pholidote

Local News Says: You are Going to Die

2009-04-30T19:53:00.000-07:00

Well, I was not blogging throughout the winter, when the local news station that I always watch with morbid fascination was setting new lows with its horrendous weather coverage. There was a big blizzard that the station tracked for 800 miles, giving us daily, sometimes hourly progress reports, as though it were an imminent emergency. It's not so much the interruptions of regular programming I object to, as the tone of "panic now!" throughout the coverage. Stock up on provisions, we'll report up to the minute, that, oh wait... no, the storm missed us. We got a fraction of an inch. Sensational stories designed to scare people. Murders, drunk drivers, dirty dining, all the imminent threats that are never quantized because they'd be exposed as trivial.

Well, now it's the swine flu. One night it was, "swine flu is spreading rapidly in Wisconsin" followed by the schitzophrenic allowance that Wisconsin has zero confirmed cases, and its three suspected cases were all people that had recovered. The next night, the line was that "concern about the SWINE FLU IS SPREADING RAPIDLY" -- get that? concern is spreading. They had a demonstration about "how easily the virus could spread" by having the reporter go to the mall and shake hands with strangers and say, "and that's all it could take." Followed by him washing his hands (in a manner that would be a good example of how not to wash hands). They also had a man on the street who said the night before -- without being contradicted -- that he wasn't worried because it's not like you could get it shaking hands. Why do they feature laypeople expressing expert opionions about things they know nothing about? They also declared a pandemic, when the WHO had declared a level three potential epidemic, pandemic being level six. They also show a lot of people earing masks, although experts are dubious about masks. They told people not to go to the hospital, where the professional advise is to call first and then go. (I also think it presumed a lot to tell people to call their doctors -- how many thousands of us in the viewing area have no doctor?)

A list of my general gripes: (1) They use or misuse specialized vocabulary without defining it. (2) They give extremely oversimplified or false information. (3) They use suggestion or innuendo to hype a crisis and create alarm. (4) They solicit or offer unqualified opinions. And (5) they have a lead story that they cover night after night, and spend each night correcting the previous night's mistakes rather than just doing the work to get it right in the first place. Wouldn't it be good to learn the basic facts first, and then worry about clever ways to present them?

The Language of Rejecting Torture Prosecution

2009-04-26T00:58:00.000-07:00

Recent arguments regarding whether there should be prosecutions of those responsible for officially sanctioned torture during the Bush administration have struck me for their profoundly dishonest use of language.

For example, when David Brooks (whom I like on many things, but I'm going to pick on here, because I just heard him talking like an ass -- the same goes for Obama, who is the other main source of the doublespeak in this comment) talks about "relitigating" the issue, I instantly wonder, when does he think this has been litigated before? Relitigating is not such a profoundly difficult or esoteric concept. It means litigating again. Courts believe in finality, which is why appeals are difficult, and one cannot come back over and over to try the same case. A criminal defendant is protected by the concept of double jeopardy. A civil litigant who won their case is protected by res judicata from having it retried.

Of course there are fine points about where relitigation begins and ends. I have had some legal cases where opposing counsel has argued that a matter was litigated because of some other case where the same party made similar arguments, even though in my view, it fell short of legally precluding the same matter from being argued again. For example, a discharged worker argues that he did nothing worthy of losing his job but was excessively punished because of hostility toward his race. He argues this at an unemployment hearing, in a union grievance hearing, and in an EEOC hearing. In each setting the issues are not legally the same. In the union hearing, the union is the party. In the unemployment hearing, the standards of evidence are completely different. The similarity of the argument makes for a repetitive feel in some cases, but from a legal standpoint, nothing is relitigated.

So in the case of people who tortured, what is to be relitigated? None of these people have ever had to answer for their crimes, or been vindicated of the accusations against them in any legal proceeding. The closest they've had to "litigating" the matter of their having violated the law was that the kinds of actions they engaged in were considered in the abstract in some memos, where no question existed of who actually did what. Those memos were not determinations of a court, of an administrative panel, or an independent arbitrator. They were highly subjective arguments written from the position of one of the parties. It is inane to suggest that presenting them to a court for the first and only time would violate some principle of finality, as though the torture memos, since withdrawn, should be the last word.

Let me note one important point: I am not in the camp that says you must prosecute every single crime that ever occurs. I believe in exercising discretion. So there could be cases where pressing a prosecution would seem like relitigating in some moral sense even though the prosecution was not legally barred. But this is just such a long, long stretch from being remotely close to actual relitigation, that that does not apply.

Brooks also used the word "criminalize", as in, "we should not go back and criminalize this behavior." Again, without saying so explicitly, he is evoking a set of legal principles. Just as we have a principle of finality that says, decide once, we have a principle of non-retroactivity that says, you go by the law of the time. For that reason, you cannot create an ex post facto law, making conduct that was legal at the time a crime.

And just as with the word "relitigate", the word "criminalize" in this case appears to suffer from the phenomenon of the faulty referent -- what is being criminalized? Torture? We have a statute already that makes that a felony. The torture memos addressed the torture statute, as well as other law such as the Geneva Conventions, other international instruments, and applications of Eighth Amendment principles, that also criminalized conduct that, so far as we know from news reports, actually occurred hundreds of times. Of course the memos concluded that some of this conduct was not criminal in the view of the authors, although courts might disagree (as most informed legal commenters have), and although practices straying from those outlined in the memo (reportedly what actually happeed) would likely be criminal.

As above, I don't think it determines the case that from a legal standpoint, this is an extant crime, long on the books, and prosecution does not depend on an ex post facto law. If the law were really unclear, so that a court would be determining for the first time in a U.S. jurisdiction that, yes, torture is illegal, then I could see the point. But I think in this case you have in the torture memos an elaborate effort to take what it clearly the law against torture, and render it unclear such that some further judicial process would be necessary to make the law clear. And I think those memos are a resounding failure. The arguments in the memos are strained as though they were being stretched on the rack. Reading them, one comes away with the impression that they are a sham and that the law is clear as daylight that many of the approved tortures were tortures just the same, and felonies to inflict. Does Brooks or anyone really think that prosecuting these tortures would be the same as going back and changing the law?

So in both these cases, the words used are evocative but completely wrong: prosecutions would not depend on relitigation or criminalization.

"Looking backward" is another lingusitic styling that makes no sense in this context. Our criminal law permits us only to prosecute crimes by looking backward after they have occurred. We don't prosecute future crime. We prosecute conspiracies and attempts, but this we do on the basis of actual conduct that has already occurred, even when there will definitely be no further completed crime in the future. Why would prosecuting these crimes constitute some illicit form of backward-looking while every other criminal prosecution that takes place based on completed offenses somehow would not?

"Good faith" is another usage that strikes me. It's not that I think it makes no sense in this context, but I think that when most pundits talk about interrogators relying on the torture memos in good faith, good faith actually means bad faith.

I don't typically think of torture as being a "good faith" kind of crime. We also don't generally excuse crimes because the perpetrator can present an argument that he acted in good faith. We don't generally ignore crimes because they had a positive motive or even a positive effect. These are issues for sentencing. Ignorance of one's legal responsibilities is no excuse, although I believe there are three very narrow exceptions to this:

One is for crimes of total passivity where notice is lacking. If someone passes a law to make you do something, you actually have to hear about the law before doing nothing becomes a crime. Torture is active.

One is for highly esoteric offenses, like observing certain tax regulations. But torture is a mala in se crime, which is to say that despite its historical prevalence it has always been, when conducted ouside the color of official authority, a crime obvious unto itself. It is not like some kind of economic regulation that requires you to get a license before doing something that presents no obvious harm. It is an activity which one cannot generally commit in good faith. The cries of the victim should tell you that this questionable conduct.

And the last is where the error is one of fact rather than law. If you were to torture someone because you sincerely believed that you were participating in a sociological expermiment, the electrodes were fake, and the victim was an actor, then you would have a defense. If you relied on a legal memo that said torture was really not illegal after all, this would not be a defense. (Since we're in the area of politics, let's just note in passing that when Clinton was disbarred, it was for making statements in a deposition that were not false but misleading, which he felt he could properly make because he relied on bad legal advice.) So "good faith" in terms of relying on these memos, which are so hard for a reasonable person to swallow, that seems like a non sequitur.

Legal defense or not, I could understand exercising discretion not to prosecute persons who did rely on legal advice in good faith. But in my mind this would mean reasonable reliance, not just, "okay, my ass is covered, I don't need to think about this." It already seems like news report suggest a wide range of degrees of culpability. It's hard for me to imagine that the torturer who presses forward with waterboardings every few hours for weeks on end can say he felt any reasonable assurance that the orders he was following were lawful. But I can see people on the fringes, mostly in the dark, being tricked into thinking that someone was looking at this from a legal aspect and doing their diligence.

In this context, "chilling effect" as in threatened prosecution would chill the torturers from proceeding aggressively, seems a perversely misused parlance. The phrase is most famously associated with the right of free speech, which one may exercise without restraint, even when it harms others, because to restrict it would "chill" the exercise of this fundamental right. Now we're speaking of torture as if it were not a debasing crime, but a basic right? Chilling means that people will balk because they are unsure of their justification and decide to err on the side of avoiding liability. This seems like a good thing when instead of speech, we're talking about war crimes. If one is in a situation where immediate action is required and the law is fuzzy, I can see granting a range of discretion as we do when we give officials qualified immunity. But we don't generally offer that immunity when the crime is one of brutality. And in the context here, if you are torturing someone for months, isn't that long enough for someone to get a second opinion on the legality of their orders?

Finally, "Apolitical forum." Brooks gets to the end of his "don't prosecute" argument and says, perhaps he could see prosecutions if there were some kind of apolitical forum. This is an odd expression. What does he mean? I seem to recall the drafters of the Constitution had the foresight to set apart some kind of institution, separate from Congress and the President, where issues could be tested on the basis of the law, rather than on political considerations. One could bring cases at law there, and have them ruled upon by magistrates, protected from influence by life terms. That is where prosecutions would be held. But obviously the courts are not the apolitcal fora Brooks is looking for, because Brooks already knows about those.

So, the common thread in these points is that all six terms are being used in an obfuscatory manner. If they were interpreted according to their regular meanings, they would cause all the arguments against prosecution using them to vanish. Why not just let the legal system sort it out? Which means, where there is a reasonable basis to suspect crime, investigate it. Where one concludes the crime did take place, prosecute it. The legal system already has answers to the questions posed by each of these phrases.

Babylon 5 (and more Sarah Palin)

2008-09-14T11:31:00.000-07:00

In 1993, there was a science fiction television show launched called Babylon 5. It ran for five years. The first 4 years I saw when they ran in syndication on a local UHF station. The last season was on the TNT network on cable and I saw one episode when I stayed overnight in a hotel on a business trip. I remembered being very fond of the series and I have been watching the old episodes on DVDs borrowed from the library or as available online.

The show concerned a space station, Babylon 5, conceived as a meeting place for the various spacefaring humanoid races to settle differences. The events of the show mostly contribute to a preformulated 5-year mytharc in which a series of political developments lead to a galaxy-wide war, among other things. Its structure was virtually unique at the time, it was unusual in its prolific historical references, and it had some very compelling drama.

Re-watching it now, I am much more critical. The use of CGI, groundbreaking at the time, now looks in the early episodes a bit too much like a 20-year old videogame. At the beginning of season one, the sets and lighting are lifeless, the dialogue and performances of the human characters flat and unconvincing. The script is full of exposition. The episodes often coast in to anticlimaxes trying to tie up episode storylines after the big moment is passed. Even the historical references that I enjoyed originally seem trite and obvious. What was seen 15 years ago as a dose of realism to correct the idealistic fantasies and gross internal inconsistencies of the old Star Trek, now seem cheap compared to the almost documentary-like reimagined Galactica.

But it improves. After the show gets going, everything improves. The technology behind the special effects evolved. There was evidently a better budget for sets and props. As the story unfolds the characters that were uninteresting develop somewhat, and the stories themselves develop a depth through internal consistency and allusion. The actors settle into more confortable rhythms. The aliens, who were always the most fun to watch (brought to life by stunning makeup and costumes, interesting accents, and broad threatrical flourishes) see their roles get meatier as their races slide into war.

One thing that remains annoying, however, is the show's flavor of minimal administrative institutions.

The B5 station itself begins with a population of 250,000. It has no industry, but has an economy based on trade, tourism (it particulaly becomes a destination for religious after an angelic sighting), and information technology. In season 3 it declares itself independent of its sponsoring government and becomes a state unto itself. Its own taxation system apparently erects and runs itself after state funds are cut off. It has a security chief that personally knows everyone who might be a criminal, like a small town sheriff. Its number two military officer personally commands the station's defensive fighter squadron. It has the flavor of a very small operation, with a shallow command staff that does little delegating and has few meetings or protocols.

In addition to having the government of Earth withdraw all support for the station, its commander becomes the mostly-absentee leader of a fleet of advanced ships that spearheads one side in a war of galactic scale in which whole planets are destroyed and countless billions are affected.

Over and over, the show commits the embarassing lapse of treating serious matters of galactic consequence in this folksy small-institution way. When the consequences grow to a tremendous scale, big-time institutions simply do not follow. There is no apparent second eschelon of leadership beneath the top command staff. Huge operations simply coordinate themselves. None of the top people possesses a personal security force, and remain vulnerable to small bands of unsophisticated crazies and malcontents. They continue to carry out their regular activities, doing everything themselves. The show is incredibly naive about death and torture and the role of espionage, as if none of the characters has any real experience or serious training or anticipates the extent to which people ordinarily go with much less at stake. The heroes develop a fastidiously honest broadcasting operation not as part of a comprehensive set of war operations but because the captain says one day, "hey, I have an idea -- let's do this." Treaties are forged without any concerns over the details. The captain takes command of the warfleet without asking how many ships there are, what firepower they possess, what their crew complements are... There appears to be no understanding of the questions of bureaucracy and administration, of established ways of doing things, and the millions of unpredicted but extremely predictable things that tend to go wrong when ordering levels of management and control do not exist, and everyone is doing everything by ear. Everything that happens requires a support structure, staff must be recruited and trained, materiel must be procured, advantages that present themselves must be exploited, and mistakes that have been made in the past must be prevented in the future.

These mistakes threaten the integrity of the show and infect otherwise exciting storylines with a distracting problem of complete unreality. You do not feel the weight or inertia of tradition, structure, a large body of professional knowledge and experience and layers of management and administration.

Without exaggerating the point, I would contrast the better handling of this consideration by the current Battlestar Galactica series. Galactica is the story of a struggling remnant of humanity which flees in a ragtag fleet of spacecraft after massive nuclear assault by evil God-crazed robots. The fleet has a civilian president and the one surviving battleship itself has a military commander. The two together are responsible for roughly 50,000 souls, a number which is chopped down by nearly a third due to losses over the course of a few years, mostly during a disasterous period of enemy occupation of a large segment of the population. But even with a much smaller body of people involved, institutions feel weighty and resilient. When there is a task to be done, someone must do it. Three episodes in, prison labor must be recruited to mine ice to replenish the failing water supplies of the fleet. Personnel losses must be compensated by recruitment and training. The overtaxing of the workforce erupts into conflict. Attack plans must be developed, presented, and approved. Meetings are held in which problems are quantified and solutions proposed and debated. There is a maturity in recognizing hard choices.

B5's crew managed to avoid total disaster because it had the advantage of being fiction. With good writers, the logistics will take care of themselves. In real life, what you get is more like FEMA's response to hurricane Katrina, or the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, which lost the initiative, credibility, and uts shirt before it knew what was happening. If you buy something without a plan to deliver or distribute it, you waste it. If you distribute something on an emergency basis but provide no security against fraud, it gets stolen. If you fail to think of people staying in their homes because you won't let them leave without their pets, or because you have not secured the streets, or because they are listening to a religious leader whom you did not understand to have any authority, you lose.

Personally, I've been on the executive board of several organizations, but let me mention three: a metropolitan group representing 25,000 people, a state group representing 150,000, and a national group representing 3.5 million. Because these were groups that represented an interest sector and not all citizen concerns, my portfolio at any of these groups was not nearly what would be faced by a mayor or governor. But there were plenty of issues, budgets to develop and debate, staff to hire, legal issues to confront, internal politics, and external relations. The smallest group was something I worked on full time; the others I had a more ancillary role. Still, I have some impression of the effects of scale and how instututions grow more complex, expectations higher, and a more sophisticated set of protocols involved as one moves up.

I have seen people in my institutional adventures who had a big-time mindset, and those whose views refected small-time, small-organization ways of doing things. It's possible to walk out of Supercorp into a mom-and-pop outfit and not get the small scale of things, to expect a proposal to be circulated and go through comments and legal vetting before implementation, while auntie Jo could just do it before dusk. It's also possible for someone unfamiliar with the larger-scale environment to see a proposal enacted by sidestepping the usual regulatory requirements, political ane social niceties, and create a ripple of small problems and risks of larger ones in so doing. When you just call up someone you know and write them a check, instead of soliciting the proper bids, making the proper records, verifying eligibility and compliance, and paying from the proper fund with proper approval.

