Nature versus Nuttier

Version 0.4

Nature Versus Nuttier in Texan Politics

Whenever I notice there is an election for which I am a qualified voter, especially an official governmental election, I feel obliged to participate. Recently two things reminded me that this is an election year in Texas. One was my voter registration certificate and the other was a bunch of unsolicited spam from rightwing lunatics. As a result, I initiated an attempt to perform my civic duty, and I ran into more of the usual obstacles. An old friend (actually one of my first computer mentors) asked me to explain what happened, and I decided to prepare this public statement of the situation

There are two underlying and extremely basic principles in this presentation: (1) Change happens and (2) Democratic government is good. Why do I need to start so far back? Because my conclusion (which will follow from considering these principles) is so sad, which goes back to the overlying theme of this particular blog, which is that America really is close to its end this time around.

As long as we are alive, as long as we participate in the flow of time, change happens. Some people argue that change is the very nature of time, but my concern is with two types of change that I'll call evolutionary versus revolutionary. Something of a strained metaphor, but evolutionary change is similar to the evolution of a species. After enough generations, the species is going to be different, but there is a line of continuity there. Revolutionary change is different because there is a serious break there, in the natural metaphor corresponding to the extinction of a species. In general, the niche is still there, but some other species (or several species) will fill it.

Now it's time to justify democracy and democratic forms of government. The basic problem of government is that groups of people are more powerful than any individual, and we are social animals that are going to live in groups and we need rules and laws to limit the chaos. The difference with democracy is that each individual can feel a vested interest in the survival of the society because they participate in it, at least to that degree. Rationally I know that my vote is unlikely to make any difference, and the likelihood goes down as the scale of the election goes up, but I still feel that the act of voting gives me some stake in the system. Maybe my candidate didn't win this time, but I can always hope to pick a winner the next time, and therefore I should go along with the system and even try to make it better.

Now the background of the current situation is that the elections in America have been turned on their head. Instead of voters picking someone to represent them in the political process, the professional politicians pick the voters who will keep them in office. The mechanisms have varied over time, but the current mechanism is legalized bribes, and the most cheaply bribed politicians write the laws on behalf of the greediest and least ethical businessmen. Since the goal is to make more money, of course American politics has become a kind of monetary game, where the goal is to buy just enough votes so that you have just enough representatives to dictate the rules of the game. In the last election, most voters wanted Democratic Party politicians to represent them in Congress, but the gerrymandering and other mechanisms resulted in a House of Representatives that is dominated by neo-GOP politicians. Getting too far afield in this paragraph, and I've said this stuff before, but...

Let me get back to my own situation, eh? I still have this delusion that democracy is good and that I am morally obligated to vote. However, over the years it continues to become more and more difficult for me to actually do it. I think that is a systematic thing. I am categorized as a troublesome voter who mostly opposes the elected politicians, and voters in my category should be discouraged from voting whenever possible. Over the years my so-called franchise has become more and more restricted and ever harder to exercise.

This year I sent in the forms and received a response that, although my forms were mailed before the deadline, they were received too late. I have no way to check that, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out they were 'mislaid' for a few days to make sure they were too late. I was told that there was still an option via FAX machine, if only I knew where one was and had the special knowledge required to send an international FAX.

If they actually wanted me to vote, then they could simply have assumed that I wanted to vote. Based on my past record of voting in almost every election in the past, then it's a safe bet that they could just send me the ballots if they wanted me to continue to vote. Even on this issue of the FAX, there is a viable alternative that I suggested and which was ignored. My suggestion was that they accept a scan of the FAXable forms attached to email--but that idea is evidently too convenient (for those pesky little voters) to even consider or respond to. It's just one of the suggestions I've offered several times, but...

Another option I considered was asking a friend in the States to FAX the form domestically, but I decided against that on the grounds that they might get prosecuted for improperly assisting an actual voter. These days one of the top strategies to disenfranchise voters is to go after people and organizations that try to help people vote.

Then again, even if I got the ballot, Texas persists in using a really bizarre and oddly sized ballot that is rejected by all of the international standards. It's only a minor injury added on top of the insult, but it's a rather expensive form of stupidity that they must have noticed over the years. Well, that they must have noticed if they actually had any sincere interest in encouraging votes, that is.

Now we get to the awkward punchline and the relevance of the stuff about evolutionary versus revolutionary change. In my situation, the only possibly meaningful election I can still participate in is the so-called Republican primary in Texas. I suppose it's possible the clerks who have been working so hard to prevent me from voting are just sincere public servants, but I think it much more likely that they are sincerely partisan as a job requirement of modern Texas. In the old days, that was actually tilted the other way, in favor of the so-called Democratic Dixiecrats of Texas, and the most meaningful election was the Democratic Primary.

How could my vote have mattered? Confession time. It could have mattered by voting in the primary against the candidate I dislike more. In other words, I think the neo-GOP has rejected any possibility of evolutionary change and they need to experience the revolutionary change of going extinct so that a better species of politician can take their place. Stretching the metaphor again, but sometimes a species commits suicide without regard to the competitive competition. In natural terms, the species goes crazy and commits itself to extremism that results in extinction. It certainly isn't pressure from the Democratic species that has forced the neo-GOP down this road. Rather, Abe Lincoln's progressive and liberal Republican Party evolved into the increasingly conservative GOP of Teddy and Ike, but has now branched into an evolutionary dead end as today's neo-GOP.

Anyway, I wanted to write more on the topic, but I also wanted to finish today, so the compromise is to decrement the version number and publish it as is... In closing, I want to clarify my personal policy regarding moderation: Spammers go away. Anything else is going to get approved, but I admit that I may take the last word if I strongly disagree with your comments. In extreme cases, I'm just going to say something like "See what an extreme lunatic supports the neo-GOP" and not waste any keystrokes arguing with the fool, however I'd actually be grateful to get useful new data or superior reasoning that obliges me to learn something new.

Candidates from Beyond the Absurd

Version 0.2

Candidates from Beyond the Absurd

The American political system is so broken these years that it has become impossible even to guess where to begin an attempt to fix it. There are just TOO many problems and flaws. Some of the systematic problems afflict both sides, and those are going to be especially hard to cure, because both sides are in effect equally committed to NOT curing them, which means it doesn't even matter how elections turn out since the so-called winners will have won because of taking advantage of the problems. Campaign finance and gerrymandering, I'm talking to you. However, some of the problems are sort of within the scope of influence of the voters. Kind of laughable to imagine putting anything within the actual control of the actual voters, eh? Perhaps that is the real sickness of the American political system?

The so-called democratic or even republican thesis so far is that it makes sense to begin with the problems that can be influenced by the results of the actual elections. Maybe we can get some reform by a focus on the places where there are clear differences between the political parties? In those places, the voters may actually have some influence, at least in theory. I've written elsewhere (though I can't find the comments so as to include a link or two) why the American political system is a winner-take-all system that essentially reduces to two parties, so I'm just going to take that as a given and focus on one of the key differences between the two main parties: Today's so-called Republican Party nominates nuts.

There are two proximate data sources that motivate me to address the topic now. One provocation was a recent final new rule from Bill Maher on the disastrous legacy of Ronald Reagan. [That's a transcript link on the HBO website, but I don't currently know of a video link that looks reliable, though he delivered it quite well.] The second provocation was reading Tina Fey's fairly recent book Bossypants, which included quite a bit about her comic impersonations of Sarah Palin during the 2008 presidential campaign. These are just examples of the general thesis that the neo-GOP can and does nominate incredibly unqualified candidates, even for national offices. Two other examples are Dubya Bush and Dan Quayle.

There have been some competent Republican candidates, too--but as far as the neo-GOP partisans are concerned, those competent candidates are regarded as failures or losers or both, and therefore the obvious prediction is that the quality of so-called Republican nominees is going to continue to decline--if that's possible. In other words, the lesson the neo-GOP has learned from candidates like Romney, McCain, Bob Dole, and even Poppy Bush is that they were too competent and not sufficiently extremist. Many of them believe it was precisely because of his hand-on competence that Nixon himself was hounded out of office.

It might be nice if the self-immolation of the neo-GOP was going to help the nation, but there is little evidence of that. Instead, we are likely to have a collapse into permanent control of the White House by the Democratic Party, with Congress going the same way once the mathematical limits of gerrymandering are passed. Hopefully I'm wrong, but I think one-party rule is going to be disastrous, even if that party starts with the best of intentions... At least that's what the historical record indicates.

