CHRIST ON A CRECHE. Peggy Noonan is telling us about bad people again, this time the folks who want to ban nativity scenes:

They think that if only people would stop being religious, we wouldn't have religion around roiling people's emotions and making them violent. (If you say to them, "Man is prone to violence, and one of the things that tends to make his heart gentle is faith in God," their eyes widen in shock: That couldn't possibly be true!)

Ms. Noonan meets such interesting people, and says such interesting things to them. I wonder if she also sees leprechauns, and asks them where they keep their pots o' gold.

Her solution to anti-crechism is "to fill the public square with the signs and symbols of faith. It is not to banish them from the schools, it is to teach them in the schools... display a menorah and explain what it is... to display a crucifix or a cross and explain what it means to Christians. And, yes, the answer is to show a Koran and explain what it is." The kids should also sing Christmas carols and "other religious songs that are not Christian."

I'm all for it! The children can lift their voices in tribute to Buddah, and Zoroaster, and Lord Mahavira, and Gaia. And in the spirit of true ecumenicanalism, we can tell them about the worship of Satan, and crank some Black Sabbath.

Later comes my favorite line from the whole exercise:

"So I took Mary into the house, and she lived for three years in a closet. "

So that's what happened to her. Ms. Noonan also talks about the wonderful panoply of religious artifacts visible in her neighborhood, just down the road apiece from me in Cobble Hill, unmolested by the atheists who apparently all live on Park Avenue in the dark borough of Manhattan. "May the world in 2004 be more like Brooklyn," she concludes, "and may its arguments over religion and the public square be solved the Brooklyn way."

Here I must agree. Just a short distance from the madonnas and menorahs are several very nice gay bars, which coexist harmoniously with Mary Star of the Sea and the other neighborhood places of worship. If Ms. Noonan is okay with those, I'm okay with the little religious theme park she wants to set up. Just so long as she doesn't use my tax dollars to pay for it. Compassionate and conservative -- what a solution! Why, I'm feeling more Brooklyn already!

comments please

TEST. Well, as the Warden says in A Clockwork Orange, these new, ridiculous ideas have come at last:

comments please

LOVE ME, LOVE ME, LOVE ME, I'm a liberal, says the Christian Science Monitor's "Are U A Neocon?" quiz in response to my answers. (Okay, I made the title up, but basically it's an egghead version of one of those Quizilla things.)

The questions pertain to pre-emptive strikes, the Axis of Evil, the defense/domestic political balance, and other hot topics. The possible results are Neo-Conservative, Isolationist, Realist (!), and Liberal. So I guess me, Wolfowitz, and Pat Buchanan are all livin' in a dream world!

I got a kick out of the Monitor's descriptors for each result. Liberals, for example, "believe political solutions are inherently superior to military solutions." Gosh, how will we ever win elections with goofy ideas like that!

But the fix is in: look at the liberal examplars:

Historical liberal: President Woodrow Wilson
Modern liberal: President Jimmy Carter

Geez, why didn't they just use Percy Dovetonsils and Alan Colmes?

Thanks to Jim at Rittenhouse for the tip.

SOLDIERS' PAY. From Phil Carter's very thoughtful weblog, a Washington Post story on how the Army's using a little-known maneuver to keep soldiers on duty for longer than they expected:

According to their contracts, expectations and desires, all three soldiers should have been civilians by now. But Fontaine and Costas are currently serving in Iraq, and Eagle has just been deployed. On their Army paychecks, the expiration date of their military service is now listed sometime after 2030 -- the payroll computer's way of saying, "Who knows?"

The three are among thousands of soldiers forbidden to leave military service under the Army's "stop-loss" orders, intended to stanch the seepage of troops, through retirement and discharge, from a military stretched thin by its burgeoning overseas missions.

"It reflects the fact that the military is too small, which nobody wants to admit," said Charles Moskos of Northwestern University, a leading military sociologist.

We pay our servicemen shit; it's so bad that Wisconsin is contemplating chipping in to make up the difference between its native sons' and daughters' military pay and a living wage! And now we're holding 'em over by special request.