There are advantages to both the big-scale and the small-scale ways of doing things. That small-scale mentality can be great for getting things done, breaking away from outgrown and unnecssary limits. But...

But it also means turning a blind eye to the reasons for the limits, incurring unknown risks, creating secondary problems and side effects that must be solved, injuring constituencies, and courting all sorts of predictable failures.

Sarah Palin's credientials include representing Wasilla, pop. 5900, and Alaska, pop. 680,000. Her record is one of both corruption and reform: she basically does not conform to institutions, acts in a small-scale way. Hires cronies, ignores conventions, offends bureaucrats and powers that be, and violates the law. It's all part of the same picture. I've seen this person before. I've seen this style. It has its merits for getting a narrow range of goals accomplished, but as the scale and diversity of operations expands, it becomes more and more risky in terms of all the competing considerations that get sacrificed or distorted, and sometimes this leads to complete collapse of the overall ambition, as we saw in Katrina and Iraq.

Palin's Disclosures

2008-08-31T22:13:00.000-07:00

Had a look at Sarah Palin's disclosure forms.

I have seen some commentary on the amount of property she owns. Not much note that her husband's tribe (native corportation, BBNC) collectively made close to 1.3 billion dollars in gross oil revenues last year, which is a significant interest even if she personally doesn't rely on it: it's important to the community.

What strikes me the most, however, is just the sloppiness of it all. Handwritten, often last-minute submissions, with boxes not checked, covered in abbreviations. BP is obviously British Petroleum, but who outside Alaska would guess that SBS stands for? Maybe Spenard Building Supply ("Alaska's choice for building materials and home improvements")? The unchecked boxes may seem trivial, but it says something when you fail to be attentive enough to fully complete the form and follow the rules. The instructions say to list all or check "none." Doing neither arguably means that the information has been withheld.

The officials monitoring the disclosures did not flag that, but they did find other items incomplete and seek further information in response to the Wasilla mayoral annual disclosure in 2002, which actually took more than a year to be supplied. Even when filing disclosures for governor, her October 2005 form generated an exchange about necessary changes and the same form was refiled in May 2006 with a new signature over the old one and new information scribbled in the margins.

This to me elevates the unpreparedness factor. It looks like a half-assed backwater operation when the chief exec is filling out these forms by hand and having them sent back for more work. can't you get someone on staff to handle it and make sure it's done right?

Remember, Alaska isn't Texas. There are five cities in Texas alone with more people than the entire state of Alaska, and El Paso is close.

Recipe for Economic Disaster

2008-08-31T20:51:00.000-07:00

Every time I see that McCain ad, I think the same thing. It's one of the ads -- not "Taxman", the other one -- that quotes the Las Vegas Review Journal as saying that Obama's tax policies would be a "recipe for economic disaster." And I think, Las Vegas Review Journal?

This ad exploits "source amnesia." People remember they heard something but they forget where they heard it.

Ever see those film reviews where there are three blurbs and they're all from people and outlets you've never heard of? Random radio call letters and obscure papers and magazines? I always see these and think, boy, how desperate must they be? They couldn't get one good review from a source people have actually heard of?

The Las Vegas Review Journal is not the New York Times, Wall Street Journal or USA Today, not even the LA Times. These are the only four national US papers, the only ones with more than a million circulation. It's not in the top 20 by circulation. Or the next 20. Or the next. Which is not exactly a surprise. You've probably never heard of it if you live outside Nevada.

It's not just small, it's extreme. Its editorial policy is far right on economic issues. Wikipedia describes it as libertarian, but from what I've seen it's not a great fan of civil liberties or social progress. Its editorialists are fully committed behind McCain against Obama and stridently press the partisan line.

So it's a not an organ swing voters would naturally want to follow. And it's probably not what a maverick Republican would consider a reliable source. This may be a foolish mistake, or it may be an appeal to the natural followers of the Review Journal. But not likely. In all likelihood, the ad is effective because it carefully and dishonestly uses a quote from an unreliable and unrepresentative source to plant a point.

Not the biggest thing one can knock McCain on, but I see these things, and they get to me.

A Sigh of Relief in Warsaw

2008-08-30T15:26:00.000-07:00

It's so nice to know that new missles in Poland will protect it from Iranian agression. Teheran has of course revived its historical threats, and no one could fail to share the apprehension of Northern Poles at seeing the throngs of Polish Shiities in Rzeszow carrying pictures of Khatami and demanding the reincorporation of Southern Poland into Greater Persia, the way things used to be before the shifting of Polish borders west and south in the reconstitution of 1945. This is of course a blow not just to Russia, but especially to the Yushchenko adminstration in Kiev, which has done the bidding of Iranian officials in Lvov by encouraging cross-border agitation. The missle shield is also sure to dampen Iranian territorial ambitions, frustrating their long-term drive to obtain access to the Baltic.

Palin's Selection

2008-08-30T11:59:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of very good instant commentary on the selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate. Some of the articles and comments on TPM I think are particularly good at laying out some of her potential plusses and minuses. She is to large extent a cipher, and I would not be shocked if she surpassed all expectations; nor would I be shocked if she were a total disaster. Well, maybe a little shocked: there is not a lot of time for weak spots to show.

Which is an issue in itself.

The most important things about her nomination that we know now are not that she is a woman or that her resume includes more time as a sports reporter, snowmobile seller, and as part of a small body that oversaw her village of 1430 families than as mayor of that village or governor of the 47th largest state (about three times the size of Obama's State Senate district).

Rather, what is important at this stage is the very fact that she is a virtual unknown. And particularly that she is such an unknown even to McCain.

Reports on how McCain made the selection are not impressive. What we have heard is: He's never worked with her. He's met her once. He decided at the last minute. The announcement was clearly designed as an attention-grabber. The The selection is risky, but as Mark Halperin explained, "McCain loves to roll the dice."

Contrast this with Obama: he selected someone wih whom he has worked, and who has a 30-year public record. Biden also was subject to opposition research and media scrutiny while running for the Democratic nomination. He makes numerous public appearances. He is a very known entity and in particular, Obama knows that they interact well. Likewise, Obama went through a very public process of vetting other potential running mates, going on fact-finding trips with them, interviewing, interacting, and observing. They are also well-known public figures and well vetted.

This tells us a little about Biden, nothing about Palin, bust most importantly it tells us something about Obama and McCain. Obama went through a professional orderly process, considered the intelligence, and committed to a course of action. McCain? The clear impression is one of impulsive decision-making based on unnecessarily limited intelligence. If the risk were borne only by the campaign, this might be a plus...

But it won't be if McCain is elected. The other imporant aspect of thic calculation is that not only has Palin apparently not been well vetted by the McCain forces, but it will be very uncertain, if not impossible, whether we can get a good picture of her before election day. If elected, Palin will be in office and standing by to perform as President, whether or not her record would support that decision.

Again, compare with the Obama camp. On Obama's side, the risk inherent from nonexperience is at the top of the ticket. Experience is important for several reasons. One is vetting. We have for Obama several biographies, ranging from excellent to borderline illegal. We have had an extended campaign, with months upon months of investigating Obama as a first-tier candidate. We have a national record.

We have not necessarily had much time to time test whether the policies he championed in the U.S. Senate have been fruitful, but Illinois ain't beanbag. In contrast, Palin is on her second year as governor of a state of 680,000. To go back and see how successful her past actions have been over time, sift through the fallout, one needs to go back before her inauguration in 2006 (statute of limitations is 3 years on state contracts, 6 on torts, for example). That leaves only her mayorship. It's probably safe to say that Illinois faces most (though obviously not all) of the domestic issues the U.S. government faces. Hardly true of Wasilla, pop. 6700.

Incidentally, I don't object to political considerations entering into the selection of a running mate, but the first priority must always be the interests of the country if the nominee is elected. Obama made clear this was his priority, stated so in the face of overbearing media concentration on horserace issues, and selected someone who was credible as a backup president. McCain cannot credibly say that Palin is the best, or second-best, or third-best, or fourth-best, or among the 25 best people for this position. There are too many good people out there, and more importantly, he just hasn't enough knowledge to know how good or bad Palin would be.

McCain bought a pig in a poke, and wants to sell it to America. So the main issue is not whether it is going to turn out to be a good pig. The issue is not the pig but the poke.

Celebrity-Envy

2008-08-28T23:54:00.000-07:00

I don't relate to the reaction of some pundits that John McCain's purchasing of ad time on the evening of Barack Obama's nomination acceptance speech as gracious or classy. First of all, the ad has a false, patronizing and at times almost sarcastic quality and most importantly, it seems to say on one level, this is your day, I won't interrupt, while on a deeper level screaming, "Hey, over here, don;t forget about me!"

First an analysis of the text:

1 Senator Obama, this is truly a good day for America.
2 Too often the achievements of our opponents go unnoticed.
3 So I wanted to stop and say, Congratulations.
4 How perfect that your nomination would come on this historic day.
5 Tomorrow, we’ll be back at it.
6 But tonight, Senator, job well done.

1a) First of all, it's an open message to Obama, which means, I will direct my speech to you, but rather than speak to you privately, I will pay to show millions of people the image of me talking to you, because it is really a message for them to see me talking to you. We won;t show any images of you in the ad, because it's about me looking good, not you. It's my way of hogging some attention while trying to look superficially like I'm being respectful toward you.

1b) It's a good day for America. I won't be specific why, because I want to claim to care about race relations in spite of my record, and without doing anything, and I won't even mention it because I can't do it deftly enough to not get in trouble, especially since I want to keep the racist vote energized for me.

2a) This is absurdly vague and almost certainly does not say what it means. What it suggests is, too often, we all fail to notice our opponents' achievements. For example, I may might go completely unaware of your obtaining your party's nomination for president, and you might fail to mention repeatedly how I was a POW. But this is not literally what it says. To go unnoticed is not specific as to who is not noticing. Literally, it seems to suggest that everyone regardless of side fails to notice enough. The "our" is ambiguous -- whose opponents? Who is us? We in politics? We on my side? Me and you? And it it each of us our own opponents, or our common enemies? Did we not notice Bin Laden's achievements often enough?

2b) "We" is intended to suggest you and I are in some kind of parity despite this being your day and not mine.

2c) Making it a general statement about not appreciating our adversaries is a vague way of stealing your trademark vision of a new politics, without actually acting that way or committing to do so. (See 5a.)

3a) Way to go kid. I know this will mean a lot coming from me because I'm so much more experienced than you.

3b) By stop, I mean step into your spotlight for a moment and steal a little of your reflected media.

4) Yeah, gee, how convenient that it worked out that way. What an odd coincidence. Smirk!

5a) This is my escape clause to be able to knofe you tomorrow and not look like I went back on my word.

5b) We again. You, ahead in the polls, me behind, really just alike, both alike.

6) See 3a.

What this really makes me think of is 1a/3b: this guy can't shut up for one day, he needs to get the attention. Now this is probably a campaign decision that was done for practical and not emotional reasons: throw Obama off gain, keep your own campaign from being forgotten, score points with key groups. But it also has a look to me of being a purely emotional investment, and it does this not just because that is a dominant vibe of the ad, its timing, its function. It is also because that is part of a pattern and an emerging meme for McCain: McCain the attention-craver who can't get over his envy of someone else's superior celebrity.

I'm not an expert on McCain's bio, but here are some bits that strike me from what I know:

He describes in his autobiography how at age 2 or so he would keep passing out because he would hold his breath until he turned blue. He was a spoiled little kid who wanted attention.

He led a wild life and was a bad boy prior to his military service and period as a POW. Lots of sex and booze and nasty behavior. He was like a spoiled little kid who wanted attention.

He was treated by the Vietnamese as a celebrity POW because his daddy and granddaddy were famous and important admirals. After returning to the US, he enjoyed some celebrity because of being a POW, so for a while he had the fame he wanted.

His military career was okay, but he was never gonna get to be dad or granddad. He loved the legislative liaison work with lots of travel, power, and money closeby, so he got into politics. Public service my ass. He was a nobody on the fringes of fame and he wanted some of the that celebrity for himself as he had had before.

He got into politics. He soon developed a comprehensive media strategy which involved selective brief adoption of populist stands on reform issues to develop a phony reputation as a maverick, being unusually chummy with the press (although still hiding the dirt), and relying on the POW card. He started running for president, writing books, appearing on shows like 24 and SNL, doing more talk shows than anyone else, and grandstanding on selected issues.

His ads have appeared obsessed with griping about Obama being more successful, younger, smarter, and better than him, drawing bigger crowds, mastering issues more easily, quickly gaining access to and praise from national and world leaders. What an elitist, celebrity, hotshot, smartypants -- ooo, he makes me so mad, I could just hold my breath till I turn blue and pass out.

"Suspect"

2008-08-26T15:30:00.000-07:00

In a report on the local news last night on WTMJ, the reporter did something again that I've occasionally noticed, but which freshly struck me when I saw it again: she used the word "suspect" to refer not to a particular person of whom the authorities bore suspicion, but a person acting in a clearly criminal manner, e.g., "So-and-so was at home and heard a noise in their living room. Going to investigate, they saw a burglar in their home. The suspect was stuffing the family possessions into a backpack." Tonight's was a pretty clear-cut case of this.

The ill which this portends, and which I hope comes back to bite these stations in some form of libel action, is that it means they are re-defining the word "suspect" for their viewers to mean "perpetrator" so that when they describe an innocent person as a "suspect," they are in fact stating literally and explicitly that that person is guilty.

I know this seems like an exaggerated claim. Surely, it must be merely implicit that they are being called guilty, right? Wrong. Consider how this plays out in the form of a debate:

P: You ruined my life. You told everybody I committed this crime.

D: No we didn't. We never said that.

P: Well, that was clearly what you meant. That's what everyone understood.

D: We're not responsible for how our reports may be misinterpreted. We clearly stated you were only a suspect. Look it up. It means you didn't necessarily do anything. It means just that some people think you might have done it.

P: But that's not what it means to your viewers. It's not how you use the word yourself. On other newscasts you've said someone definitely did something, and then you call the person who did it the "suspect." When you use the word in that way, you give it the meaning of someone definitely guilty. A reasonable person, familiar with the way you use language, would understand you to be saying that I was definitely guilty. And that includes you: you knew what you were saying when you said it.

More on Georgia

2008-08-15T23:20:00.000-07:00

As the news filters in with respect to the Russia-Georgia conflict, I find myself with some views and ideas, which are not necessarily those that would be suggested by my comment a week ago.

I still think the media and some politicians' responses bear internal contradictions that make them seem not a little bit odd, to say the least. Perhaps they are simply unclear, but in any event it is confusing and suggests a very odd mindset indeed when the same figures refer to Russia as having violated the territorial integrity of a sovereign nation, and as having responded disproportionately in how they did so. This would make sense, perhaps, if Georgia had invaded Russia, but it is hard to see how the two ideas are consistent when the same comments make no acknowlegement of any attack or provocation against Russia. It makes it sound like Bernie and Jeff are standing on a streetcorner, Jeff minding his own business when Bernie suddenly smacks him in the head, throws him to the ground and starts kicking him in the gut. Along comes George Bush or John McCain and says, gee, I find that to be an overreaction.

It turns out, though, that Russia has a position that makes the charge of disproportionality a rational one. It has rights and obligations under treaty which include stationing of forces in South Ossetia. So when Georgia decides to throw aside the treaty and subject the Ossetian entity -- something less than a recognized state, but nevertheless paradoxically a party in its own right to an international accord with Georgia and Russia -- to an attack that afflicts Russians and Russian rights, the whole equation reverses and Russia becomes the unsung victim. At that point it is credible to say that they overreacted. But the talk of Georgian territorial integrity becomes somewhat strained. If recognition of the old Georgian border was a consideration in the threaty Georgia has broken, then we can talk about respecting sovereignty, but Russia has a reasonable argument that it can respond with its own incursions against Georgian territory. An aggressor is in no position to demand that the one it attacks limit its responses to disputed territory.

I don't know much about this situation and don't take an ultimate position, but I have always remarked that the most acute failures of the media are those which take little knowledge to detect. This is such a case. The commenters have a lot of trouble making sense.

Take the claim, endlessly repeated, that Russia is trying but failing to take over all of Georgia. Well, maybe it's trying but failing to take over all of Asia. Maybe Georgia is. But what's the evidence? That it has not done so? Perhaps Turkey is trying to overrun Brazil. The fact that it has not done so is proof that it has failed in its ambitions. I somehow think that if Russia wanted to seize Georgia it could do so. Has it ever done so before?

A parallel I am waiting to hear mentioned is Panama. A superpower has troops in its backyard, permitted by treaty, right at the edge of a major global transshipment point for a vital resource. A hostile local leader, with a horrible record on democracy and human rights, rattles his sabre. A prospect looms in the future for a treaty realignment. Then there is a petty outrage against the superpower's constabulary. Suddenly the entire country is taken over and a friendly government installed. The last part has not happened in Georgia, but Russia is accused of wanting it. Does anyone sense a bit of projection here?