There's a need to clarify the use of "so-called" and "neo-GOP". That's because the modern neo-GOP is just borrowing the brand name, but there is no real connection the the progressive Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln or the rationally balanced conservative GOP of Teddy Roosevelt and his ilk.

Lock and Load your Will for Gun Safety

Version 0.3

Lock and Load your Will for Gun Safety

Not sure where to begin, but let me list a few obvious points:

1. Lots of Americans die by getting shot, at least 30,000 per year.
2. America's professional politicians are incapable of addressing the problem in any meaningful way.
3. Gun safety is not an unsolvable problem. I think every metric shows the United States has the worst record for gun safety--but you can't even find out how bad the problem is because the statistics are actively suppressed.

Actually that leads me to start with point #3. I already knew that the US government is basically forbidden to collect various kinds of statistics about gun deaths and gun safety. So I started my research by searching the Internet for gun deaths and quickly found an apparently useful lead on Wikipedia for firearm-related deaths organized by country. The United States was not included.

Wait a minute. Tens of thousands of Americans are shot to death every year, but it isn't worth mention?

I don't think the lives of Americans are worth so little. Do you?

It's obvious the data is being censored, even on Wikipedia. Censorship is NOT a neutral point of view. Sorry Wikipedia. It's a big FAIL, at least as of the date of this writing (23 April 2013).

So I've expanded a bit on points #3 and #1, so let's hit on #2. Why are politicians unable and unwilling to do anything about gun safety? Of course I'm mostly concretely talking about the recent use of the filibuster to prevent a very slight improvement in background checks, but in general terms we have an almost total political paralysis in Washington, DC.

"It's the MONEY, Lebowski!"

In this case, the particular is mostly the money of the gun manufacturers invested with the NRA and some rightwing media. Easy to understand why. Gun manufacturers make money when everyone buys more guns.

To paraphrase the NRA itself, "The only thing that stops a bad politician with bad money is a good politician with good money."

Here is my suggestion for a source for good money: Lock and load your will. Not sure how this should be written, but I suggest that lots of people should add a paragraph to their boots-on will. If you die because of a gun, then 10% of your estate will be donated against some incumbent politician who has a favorable rating from the NRA. If you are shot by a gun that might not have been there if Congress had passed some gun safety regulation, then it should go to 20%. Probably too long for most people to write, but your will could even specify the kind of gun safety legislation that would cancel the paragraph.

Remember we're talking about 30,000 deaths per year. Those are pretty much unplanned deaths, but if some of those deaths start producing political funding for gun safety, maybe enough of the politicians will become as afraid of opposing gun safety as Americans should be afraid of the guns.

Loss of the Republic of Franklin

Version 0.5

Franklin's Republic Lost

Probably another apocryphal quote, but Benjamin Franklin was supposed to have been asked what the new American government was, and his answer is widely reported as "A republic, if you can keep it." Well, we just lost it. Not because President Obama won reelection, though that was a widespread lament of the right-wing authoritarians--but sometimes there is a grain of truth even in the rantings of nuts. There are plenty of extremists out there who are ready to be certified, but in this case they came close to a truth they couldn't see. The death knell of the American experiment with a representative republic was actually the victory of the incumbents in the House of Representatives.

Let me repeat that the crucial results in this election were NOT at the top in the presidential and Senatorial elections, but at the bottom, in the local elections for the House. In brief, most of the voters actually voted for Democratic Party candidates for the House of Representatives, and yet the result is that the Democratic Party only has about 45 percent of the members of the new House. The Congress went into this election with an approval rating around 10 percent, and yet roughly 90 percent of the incumbents were reelected to their positions.

Before considering the reasons, it's worth considering the rationale behind the design of the House of Representatives. The House was specifically designed to be highly responsive to the voting constituents. That's why their terms were set to only two years. The idea was that their accountability would make them responsible and for that reason they could be given the primary responsibility for controlling the purse strings.

On one level, the outcome represents the power of partisan gerrymandering, which is basically a triumph of the targeted investment of conservative money in lower-level elections, especially over the last few years. Entire States such as Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania have had their Democratic voters packed into districts that essentially waste a large fraction of the Democratic votes. (My own district has been stretched 300 kilometers to flip away from the Democrats.) Meanwhile, the neo-GOP carefully distributes their own voters into statistically safe districts around 55% that maximize the number of districts they capture. At the presidential level, the Electoral College has the same effect of negating most voters as regards the presidency. (This pressure from big businessmen has been around for a long time, and it isn't the first time the GOP was trying to create a permanent majority. The major difference this time around involves the pro-money tilt of the Supreme Court, which certainly looks to be decisive as things stand now.)

There are several other factors that should be considered but mostly dismissed. One is the cooperation of the incumbents of both parties to insure their reelections. This is the only thing that both parties can agree on, but there is clearly a tipping point effect. It is quite clear that many states have passed the point where the Democratic Party has any influence on the redistricting process. Rather than cooperating with the more powerful politicians to make things smoother for everyone, they now target those opposition leaders quite deliberately. Another factor is the dominance of money, but correlation is NOT the same thing as causation. Yes, the candidate with more money usually wins, but the events are not independent, and it is more likely that the candidate who is most likely to win is going to have the easiest time collecting money. It's the motivation of the donations that matter. Some people donate as insurance, but the neo-GOP is now dominated by investors who expect specific returns in exchange for their donations. Let me reiterate that most businesspeople are fine and upstanding people who just want to play the game, but it is the LEAST ethical businessmen who make those investments in the most cheaply bribed politicians.

The next level is less obvious. The central idea of public elections is that the candidates are supposed to talk to the voters about the issues and their plans, and the so-called mainstream media is supposed to facilitate the political process by disseminating that information. However, what has actually happened is that the media coverage focuses on making the election look like an interesting horse race, and the serious, but difficult and even boring, discussions of the real issues get ignored.. The professional journalists are supposedly responsible to influence or even push the discussions so that the elections actually do involve substantial debates of the real issues facing the voters. What's wrong?

It's the money that drives the media to the horse races and away from the real issues. After this election, there has been some noise about how the neo-GOP wasted over a billion dollars in this election cycle, especially in the presidential race. Was that money wasted? Did it disappear? Absolutely not. The deeper story is where the money went. Most of it went to the media companies such as television stations that ran campaign ads, especially in the so-called swing states and hot districts. I read that the nonpublic SuperPACs sometimes had to pay 10 times the most favorable rates that the laws provide for the official public advertisements of the regular candidates. Talk about your windfall profits! It's also important to note that these profits were concentrated in only certain media markets. Not sure how large these profits were, but I am sure that the people who made them liked those profits and would be glad to get more in the next election.

So was the billion dollars wasted? If you got your beak wet, you wouldn't think so, would you? My new hypothesis is that the billion dollars wasn't wasted, but represents highly effective bribes invested in the mainstream media to insure they play the same games in the the next election. It's worth noting that negative money is less evidently less effective at the higher levels, both because the higher level candidates are stronger and because of the blow-back taint that sometimes affects such high-level candidates. In contrast, in the low-level elections, it's relatively easier to find and sling enough mud to control the results--and it pretty clearly worked for the House of Representatives quite well this time.

My final conclusion is that the presidential election was mostly just a distraction, the bright shiny object that kept the voters from actually looking at the real problems of the nation, including the problems in the election system itself. Yes, the presidential election mattered, and I think that Romney's performance as president would have been on the scale from harmful to terrible, but the real damage was being done elsewhere. The political system has been disrupted and destroyed in a way that makes a mockery of the intentions of the Founding Fathers.

Luck of Obama, but...

Version 0.7

The Luck of O'bama:

Is President Obama Secretly Irish?

This is basically a commentary on the election of 2012. I will explain why I think the outcome was mostly a matter of luck and why the entire thing (including most of the results) were just more symptoms of the ongoing sickness of democracy in modern America.