To be fair, an across-the-board pay raise is in the works. But it ain't much. Yes, I know that in time of war (however nebulously defined), troops may expect to be held over. But since everyone over in Iraq loves us (a highly-placed source tells me, and everyone), you'd think we'd need fewer rather than more troops.

DID YOU EVER FIND BIGS BUNNY ATTRACTIVE WHEN HE'D PUT ON A DRESS AND PLAY A GIRL BUNNY? I see the notorious homophobe John Derbyshire has proposed a "sexy-but-not-pretty" poll for males. (He ran one about women some months back. Derbyshire, by the way, is a grown man who writes books about math.)

When I read this Derb post about the male poll (ahem), I assumed his aim was to give the ladies in the audience some share of the frisson he'd enjoyed fantasizing about Ellen Barkin et alia in the previous poll. I see by his previous post, though, that he had something different in view:

Bates seems to illustrate the male side of the "pretty but not sexy" business I raised in a column some months ago. I always thought him an extremely attractive man, and supposed that if I were a woman, I would have some serious fantasies about him. Yet on the odd occasion I have raised this topic with women, I have got blank stares in return. "Alan Bates? No, nothing special. Why would you think that?...." It's an aspect of the Mars-Venus thing. Women generally have no clue what kind of woman men find attractive, and vice versa

Two things:

• Saying you would fantasize sexually about someone only under certain conditions means you're already fantasizing about him.
  
• Fantasizing about someone and then going around asking your girlfriends if they think he's cute means you want to marry him.

How long can Derb bang on that closet door before it collapses?

A LITTLE SANITY FROM MR. VIDAL. I've got the Sunday-morning political shows on TV now. They look a little dumber than usual to me, partly because they're in their year-end what's-it-all-mean mode (which races the shouting heads through a gauntlet of economic to military to legal issues so quickly that their normally reductive analyses become practically incoherent), but mostly because I read Gore Vidal's Washington, D.C. yesterday.

That book, published in 1967, was the first of Vidal's historical fictions (to be followed, in production if not in sequence, by Burr, 1876, Lincoln, et alia), and establishes the themes that run through its successors: the ethics of power, the struggle (not altogether unfriendly) between the self-made and the patrician, the uses of the press, the degeneration of political culture, and, of course, the author's Epicurean view of natural relations between men, and between men and women. (This last is really the underpinning for the political drama: Vidal sees us as selfish creatures who, when we strive for the good as opposed to the merely convenient, do so almost by accident, as a means of attaining something better when the pursuit of power, for whatever reason, ceases or never begins to satisfy.)

The plot, such as it is, runs some ambitious Washingtonians through the Roosevelt and Eisenhower administrations. Blaise Sanford runs a paper, James Burden Day is a perennial Senator; their children and charges marry, have affairs, choose careers, and plot; one of these, Clay Overbury, becomes an immensely successful politician, while another, Peter Sanford, runs a magazine, at first desultorily and later with a grudging sense of purpose.

There are, naturally, good and bad people in the book, or rather good and bad forces with which the characters align themselves. Though this is clearer when seen through the prism of his later writing, in Washington, D.C. Vidal already hints at the less propitious course: when the natural appetite for power is ungoverned by good sense or at least countervailing appetites, enormous follies result that wound the purpose of the nation. In this book, Red-baiting is the most egregious example (brief appearance by hissable McCarthy); today, of course, Vidal sees in the creepy confluence of Christian Fundamentalism and neo-imperialism a likely fatal assault on the remnants of what was once a pretty good Republic.

