Protectionism anyone?

On Monday, I have a debate in my Political Economy class addressing the question, "Is regional integration in the best interests of its adherents?" To no surprise, I'm on the affirmative side essentially arguing whether or not free trade is a good thing. The answer seems so obvious to me that admittedly, I'm having a very tough time coming up with counter-arguments to free trade. The benefits seem obvious: free trade utilizes Ricardo's wonderful theory of comparative advantage, thus maximizing a given state's total wealth. Sure there are winners and losers, as Stolper-Samuelson and Heckscher-Olin suggest, but overall the effects net positive, and in many cases, way positive. Given proper compensation (yes, I said it), Pareto optimal outcomes are possible. It doesn't take a Utilitarian to see the benefits of free trade. Clearly, certain domestic groups have reasons to oppose free trade. But protectionism makes actual sense in few hypothetical situations and even fewer real life situations. No rational economic thinker should oppose, at the very least, the concept of free trade.

But as recent evidence suggests, this is not the case. As The Ennobler has mentioned before, our president does not have a pro-trade voting record and, despite claims that he supports free trade, has given little reason to suggest otherwise. On the other hand, his economic team is comprised of some of the best in the business, almost all of whom do support free trade. Unfortunately, many of his fellow politicians in the Legislative Branch hold some particularly protectionist beliefs. This is worrisome for many reasons, but especially the fact that protectionism typically increases during economic downturns. Following recent provisions, Bill Lane said:

Any student of history will tell you that one of the most significant mistakes of the 1930s is when the U.S. embraced protectionism. It had a cascading effect that ground world trade almost to a halt, and turned a one-year recession into the Great Depression.

Hopefully, the leaders of our country and, in particular, our President are students of history.

Ave Atque Vale: John Updike

John Updike died of lung cancer on Tuesday at the age of 76. One of the most prolific writers of the modern era, Updike wrote memorable novels about the American small town, the American middle-class suburb, sex, death and the divine. From time to time he’d write about baseball.

David Foster Wallace once grouped Updike among “the Great Male Narcissists who've dominated postwar fiction.” He was not endearing himself to the legendary author (if it wasn’t apparent enough, Updike was specifically termed the “Champion Literary Phallocrat”). Updike’s recent novel Terrorist may have been his least accomplished work. His most moving creations behind him, perhaps the Phallocrat should have made a full late-life transition to criticism. It’s no matter, for he’s gone now and his canon can be appreciated for the national treasure it is without expression of disappointment in decline or anxiousness for a more humble literary tradition to form on our watch.

Part of understanding Updike is an avoidance of one’s admittedly well-nurtured aversion to the less-than-ennobling aspects of our culture. Brooke Allen called him “the high priest of the sexual revolution”: in Couples and The Witches of Eastwick and the Rabbit series and almost everything written through the 1980’s there were sexual encounters, messy divorces and self-gratification of the highest order. There was full-fledged eroticism at every turn, and Updike struggled with being so unbelievably good at producing it.

Of course, the issue was never a bodice-ripper in emperor’s clothes as much as a generation of writers, who seemingly all hated their own fathers, coming of age at a time when Updike had been bold enough to challenge the moral wasteland of the beatniks. He represented a stern challenge to the 'sexual revolution' he proselytized at the foot of, exposing the depression and self-hatred that plagued a society of disordered passions. His most famous work, Rabbit Run, was written in response to Kerouac’s On the Road. It said, “This is what happens when a young American family man goes on the road – the people left behind get hurt.”

The critics may have detested Updike’s seemingly absurd lack of personal anguish over the years. After all, he was an artist, though he benefited from never torturing himself over an elusive essence of cool or a transcendent aesthetic of some other kind. He was never manufacturing something in himself. What he was constantly working out in his writing was related to sex and death and the milieus he subjected himself to as he lived, but it was never really about those things. What was most important to him were “the pleasures of parenting, the comforts of communal belonging, the exercise of daily curiosity, and the widely met moral responsibility to make the best of each stage of life, including the last.” His work may not have been modest, but he was.

Nobody likes a writer who is comfortable with his life, and his passive Protestantism was irksome in its complacency. To Updike, the world was divine and physically beautiful, and so were all of its subjects. Even the common element was deserving of flowery prose: Harry Angstrom may not deserve the love of the reader, but he earned the devotion of the author because he was situated in and emanated from a world of beauty. Updike put in more effort than most in scraping away the colorlessness as a matter of philosophy.

