Opinions

Reductionism has its charms. You can eliminate a lot of clutter and complexity by believing that the future will hinge entirely upon one dis­cern­ible and measurable factor, element or thingamajig. It’s like knowing a code word, or a secret handshake.

Remember this:

“Ben — I just want to say one word to you — just one word.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you listening?”

“Yes I am.”

“Plastics.”

So what’s going to decide the 2012 presidential election? “The economy, stupid,” is the officially sanctioned response. And the economy will depend on oil prices. Or something happening in Greece, maybe.

Carter Eskew picks the unemployment rate. That’s the statistic that matters, he think. I’m not sure about that, but in his blog post he makes a good point that everyone should heed: “presidential elections are increasingly a series of state-wide elections” His message is that the national unemployment rate doesn’t matter as much as the unemployment rate in, say, Ohio, or Virginia, or Iowa, or Missouri — swing states that have lower-than-average unemployment and where Obama could well pick up the electoral votes he needs to get over the top.

Of course, under the Constitution, presidential elections have always been a collection of statewide contests. The national popular vote doesn’t matter a jot. So it’s hard to know what to make of national polls, particularly ones that don’t sort out the likely voters. This morning, the estimable Nate Silver of the Times warns that we’re still in the general-election preseason, and haven’t seen the best and sharpest arguments from the campaigns about why their guy is the right choice and the other guy is a doofus. Silver focuses on Obama’s national approval rating. Talk about a country that’s divided on Obama: “Right now, in the RealClearPolitics average, 48.3 percent of Americans approve of the job that Mr. Obama is doing, and 48.6 percent disapprove.” So, close election ahead. According to Silver, approval ratings are good predictors of elections, particularly for incumbents.

This morning I read with some concern and personal discomfiture if that’s a word my colleague Darryl Fears’ story about the Potomac being named America’s most endangered river. The story notes that the river is full of sewage and agricultural runoff and there are all these pharmaceuticals that get in the water and cause fish to change sexes, to the point where there are male fish swimming around with eggs inside them. Whoa: I swim in the Potomac! I got swimmin’ holes up and down this river. I have immersed myself countless times in the hormonally discombobulating waters of the Nation’s River. And suddenly it occurs to me that, whenever I get lost these days, I stop and ask for directions. Ruh-roh.
The Potomac River near Georgetown — endangered by pollution and, obviously, rowers. (Astrid Riecken - FOR THE WASHINGTON POST)

Back to the river: A group called American Rivers puts out an annual list of the most endangered rivers. This year the Potomac tops the list, followed, in order, by the Green, the Chattahoochee, the Missouri, the Hoback, the Grand, the South Fork Skykomish, the Crystal, the Coal and the Kansas.

I like this list a lot because it includes a bunch of rivers I’ve never heard of, and which sound like they’d be fun to raft down. I like the sound of the Hoback. I am happy that there’s a Skykomish with multiple forks. I question whether there’s really such a thing as the Kansas River. I didn’t think they had rivers there, just vast fields of grain and a lot of cows and the occasional tornado that can deposit a house from someplace black-and-white to someplace in color.

That said, there is nothing here that I can see in this American Rivers report that explains why the Potomac is more endangered than any other river in the country. Why are we number one? A Potomac River fact sheet states:

“[T]he Potomac is threatened by agricultural and urban pollution that will only get worse if Congress rolls back national clean water protections. If Congress puts polluters before people, our nation’s river— and many other rivers nationwide— will become a threat to public health, unsafe for drinking water, wildlife, or recreation.”

I have a hunch this most-endangered designation is political at some level, but I don’t want to go out on a limb here.

[Garden update: Got the tomatoes in! This year I’m going to have a bumper crop. There will be no tomato blossom wilt. There will be no mysterious fungus crawling out of the dirt to yellowfy my plants. The fruit will not split or get cat-faced. Also there will be corn, melons, cukes, and perhaps some animal husbandry (chickens, goats, whatnot) as I teach the children how to find spiritual nourishment from milking the cow before dawn rather than all this shopping at the mall stuff. This year will be different.]

Just peeked at Memeorandum and see the usual squawking and squabbling and kvetching and snarling. The Internet is great if you are interested in Breaking Snarling. The meaner and more vicious the snarl, the faster it goes to the top of the queue, usually. Also it helps to excoriate the MSM. (Has anyone started a website called Demagoguery.com?)

This is interesting: Reince Priebus, head of the RNC, says the Republican Party opposes same-sex marriage because that’s not how marriage is traditionally defined (I’m paraphrasing). And he says it’s not a civil rights issue and shouldn’t be compared to Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation in the South:

“I don’t think it’s a matter of civil rights. I think it’s just a matter of whether or not we’re going to adhere to something that’s been historical and religious and legal in this country for many, many years.”