In 1967, there seemed less of a crisis. Though many of the people in Washington, D.C. are trying to influence the course of government, they at least possess some sense of priorities, and the tone, carried by bitchy conversations, is often breezy. (One of Vidal's stylistic signatures is his ability to sustain drawing-room dialogues without letting his constant, simultaneous translation of intent deflate them.) The main characters are basically serious people playing for serious stakes, but each also has a strong sense of himself, which has the effect of making them all seem rather cynical. Even Overbury, on his surface the most pedestrian of glad-handlers, has private thoughts about people and power that would credit a habitue of Versailles; even Day, who suffers rather more than the others from the necessity of corruption and ambiguity in his line of work, and at times behaves foolishly because of it, tends toward the long view, though in a few flashes that view is very grim indeed:

Burden looked out the window. They were on an unfamiliar road with houses to the right and left, each with its high television anttena drawing from the air crude pictures and lying words. Oh, detestable age! he thought, hating it all...

Padded payrolls and illegal campaign contributions were the usual crimes, momentarily embarrassing to the legislator involved but seldom causing much damage. Americans had always believed that their representatives were corrupt, since, given the same opportunity, they would be, too. As it was, the common folk daily cheated one another, misrepresenting the goods that they sold and otherwise conducting themselves like their governors...

Vidal writes popular, not literary, fiction, though some of us think it is literature because it is built sturdily enough to be read out of season, and because it offers a detailed image (drawn by, as Vidal never tires of telling interviewers, one who knows well the lay of the land) of its time and place. It is interesting that, despite the palpable world-weariness of his view, Vidal keeps churning it out (Peter Sanford turns up again in The Golden Age, published only a few years ago), and also continues to produce long essays on the state of this nation from his villa in Italy.

I don't know how many of us who were not born into Vidal's circumstances, and lack his apparently constitutional imperviousness to bullshit of all sorts, could completely adopt his mordant detachment without giving up entirely on politics, and maybe life. But some people serve as good examples to us even if we we can't go the final mile. Vidal gets a lot of shit for his lonely defense of America as it was, and seems to take pleasure in the low character of these assaults. Here is a description from one of his essays on his appearance on one of those shouting-head shows I was watching:

I was once placed between two waxworks on a program where one of the pair was solemnly indentified as a 'liberal'; appropriately, he seemed to have been dead for some time, while the conservative had the vivacity of someone on speed. For half an hour it is the custom of this duo to 'crossfire' cliches of the sort that would have gotten them laughed out of the Golden Branch Debating Society at Exeter. On air, I identified the conservative as a liberal and vice versa. The conservative fell into the trap. 'No, no!' he hyperventilated. 'I'm the conservative!' (What on earth they think those two words mean no one will ever know.)

I'm glad he's still around. It means that we're not completely nuts, yet.

COWBOYS AND HOLSTEINS. Scrolling through the Mad Cow news I found that there is such a thing as a Disaster News Network, devoted to really big and bad events. If you're feeling too happy sometime, give it a visit!

Anyway, from their coverage of the U.S. case, I learned that the USDA has fingered a Canadian cow -- "one of a herd of 74 cattle shipped from Alberta to the U.S. in August 2001" -- as the true culprit. And that other nations are in a bit of a panic about U.S. beef now:

If the sick cow is confirmed to be from Canada, the U.S. might possibly retain its "disease free" status. By Saturday, the U.S. had lost 90 percent of its beef exports because of its first case of mad cow disease.

More than two-dozen foreign nations have banned the import of U.S. beef, though USDA officials have insisted the meat is safe.

This seems like an area where the opinion of the rest of the world does have some bearing on how well the U.S. performs economically. I wonder if the nations that threw up bans are at all influenced by the USDA trend toward less rather than more regulation.

Frontline recently examined the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) meat inspection system that the USDA adopted in 1998, and reported, "Previously, federal meat inspectors had been limited to visually inspecting carcasses in processing plants; the new system placed the responsibility for developing a comprehensive safety-procedures program on the companies themselves, and required that they conduct scientific testing of bacteria levels in the meat. The inspectors are to monitor the companies' compliance with their own plans." (emphasis added)

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and seems to have no direct bearing on the Mad Cow case. But at a time when EU countries are hot for standards on food, particularly beef, they may observe our tendency to let large producers run their own inspections, for example, and be less inclined to give us the benefit of the doubt.