First I have to include a disclaimer to prevent neo-GOP authoritarians from claiming this proves liberals agree with their defense of their OWN incompetence and their OWN reality-divorced stupidity. They are projecting again. The rest of the world doesn't require monolithic thinking and conformance to the official party line. That was how the Bolsheviks, Nazis, and Maoists (among others) ran things, and for largely the same reason. When you actually represent an extremist minority position, you have to speak with a single voice and single opinion. If you try to cite my comments in defense of your propaganda, this disclaimer will emerge into the full context and I will be quite glad to say you are lying AGAIN. If there is ANY lesson you right-wing authoritarians should learn from this election, it is that there are limits to how far you can carry a lie. Even Romney reached his limits, and he is almost certainly the greatest liar I've over seen.

Here are my main points:

1. President Obama is an extremely lucky fellow, and though luck is quite important, luck alone can't cure what ails America. Actually I feel like the best we can hope for is that Obama's luck helps keep the patient alive until a real cure appears. Unfortunately, even as an amateur historian, I'm unable to feel a lot of optimism.
2. Superstorm Sandy was the primary factor that led to his reelection. Though it was bad fortune for a lot of people, the precise timing and location had a powerful and fortuitous effect on the election. I'm not saying it was the only factor, but it certainly mattered and in a narrow election, I tend to believe it was decisive. Extreme weather events are becoming almost routine as the climate changes, but the details are a matter of luck, uniformly bad in the case of Katrina (mostly due to poor preparations and responses), but relatively mixed in this case, especially considering how many more people could have died if the response had been weaker.
3. The presidential election should not have been a close contest from the day when Romney picked Paul Ryan as his V-P nominee. Romney's statements about his policies and positions are meaningless, but picking Ryan was his first binding presidential decision, and it clearly defined Romney as part and parcel of the lunatic fringe of American politics.
4. Even worse, the House of Representative, which is part of a Congress with a current approval rating around 10%, managed to reelect almost all of it's incumbents. The neo-GOP retained its House majority even though the neo-GOP candidates received substantially fewer votes than the Democratic Party candidates. The Founding Fathers intended that the House would be MORE responsive to the will of the voters, and this travesty is strong evidence that the system they created is on its last legs.
5. In conclusion, if the neo-GOP extremists and authoritarians continue to block smooth evolutionary change, then the problems they are unintentionally and foolishly nurturing will lead to the chaotic revolution they most fear. Since the speed of change is so rapid these days, their catastrophe may arrive quite soon.

Now let me expand a bit on some of these points.

The tradition of how to win in American elections has been for both candidates to claim the center and sell themselves to the moderate voters. Romney's campaign had realized (probably from the start) that they needed to make a play for the center to win, and apparently their market research convinced them they could delay that play until the last few weeks of the campaign.

In the closing days of the campaign, Romney was pivoting to the center around a claim that President Obama was weak, incompetent, and too partisan to govern American effectively. Then Superstorm Sandy struck. Essentially for an entire week Obama received nothing but favorable media coverage showing how strong, competent, and bipartisan he actually is. Romney's attack ads were also cut from the air. It certainly helps that this view of Obama is basically the truth, and it put the lie to Romney's sales pitch. The attack on Obama as partisan was especially offensive insofar as the documented reality was that the neo-GOP had resolved NOT to cooperate in ANY way from the day that President Obama took his oath of office--and in spite of their OWN oaths to the Constitution.

However, the truth was never relevant to Romney's campaign, which was an endless stream of lies from beginning to end. At that point in the campaign Romney need to hold on to that particular set of lies for another week. There was no time to create plausible new lies with the appropriate new ads, and the result was President Obama's victory. I don't know how to price the week of free publicity and the loss of Romney's advertising airtime, but I think Romney's (mostly secret) monetary advantage was at least a billion dollars, and that was obviously cancelled out by Superstorm Sandy.

Romney's entire campaign was like a kleptomaniac visiting the lie store. I want to call it "Adventures of a Kleptomaniac in the Field of Lies", but a real kleptomaniac is sick and acting compulsively. As I've noted elsewhere, I think Romney just lies because the truth has no intrinsic value to him. He's like Nixon, in that I think he is smart enough to know what is true and false, but like Nixon, his only concern in his statements is instrumental, in whether or not he can use a statement to his advantage, and truth or falsity is irrelevant.

Romney never should have mounted a serious campaign because he didn't start with an albatross around his neck. It was more like several flocks of albatrosses, and President Obama's failure to use those albatrosses more effectively against Romney is the only reason I think the campaign was ever close. One flock could be tagged "Dubya", and even if you dismiss the junior Bush as irrelevant now, Romney had surrounded himself with many members of that disastrous administration. Another flock involved his business dealings and tax returns, and there was a third flock around his "severely conservative" performance as governor in Massachusetts. It wasn't until the end of the campaign that I learned how false were his claims of bipartisan leadership at that time, where the reality was large numbers of vetoes and many overrides of his vetoes by his legislature, sometimes even including the overriding votes of the members of his OWN party.

Early in the campaign I actually said this kind of outcome was worthless. We have already watched several years of the obstructionist Congress putting their neo-GOP partisan concerns ahead of the nation while loudly accusing their opponents of doing exactly that. I think President Obama should have almost turned his back on Romney in the campaign and focused great efforts on the worst of these political hacks. He should have made them into national figures and forced Romney to their defense, while also forcing the neo-GOP to pour money into those black holes such as Michele Bachmann, who barely managed to survive by outspending her opponent by $12 for every $1 (that we know of, but there was probably more money under her table). As it actually came out, only a few of these lunatics were defeated, and Romney was only caught in a couple of embarrassing endorsements. In one of those cases (the Senatorial race in Indiana), Obama's campaign advantageously exploited Romney's endorsement in a very powerful series of ads.

By the way, I only made two small donations in this campaign, and one of them was targeted at 11 of these extremists. Four or five of the 11 were defeated by relatively small leverage. Unfortunately Bachmann and the one Romney had endorsed were two of the survivors, but if the Democratic Party had gotten more heavily involved in these races, I think their defeats could have helped lead the way to the rout the neo-GOP Congress richly deserved. (My other donation was to Mother Jones for their part in publication of the 47% video, which quite probably hurt Romney's campaign as much as Superstorm Sandy.)

In spite of the pessimistic title of "Distant View of America's Fall", I want to end on an optimistic note. Maybe the neo-GOP will realize that there is no reason to be totally obstructive now. President Obama is done with his political career now, and he has nothing to do but run the country, more easily with their assistance (even if it is grudging), but it would suit me just as well if he did it on top of their political corpses. Most of them are going to have to run again in two years, and they could actually claim some credit if the country is in better shape at that time. So let me close with a few suggested issues that President Obama could use for seeking a more bipartisan working relationship with the same politicians who have tried to cut his hand off every time he's extended it towards them. Hope spring eternal, eh?

Here are some possible areas of bipartisan agreement:

1. Disaster relief for Superstorm Sandy. No reason for the neo-GOP to punish the victims, even though many of them are still angry at Chris Christie for his 'treasonous' bipartisan behavior when his state was drowning.
2. An agreement to defer to the states on marijuana. States' rights has been a favorite topic of many conservatives, and two states have just voted to decriminalize marijuana in spite of the federal laws.
3. Normalization of diplomatic relations with Cuba. Hey, even many of the neo-GOP pundits realize that their relationships with Hispanic-Americans need to be improved, and I think everyone should be able to agree that Castro is no longer relevant.
4. Campaign finance reform. Unfortunately, there is already evidence that the neo-GOP extremists think the "real lesson" of this incredibly expensive campaign was that they didn't "invest" enough money in the campaigns, especially at the presidential and senatorial levels. Gamblers have a tendency to throw good money after bad.
5. Stopping the neo-GOP war on women and their rights. Oh wait, now I'm babbling.

There will be more change

Version 0.4

There Will be More Change

An open letter to Lloyd Doggett (and Dan Grant):

There was once a time when I felt that I was participating in America's government and that my vote was just as good as the vote of any other American. That was a long time ago, and you [Llyod Doggett] were my representative to Congress in those days.

There will be change.

One of the older changes was that my district was gerrymandered. I didn't change my mind or move or decide that you no longer represented my [basically moderate] ideas. The district was deliberately changed and mangled to make it into a "safe" neo-GOP district. Amusingly, I just read that they had to gerrymander it some more to defend the trivial political tool whose name I can't recall. That district should be the poster child for anti-democratic neo-GOP tactics. (In response to the gerrymandering, you moved, and two Democratic representatives were reduced to one, which was the entire point of the exercise.)