Updike’s characters were cut out of a distinctly American fabric and shaped by distinctly American habits. As such, he was a distinctly American writer. He was, by most accounts, a kind and generous and pious man. His artistic range was commendable in itself, but his best work was of the domestic sort. Jeet Heer argued that “no one wrote better than John Updike about what it means to be a husband and a father, about the hearth as place of emotional warmth and also a trap, about the family as a cornerstone of life.”

Updike published work until the very end, for better or worse materially, but always for better in the sense that a sincere attempt at conveying the happiness that comes with an assuredness in the good of the world is always welcome. As is the hope that it may one day prevail in our discourses on culture and perpetually exist in the hearts of the appreciative.

Boredom in the Wilderness of Gadgets

It is a view widely acknowledged to be true that any technology providing a hitherto unrealized capability must be a source of human freedom. That is to say, the undeniably astounding advances made by scientists and engineers through the centuries have had a profoundly liberating effect on us as members of the human race. We have been granted freedom from the scourge of many infectious diseases, freedom from the toil of planting and harvesting crops by hand, freedom from the constraints of geographic space, and freedom from the scarcity and expense of thousands of commercial goods.

Most recently, and more than any civilization in the history of the world, we have been treated to a vast array of attempts to free us from our boredom. At the risk of sounding like a cantankerous old geezer (a risk I take with ever-increasing frequency), I would term our American non-culture a “Wilderness of Gadgets.” In this wilderness, we are promised utterly limitless entertainment options no longer constrained by a lack of portability. The freedom from boredom afforded by movies, television, video games, digital communication and the Internet can now leave the living room and be enjoyed anytime, anywhere. The year is 2009, and everyone is finally interested.

Unfortunately, these developments in consumer technology do not so much create freedom as take it away. We see this most immediately in the form of that paradigm of our young century, the Blackberry. By means of this device, thousands of businesspeople have been made accountable for their work emails every hour of every day, from Pawtucket to Pyongyang. In this case, “wireless technology” simply means that the shackles are invisible to the naked eye. Thousands of eager young professionals have learned too late the wisdom of Laocoon: “I fear CEO’s, even bearing gifts.”

I met a young man of thirteen this winter who, as of January 5, had logged over 100 hours on Xbox LIVE since Christmas. Perhaps some of you readers can boast higher levels of dedication; honestly, I do not want to know. The point is, my young friend Andrew was so freed by his console that he did virtually nothing else for an entire two-week period. In the absence of specified scholastic obligations, he answered the Call of Duty in a decidedly different sense. The conjoined boxes of pulsating light had not so much liberated him as swallowed his existing freedom whole.

The worst part of it is, even as our gadgets satiate our ennui, they increase our propensity to boredom even more. As one becomes immersed in the ever-more-clearly visible landscapes and clearly-defined objectives of video games of all kinds (as another middle school student told me when I chastised her class for playing too much Xbox: “It’s OK, I have a PlayStation 3.” Not quite), one’s imagination begins to atrophy. There is no need to invent fantastic adventures and mysterious kingdoms when such things can be purchased for only $49.95 a pop. Thus, as one fights boredom at the cost of one’s imagination, the boredom simply grows back, multiplying in strength like the heads of a Hydra.

People espousing views like mine on this subject are often accused of being either Luddites or hypocrites, of harboring an irrational hatred of technology or, indeed, of not harboring a hatred of technology, as evidenced by the fact that critics of technology criticize via computer. This opposed but related criticisms miss the point: the great danger of gadgets is precisely that they are so appealing, that even those striving for virtue are solely tempted to squander the little time on given us on earth by using it. I am just as susceptible to the siren song of the television as the next guy, and almost certainly more so. The problem of technology is not that it is detestable; the problem is that it is easily and universally appealing.

Another contention, often made even by those who concur in my dark assessment of technology’s effects, is that technology in itself is neutral; it can be used for good or for ill, and the latter is too often the case. To my mind, this view is also mistaken. In the most literal of senses, yes; technological artifacts are inanimate, and thus neutral. But technology conditions us to think and act in certain ways, and the vast and ever-growing havoc wreaked upon our society by the present digital explosion is not simply the result of unencumbered human choice. Even as technology encourages a quest for dominion over nature and claims victory over our humanity, it feeds on the lowest impulses in our nature by appealing to our laziness and indulging our lusts, for violence in particular. Our hearts and minds are becoming enslaved, and here is the greatest irony of all: what with the death of our imaginations and the technological alienation of the human person from itself, we’re more bored than ever.

