I’d thought about letting this go but it’s stuck in my craw. In James Taranto’s column this morning I saw this:

You can’t make this stuff up–but your tax dollars pay for the guys who do. Those would be guys like Ezra Mechaber, deputy director of email and petitions at the White House Office of Digital Strategy. (As an aside, have you ever noticed that the length of a professional title tends to be inversely correlated with the importance of the position?)

That piqued my interest for a number of reasons. For one thing the name. One of the miscellaneous items in my vast supply of useless trivia is that “mechaber” is Hebrew for “author”. It would be like having the name “Pseudonym”.

Another is the title. Back to that in a second.

I did a little prowling around and learned that Mr. Mechaber graduated from University of Rochester in 2011 with a bachelors degree in political science and religion, worked for a short time at a web startup, and then went to work for the White House. I’m not exactly sure what a dual major in politics and religion is good for. About 90% of web startups and fail and with the amount of time he had he could just about learn the location of the wash room. By just about any reckoning that makes him a beginner.

According to the Executive Schedule a “deputy director” is a very responsible position. Deputy directors earn about $175,000 a year. That leads me to one of two conclusions. One possibility is that he isn’t paid a deputy director’s salary and is actually an intern with a big title. That does an injustice to every genuine deputy director and puts something very misleading on his resume.

The other possibility is that he’s being paid $175,000. In what world is a junior without relevant credentials worth $175,000?

That may be a lot things but technocracy it ain’t.

Gallup is reporting that Americans have a strong anti-incumbent mood these days:

PRINCETON, NJ — The environment for congressional incumbents seeking re-election may be more challenging in 2014. With six months to go before the midterms, 22% of U.S. registered voters say most members of Congress deserve re-election, and 72% say they do not. The “deserve re-election” figure is on pace to be the lowest Gallup has measured in an election year.

Support for their own Congressmen points to the possibility of many incumbents losing their seats:

U.S. voters as a whole are more positive about their own member of Congress than about most members of Congress, as they have been since Gallup first asked these items in 1992. Currently, 50% of voters say their own member deserves re-election. This, too, is slightly more positive than in January (46%), but is similar to levels observed at the time of the elections in 1992, 1994, 2006, and 2010. Most of these years saw relatively high turnover in Congress.

This election will turn on who can bring out their voters. Negative advertising, the tool of choice these days, is not a particularly good one for energizing turnout.

I just love this NYT headline:

Girding for a Fight, McConnell Enlists His Wife

Whoever wrote that either has a great sense of humor or none at all.

My understanding of the “SaveOurGirls” hashtag campaign is that it began on Twitter among Nigerians as a spontaneous method of protesting the Goodluck government’s apparent indifference to the kidnapping of several hundred girls by Boko Haram in northeastern Nigeria. As such I think it’s completely appropriate.

My immediate reaction to the First Lady’s entering the campaign was discomfort and I’d like to explain why. When the president or First Lady or Speaker of the House or other major official or semi-official public figure enters into a popular campaign it has several effects. It attracts attention to the campaign. It coopts the campaign. Whether intended or not it gives the campaign political and even diplomatic meaning it might otherwise not have had. None of these are under the First Lady’s control. Her mere participation is enough.

I think that the main thing the U. S. should do with respect to the kidnappings and more generally with respect to the Nigerian government’s activities against Boko Haram is maintain a low profile. I think it’s a problem for Nigerians to solve and, should they need additional resources, for the African Union to solve. I’m uncomfortable with colonial powers taking a leading role in the matter. Or even honorary colonial powers.

I think that the much-publicized (and occasionally mocked) photo of the First Lady is a sincere expression of feeling on her part and, obviously, she’s entitled to her feelings. But as a public figure I’m not quite as sure that she’s entitled to express them publicly especially if that expression is taken as a commitment of American resources.

It’s been suggested that the participation of the First Lady puts additional pressure on the Goodluck government. I think that’s a fair argument in favor but I’m not completely convinced.

Discomfort on my part is not opposition. It’s discomfort and I’m trying to decide what I should think about all of this.

What should I think about U. S. participation in a clearly internal Nigerian problem? About “hashtag diplomacy”? Please help me decide.

Maybe it’s because I rarely read anything at Townhall.com but it’s been quite a while since I’ve read anything quite as foolish as this item from Dennis Prager. Here’s his central thesis:

They [ed. “the Left’] don’t care because the left is not interested in prosperity; the left is interested in inequality and in the environment. Furthermore, the worse the economic situation, the more voters are likely to vote Democrat. The worse the economic situation, the greater the number of people receiving government assistance; the greater the number of people receiving government assistance, the greater the number of people who will vote Democrat.

Therefore, both philosophically and politically, the left has no reason to be troubled by bad economic news. And it isn’t. It is troubled by inequality and carbon emissions.

I should preface my remarks with the reminder that my eyes tend to glaze over as soon as I read either “the Left” or “the Right”.

I wouldn’t presume to tell anybody what “the Left” wants any more than I would tell them what “the Right” wants. I don’t think either term is particularly meaningful and probably never has been in the United States and any such pronouncement is a tremendous exercise in over-generalization.

However, I do think there are different views of what constitutes prosperity and intelligent people can differ in their views on this subject. Minimizing downside risk and maximizing upside gain are two different strategies. Neither is correct. Neither is wrong. Which you prefer depends on your appetite for risk and what you might expect to gain.