Today I decided to do some searches on the big Internet. I was looking for a recent video of Lloyd Doggett and President Obama speaking together. Couldn't find one.

I searched for my district and found that someone named Dan Grant will apparently be the Democratic candidate for my district. I looked for a video of "Dan Grant and Obama". Nothing.

I visited both of your websites. You both want my money. Sorry, but that's a silly request. I can't help you against Sheldon Adelson and Mitt Romney and the Kolk Brothers and Karl Rove and a few of their extremely rich friends. For each dollar I would strain to give you, Sheldon Adelson can easily give a million.

The ONLY way my money donated to you could possibly matter is if there is a massive multiplier to make things more fair. Looking at the recent results in Wi$con$in and California (Proposition 29), that would take some convincing. You don't need to fool all of the people all of the time. You just need to fool about 20% of the voters on Election Day.

Here's a campaign suggestion. If I do that kind of search, I should get some videos. Show me President Obama endorsing the candidate and telling me that it's up to me--to ME personally--whether or not that candidate has a chance. It's up to ME whether democracy has a chance in America against the corporate money. I don't think Obama should go into the nitty-gritty local issues, but rather focus on corporate personhood. I actually think President Obama should endorse a simple Constitutional Amendment saying that human rights have priority OVER corporate rights, and I believe that ANY candidate I would support should agree to that position. (Of course, I think that the neo-GOP candidates would be lying about their agreement to negate the issue.)

Let's imagine that President Obama can flip a few districts from "safe neo-GOP incumbent" to "probable Democratic challenger". Here are my predictions for what would happen:

(1) Karl Rove and his friends would pour a FLOOD of black money into those districts, but it would be relatively visible (because of the concentration) and it would have a HUGE multiplier effect (since there would be almost no Democratic campaign money involved).

(2) Mill Romney would be obliged to respond by leaping to the defense, and most of the people he would be forced to defend and link himself to are extremist morons.

Here are some more changes America desperately needs: Joe Walsh, Allen West, Peter King, and a bunch of other rightwing lunatic neo-GOP politicians.

Some of those madmen should be black holes. They are SUCH bad candidates that NO amount of money will save them, but by making them prominent national figures and exploiting their irrational hatred of President Obama, the neo-GOP is liable to pour a LOT of money into those black holes before they figure that out. When they give up on those districts after accepting the challenge, they will be LOSERS in the most public and humiliating way possible--plus they will have that much less money to spend elsewhere.

Oh yeah. The neo-GOP thing. Today's so-called Republican Party is NOT the progressive and liberal party created by Abraham Lincoln. It is NOT the GOP of such leaders as Teddy Roosevelt and General "Ike" Eisenhower. The neocons were NOT conservative, and today's neo-GOP is even farther from their Republican so-called roots.

I want to rant on about political philosophy and flagrant liars in American politics, but let me try to reduce it to a simple theme. Most businesspeople are good folks, but the WORST businessmen are legally bribing the CHEAPEST professional politicians to write the WORST possible laws. At this point the rules of the game of American business require your company to become an evil cancer just to survive--and now, thanks to Citizens United, I think the corporations are calling the shots. The experiment in democracy in America was a glorious one, but I think it's over. Please prove me wrong.

A narrow victory of President Obama that retains an obstructionist Congress will NOT lead to change. We have seen that over the last years. The only hope for America is if the neo-GOP Congress is CRUSHED in November. Time to go on the offensive.

--
Freedom. It's about meaningful and unconstrained choice, not beer.

There will be change

Version 0.5

There Will be Change

An open letter to President Obama:

America is dying, and it's my fault. I'm not a powerful person, so the degree of my fault is relatively small. However, insofar as America is a representative democracy and my vote is as good as yours, then I share that degree of blame with you.

Insofar as you are a MORE powerful and influential person than I am, it is MORE your fault. In particular, if you are a professional politician using gerrymandering, lies, and the bribes you've received to make my vote ineffective, worthless, and meaningless, then your fault is just that much greater.

Insofar as President Obama is a much more powerful and influential person than you or I, it is much more his fault. He's supposed to be the leader of America, and he is not leading to positive change.

While we are alive, we change. Only in death does change stop--but America is dying.

There will be change. Good or bad?

President Obama campaigned on promises of good changes. He has not delivered those good changes. Pick your favorite promise and cry. Now Romney is campaigning on promises of bad changes. Romney promises to change back to policies that are already proven failures. Weep some more.

The choice of this election is apparently between empty promises and bad promises. Once again it's apparently a choice between bad and not quite so bad.

Does President Obama have a good excuse? Sort of. I believe he sincerely tried to help America and he at least tried to put America's good ahead of politics while his opponents put their personal hatred of Obama ahead of EVERYTHING else. There was a time when patriotic political opponents could still hope the president could succeed insofar as that was part of the success of America. Kind of hard to believe now. John Wayne probably said it best when he said "I didn't vote for him, but he's my President, and I hope he does a good job," but...

Is there any hope for America? I really doubt it, but I think there is only one path that might lead towards good change.

If President Obama wins a narrow victory and continues to face an obstructionist Congress, we know there will be no change. If Romney wins, he will change America for the worse.

The only path for good change is with a massive defeat of the neo-GOP Congress. You'd think that would be easy given the low approval of Congress--but they've rigged the system in favor of the incumbents. That's the ONLY thing all of the professional politicians can agree on.

President Obama should mostly ignore Romney. That's just forces a choice between lesser evils.

President Obama should campaign DIRECTLY and primarily against the neo-GOP Congress. He should go to the districts of the worst neo-GOP Congressmen and try to flip them from 'safe neo-GOP incumbent' to 'probable Democratic challenger'. He should speak directly to the voters in those districts and tell them that they have the power of change. Not likely, but at least that would be a possibility.

Here are some of the things he could do in a target district: (1) Give a speech in the district focusing on the harms of Congress and the specific harms of that Congressman and personal attacks from that Congressman. (2) Appear with and strongly endorse the Democratic challenger. (3) Make short forms for advertising in that district. (4) Put videos of all of the above on the Internet addressed to the voters of that district. (Of course he should use similar tactics for the Senate, going for 61+ Democratic senators.)

Two helpful side effects of these tactics. First, he would provoke massive (and therefore relatively visible) expenditures of black SuperPAC money in those districts--and the natural and relatively inexpensive response is to ask those voters "Are you for sale?" How much money can the neo-GOP waste in such an uneven struggle against the bully pulpit? Second, he would provoke Romney into linking himself more closely to the most extreme elements of the neo-GOP. The American voters actually dislike extremists, no matter how much Romney lies about his own extremism. My own favorite target would be that West character in Florida. What about King in New York? Even my own district elected a progressive Democrat for many years until the gerrymandering--but maybe it could be flipped. Some of these targets are quite soft. At least some of those neo-GOP politicians are really soft in the head.

The Republican Party is no more. Abe Lincoln's original Republican Party was progressive and liberal, NOT conservative. The GOP of Teddy Roosevelt and Ike (Eisenhower for you children) was moderate and balanced, in favor of national parks and infrastructure such as roads, NOT extremely conservative, quite mindless and proudly ignorant, and against EVERYTHING that America needs for the future. Today's neo-GOP is something new, but a change for the MUCH worse. The only chance for positive change in America, the only hope for America's future, is if the neo-GOP is decisively defeated and crushed.

There will be change.

President Obama versus the neo-GOP Congress

Version 0.7

Is There Still a Path to the Survival of Democracy in America?

In the future, there will be change. If it is not change for the better, then it will be change for the worse.

If President Obama is going to help America change for the better, then his only hope is to campaign against the Republican Congress. EVERY Congressional race for a seat held by a neo-GOP politician must become a referendum on the performance of Congress.

If President Obama wins reelection, but Congress remains a gang of noisy neo-GOP obstructionists, then there will be no change for the better. The last four years have proven this. A narrow Obama victory is a defeat.

I strongly believe that a Romney victory with a staunchly conservative neo-GOP Congress will lead to a change back to Dubya's failed policies (which were actually the policies of Rove and Cheney and their associates). Those policies did not succeed when Bush was in the White House, and they will do no better on the second, third, or 10th attempt. This will NOT be a change for better.

