From the desk of Jane Galt:

Is the city a terrible place to raise kids?

Matthew Yglesias doesn't think so:

Erika at Apartment 401 says, among other things:

Although they like the city, I do sense from her blog that the kid-friendly culture of the suburbs has some appeal. Most of us grew up playing in muddy creeks and going to community barbecues and riding our bikes down empty streets and we want our kids to have some of that.

Having grown up in New York City, this kind of talk always pisses me off. What, exactly, is so "kid-friendly" about the suburbs? It seems to me that it often just comes down to this -- "most of us grew up playing in muddy creeks . . . and we want our kids to have some of that." I didn't grow up doing any of that stuff, and I think I turned out fine. Conversely, the people I knew who grew up in the suburbs wound up not doing things that I did all the time and they turned out fine, too.

Two things about the whole "kids = suburbs" thing make perfect sense. Primarily, if there's more people in your family, it's desirable to have more space, and space is cheaper in the suburbs. Secondarily, depending on circumstances, it may be cheaper to obtain access to a decent school. If the financial circumstances apply, those are great reasons to move to the suburbs. Similarly, if it so happens that you really want to own a big yard, or you realize that you've reached a point in your life where the sights and sounds of the big city are no longer all-that-appealing then, obviously, you should move to the suburbs.

But please, please, please don't "do it for the kids." If you'd rather live in the city and you can afford a place you like, do that. Kids grow up fine in the city.

I also grew up in the city, and also have some treasured memories that my suburban friends don't have . . . like being able to go more than two feet from my house without finding someone to drive me. And for all the claims of safety in the suburbs, my friends and I were immune from one of the main killers of teens, which is drunk or insane driving. Nor did we turn out noticeably more thievish, drug-addled, or unmotivated than nice suburban kids.

But while the city may not, depending on your definition, be less kid friendly, it's definitely less parent friendly. If you want to raise kids in New York City, you'd better be prepared either to put heroic efforts into getting your kid into one of the few decent public schools, or pay something on the order of $15K per kid, per year, for private school tuition. And unlike when Matt and I were in school, the process of even getting into one of those schools has gotten ludicrous: the parents I know are scrambling to get their kids into a few preschools that are roughly as competitive as the Ivy League, which in turn are feeders for good prep schools, which are good feeders for the Ivy League . . . a friend of a friend was asked at the interview for one such school, in re her two year old, "What are her aspirations?"

But beyond all that, there's simply very little space for a child. If you want your child to play outside instead of reading or watching television, you have to physically take them to the outdoors, sit there watching them while they play, and then take them home again. Or you have to pay someone else to do so, and whee! there go the bills again. Parenting in New York is a tradeoff between encourageing your child to be a vegetable, or spending every waking minute shepharding them from activity to activity.

When the children are older, this is reversed; once I was eleven or twelve, I, unlike my suburban compatriots, could hop on a subway or a bus and get myself to shopping, food, friends, school, and activities. This is very liberating for parents -- who usually need the liberation, as they're busy working sixteen hours a day to earn your school fees. If I had to pick, I think I'd probably want small children in the suburbs, and adolescent and older children in the city. And a trust fund, of course, to pay for it all.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Compromise? What compromise?

Larry Solum argues that, as far as appointing judges goes, nothing much happened yesterday.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Reader survey

I know that most of you have probably already seen this, but just in case you haven't, Henry Copeland, who provides the magnificent ads at the right (which you should all click through to help out Asymmetrical Information's very fine advertisers), is running a reader survey. Please, please, please take a moment, if you haven't already, to fill out the survey. And if you want to help me out, by giving me a glimpse at my reader demographics, write in "Asymmetrical Information" (watch the spelling!) for question number 22.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Says it all

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Expense this!

Just in time for the economic recovery, New York City restaurants are preparing even more fantastic menu items for rising young Wall Street tycoons to expense:

The omelet, which debuted May 5 and is billed as the "Zillion Dollar Frittata," has six eggs, a lobster and -- here's the kicker -- 10 ounces of sevruga caviar.

The restaurant pays $65 an ounce for the caviar, according to Norma's general manager, Steven Pipes.

"Since we knew it was going to be a very expensive dish, we decided to have some fun with it," Pipes told the News. "It's not just a gimmick, though. It tastes good."

Beside the omelet's entry in the menu is the following message: "Norma dares you to expense this."

No one has ordered it yet.

