noticed was the politics (Note to Scott and Dave: you’ve read this part already):

(1) Smith’s son, about ten years ago or so, looked and sounded so much like her (when he was about twelve) that it was hilarious: same spindly body, exactly the same face, same demeanor and downbeat/weird outlook on life, same hair, same haircut, same outfit. It was like they just shrunk her.

(2) Smith’s parents looked like utterly normal middle-class rural New Jersey residents with beer bellies, a dog, and a nice little run of the mill house — and she gets along just fine with them despite dad saying he lost hearing in one ear from going to her shows.

(3) Since CBGB’s was for poets as well as rockers back in the day, William S. Burroughs was apparently central to its milieu, which I have to admit I hadn’t realized, and she was close to him (being more poet than rocker in some ways herself — if only we could put her lyrics to Patty Smyth’s melodies!).

So in both Burroughs and Michael Moorcock (who wrote a fictionalized, official account of the Sex Pistols back in the day — which will be the June 2009 Book Selection on this blog, for those planning ahead), we have actual punk/proto-cyberpunk overlaps.

And the Burroughs/Smith connection means I need to learn more about the beatniks one of these days, I suppose. Or I can just drink and wander lonely streets, perhaps.

(4) In one funny bit of the documentary, Sam Shepard was trying to teach her “You Are My Sunshine” on the guitar, and she was having a pretty hard time with what seemed (to my untrained eye) relatively simple parts, and in the midst of this quiet, serious, black-and-white, arty-seeming film moment, Shepard asked (quietly and with humor but also with some genuine frustration, it seemed), “How many records have you made?”

Nader on Obama

I think the most surprising part of that article about Nader predicting Obama will pick Hillary for his running mate is that Nader says Obama’s second-smartest pick would be Sam Nunn. Nader says Nunn would provide foreign policy heft and help in Georgia (the U.S. Georgia, where both Green Party prez candidate Cynthia McKinney and Libertarian Party prez candidate Bob Barr happen to dwell).

I’m sort of impressed that Nader isn’t too left-ideological to like centrist Nunn (though Nunn is an anti-nuke-proliferation expert and environmentalist on his left-leaning days).

I think a lot of political-fringe guys have a soft spot for moderate “bipartisan” people because the bipartisan people, too, are defying the usual two-party two-step. So, “crazy” and “sane” have a lot in common, by some measures.

That makes one suspect that things are a lot more politically flexible, over the long haul, than they superficially appear. Will we see the Global Christian-Green Party vs. the Pro-Technology Militarist-Isolationist Party in the 2020 election, with the (predominantly lesbian) La Raza/Constitutionalist Party the wild card? Don’t say it can’t happen.

UPDATE 8/22/08 4:55pm: Irony note: If Obama picks Biden, I doubledare Biden to say in his opening comments about it, “I wish to repeat my earlier statement from the primaries that it’s nice to see a clean black man running for office.”  And on an even more petty note, I can’t imagine Obama picking Rep. Chet Edwards and risking voters thinking “Obama and EDWARDS?”

Never Mind Kansas -- What's the Matter with Thomas Frank?

Thomas Frank is the author of the anti-conservative screed What’s the Matter with Kansas? (released in Europe as What’s the Matter with America?, which suggests to me that Kansas wasn’t all that aberrant after all). He likes anti-conservative conspiracy theories, particularly anti-market ones.

Virtually every column he writes takes one of two juvenile forms: either he (1) accuses conservatives of deliberately harming people or screwing things up to advance their sinister agenda or, even more annoyingly, (2) picks some bizarre boondoggle associated with Republican politicians but in no logical way an outgrowth of conservative (and certainly not free-market) ideology (waste and ineptitude at the Department of Labor, in one recent column), then claims, like a child yelling “Tag! You’re it!” that since the boondoggle is nominally “conservative” (or in the case of the Department of Labor, was merely spoken of in a positive way once by religious-right activist Paul Weyrich), said boondoggle is not merely conservative but in fact a perfect representation of conservatism at its best, thus proving all conservatives (like me) to be evil morons (like Thomas Frank).

If you don’t think I’ve got his formula pegged, check out his August 6, 2008 Wall Street Journal column (he does this over and over again — and on a slightly more abstract note, check out his column from yesterday lamenting the creation of a Milton Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago).

