Categorical Aperitif

(1) Under the Bush Administration, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has become an impotent joke. The whole story is worth a read, but it's the details like these that really make the heart sing:

The cranes that hover like a swarm of giant praying mantises over the piers at the Long Beach, Calif., port are concrete evidence of how global trade has transformed the safety commission’s task in keeping American consumers safe.

The towering cranes lift container after container of goods from China, which sends more products through the neighboring Los Angeles and Long Beach ports than to any others in the United States. In just the last decade, imports of Chinese consumer products nationwide have surged to $246 billion from $62 billion, according to agency statistics. Nearly 20 percent of the consumer products for sale in the country today are Chinese-made, compared to 5 percent in 1997.

And some of them may be dangerous. By law, the commission can mandate safety standards only after voluntary measures have failed. Chinese officials and factory owners have said, however, that they do not feel compelled to meet the voluntary standards.

“Time and again, through the translators, they made clear they did not understand this concept,” said Nick Marchica, an engineer and former agency senior aide. “What they told us was, ‘As far as we are concerned, voluntary means we don’t have to.’ ”

Gosh, we'd better hurry up and scrap the rest of our regulatory frameworks before the Chinese surpass us completely in the Capitalism Without Conscience department </competitive enterprise institute>.

Mr. Marchica said some Chinese products, like electrical extension cords or children’s jewelry, frequently violate the standards. But the consumer agency is handicapped in finding those goods or blocking them from reaching American buyers. The commission has no inspectors at factories overseas. And at ports in the United States, the agency is overwhelmed.

In Los Angeles area ports, through which 15 million truck-size containers move a year, a single agency inspector, working two or three days a week, spot-checks incoming shipments. Agency officials would not permit the inspector to speak with a reporter, but colleagues said her assignment was all but hopeless. “It is completely ineffective,” one agency official said.

Predictably, members of the Federalist Society are involved in the pillaging and a government that attempts to protect its citizens from unscrupulous business practices is derided as a "federal nanny." Oh, it's good to hear the classics on a Sunday.

(2) There was a big same-sex sex scandal in Idaho back in 1955, when Larry Craig was just a boy. This first featured a number of prominent whitebread male citizens caught dallying with teenage boys but then spread with the accompanying hysteria to ruin the lives of adults involved in quiet consensual relationships. The authors suggest that Senator Craig's intransigence might owe something to lessons learned many years earlier:

By the time snow fell, scores of men had been questioned. Sixteen were charged, including one who was hauled back from San Francisco, where he had fled when the scandal broke.

Of the 16 men who were formally charged, only one, the one who denied it all, who fought the case through a brutal trial, beat the charges. His steadfast denials, coupled with questions about the evidence against him, persuaded the jury to let him go.

The lesson of the 1955 scandal was clear: sexual misconduct — or even the mere perception that one is gay — could ruin a man’s reputation. But steadfast, straight-in-the-eye denial just might get him off the hook.

(3) Another op-ed contributor comes right out and says that Craig was entrapped. She bases this claim on the findings of an (in)famous 1970 dissertation that examined the elaborate system of codes in public-place liaisons. Basically,

various signals — the foot tapping, the hand waving and the body positioning — are all parts of a delicate ritual of call and answer, an elaborate series of codes that require the proper response for the initiator to continue. Put simply, a straight man would be left alone after that first tap or cough or look went unanswered.

Why? The initiator does not want to be beaten up or arrested or chased by teenagers, so he engages in safeguards to ensure that any physical advance will be reciprocated. As Mr. Humphreys put it, “because of cautions built into the strategies of these encounters, no man need fear being molested in such facilities.”

Mr. Humphreys’s aim was not just academic: he was trying to illustrate to the public and the police that straight men would not be harassed in these bathrooms. His findings would seem to suggest the implausibility not only of Senator Craig’s denial — that it was all a misunderstanding — but also of the policeman’s assertion that he was a passive participant. If the code was being followed, it is likely that both men would have to have been acting consciously for the signals to continue.

[...]

Clearly, whatever Mr. Craig’s intentions, the police entrapped him. If the police officer hadn’t met his stare, answered that tap or done something overt, there would be no news story. On this point, Mr. Humphreys was adamant and explicit: “On the basis of extensive and systematic observation, I doubt the veracity of any person (detective or otherwise) who claims to have been ‘molested’ in such a setting without first having ‘given his consent.’ ”

The author does not explore the implications re. Tucker Carlson. Pity.

(4) Meanwhile, Bush has been talking to a former Texas Monthly writer about what he's going to do once his (p)residency is over. Caution: you might not want to read this one if the thought of that man going on to a long, comfortable life of faux ranching and getting paid thousands of dollars a pop in wingnut welfare money to give insipid, predictable speeches makes your veins pop with righteous anger or your soul sink into despondency.

(5) Finally, libertarian Reason editor Nick Gillespie reviews a new book by Matt Bai about attempts to turn the Democratic Party into a progressive powerhouse. Apparently, the problem is that Democrats are shallow and lack big ideas—claims buttressed, I gather, by Bai's relentless accumulation of incriminating details, such as Rob Reiner being rude at a meeting once and Markos Moulitsas not reading Friedrich Hayek. Meh. I'm particularly baffled by this assertion from Gillespie's mournful conclusion: "Our political system works best — or is at least more interesting — when big ideas are being bandied about, both within parties and between them." Well, maybe. But it seems to me that what Democrats really need if they want to be a progressive force in these regressive times is not "big ideas" but rather a proud, loud respect for some time-honored ideas:

• no one, including the President, is above the law;
• respect for civil and human rights may not be set aside except in cases of direst emergency—and frankly, today's terrorism threat just does not qualify;
• economies exist for the sake of people, not vice versa;
• governments exist to serve their people, not to help channel wealth and power toward a corporate elite;
• the desires of a few to maximize profits do not outweigh the rights of the many to fair wages, consumer and environmental protections, etc.

None of these strike me as terribly radical ideas, yet Republicans have been in de facto opposition to each one of them for decades—and the results are now painfully apparent in Iraq, New Orleans, the housing market, the emergency rooms, etc. etc. etc. I doubt that either Times writer Bai or libertarian Gillespie is terribly sympathetic with them, though, so perhaps it's not surprising that they downplay progressive activism by prattling about a dearth of "big ideas" and trotting out troubling anecdotes about limousine liberals. See Joan Walsh for a longer, deeper dissection of Bai; she at least does not buy into the mythology about how Republicans win because they're "the party of ideas."

The one thing I wish Democrats would learn from Republicans is how to bash the media effectively. I don't want them to turn into mirror images of those wingnuts who scream "liberal bias!" whenever the media tells them something they don't want to hear, regardless of whether it's true, relevant, significant, etc.; however, I do wish they would get better about fighting back when the media treats them unfairly, gins up fake controversies about them, and so on. We had a great example recently, when Barack Obama's wife made an innocuous comment about how the couple arranges their schedules to ensure that their children are not neglected thanks to the heavy demands of campaigning—only to have media outlet after media outlet rip her quotation from its context, selectively edit and present it, and then treat it as part of a demeaning "catfight" narrative wherein the remark was really a cheap shot at Hillary Clinton. I don't particularly care for either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, but I personally would love it if the candidates made a habit of pointing out stuff like this and going after the various reporters, talking heads, internet gossips, etc. that thrive on this kind of idiocy. I don't know if "fight back hard when the media mistreat you" would count as a Bai/Gillespie "big idea," but I know I'm not the only American who would like to see Democrats put it into practice far more often.