That's it, folks: I'm declaring the downturn officially over.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Is GDP growth a function of female labour force expansion?

Busy, busy, busy at work, but just barely time for this interesting snippet, from Stuart Buck:

I wonder what effect this trend has had on the GDP of the United States? After all, people who work outside the home draw salaries and spend money, all of which counts toward GDP. But people -- men or women -- who spend their time on homemaking and child-raising don't count at all. Their work is unpaid, and unpaid work doesn't count toward official statistics.

According to the Census chart found here, there were about 19.5 million children under 6 in 2002. I don't know how many of these were siblings of each other, but there were a lot of mothers involved. If a substantial number of them move out of the workforce and into household labor, that would have to affect GDP somehow.

How much? Studies show varied values for unpaid household work. An Australian study estimated the value of unpaid work at around 47% of GDP. A British study from 2000 stated that estimates range from 44% of GDP to 104%. This is obviously a wide range, and there must be quite a bit of uncertainty in the valuation mechanism, the time estimates, or both. Even so, the number is substantial.

How does this all play out? I don't know. If a genuine economic study exists, I'd love to hear of it. I'm just saying that it looks like more women have moved into precisely the sort of work whose value is huge but that is not counted toward GDP.

In that case, then, the amount of lost GDP would have to factor into one's assessment of the economic slowdown since early 2001. In other words, a slower economy may be in part due to the fact that more people are choosing to perform unpaid household work.

UPDATE: I found one study that examines the opposite effect: How much economic growth is really due to women moving from unpaid household labor into the marketplace? Here's the opening quote:

If one accounts for the shift of women’s work from the household to the market during the course of economic development, what does the trajectory of growth and structural change look like? Economists do not typically consider this aspect of economic development. But if a significant proportion of growth is propelled by such a shift, then analyses of growth will mistakenly attribute social and economic policies with production expansion when what is really happening is a sectoral shift.

And here's part of the conclusion:

Raising the market labor force participation of women, especially women with high levels of human capital (measured in terms of education and health) was a key feature of the Taiwanese miracle.

The opposite should logically be true as well.

So was some large proportion of our GDP growth in the 70's, 80's and 90's a function of political change, rather than actually having a more productive economy?

I'd argue no, because I think that the political change that propelled women into the workforce was actually in large part a function of economic change: household labour became vastly more productive.

Consider that when my grandmother got married, laundry took an entire day, and left her exhausted by the wrenching work of boiling water for washing, wringing the clothes out, and physically hefting wet clothing onto the clothesline. Three hefty meals a day had to be prepared for men doing hard physical labour without any of the modern aids, from food processors to frozen vegetables, that I enjoy, a mound of dishes done after every meal, a house had to be cleaned without the aid of vacuum cleaners, groceries had to be gotten on foot . . . everything was physically more demanding, and more time consuming.

My mother stayed home with us. By the time I was ten, she was going bonkers. There simply wasn't enough to do in the house . . . and my mother, mind you, had gone in for gourmet cooking in a rather large way, producing elaborate dinners that took hours to prepare. She was the mainstay of the PTA, the building's co-op board, and so forth. Nonetheless, there simply wasn't enough to keep an active woman occupied after the children were in school.

Women in the house, other than those with small children, became economically useless to their families once labour-saving devices and modern food processing made 90% of their labour obsolete. So they went to work.

Thus, I'd argue that the GDP growth we experienced when women went to work is measuring the same thing as other kinds of GDP growth: the movement of labour resources from less valued to more valued uses.

This has created a problem, of course: women's work used to be compatible with child care, and now it is not. And the business world is still largely designed for men: it is not structured to accomodate professional women who stay home with young children. On that, more later.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

We're all gonna diiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!

Right now I'm reading Christopher Hitchens' Why Orwell Matters. So far, I like it very much. He has some of Orwell's talent for the painfully apt phrase, which arouses in me both envy and wonder.

I was struck, this morning, on the train, by this passage:

Indeed, Orwell himself had been extremely quick to see the implication, of a world run by unnaccountable experts and technicians, that was contained in the advent of nuclear weaponry.

Orwell did not mean to suggest that the choices--between democratising and perishing--were exclusive. He thought there was a third alternative, namely the mutual and absolute destruction of all systems (and all non-combatants) by atomic warfare. But though he often wrote about this in the morbidly fatalistic way that was to become commonplace a decade or so after his death, he also saw the threat of nuclearism to the present, as well as the future.