If he really believes, though, in constant sinister calculations by conservatives (who always get exactly the results they wanted in the political realm!), I have a great conspiracy theory for him: I think the Wall Street Journal hired him as the ongoing default left-wing columnist precisely to remind their right-leaning readers what complete idiots there are on the left. (Has it never crossed your mind that this might be why you were cast in the role, Mr. Frank?)

Luckily, I am not the only one who has such suspicions about Frank — so too, I think, does Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times, who savaged his new book (which is about conservatives being evil). Good for her — and good for the left’s self-improvement.

(One odd sidenote: Kakutani’s review of this dimwitted leftist may be good, but according to New York magazine, she shares a flaw with a free-market writer of my acquaintance — like Reason’s Brian Doherty, she has been criticized in print for making excessive use of the word “limn.” Coincidence?)

Legion of Three Worlds!

I will not argue that August 2008 is the greatest month in the history of American literature. And yet…

It is largely this month that has drawn me back — very briefly — to comic book reading after about a year’s hiatus, intended to be permanent. And how could I resist?

As a younger person — always more of a sci-fi fan than a superhero fan at heart — I was happiest when comics delved into relatively highbrow concepts like time travel, parallel universes, reality-altering, and the nature of the cosmos. The first superhero comic book story I remember reading, in 1976, was drawn by George Perez and featured multiple universes (I was mainly into comics about Godzilla, Star Wars, dinosaurs, and Micronauts around that time, though — and Rom: Spaceknight, of course).

The first DC Comics comic I regularly collected was Legion of Super-Heroes, a sci-fi-ish series set a thousand years in the future, occasionally featuring the time-warping villainy of the Time Trapper. The series that started my shift toward complete DC fanhood, away from Marvel Comics, was the Perez-drawn parallel-universes saga Crisis on Infinite Earths. I retained my love for Jack Kirby throughout, though, having savored all nine issues of his late-Marvel series Devil Dinosaur but also his New Gods stories for DC, featuring the evil god Darkseid. My comics reading would start tapering off somewhat around the mid-90s, when DC depicted the hypothetical final adventure of its present-day heroes in the miniseries Kingdom Come.

But I would go on to write a few comic book stories for DC myself, one featuring the old character Krona, depicted in Crisis on Infinite Earths as the person responsible for the fractured multiverse of parallel universes coming into existence in the first place. Throughout it all, I’d remain fascinated by the continuity implications of revising reality and having multiple versions of characters.

•••

So what’s happening, all at the same time, this month, thirty-two years after I developed this sick addiction?

This month alone, partly by accident and partly by design:

•Darkseid has conquered the Earth.

•He has done so in a series called Final Crisis by my favorite comics writer, Grant Morrison, which is a sequel to the aforementioned Crisis on Infinite Earths.

•George Perez is drawing the first issue of an affiliated five-issue miniseries featuring not one but three different versions (from parallel universes) of the aforementioned Legion of Super-Heroes up against Time Trapper (and a deranged doppelganger of Superboy left over from Crisis on Infinite Earths), called Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds, written by a writer whose age and geek sensibilities are near-identical to my own, Geoff Johns (I hereby predict that today’s issue #1 of Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds will dwarf its own parent series in sales and indeed be the best-selling single issue of a comic book all year).

•Another affiliated series, the two-issue Final Crisis: Superman Beyond (again by Morrison), features godlike beings called the Monitors, derived from Crisis on Infinite Earths, dragging Superman across the multiverse in 3D, with actual 3D glasses included(!).

•Meanwhile, the aforementioned Johns is depicting the alarming present-day creation of Magog, the apocalyptic villain who caused the twilight of the superheroes in Kingdom Come, which may not be so hypothetical or far off anymore (and his creator, Gog, has brought the Justice Society into conflict with its Earth-2 counterparts, themselves seen for the first time in two decades).

•And another geek-turned-writer, Kurt Busiek, is doing a weekly series called Trinity in which Krona threatens to emerge from the cosmic egg in which he was imprisoned by a combined force of DC and Marvel superheroes, shattering reality in the process (I wish he’d use the Krona-worshipping characters I created, the so-called Hand of Krona).