And remarkably, McCain actually gets credit from the press for the best reaction despite: (1) having no nuance or precision or sense of proportion, and actually saying that countries don't invade other countries in this century (Iraq and, if he get's his way, apparently won't count because they'll continue through 2101.) (2) jumping to an extreme and bellicose position before he has any reliable intelligence, a formula that has proven in the past to get us into conflicts that may last to 2101, (3) saying exactly what he is told to say by his lobbyist advisors and effectively becoming the puppet of a tinpot Central Asian despot.

Energy Policy: Top Ten Reasons to Reduce Demand

2008-08-09T21:22:00.000-07:00

It surprises me that the presidential campaign is mostly about energy policy. Perhaps I'm overcompensating for my surprise it was not a bigger issue four years ago. I'm also surprised that McCain would make drilling and nuclear his big issue. My impression is that most people aren't especially positive about those things, though obviously, they buy the argument that they got better when oil prices went up again.

At any rate, there are a few really compelling arguments for conservation that I think deserve more attention:

1. Comfort. People associate saving with austerity and constant attention to details, all stress and burden and sacrifice. That's not what conservation is about. If you lived in a house with an extremely inefficient heating system, you are not making yourself more comfortable. You're just losing money to no good effect. If you improve efficiency, it becomes cheaper to purchase comfort, and you have more money to purchase it with, so efficiency means a longer shower, not a shorter one.

2. National Pride. If you don't conserve, you waste. It's like having an army of people around the country whom we pay to dig a big hole in the desert, suck oil from the ground, refine it, transport it to the hole, and keep it burning all summer long. Everyone knows it. No one respects waste. It's just stupid. So follow that up with one simple question: Is that what our country stands for?

3. National security. If you free yourself from a need, that's one less vulnerability that can be used against you. If you reduce demand for oil, there's no way that can be used against you. But if you cater to it, feed the need by turning to riskier and less secure sources, you prostrate yourself before anyone who can threaten that resource. Pipeline. Tanker. Nuke. Any of those sound like potential targets to you? The transalaska pipeline is notoriously vulnerable and impossible to secure. We've seen the damage a breached tanker can do, and we've seen our enemies target sea vessels. And drills to test our security at nuclear plants have shown they are not ready.

4. Speed. Conservation and alternative energies are closer at hand than you may think. While we've been slow to implement them, we and the rest of the world have developed the technologies. In contrast, nuke plants and new oil exploitation take forever. Paris Hilton may think otherwise, but she and McCain are just wrong.

5, 6, 7, 8. Environment, Sustainability, Climate Change, and Piety. These are all aspects of an overarching stewardship issue. There's no need to spend a lot of words saying that the prospects of conventional pollution from fossil fuels and nuclear are generally greater than that from conservation. Or that one can keep saving forever, while fossil fuels are limited. Climate change is worth noting especially because the effects have intensified and produced a global awareness and consensus only recently. Piety is an aspect that should not be overlooked. Most religious traditions, and evangelical Chrisianity in particular, view careful stewardship of nature as not just a human good but a divine mandate. Faith would call upon us to save energy even it it were not already in our interest in many other ways.

9. Economics. If you keep demand high, you are engaging in a risky economics. The economics of fuel consumption become the same as they are for heroin addiction. Demand is inflexible, meaning suppliers can push up the price by limiting supply. There is no way we can expand domestic supplies so much as to completely negate this effect. On the other hand, if we reduce domestic demand, that will leave us more domestic supply which we can export for profit.

10. Technology. Conservation is a technology-intensive endeavor that plays to our strength. By going this route, we master something and create an area where we will lead the world. We create jobs domestically that cannot be easily exported, developing and installing the new tech. This has benefits for economics and national pride (see above) and is likely to produce spinoff technologies which will benefit us in ways we cannot even guess at. Finally, conservation technologies experience synergy: technologies to improve efficiency themselves consume energy, but when several exist, each can improve the efficiency of the others so there is a massive multiplier effect. For instance, transport ethanol in high-efficiency vehicles and it turns from a boondoggle to an effective efficiency technology. The point is that this should be not cast as some sort of hippie fantasy, but as the object of modern technophilia: the opportunites are there to develop systems for efficient production, use, and recovery of energy that resemble science fiction. Oooo! Ahhh!

Media Oddity: South Ossetia

2008-08-09T15:51:00.000-07:00

Another short note.

Since the US government position emphasizes that Georgia is sovereign and South Ossetia is part of it, and therefore that Russia is committing aggression against Georgia by its military action in South Ossetia, one might expect the US news networks to adhere uncritically to labeling South Ossetia as a mere region of Georgia, and at most point out for sake of context that South Ossetia did declare independence, but its statehood has not been recognized by the world's governments.

So it has surprised me, and contradicted to some extent my general view of the US government's hegemonic role over the media, that so much of the early reporting, not just by my local news, but by the networks and major print media, has at least fudged on the status of the region, and at times, has seemed to positively suggest that it is a genuine independent breakaway republic, which Georgia was undertaking to re-acquire. This despite the fact that in the narrative of the government, it was not seeking to annex a state formed by separatists; it was cracking down on its own citizens that resisted the supremacy of the legal national government.

My explanation is that the media responds to what it sees and feels more than it responds to the law. As I understand, the de facto situation was that there was a separate country of South Ossetia, because Georgia had let that condition persist since the end of the war back in the '90s. That situation existed in seeming contradiction to the legal status of the region as part of Georgia. On this account, it would be something like the U.S. letting Texas get taken over by far-right nuts who think of the federal government as an occupier, and after that letting Texas do whatever it wants, and operate with complete autonomy, but remain legally a part of the U.S. for foreign policy purposes. Looking at Texas from the inside, you would not think it was part of the U.S. The media would get caught up in that, and their language would reflect that, even if it were not legally correct.

UPDATE: I have made a couple of unmarked edits to the above. It appears to me now that there is another explanation. There is in fact a more nuanced legal status of the region, and there is a deeper narrative under the surface reporting in which the government acknowledges some of this nuance and is actually sending mixed signals. This comes through in the media with the contradictions appearing in the surface without the explanation. (Also, the comparison to nuts in Texas is valid as a theoretical point of debate, but paints both Texans and Ossetians in an unfairly negative light, so I declare the example withdrawn.)

I wake up

2008-08-08T17:37:00.000-07:00

I've been kind of depressed and not working much for the last six weeks. I feel like the last couple of days I've really picked things up and gotten back to my old self. I have had a number of things I've wanted to post lately. But it seems like a tradition at this blog to break silence with a short gripe against my local news, so here goes:

Hundreds dead as war breaks out between Russia and Georgia. We'll have that nine-second report in a few minutes, but first, more fan reactions about Brett Favre's trade to the Jets.

More Little Media Pickiness

2008-07-10T17:47:00.000-07:00

Throw these in the hopper:

1) I recently have been annoyed by news reports that say "bucks" instead of "dollars", use the verb ending "-in'" instead of "-ing" and generally use colloquialisms. Is that wrong of me?

2) Brian Williams tonight led off the first report with a comment that air travel "hasn't been fun for a while" and my thought was that: (a) "fun" is subjective--fun for whom?; (b) "a while" is not very precise, but then how can you be very precise about when something ceased to be "fun"? Am I just being way too anal?

3) That same report included a lot of fancy graphics, like showing the numbers of announced layoffs at different airlines on the tails of their planes, showing logos of airlines given as visual examples of a set described but not enumerated in the spoken text, and using an animated flying plane as a wipe between screens of data. Even though this added to the report, my first thought was that this was a waste and showed a misplaced emphasis on flash over substance. Should I focus on the positive?

4) The report was about the airlines political action to support anti-speculation legislation. They went to a senator and a person identified simply as "CNBC" as experts, focusing on what the political fallout might be. But there was only the on-air reporter, standing as always in front of a symbolic backdrop, to tell us (inconclusively) whether such legislation would be good or bad for the country. Is it hypercritical of me to think that when something like this happens, the focus should be on whether the promoted policy is well-advised rather than on what the political reaction is likely to be?

5) The report also briefly mentioned "concerns over Iran's nuclear program." It was pretty elliptical about why that was even mentioned. Whose concerns? What concerns? I feel that lines like this are especially dangerous because they operate at the level of innuendo. People will hear that Iran has a nuclear program and that it is a "concern" for someone, and take from that that they should see it as a concern, be concerned, be negative, be distrustful, be opposed, even if no reason is given why. You can't confront something like this directly, because it is not based on evidence or even directly assertive. It would actually be better to be inaccurate than the be insinuating. Or am I being too conspiratorial here?

An epilogue on the Butler Campaign

2008-06-26T15:33:00.000-07:00

Today it was reported that the US Supreme Court has decided that in most cases, a murder victim's prior communications to the police are inadmissible because the accused murderer has no ability to cross-examine the victim on the statements. The local paper is reporting that this could end up meaning a retrial for Mark Jensen, against whom such a statement was said by jurors to be the sine qua non evidence for conviction.

Having offered the same opinion as the majority of the highest court of the land was offered as evidence of Louis Butler's being unqualified or undeserving to remain on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, in attack ads that successfully removed him from the bench.

But the decision does reflect well on Scalia. This was one of those instances of exactly the type he cited where fealty to his judicial philosophy yielded a decision that was not the desired result for conservatives. The conservative wing of the court was pro-defendant to the man. It was Breyer, Stevens and Kennedy dissenting. It is gross stereotyping to presume that anyone on this court is entirely consistent or blandly predictable either positively or negatively.

McCain's Reward

2008-06-25T12:13:00.000-07:00

We already have a publicly funded reward for new inventions designed to promote new technologies. It's called a patent. It's mentioned in the Constitution. John McCain should learn about it.

The Founders realized that innovation was cool: Jefferson prided himself as an inventor. They also respected but didn't completely trust the market. They implicitly understood that there was an appropriate space for the government to shape the market, and one way was by guaranteeing artificially by law that profit from innovations should be exclusive to the inventor for a while so that they would have a stronger mercenary incentive to invent. They left it to Congress to fix the terms in an effective manner.

If there's a technology we want developed, we can muck about with the patent system, or we can mandate it. If we know something is inventable, we can pass technology-forcing regulations that, say, mandate that all vehicles run on super-efficient electric batteries by 2015. Car companies can either develop the tech, or get out of the business and leave it to someone who will. That has worked in the past, but for obvious reasons, business does not like it. So it's easier to sweeten the patent prize.

McCain thinks this is a super-duper technology that it would benefit the public to develop, to the tune of $300 million. Supposing that is so, we should mandate its use, right?

Consider that one of three things is true: (1) the new tech would be very profitable to its developer, or (2) it is of marginal difference, so not worth investing in developing, or (3) it would ultimately be a bigger threat to existing profit streams than it would be an advantage, enough so that's it would be worth developing it or buying the patent just to keep it off the market.

If (1) is true, then an extra reward is unnecessary. It may cause a breakthrough to come marginally sooner, but for the most part, it's just an extra bonus to someone (most likely a Korean business) who already stands to get truckloads of money.

Number (2), although logically possible, is far-fetched in real life. If it is true, then it stands as an extraordinary example of market failure that should make McCain re-examine the economic philosophy he claims to have (although he probably does not really know what it is, or actually have it).

If (3) is true, then McCain's proposal gives a pile of extra money to someone for actually harming the national interest.

More on Scalia

2008-06-24T18:46:00.000-07:00

It's been pointed out to me that in his Boumediene dissent, Justice Scalia did some other wierd things:

1) He relied on the supposed "fact" that 30 former Gitmo detainees have committed acts of violence since their release, despite the fact that that "fact" was repudiated by its source, which was, incidentally, the U.S. Department of Defense.

2) He also described them as "returning to the battlefield" which is at best misleading -- most were not picked up on any literal battlefield, but Scalia may just mean the everywhere-battlefield of the global war on terror, which takes place wherever people have a potential to do evil. Even in that sense, it's a stretch, since there is pretty strong evidence that many of our detainees were pro-US in their sympathies, but turned into enemies of America after being kept under our gentle hospitality for several years alongside genuine al Qaeda. It's amazing how much anger you can generate by locking someone up for several years without a hearing, subjecting them to a kangeroo proceeding, torturing them, shitting on their religion, and then suddenly letting them out without any explanation or apology.

3) Of course, it's been noted that the end-of-America fears stoked in the opinion stem from the sought relief of the petitioners merely getting a hearing. Is it that a hearing will result in embarassing disclosures, or is it taken for granted that the petitioners would be granted release because there is no probable cause to detain them, and hasn't been for six years?

4) Finally, why should Scalia care? A few nights ago, he was on Charlie Rose expounding his purpoted adherence to originalism. As Antonin explained to his never-critical, never-skeptical friend Charlie, the trying thing about having a stricy judicial philosophy where the Constitution has a fixed meaning, is that you have no flexibility in your decisions. They are dictated by the philosophy. Hence you have nothing to horse-trade in negotiations, because your position is non-negotiable. Also, you get stuck with outcomes you don't like. Scalia particularly said that as a conservative, he was often forced to take pro-civil liberties views when dealing with prisoners. That's because you don't get to consider your own policy views regarding the effects that your decision will have. You just look at what Madison and the rest of them meant, and you go with it wherever it leads. So, I repeat, why should he care how many Gitmo releasees have gone on to bad things? What does that have to do with the text of the Suppression Clause or the views of Madison and Jefferson?

Navel Gazing

2008-06-19T20:36:00.000-07:00

Seems like it's been a while but I guess it really hasn't been. I have been sitting on a couple of thoughts, but what stirs me to log on is the thing that always gets to me: the stupid local news. Tonight on the WTMJ news with Mike:

Mike talks about an event that happened today. He attended with his wife. There's a picture of him smiling and waving. Now to our interview. Mike finds out that the famous interview subject used to listen to the radio broadcast by the sister station of his TV news station. How about that! Mike tells the celeb what an honor it was to meet the guy. Thanks, Mike. It's really more important to hear your opinion than anything else he might say that isn't somehow about you. And they opened a new lane of highway. This is great news. I know because Mike gave his opinion that it was great news. Also, he smiled so wide at announcing the news that he looked like he'd been drugged, so either he really was on drugs, or this was an intentional means of making absolutely sure that we understood his very strong opinion what great news this was.

Also, I'm not sure how much of what he reported on the McGee trial was what McGee said on tape that was played in court, and how much was Mike's characterization and interpretation of what was played, but in Mike's version, McGee sure must be guilty, so I guess I know where you stand, Mike. Yessiree, I went into that newscast with only a guess of what Mike thought, and now it's like I've met him and his wife and got to know what makes him happy and how he feels about stuff. Just like the local news is supposed to do. Now if I want to know the facts, I can just read a newspaper.

Scalia's Derangement

2008-06-15T15:59:00.000-07:00

I'm just setting down to read the big Habeas decision from SCOTUS. Thought I'd dash out one point that seems incredibly obvious about one of the dissents. Scalia is a smart guy who says incredibly stupid things, despite access to smart clerks and concurring justices, their clerks, and a community of lawyers who all presumably don't point out these stupidities because of some combination of laziness, subservience or groupthink. The NYT quoted his dissent, which makes a point in passing about the seriousness of the threat America is facing from its enemies in the GWOT. In the third paragraph of his dissent, Scalia says, "one need only walk about buttressed and barricaded Washington, or board a plane anywhere in the country, to know the threat is a serious one." I find this remarkable.

Translating, Scalia is saying, look, we've received no evidence here that there is a serious ongoing threat, and we're not going to ask for any. Our chief of intelligence has told us that our enemies are on the ropes, their capacities destroyed, their entire organization on the verge of elimination. We're just going to take for granted that that's a load of political bullshit, and yet when the same government insists that the threat is so serious that it must buttress and barricade the capital city, we choose to accept this without question. In fact, why even refer to these signifiers of danger. All we need to look at is the government's decision to strip its accused enemies of habeas protections. Would they do that if the threat were not severe? Of course not. We're not going to doubt the sincerity or the wisdom of the political branches.

Having assumed at the outset that whatever is done is therefore justified, hence having disposed of every question before the court, Scalia goes on for 24 superfluous pages. This little piece of dicta is nothing less than the virtual repudiation of judicial review. Of course it's all just rhetorical garbage. Scalia will say anything that suits his immediate purposes and backtrack the next day, because it's all activism and no principle.

Hillary's Derangement

2008-06-06T02:55:00.001-07:00

For a long time, there has been a perspective out there that Hillary, or at least her surrogates, were going out of their way to exploit racism to better position her against Obama. It was and remains a topic on which I remain agnostic. Some of the evidence out there I think is pretty unconvincing, and I think when you have a machine that's speaking a million words a day on a subject, it's easy to build a case for almost anything by cherrypicking statements, but I think it's still a very plausible position. I don't think Hillary is anything close to what we paradigmatically call "a racist" but she obviously is smart enough to see the racial dimensions in what she says, enough to know that they exist at least to some degree in almost anything she could say, so it was always going to be a question of how much one could draw on that strain of thinking without getting queasy over it.

Her extreme tenacity, to the point of ridiculousness, over remaining in contention despite having lost the race irretrievably months ago, relates to the race-baiting charge in two ways, both as a cause and as an effect. This stubborn resolve to fight obviously evinces the kind of passion to win that would tempt her to accept a degree of racist support that she otherwise would not. That is the causal side.