The trend 'round these parts is anti-regulation, goodness knows. Stories like this one about the international regulation of banana imports make us laugh. But if circumstances make it easy for us to flip off foreigners when it comes to matters of war and peace, that may not be so easy when it comes to matters of buying and selling.

UPDATE. Sisyphus Shrugged has more and, naturally, better.

FUCK GATT, FUCK NAFTA. Matthew Yglesias thinks Bob Herbert is wrong to worry about the exodus of American white collar jobs to India:

Say we changed things around and more Americans made more money, more Indians made less money, and all people everywhere had to pay somewhat more for their software. How is that really better? Because it's better for Americans?

Short answer, Matt: Yes. I'm very happy to see consumers worldwide pay a few more pennies so our own economy doesn't fall into the toilet.

The threat to U.S. jobs is real and I wouldn't mind a little protectionism right about now. I know it's unfair, and my sympathies go to the subcontinent, which has been doing a good job of attracting business -- but I live in America and want our citizens to prosper first.

This is not about agricultural subsidies, where a few pennies' worth of fluctuation means starvation for a number of people. Yes, I know that tech activities affect the ability of India and other countries to meet their financial obligation, and that the fiscal health of the U.S. also relies upon global trade. Those are big issues, but first things first: our race to the bottom is getting a little too close to the finish line, and it's time to reverse course.

So fuck NAFTA and GATT. However well these have been managed to benefit American businesses, they're a net loss for American workers. Yet even the Democratic presidential candidates (with the rousing exception of Dennis Kucinich) act as if they were part of the Bill of Rights.

You want to know how Democrats can win in 2004? Here's a great, yawning need that the do-nothings in the GOP and the DLC are only making worse. Howard Dean, step up and win.

MERRY CHRISTMAS.

Angels from the realms of glory
Stars shone bright above
Royal David's city
Was bathed in the light of love

Jesus Christ was born today
Jesus Christ was born
Jesus Christ was born today
Jesus Christ was born

Lo, they did rejoice
Fine and pure of voice
And the wrong shall fail
And the right prevail

Jesus Christ was born today
Jesus Christ was born
Jesus Christ was born today
Jesus Christ was born
And we're gonna get born now

-- Alex Chilton

GUNBLOG DIPLOMACY. A typically bright and provocative post at CalPundit asks why Iraq war supporters have not been more distressed by the lack of WMD evidence after the fact. All the responses have been interesting, but one by "Ben" datestamped December 23, 8:29 am seems to boil the cons' case down most aptly:

...The war in Iraq (as I saw it) was primarily about 9/11. (Before anyone screams about "no direct connection between Saddam and OBL, etc.", please realize that I don't care about that). As a matter of US national security, we must remake the Middle East, one nation at a time. This can be done through a combination of diplomacy, economics, war and whatever other tactic advances the cause. Iraq was as good a place to start as any other (and probably better than most for the reasons outlined above).

Iraq was also about sending messages to our other enemies in the Middle East. Hopefully, they will now understand that their bad acts draw a respons from us that will lead to bad consequences for them. Such an understanding on their part will encourage the peaceful resolution (on favorable terms) of issues with our other enemies. In other words, this makes continued terrorism and war sponsored by other rogue regimes less likely.

(Sidebar to alert Amygdala and others that this was an exceptionally well-spoken post and does not violate our covenant against trawling.)

I'd like to thank Ben who, despite the multisyllabic and compound-sentence cloud cover, tells it like it is. Be aware, folks, that this country really is embarked on a course of blowing the shit out of countries in order to send messages.

In support of our drug policy, for instance, we might occupy Amsterdam, London, and other cities famous for their off-message policies of more-than-zero tolerance.

In support of our pharmaceutical policies regarding AIDS, we might attack South Africa, which first imported generic HIV drugs contrary to Big Pharma's wishes.

And once we ram that Defense of Marriage Act through, Belgium and the Netherlands will feel our wrath!

Our policies, the best minds of our generation have determined, are best promoted by military force. It ought to work as well as it did for the Romans. And maybe even as long!

YADDA YADDA, GOVERNOR! "Good news, Lenny! We reversed your conviction!"