FISA's Affirmation

When Senator Carl Levin and Congressman John Conyers continue the witch-hunt against Bush Administration officials for "indictable offenses" related to the War on Terror, none of us should be surprised when The New York Times and media outfits of its ilk tag along for the ride. Similarly, none of us should be surprised that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review's August 2008 decision, released just a week ago, has been stashed in the proverbial corner of media portals everywhere.

As it just so happens, the panel affirmed the Executive's Constitutional authority to collect national-security intelligence without judicial approval. The facts of the case (at least the non-classified facts) involve a telecom company's failure to comply with the National Security Agency's wiretap program on Fourth Amendment grounds.

The Court held that searches and seizures conducted under the President's Article II war powers were not "unreasonable," and thus exceptions to Fourth Amendment limits on intelligence gathering. But don’t sound so surprised. In Truong, the Fourth Circuit held that there were indeed circumstances where the Executive need not obtain a warrant of any type to gather foreign intelligence through surveillance. In the FISA appeals court’s In re Sealed opinion: “The President has inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information.”

The court “took for granted that FISA could not encroach on the President's constitutional power.” Perhaps this is why the venom persists; the actual legal authorities involved defer to Presidential power in a measure that escapes the critics’ notice. But what the recent decision shows is exactly what has been the case all along: FISA is a creation of Congress that specifies the process through which domestic wiretaps are approved. It does not and cannot encroach on the President’s war powers. That does not change with the structure of the telecom industry either.

Now that President Obama is commander-in-chief and politically responsible for any terrorist attack resulting in loss of American life, it will be fascinating to see the left’s response to the inevitable continuation of the NSA’s wiretap program under somebody not named Bush. No President has ever rushed to abandon the powers he's been legally granted, though it's always nice to see a little more legal cover for the essential programs one might feel tempted to limit in the face of Levin & Conyers, LLP.

The kidney trade: unfair or unethical?

A recent chat with one of my friends reminded me of a topic that I haven't given much thought as of late: the economics and ethics of kidney donations. In the United States, there is an extreme shortage of kidneys, basic economics suggest that an increase in price will lead to an increase in supply, thus reducing this shortage. But this is illegal in the United States, so the list of organ donors is composed of the dead and the altruistic. Clearly the number of altruists falls short of the number of patients. Even though you only need one kidney to live a normal life and the procedure is very safe, most citizens are unwilling to sacrifice their body for another human's life. From an economic standpoint, the answer to this seems clear: let people sell their organs.

But not so fast. Understandably, there is a "yuck" factor in regards to an organ trade. Many think that selling one's organs is repugnant or unethical. Others argue that it devalues human life. These arguments mark valid opposition to a kidney market. I have little interest in making a normative argument over the ethics of selling one's body parts. There is, however, another argument against the organ trade that I find preposterous: that it unfairly benefits the rich.

I won't deny that an organ trade would probably benefit the rich more than the poor. Certainly, with more money at their disposal, were a kidney trade legalized, the wealthy would have easier access to the market. I don't, however, think this should limit the ability of a wealthy citizen to, essentially, save their own life. I'm sure the rich "unfairly" benefit from plane tickets to Hawaii and I'm sure the rich "unfairly" benefit from the housing market (though an effort to change that sure didn't work out too well). Should making these purchases be illegal? Last time I checked, the United States was not a country found on socialist values. Point is, we're talking about saving lives here, ceteris paribus, a rich person's life is worth no more than a poor person's, rich people deserve a kidney no more than a poor person. But denying the rich access to a market that would save their own lives is in itself unethical.

Despite the fact that a kidney trade would be "unfairly" beneficial to the rich, that doesn't mean it would be detrimental to the poor. In fact, plenty of poor people could afford to buy organs themselves, through health insurance or donations. Not only that, but the waiting list would be shorter and the probability of any individual on the waiting list receiving a kidney would go up. In addition, as the organ market stands now, the rich can often buy their organs illegally either through the black market or otherwise. In regards to those on the waiting list for kidneys, creating a kidney market would get as close to a pareto improvement as I can imagine.