On the effect side, one sees the deep denial of defeat and wonders at what has gotten into her most avid supporters. Getting carried away, locked in a Hillary bubble, being wedded to the historic symbol her victory would represent, they're all poweful. But maybe it's cynical, but I find it very easy to imagine that racial animus is furnishing some of this intensity.

Watching her poison Obama's candidacy by comparing him negatively to McCain; hold a gun to the head of the Party to get her way; arguing incessantly that she should win regardless of what the rules say, and demanding the rules be broken or changed to accommodate her ambitions, her supporters, and her view of the party's interests; and failing to concede after victory has become all but impossible (as it is now and has been for months) and after the mainstream has finally reasoned this, thanks to an absolute majority of delegates won by her opponent; where has one ever seen this? Hostage situations? Suicide cults?

In politics, this kind of resistance to law can work. It plays on mass support of great intensity. I am increasingly reminded of some stalwart recalcitrant like Orval Faubus, placing his body in front of the advancing forces of morality and law, to hold off the inevitable one more day. In his case, the national guard was coming to desegregate the schools. Yesterday it was the Rules Committee voting to allow the imminent desegregation of the presidency. It's an uncomfortable comparison, but apt. Even if it were not apt, it is a comparison that grows in resonance every hour that Hillary does not stand aside to let her biracial opponent pass. When it becomes too evident, it will blight her image indelibly.

Day Whatever

2008-06-05T23:46:00.000-07:00

A brief note on the local news tonight. There was a tuition hike throughout the UW system. The station's online text and video reports are different from what I recall seeing on the air. I just wanted to reference the nomenclature here: "schools" versus "colleges" versus "campuses" or "universities." The UW system consists of a central administration, 26 campuses, UW Extension, UW Colleges Online, and maybe some other parts. The campuses include two institutions, UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee, that grant graduate and professional degrees (each of which has numerous schools and colleges such as the UW School of Law, and UW-Milwaukee College of Letters and Sciences), 11 "comprehensive" campuses with 4-year schools, and the 13 "UW Colleges," which only have freshman and sophomore curricula. There are UW "Centers" in every county that lacks a comprehensive campus or doctoral insitution, which serve the Extension.

So what did the news say? The video online says "students at UW schools will pay more next year" and gives figures for undergrads in Milwaukee and Madison. "Schools" is at best ambiguous, and the sentence suggests all but could mean some. The text is better, clarifying that the increase does not affect the UW Colleges. In the report that I actually heard on TV, there was specific reference to an increase at "colleges" which is at best misleading.

Also, none of these reports, going back to the AP report or the UWS press release, captures the ways in which tuition varies among students at a campus. The press release and AP at least are precise enough to refer to resident undergraduates, whose tuition is lower than out-of-state students or grad students. But a majority of the comprehensive campuses charged differential tuition, attaching greater rates to students of particular schools and colleges. There are also segregated fees that vary by campus, which are paid as part of the tuition bill although they are not technically part of the tuition. And at least when I was a student, there was not just a flat fee to attend, regardless of the credit load. If you took an overload schedule of 21 credits, it cost more than auditing a one-credit summer class. So this idea that your tuition went up X dollars has a lot of built-in assumptions.

McClellan, McCain...

2008-05-31T01:21:00.000-07:00

Just a few thoughts, not as developed as I would like...

First, McCain. I've been saving up a thought from a few days ago when McCain was criticizing Obama on foreign policy. Two salient critiques: (1) it demonstrates unfitness for the presidency that Obama would meet with leaders of adversary countries without preconditions; and (2) he hasn't been to Iraq as often as McCain.

Obama in July was in a debate and he was asked whether in his first term as president, he would meet without preconditions with the leaders of Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Iran, and North Korea. Obama, apparently not wanting to overlawyer the question, said "yes" when he probably should have said, "Will I? Well, anything can happen, so I can't commit to that, but it would be fair to say that as a matter of policy I would be inclined to talk with our adversaries, and under appropriate circumstances, I would go and meet leader-to-leader with those states you mentioned." None of it is literal anyway. "Preconditions" is a term of art. "I will meet but only if I can being a Secret Service detail" is not considered a "precondition" though literally it is one.

Getting to the point, Obama took a little crit. On the margins, that's justified. But in essence, what he articulated as policy is pretty standard. The countervailing view, that meeting with, say, an Assad, gives the guy prestige and makes him a winner just by the fact that he got to talk to you, is really silly. It's considered a credible view, but it makes sense only in exceptional cases. If a person runs a country, has for more than a week, the world recognizes their government, and they haven't just done something so egregious that the world is withdrawing its ambassadors in protest, you talk. Talking may eventually be something you want, and if you set the rules in advance that talking is a victory for them, then it will be. I don't understand this fearful, counterproductive foreign policy view that wants to define every eventuality as a failure except for the unobtainable ideal of having all your wishes come true without effort or compromise. Why is there prestige for them in just talking to us? I'd say, "hey, I've met with thousands of people, and nearly every minor head of state, what's so special?" You can meet with someone and dis them. Or you can not meet with them, and talk about them constantly, which lends a lot of backhanded prestige.

Again, trying to focus here on what I wanted to say, Obama's perspective is pretty mainstream. He's got good advisors. He's given some high-profile foreign policy addresses. He basically gets how this stuff works in the mainstream DOS framework. You can disagree marginally, or disagree fundamentally. But one thing it's not, is embarassingly naive. So for McCain to assert that this was a failed test, and a disqualifying one, is either extremely disingenuous from someone promising straight talk, or way out of touch, from someone who never showed much originality or nuance on foreign policy. It shows a lack of preparation or honesty on his part. Plus, the don't-talk unless they pay a toll first doctrine is so third-term-Bush, it's an instant club for Obama to hit him with (which is why he had to come back later and nuance it).

Speaking of clubs for Obama, number (2) on this topic is Obama's untraveledness. Again, the reply is, you John went to a marketplace with a kevlar vest and 100 troops and helicopter gunships to protect you, and you couldn't tell that it wasn't really safer than main street USA, so either you're not making the most of those trips to learn something, or you need to spend more time at home, so you understand the comparisons you're making.

Second, McClellan. I'll try to get this out quick and not get distracted. The responses to this: (1) Ari Fleischer makes the rounds with some talking points, which boil down to: "Garsh, it's like it's not the same guy; I don't know what happened to him; he was always happy to spout our lies, er, um, information, before; he must just be spiteful now." (2) A dozen media bozos say what amounts to, "I find it hard to remember my own performance more than one or two days back, but as I recall, I was pretty comfortable with my performance then, so it must be that I did nothing wrong, you know, we asked questions, we did our homework, we had the issues pretty much mastered that came to us from the White House and the mainstream of the pro-war Democrats. No one really saw an issue then, at least no one that I paid attention to." So the Bush team goes ad hominem and avoids the substance. The media puts its hands over its eyes and repeats circular rationalizations. Neither seems very persuasive.

The consumer beat

2008-05-28T18:05:00.000-07:00

The other night, Channel 4 celebrated another decennial if its "4 on your side" series, a copy of a a rival station's original "contact 6" consumer help segment. I like most people have always felt these segments were a service, but looking at them disinterestedly, I see two sides. The consumers that are helped are not always necessarily in the right. The companies that are on the other side of these segments, who usually do something to make the customer whole, deserved or not, probably aren't due a great deal of sympathy overall, but given the unfairness of a lot of what the local news does, it's worth looking at the process here. I have never seen a report where the customer was acknowledged to be wrong, and the local station advertised the fact that it took their case, discovered the client was undeserving, and abandoned them in order to avoid effecting undeserved relief. The station is advertising its services as an advocate, which is a problematic position for it since it also is the only entity available to serve as neutral judge. Assuming the client passes whatever initial screening the station does, it employs the same shame ethic that it so vulgarly applies to the deadbeat dads, revoked drivers, and miscellaneous petty offenders who are targets of its "investigative" segments. The alleged corporate offender, innocent or guilty, has an interest in avoiding or mitigating negative exposure, and so has motivation to give the consumer something, and be seen as contrite and helpful in setting right whatever is wrong.

I also want to relate this to the "Dirty Dining" segments that the station airs. It would be a service to note, as the newspaper has, that the frequency of public inspections has not met federal standards, and that a concerned individual can simply look up all the information online that the station is using as the basis of its reports. I have no idea that any of the reporters on these segments, primarily Courtney Garrish, have any training or expertise in this area, although I must admit that after holding this beat and reading all the reports she has, she must be pretty familiar at least with some of the standard violations. But this does nothing to quantify the risk or place into perspective the position of one restaurant with respect to its peers. There is always a risk that by the process of reporting, the news will foster a misimpression that the ordinary or insignificant is extraordinary or severe. It would be interesting to know whether these reports actually contribute any deterrent effect to restaurants. Maybe it encourages them to relocate to where the inspection reports are not so public.

Tonight, I was shocked because the station actually aired the side of an accused. It relayed the denials of a man who confessed (in terms he says were misunderstood) to the beating of a bus driver in footage repeatedly aired on the station. I must note this to be fair.

What is the greatest spiritual threat to our nation?

2008-05-26T13:38:00.001-07:00

Coral Ridge Ministries, the prototypical rightwing Christian outfit, has released its annual survey of spiritual threats. Drawing a little attention is Question 2: "How dangerous are the following to the spiritual health of America?" Responses to fourteen subparts are recorded, ranked by the number calling the threat very dangerous. All of the responses were rated somewhat or very dangerous by 98-99 percent of respondents. The report does not indicate that anyone failed to respond to any question. But I have not seen the original survey, and I've assumed that these fourteen all represent prompts in the survey, but there could have been other prompts. No n is reported, or any margin of error. So, at the point of highest concensus (95+% argee very dangerous) we have (1) the ACLU and similar groups and (2) Pro-homosexual indoctrination.
The second order of threats (90+% agree very dangerous) are (3) Abortion and (4) Islamic terrorism.

I'm not really sure why Islamic terrorism is considered spiritually dangerous, unless you're a Muslim and you think that the mystique of martyrdom in the lesser jihad is apt to lure people from the true path. Or if you're a sincere Christian who believes in foregiveness, and see how Islamic violence is exploited to create fear and hatred.

By the way, one ambiguity to note here: how dangerous are bears to health? The answer could be very, or not very, depending on whether one is rating the scale of the threat each time it appears, or whether one is factoring the rarity of its appearance.

Third order threats: 80%+ very dangerous: (5) Hollywood, (6) News Media, (7) Darwinism/evolution, (8) Cults and false religion, (9) Atheism, (10) Courts. The relatively moderate threats (67%+) are (11) Apathetic/uninformed Christians, (12) Colleges and Universities, and (13) Public education (K-12). Congress (14) is relatively un-feared. Obly 63% consider it a very serious threat.

This presents an interesting question: what are the real spiritual threats? I happen to think that the lust for money is the root of most evil, and that it is rivaled only by other false pursuits that absorb us: classical deadly sins like jealosy and wrath, and modern obsessions like drugs. For America, we have the the adversarial system of doing everything competatively, which results in preoccupation with victory and comparative measures of success, and obsessive promotion of the market as savior; excessive nationalism, including national security extremism and anti-immigrant hysteria; the urge to punish; the reification of conceptual liberty and individualism, divorced from the real world, and perversely implemented to protect freedom to exploit others; consumerism, globalism, and attenuation of responsibility, that allows everyone to participate in violent and unsustainable modes of life by consuming at a distance from the conditions in which our products are made.

Even among the Christian right, one wonders if, allowed to pick their own answers, the laity would identify internet pornography or drug addiction as threats. One might imagine that it would be a particular threat to spiritality to have corruption in the heirarchy of the church, such as insincere televangelists who are motivated by the desire for personal wealth, or sex offenses by clergy against parishoners. Those who come back traumatized from war might see war and the experience of killing or entering mortal combat as having been an impediment to their spiritual wefare. Racial minorities might have some understanding of how racism eats away at our national soul.

If I had a regular sermon to give every week or every day, I would spend every sermon decrying some threat to the nation's spiritual welfare. I would have to perform a reality check every now and then to see that I was addressing the most important matters. It wouldn't be a list of angry political wedge issues or anything as stupid as fighting the science of evolution.

Day 20

2008-05-26T13:14:00.000-07:00

Do these "ad" stories come from press releases, or does some reporter encounter them and really think,"people need to know about this?"

May 25 there was a long piece that had taps playing in the background, over a flag and an honor roll of names, preceded by a homily about how these people had given their lives for freedom. This is a religious ceremony, not a news report. It brings to my mind a question, which is a reporting question as well as a political one: what does this rhetoric mean? Is it objective or subjective? Is it literal or does it have some figurative meaning? I think the plain reading of the report is objective and literal: this course of military service and this death in particular promoted freedom. (There is also an implicit assumption that the U.S. military member promoted freedom willingly: that it was not the enemy that promoted his own freedom by causing the death of an occupier.) But since the literal truth of all this is controversial at best -- no one appears to be happy with anything that has come out of this war, Americans are less safe and less free, Iraqi and Afghani women, secularists, local religious minorities, and various groups are confronting new oppression, and everyone else is under the gun, living in ruins, confronting multiple humanitarian disasters -- since the claim of actually producing freedom is a weak one, I think the report relies on ambiguity that maybe this is what the soldier was seeking to do: it was his or her subjective purpose. In this case, there would be the problem of generalizing, not having the soldier to ask anymore, not knowing how views may have changed, and finally, not being able to fully interrogate what each meant in expressing this purpose. It is also a bizarre interpretation given that the soldier is a subordinate who has given up most decisionmaking power, is under both orders and intense indoctrination and coersion to do certain things, so the question of what they were objectively seeking when they did something largely fades under the assumption that what they did was not even their choice. There is also a problem in this analysis because if an objective standard is used, then the enemy is also fighting for some positive goal, whether freedom, the security of his family and people, rigteousness or divine grace, national dignity and sovereignty, et cetera. Finally, is it literal? To be literal, one must be thinking what the words mean and not simply repeating them as some kind of rehearsed prayer or shibboleth. They way they are used, this seems unlikely.

Day 14

2008-05-19T21:01:00.000-07:00

Three quick points:

1) They pronounced Mr. Marroquin's name as "Marrow Quinn." Could be, but I doubt it.

2) Speedbusters took us to the "third worst" place in terms of speeding in the City of Brookfield. Worst measured how? Average speed, number of speeders, tickets, accidents, injuries, what?

3) John Mercure. Last night their teaser warned us that our kids could be at risk at day care. This was a report you had to see to save your kids. So, it starts. Cue up the heart-wrenching sad piano music. John starts talking about this infant. Tiny feet, tiny hands. The father who said goodbye to his son and did not realize: it would be goodbye forever. So you get the idea that this child is going to be presented as an example of the kind of tragedy that the report is going to warn us against. If only he had known to do X, then the child might not have died. Here comes at last the reveal of what the report is about. So what does he say. The child's death was never explained. It happened while he was in daycare. Was the daycare responsible somehow? Um, well, it's John Mercure, so any important question basically goes unanwered. Insert sound of crickets. No, the solo piano and photos of a dead child, the scary teaser, were all there for a cheap emotional bait-and-switch. After getting this far, Mercure says that other parents had complaints against the daycare? Abuse? Safety issues? Hours too short? Too expensive? Shortage of crayons? John leaves the innuendo hanging that these complaints might have something to do with unexplained death. Then the transition to the real topic. When we wanted to learn more, we found out that (1) there are very few inspectors to look at all the licensed daycares. (Mercure asks, would you feel a lot better if there were twice as many inspectors? Surprise, the answer's yes! Good leading question, John.) Also, (2) there is no website or helpful staff that will help parents find out quickly what the record of a given daycare is. He points out that they have ways to inspect the records of all sorts of other kinds of licensees, like manicurists.

Well, there was a potential story here, had Johnny tried to develop it, rather than lather on sentiment through an unconnected tragedy. Is it an important issue? How many kids in daycare? How many deaths, illnesses, injuries, or ill effects of any type attributable to bad day care? What do the inspectors actually do, are they effective? What constitutes a regulatory violation. If a violation is found, what happens? What would be the effect of more enforcement? How do we make daycare better? Do we need to promote alternatives to daycare, provide greater subsidies for daycare? This is a compelling topic. For John to poop on.

Tweety getting it right

2008-05-19T11:59:00.000-07:00

Just saw this.

Normally, in an interview, the process is something like this: The interviewer asks a question. The guest gives a little hint of an answer and then launches into a message point. If it's a close connect, that it all seems responsive enough, then the interviewer may just go on to the next planned question. Otherwise, the interviewer either listens to the point, finds it interesting, surrenders any unfinished remainder of the old point and asks a follow-up on the new point, or thinks that he hasn't quite finished with the old point, so asks another question about it. It could be the same question, but it will probably be a little different, which helps smooth over the lack of a sufficient answer the first time. The guest gets the drift that the easiest way to move on is to gratify the original question a little more than last time before going back to talking points, and does exactly that. The interviewer is satisfied, or else the process repeats until the interviewer either gets an adequate answer, or moves on.

If the guest does not play by the rules and courteously attempt to answer the question before getting in his owned canned ad for his or her position, the occasional interviewer will throw a fit and end the interview, but usually, they sit for it, and at worst the guess is not invited back.