The reason this struck me is that phrase -- morbid fatalism -- which so perfectly describes books like On the Beach and political groups like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Anyone over the age of twenty is occasionally confronted with the ignorance of today's youth of some phenomenon that was utterly ordinary when we were their age. It is always disconcerting, perhaps because none of us ever really thinks of ourselves as having grown up, which makes it hard to confront the fact of sixteen-year olds who are palpably not of our generation. Pay telephones (rotary telephones!), cassette tapes, typewriters, black and white televisions, Captain Kangaroo . . . how can they not know about these things?

But perhaps the strangest thing of all is to realize that these children, unlike my generation, did not grow up with the ever-present fear that they might at any moment evaporate, suddenly and without warning, into a fine cloud of radioactive dust. I think that if you had asked the children of my high school class, we would have placed the eventual probability of a nuclear war at higher than 50%. Now, to be sure, they worry about a terrorist attack. But I doubt that any of them has the worry that was always at the backs of our minds: that America, western civilisation, or the earth itself, might at any moment be irrevocably destroyed.

So after fifty years of sullenly expecting it, the doom everyone was waiting for has not only failed to come to pass--even the worry about it has faded utterly. And we achieved this neither by defeating the Soviet Union in battle, nor by unilaterally disarming, the two solutions that were most widely proposed as the only thing that could save us from this disastrous fate (and the former only in the few brief years before Russia tested her first nuclear weapon).

Why do I bring this up? Well, because the failure of one impending doom to come to pass has not stopped other prophets from pushing theirs.

No, I'm not talking about the environmentalists. I mean, that Day After Tomorrow movie Al Gore is pushing looks about as scientifically sound as one of those ads for pills that make you lose weight while you sleep WITHOUT DIET OR EXCERCISE. But not being an astrophysicist, geologist, meteorologist, or other scientific type, I do not consider myself qualified to comment on whether we are, or are not, emitting our way to hothouse hell.

I'm thinking of the purveyors of political and social doom. A few weeks ago, I was talking to a libertarian who was arguing that the Patriot Act was a one-way ticket to totalitarianism. We were violating fundamental rights that had been enshrined in the constitution for 200 years, and once we'd given them up, it was going to be a short step on the slippery slope to a police state. I share her fear of government intrusiveness. But this a markedly ahistorical view of the constitution and the liberties it allows us to enjoy, which is no more accurate for its extreme prevalence in libertarian circles. There is no primal state of liberty, created by the Constitution, from which we have slowly but inexorably been moving away. Liberties have been granted, and taken away, and granted again throughout the history of our country. Just off the top of my head: Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, the Palmer raids, the detention of the west coast Japanese in camps during World War II, the committment of anyone FDR or one of his minion's thought was especially dangerous to the war effort to St. Elizabeth's mental hospital during same, the McCarthy hearings--see this wonderful Richard Posner piece for a more elegant exegisis of the history of American liberties. The shape of liberty has changed over the 200 years of our existence, expanding in some places and contracting in others. There is no libertarian eden, located somewhere in the American past, from which we are now fallen, or falling.

Now, this doesn't mean that the Patriot Act is a good thing. But the fact that we have the Patriot Act now does not mean, as many libertarians ardently argue, that we will always have the Patriot Act. If the Patriot Act is bad, we should vigorously fight it. But there is no need to construct doomsday scenarios in which the existance of the Patriot Act consigns us to a totalitarian future.

Not to dump on libertarians exclusively, because everyone seems to do it. Social conservatives think we're doomed because the institution of marriage has been dangerously undermined, and is therefore likely to disappear entirely, along with God, patriotism, and the super-sized big mac meal, if we don't do something, quick. A large number of wonkish types (including, on odd days, me) spend a lot of time worrying about the possibility that our old-age entitlements will drive us into disastrous bankruptcy; few of us stop to reflect on the many, many unsustainable economic trends that have worried policy wonks right up until the moment that the impending doom suddenly solved itself under the inexorable logic of Herb Stein's famous dictum: "If something can't go on forever, it won't." Many liberals, like Paul Krugman, think that we nearly got into socioeconomic eden sometime around 1966, give or take, and have been staging a fast retreat towards armageddon ever since; marginal tax rates and some forms of social spending here take the part of doom-bringer, even though on every measure except simple inequality, the lives of the poor and the middle class seem to be richer in material goods, leisure, and quality of work than they were in the Golden Era of America's Middle Class.