•Plus, while all that’s going on, on the more negative but still intriguing side, a being called the Demiurge has revealed, in a blow to much established continuity, that Hawkman was never from ancient Egypt at all (that whole thread of reality was a cosmic fraud somehow tied to the Crisis on Infinite Earths) but instead hails from the planet Thanagar after all (I don’t know why they can’t just massage the conflicting stories a bit and say aliens built the pyramids and that it’s all connected, but I don’t write the damn things [often]).

•••

Look, I want off the stuff as much as any addict, but all this happening in the same month is the sci-fi-leaning, continuity-obsessed, reality-warp-examining comic fanboy’s equivalent of delivering all the crack in the world to one crack addict’s doorstep in a single morning — and unlike the members of the Legion, I’m only human. It’ll all be over by year’s end, though.

And I hope it ends well, though the fact that ads for the penultimate issue of Final Crisis feature a villain called Mandrakk the Monitor, who sounds just a tad too much like some sick parody of reality-warping Mandrake the Magician, has me a little worried that (gonzo-inclined) Morrison is going to do something silly and postmodern involving a top hat that we’ll all regret. We shall see.

In the interim, you normals (if any of you are still reading this) can get a tiny, self-contained taste of some of the above by watching the eighth-or-so episode of the new season of Smallville (now entering its eighth year). That episode, which will be written by Johns, will feature the time-traveling Legion of Super-Heroes, portrayed by living, non-animated actors for the first time. And who knows? Maybe the geeky Johns will even put the Time Trapper in the episode.

(For people who are far too cool for comics: Trapper’s sort of like the Master on Doctor Who — you know, when the Master was all cloaked and decaying and mummy-like but still had time-travel powers.)

The truly amazing time-warping feat on Smallville, though, is going eight years without Clark Kent yet growing up, moving to Metropolis, and becoming Superman. Ratings can bend reality like nothing else.

The Fixx Plays, Loser Pays

Yesterday, I talked about the inescapable vise of progressive politics — but today let’s talk about the efforts to put a vise around quasi-progressive rock.

Yes, today is the pivotal day in legal history when witch-burning socialists in Massachusetts decide whether to punish the rock band the Fixx for being too cool.

All right, I’m slightly misrepresenting the details of the situation. Actually, they’re just having a meeting of the events licensing board in Newton, MA about whether to revise their noise rules to henceforth forbid things like the recent outdoor Fixx concert in celebration of the opening of the Hotel Indigo. The Fixx themselves have long since safely escaped the town (and after all, they did once do a cover of “These Boots Were Made for Walking,” oddly enough).

If Indigo ends up being fined or something (presumably not in a post facto fashion), and they organize a benefit concert to pay their legal bills, perhaps they should consider using that band I saw perform with a theremin a few weeks ago, Rebel Hotel. Get it, Rebel Hotel? You see how perfect that would be, since, like, the Indigo’s a Hotel, and they’re, like, rebels?

•••

On a more broadly useful note, this seems as good a juncture as any to note that I’m strongly in favor of the U.S. adopting the principle (very common in the rest of the world, including Europe) of “loser pays” in legal battles — that is, you lose the case, you must make the other side truly whole by paying the victor’s court costs, not just the damages at issue. This would eliminate the all-too-powerful incentive to shut people down simply by targeting them with lawsuits that they know will be time-consuming and expensive even if they win. It also diminishes the incentive to “give it a shot” and bring likely-losing bogus cases. More important, restitution to the vindicated party is just basic justice.

The pros and cons of loser pays will be the topic of discussion this week on NewTalk.org, a civility-encouraging political-discourse project of libertarian lawyer Philip K. Howard, whose minions include my non-libertarian but nonetheless swell friend Jenny Foreit and whose book The Death of Common Sense nonetheless does wonders to angry up the blood against nonsensical laws.

Strangely, I encounter a lot of people (including a smart libertarian) whose immediate intuitive reaction to loser pays is that it will prevent the poor from bringing lawsuits.

Now, if the end result of loser pays is that you can in effect bring a meritorious case for free, I fail to see how this is (on balance) bad for the poor. Indeed, even those of us who are not poor might like the ability to bring lawsuits over various petty matters not currently worth hiring a lawyer for (say, having one’s computer deliberately misdiagnosed by a repair shop so they can charge you more, to take an example from my own experience, back when the villainous Computer Era store in the East 20s existed — and just days, alas, before its thuggish staff were exposed as con artists on the cover of New York magazine).

