In the Washington Post this morning, we learn that no less august a personage as Joe Biden is going to head up a new Task Force.

Biden made his first prominent White House appearance Friday with the launch of the Middle Class Working Families Task Force, billed as a “major initiative targeted at raising the living standards of middle-class, working families in America.”

You know, it seems that very recently, these same people were telling us that the living standards of middle-class Americans were Destroying The Earth, and that we all had to Cut Back or the Seas Would Rise etc., etc.

There are undoubtedly some people in the United States who could use a boost in their standard of living. And there are some others who really couldn’t have a boost in their standard of living, barring the discovery of hitherto unknown loopholes in the laws of physics or the invention of some new and wonderful cocktail; these people have a standard of living that is already as high as is possible given the current state of technology.

In the middle are the middle-class, the people for whom an improvement in their standard of living is theoretically possible, but who are not going hungry, or cold, or without a car or TV or boat (if they want a boat) or, really, pretty much anything else this side of stained-glass bathrobes and world’s fattest racehorses. The middle-class American lifestyle is the envy of pretty much everyone in the world — excepting only the contemporary super-rich, and even they might see some things to be admired in it.

But it’s not enough for Joe Biden.

Putting aside political cynicism, the only conclusion I can arrive at is that they are talking about something else. ‘Middle class’ as used by Biden et al. does not mean what it means when used by humans.

I think that by middle class they mean what used to be called the working poor. (The working poor used to be called just the poor until people started to notice that, in a hell of a lot of cases, the poor were poor because they didn’t do any work. The majority quite rightly doesn’t feel a lot of sympathy for such people, so people who worked but didn’t make much money started being called the working poor.)

The chief clue is in the name of the Task Force: the Middle[-]Class Working Families Task Force. Barring people who are temporarily unemployed, are there any middle-class people in the United States who don’t work? Presumably, if you don’t work but are able to live off your investment income, you are rich (or at least retired); if you don’t work but are not able to live off your investment income, you are poor. If you do work but are not able to live off that income, you are the working poor.

It used to be that everyone else was middle-class. Now we have a new thing, this ‘working’ middle class. Presumably as the Task Force spins up, the meaning of this phrase will become a little less opaque.

Sea birds tend to congregate in this too-big parking lot in Warrenton, VA — at least 70 miles from the nearest salt water. There are about six of them on top of each of the light poles.

An AP story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

President can’t always control unemployment rate

[...] Presidents don’t have much control over either the number of new jobs or the number of people looking for work. The labor force has more than doubled since 1953.

Likewise, the number of new jobs created in a year is determined by expansions and contractions in the business cycle — cycles that begin years, even decades, before a president takes office.

A year ago, of course, the articles in the paper seemed to assume that the president was somehow able to control the unemployment rate, that for some reason Bush et al. preferred that things go south. Though, it must be said, that we were also hearing about the ‘disastrous Bush economy’ even while the economy was booming.

Further down in the article:

Is there anything presidents can do to create jobs?

One thing: Build infrastructure.

“We built a lot of infrastructure in the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson era,” [Colgate U economic historian Michael] Haines said. “I’m sure the interstate highway system created an incredible amount of employment. We can do it again.”

This ignores the distinction between productive jobs and just jobs. You could always hire two guys, one to dig a hole and the other to fill it in again: two jobs created! Few ‘job-creation’ schemes are quite that useless, but most of them have a significant amount of futility built in; almost always, if the work being done under the scheme were work that people particularly wanted done, someone would be making money off it.

Do we need another Interstate Highway System? What else could we build that would require that kind of initial outlay without being money down the tubes? I can’t think of anything. I hear a lot about ‘crumbling infrastructure’, but I just don’t see it. I hear a lot about the need to ‘invest in schools’, but I can’t help but notice that most public school systems already spend more than all but the most elite private schools. I hear about making sure that everyone has the ‘opportunity for a college education’, but I note that graduation rates are already falling off because we’re already sending people who aren’t suited to it off to college.

The ads on the inauguration coverage on the local DC TV stations are a bit strange. The vast majority of them are for personal-injury lawyers — the usual advertisers on local TV at this time of say — but also lots of frankly disingenuous ads about the Employee Free Choice Act, AKA ‘card check’.

The EFCA would allow unions to sign up members by getting them to sign union cards, rather than through a secret ballot as is currently required. The unions’ argument is that this secret-ballot procedure is cumbersome and inconvenient, and that its effect is to make it more difficult to unionize workplaces. They probably have a point.

On the other hand, a ‘card check’ procedure would mean that people pushing for unionization of a given workplace would know exactly who was with them and who was against them. It might then turn out to be in the union’s interest to cajole, threaten, or eliminate — by getting them fired or by encouraging them to resign, not by killing them (though that’s not unknown either in the history of unionization) — recalcitrant employees.

