Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Politics

  • Gitmo Detainees have Rights

    Whoda thunk it? The Supreme Court has ruled 5-4 that the detainees have constitutional rights and can appeal to civilian courts, according to this MSNBC story.

    While I believe that extraordinary measures may be needed in war, there are several reasons why I don’t think that is the case here. 1) This has gone on for a long time. 2) We have a very stable situation, unlike a battlefield in a more general war, so there is no reason that hearings can’t be afforded. 3) It should require extraordinary circumstances, such as being under fire in a war zone, to classify people as enemy combatants. Errors have already been made. 4) Finally, reports from Guantanamo suggest strongly that accountability is a necessity. I do not believe this will compromise our national security as some predict.

    Considering this was a 5-4 ruling, it should remind all of us, on either side of this issue, of the importance of voting in this election and considering the type of justices that each candidate is likely to appoint.

  • McCain Supports Warrantless Wiretaps

    . . . according to a letter on NRO reported in this MSNBC story. He gets worse as he runs. Too bad. In 2000 I supported him.

  • Politicians, Adultery, and Integrity

    Despite the broad and pretentious title, this is going to be short and simple. James Poulos wrote today about politicians who commit adultery (HT: evangelical outpost), and said:

    …What I’m angling for here is simple: a basic public consensus that if you sleep around on your spouse you are a bad person, and to hell with your future in politics, because we still have enough talent in America to replace you with someone who isn’t a bad person and is nonetheless capable of being a ‘gifted’ and ‘dedicated’ public servant.

    That’s good within certain limits, and I’ve argued the same myself for folks like David Vitter, Larry Craig, and Eliot Spitzer. But that’s not because of my view of marriage, which some might say borders on the puritanical, but rather because I believe your actions should reflect what you say. For example, I vowed to be faithful to my wife “till death do us part” and others are welcome to hold me to that.

    Why is this not a personal matter, to be dealt with by the family alone? In the case of someone in public office, I would suggest that it gives a strong indication of whether that person will do what he says. He took marriage vows, he took an oath of office. If he violates the one, why should I regard him as a person of integrity who will uphold the other? It is unfortunate, of course, that there are those who are faithful to their marriage vows, but quite unfaithful to their oath of office, but that is another topic.

    In my view this is not primarily about sex. We get excessively excited about such scandals because they involve sex. We are too ready to excuse because they involve sex. The question is whether we, the voters, have enough integrity to demand similar integrity of our public officials. Can we do so when the politician is on our side of the aisle in the same way that we do when he or she is on the other side?

    I would add that by integrity I mean one’s intention and reasonable success at remaining inside one’s own moral boundaries, and also that one’s own moral boundaries are what one proclaims. If one’s actions do not violate one’s own standards, then I would not question that person’s integrity. I might, however, question his or her standards.

  • Hillary Clinton and the Black Knight

    This video is pretty funny:

    HT: One Thing I Know.

  • Yes, Race Influences my Vote

    There! That should be provocative enough as a title. Actually this post will be more of a gathering of election thoughts at this point in the campaign.

    But first, to honor the title, I think that there are very few people in this country who can honestly claim that race has no influence on their vote at all. That 1 in 5 thing from West Virginia just catches honest folks. I’m not saying that the vast majority of people are racists. What I’m saying is that we don’t have race issues so thoroughly removed from our systems that we don’t even think about it.

    At a minimum, I’m guessing most Democrats have at least discussed whether Barack Obama can win because of the prejudice of other people. That’s a dangerous argument to have, because in some ways it’s allowing the bigots a veto without even having to make the effort to vote. Perhaps a better plan would be to make a positive effort to educate wherever possible and then hope that there are enough people of good will to make the difference.

    For me, however, there is an additional point. I think the nation benefits from some diversity in government. Thus both Democratic candidates entered the race with a positive bias from my point of view. If Hillary Clinton were elected, she would be the first woman president, and that would be a positive model for girls and women across the nation. If Barack Obama is elected he will be the first African-American president, and that speaks of a whole other set of barriers being broken. I don’t put diversity very high on my list of priorities, but other things being equal, it could tip the scales to one or another candidate. In this case, the scales are tipped by the Iraq war. I believe Obama is right about it, and continues to be right about it, and that’s why I continue to support him despite a number of economic policies with which I am less pleased.

    I think we ought to be honest and admit that issues of race and gender are still functioning. The statistics don’t prove it as they can’t give us the real reasons for a person’s vote, but they are very suggestive. It’s probably not a policy issue that is causing the vast majority of African-American voters to support Obama, and it’s not policy that is doing the same thing amongst women for Hillary Clinton. As far as I’m concerned, I think that’s nothing either group needs to be ashamed of.