While the logistics of a legalized kidney trade would need to be worked out, I believe it is an area that deserves more attention. It seems that a kidney trade could be appealing to individuals who are either pro-life or pro-choice. Hopefully this is not a topic that is above our President's pay grade. Maybe a kidney trade is unethical. If it is, however, it's not due to inequality, but rather moral righteousness.

Executive Orders and National Headaches

Earlier today President Obama signed a series of executive orders pertaining to the country’s anti-terror detention network. He has directed that the Guantanamo facility be closed within the year, as well as a multi-agency review of each prisoner's case to determine who can safely be released to third countries, which cases can be referred for trial in U.S. federal court and which cases require some other disposition.

Throughout the transition process, Obama indicated that he understood the security and logistical challenges facing a successful closure of Guantanamo. Now that it appears to be a political reality, it’s worth asking: what’s the problem with Guantanamo anyway?

Currently residing in the detention facility are nearly 250 prisoners, the vast majority of which are legitimate enemy combatants who pose an acute danger to our nation’s armed forces and citizens. It’s now the job of the Attorney General and ‘multi-agency reviewers’ to repatriate as many of them as possible. It’s been reported that 60 cleared detainees are staying in U.S. judicial hands for fear of persecution following release. Without the luxury of a remote naval base with advanced and robust defense capabilities to house them away from domestic shores, any mainland facility would instantly increase the probability of terror attacks by providing an all-too-sensible target. The benefits (putting the name ‘Guantanamo’ out of our collective conscience) would be immaterial, and the costs could be fatal.

Reworking the prosecution framework makes the detainee’s housing problem look like a walk through Maple Street Park in July. The Military Commissions Act built a clear and sophisticated piece of jurisdictional infrastructure geared towards the attainment of an all-important balance between our general legal principles and security interests. This may be doomed to collapse now that detainees will have their day in U.S. federal court. Many prisoners have been detained as a result of gathered intelligence that determined them to be too dangerous to do anything else with, despite the fact that a crime was not in actuality committed. They will be released. Further, under current law and disposition, conviction with the evidence gathered on the battlefield (minus that which is not adequate due to Miranda violations) will always be an uphill battle.

Making the rounds in Obama circles is the possibility of creating a special court presided over by federal judges for the purpose of supervising detentions and administering trials. The court would “operate under rules of evidence and classification that would allow the military to avoid compromising intelligence sources and methods, as well as admit intelligence gathered under battlefield conditions.”

Now that sounds like a good idea. It would be all the more impressive if it didn’t turn out exactly the same, in purpose and form, as the military commissions developed by Congress and the Bush Administration in 2006. It’s becoming increasingly obvious, amid all the backslapping associated with Obama’s first steps towards closing Guantanamo, that the commissions we’ve had in place were well designed and necessary. There is virtue to Guantanamo as it sits today. Perhaps we could deal with a shallow bit of politicking on the part of President Obama if Bush’s policies are recycled with a new nametag and spit shine. A continuation of his predecessor’s brilliant track record on national security would be a real win for a new President who values his nation’s citizens more than his nation’s image abroad.

Farewell, President Bush

I never had the honor of voting for George W. Bush. Although his presidency spanned the formative years of my political life, I was too young in both 2000 and 2004 to cast my ballot one way or the other. Thus, the man who won both of the first two elections during which I possessed a significant degree of knowledge and engagement did so without the benefit of my vote.

In 2004, he also did so (miraculously and inexplicably) without my endorsement. For reasons which are no longer clear to me, I threw my meaningless and, thankfully, ineffectual support behind the unflaggingly mediocre junior senator from Massachusetts. I think peer pressure played a role, as did my rather lazy reluctance to defend a man who was—and remains—the member of the human race our generation detests more than any other, living or dead.

I was wrong then, and although I was unfair to Mr. Bush at that time, I hope to atone somewhat now and offer a feeble reminiscence of his virtues.