In this case, Chris Matthews would not abandon his question. If you were in court, refusal to answer a question put to you two dozen times would suggest the judge had some mental infirmity such as narcolepsy that caused him not to have the witness held in contempt in a small cell until ready to answer the question. Poor Kevin James skipped history in high school and did not know what Neville Chamberlain had actually done which constituted appeasement. As Matthews later put it, he didn't just sit down and talk, he gave away countries. I might debate Matthews on that, but James could not because he simply had no clue. He gave no indication that he knew who Chamberlain was, what his office was, what nation he represented, or what he said or did that made him the poster boy for everything wrong with appeasement. Yet he went through the motions of a nationally televised debate with Matthews, characterizing Chamberlain's actions as no different from Obama's allegedly proposed actions, (or maybe just Obama's statement advocating talks was appeasement enough.)

I would have done it a little differently from Matthews. I would have said, "Look, be quiet a second. You have to give me a turn to ask the question. What I'm asking is not whether Chamberlain's actions constituted appeasement. You've given me your view of that several times. I'd like for you to go through the particular things that he did, and tell me which in your view were appeasement and which were not," instead of saying "what did he do" over and over.
In a perfect world, I would have added, "Let's start with May 28, 1937, what affirmative steps should he have taken then? Should he have moved to cancel the changes to the bilatreal naval agreement? Why was the remilitarization of the Rhineland not a crisis? Walk us through it just through the Anschluss and tell me what you consider appeasement up to that point."

It would be very interesting to get knee deep into comparisons between Chamberlain's situation and that which will face our next president, and the lead-ups to those points. Distracted by flare-ups in the Empire, lacking good intelligence, military forces allowed to fall behind what was needed, not strong enough to act unilatertally, strategic resources at stake, an adversary seen as a counterweight to other forces in a complex field, and influenced by a past of recent injury with its ideological echoes, a polity came to decisions. Not the best nor the worst, but inadequate to stop the bad that happened next. The biggest difference is that now there is no agreed-upon Hitler, just a lot of players whom the Republicans are eager to audition for the role because they really want a Hitler.

Okay, I'm babbling now, I'll stop. It's just good to see someone in the media not putting up with the crap.

Damaged Brand.

2008-05-18T23:32:00.000-07:00

Watching Meet the Press. The Republican brand is damaged? Is that all?

Brand Republican is now poison. The "conservative" brand is deeply damaged. The coattails of national Republican leaders are whatever the opposite of coattails are. Ground Zero of the rot is George Bush, and the stink has spread to everything associated with him: the party, the ideology, his policies, his associates. No one knows exactly what made him so bad, but anything he touched bears the stigma that it might be the carrier of the infection.

The government's conservative policies have demonstrably failed. The very basis of being able to enact and continue those policies is crumbling: the army is unready for war; the economy is already wrecked in many areas and bled dry. The administrators of these polices and their spokespersons have destroyed their own credibility not just by unmet promises but by blatant lies. The bubble of drawing investment because the party and the ideology were assured victors in everything has burst hard, leaving a scramble to get out. The ideology has never been that popular and Republican candidates have always run on distractions anyway. Now even the distractions appear in a different light. Those bad habits of the shortening attention span and blind conformity that worked to amplify the noise of Republican talking points now amplify the noise of conservative failure and humiliation.

If it were just the Republican brand, you could change the logo and go on from there. It's everything about that half of the politcal spectrum that has problems, and the problems are more than some superficial matter of where the brand is positioned.

But 50% of reality is just appearance, and if you can persuade people that it's just the brand, then the brand will recover, and it will really just be everything else.

Day 13

2008-05-18T23:31:00.000-07:00

You can see I'm not staying with it, but I have a few notes:

1) Why does the weatherman always refer to Fond du Lac as "Fondy"? That's so annoying. Who else does that? I've never seen a rule of journalistic ethics against neologisms or vernacular, but it just seems to go along with the other problems. Sports guys deliver their entire report in a shout, peppered with cheering and dumb jokes. I have a very traditionalist preference (moreso than I can probably justify) for a direct, subdued demeanor that will give the facts respectfully and without embellishment. It's impossible to engage in silliness, banter, or shouting without conveying subtle commentary. If you're reporting on a major tragedy, you wouldn't be making up silly nicknames. So even by doing this, you're telling us what is and is not serious enough to force you to report soberly.

2) Two stories caught on tape: a five year old drives a truck, and some other nonsense. Not important, not local, just crap you happen to have video for. Oh, and a celebrity marriage. Because celebrity updates are news you can use.

3) Another carp about the weather report. I can always pretty much get the weather, but my roommate and other people are constantly telling me BS that they say they got from broadcast weather reports. It's almost always wrong. I can see why. The northern half of the state is under a frost advisory. I guess just to be cute, weatherguy says that it will be "frosty" in the viewing area for those not close to the lake. But not apparently cold enough for frost. So the confusion is: we're going to get frost, there's a warning, et cetera, when in fact it will not even be that cold, but the misleading exaggerated language, coupled with a report of conditions far away, leave a misimpression. Similarly, I think that all the wind chills and heat indexes are misleading because people confuse them for actual temperatures. I wish more would be done to idiotproof those reports,

4) There was a "4 your health" segment, that I did not even recognize as such until it was done. It was basically an ad for weight loss equipment. I'm not completely against stories that help make people aware of new products, but the sales information should be included because it answers a question that would have been posed with or without someone else's motive to sell merchandise. Otherwise, the journalist is ceding control to the marketer out of laziness.

5) A teaser about something that may be putting my child at risk. I don't like the presumptuous familiarity of assuming I have a child, and if I had one, I'd want to know right away what the risks are. I understand that if you give away all the spoilers, the report won't be much of a draw, but I don't believe in journalists holding back information for profit. Can you give us a hint? Is it the drinking water, the playground equipment, child molesters, sick building syndrome? Oh my god, it's sick building syndrome, isn't it? I knew it. I'm keeping Junior in a tent out back from now on.

By the way, I looked at the John Mercure blog. What vapid pabulum there. Short entries, mostly. A lot of promotion: you gotta see this story I'm doing tonight! Occasionally a dumb joke off the internet, or an opinion (completely conventional and thick-headed of course) about a story from somewhere else, the somewhere else being the new's station's sister newspaper. Sample opinions: They should put that drunk driver away for 50 years! That deadbeat sure is a loser for not paying child support! I guess the station expects him to have a blog even if he has nothing interesting to say. Actual decent blogging demands commitment (which I muster in little spurts from time to time, and John does not). I don't understand why the station pushes everyone to do a bad blog. Instead, why not have a few decent bloggers who work full time, and let the TV crew do their thing full time, and have them interact to help each other?

Day 9

2008-05-16T21:50:00.000-07:00

I'm noting this on Day 10, but it refers to day 9. Just two brief notes from a glimpse and little more of the news:

(1) There was follow up to the rich bus driver story. To their credit, they ran some feedback, including from the bus drivers' union. They also admitted to an error: they overstated by a factor of ten the number of new buses that could be purchased with all the large salaries. Coming back to that, I think it was misleading because the long term cost of a bus is much higher than the purchase price. To put them into use you have to pay insurance, storage, fuel, cleaning and maintenance, drivers, supervisors, and so on, unless the plan is to just let them sit and depreciate. There was also a new statement that seemed misleading, a reference to the millions the bus drivers are making. They make millions collectively. The highest paid bus driver makes a million in gross bus driving income in ten years, or will if he happens to continue to be the highest paid every year for ten years.

(2) Saw just a little of the deadbeat story. Because it felt just too lazy to comment wothout looking at the full report, I checked it out online. Watching it again, I remember the mournful piano music accompanying the pictures of the children. Apart from this maudlin effort there is amazingly little there. Two deadbeats. Johnny Mercure shoves microhones in their faces as usual, and comes back with his typical information-packed report. It's virtual information overload when you get to dense portions like this:

We caught up with Brian one recent morning.

John Mercure: "Im John Mercure. I work for channel four."

"How you doin?" Cuthbert said.

John Mercure: "I'm doin all right."

John Mercure: "I wanted to know if I could talk to you about your child support."

"No," Cuthbert said.

John Mercure: "You owe 40 grand."

"I cant talk about it," Cuthbert said.

John Mercure: "Your son needs you."

"I cant talk about it," Cuthbert said.

Cuthbert slammed his car door and drove off.

Did you keep up with all that? Mercure is doing "all right" and Cuthbert has a son who need his 40 grand. And we can see it all for ourselves because Mercure says so himself. Without even asking a single question! How's that for a feat of journalism. (Though admittedly, "I wanted to know if I could talk to you" was pretty question-like.)

Johnny Mercure was exposing the fact that one of the deadbeats was "also a scofflaw" because he continues to drive after the revocation of his license. This is just habit for John, since OAR offenses are another story he has done repeatedly. What does that add to the story? John spins it as: bad person, violates laws. I looked the guy up. He was divorced in 1997. In 2002, his child support was converted from a percentage to a fixed $300 a month. In 2004, his arrearage from 1997 to 2002 was set by the court at almost $19,000. In the last 72 months, that has increased by about $24k, so he has paid roughly nothing since then. But the guy has 61 court cases listed against him, including five for tax warrants totalling $15k or so in unpaid taxes, and many thousands more owed in small claims actions, unemployment tax warrants, and then there's the criminal cases. I counted guilties for 10 misdemeanors and six felonies. Bail jumping, possession of THC, possession of drug paraphenalia, resisting/obstructing, damage to property. So that's probably some restitution payments, some lost bail money, and some money wasted on drugs. So maybe the guy has lots of money coming in, but I would guess he doesn't have a lot. Prison time does not do much for one's economic standing. John told us nothing about any of this. Nor what he does for a living. Whether he has a job. Whether he has assets. I wonder what this guy's story is.

If only Mercure had the curiosity that makes for a decent journalist, but to him, the deeper issues that account for why some people don't keep up (is it spite, laziness, drugs, or just giving up on a bad life?) and how they could be prodded to do so, just aren't interesting. How to solve the problem is not interesting. Whether the court's order is really just is not interesting. As he responds to the other "deadbeat":

We decided to ask Christina about the obligations she's not meeting. When we caught up with her she told us, "You don't know the story. So until you can understand the story, dont blame it on me."

OK. Here's the story: Christina was ordered to pay $515 a month. She paid $627 all last year. Ten months she paid nothing.

Simple, huh? If Mercure actually gave a damn about these poor kids, or about doing decent journalism, he'd have to give us a little more background. Show us that there's a problem, and look at possible solutions. First, was the order justified? I'll assume yes, but maybe not. How is each parent and the child doing? Is the brunt being taken by the child, the ex, the whole family, or some benefactor who is pitching in to make up the difference? Assuming that this is unjust, how can it be fixed? Will throwing Brian in jail again help his kid any? Is that what mom wants? Maybe the loser dad needs help, maybe he needs motivation. We just don't know anything useful at the end of the report, because John doesn't think there are any questions to ask.

At root, I think this is the big problem with everything Mrecure does in his "investigative" reports (what an irony that is!): It isn’t about informing the people so that an enlightened public can recognize and understand problems and find sound solutions; it’s about using the power of the press to expose, humiliate, and present object lessons along the lines of Greek drama to pressure people to comply with authority. The promotional segments for the newscast go about half way in honestly representing this obsession: it says that when you investigate, you expose the bad guys. It's not clear that it requires much investigation to do what Mercure does. He definitely makes it a point to "expose" people in the most vulgar manner. But then the promo says something about getting to the truth, which has always been odd, because one assumes that everything they cover is being presented as the truth, and nothing in Mercure's antics has seemingly ever led to that Perry Mason moment where the subject cracks and admits hedunnit. If the distinction is between covering and uncovering, Mercure looks more like covering.

Day Next

2008-05-14T22:09:00.000-07:00

Watched the news tonight, and have a small harvest of observations:

1) Story about a kid beaten bloody from a school "tradition" of everyone lining up to punch the celebrant of a birthday. Report adoped the frame of whether it went "too far." Did not like that frame, because it seemed dubious to me that this was in any way a "fun" "tradition." It left me with questions: if one kid was suspended and no others, because he supposedly beat down the birthday boy as no one else did, then perhaps the injured child had nothing really to do with the tradition. No mention of any girls. Is this a male-only phenomenon? No evidence that it is really a tradition other than it having been repeated among a group of kids -- any official awareness? Where did this come from? How long has it been around? And what evidence is there that it is entitled to any respect even if it is a tradition -- who is willing to stand up and say why the tradition is important? Without such data, the frame of "too far or not" is unjustified -- what evidence is there that any level of violence above zero is the right amount?

2) That story about overpaid bus drivers. Actually a good story. Yes, it's a handful of drivers who, because of massive unscheduled overtime, have very high incomes. They explained a couple of factors: bus drivers cope with violence and policing issues on their buses, bad weather, and miscellaneous problems. The people who schedule the overtime are saving money on benefits by not overstaffing. The search for short term solvency is pushing decisions that are not on track for the long term. It's a private company that gets an exclusive contract with the county. Confronted with the issue, the conservative Republican County Exec is now rumbling threats against the contract, apparently seeking to micromanage the business decisions of a private business -- a transparently craven political response that might be correct, but contradicts the ideological excuses for attacking the bus system. The report considered the value of the bus system, the recent economic pressures to cut routes. Very interesting and informative. Now to the complaints. First the fancy graphics: not sure if that is a complaint or not. Someone did a nice job. It's only a possible complaint because one fears that the graphics take attention away from other aspects of the assignment. Those: I never heard a statement how many drivers there are, so that we don;t really understand the scope of the overpayment issue. I also didn't get anything about whether the bus drivers have a union, or whether seniority is a factor in pay. They talked to a guy from the Public Policy Forum but did not really identify the PPF for me in terms of ideology, funding, tenure or credentials. So missing information was a problem, but not a huge one. Actually there was only one big problem, and that was mostly but not entirely in the anchor's intro. Before the report could begin, the salaries in question (not even "salaries" as stated but incomes based on hourly rates) were characterized as "shocking" results of a "broken system" that allows some pampered employees to start "cashing in, big time." I wish the newscast was free of this kind of overt spin, telling me why I should be outraged.

3) There was a crime of some kind on the East Side. We got some anchor spin about how the goods stolen were not the only things the criminals took: they also took away some people's sense of security. They talked to some guy, I don't know if he was the victim or not, whom they gave a platform to opine about what should be done, which apparently he thinks would be "more aggressive" policing or else a blanket of security cameras. I never like when they have this unanalyzed kind of toss-off policy proposal from someone who is driven by emotion. It's like offering a sound bite to the guy in the angry mob who yells "kill 'em!"

4) Another crime story. Introduced by a line something like "you'll never believe who is responsible!" Middle-aged women. You can just imagine them saying "middle-aged white women" but no, they left race out of it. Nevertheless, I'm not comfortable with this framing, which is: you expect people of certain demographic groups to be criminals and others not to be. Why should we have our expectations validated or our generalizations like this reinforced, when the evidence in the story is the exact opposite. As a general rule, I would not underline the race or religion of criminal suspects unless it was for some reason important to consider. I am a little less nervous about age or gender, but I still think there needs to be a point beyond simply pointing to one group as more criminally inclined than another.

5) There was a report that Obama launched a new ad, with a clip and a helpful hint that the ad would be aired during the news broadcast. This is an odd story. There was also an ad for an amusement park during the news but I don't recall there being a news story about it. It seems more like a reminder to patronize the broadcast sponsors than it does real news.

6) Footage from Baltimore. Thankfully no one was hurt. This is one of those, hey -ook-we-have-footage-from-somewhere-let's-show-it-for-no-reason stories.

7) Another brief crime report, with a John Mercure-style lunge at the accused to ask, "How do you respond to the charges" which resulted in he accused's sister interposing herself and yelling, "Go away!" Thanks for that. I really feel like I learned a lot. It makes about as much sense as playing a recording of the reporter calling a source and getting a busy signal.

8) A long report about some victim of something or another. Seemed like endless minutes of hearing about how all of her cats have been found and will be just fine. Maybe it's crass of me, but I have a hard time imagining that somewhere in the world or even in the city, something more important is not happening than this woman's cats being okay.

9) Teaser for yet one more confrontation with deadbeat moms and dads, i.e., people who owe child support. I think newscasts should be used to inform the audience, not shame the subjects. We've seen this a million times. I noticed this time that they referred to one of their subjects as the "worst." What does that mean? Really, it's just somebody's opinion, but I suspect it's intended by the station to be measured by the amount owed. This makes little sense to me. What to me would make it worse is a variety of factors: (a) kids in need; (b) "deadbeat" has a lot; (c) kid gets little; (d) "deadbeat" acts maliciously to reduce or conceal income; (e) "deadbeat's" actions brought on the divorce; (f) "deadbeat" did not seek custody; (g) continuation persisted despite time and remedial orders; (h) ex-spouse is a saint. Probably a bunch of other things. Divorces can be really complicated. Although the law is the law and evading child support obligations harms innocent people, these situations often have two sides that bear consideration and I don't think the kind of simplistic, ham-handed judgments passed out by Channel 4 really lead to any understanding.