That's not to say that liberals shouldn't want more progressive taxes and social spending, policy wonks more sustainably structured entitlements, social conservatives more traditional cultural values, or libertarians more freedom. It's perfectly reasonable to look at the way things are and say "they could be so much better if . . . " What we shouldn't do is compare our present to some highly airbrushed past, or mindlessly extrapolate trends, and thereby hastily conclude that we're all going to hell in a handbasket.

Madeline Albright spoke at my sister's graduation last weekend, and during her speech she said something to the effect that the world situation now was scarier than it had been at any time since World War II. This is a common belief -- commoner among liberals, but not exclusive to them. But huh? Think of what the world looked like to George Orwell. Nazism defeated, but at terrible cost--and no one knew, then, that Fascism wouldn't re-emerge. Russia, with Stalin still at its helm, devouring Eastern Europe. The most terrible weapon ever imagined recently used for the first time, and every nation with two scientists to rub together working hard to develop their own, personal holocaust-maker. The Cold War incipient in the battles over Berlin. And, if you're Orwell, a nasty case of tuberculosis, and no nice antibiotics to cure it. Things were bleak.

Yet we made it through, with a modicum of liberty and a splash of human kindness, and now democracy is springing up like mushrooms everywhere you look, poverty is steadily decreasing, though perhaps not as fast as we'd like, and wars are killing fewer and fewer humans each decade. The world is a pretty good place to live, and getting steadily better for almost everyone. As flawed as the human race is, we seem to be a lot better than the doomsayers think at muddling through.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

What is normal

A little over a month ago, I attended a Liberty Fund conference run by the inimitable Tyler Cowen, of Marginal Revolution, on biological determinism. For those of you who have been wondering what Mr Cowen is like, the answer is that he's incredibly smart, as is his co-blogger, Alex Tabarrok. Their styles, however, are very different. Alex is hawk-eyed when it comes to spotting lazy reasoning or fallacious argument, and lightning-fast at exposing it where it occurs. Tyler is quieter; he sits and listens for a long time, and then just when you've forgotten to wonder what he's thinking, he unleashes, in his quiet way, some devastatingly obvious (in hindsight) demolition of your argument, or a new point so clever and elegant that you know you would never have thought of it in a million years. Both are very good, if somewhat unsettling, company.

But back to the reason for this post: one of the pieces that we read was on female circumcision, more perjoratively known in the west as female genital mutilation. The author of the piece argues that our attitude towards it is mostly irrational prejudice. And most of us reacted with--well, to be honest, a fair amount of irrational prejudice.

That's not to say that I think the author made his case. A lot of his argument relied on the fact that female circumcision is often practiced, and encouraged, by women, particularly the mothers of the girls. African women, he is at some pains to point out, love their daughters just as much as Americans do. Well, of course, that's true, but not really useful. Victorian mothers certainly loved their daughters, but that doesn't mean that their encouragement of chattel marriage and one-gender chastity taboos was good for women. Victorian mothers pushed their daughters into these things for the same reason that mothers in cultures that practice female circumcision push their child under the ceremonial knife: because it's necessary, in that society, in order to get a husband, material security, and children. That doesn't mean that the 19th century oppression of women was a good thing, and I doubt that the author would attempt to argue that it was simply because Victorian mothers, the primary enforcement agents, loved their daughters.

Nor do I think that arguing that infibulation (the most drastic and repulsive of the procedures, which I won't describe here) occurs in "only" 15% of the cases is reallly very compelling.

But he does make a good case that, far from being grounded only in patriarchal power politics, as most feminists opposed to the practice argue, there is a strong aesthetic component; women (and men) in societies that practice female circumcision think that uncircumcised women are repulsive-looking, and feel the same disgust towards them that we feel towards women who circumcise their daughters. The "Ick factor" makes it hard, on both sides, to have a rational discussion.

Oh, we think we're being rational; of course we have the better argument. After all, our way is pristine and natural; that's why alterations, particularly drastic ones, are "mutilation".

