On this week's Georgia Gang, Martha Zoller made a statement along the following lines: Strom Thurmond changed with the times, becoming the first senator to hire a black aide, not some New England liberal.
What a cheap shot. First of all, Thurmond was the first Southern senator to appoint a black aide, in 1971. Surely Mass. Senator Edward Brooke, who is black and was first elected in 1966 appointed a black aide before 1971 rolled around. In fact, maybe Brooke's black aide interacted with Thurmond on the floor of the Senate and convinced him to widen his own pool of applicants.
I'll never know if that's the case or not, but my own statement is conjecture based on historical fact, not revisionist claptrap which tries not only to paper over the racial record of Strom Thurmond, but also attempts to score another "and Southerners had a much better race record anyway point, which is the kind of thinking Southern pundits employ when they're feeling guilty about, on the one hand, worshiping Southern Conservative values, when on the other, so many of those values are expressed not in an intelligent stump speech but with a confederate flag.
Neat NYT story on the field. In the current economic climate, mainstream economists are looking more and more to the behavioralists. I've even practiced a little amateur behavioral econ myself, namely my speculation that (even) lower rates won't help spur the economy beyond a certain point. What's my reasoning? Who thinks a 1% interest rate is a great time to borrow money that didn't think 1.25% was? Additionally, how do you explain all those people out there who still haven't re-fi'd but will only get around to doing it once rates start going up?
Well, maybe not, but the syllabus and opinion in Georgia v Ashcroft is available here.
Two Georgians died this week, one (unwittingly) oversaw the end of an era; the other began a new one. Lester Maddox will lie in state and Maynard Jackson in city hall.
Whoops! Not all of our accounting troubles are over. Well, potentially. In the good times, when pension plans overperformed, companies skimmed off the top to increase their earnings. Now that plans are underperforming, either earnings have to go down (as assets have to be added to the pension fund) or corporations can switch to "cash based" pensions, thus delivering "actual" returns to employees far below those promised when employees chose to participate in the company plan. Theoretically it evens out in the end, with inflated earnings from years past being cancelled out by deflated earnings today, unless of course you bought your own company's inflated stock in your retirement account, which many companies and individuals do.
What to do? Well, if individually you can afford to take on some of your retirement yourself, have it at. An individual who has a stellar year (like those of the late 90's bull markets) generally doesn't withdraw from his retirement account because he outperformed his target return for that year. For corporations, it seems that the best plan would be to outsource your pension plan. For too many companies, the temptation to steal (yes steal) from their employers to get that extra dollar appears to be too great.
PS: If you want to see an example of the power of computing used for dubious causes, check out this article. It's conclusion that you should dump your stock during the first two years of a presidential term and then load up during the last two is surely just (in this case) partisan wishful thinking. Yet another example of driving forward by looking in the rearview mirror.
It sure has been raining a lot in Atlanta lately. Not much on the newsfront to report, however, next week we expect a ruling in Georgia v Ashcroft (redistricting) and maybe the earliest hints as to who will be the next steward of the nation's best roads (DOT Commissioner). I'm biting my nails waiting for both!
I had no idea the deodorant market had stagnated. The news that deodorant sales aren't keeping up with new underarms points to a sadly stinky future.
Say what you will about the flaggers, but they sure are economical with words and slogans.
I promised I'd post about the Dean meetup a while ago. It was very exciting, with a good mix of about 80 people. These people are determined to win, and from the ground up. It's kind of the exact opposite of the McGovern strategy.
A quick history lesson: McGovern was in charge of a committee that completely revamped the Democratic nominating process in the late '60's and early '70's. As such, he was the only candidate with an intricate knowledge of the new primary process and used it to his advantage against lesser organized candidates.
The Dean people, as I said, seem to be doing the exact opposite. It's highly de-centralized. Activists on the ground are learning as much as they can about the counties and states they're from and working to take them over from the inside. If Dean wins, which is still a longshot at this moment, I don't think he'll even know the half of the story of how it happened.
Like I said, it was exciting. You can track Dean's Georgia campaign here. And you can see the video of the CNN Inside Politics that yours truly was interviewed on here.
Cell phone portability is right around the corner!. The industry's lame opposition to one of the more pro-consumer regulatory decisions handed down in the past few years didn't stand up in court. The cell phone companies do have one valid criticism: portability should be applied to home numbers as well so one can junk their home phone and just go mobile, if they so choose. Now, finally, you can change your cellular service without getting the dreaded 678 or, even worse, 470.
Grover Norquist likes to say that God put Republicans on Earth to lower taxes. In the South, something a little different is happening, owing to the historical ties to the Democratic party. Alabama's governor is trying to raise taxes while undergoing structural reforms.
The idea that a family of four starts paying income taxes after $4K of income should make even the WSJ's editorial page blush. Tax cuts all around sound great as long as no party is pointing out the tangible government programs that will be cut in response to lower revenues. I think the Republicans are taking a big risk with their current strategy. Citizens aren't stupid and if Social Security and Medicaid are cut in the future, an enraged army of seniors won't have any problem voting for tax increasers.
Regardless of what happens on the federal level, Alabama's governor is taking a huge risk. He's put his political career on the line via the same referendum process (the state legislature gets off easy this way) that cut short his predecessor's. I'll say one thing about Georgia: at least our legislature occasionally votes on important issues themselves instead of just passing along the buck.
You can tell that an actual Seinfeld fan filed this sidebar item about Seinfeld in the AJC. If I had to pick a favorite cultural contribution from this list, I'd pick Elaine's dancing (or Rochelle, Rochelle). There's got to be a whole subculture out there that traffics in the made up movies of the Seinfeld universe. With titles ranging from Ponce De Leon (George's favorite) to Sack Lunch (Elaine's), why would anybody see The English Patient?
Having some success with the Earthlink SPAMBlocker BETA. You can still let most of your stuff through, you just have to ok it once online. I still personally think that for email to be as efficient (on a marketing side) as snail mail is, there will have to be some sort of optional charge, preferably by individuals setting a certain price to receive email.
At present, it effectively costs spammers nothing to email me, thus, they don't bother to filter their lists in even the most basic of ways. I should get either penis or breast enlargement spam, but probably not both. If they had to pay me $.01 for delivery, they could at least get this right. If they had to pay $.20, which is about the cost of direct mail sent to my physical address, they would get a lot of other things right.
I would guess that most people would decide that their cost is somewhere in between. The main beneficiary of this kind of setup would be honesty. When I go to a website that has information I'm interested in, I often leave a fake email address if I'm required to register. If internet marketing was intelligent, I'd leave a real one. If some marketer has something that readers of TNR and the NME (perhaps a britpop singing Joe Lieberman doll) might be interested, it's in my interest to hear about it.
I'm not optimistic at all about Congress' various proposals to tackle the spam problem, such as the impossible to enforce idea of making spoofing illegal. Only ideas that keep in mind the following sad but true (yet made up) response to the Onion's What Do You Think will have any chance of working:
"Even more disturbing than this never-ending torrent of junk e-mail is the fact that, apparently, they must actually work once in a while." -- Chris Kingery, Systems Analyst