The only hope is if the neo-GOP politicians are punished for blocking constructive change. There is only one path to progressive and constructive change. The first step on that path is that President Obama has to win and the neo-GOP Congress has to lose.

In light of Citizens United and considering that so many Americans have been so well trained to obey the ads, the situation looks quite bleak. All good things must come to an end, and I fear that I am about to witness the end of America. I would much prefer to believe that I will not outlive my country.

Truth, justice, and the American way in Wi$con$in

Version 0.1

  

Truth, justice, and the American way? You silly rabbit! How much cash do you have? Thanks, Wi$con$in, and go to the devil.

Basically just recording my initial reactions to the debacle of Wisconsin. Unleash the hounds of hell? Well, the big, bad money has certainly been unleashed and we'll see its full wrath in November.

One question is why the same math (statistically sampling) apparently failed (again) for exit polling but apparently worked perfectly in predicting the final results within an hour of the polls closing. Apparently the exit polling showed a very close race. Statistically, that should mean that the actual result is quite close to even. Then they start looking at a different sample and almost instantly decide the result is NOT close to even. Do you believe in math? I think that's the real problem with the anti-evolution nuts. After all, genetics is really statistics, too. I would like to see detailed comparisons of the exit poll results and the actual results.

Obviously worth very little, but I can put my defense of democracy rather succinctly: Any system (1) will work better if all of the people involved care about making it work better and are trying to make it better. A system (2) will work worse in direct proportion to the number of people who are NOT sincerely trying to support it, and the system (3) will work worst of all when most of the people involved are working to destroy the system.

America was never a perfect democracy, but it used to be much closer to Clause (1) in a more democratic condition. There were periods of high social mobility when it really was possible for almost any white man in good health to succeed as an independent farmer. Most Americans could rationally feel they were roughly equal to most other Americans and had roughly equal prospects for the future. Not perfect, of course. For example, if you were a black slave, there was no reason you couldn't be worked to death, ordered to warm your master's bed, or worse.

The neo-GOP Congress is the perfect example of Clause (2), where an obstructionist minority is clearly most focused on their own political success to the point where they can't even stop themselves from cheering when they receive BAD news about the country. "Unemployment is up? GREAT--for US in November." I even think America is headed for Clause (3) in the style of the Russian Empire in the 19th century.

However, if you have enough money behind you, there are NO limits now. Our advertising and political propaganda technologies have reached the point where people routinely vote against their OWN future.

Rather safe prediction for the November is that there will be LOTS of secret black money poured into the campaign. President Obama's people have already realized that they will be badly outspent and that they need to focus their limited resources to have any chance of winning. However, such a narrow victory will be no victory at all. The only victory that would make a difference would be a victory that allowed us to get the money out of politics, a victory that would lead to LEGAL proof corporations are NOT people. For that meaningful victory, Obama needs a LARGE victory, not a narrow victory that will leave the obstructionists in place.

Yeah, I still love America, but it's evolving. It was already to the point where I had to compare it with love for a close relative in the last stages of an incurable disease. Now it's like the close relative has adopted crazy and self-destructive habits, snorting cocaine, juggling flaming clubs, and worse.

Can Romney Lie His Way to the Presidency?

Version 0.3

Can Romney Lie His Way to the Presidency?

It seems to be time to make my prediction for this coming election. Pretty simple, actually. I think Romney will buy the GOP nomination and the neo-GOP will ride his coattails only because they sincerely hate President Obama, not because they think Romney is sincere about anything. It seems most likely that Romney will pivot SHARPLY to the left the day after he secures the nomination, possibly moving even to the left of Obama on many issues. Perhaps his final campaign slogan should be selected from this list:

1. This time I'm telling you the truth! Really!
2. Don't you just HATE President Obama!
3. Vulture Capitalism Works!
4. So that government of the corporations, by the lawyers, for the richest 0.1% of Americans, shall rule the earth.

You can certainly argue that Romney is a terrible businessman, at least when it comes to politics. While we know nothing about his real beliefs, we do know that Romney is spending a LOT of money to buy the nomination and will presumably spend much more to buy the presidency if he secures the nomination. Actually, if you're a sincere neo-GOP supporter, then you even regard Romney's only prior electoral success as a political liability, since he was a 'liberal' governor of a liberal state, so it certainly appears that he wasted ALL of the money he has spent on his numerous previous campaigns. All of that dough invested and NOTHING to show for it? So much for Romney's reputation as a so-called great businessman, eh?

Unfortunately, I feel that an election between Obama and Romney would be quite meaningless--which turns out to be an anti-freedom thing in my worldview. While I continue to feel that President Obama does stand for some good principles, his stands are mostly pretty weak, so it's hard to care much there.

In contrast, Romney stands for nothing that can be detected with any of my sensors. It seems that almost everything he has said at one time is contradicted by its opposite at another time for another audience. Perhaps it's a secret Mormon conspiracy to take over the afterworld with mass proxy baptisms?

Seriously, I feel there's no real choice there (because Romney is a meaningless choice), and meaningful (and unconstrained) choice is the essence of the important sense of freedom. For that reason, I conclude it would be quite good if Romney lost the nomination and the neo-GOP candidate (presumably the extremist Santorum) offered a REAL choice to the American voters. At least if Santorum or a neo-GOP politician won, then everyone would know for certain that America is finished. (I still love my country, but it's increasingly like the love for a close relative with a terminal disease. While I think Reagan and Dubya were rather minor symptoms, I definitely think Nixon and Cheney were quite serious indicators of malaise...)

Amusingly enough, I even think I know how to destroy Romney, but I don't know the person who could make it happen. What I 'think I know' is the central theme of a series of anti-Romney commercials. I think they will probably appear later on, but after Romney has the nomination it won't really matter even if they prevent him from winning, since the essential problem in America is now the lack of real choice (and thus the loss of freedom)--the so-called deficit of democracy in America. Maybe you know someone who can create some viral YouTube videos to get rid of Romney now? Before he wins the nomination and renders the election meaningless except as a contest in fund raising...

I can see these ads as running at various lengths, basically divided in two parts. The first part is essentially posing the question: Are you confused about what Mitt Romney believes? During this part of the video, the top should show the question, perhaps in the simplified form of "What does Romney believe?" while it shows paired clips of Romney contradicting himself on various issues. I think it might be best to do this part with a vertical split, freezing the first statement on one side as a visual reminder of each contradiction while it is showing Romney's second statement on the other side. Punch it up at the end with a big keyword diagonally displayed on top of each side? There are so many of these self-contradictions by Romney that they could run as long as desired, though of course the best pairs should be as diametrically opposed and as close together in time as possible.

Then it switches to a new theme: What I (the creator of the video) think Romney REALLY believes. In that part, it plays a pastiche video of Romney saying one sentence. I think it should be the Lincoln misquote mentioned in the facetious list above: "So that government of the corporations, by the lawyers, for the richest 0.1% of Americans, shall rule the earth." The punchline sentence is the only difficult part. You want it to show the cuts so that it is obvious it is not a claim of his actual in-context words, but you also want it to be smooth enough to be clearly audible and to get the message across... Perhaps display the words in a smooth scroll across the bottom as he 'says' them in the video snippets at the top?

Should Joe Biden Step Down as VP?

Version 0.2

Should Joe Biden Step Down as VP?

This is actually based on a comment I added to an article about replacing Joe Biden as VP on Huffington Post. My own answer is yes, he should step aside, mainly for the reasons below, most of which were not addressed in the article.

This article raised the political considerat­ions and then ignored the most important factor--th­e neo-GOP nominee. The best V-P pick to balance the Democratic ticket will crucially depend on who President Obama is running against. I actually like Joe Biden and don't think he's done a bad job, but he is fundamenta­lly too old to represent the future of the Democratic Party. Actually, I'm sure it was another metric of Dubya's fundamenta­l incompeten­ce that he didn't dump the big dick Cheney in 2004.

I actually think the most powerful V-P pick would be a progressive or even liberal candidate--from the OLD Republican Party. Someone who switched to the Democratic Party precisely because the GOP is no more. The dominant rightwing clique of the neo-GOP is actually strongly controlled by the Reagan Republican­s who used to be Southern Democrats. Unfortunately, I can't think of any examples of a prominent Republican who has switched to the Democratic Party. The neo-GOP party discipline puts Lenin's Bolsheviks to shame.