But consider this: intersexuals, people with abnormal quantities of X or Y chromosomes (XO, XXY, XYY) or hormonal conditions that alter fetal development, are often born with genitalia that are ambiguous, or abnormal. We commonly perform surgery on these people in order to define them as one gender or another. We do it for the same reason that African mothers have their daughters circumcised: so that they will fit into the tribe, meet our aesthetic standards for genital appearance, and have an easier time finding a mate. Yet most of the people who are repulsed by the actions of those African mothers, would, if they had a baby with one of these abnormalities, eagerly schedule it for surgery to normalise its gentalia. So are we really opposed to mutilating the pristine work of nature, or are we, like those African mothers, simply enforcing our own cultural norms?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Public service announcement

Last night I had something of a rite of passage in New York: first roach in my new apartment.

Lest you think I'm the sort of filthy creature that tolerates vermin in her kitchen rather than clean it properly, this roach was an interloper that followed us into the apartment as we came in. And technically, it was not a roach, but a waterbug, which is a New York City term of art for a really huge, disgusting cockroach. (See, Palmetto Bug).

The problem with apartments is that no matter how clean you are, somewhere in your building there is some verminous lout, blithely unconcerned with the wriggling things flitting about his abode, who is breeding a small army of roaches to spread out through the pipes as summer arrives. My apartment has been, for the first five months of occupation, vermin free, which is a good sign. If I want to keep it that way, however, it appears I must Take Steps.

Luckily, having grown up in New York City, I am well versed in the lore of roach combat. Unlike my mother, who arrived here from a small town in upstate New York, where the only people who have roaches are the sort of people who don't take out the garbage for weeks at a time, and litter their yard with broken appliances and other trash. The discovery that she had COCKROACHES was so emotionally devastating that she very nearly did not recover. And she, of course, had no idea what to do about the disgusting creatures.

There are still a flood of such people into our urban areas. And so, as a public service, I thought I would offer some tips for successful roach extermination.

1) Do not leave anything edible where roaches might find it Unfortunately, for roaches, "edible" is a very broad category, which apparently includes soap. You need not go so far as to lock the Camay way each evening, but you should do a thorough scour of your cupboards. Anything which is not in a sealed container -- bags of flour, open boxes of raisins, jars of jam with little bits of dried goo that have dribbled down the sides, etc. -- should be either put in tightly closed tupperware, or in the refrigerator. (Putting your flour and sugar in the refrigerator also keeps them from getting flour bugs or sugar ants, a common hazard in apartment buildings). Tupperware, canisters, etc. must be kept clean on the outside.

2) Take your garbage out every night, and twice a day in the summer This will seem impractical to many of you, as indeed it is. Put your organic garbage in a plastic shopping bag, tied with a twist tie, in the freezer, or the fridge if you don't have space in the freezer. If you live in New York, where there are conveniently located trashcans on every streetcorner, just grab your baggie on the way to work and deposit it in the nearest municipal garbage can. This seems extreme. But the best way to keep roaches out of your apartment is not to give them any reason at all to be there. Spending an extra $20 a year on garbage bags is well worth it.

3) Wash your dishes as soon as you're done with them Whoa, what a drag. But not as much of a drag as turning on your lights and hearing things skitter. Note to dishwasher owners: a dishwasher filled with unrinsed dishes and left for a few days is a roach's idea of Lutece.

4) Sluice down the counters and sweep the floors every night You'd be amazed at how little roaches can live on.

5) Put out roach traps Combat is the preferred brand of New Yorkers. People with waterbug or palmetto bug problems should use the extra large size. (Guess what I'll be stocking up on tonight?) These should go EVERYWHERE, but especially in areas that have either food, pipes (roaches travel along them), or sheltering darkness for your six-legged enemies: in cabinets, behind the fridge, behind the toilet, under the sink . . . don't forget to put one (tastefully hidden, of course) near your doors and any windows that border either a terrace, or the street. A roach's first step into your apartment should be its last.

6) Put down boric acid in every crevice I have no idea why it works, but it's great roach prevention. Keep it away from any areas that pets or children might come across it an consume it.

7) Get your landlord to call the exterminator And don't be put off by assertions that there's nothing to be done.

8) Bug bomb the apartment when you go away for vacation By the time you get back, the smell will have dissipated, and so, hopefully, will the roaches.

9) Buy a gekko This is somewhat extreme. Clearly, it won't work for those who don't like lizards, or have pets, such as cats, that will try to kill the gekko. But they are remarkably effective at getting rid of your roach problem, if you're willing to tolerate occasionally finding a lizard perched on your shower head. Myself, I'll take a nice clean lizard over a filthy old roach any day -- though I'm not really at lizard-buying point yet.