This is what the ads are calling ‘a level playing field’, while strongly giving the impression that unionization is impossible otherwise.

Bla bla bla bla bla. Guy travels to Memphis for a client meeting with FedEx, Twitters to the effect that he doesn’t like Memphis (specifically that he would ‘die’ if he had to live there). FedEx people see this, forward it around. Guy is likely in trouble now.

Two points:

1. I like Twitter, but it’s dangerous. In 160 bytes, you don’t have the space to say anything that’s at all nuanced. I have no doubt that most happy New Yorkers wouldn’t want to live in Memphis, as those two cities are very different places. Even the most die-hard Memphis partisan would likely readily agree that if good bagels, access to diners, walkability, etc., etc. are your priorities, New York is probably a better place to live than is Memphis. But you can’t get into any of the specifics of that — or the specifics of anything — on Twitter. This isn’t exactly a weakness of Twitter; it’s just that Twitter isn’t the right medium for some messages. Like nearly anything of substance.

2. People in most American cities can understand the benefits of living in New York, even if they themselves do not want to do so. New Yorkers would do well to attempt to understand that there are also benefits to not living in New York, and that many people prefer those benefits. As it is, a lot of New Yorkers — particularly people who have moved there from somewhere else — seem to believe that everyone everywhere else would move to New York if they weren’t somehow trapped elsewhere.

Yesterday, in Herring v. United States, the Supreme Court held:

When police mistakes leading to an unlawful search are the result of isolated negligence attenuated from the search, rather than systemic error or reckless disregard of constitutional requirements, the exclusionary rule does not apply.

Which effectively means that the Fourth Amendment now reads:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, [...] unless such an otherwise illegal search is the result of isolated negligence rather than of systemic error or of reckless disregard of Consitutional requirements.

I suppose we should be grateful that the Court still holds that reckful disregard of Constitutional requirements is still not allowed.

Or does it? We need a test case, but past decisions suggest that where drugs or sex offenders or children or any one of a number of classes of super-duper crimes are involved, recklessness in searching and seizing might be just what the Founders intended.

That this is a generally reasonable approach will be seen by anyone who studies the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and notices how they consistently give the benefit of the doubt to the government in edge cases. The Framers of the Constitution, after all, had no reason to suspect the motivations of the government; think of Thomas Jefferson. ‘I have sworn upon the altar of Almighty God eternal hostility against every form of non-isolated negligence, systemic error, and non-reckless disregard of Constitutional requirements.’

This thinking was not fully elucidated in the text of the Fourth Amendment simply because of constraints of space.

You can see how the Bill of Rights fills up the whole page. Lessons like these are why the modern legal system has its own paper size:

The real effect of this decision will be that the police and prosecutors will seek the exact location of that division between, one the one hand, isolated negligence, and on the other, systemic error. The police will now have carte blanche to search anyone they want, as long as they don’t do it so often as to make their ‘incompetence’ be systemic in a way that’s provable in court.

I mean: What the fuck.

Steve Jobs:

[...] during the past week I have learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought.

In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products, I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.

While I wish Steve Jobs all the best, and I think that Apple would do fine without him. The stock, on the other hand, will not do fine without him. In the best of times, Apple trades wildly on rumors and whispers and total bullshit spouted by ‘analysts’ who don’t know their asses from so many holes in the ground. Throw in something like this — after the shares have already been depressed for some time on Jobs health uncertainty — and Apple shareholders — a group which includes Tino — are going to be screwed. Rest assured that I will be first in line for the shareholder lawsuit if it turns out that they’ve been lying to us about his health. ‘Hormone issue’ my ass.

The funny thing about shareholder lawsuits, though, is that you sue the company in question. And who is the company? The shareholders; the lawyers are the only ones who make money in that kind of situation. Really it’s the board members and management who should pay, either for lying to us or for gross negligence in not knowing that they were lying to us.

The New York Times:

A task force created by 49 state attorneys general to look into the problem of sexual solicitation of children online has concluded that there really is not a significant problem.

Well, of course. But I don’t expect this to make much difference.

Not everyone was happy with the conclusions. Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general, who has forcefully pursued the issue and helped to create the task force, said he disagreed with the report. Mr. Blumenthal said it “downplayed the predator threat,” relied on outdated research and failed to provide a specific plan for improving the safety of social networking.

“Children are solicited every day online,” Mr. Blumenthal said. “Some fall prey, and the results are tragic. That harsh reality defies the statistical academic research underlying the report.”

In what social networks may view as something of an exoneration after years of pressure from law enforcement, the report said sites like MySpace and Facebook “do not appear to have increased the overall risk of solicitation.”

Since the report doesn’t support their preconceptions, the who-will-think-of-the-children crowd will simply ignore it. And since the news media really only loves crisis and fear, a report to the effect of Things Aren’t So Bad After All will sink beneath the waves within a few days.