"What? Are you putting me on with that? (whistles) Man, that's -- lemme see that paper --"

"See, it says here Governor George Pataki just wiped your New York bust."

"Wow. I mean, (whistles) groovy but talk about a day late and a dollar short -- what, are they gonna reanimate my corpse and let me host the MTV Awards now? 'Good evening ladies and gentlemen... ah, I know I look a little moldy, but screw it, so does Keith Richards!' (throws down paper) Ah, shit, I wouldn't want to do that lousy gig anyway. All those little schmucks sucking up to record executives in their $500 Dolce & Gabbana t-shirts, sick red eyes, tap-dancing on the parquet floor... I'd have to explain the bits to them, I'd have to bring out a newspaper like Mort Sahl..."

"Oh, but the kids are hip now, Lenny!"

"Hip, get the hell outta here -- they think wrestling's legit, are you kidding me with that? And they have this American Idol thing, makes Pat Boone look like Little Richard. Clay Aiken, are you jerking me around -- Johnny Ray could kick his ass! (mimes smacking someone around; sings to the tune of 'Cry") 'If your suh-WEET-heart -- doesn't KNOW -- you're schtupping some guh-UY -- (speaks) POW! POW! C'mon Clay, clean yourself up, we're going to Rock Hudson's place to do show tunes for Nancy Reagan!' Man. At least back in the old days I had a really tight little crowd, you know, and they were kinda square, sure, guys dressed like rabbis, girls in bas-mitzvah dresses and three inches of makeup waiting for some high-class dyke to rescue them -- always looking at the bar, you know, some skinny chick drinking Jim Beam straight, eye contact, head nods, (falsetto) 'Nigel, I'm going to the powder room,' chick comes back three days later with Mattachine Society pamphlets, (coarse voice) 'Nigel, bubby, the patriachy is over, leave the Miles Davis records I loaned you with my roommate or we're all gonna come over there and set your African tribal masks on fire.'"

"Lenny, come on. They did you a solid here."

"Solid? What solid? This Governor, he's from what, Peekskill? You ever been to Peekskill? I knew a magician did a gig there, he pulled a rabbit out of his hat, they burned him as a witch! When they want a bonfire for the homecoming dance they set a bum on fire and throw him into the cornfield! Look at the guy, a major schlub, he should be dropping the handkerchief at a tractor pull, never mind Governor. You think he's heard my bits? Forget about it. If they had a Cardinal like Sheen nowadays, this wouldn't be happening. But now they got this schnook from Bridgeport -- I mean, you ever been to Bridgeport? -- ten minutes after they make him a Cardinal, they find out he was running a whorehouse for little boys. (Father Flotsky voice) 'Y'say Father O'Reilly gave yez communion and it tasted like a really big finger with paste comin' out tha end? Mother a' Mercy! Here's ten grand, keep yer dirty mouth shoot!'"

"But Lenny..."

"You think I don't know what's going on? I'm dead forty years and they pull this? Politics, baby -- nothing but politics. Guys have been working blue for forty years, but it's all bullshit -- I mean you turn on cable and it's like all the comics are like that cop at my trial -- 'Ah, he said cocksucker, your honor, and then he said Jackie Kennedy hauled her ass to save her ass, and then he said motherfucker' -- I mean it's like they know the words but they don't know the music, man, or why it was necessary to say those words in the first place."

"Lenny, I can't argue with you, and you know what? The way things are going in this country, they'll probably reverse this decision pretty soon anyway."

"In the shithouse for good this time. Forget about it."

XMAS MAILBAG. At The Corner, Jonah Goldberg is posting letters about the death of Howard Dean's brother Charlie, who got whacked in Laos in the early '70s. One is from an "NRO reader in California" who claims to have known the Dean boys back in the day, and tells a heartbreaking story:

Charlie was a popular guy (much more outgoing than Howard), a McGovern worker, University of North Carolina, preppie… no chance he went into the CIA from that background... However, I am not going to criticize Howard for the controversy this week about listing Charlie as a possible POW. Charlie’s death was a terrible tragedy, and I know it had a huge impact on Howard... Any of us might wish that our brother died on a mission with some purpose, rather than just an ill-advised adventure, even if we know (as Howard himself has said many times) that the CIA theory is wrong. This theory perhaps lurks in Howard’s heart... To this day, the emotions must make it difficult for him to think or speak clearly about Charlie.