10) More speculation about Brett Favre's future. Give it a rest. This is a story they run constantly even when there is literally nothing to report.

Day 8

2008-05-11T16:43:00.000-07:00

Well, we see how well my diary project has gone for the last week. I'm basically online to recap some of my old ideas (I'll be brief with each of them), but before proceeding, let me make a couple of belated entries in that diary:

Day 8: A teaser for one of the station's "You paid for it" segments. This time, high pay for bus drivers. I'm guessing this will reflect seniority and overtime, and will not compare to the pay given to police. The think that annoyed me was the statement that it doesn't matter whether you ever ride the bus, you still are paying. I'll wait to see the report, but that sounded to me like an argument more than a fact: why should you have to pay all this money when you don't ride the bus? This is a contentious, politically slanted, and quite stupid argument. I'm never going to use Walter Reed because I'm not in the service. I'll use the bus, but I may never use the 41 line. Even if I do, I'm not going to use the 8:25 stop at X street. I could save a lot of money by vetoing every tax that I don;t personally make use of, and pay only for what directly benefits me. So what? Maybe I want our soldiers to get medical care just because I favor sick people being treated. Maybe I think it's good for people to have access to mass transit so they can get to hospitals, jobs, day care. It benefits me because it benefits the general public. Public transit at least gives our veterans a place to go when it gets cold at night.

Day 7: I didn't see it. Howeverm there was a teaser for a "Speedbusters" segment, and this time a twist: they bring the cops along. I don't get why they think it's their job to participate in this kind of law enforcement. Plus, if they simply reverse rolls: instead of watching and reporting on the police catching people, the news is going to catch people and bring the police along to watch. How is that a benefit to anyone? It's an interesting question to what extent the nightly news should participate in law enforcement. There are disasters out there that happen when the police get more interested in fame and exposure than they should, and let the media crew take the lead. When a defendant gets met at the door by a SWAT team and a television crew for a sex offense charge before having a day in court, that's a problem. The news shouldn't play cops for the entertainment value. In principle, they could be doing a lot of law enforcement if they did it right, but so much of it is one-sided, misleading, with heavy-handed judgments and epithets directed at the supposed bad people. I would like to see a code of ethics and a code of standards for the local news acting as an arm of law enforcement.

Day 6: Three things: (1) A report of four dollar gas. I thought: BS. It's either $3.99 and 9/10 cents, or more than 4. I suppose it could be exactly four, but given that that seems unlikely, and that $4 gas may mean exactly or may mean at least, I find the report ambiguous and unreliable. (2) Sportscast reported that Eva Longoria Parker was in the stands to watch her hubby, and remarks that "that's always worth a peek." Eva worth looking at? I agree, but to hear it reported that way seems sexist, objectifying, lookist, and just vulgar. (3) This is the one that really got my goat: Milwaukee's Archbishop Timothy Dolan was interviewed to give his reaction to a story about a pastor who kept a dead relative at home for two months, cashing her social security checks and claiming that she still might be resurrected by a miracle. (This is similar to what the couple who let their daughter die of untreated diabetes was told: pray hard, and she still might recover.) I would not automatically run to a Roman Catholic heirarch to comment on the beliefs of an obscure non-Catholic religious minority. So what did he say? Well, it was just a perversion of evertything religion is about, and these people are crackpots. Personally, I have no trouble with the notion that this is crackpotism. Keep your dead relative on the toilet for weeks on end? Yikes! But I have some forced respect for religious crackpots; I have to because most religion is at least a little bit crazy. I think some of the Archbishop's beliefs are a little goofy: miracles? People rising from the dead? Jesus? Lazarus? All of us living forever through the "blood of Christ": crazy stuff, for sure. Certifiable for anyone looking at the belief system from outside. So I was yelling at my TV set: who is this fat rich ugly hypocrite to stand there and mock and judge these people for believing in resurrection. Sure, they may be crazy. There are some decisions I would not let them make, and posing a public health hazard by failing to report a corpse is one of them. But what does it mean for this fat rich jerk, representing his fat rich church, with its centuries of crimes and its unravelling factories of child rape, to say that someone else's faith is crazy, perverse, disgusting and intolerable? How is that anything other than sectarian hate speech against a fellow faith tradition? And why is it being aired uncritically?

Day (??): Forget exactly when it aired, but t's in my recent notes: On the same day, two stories: (1) People are upset that the new release of Grand Theft Auto is being advertised on city buses, and this has led public officials to engage in a lot of vituperation and try to cancel contracts; (2) The Republic of Iran has formally denounced and banned Barbie dolls as a negative cultural influence. The first report appears more incritical than the second, but in neither case is there any meaningful analysis.

Now to some other items that are not part of my diary:

1) It's an old issue that has been addressed already, but I was thinking about Bush's low approval ratings and the Republican talking point that Congress has a worse rating. The obvious and well known answer is that people like their own reps, whom they voted for, but just don't like the group made up of 535 people, 533 of whom they did not vote for. In contrast, even most of the people who voted for Bush would like to see him fall out of Marine One and be lost at sea. Then I had another thought, for my brothers and sisters in DC. They had the chance to vote for president but have no votes in Congress. So the difference is, they dislike Bush because they voted against him. They dislike Congress because they never got to vote on Congress at all. Zero for 535. Does that help explain it?

2) Some coverage of the new Gitmo trials has mentioned that one of the charges that the US is trying to prove is that of giving material aid to terrorists. This struck me as so bizarre that at first I thought it was a screwup, but even the more detailed reports from legal blogs have included this fact. The problem is, material aid to terrorists has become familiar since 9/11 as a domestic crime. It is controversial because it is so broad: giving money or services for hospitals or schools operated by foreign groups the United States government doesn't like and has labeled as terrorists will get you in trouble. But foreign citizens, those of, say, Yemen, swept up in Afghanistan and associated with al Qaida, are not subject to substantive US domestic law. Giving material support to terrorists is not generally, to my knowledge, a crime in international law. Terrorism, depending on how broadly it is defined, is probably but not necessarily a war crime or crime against humanity, but merely giving aid to such people (perhaps giving them legal representation, or being their driver or bodyguard or physician) is not by itself unlawful. Yes, if you're so involved as to be a party to the actual root crime of terrorism, that might count. But until Nuremberg, conspiracy was not even recognized as a crime much outside the US. So this whole matter still has me questioning.

3) Did I ever mention my idea about Hillary and Barack and the vice presidency? Don't offer her the VP slot, but ask her to lead the search committee. That way, the pick that isn't her will still have her imprimatur.

4) I am a fundamentalist. A fundamentalist believes that while there may be some mysteries about things, some areas of doubt, there is some core that you believe ane what you believe is what you believe and it's absolute and you serve God according to that belief without limitation or exception. It's odd because, even though I am a member of the clergy, I'm not very religious, and I'm not good at practicing what I preach. In fact, I'm against many uses of religion. But I think that what you believe, you believe. So when Mike Huckabee says something pastorish that offends a lot of people, I cut him a little slack: are you explaining that his view is idiotic and evil, or accusing him of being insensitive and mean-spirited, or are you attacking him because he has beliefs that he thinks come from God, and he won't shut up about those beliefs simply to avoid offending somebody? I remember making a defense of Huckabee like that not long ago, and I'll make the same defense for Jeremiah Wright. Disagree with what you want to disagree with, but he was called to preach. He believes some stuff. He thinks it's fundamental to somebody's salvation that he come out and say what he believes. He's been called to witness. So don't expect him to be quiet. There was a piece in the local paper by one of our community columnists, and it attacked Wright very subtly. I had to read it a couple of times before I could break it down and what the argument boiled down to is, whether you agree or disagree with him, the way he presents his case is too black. I wonder how prevalent that is.

5) One thing I don't like about McCain is that he jokes about torture. Now because he's a torture victim, I respect his right to joke about torture privately. But I think it is very disturbing that he does it before masses of people that are not torture victims. What that does is it seems to give permission to other people to maks such jokes. This is no different than if Obama were to start using the word "nigger" on the campaign trail, except that torture victims are a minority that no one much thinks about.

5A) More on torture comments. One of the defenses used to belittle acts of torture as somehow not so serious is to decribe them without the elements of extremity or forced exposure. Hence sleep deprivation, heat or cold, hunger, loud music, maybe getting a little water down your nose. You know, these are things that lots of people have to deal with once in a while. But they are much more like torture when they are being done to you deliberately and prolongedly or repeatedly or harshly and against your will. So much of torture is psychological, about control. For that reason, getting waterboarded by choice in a controlled environment is a lot less devastating than having it done to you against your will. Another thing that could be put on the list is sex, which is also forced on people as a form of torture. The only difference is that we have a words for being violently exposed to unwanted sex: rape, sexual assault, or in more diluted form simply sexual harassment or humiliation. One cannot casually refer to rape simply as sex, the same way one can casually refer to other forms of torture as "sleep deprivation" or "loud music." We need to change the way language is used here. The weak language used to describe torture methods makes them easy to mock, which is grossll misleading and dangerous.

6) Hillary won't quit. She keeps on attacking. She's got so much invested in her war that of course she does not want it all to have been in vain. The problem is, she can't win, that's just the reality. But she doesn't care if this goes on for 100 years, she just has no exit strategy. Good to know Iraq would somehow be different for her.

7) Reality-forcing is a really nifty concept that is too often overlooked. It comes to mid because I read that just a year before Obama's candidacy, some staggeringly high number of folks polled said they could not conceive of themselves voting for a black president. Yet here he is, the likely president. Just being there changed something. Likewise, advocates for Bush's impeachment say what every trial lawyer understands: it does not matter that most people think your case is a loser. You put it together, present it, and when people see it in action they take notice. Once Bush was impeached and the evidence started coming out, it would show how justified the impeachment was. There are numerous and wider examples of this. Airbags were an example of a forced innovation brought about by technology-forcing innovation. If you demand that all cars must have something by year X, chances are it will get invented.

8) Intelligent design. I think maybe here too we should change the language. I don't have a problem with an evolution-compatable "weak ID" theory. You could postulate that there is something analogical to intellligence or design in the way evolution works out by trial-and-error, interated variation and selection, nifty solutions to environmental challenges. The real rub is the notion that the "design" is not taking place over time, organically, but that it was somehow worked out in advance. I recently read on the "Expelled Exposed" website that ID advocates tend to exploit an equivocal use of the word "design." The issue is not design, but predesign. Evidence for evolution is evidence for continuous design as against predesign.

Day 1.

2008-05-06T20:26:00.000-07:00

Haven't posted in a while. So I have miscellaneous ideas stored up, but instead, I'll post this:

I had the thought of beginnng a daily diary (that's redundant) reporting what is on the local news every night and noting my reactions. I doubt this will actually happen, but let's pretend for one night:

Today, there were a couple of things that struck me. The first is that the show had a lot of name calling. There was a report about some youths being apprehended by police, suspects in some grafitti vandalism.

This was a follow-up report after a broadcast that mentioned the grafitti itself and speculated that it was not gang related, but the work of gangster wannabes. This struck me as a lot of mind-reading. I generally find it objectionable when reporters say things like "the White House believes" rather than "the White House argues." You can't possibly know what they really believe. If you believe they do not lie, then the viewer can take the report of what was argued and reach their own conclusion what was believed. But to reach that conclusion for the viewer overreports. It goes beyond what the available data supports. It means that if the argument turns out to be spin (does that ever happen), the original report will have been wrong. Why report what you don't really know?

So today the culprits were found -- maybe, I'd have to go back and check what language the report used, maybe "suspects" is better than "culprits" -- and, like last time, the report referred to them as "punks." What does that mean? Do they identify with "punk" subculture, listen to punk music, call themselves punks? Obviously, nothing like this was known at the time of the original report. I mean, conceivably, the grafitti might have included actual punk slogans or symbols, but I did not recognize any. I assume that the report was calling them punks as a term of derision, meaning bad youths. This is, I think, borderline hate speech, "punk" used this way being to young people what "bitch" is to women. It is also, to the extent that punk has a potential factual meaning, a misleading epithet which some might see as identifying these bad acts with punk subculture. And in general, I don't see the point of namecalling in a factual report. How can one be objective and fair while calling someone names? I don't think this kind of expression of personal opinion has a proper place even when the crime is murder. Why heap abuse on kids for petty offenses before they are charged or tried? There could be any number of things to be said in favor of these kids to mitigate the offense. Or aggravate the offense. We don't know any of it. How is that fair?

There was another report tonight that involved a report of some people who gave a 2-year-old marijuana. The online transcript does not include Mike Jacobs' bumpers to the report, referring to the people who did this as "rocket scientists." I assume this is again not to be taken literally but as a petty insult. This is Mike showing how he's one of us by expressing the same opinions we would have. Standing up for conventional opinion, pandering, padding the facts with vapid commentary.

I just read the report again online. Some quotes and comments:

(1) "Exclusive: shocking and sad video." The local news equivalent of a laugh track, so you never have to make your own judgments.

(2) "A toddler caught on tape smoking pot with his mother in the same room." Can I get a verb, please? What is with the style that omits verbs? Grammar is a good way to assure that whatever you say asserts something that has a meaning and a truth value.

(3) "The mother is from Menomonee Falls. She was punished along with two of her friends." Does "from" mean that she is somewhere else now? Japan? Mongolia? Punished when? How? (Let's check ahead... Well, "They were all smoking marijuana inside a Menomonee Falls home..." and "TODAY’S TMJ4’s Heather Shannon showed the tape to several Menomonee Falls moms," so it looks like she was still there when this happened. At almost very end of the report: "Weber's attorney says his client has maintained complete sobriety since her arrest last fall. 'She is gainfully employed and has been doing everything in her power to better her life and the life of her son.' Children's Hospital did run tests on the little boy and they found that he did not have any marijuana in his system." So it looks like the arrest was six months ago, give or take. The punishment might have been five months ago or yesterday. So much for the five Ws. She is apparently not in prison. We're left to guess whether she got probation, for how long, under what terms. We don't know about the friends.

(4) "The cell phone video shows a 2-year-old boy taking a marijuana blunt and smoking. The video shows his mother's friends teaching him how to do it." Was it a blunt? I didn't see the video but I am not confident. Teaching a two year old? How? Telling? Demonstrating? I doubt this too. Just doesn't sound like an easy thing to do.

(5) "Everyone had the same reaction. 'That poor little baby,' one mom said.' Oh, that is disgusting,' another mom said. [Another is] appalled at what she saw. 'Instead of a child, he's a form of entertainment, and that is just awful,'... [Another said,]. 'I am in shock. I just cannot imagine doing something like that with your child and videotaping it and making a joke of it,' Holmes said. Are those all the same reaction? Pity, disgust, shock? I was trained that you never characterize ("appalled") before the quote: let the quote speak for itself. And the woman who said she could not imagine: well, first of all, I hear about stuff like this all the time. But more importantly, the woman is also wrong in how she characterizes the video: the mom was not reported as being the one doing it, she was in the room, and can be heard commenting. Why include a quote that reacts to facts contradicting those reported?

(6) "were all charged with giving the marijuana to the boy." Again, they always say "charged with" followed by the substance of the accusation rather than the name of the alleged offense. That is a big problem. If a report says, "he was charged with killing his housekeeper," is it negligent homicide, first degree murder, manslaughter, party to a suicide? Is the fact that the victim was a housekeeper relevant to the offense as an enhancer?

Next story: free breast implants. The teaser talks about doctors being outraged, bit the item struck me as spun in exactly the opposite way, as a horrible, big ad for women to seek free breast implants by, hinted but not stated, offering sex. I need to check this again tomorrow when there is a transcript online and not just a teaser. At the end of the report, Carole Meekins makes a comment about the sad lack of self esteem among girls. Well, I might agree with that, but why I didn't really feel that perspective came through that well in the report, with any facts. It seemed like a wierdly schizophrenic report, slanted in one direction, but with a commentary at the end completely contradicting that spin, unsupported by any facts. Plus it basically charged the woman in the story with acting irrationally out of self-hatred, which she would probably resent. More mind-reading. And no chance to respond. Maybe I'm wrong. I;ll check.

Finally, I remember that yesterday John Mercure had a report that was actually interesting: they put a boy in a lobby of a heavily trafficked city building surrounded of posters of him, in the identical coat, calling him missing. Almost no one noticed. The only problem is that I can remember maybe a few months or a year ago they ran an almost identical report. So this was really lazy and not new. Does that justify fake posters? Why keep running the same "unscientific experiment" and reporting all the unreliable results on who tends to notice more? Why not just do it once, right? And then find something different to do that will move us forward.

Less babytalk. Less trivia.

2008-04-18T17:03:00.000-07:00

The other day my local news referred to vegetables as "veggies" and bees as little "stingers." Assuming most viewers are adults, it would be good to not have the language cutesified.

Also, some very good things have been said by Glenn Greenwald and by Rachel Maddow concerning the whole Obama "bitter" flap. Not only is the coverage loaded with misinformation, as I noted, but of course the whole issue is stupid. Of course, the whole thing shows a disingenuous bit of circular reasoning: the media covers this stupid trivia about little things a candidate says or does that are not really very important otherwise, on the excuse that they may have the power to influnce the election. And of course they do have that power, because the media covers them obsessively, to the exclusion of actual news.