I think that for the last forty years as a matter of national economic policy we’ve been rhetorically supporting minimizing downside risk while pragmatically favoring maximizing upside gain. I’m more interested in optimizing risk or gain. That requires thought and judgment and won’t energize either voters or campaign donors which explains its lack of popularity.

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, the “New Deal coalition” he forged maintained a grip on American politics for almost forty years—from 1932 to 1968. The New Deal coalition was composed of unions, liberals, white ethnics, blacks, and Southern whites. That the goals of these groups were frequently at odds did not seem to be a barrier to maintaining the coalition because they all thought they had something to gain.

I think that the Obama coalition is not only composed of different groups than the New Deal coalition but is different in kind, will behave differently than that prior coalition. Here’s Josh Kraushaar’s characterization of the Obama coalition:

White blue-collar voters, once a staple of Democratic coalitions past, have become estranged from their old political home over cultural issues. In their place are what my colleague Ron Brownstein labels “the coalition of the ascendant”—single women, minorities, and millennial voters.

I don’t believe that coalition is nearly as durable as the New Deal coalition. One thing of which we can be sure is that young voters won’t be young forever and as they mature I think we should expect that their interests will change. Whether that means that they’ll vote for somebody else or the programs they’ll insist on will change I couldn’t tell you. If recent history is any gauge it suggest they won’t vote at all.

That’s another difference. The New Deal coalition were reliable voters who would turn out in numbers at every election. Whether the “coalition of the ascendant” will be equally reliable remains to be seen.

Something I’ve pointed out from time to time is that once any political party has a solid majority in a district or state increasing the size of the majority within that district or state doesn’t help it a great deal. In terms of election results it doesn’t make much difference whether Obama wins New York by 51% of the vote or 100% of the vote. Megan McArdle has a post in which she points out the problem that running on income inequality has for Democrats:

New York’s new mayor swept into office on a campaign against inequality. President Barack Obama has made any number of speeches about the rich who don’t pay their fair share. And yet, nationwide, this has not translated into big gains for the Democrats who are pushing it. Why is a phenomenon that keeps being heralded as the defining issue of our time such weak tea at the ballot box?

As a new article from Bloomberg News explains, Democrats aren’t benefiting from hammering on inequality because almost all the areas with the worst inequality are already controlled by Democrats…

Here’s another interesting observation:

You can make a case that the difference between the Republican and Democratic politics of wealth lie in the difference between who tends to make up “the wealthy” in their districts. The rich of America’s affluent urban areas tend to be the beneficiaries, one way or another, of a global tournament economy in which markets are often close to “winner take all,” and vast sums can flow to people who are just a little bit better than their competitors. The wealthy in Republican districts, on the other hand, are more likely to be competing in local or national markets, not glamour industries, where sales are ground out one at a time. Because the sums involved are smaller, the wealth gap is also smaller — and business owners are less likely to be sympathetic to the idea that their success has a huge luck component.

What bugs me about income inequality as a political issue is that nobody who’s emphasizing it seems to have a solution for it and, worse, the solutions being proposed don’t really ameliorate the problem.

I wonder if Dan Drezner knows about this? The folks at the Pentagon who’ve got a contingency plan for just about everything have a contingency plan for dealing with a zombie apocalypse:

The U.S. military has always been the one place in government with a plan, forever in preparation mode and ready to yank a blueprint off the shelf for almost any contingency. Need a response for a Russian nuclear missile launch? Check. Have to rescue a U.S. ambassador kidnapped by drug lords? Yup, check, got that covered. How about a detailed strategy for surviving a zombie apocalypse? As it turns out, check.

The plan was apparently put together as a training exercise for assembling contingency plans. And, I assume, fun.

The plan reviews, extensively, the various phases of saving the world from zombie rule and reads not unlike the phases of a counterinsurgency campaign: from "shape" to "deter" to "seize initiative" to "dominate" to "stabilize" and, finally, in the final, confidence-building phase, "restore civil authority." That final phase includes the directive to "prepare to redeploy the forces to attack surviving zombie holdouts."

There are several aspects of this plan I’m curious about. It’s unclear to me, for example, how one would go about determining whether a member of Congress were a zombie.

I ran into something interesting this morning. As it turns out the Australian gastroenterology prof who did the 2011 study that kicked the interest in gluten-free diets into high gear has produced another much more rigorous study that contradicts his previous findings:

Analyzing the data, Gibson found that each treatment diet, whether it included gluten or not, prompted subjects’ to report a worsening of gastrointestinal symptoms to similar degrees. Reported pain, bloating, nausea, and gas all increased over the baseline low-FODMAP diet. Even in the second experiment, when the placebo diet was identical to the baseline diet, subjects reported a worsening of symptoms! The data clearly indicated that a nocebo effect was at work here — patients reported gastrointestinal distress without any apparent physical cause. Gluten wasn’t the culprit.

The present working hypothesis is that people are reacting to the FODMAPs. “FODMAPs” are short chain carbohydrates and everybody has difficulty in handling them. They’re the cause of the frequently, er, observed problems in digesting beans. Just about everything contains FODMAPs so avoiding them altogether isn’t a particularly good option. There are several different classes of FODMAPs (fructans, galactans, polyols), some people have more problems with one or another of these than the others, and the sensitivity to them appears to vary based on genetic background. Some people can’t eat beans. Others can’t eat crucifers (members of the cabbage family). Some can’t handle artificial sweeteners (many are FODMAPs). And so on.