I myself have been lax on enforcement of some of these edicts, lulled into complacency by the previous absence of vermin. Now, however, I am preparing for Total War. And I thought I should offer my advice to newer city dwellers, who may have been told by fellow citizens that there's nothing to be done about roaches. You never really win the war against bugs in a city -- but contrary to the assertions of many city dwellers, you can fight them to a draw.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

How does fat kill?

By sheer volume, according to a new study. The authors argue that it's not the strain of carrying around that extra weight, but the fat cells themselves, which emit ever-more hormones and so forth as they grow.

So building muscle to help counteract the strain won't undo the damage (except, perhaps, to your joints, in a limited way.) Sigh. There's no substitute for losing weight except . . . losing weight.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Speaking of plagiarism . . .

Why buy a paper off the internet when you can buy a degree?

According to the General Accounting Office, 28 top federal workers have degrees from diploma mills. At least, 28 that they've found so far:

Three unaccredited schools — Pacific Western University, California Coast University and Kennedy-Western University — provided data showing that 463 of their students were federal employees. Most of those listed were in the Department of Defense. The report did not name employees.

I'm speechless. Libertarians, the comments are yours.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Are we a nation of cheaters?

This morning I read this excellent piece, via Matthew Yglesias, by a philosophy professor sharing his techniques for catching plagiarism. I've read discussions about plagiarism on academic blogs, and I was pondering this as I rode the subways this morning.

Shocking confession here, but I've never cheated in my life. (Or at least not since 6th grade, when I got in trouble for reporting that I'd done homework that I had not, in fact, done.) I've never copied someone else's test answers, or had someone else copy mine, never copied an essay, had another person do my homework,inserted uncited text from someone else's writing, paraphrased someone else's work or ideas without citation, or even forgotten a footnote. And I've written a lot of essays in my time, being an English major. I had something close to a 4.0 in my major, and I was certainly no apple-polisher; my priorities lay more in figuring out exactly how little one had to do to earn an A.

Of course, I was an English major, which some would argue means I wasn't exactly playing on the varsity, academically speaking. And English relies much more on primary texts than most other fields, which means students read a lot less secondary criticism than, say, philosophy students; those secondary critics make fertile ground for plagiarism. Perhaps it also makes plagiarism less necessary, because the papers are easier to write. But we can slander the English major some other time.

For nonetheless, it would seem that paper mills, files, google searches and so on would be no less useful in plagiarising English papers than other sorts of papers. Yet I never even thought of doing so; I would have been shocked had anyone suggested it. I feel certain that none of my friends were plagiarising their papers -- lying heroically about mythical family, medical or automotive crises that necessitated an extension, yes, but not cheating on the actual writing. Were we a more honest generation, or am I naive? And if we were more honest, is it because those were nobler days, or because the tools for plagiarism are now so much better, what with the internet and all?

Readers are invited to offer their opinions -- under strictest confidentiality, of course.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Iguanas. Hmph.

I agree, no more iguanas.
But breeding boas, that's commentworthy.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Has Jane Galt sold out to socialism?

It's not true, I swear it! In fact, I was getting ready to do a big post about feminism, but I'm still flying solo at work, and now I have to fly off to Duke to watch my sister graduate from Public Policy school.

(Speaking of which, if anyone out there in the policy biz is looking for an extremely bright new hire who's pleasant to be around, knows her way around both qualitative and quantitative research, writes well, and works like a demon for whoever is lucky enough to have her, please shoot me an email at janegalt-at-gmail.com.)

But really, I haven't sold out to the left. I'm right exactly where I've always been (at least since my Road-to-Damascus experience in college). I'm not trying to slip Kerry in under the wire so I can nationalise health care and raise taxes until everyone's gums bleed. I'm just trying to figure out what I think is best for the country. I could be wrong, of course, but I definitely don't have some hidden agenda. On which, sadly, more will have to wait until later, as I have to catch a plane.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Who's calling who unpatriotic

Democrats who are fond of attacking Republicans for attacking the patriotism of various Democrats, should be preparing to eat humble pie, since the first person to actually attack the patriotism of their opponents (as opposed to criticising their national security votes on substantive grounds, which is the same thing only to those who don't care about either patriotism, or national security), is John Kerry's wife.

She seemed like quite an interesting person in the Newsweek story. But I don't think she's doing her husband much good. She seems to have absolutely no idea what kind of thing plays in Paducah, and what doesn't.