    It’s easy to pontificate about voting pure issues, but the fact is that our perception of a candidate’s personal integrity, and whether we trust that person is part of most people’s thinking. I try to be more objective, and go through lists of issues, comparing my own position with that of the candidate, but there will still be other elements.

    Voting is a good area for a bit of affirmative action, and I would say highly visible political appointments are as well. It is important that the justice system, for example, not only operate impartially insofar as possible, but it needs to be seen to do so. An all white judiciary, however well qualified, would leave an impression of unfairness. Those in cabinet positions are often seen representing our country. I have appreciated the way in which George Bush’s cabinet has shown better than average diversity. I don’t like much else about it, but I give him points for that!

    Those who might claim that race or gender is extraneous on these types of appointments would probably suggest that we take the person who is the best candidate, irrespective of such irrelevant factors. But such a selection occurs only in imaginary worlds. In practice, such appointments have to do with community relations, personal interaction, and subjective impressions. Just as the campaign staffs for Obama and Clinton can each provide a spin for just about anything that means it’s good for their candidate, so one can spin the job application or the list of candidates for an appointment. One might as well admit the subjective factors and use them out in the sunlight.

    Finally, I’m not with the folks, even now, who urge Clinton to quit the race. Yes, I support her opponent. Yes, I want him to beat her. But if I were a Clinton supporter and she were running, I’d want my chance to cast my ballot and at least have my say, even if victory was already impossible or incredibly improbable. Electability is low on my list of reasons to support a candidate anyhow.

  • Robert Reich on Gladiator Politics

    I would suggest that everyone read this post. When Robert Reich was Secretary of Labor I didn’t like him that much, but he is truly expressing wisdom in this post.

  • Fairness vs. Fairness

    With a hat tip to evangelical outpost, I present this quote from P. J. O’Rourke in the LA Times.

    The Bible is very clear about one thing: Using politics to create fairness is a sin. Observe the Tenth Commandment. The first nine commandments concern theological principles and social law: Thou shalt not make graven images, steal, kill, et cetera. Fair enough. But then there’s the tenth: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.”

    Now please, please go read the whole article before you comment on how I used it. There is absolutely no way I could get the flavor while staying within the bounds of fair use. The article is funny, and if you read closely, you’ll find some truths lurking in it, just waiting to jump out and bite you. But above all, it’s quite humorous.

    Nonetheless, I’m grabbing a sentence that involves equivocation in the use of the term “fairness” that is all too prevalent in our society. Being humor challenged, I’m going to deal with it seriously. I hear or see “fairness” used in two substantially different ways.

    First is the fairness of approach. For example, in a game, a “fair” game is one in which the umpires ruled impartially, the rules were followed, and generally cheating was prevented. That’s fairness of opportunity or potential. In politics, we might be talking about the opportunity to make money. The government doesn’t deny me the opportunity to start a business or to take a job. I’m not blocked for some irrelevant reason, such as gender or age. That doesn’t guarantee me the ability to sell my idea and acquire or borrow the capital to put it into action. It doesn’t make me succeed at the resulting business. But all else being equal I am not prevented from access. (Note that there are move controversial points in economics than in sports because the possibilities are more complex, but that’s not my topic.)

    The second is a fairness of results. In this case we assume that people should win a certain amount and lose a certain amount. We usually find this amongst young children who think a game is fair when they win, or when they’re a little older they think it’s fair when they win the appropriate percentage of the time. In politics we’d look at the idea that everyone should receive either similar incomes, or incomes that are rated on some scale of non-economic value of their work. Why, for example, is a doctor rated as less valuable than many entertainers, and a school teacher less than either? This view of fairness results in some sense of moral outrage at economic inequalities, and often in an attempt to directly address those inequalities rather than looking at opportunities that lie behind them.

    The 10th commandment would certainly stand against fairness in this second sense, but I would suggest that this second type of fairness is a muddled concept, incapable of being resolved into clear thinking. The reason an entertainer gets more money is that more people want his or her services and are willing to pay more for it. (Note that each individual pays less to the entertainer than they do to the doctor, though the total income for the latter is less. Should the doctor learn how to serve patients in the millions he would likely get very rich!)

    But in the first sense, fairness of opportunity, the 10th commandment creates no problems. I think it’s unfortunate that in discussion these two senses are so rarely sorted out. In social policy, the line may not be so clear at the edges, but it is certainly a distinction that needs to be made.

  • Math Education and a Bit of Logic

    Recently I’ve had several different things remind me of what I perceive to be a serious problem with numbers in this country. This can have a severe impact on one’s personal life, but also on church and social policy issues.

    I recall when I argued some academic affairs committee into allowing me to count a probability and statistics course against a math-science requirement, even though it wasn’t on the list, and I have always been glad that I took that particular course as part of my own limited math education. Of the courses I took outside my own major, that one is easily the one that has contributed to my daily life.