These two topics raise broader ones. I love media criticism, and I think the topic is vitally important. The fact that the Obama story here is so trivial raises a question of news values. One project which would be important would be to identify actual news values and interrogate them. For example, it has been commonly said for 40 years that negativity is a news value, and people have asked, why is bad news more important than good news? Or, if it is sometimes, when? Perhaps we should eliminate or at least refine this news value so that we do not overemphasize negative coverage. Of course, the local news have a habit of trying to be upbeat, which is just as disgusting. They still follow the formula that if it bleeds it leads, then produce "positive" segments for balance that are awful and do nothing to balance out the obsession with crime news.

A few days ago, for some reason I've forgotten, I had to look up standard western news values. I think those values have some serious shortcomings. I like Wikipedia's entry, on which I have based the following synopsis. They utilized three sources: Johan Galtung & Mari Holmboe Ruge's classic, "The Structure of Foreign News. The Presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus Crises in Four Norwegian Newspapers, " from the Journal of Peace Research, vol. 2, pp. 64-91 (1965). This gave them 10 values. They added four more from Allan Bell's book, The Language of News Media. (Oxford, 1991), and a final two from Philip Schlesinger, Putting "Reality" Together (London, 1987), making a total of 16. I recite them below with my own explanations based on Wikipedia's, and put in my own order to reflect what I see as supercategories among them. I have put an asterisk on each of Bell's contributions and two on each of Schlesinger's.

Narrative structure:
Frequency (events at a convenient time versus other events or slow trends).
Unexpectedness (unusual versus everyday occurrence).
Unambiguity (simple background and obvious implications versus complexity).

Drama:
Personalization (individual actions versus no human interest).
Conflict (dramatic opposition versus none).
Negativity (bad news versus good).

Subjects important or culturally proximate:
Meaningfulness (culturally proximate subjects versus foreign).
Reference to elite nations (global powers versus other nations).
Reference to elite persons (celebrities and decisionmakers over everymen).

Relating to synergy or countersynergy:
Consonance (fit media's expectations versus unreadiness to report).
Continuity (inertia from being already in the news versus new subjects).
Co-optation* (related to major story versus not).
Competition* (endorsed by other news outlets versus not).
Composition (balances overall news output versus not).

Relating to the ease of production:
Prefabrication* (supplied verus requiring work "from the ground up").
Predictability* (pre-scheduled versus not).
Time constraints** (able to be covered quickly versus not).
Logistics** (nearby, accessibile and secure location versus not).

If one thinks about it, though, this list is plainly inadequate. Here are some I would add:

Exclusivity: (proprietary versus reported by others).
Currency: (recent, breaking, or imminent verses temporally distant).
Aesthetics: (compelling audio or video available versus words-only).
Uncontroversialiaty: (free of legal, security, or social restraints versus problematic).
Structure: (having a standardized narrative, like a legal proceeding or election, versus developing randomly).
Reproducability: (able to be repeated as a new story with small changes versus not).
Categorized: (belonging to a staple type like sports, weather, or crime versus miscellany).
Source-value: (known and considered important by frequent sources versus information scattered among those not frequent sources).

Another, broader project that I have had in mind for a long long time would be to gather up the various criticisms of media coverage and sort them out and evaluate them. Some, I think, would fall away as cases of a very intuitive but ultimately unsatisfying and unprincipled approach: if it does not reflect my values, it is biased. Without a set of neutral procedural and substantive criteria that identify how to present the news objectively, the tendency is to navigate between critics, covering things however intuitively feels fair. It's a start but it only goes so far, and explains why there is so much failure in objectivity in the present media output.

Wikipedia has a nice little entry on objectivity, but it highlights this shortcoming. It fails to mention Westerstahl's definition of objectivity, which I've always liked. More on this later.

Of course, the criticisms do not all center on bias. The problems of clutter, narrowcasting, entertainment values, horserace journalism, and stuff like the babytalk I mentioned above all pretty much grate on me. The local alternative weekly actually had a very nice cover story about a year ago, drawing together dozens of particular criticisms, to which I could have added a dozen more. I thought I had done a blog entry on it at the time, but I see that I never did, and have only my rough notes. This is something I want to come back to. It's a rich subject, important, and something I like to think about.

More later.

Precision, please. Balance, please.

2008-04-14T21:44:00.000-07:00

I hate the fact that when I listen to news and talk programs I always have to second guess them as I would a scatterbrained friend who comes to me with a "Did you hear?" story. Im writing at the end of the News Hour and beginning of Charlie Rose and I've just heard a series of statements that are false in various minor aspects, regarding the statement Obama made that people in hard economic times unsurprisingly tend toward bitterness and cling to their religion and so on. Regarding what he said, what it meant, reharding what others said about it. What was particularly frustrating concerning this affair, is that both shows spent good lengths of time debating the parsing of the statement, and then wrap it all up with a paraphrase that adopts a particular, innacurate reading of what was said.

There was a nice piece in the local paper yesterday on the local cold case unit, looking at two cases from 1990. It was all very well done. But it was one of those pieces that assumes at the outset that balance does not matter. It referred to one of the cold cases as having been solved, because someone has confessed to it. That always annoys me because to me, the case is not solved when the prosecutor decides it is, or when the police decide it is, but when someone has been found guilty. The other cold case the article examined still exists as a cold case only because it was not considered solved eighteen years ago when a suspect confessed after a long grueling interrogation. Beyond the individual defendants' perspectives not being included, there was a more general question which the article did not consider: is there a downside to solving these old cases and prosecuting them? Does that mean reopening old wounds? How do you go about defending against a nearly 20-year-old charge? I'm not taking a position, but I think the article did.

Earth Hour

2008-04-10T18:30:00.000-07:00

I don't know if I should even spend my time noting this, but it seems like the commentary from the Journal-Sentinel's community columnists just gets stupider and stupider. They seem to include a small minority of reasonables set against a crowd of...

Well, best to avoid sputtering insults at them, which would only prove the phenomenon is contageous. I've been sitting on this for a week, since I read Al Smith go off on Earth Hour. The guy is apparently some ridiculous old crank who gets whipped into a frenzy by some news outlet that he takes far too seriously. Or maybe it's performance art -- imitating a slobberjawed hysteric as a kind of hoax. Or maybe he's really a good guy but had been involuntraily drugged on hallucinogens when it come time to write last week's article. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt for now, but I tend to suspect he belongs in a place where the friendly nurse will remind him to eat his jell-o and take his meds.

Judge for yourself. Here is the article in question. I've shown it to a few folks who have said what I think is obvious: if this came in as a letter, it would be attributed to a crackpot and thrown in the dustbin with the old sandwich wrappers or at best the "maybe if we're really desperate" pile. It certainly wouldn't get spotlight treatment. But here he is, a columnist. And advertising his freelance writing availability in his ID tag.

I shall now give my analysis of his argument.

Earth Hour, in the real world, is a sort of a stunt event promoted by various cities and countries around the world, where near the end of March, people are encouraged to douse the lights for one hour. The idea is to draw a little attention to global warming and also just to get people to try just a tiny taste of conservation, on the notion that some might see that it isn't so bad and try it more. It's designed to be minimally demanding, an admittedly negligible start in terms of actual conservation, but significant to the extent that it commands some attention and breaks some resistence to further steps. It's basically costless. The only negative is that some people might decide that participation in this trivial act of conservation is sufficient to purge their guilt over their Hummer and do even less than they otherwise might.

Smith, on the other hand, calls it first a "charade" of "staged" "propaganda" for the "gullible."

Huh? How can any of this apply? What's the message that we shouldn't fall for? Is it a charade because even when you turn your lights off, they aren't really off?

Al's wife: Will you turn out the light when you come up, honey?

Al: Propaganda and lies! You won't trick me!

Well, apparently, despite being obviously intended to deceive us, this effort is in fact the exact opposite. It is, Al informs us, extremely revelatory. "It all becomes clear now" because nothing more perfectly reveals "the true intent" of Earth Hour: it is "merely the prelude" to an even more diabolical scheme. The manufacturers of Earth Hour want to "turn off the lamps forever" and achieve their "longed-for dark age." Really! This is their "vision," their "only approved endpoint": the "dismantling" of capitalism, consumerism, and civilization altogether. (How this all becomes clear from asking people to conserve electricity is not exactly spelled out in detail. I assume this is because Al considers it too self-evident to bother to explain. Somewhere in his fevered brain, it came to him that this was true, and all he need do is point it out to the rest of us, and we would see too. Yes! It's so obvious now! Thanks, Al!)

Al appropriately labels these enemies of civilization. They are not just "extreme" "radical" "zealots" who push "insanity", "absurdity", "buffoonery" and "tragicomic...farce." They are "Goths". Worse, their campaign is "anti-human" based on "self-loathing" and "self-flaggelation."

To be fair, Al does not completely eschew evidence. He makes, as far as I can tell, two observations of fact supporting his epithets against environmentalists. First, they obstinately reject the obvious solutions to all our problems, such as simply finding more gasoline and burning it. I guess Al remembers thirty years ago when the issue was more about shortages than it was about climate change. He should check into this milennium. Fighting pollution with more pollution is at best unproven as a panacea. Other solutions they reject: burning more coal, burning more corn, and building nuclear plants. They also supposedly hate hydroelectric power, because rivers should run free. I must confess I had not heard this. He does not explain why they supposedly reject harnessing hydroelectric power from the oceans.

His other item of evidence is that he quotes a single climate and public policy specialist as saying that Earth Hour, while nice, will not stop global warming on its own. No private inititive ever will. The government must step in. I suspect he meant applying a range of policy tools, a carbon cap-and trade system, or a tax, clean power subsidies, tax breaks or other incentives, government limiting its own wastefulness, and assisting with public awareness, research and effort coordination.

Al, however, is certain that what this means is that the black helicopters are coming to get him the next time he forgets to turn his porch light off. He has figured out that "government is to have the power" to cut off your energy. Oh, the Constitution! he raves. People sadly are too "afraid" to defy the Nazi "Uber Greens" or the Communist greens of the "People's Republic of San Francisco" and their worldwide "fellow travelers."

So, I'm right, am I not? This guy is a nut and the Journal's standards are dropping like a stone.

Elections as IQ Tests

2008-04-06T14:33:00.000-07:00

I believe it somehow made it into this blog that I have referred to the election of George Bush as a failed national IQ test. There is currently a wave of debate that has consumed the local papers and local bloggers regarding whether the election of Mike Gableman to the state supreme court over Louis Butler represents such a failed test.

Butler's advocates (including blacks, liberals, most of the state's judges, and me) saw him in this race as clearly superior: he has more experience, is more scholarly, has more integrity, lends the court some diversity of perspective (the only justice from Milwaukee, as well as the only African American), and was generally far better qualified (as ratings from the bar confirm). His sense of justice may be labeled as more liberal or pro-criminal defendant (but more pro-civil plaintiff) than Gableman's, but it probably corresponds better than Gableman's to the actual values that most people can agree with: injured people should have decent access to the courts, even people accused of terrible crimes should receive a fair trial.

It is also easy to account for the votes against him on the basis of misinformation. Even when the local paper here was pointing out the lies in Gableman's ads, it assumed the framing of the Gableman campaign that the election was about which candidate would better use his position to fight crime. Since this is not the function of the court, there was an implicit contradiction in the Gableman campaign: I will not be an "activist" judge: rather, I will subvert the position to reach outcomes that I am running on today. Gableman's supporters and Gableman himself implicitly and explicitly argued that Butler's experience, dedication, and success as a public defender were negatives, a position that has profoundly negative implications for justice.

Joel McNally said on InterCHANGE, a local public television panel show, that the voters knew nothing abot Gableman, which is not entirely true. But it is hard to see what positive information got out about him other than: he was a prosecutor and judge, which is probably enough to show most voters that he is at least minimally qualified (notwithstanding that the bar buried him in "not qualified" votes), and he promises to be "conservative" (a term that probably confuses more than it explains) and anti-crime (which given the role of the court, also probably does more to confuse).

More to the point of course is the misinformation about Butler. As suggested above, he could be called more liberal than average. He treats Constitutional protections for the accused seriously. Ads regarding him worked hard to create the false impression that he was happy to see criminals run free and reoffend. Voters may never realize what a great justice they had in Butler, because he will leave his seat and who knows what they will hear of him in the future.

But the buyers' remorse over Gableman may be starting before Gableman is even seated. As the press continues to play out on this, and as ethics investigations proceed, and then when the court starts issuing opinions with his deciding vote, there will be almost certain regrets. It should be amazing, except that it is completely commonplace: the day after an election, the local papers report what the outcome will mean for the public. This was front page in the Sunday paper here. I can think of few things the press regularly does that are more absurd. Either the press has done their jobs and reported what the likely results of this victory would be before the election, or they have not. If they did so, then this is old news. If they did not, then they only indict themselves by reporting the information after its utility has fallen from 100 to nothing overnight.

This is one of those elections where one feels that if the truth had gotten out, the result would change. In that sense, it is a test failed. Failed by the system, and yes, failed by voters, but only because the test was made harder for them and they were led to think they did not need to study.

There is now a push led by liberal Butler supporters to reform the system. One (liberal proposal) is to eliminate judicial elections altogether. (Others include public financing and the Illinois retain-or-dismiss election system.) Any of the above would probably be an improvement. All deserve consideration. But ultimately, it is hard to see where any of this will make any difference if the public remains completely bewildered regarding what the court actually does and what qualities really make a good judge. To some extent, the fault is out in the democracy itself. As the saying goes, you always get the rulers you deserve, or else we would have gotten the metric system.

The conservative conventional wisdom is now that the liberals are animated by "sour grapes" to make any changes, and that the whole thing is profoundly undemocratic and dismissive of voters.

Of course, it is not that anybody wants to impose upon the public something that the people don't want; it is rather a paternalistic desire to protect voters from making the dumb decisions they make and regret. Time and experience show that there are some decisions people make that they frequently (or nearly always) regret. Like flirting casually with dangerous things (unsafe sex, unsafe drugs, unsafe explosives). Like falling for con artists, absusive husbands' promises to stop hitting, and conservative political ads. We make some of these deals voidable, grant rights of rescission, require some terms to be in bold print, and outlaw others. Some actions can only be taken with a license. But not voting for Gableman. The system really looks broken when 95% of judges support the incumbent justice, and an upstart under and ethical cloud is able to steal the seat by massively advertising distortions or lies.

I cannot buy all the righteous piety regarding how we should respect the voters. The same conservative conventional wisdom, before Gableman won, was very pronounced in the opposite direction on another race. There was a contest here in Milwaukee where the voters were constantly being second-guessed and there was rampant speculation over whether they would make the obvious right choice or be fooled. But that was the race for the Sixth Aldermanic District, the voters were nearly all black, and the second-guessers were white folks from outside who assumed they would get it "wrong" by re-electing the imprisoned Michael I. McGee to another term.

McGee lost, and I happen to think the voters in that district made a good decision, but I would not have faulted them for keeping McGee, either. Those who would have, though, dominated the discussion prior to the election, and they were the same conservative segment of the punditsburo that now find second-guessing of the Gableman vote distasteful. Was the supreme court race afford fewer unfair advantages to Gableman, whose victory we cannot question, than the Aldermanic race did to McGee, whose victory we could have? McGee was in jail, impeded from serving his district, under a cloud he could not answer without injuring his defense, and his whole budget was spent for legal defense rather than ads. He had no unfair advantage, and in fact was saddled with disadvantages. But his opponent's victory is not suspect, and his somehow would be. The only explanations for this doublestandard are political convenience, and, of course, race.

How ignoring the past can help us

2008-03-27T12:41:00.000-07:00

Concerning the occupation of Iraq, a prominent pro-war meme has been: "Okay, mistakes have been made. Should we have gone to war in the first place? Maybe not. But now we're there, and whether to get up and leave is a different question."

It's easy to see why the past and future must be carefully distinguished if this is your position. The argument regarding the past is a loser. Bush lied. The intelligence was cooked. The war was sold as a brief, easy run, that would pay for itself and inflict scarcely a scratch against our military machine, bring about the rapid flourishing of democracy, strike a blow against terrorism, allow us to secure the stockpiles of WMDs, yadayada. Instead, we have broken our military, encumbered trillions of dollars, furnished a variety of militias, Islamists, Iranian proxies, and criminals with a central government, supplies, training, thousands of tons of unguarded explosives, a no-man's-land in which to operate freely and test military and terrorist strategies, billions in stolen cash and black market oil, and subject matter for recruitment propaganda in the form of US lies, vulnerability, and evil, racist and blasphemous acts. Terrorism is increased, Iraq is worse off, the US is poorer, militarily constrained, and diplomatically isolated. The war is the second longest and the second costliest in our history, and the biggest military or foreign policy blunder since the birth of the US.

So, they say, let's not focus on that.

Instead, let's look ahead. The surge is working! The surge is working! Can't quit now right when things are getting sunny. Don't want to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Fail unnecessarily due to lack of resolve, dishonor the dead.