I see this morning that Obama’s statement on gay marriage, and the Obama-Biden relationship, is still the big story on Memeorandum, even though this news broke all the way back on yesterday afternoon. I should write about this since I’m trying to get a little more blog traffic and more Twitter followers and, just generally, more digital vim in my analog life. I used to want to be a writer, but now I tweet, and am learning how to turn a praise. [By the way, it’s May 10, which is historically tomato-planting day in the DC area. Though with this climate change that seems to be going on, all bets are off. Probably we should be harvesting soon.]

Gay marriage: Remind me what’s the objection, precisely? Is the objection that it will somehow fray the bonds of traditional, hetereosexual marriage? Hey: If protecting traditional marriage is the goal, clearly what we need to do is stop worrying about same-sex couples and start worrying about teenagers.

If two gay people somewhere want to get married, there is zero effect, so far as I can tell, on my own, State of Florida-sanctioned, opposite-sex marital union. But if my high school daughter announces that, while wandering Dupont Circle. she met a biker named Virus who wants to take her to a music-and-culture festival (“Scumaggedon”) held every year in Death Valley, my wife and I have to spend hours debating whether it’s a good idea.

I tend to be more lenient. I’m like: Only if she wears a helmet!

(I’ve said it a million times: The one thing I don’t like about having children is this thing they call “parenting.”)

So it’s stressful, raising kids, especially when the hormones start surging and they turn into – how can I say this politely? – Creatures from the Black Lagoon. They’re walking, breathing wedge issues. This is why I’m a little worried about what Obama said Wednesday. He didn’t so much endorse gay marriage as he endorsed the gay marital bliss and domesticity. He said in an email to supporters last night: “I’ve thought about members of my staff in long-term, committed, same-sex relationships who are raising kids together.”

Does that mean gays can only get married if they promise to buy a house and raise kids and be as boring as possible?

Can gays get married impulsively in Vegas, or is that for straights only?

Who speaks for gay divorce?

With the Facebook IPO show hitting the road, a lot of people are asking: Will Warren Buffett invest? And how about Achenbach? Of course not. I don’t run in that crowd (successful people). And I’ve developed a rule of personal finance that is incontrovertible: It would be stupid for me to make any financial move that I perceived to be intelligent.

The moment I think something’s a good investment, it isn’t.

This is an ironclad law of the universe, like the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This is why I’m worried about Twitter: I now have a Twitter account (@joelachenbach) and have started to tweet more regularly, so THAT’S over, a dead technology.

I’m the guy who bought WorldCom at $55 a share, just as the company had stepped off the cliff but before the forces of gravity had yet exerted their effect. I am STILL the proud owner of bought-at-the-peak Lucent stock, which now has some other name, having emerged from the mulch pile of corporate collapse.

Why not sell my old, failed, miserable stocks? Partly because I forgot my username and password for my online trading account. Partly because it would probably require paperwork and some complex tax write-off that I just don’t know how to do. More importantly, I don’t touch the stock market anymore. Burn me once, that’s your fault. Burn me twice, that’s my fault. Burn me about 17 times, that’s the fault of the people who raised me wrong.

I just don’t go near the market anymore, having been suckered into that game in the late 1990s, when I discovered that the Internet connection at my desk enabled me to invest — with the merest touch of a button, and after reading what seemed to be credible ratings reports by analysts — in companies that were just seconds away from evaporating into nothingness.

I tried to invest in solid companies, not the dot.com wonders. I picked stocks in companies that did good, old-fashionged stuff — established companies that made whale-bone corsets, and top hats, and wagon wheel spokes, and mustache wax, and quill pens, and papyrus. How could I have known these were bad investments?

I hope the Facebook IPO goes well, since I have a connection to the company via my FB page and the Washington Post Social Reader. But I wouldn’t know how to participate in an IPO — I assume they screen investors and I would not pass muster in some fashion. The wrong shoes, the wrong tie. They might refuse to let me pay with loose change (I have a bowl of change — surely enough coins in there for some serious FB stock.)

The Facebook IPO story on our site this morning contains this ominous, buzzkilling quote from an analyst, Anthony Valencia: “It’s generally agreed upon amongst investors that the Facebook IPO will be very successful and Facebook as a company will be very successful....What is not agreed upon is how much upside there will be for new investors.”

In other words, this IPO is going to be a very good thing for the people who are already rich beyond belief and driving sportscars capable of achieving geosynchronous orbit, but will offer nothing to those of us who are condemned, simply because of the misfortune of being financially moronic and having forgotten our online trading usernames and passwords, to be mired in the humdrum middle class.