First and foremost, George W. Bush has been the most staunch defender of human life—in particular of the unborn—the White House has ever seen, and he will probably retain this distinction in perpetuity. His belief in the sanctity of human life, informed and strengthened by his deeply and sincerely held religious faith, informed all aspects of his presidency. Many have blasted him for caring about inconsequential lines of stem cells more than the United States troops he sent into harm’s way in Iraq and Afghanistan, but this criticism imputes a viciousness to the man which requires a faith in the unseen much stronger than any of the evangelical proclivities which supposedly catapulted him into office. Arguing that Bush is an evil, greedy warmonger puts one in the position of defending the devotion to human life of such paragons as Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and ignoring the almost constant vigil of tears and prayers our commander-in-chief has kept at the caskets of our fallen troops. Nor was Bush merely a nay-sayer on life issues; he spearheaded initiatives to use non-embryonic stem cells, which have resulted in great progress, and he has worked tirelessly to help alleviate the ravages of the AIDS virus in Africa.

Secondly, despite the savage, brutal and ridiculous attacks which were hurled upon him from the very day he set foot upon the national stage, he kept his incredible composure at all times, frequently flashing his wonderful smile and terrific, always self-deprecating wit. Simply put, Bush handled lava-like torrents of abuse with a bottomless well of grace. “Some folks look at me,” he said at the 2004 Republican Convention, “and see a certain swagger. Well, in Texas we call that walking.” This pithy observation sums up the whole of the Bush presidency. Somehow, people all over the world look at the somewhat goofy, eminently likable man in charge of our Executive branch and see 1) the stupidest primate ever to crawl the earth, less worthy of compassion or admiration than the Great Apes of Spain, who now (unlike the noble men held with no cause whatsoever in the soon-to-be-redesignated Guantanamo Bay facility) possess habeas corpus rights, and 2) a demonic figure, the Devil himself in chaps and a diabolical grin. In fact, it is entirely accurate to say that many of these folks believe Dubya to be the most evil being in the universe, since they sure as hell don’t believe in the Devil.

This interesting myopia—the belief that all moral and values are relative, except for the immutable and unadulterated wrongness of George Walker Bush—provides the fodder for the final point in my eulogy of the outgoing Chief Executive. In his truly magnificent farewell address last Thursday evening, Bush recalled that “I've often spoken to you about good and evil, and this has made some uncomfortable. But good and evil are present in this world, and between the two of them there can be no compromise.” Bush may well be wrong about many things, but in this observation he is dead accurate. There are indeed good and evil in our world, and moral absolutes do indeed make a great many people very uncomfortable. In the end, the reason Bush was so detested by so many is that he dared to spend his presidency—and his life, which he can now continue happily—in an uncompromising, untiring, unapologetic pursuit of the good.

To what end is diversity?

The mission statement of Carleton College reads as follows:

The mission of Carleton College is to provide an exceptional undergraduate liberal arts education. In pursuit of this mission, the College is devoted to academic excellence, distinguished by the creative interplay of teaching, learning, and scholarship, and dedicated to our diverse residential community and extensive international engagements.

Sounds good. Nothing too revolutionary or controversial. At first glance, I would tend to believe that the college is doing its best to pursue the goals set in the mission statement. But is it really?

I'm drawn to the penultimate line in the statement, that the college is "dedicated to our diverse residential community." There is no doubt in my mind that Carleton College is among a large percentage of schools across the country that are doing their best to attract as diverse a campus as possible (though this is not necessarily the case for all schools). These institutions have used affirmative action, legally in most cases, to increase the diversity of their campuses in order to attract students and, as a professor of mine said recently, use diversity as a "pressure for innovation." These seem like noble intentions.

Quickly glancing at the Carleton College website, one is bound to come across a statement such as "a primary mission of the academy must be to create a climate that cultivates diversity and celebrates difference." But if diversity is so important, why do I see such little diversity across the political spectrum on campus? In essence, why don't colleges seek to enhance diversity by reaching out to young conservatives?

Giving a litmus test for college applicants would neither be legal nor justified, but if diversity is the goal, I'm sure that schools like Carleton could do a better job creating a more diverse student body. Maybe these schools are doing their best to attract students with religious upbringings and/or conservative values, but there is little evidence to suggest that this is the case. It would not be a stretch to say that 90% of the student body would identify themselves as liberal. If the goal of the college is to increase and promote diversity and difference, as this states, then there should be more of an effort to reach out to conservative youths. If the goal of the college is to increase racial and/or international diversity, then it should say so.