By the way, I don't think Reagan deserves much of the credit (or blame) for remaking the GOP into the far rightwing neo-GOP. That was mostly a negative reaction to LBJ's civil rights legislation, and Reagan was just an excuse that the Southern Democrats were waiting for. Almost any excuse would have done, and it was more like a supersaturated gas that suddenly condensed from gaseous Southern Democrats into Reagan Republicans. When I arrived in Texas in the mid-70s, there hadn't been a Republican governor of Texas since Reconstruction, but since the cloudburst of Reagan Republicans, there are no prominent Democrats in any statewide office in Texas.

Unfortunat­ely, as much as I respect President Obama, I think he lacks Reagan's skills as a propagandist and figurehead, and that is apparently what it takes to motivate Americans these days. Or maybe it's just the superior power of negative motivations? The Southern Democrats REALLY hated LBJ's civil rights laws... Maybe Obama could motivate a large migration of old progressive GOP voters into the Democratic Party, but I haven't seen any hint of such a trend.

In conclusion, I repeat that I think it's time for Joe Biden to step down as V-P. Though the original article dismissed him as regards State, I think he could and probably would do a good job there. However, I think that Clinton has done quite well there and he would probably be overshadowed for just that reason, barring some massive success such as peace in Israel.

Metrics of Democracy's Sickness

Version 0.6

Metrics of Democracy's Sickness

This is in response to John Dean's second installment on the destructive gaming of American democracy at http://verdict.justia.com/2011/10/07/gaming-american-democracy-2.

This is an important topic, but I really feel like you [John Dean] are focusing too much on some of the relatively minor fronts in the larger war. There are at least two other fronts where I think much larger battles are being fought--and lost--by the proponents of democracy. The first front involves gerrymandering, and the second front involves biasing the judicial system.

(1) Why do 40% of the voters ignore elections? That's far more than the roughly 30% that vote for the winning presidential candidates. Mostly because they believe their votes don't count and can't affect the results--and they are right. Their districts have been gerrymandered and their votes have been effectively precounted and negated before they are ever cast.

A metric for the degree of gerrymandering should be easy to calculate, and yet I've never seen a good one published anywhere. The effectiveness of partisan gerrymandering is in the degree to which you can waste or squander your opponents' votes. Equivalently, that means you want to distribute your own votes to maximize their impact. These effects must ultimately be measured by considering the anti-democratic results of the elections. The degree to which the electoral and policy outcomes differ from the preferences of the actual voters should be something that can be mathematically assessed and compared.

I can easily cite two examples of abusive gerrymandering, and both of them involve the neo-GOP politicans gaming the system. The earlier example is in Texas, where the Republicans forced early redistricting in 2003. My very own district was held by Lloyd Doggett at that time, but that district was stretched to Houston to include enough Republican voters to tilt it safely to the GOP, and Doggett was basically obliged to move to a different district with a much higher and newly concentrated percentage of Democratic voters--where more of those votes were now a meaningless excess. There was no massive shift in the voting demographics of Texas or in my original district, but in one fell swoop the Republicans were able to capture a large number of House seats from the Democratic Party.

The second example is in Pennsylvania. On a statewide basis the state voted for Obama in 2008, but the Democratic voters are highly concentrated in certain districts while many other districts have narrow (but safe) Republican majorities. I'm not certain how much of this situation was the result of deliberate gerrymandering, but the current situation is highly imbalanced. Therefore the Republican legislature is trying to change the rules regarding their electors. The math shows how Obama could win most of the votes in Pennsylvania while the gerrymandering would allow his opponent to capture most of the electoral votes.


I spent a while trying to define a good metric for the harm of gerrymandering. The best reference I was able to find was this paper on the geometric assessment of gerrymandering, but it doesn't consider the voters at all. It barely mentions them, so you wind up feeling like 'No harm, no foul.' It barely acknowledges the negation of voters. Based on that paper and my own struggles, I believe a good metric will consider the geometry, but not just the districts' shapes. The geometry of the voters must also be considered. In addition, to assess the harm, the electoral outcomes and even the legislative outcomes should be assessed. Finally a useful purpose for polling? Well, that would be nice, but...

Just to clarify the harms of extreme gerrymandering, I'm going to construct a little example here. We have two imaginary states, A and B, each of which has 10 equal districts of 100 voters. So as to include the most extreme case of the harm, we'll assume that each state's 1,000 voters are divided into 694 consistently blue voters and 306 consistently red voters. You can easily imagine the associated political parties, eh?

State A uses nonpartisan redistricting with the intention of producing the fairest and most representative possible outcome. The voters are somewhat unevenly distributed, with concentrations of blue and red voters. In this situation, it is not difficult to draw the lines to that 7 districts will be blue and 3 will be red. There is some threat of 'dictatorship of the majority', especially if party discipline is strong, but that is a known danger and we even have some established responses, such as some parts of the Bill of Rights and the judicial system.

The situation in State B is similar, but the red party is in charge of the redistricting and they are allowed to use perfect gerrymandering. They draw the districts so that their 306 voters are perfectly placed in 6 districts with 51 red voters each. The result of that election is that less than 31% of the voters would then control 60% of the legislature. If the red party has good party discipline, we can wind up with a fake democracy that is actually a strong dictatorship by a small minority.

I was going to say that the real situation in America is not that extreme, but now I find myself wondering. The actual percentage of Republican voters is only around 25%, and yet their party discipline is so strong that they were able to cripple the Senate with even fewer than 40 Republican Senators. The Democratic Party is fundamentally weak on party discipline, and the Republicans could pretty much always count on getting one or two Democrats to join them. Since gaining that 40th Senator, I feel the Republicans have gone way beyond crippling the Senate and right to the edge of destroying it as any sort of democratic institution. Then you have to consider that the Senate is not even apportioned fairly in relation to the population... Throw in the gerrymandering and various forms of disenfranchisement, and maybe the amazing thing is that the federal legislators EVER pay attention to the actual voters in this reputed democracy?

(2) The second front involves biasing the judiciary by appointing judges based on age and political opinions rather than based upon their judicial qualifications. I actually think this one would be easier to measure. There are only a few categories of data that have to be assessed. The easiest one is the age of judges who are nominated to the federal judiciary. If you think the neo-GOP is biasing things on a political basis, then the obvious prediction is that their judicial appointees will be significantly younger, the longer and better to thwart the voters' will when they pick the 'wrong' president. The other metric would be ideological consistency of the judges in their decisions. The prediction here would be that the judges appointed by Democratic presidents would be less ideologically consistent in their rulings.


If these are two of the main fronts in the war against democracy, then I think America is in a whole lot of trouble...

Campaign Finance Reform in the Lame Duck Session

Version 0.3

The minor lesson of the recent election was that visible money gets discounted, and heavily. Even with $140 million of her own money, the voters knew exactly why Meg Whitman was saying all those bad things about her various opponents, and she got discounted down to zero and lost badly.

However the main lesson of the election of 2010 was that invisible and anonymous money works rather well, as clearly shown by the large bulk of the election results. Not all of the voters select political leaders the same way they select laundry soap, based on the last ads they were exposed to on TV, but enough of them do that democracy is pretty much nonfunctional in America. (Remember that the largest voting bloc is the non-voters, who quite rationally understand that their votes have been gerrymandered away in advance.)

In the big picture, it's worth thinking about why McDonald's doesn't run attack ads against the other fast food restaurants such as Burger King and Wendy's, and vice versa. Obviously because they would be hurting their own business, shrinking the pie, so to speak, which is exactly what has happened to the value of the professional politicians as perceived by the citizens. About the only thing that all Americans agree on at this point is that we need far more high-quality political leaders to replace the current crop (but who quite often cling to power right up to their dying days).

The most obvious solution is campaign finance reform, and it's even conceivable. All it would take is for a few of the outgoing Republican senators to decide that they wanted to go out as statesmen who tried to save democracy in America. It's clearly in the interests of the less wealthy Democratic politicians to go along with the idea, and it's clearly what most of the people want. Unfortunately, there is absolutely no public discussion of the topic or any evidence that Congress is considering it. In the month since the election, I've only seen two public mentions of the topic. One was a letter to the editor from a defeated Democratic candidate suggesting he had been defeated because he had almost no money, which was probably true, and the other was a report that the supporters of the so-called Tea Party were determined to block any consideration of campaign finance reform, though they haven't had to lift a finger or spend a nickel on it.