I'n't that nice? Don't you wish you had friends like this? Run well as a Democrat for President of the United States, and you'll find many such friends you never knew you had.

This has inspired me to share with my own readers a note I recently received on the subject of George W. Bush. I have as little reason to doubt its veracity as Goldberg, drunk as he is, has to doubt his own correspondent's.

You shouldn't be so hard on ol' W. He suffered greatly at Harvard. He pretended not to care about what people thought of him, but often expressed his hurt in quiet ways, like having guys who pissed him off blackballed in their chosen fields. There was this one brilliant business student, on scholarship I believe, who got much better grades than W but found himself unwanted by every employer he contacted after graduation. I suspect he went to his self-inflicted death never realizing the pain he'd caused our President-to-be.

Poor George never really got over the ribbing he took in school, which affected his relations with others for years. I recall talking with him in the executive offices of the Texas Rangers after Rafael Palmeiro got himself traded to Baltimore. "Mexican bastard never liked me," he said. "Well, I know a doctor down in Maryland that'll fix him up." I couldn't say for sure whether Rafael's erectile dysfunction had anything to do with this, but I do know that W would laugh maniacally whenever one of those Viagra commercials came on the TV.

This is not even to mention the time, right after the 1992 elections, when I came to the Texas Governor's office and found W stabbing a pillow with Saddam Hussein's face glued to the front.

When George stopped drinking, we all thought he'd turned a corner, but alas, we came to realize that he'd only replaced Scotch with horse tranquilizers, heroin, codeine, OxyContin, and some experimental drug his father's friends in the CIA shipped to him from Langley. "I tole that book-readin' bitch I'd give up the grain and grape," he'd tell me as one of his servants injected the light brown fluid into his spine, "but I never said nothin' about stoppin' this medicine for my 'stress'!" Then he'd wink at me, or rather, his eyelids would flutter spasmodically before he passed out.

So if ol' W says and does some things that don't quite make sense, I suggest you cut him some slack, lest he take a personal dislike to you, too.

Sincerely,
An alicublog reader from Texas

PUTTING THE "JESUS FUCKING CHRIST" BACK INTO XMAS!Pandagon's Jesse (God that sounds like Herlofs Marte to me, maybe because he'll be burned at the stake someday) has keen eyes, and has noticed what a lot of us perhaps willfully failed to see: that the Xmas illo at National Review is pretty bizarre.

Hey, you should have seen it before they changed it:

NOT ON AGENDA: •DEDICATE •CONSECRATE •HALLOW... Crooked Timber's Chris Bertram tips us to a PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg Address. A good picture of what's wrong with, well, everything.

I KNOW THIS SILLY LIBERAL WHO SAID A BUNCH OF SILLY THINGS. I expect this kind of thing from Victor Davis Hanson and Homer Simpson but not from Tacitus. Disappointing.

At least in T's case the quotes sound authentic. But I still wonder how it is all these conservative guys keep their liberal friends after mocking them in public. I guess we really are a bunch of wimps!

PROPS. I don't say enbough good things about Altercation, but today Charles Pierce, always a good writer, dropped a turn of phrase that bears wider disbursement:

I always had a soft spot for Tom Kean -- even though he said some things about poor Mike Dukakis from which you'd have to dial 18 numbers to place a call to The Pale.

Style, my friends -- as Raymond Chandler said, the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.

CAN'T HELP LOVING DAT MAN OF MINE. Is Andrew Sullivan suffering from holiday depression? His response to an incomplete quote in the Times is nearly delusional:

One small problem: the president did not say that ["I will support a constitutional amendment which would honor marriage between a man and a woman...]." He said: "If necessary, I will support a constitutional amendment..." In the context of religious right demands for immediate support for the FMA, that's a big difference."