    Now the one course, and whatever reading I’ve done on the subject since, does not make me an expert. But you don’t need to be an expert to detect problems with the way people use numbers. You just need to know some basics, and then ask questions. Some of the questions don’t even require math. For example, if you read a newspaper story about sexual promiscuity that indicates that a certain percentage of teenagers are sexually active, you need to ask just how they know that. The answer can be found, though to get very specific you might have to go find the report. Reporters rarely give any of the methodology. (A second course in survey design, only partially completed though I read all the texts anyhow, helps me here.) In the survey you want to look at the questions asked to see just what the definitions are. Normally you will find that those who conducted the survey used good methodology and reported the facts in the appropriate context. It’s when the survey gets quoted that the problem starts.

    Here are some of the interesting cases I’ve noticed. The Florida Lottery is advertising a new drawing. According to them, this gives you additional chances to win. Now this is one of those lines that can qualify as true, but only if you assume people will understand it in a certain way. The way consumers, especially those addicted to the medium, actually hear this is that they have a greater chance of winning. Unless you increase the number of winners while selling the same number of tickets, the probability of an individual winning does not increase. Similarly, a few years back the lottery advertised better chances of winning by placing five scratch-off patches on each ticket rather than just one. A moment’s thought will tell you that the probability of winning remains the same, since every ticket now provides five chances–every ticket.

    Pepsi’s current commercial talks about the number of chances you can get. Here it’s more benign because you’re merely buying Pepsi products, which I presume you were going to buy anyhow (I could be wrong!) yet they work with the “billion” chances. If I give out a billion tickets to allow someone to win $10, but I only have one winner, then I have, truthfully, given out a billion chances. Of course Pepsi has many prizes, but the principle is the same. Here they are merely impressing everyone with large–and irrelevant numbers. The real number that should interest you is the probability of winning any prize or of winning a particular prize, a number that will be quite depressing.

    Then there are the polls. Reporters have gotten much better at pointing out the margin of error, though they seem to miss the decimal portion of it frequently. A 3.7 margin of error is closer to four than to three, and I’ve seen a couple of cases where two candidates were actually within the margin of error but were reported as outside of it. Then people regularly miss (and are not told) the percentage chance that the result is outside of the margin of error. What I’ve noticed more in the last few days, however, is that reporters will note a trend when the difference between the previous figure for a candidate and the current one is still within the margin of error. I would point out, as well, that the margin of error is not a line inscribed in steel, in other words it doesn’t switch from “certain to be correct” to “certain to be incorrect” on the dot.

    Then there is the division of demographic groups. I’m not really talking statistical measures here, but rather our need to divide and classify things. I don’t even object to this division. It’s necessary to analysis. But it’s useful to remember in thinking about these groups that people’s attitudes don’t undergo a radical shift on the line between 25 and 26, or at the point where they begin to make $50,001 annually. People are pretty analog. Analysis tends to be binary.

    I want to mention one last church related issue. I remember a conversation with a pastor who informed me that most (I forget the particular number, but I think the percentage was in the 50s) people who were looking for a church in our neighborhood were looking for a traditional worship experience. The immediate assumption was that the road to church growth was by providing such a service and focusing on it. Now that might be true. But don’t forget the 40+ percent. Before those numbers have good context to provide a basis for decision making, we need to know how many churches are providing a traditional service and how many are providing something more free-flowing with contemporary music, amongst many other factors. Many business operate with the purpose of providing services to the minority in a community, those with specialized wants and needs.

    For whatever reasons we place greater weight on an argument that has numbers in it. When I went to the emergency room a couple months back with abdominal pain, the nurse wanted me to rate it from 1 to 10. Now the fact is that I have experienced remarkably little pain in my life. How do I come up with a number? Painful enough to get me to the ER, but what number to assign? Once we have a number for the record, however, we feel that we have more accurate information. Those numbers, however, are only as good as the data collection method that produced them.

    Statistical information could be extremely valuable, but it is also subject to abuse. That’s not because of an inherent weakness in the method, but because so few people take the time to take the numbers apart and understand what they’re saying. Thus the unscrupulous, or just the numerically challenged, can deceive us too easily.

    (For those without math training, let me recommend a couple of books: How to Lie with Statistics, which is old but fun, and Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics. I have seen some reviews that accuse the latter book of a conservative bias, and it may have one based don the selection of stories, but I think he does well in analyzing the data for each case he does cite.)

  • Now Just How Do You Do That?

    By January 2013, at the end of my first term as president, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom. The Iraq War has been won and Iraq is a functioning democracy. The threat from a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan has been greatly reduced but not eliminated and there has not been a major terrorist attack in the United States since September 11, 2001.