Anyway, the hope would be pretty slim. The Supreme Court created new law to undo the McCain-Feingold law, and the same five so-called justices are still there and just as eager as ever to destroy democracy in America. The flood of secret money will eventually be exposed, but it's already too late to worry about it, though the full force of the damage won't be in place until next month... (I'm reminded of a law student with whom I corresponded at the time of Bush v. Gore. He said America was becoming a judicial dictatorship--and that was exactly why he was in law school.)

As it stands, the last chance for campaign finance reform is rapidly slipping away, though I wasted the last month doing what little I could to try to stimulate a public discussion of the topic. I'm convinced that if they don't pass it NOW, in this lame duck session, it will never happen. America has already suffered from one experiment with a so-called permanent Republican majority, but I don't think the country can hope to be lucky enough to get another Teddy Roosevelt.

Perhaps some of the problem is the demeaning label of "lame duck session" for the last session of the outgoing Congress? Maybe it would help if we called it the "retiring statesmen session"? Ha ha.

For my next joke, did you hear the one about the gerrymandered term limits?

(The effective discounting of votes by such practices as gerrymandering and the general abuses of professional lifetime politicians are also very important, but those problems are much more difficult and even I am unable to imagine them being tackled in a lame duck session. Congress has NEVER had that many statesmen at one time, even without regard to the consideration of extra ethical freedom for imminent retirees.)

P.S. This is really just a kind of outline post, but my new blogging policy is not to spend much time on a theme unless there are some comments suggesting someone is at least slightly interested in the topic. I will probably limit my responses to comments in responses, but if there is enough interest, I may do a full-scale consolidate rewrite, presumably as a new post.

Democracy was a nice idea

It seems I need to preface these comments by saying something about why I think democracy has mostly worked pretty well. It keeps coming back to my basic projection of my love of freedom. I like to make my own choices and control my own destiny, and democracy is the system that makes that possible for more people. Amusingly enough, I don't think it's the highest percentage of people, but the largest absolute numbers of people. As you go backwards in time, when you arrive at a primitive hunter-gatherer society, then you can argue that everyone has absolute freedom--but none of the other comforts of civilization. However in terms of the old utilitarian approach, civilization creates a lot of happiness for a lot of people. I think the costs (such as governments and taxes) are worth the benefits (such as larger populations with more interesting and longer lives), but you can argue that is just my personal bias. As it applies to democracy, if it's actually working, then everyone should feel like they have a stake in the pie, even if their own preferred leaders didn't win the latest election.

However, that isn't how it's working out in America these days. I would say that democracy is being destroyed from two directions, and we had sterling examples of both attacks in this last week, one in the special senatorial election in Massachusetts and one at the SCOTUS in Washington, D.C.

The first attack is the transient rise of populist stupidity. You don't have to fool all of the people all of the time to persuade them to vote against their own best interests and against the best interests of their nation. That's the bow to Lincoln's 'all of the people' (though there's some doubt he actually said it). You don't even need to fool 51% just on Election Day, per 'most of the people'. It's even worse than that. There are large blocs of voters who are known to vote in certain ways, so all you need is to fool enough people to reach 50% + 1 voter on Election Day, which is a rather small chunk of 'some of the people'. Maybe the real cause of the stunning neo-GOP victory wasn't stupidity and very short memories. In that case it would appear to be pure vicious selfishness. Take your pick, but it's pretty hard to see as a victory for the wisdom of crowds. What this election apparently proves is that the voters have already forgotten how the neo-GOP ran the country into ditch, and now the neo-GOP can prevent anyone from fixing the mess they created. (As a political party, the existing neo-GOP is most like Lenin's Bolshevik's and nothing like the GOP of Teddy Roosevelt or the progressive Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln--but now the neo-GOP party is joining the Teabaggers, who most closely resemble the Russian anarchists who gave the czars so much trouble. Pretty hard to find anyone who would claim that either of those groups made any constructive contributions to Russian history...)

The other prong of the attack is the amazing SCOTUS ruling that allows corporations to donate as much as they want to any political campaign. Perhaps it's kind of inconsistent, since I actually regard money as a pretty pure motivation--but that's only true when all the parties to the transactions know everything that's going on. Absolutely safe to say that this is not the situation as regards politics, even in the relatively open American system. Of course Exxon is going to say they donated $50 million out of love, and it was purely coincidental that 6 months later the politician in question decided to kneecap and eliminate all of those pesky alternative energy projects. If hypocrisy was a fatal condition, Obama would get to nominate five new Justices, because those five would have exploded their own heads. Or maybe they don't know that the strong from of the claim of corporate personhood was actually a mistake, basically an opinion inserted into the official record as the SCOTUS deliberately evaded the issue.

Anyway, I did feel that democracy contributed a lot to the success of the United States over the years, though I don't feel it was the only factor. I'm actually inclined to think the main factor was the infusion of pure wealth from the real estate that was simply taken without any value-related payment as the native Americans were exterminated. Probably be a few centuries before historians and economists reach any kind of consensus on these topics, and as of this writing, I'm absolutely convinced that the United States won't last that long. I feel like the country has been racing towards a cliff, and the leading fools are squabbling over who's holding the steering wheel without even thinking about the lead foot on the gas pedal.

President Obama is about to make his state of the union speech. Every president says the state of the union is "strong". That's become pretty meaningless, because the strengths that exist are being overwhelmed by weaknesses that no one wants to face honestly. If he wants to be honest, I think he has to say that the state of the union is "insane, and quite possibly incurably insane."

The traditional Chinese system is an authoritarian kleptocracy with a merit-based bureacracy, and they just change the name of the ruling dynasty from time to time. Right now its the so-called communists, but things in China haven't really changed that much if you look at the big sweep of history. The Chinese view has always been that China is the center of civilization. It's just that they have a few bad centuries from time to time--and think they are just getting back to normal after one of those 'little' slumps. It troubles me to think that I may well live to see the contest decided, and the overwhelming evidence seems to be that China is smarter and tougher at playing these big games.

Comments on the Election of 2008

Secondary Subject: I hope you have hope

That's the great thing about voting. It gives me a hope I can make the world a bit better. It isn't like owning the government, but it's better than nothing, and even if my guy didn't win last time, maybe I can pick a winner this time.

Short version of my story: The neo-GOP of Texas tried to prevent me from voting this year, but Senator Obama's supporters saved my vote. I am grateful and want to share my gratitude.

Introduction to the long version: All things are linked, and pulling out a key thread is hard. What do you already know? Where are the gaps I must bridge? Why are you interested? What bores you? There is no Zen, but this is a Zen tale...

So does voting matter? Perhaps it's a kind of religious thing for me, but I've always regarded voting as a sacred right and a civic duty. I'm big on doing my duty. Often it seems that my vote will have no effect, but I do my duty and I rarely skip an election. I always hope to vote.

The hope of Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn was to prevent me from voting this year. She works in the office of the Secretary of State of Texas and sent me a long and complicated email message that was intended to convince me I could not vote. It fooled me, and it was even good enough to fool a retired lawyer friend, too. Maybe it was just the legal code hidden between the lines? Seemed really complicated to me, but probably it's easy stuff for lawyers. Focus on legality and lawyers agree on the law. From her legalese, I'm pretty sure Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn is a lawyer, too. McCain says he hopes to make budgetary evildoers famous--though he means infamous, but I think Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn deserves to be infamous, too. Have you have been disenfranchised by her? If so, please tell your story, too. But why did Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn try so hard to prevent me from voting? That thread leads to general political motivations, and the specific situation in Texas.

Remember that *ALL* of the politicians say they approve of voting, but I think most of them are lying. Yes, a few of them really love voting and are sincere about democracy, but most politicians see votes as bus tokens that they need to collect, and collecting tokens is just a tactical game. Stealing a bus token is even better--it's like getting two tokens at once. But if you can't collect the token and you can't steal it from your opponent, then the next best thing is to make sure it gets thrown away before your opponent collects it.