In other words, though Bush has told the world that he's dead against gay marriage -- not even Sullivan denies this -- since he'll only use the FMA to stop it if he really needs to, the Times account is "what amounts to a lie about Bush's position."

"Email [the Times' ombudsman] at public@nytimes.com," cries Sullivan from his parapet, "and demand a correction but more importantly an explanation for the doctored quote..."

I wonder: were I to send Sullivan a letter, stating, "I want you dead, Sullivan. If necessary, I will kill you myself with my bare hands," he would fail to report it as a death threat, on semantic grounds.

Sullivan's so full of shit, I'm beginning to wonder is he's really gay.

SPEAKING OF DICKENS, that's one sterling parody of conservative thought that Jennifer Graham snuck into the National Review. Graham pretends to be a privileged cunt whose run-in with a misbehaving single mother turns her from a "squishy" conservative to a proudly "compassionless" one. She even quotes Scrooge approvingly, and bylines herself with a full middle name in order, one supposes, to make her literary alter-ego sound more annoyingly patrician.

How could Jonah and the boys not know they were being gulled? Drunk, one supposes.

HUMBUG. Everything is about politics, didn't you know? John J. Miller at National Review:

[Dickens'] A Christmas Carol isn't an especially conservative book, but there's no arguing that Dickens buried a conservative sentiment in the heart of this paragraph. The phrase "dead as a door-nail" was as much a cliché to Dickens as it is to us. It is possible to think of an innovation that improves upon that old standby. But "dead as a coffin-nail" doesn't have nearly the same ring. It seems better in theory, but it fails to work as well in practice: This, in fact, is the essence of liberalism. Old Marley simply needs to be "as dead as a door-nail." He can be no other thing.

"I dunno, John, it's a nice little essay, but where's the liberal-bashing?" "Alright, Jonah, I'll stick something in -- but I warn you: it won't make much sense." "Since when have we cared about that?"

HOLA, BRACERO! ERES UN "FREE AGENT"! An interesting report from Northeastern University, summarized here, looks at two Department of Labor surveys, and the very different pictures they give of our employment situation.

While the Current Population Survey (CPS) "estimates the number of employed persons has risen by nearly 2.4 million," between November 2001 and November 2003, says the summary, "the CES survey indicates that the number of wage and salary jobs in November 2003 is still some 726,000 below its November 2001 level. This chasm -- to the tune of some 3.11 million jobs -- is historically unique..."

What makes the difference more stark is that the two measurers recorded a roughly similar number of jobs in 2001.

The authors seem to lean toward the more encouraging CPS number, but their analysis of the difference in outlooks is less than encouraging: the CPS, they say,

provides a much broader measure of employment, including farm workers, the self-employed, household workers, contract workers, unpaid family workers, private household workers as well as those working for pay off the books, including legal and illegal immigrants not taken into account by the CES survey.

Also, they say, "the bulk of the difference appears to be attributable to the increased use by firms of independent contractors who will be counted by the CPS but not by the CES, and to the growth of employment in the informal economy, including the hiring of many undocumented immigrants over the past three years."

So, if you take into account "informal economy" laborers such as home-based piece-workers, seasonal fruit-pickers, temp workers who (personal experience leads me to believe) probably can't get a steady gig, those who are paid under the table (and if you've ever had a job like that, you know how dicey those can be), and those who labor without pay, things look pretty good. If not, things suck.

This is a little reductive, of course, and the authors have some good points about what constitutes a true picture of the economy. But I do believe they're more sanguine about the "informal economy" than those of us who are not gainfully employed economists might be. Advocates laud the coming of "Free Agent Nation" as a golden age of autonomy for the American worker. Of course, the American worker was largely autonomous before the dawn of the Labor Movement, and was routinely and royally screwed because of it.

In some ways, it seems, these economists and econometricians are like TV sitcom producers: they act as if everyone is a successful young professional, with tons of options and an impossible large New York apartment.