    I received this paragraph in a much larger e-mail from the McCain campaign, and similar language shows up in his most recent ad. Let me confess here that the key issue for me this year is the war in Iraq, and more broadly a strategy for the war on terror. Many people think the Republicans have the edge on this, but I don’t. I think neither party has a real, long term, promising strategy, and in lieu of that I think getting the troops out of Iraq and making them available for other activities is critical.

    But here’s what bothers me about this ad. How do you accomplish a goal like this? It’s a pretty picture. We’d all like to leave winners, or at least I think we would. But how? What is John McCain going to do differently that will suddenly make it possible to win the war and get the troops (or most of them) out in just four years?

    The problem with this war, as with many peacekeeping actions before it, is that the objectives are not stated in military terms. You send your armed forces to defeat enemy forces. Our armed forces have done very well with that. Any particular target you give them, they handle effectively. I’m very proud of our military capabilities and the young men and women who carry them out. I’m very disturbed at the way in which we use them.

    But in Iraq they have been given a non-military objective that simply cannot be accomplished. You cannot make Iraq into a stable democracy. Only the Iraqis can do that, and many of them don’t want to. In the meantime, our armed forces are poorly equipped to be an army of occupation, and our citizens (thank God!) are poorly equipped to ask them to be a successful occupying army.

    Unless John McCain is going to pull out some new, previously unheard of strategy, there is no reason to believe he can accomplish this goal. It sounds nice in an ad, but he might have said he was going to take a stroll to the moon and back.

    I should mention that each remaining candidate has problems with their goals and their means. Neither Clinton nor Obama are admitting the full impact of their health care plans, nor are they going to be able to accomplish them within the specified budget. That’s just my opinion, of course, but I think the history of government programs is on my side.

    Each candidate should be asked again and again just how they will accomplish the things they claim they’ll accomplish. We must not vote simply for the best dream. McCain may have just “out hoped” Barack Obama!

  • HRC Panders on Oil

    There is always profit for politicians in pandering to the short term interests of the voters. That’s because there are enough voters who simply don’t understand their long term interest or who don’t care enough about the future to take it into consideration.

    The stimulus package is one such case of pandering, and all the politicians got on board. Why? It would be political suicide to refuse to send the poor voters some more money. In the short term, I appreciate this money that will land in my bank account, but it’s not going to solve much in the long term. Long term economic growth will result from accumulation of capital, entrepreneurship, and inventiveness. Unfortunately, the politicians can’t transmit those to my bank account or send them out in an envelope.

    Now McCain started, and Hillary Clinton has taken up the call for another short term way to make the voters temporarily happy without solving any of the underlying problems–the gas tax holiday. Gas prices hit me pretty hard in my business, because I do work at my customers’ businesses. What that means is that I have to drive a good deal, and often can’t plan my driving because it’s in response to emergencies. So gas prices have hurt me. But a gas tax holiday will provide some short term relief at the long term cost. We are already not paying for what we are doing. We’re charging it all to the future when some other congress can create a short term solution until, as will inevitably happen, we run out of such short term solutions.

    In an election year, this is to be expected. Yet I would urge my fellow voters not to make your decisions based upon this type of vote buying. We need to work toward effective energy independence in this country. That will take a great deal of time and effort, and there are many different ways in which we will have to work. But the technology is getting better all the time, and the potential is there. One silver lining to the cloud of higher gas prices is that the higher those prices go the more incentive there is to develop alternatives.

    That type of economic incentive will produce better alternatives. Right now the government is trying to mandate particular alternatives that we need to develop. But technology moves much faster than the speed of government. What the government is mandating today may be tomorrow’s rejected option. You have to research in order to find that out, but the government can’t get in and out of such market’s fast enough.

    Similarly, a government windfall profits tax on the oil companies for such research is not the best way to bring about innovation. Robert Reich proposed such a tax here, after writing an excellent challenge to the gas tax holiday. Further, despite much erudite talking about defining windfall profits by economists, the real, practical definition is that any profit someone doesn’t like is a “windfall.” And yes, I have studied the technical definition–I just think it’s garbage.

    In fact, such government redirection of money is more likely to stagnate than to stimulate the process. The simple fact is that painful as they are, the greatest incentive to developing new energy resources is the pain of higher gas costs. A whole range of options immediately comes up, and starts to become economically feasible: More mass transit, alternative sources for oil, clean coal, solar and wind, more efficient vehicles, and the list goes on.

    It’s quite possible that the solution lies outside of the range of ideas at the present, or that there is no single major component, but rather lots of small ones. Whatever it is, you can count on the government to screw it up.

    Hillary Clinton should be ashamed of herself for supporting such a bad idea. Clearly she believes she can increase her lead amongst blue collar voters. I’m thinking they may catch on to what’s happening instead.