So how do most politicians play the game? Mostly by claiming to agree with the voters, even when they don't. But the voters often disagree with each other, so it's logically impossible to agree with all of them. Is it hopeless? Any disagreement with the politician could lose that token. One tactic of some politicians is to agree with both sides of every issue--which is why most politicians are known liars. It's just getting too hard to avoid getting caught, and it's much better to say meaningless gibberish while attacking anything the other guy said. Ergo, Karl Rove tried to perfect the art of politics as lying about your political opponents. (But maybe that mudslinging machine has finally run out of steam?)

That's actually a relatively 'good' side of the political game. An ugly side is the selective disenfranchisement. For example, gerrymandering during redistricting can concentrate the other side's votes so many of those votes are effectively wasted. Details would be too far afield here, but it's worth noting that many Americans don't vote simply because they know that their so-called secret ballots have already been precounted and gerrymandered, and thus rendered meaningless. Another vicious variation is when the neo-GOP targets 'hostile' voter registrations.

Perhaps my case isn't so bad, though I'm sure I was targeted because I was a likely Democratic voter when I mentioned wanting to vote in the Democratic primary. I don't know for certain if Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn is a Republican, but Texas politics is now dominated by the Republicans, so either she's a Republican appointed to her position for that reason or she's working for a Republican. In any case I'm firmly convinced the real motivation of her persuasive but misleading email was to block a probable Democratic voter. Voting while Democratic is almost a crime in Texas now.

These years the Republicans run Texas and control all of the top statewide offices--just as Texas used to be dominated by the Democrats for many decades. It's worth noting that the switch was due to a shift of old Southern Democrats who became new Reagan Republicans. That's a long history going back to the "War between the States" (AKA the American Civil War), but the best short summary was LBJ's statement that the Civil Rights Act was ceding the South to the Republicans for a generation--but I also hope that generation is over... Actually. when the Democrats ran Texas, the real state election was the Democratic primary, and now the real election in Texas is the Republican primary--and therefore, by blocking me from voting in the primary Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn had already succeeded in taking away my vote in Texas (but mostly if I switched to the primary that counts).

However, buried in the fine print in a lower paragraph of her email she actually admitted that I still had a residual right to vote--and that's what the Obama people told me about after the primary was past. They told me what steps to follow, and eventually I was rewarded with a ballot. Now I can hope it will be counted--unless Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn has some new tactic to kill it. Maybe I used the wrong kind of ink?

That's pretty much my story, but I want to close by trying to persuade you that you should vote, too, because there are real differences between the candidates in this race. If you don't choose, someone else will--and I confess I was *VERY* mistaken in 2000 to think it didn't matter much. I'm going to focus on one positive and one negative reason why I think this election matters.

What do you think about the "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"? I think the life thing has to come first, or you aren't going to care about anything else. But do you think your right to life should depend on whether or not some insurance company thinks it's profitable to insure you? If you haven't needed medical treatment to save your life, just wait a bit. I think Obama understands this much better than McCain. I think Obama hopes to provide more medical care to help us live, while McCain just hopes to help some insurance companies. America pays more and gets less--because the insurance companies are too greedy in the middle. I think better medical care is a positive hope.

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin hopes to meet Jesus, and soon. She's said she expects to meet Him within her lifetime. According to her church, that means she is hoping for and dreaming of Armageddon--and I *REALLY* don't want her in the White House working to make her dream come true. Self-fulfilling prophecies can be dangerous--hoping for the end of the world is a negative hope.

A summary? Politicians have various motivations. I think most politicians are in it for money, some for the power, and only a small number are really into the idea of public service for its own sake--even though all of them claim to put public service first. These differences cross party lines, but there is a bias. The Republicans have always been the party of business, and proportionately more of them are motivated by the money. That's why they normally treat elections the same way, working out the most cost-effective ways to get the required 51% of the votes. The power-crazed politicians seem roughly evenly split--but it's very clear that McCain has become one of them. However, the true public servants now seem to be disproportionately in the Democratic Party. Of course it's hard to be certain in advance, since they all say the same things... So far Obama has been walking the walk.

I started by hoping to pick a winner this time around. I'm picking Obama. This time is *NOW*. We need some hope for a better future.

Return of the native and new 2008 speculations

Over two years since I've commented here, so I think I should start with a bit of contextualizing and history. This blog actually originated in what has to be described as a "manual blog" I was preparing at http://shanenj.tripod.com/antibush.html as a kind of sporadic ongoing commentary on the political news of the day. That actually started early in 2001 when I'd never heard of the idea of a blog, though I think Blogger probably existed at that time. Great minds think alike? Or maybe I'd heard something about such an idea and just forgotten about my source for the idea? I often wonder... Anyway, I was just doing it by hand, which is a lot of nuisance for the bookkeeping and mechanics and the especially painful archiving of older posts when it got too large. No provision for visitor comments. People could send email comments, but if anyone was reading it, they mostly didn't say anything... At some point I heard about Blogger and I tried to integrate it into my existing methods, which wasn't too easy.

After a few years, there was the disgusting ultimate-mud-slinging election of 2004, and I was pretty much bummed out with the whole thing. I still think the yet-to-be-revealed truth is that Kerry was Karl Rove's hand-picked-in-secret nominee, and that the election was truly determined by the MSM attack on Howard Dean over the bogus issue of "the scream". Dubya has certainly committed a basically uncountable number of worse gaffs--if they only felt like giving him equal treatment, but in Dubya's case they just claim it makes him the guy "you" want to have a beer with--except for the little detail that Dubya doesn't drink bear with anyone in this revised life... Anyway, In 2000 Rove's neo-GOP drummed up support for Dubya as a 'name-brand' candidate who could (but didn't actually) beat Al Gore, and in 2004, the neo-GOP picked Kerry as a Democratic candidate that Dubya could beat--and I'm still not sure about that, given the games they played in that election, mostly with disenfranchising Democratic voters. Another one that may get revealed when the data is finally unraveled...

Anyway, after the election, about the only political part of my website that remained active was the anti-Dubya book review section, which has grown into quite a large file over the years, even though I'm not reading so many politically relevant books now. My general perspective remains pretty much unchanged, which is that America is on the way down... I keep seeing more and more evidence in the most surprising places. I think the big economic disaster will be triggered by a devaluation of the American dollar responding to the balance of trade and deficit spending. So the latest surprising place was in a Japanese history book a few days ago, where I ran across a very interesting graph of the American balance of trade with respect to England in the period before the American Revolution... It all fits together. Like we used to say in the Rice history department, "The only lesson you learn from history is that no one learns any lessons from history."

At this point it looks like America was sort of jostled out of it's nap for the election of 2006, and Dubya Bush's legacy of miserable failure is coming unraveled at every seam. However, I think it's just too little, too late...

Today's proximate cause of commenting was a comment I wrote yesterday for another venue. The topic of that discussion was the probably Democratic nominee for 2008. Slightly polished here...

I'm not so much against Hillary Clinton as a moderate Democratic professional politician as I am against her as a nepotistic family candidate. That's 95% of how we got Dubya in the last place. Dubya Bush should have been laughed out of any serious political race on his own track record of miserable failures and amazing incompetence. Yes, her qualifications are vastly superior to Dubya's, and Bill Clinton deliberately picked her, while Dubya is just a genetic accident of the worst sort. However, the bottom line is that she wouldn't be considered such a strong contender if she wasn't "a Clinton", and I think that family is the kind of criteria you can reasonably use for picking figurehead kings and queens, but that nepotism has no place in what is supposed to be a rational democratically elected representative republican form of government. (Did I include all the proper buzzwords there?)

However, I admit that I would certainly vote for any of the current Democratic candidates, even including Hillary, against any of the Republicans who have declared their intention to run. I kind of hope they manage to nominate that flip-flopper double-speaking McCain, but I fantasize about Cheney as the candidate. Heck, let's dream big. Imagine Rove coming out of the closet and actually pretending to be a real politician and somehow getting the nomination by calling in all his chips. That would be a rout to end all routs. (On the other hand, Dubya should have been routed in 2000 *AND* 2004... You only have to fool 30% of the voters on Election Day these days.)

The way things are looking now, the Republicans are going to be desperately fishing for any candidate on the negative litmus test "Can he beat Al Gore?" Well, that strategy didn't even work in 2000, though the SCOTUS kicked dirt in everyone's faces and shoved Dubya into the White House.