There’s little I can do — as I am reminded day after day on countless philosophical topics — to control how people will intuit or even make them see that they might have opted to intuit differently than they have. But I suspect this intuition that loser pays is bad for the poor is largely driven by a subconscious assumption (occurring most often in left-leaning people, interestingly) that the poor have a special interest in bringing bogus lawsuits.

After all, in a purely algebraic sense, the filter mechanism introduced by loser pays is not mainly to punish suits by the rich or the poor but simply to punish suits that lose. Why should we assume it is in the interest of the poor to see losing suits given a leg up? That’s a bit like the old condescending liberal assumption that cracking down on crime is bad news for the poor. Baloney — it’s first and foremost bad news for criminals.

Likewise, loser pays is mainly bad news for…losers, which is to say people bringing bad suits or (lest we forget the whole purpose of lawsuits) committing wrongs for which they should pay damages. Or to put it in terms the left can understand: Don’t you think there are companies out there committing wrongs that lovable little poor people might like to sue over but are currently afraid to because even if they have slam-dunk cases they’ll still have big legal bills to pay in the end? Or to put it as starkly as I can: Are you so worried about discouraging poor people with bad cases that you’re unwilling to encourage poor people with good cases?

Goodbye, Sandy Allen

The world’s tallest woman (like the other Todd Seavey, noted in my prior entry) has passed away.  She inspired a catchy song by Split Enz (the Finn Brothers’ band before Crowded House).  But then, saying “catchy song by Split Enz” is almost redundant.

SPECIAL BULLETIN: I Am Not Dead

But apparently, the other Todd James Seavey (perhaps the only other Todd James Seavey?) passed away last week, days after me blathering about aging and birthdays.  Rest in peace, my namesake.

I wonder what would happen if I tried to steal his identity now?

Democrat or Bull Moose in November?

Given how common the complaints from the left are that the right is all racist Christian fanatics, it’d be pretty impressive — and amusing — if McCain’s running mate were Jewish (Lieberman or Cantor) or Indian-American (Jindal).

On another positive McCain note, the Cato Institute suggests that, imperfect as both Obama and McCain are, McCain’s health plan is substantially more free-market-oriented and even takes encouraging steps toward ending the stifling tie between health insurance and employers, which would do wonders to make the labor market more fluid and ease a lot of employee anxiety (the sort of concern that has driven even some fairly market-friendly writers such as Malcolm Gladwell, dissatisfied with the current employer-mandates/governmental situation, to think a flat-out government-run system might even be preferable).

On the downside, McCain says things that sound as openly and pugnaciously anticapitalist as his hero, Teddy Roosevelt, as in the narrator’s words in this McCain campaign ad:

Washington’s broken. John McCain knows it. We’re worse off than we were four years ago.

Only McCain has taken on big tobacco, drug companies, fought corruption in both parties. He’ll reform Wall Street, battle Big Oil, make America prosper again.

Yikes. Some terrifying mixed messages in there, from a free-market perspective. Add to that the possibility of Independent Lieberman (who’s prone to call for regulation of violent videogames and that sort of thing) running with “maverick” McCain, and we might find ourselves with no real Republican ticket on the ballot at all come November — but instead a sort of Bull Moose progressive/imperialist ticket vs. a Democratic ticket — McCain leading an 1890s-style progressive ticket and Obama a 1990s-style progressive ticket, with some of us market-oriented Republicans left feeling out of options.

Unless you count the Republican who’s running on the Libertarian ticket, of course. (It’s very complicated.)

Now if we could just get the whole thing to loop around so that a libertarian or at least a real free-marketeer became the Democratic running mate, we’d be getting somewhere. Ah, well, at least the Dem v.p. slot definitely won’t be going to a certain philandering populist lawyer from North Carolina.

UPDATE 8/19/08: Giuliani as v.p. would be another pleasing thumb in the eye to the religious folk who failed to support him in the primary — and an exciting resurrection after his defeat in that process.  He’d fare better in the general, likes McCain, and is similarly ideologically ambiguous.  But maybe the Giuliani rumors will give way to something else within days.