That being said, I have to admit that I have greatly benefited from the diversity at my school. After growing up in one of the least racially diverse places in the country, I am thankful for the opportunity to meet and become very good friends with a racially diverse group of people. On top of that, being exposed to such a liberal atmosphere has helped me strengthen some of my beliefs and has given me ample access to opposing views. On the other hand, I am not thankful for being neglected the chance to meet a large number of students with a wide range of political beliefs.

Huntington and Davos Gazan

Samuel Huntington, prominent Harvard political scientist and author, died on Christmas Eve at the age of 81. In his magnum opus, “The Clash of Civilizations,” Huntington discussed what he viewed as the most dangerous illusions of the Western elites in their perception of world order and international behavior. He introduced the term Davos Man, referring to those who “have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the élite's global operations”.

Now that the State of Israel has returned to the bitter tips of leftist academics’ tongues, it may be worth understanding the implications of Huntington’s theses, even if only posthumously.

Implicit in the left’s standard anti-Israel position (and somehow the standard position seems to always recommend the trying of IDF officials as war criminals) is what appears to be an acceptance of Davos Man. We are routinely led to believe that the Israeli and Palestinian people all want the same things (peace, a home, and economic prosperity), and that their representative bodies are killing each other’s children in spite of this. Israel is just always the worst offender.

Contrary to what you may have heard, Hamas is not much of a legitimate, democratically elected body. The Palestinian Authority itself gains legal legitimacy from the Oslo Accords, which Hamas has systematically rejected. However, they did receive enough votes in the PA’s parliamentary election to find themselves in the position they're in now. And the Gazans they represent chose them because – well, some combination of Fatah corruption, Fatah infighting, change they could believe in, and plain old ideology. If universal healthcare was on the docket, I didn’t hear about it.

So maybe Davos Gazan isn’t appropriate. Anyone with any knowledge of the complex history of the Arab-Israeli conflict should reject the idea that the only thing standing between war and peace is a "road map" with more Palestinian concessions here, a forfeiture of key West Bank settlements there, and a Golan Heights to be named later.

But perhaps I’m getting too far ahead of myself. For Huntington’s rejection of a non-cultural, internationalist community of states governed only by their utilitarian interests can actually be found in the same quarters examined before. European spokesmen of all sorts seem to find incoherence a habit too difficult to break with respect to the United States’ Imperialist Stooge of Nations. For how many times have we heard the cries of ‘disproportionality’ when Israel engages any of its amicable neighbors?

Israel, the thinking goes, should distribute force in a manner proportional to the damage incurred by its own population. Proportions refer to fractions, and while the easiest strategy is to compare the respective death counts (which of course ignores Hamas’ role in grotesquely padding its own score sheet by using innocents as shields), the initial rocket attacks on Southern Israel produced a fraction that is mathematically undefined. The denominator (Palestinian deaths at the hands of the IDF) was zero between the unilateral pullout of Gaza by Israel and the initial campaign back across the Gazan border.

All this means is that (surprise!) the standards of conduct for Israel are just that much higher than for Hamas. There is something about Israel that owes us civilized restraint and Hamas that will deliver savagery no matter what. Culture is not everything, but as Huntington sought to demonstrate, it surely is something. We’re willing to admit that much. Now we have to decide whether certain regimes can operate in an arena where the actual interests of its own people and the people of the world are taken for granted as objectives. For the sake of free society, some of the other organizations, with Qassam in one hand and Iranian aid in the other, should be crushed for good.

Spend on Schools

This Thomas Friedman piece in Saturday's New York Times offers a good idea for the upcoming economic stimulus. Whether or not a federal stimulus package is desirable at this point in time is still up for debate, but since it seems inevitable that a stimulus (and a large one at that) will be passed very soon, Friedman's underlying proposal, that more should be spent on education, is a good one. General tax cuts aside, the stimulus should take the form of supplying public goods (that's econ 101 public goods, those that are non-excludable and non-rivalrous), particularly subsidizing education and defense spending. Friedman touches on the former and while the logistics of his proposal are iffy at best, the overall message is a good one.

Looking Forward

We apologize for the lack of posts (good or otherwise) authored over the past month or so. The Ennobler team has been on break, so we can chalk the aforementioned dearth of intellectual activity up to holiday excess, familial obligation or pre-111th Congressional ennui.

Luckily for you, we're celebrating the new year with a new posting schedule designed to increase our output two-, maybe three-fold. If nothing else, we have that to look forward to in 2009.

Cheers,
The Ennobler