If the future is bright, then it does not matter whether:

A. The adventure was always noble, glorious and successful

or

B. The adventure was problematic at the outset, but we're finally getting our act together and finally have a decent chance at succeeding.

Either way, we must stay.

The impulse is always, of course, that when an opponent argues X, you want to argue not-X. So there is the urge to say things like, of course they want to ignore the past. The record is that they got it wrong, and worse, they lied. Ignoring the past means not approaching them today with appropriate skepticism when they sell the same snakeoil in a new bottle. By not attending to the past, we doom ourselves to repeat it, or, to put it in the terms of our glorious leader, "There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." Ahh, wisdom!

Nevertheless, I think there's a good argument for going along with this and ignoring the past. The anti-war argument should focus on how the future is not getting brighter. One reason for doing this is that the past is socially divisive and has a psychological potency that goes against good judgment.

If the future bodes badly, then the choice that does not matter is between:

C. The entire thing has been a horrible, unjustified, criminal fiasco from start to finish

or

D. The thing was actually quite good at the outset, but its merits are declining, and pretty soon it will no longer be beneficial to stay.

Either way, we must get planning on the exit.

One big advantage of forgetting the past and not distinguishing between C and D is that the D option is far more acceptable psychologically to many people than C would be. If the effort began nobly and accomplished something, then our losses have not been in vain and we do not need to expend more money and more lives, and impose greater and greater destruction, seeking to vindicate those losses. We can declare victory and leave the table without thinking we have to double our bet to make back what we've lost in blood, treasure, and dignity. This is in fact how all our wars end even wehen we lose. We don't keep fighting until we and our enemy are both reduced to inconsequential powers and some third force conquers us both. We leave intact but bruised, pretending to have won. That's the only we can leave, is with some figleaf of victory.

So how can we characterize the effort as getting less valuable over time?

1) Well, there were some early "successes," if you care to call them that. We confirmed the absence of WMDs. (It was a lie that Saddam threw the inspectors out, but whatever -- part of the mission was to make sure there were no WMDs left, and that is done.) Saddam and his sons are dead. (This is cited as a big plus, even though the way these things happened basically was a huge embarassment for the victors that made Hussein a martyr and let much of the truth about what happened die with him.) Elections were held. A new Constitution was written. (Even if these were largely disasterous in fact, the myth of them lives on.) The point is that the biggest things occurred the earliest, and as time has gone on... What lately? Nothing on that scale. What next?

2) The Iraqis are impatient. How long after winning a war can you continue to engage in military operations without being viewed as unwelcome occupiers? The red carpet is in tatters in reality, and even in the myth it's fraying.

3) Our forces are getting ground down. Many are going out having been knocked around pretty badly. Many have done multiple tours already. The equipment has undergone lots of wear. Captains have been fleeing the service. Standards and quotas for newbies keep declining.

4) The longer this goes on, the fewer targets are left to hit. Anything or anyone worth hitting has been gotten already. It's been five years.

5) Institutions get stickier over time. When we first arrived, everything was fluid and the early marks we set had a lot of impact. Now things have settled out and fallen into more stable positions and have been calcifying into place. It takes more and more work to make changes.

6) People are impatient stateside too. Time to start addressing the domestic economic crisis.

Of course, pro-war forces have already set up their meme about the surge working. Can we please expose this as a crock of waste?

Consider by analogy the following stories:

First: You have a problem breathing. You go to a doctor who says he knows exactly what is wrong. He says you have an infection in your lungs. He gives you antibotics and says that in 3-5 days you should experience some relief, and by one week the problem will be gone. You take the remedy and everything happens exactly as he says. If this happened, you'd say, the doctor's remedy worked. This would be like the surge working.

Second: you have a problem breathing. You go to a friend who says he knows exactly what is wrong, but he never tells you what he thinks it is. He tries a bunch of things in sequence, but you can't tell what any of those things are doing for you. The problem eventually goes away, and your friend says, "see, I'm as good as a doctor; I got rid of the problem just like I said I would." If this happened, you'd say, maybe a doctor would have done no better than my friend, and maybe something my friend gave me finally worked, but it seems like he didn't know what he was doing, and who knows whether his cure or something else entirely finally got rid of the problem. This would be like being very vague about what the "surge" strategy is, and claiming that it was working at the first sign of some improvement.

Third: You have a problem breathing. You go to a doctor who says he knows exactly what is wrong. He says you have an infection in your lungs. He gives you antibotics and says that in 3-5 days you should experience some relief, and by one week the problem will be gone. You never take the antibiotics because you lose your prescription. You start taking allergy medicine and the problem goes away the instant you start taking the allergy medicine. The doctor says, "looks like my treatment worked." This would be like outlining a surge strategy, but never actually having a surge, and having things improve for other reasons, and taking credit for it on behalf of the surge.

Fourth: You have a problem breathing. You go to a doctor who says he knows exactly what is wrong. He says you have an infection in your lungs. He gives you antibotics and says that in 3-5 days you should experience some relief, and by one week the problem will be gone. You never take the antibiotics because you lose your prescription. You start taking allergy medicine and the problem stays constant but the instant you start taking the allergy medicine, a rash that you also had on your leg goes away. The doctor says, "looks like my treatment worked." This would be like outlining a surge strategy, but never actually having a surge, and having things improve that were not the announced aim of the surge for other reasons, and taking credit for it on behalf of the surge.

The last is the closest to true.

The NYT had a nice chart of the total levels of coaltion forces in Iraq and there have been regular ups and downs, but you would not look at that chart without a key and be able to point to any obvious surge. The additional US troop levels have been trivial and mostly offset by allies leaving the coalition. So there has apparently been no surge. Of course, it's hard to tell because one cannot easily tell how to think about the Iraqi forces or the huge numbers of military contractors that do not show up in those figures.

Not only was there no surge, but the proposal for the surge was very specific about what it would be and how it would work. The idea was to flood the ground with security so that conditions could be stabilized and projects could proceed. There was to be an opening produced by the increased security that would allow refugees to return, infrastructure to be rebuilt, and political opponents to reconcile. Once a whole laundry list of benefits from increased security materialized, the country would be considered stable enough to draw down forces within six months to lower than pre-surge levels.

None of that has happened. The plan failed. The ethnic cleasing of Baghdad was completed. The relative calm afterwards was oversold. Civilian deaths were reported as dramtatically reduced while bombing raids, the number one source of civilian deaths, were dramatically stepped up, suggesting that the death rate has not really gone down, but has been effectively hidden because its source and location has shifted. (Remember the killing in Guatemala that appeared to die down when it shifted from the capital to the countryside, but had in fact increased to genocidal proportions?) There is still no infrastructure. People still live in fear. About two percent of refugees returned. More continue to leave. The government fell apart, the prime minister left the country, Turkey invaded, the British bugged out. The press got better. US morale improved. The place is still Hell no matter how it's sliced. There are no plans to reduce troop levels any time soon. In terms of its ultimate goal, it is an indisputable failure.

This all leads up to no big conclusion, except, let's push this meme. I must face the fact that blogging allows me to ramble and not really write anything very polished. It's more an outlet than a cabinet of showpieces. But at least some of my thoughts are preserved.

Superdelegate Primary?

2008-03-26T11:58:00.000-07:00

Just heard the guv of Tennessee suggesting this. Purported benefit is just to get their votes in earlier in order to wrap up the race sooner. I guess another benefit would be that by committing early, it allows a state to go last and thus at least appear to cast the "deciding" vote.

Stikes me as a totally dumb idea: It will not necessarily shorten the race. It will artificially advantage whichever candidate is peaking in their superdelagate popularity. Every vote in the majority is a deciding vote. It seems to change rules in midstream (although it does not necessarily have to really do so). It adds another technical stage where there are opportunities for distortions to creep into the process. It sacrifices one of the democratic rationales of having superdelegates: to be able to account for and reflect changes in circumstance occurring between the other primaries and the convention. If a hundred people get together and votes to elect themselves as their own hundred delegates, can you think of a more spectacularly transparent waste of time? If it's "winner take all" then the force of superdelegate votes gets amplified in relation to that of pledged delegates from the states, distorting the system to make it less democratic.

Ultimately, it represents an impatience with letting the democratic system set forth in the rules take its course. Just live with it, abide by the result, and in the mean time, if you want the focus to shift from internal squabbling to confronting the opposing party, then just get on with it and stop fussing about with internal processes.

Watch this

2008-03-26T10:43:00.000-07:00

I saw this over at Glenn Greenwald:

Glenn is right as usual in everything he says in this post. Rose is so stuck in his little New York elite bubble that his perspective is obvious in everything he does. When he talks to mainstream State Department types or to neocons, to celebrities and philanthropists, or about the arts, he sounds infinitely credulous. talks their language, panders and tries to follow. When he talks to smart people whose view is a little smarter, more worldly, less mainstream, he always seems either antagonistic and dismissive (as when he talked to Ramsey Clark) or like he's struggling to get it and really won't retain much by the next day, when he'll be back to the old outlines again. Still, it's wonderful that he actually gives some limited exposure to people whose political views are outside his bubble, like Clark, Harold Pinter, and these guys above.

Much of what these guys say should be beyond controversy, yet is the opposite of what most of the media and elite class appear to assume, and what filters down to the masses from elite opinion. Most of what they said was not surprising to me, but there were a few moments where I caught myself saying "Duh!" not to Charlie or his guests but to myself: "Of course! Why am I not more conscious of that!"

Iraq: reflections and succeeding downwards

2008-03-22T23:06:00.000-07:00

A few things:

(1) Perhaps I've said it before, but Iraq seems almost a perfect demonstration case for the central thesis of Leviathan: a potent sovereign, even a bad one, is preferred over anarchy and war. It's striking to see conservatives, who I'd always understood to be the ones cramming Hobbes down the throats of everyone else, stating baldly that the success of the Iraq war is that Leviathan has been slain. In the Hobbesiverse, that's a minus, not a plus. The plus can only be a new and better sovereign that can achieve security more successfully with less interference. But the Iraqi government now in place is not cited as the success of the conflict because it's an embarassment. Hence the focus is on how a tyrant has been eliminated. But in theory, a tyrant is better than an ineffective government or no government. That's what Iraq has. Neither the occupation nor the illegitimate, phony, disfunctional regime now in place can outperform Hussein on the metric of providing basic security, providing the most basic public needs, and providing a ground where citizens can interact to benefit themselves. A million dead and five million displaced is not security or the product of a genuine sovereign, it's a state of nature.

(2) One of the tricks that misleads people into perceiving improvement is the reporting of delta-to-the-nth-degree improvement without pointing out delta-to-the-first-degree decline. I've addressed before this in the context of global warming. You have a situation whose quality is defined as x. Delta x over t is the rate of improvement or decline in that situation. If the rate is accelerating or slowing, the change in rate is delta-squared x over t-squared. That rate also may be changing, which would be a third-degree delta. In Iraq, you have a bad situation, which is getting worse, and the worsening has been hastening, and the hastening has been hastening in an n-th degree downward spiral. Real improvement would mean that the base metric is actually getting better.

In Iraq, that is nearly impossible. Consider the most obvious aspect of the Iraqi condition: a million excess Iraqis are dead as a result of the war. Tomorrow will not see that number go down, and the loss represented by each death will not fade quickly. Each day more are killed by violence, which is a net loss. Mathematically, there is a certain fixed death rate which is neutral, where the loss represented by past deaths is lightened because the dates pass where they would have died anyway, putting the direct loss in the past, leaving only the attendant losses of the violence and prematurity of those deaths, which fade as memory fades, and as the expected economic benefit of continued life dissipates into entropy. So long as the death rate remains above that (relatively) fixed level, there is a continuing net loss. The mere putative fact of the death rate going down would mean only that the rate of decline is diminishing. It would not mean any actual improvement. And as long as the excess death rate was above zero, the any improvement would be attributable only to the curative effect of time, not to the continuation of the war.

The other metrics one might consider fare little better. False hope lured between one and two percent of external refugees back to Iraq, but that does not mean their normalcy has been restored, and new refugees continue to leave. The loss of precious historical sites and artifacts, such as Paleolithic structures and tools, medieval writings, and classical mosques, is even more irremediable than the loss of human life. The immense labor, talent and inspiration that went into lost writings and architecture cannot be restored without immense labor, talent and inspiration. The historicity and age of human artifacts likewise cannot be quickly recovered. When one historically significant 10,000-year-old item is destroyed, it can only be replaced by investing some other item with similar historic importance, and preserving it for another 10,000 years.

(3) I disagree with Glenn Greenwald concerning a part of what he says here and here. (It's unusual that I do disagree, and the disagreement now is partial.) He says that one of the lessons of the Iraq war, unrecognized by most of those who got it wrong by supporting the war initially, is that the U.S. should not invade, bomb and occupy countries that have not threatened or attacked us. And he adds that at best, the reconsideration of the erring warboosters remains sadly utilitarian. I disagree because I do not think that experience teaches moral lessons. At most it can teach practical ones, and in this case, it teaches nothing general about war because the test was about as bad as you can imagine. I think the decision to go to war ultimately cannot be anything but utilitarian.

On the first and last points, the rightness of an action is related to whether it will be successful, but is not solely determined by success or failure. On the one hand, it was very possible for people to morally say, "I predict this war will be a complete success but I'm still against it because I do not think total fulfilment of its goals is sufficient to morally justify it." On the other hand, it is not possible to morally say, "I predict this war will be a total failure at achieving any of the goals from which it might be morally justified, but I support it anyway." Most actions entail at least some minor downside, and they must have an upside to be justified. People say the ends do not justify the means, but all that can truly be said is that some ends, even if certain, will not satisfy some means. The fact is that only the ends will ever justify the means of any act. I'm going to cut you with a knife, which I ordinarily do not do. I justify it because this simple surgical procedure will save your life, and I know you will thank me for it. War is incredibly negative and is only ever justified when it at least has a positive end in mind. Such an end is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to justify any violence. A reasonable prospect that the end will successfully be achieved is also essential.

On the second point, this war (or really, this occupation) was a disaster, but it does not prove that occupations are necessarily disasterous. George Bush's team cannot make anything work. The fact that they cannot make this work does not mean that invasion and occupation generally won't work. To show whether or not such things can succeed would at least require a fair experiment where a competent team was in charge that might give the thing a chance.

I'm not against war in principle, although it would be misleading not to note that my opposition to starting virtually any wars is based on a calculus so close to insurmountable, that it merges with principle. I'm happy to articulate the principle, even if in reality, there may be theoretical exceptions. Purely defensive combat, proportionately waged and with a prospect of success, is generally justified. Ultimately war, like everything else, is a special case of the same general moral principles: choose the action with the best consequences for all, but recognize that it is generally best to forbear action where risk of harm is substantial and uncertain, such as when understanding of consequences is deficient or where action diminishes a viable beneficial policy.

(4) What is "success"? What is "getting the job done"? Much of the discourse is just far to facile tossing about vague and undefined references to the object of the occupation. It seems to me there are several possible objectives we might have for staying, depending on who the "we" is. Saving the face of the president, keeping war funds flowing to contractors, protecting the building of massive permanent fortresses, bullying the puppet government on oil policy, spending federal resources in order to break the capacity of the treasury to support liberal programs, venting bloodlust -- all plausible. Peacekeeping between internal Iraqi factions, fighting terrorism, promoting regional freedom and prosperity -- all pretty farfetched. (How does arming and training both sides, but disproportionately the fanatics of the majority sect, promote peace? How does occupying, humiliating, and decimating a society while flooding it with weapons do anything but stir hatred and provide a training ground and arms supply to enemies? How does installing an illegitmate regime and initiating an immense humanitarian disaster in the name of democracy raise the image of democracy?) It is arguable that the best policy would not be to leave Iraq but to reverse our activities there by roughly 180 degrees, but since the debate is not what direction to go but how far and how fast in the wrong direction, leaving as soon as possible seems like the best thing on the table.

Obama's things learned in kindergarten

2008-03-20T16:41:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to briefly note a few impressions regarding Obama's purportedly epic speech on race. From what I heard of it, it was an extremely fundamental Cornel-Westish explanation of some extremely simple racial matters that many people still don't get. As such, it is certainly salutary. I have not heard more than a small part of it, but I have a hard time believing that it is either the speech of Obama's life, which we hear about a speech of his every few weeks, or our generation's "I have a dream speech."

What I heard of it really was not so much about race ultimately, but about acceptance of those with differing views. As such, it hits away at a consistent theme of the Obama candidacy, which is again kindergarten-basic, but nevertheless bears repeating.

This is only because the American public consists largely of, well, I won't say idiots, but certainly people whose heads have been stuffed full of cotton candy by someone, whose arguments usually seem to operate at two or three levels of abstraction beyond their competence. The News Hour has been doing this thing where they sit and have focus discussions with highly unrepresentative samples of ordinary voters. Last night, for example, they had 4 Republicans (only one of them a non-Hispanic white), 3 Democrats, and 2-3 independents all sounding generally foolish on the Iraq war. Often you could hear the malapropisms and the highfalutin arguments with big leaps in logic and all sorts of faulty and missing premises.

So given this reality, it's good for a major speech, or a major campaign for that matter, hit on the idea that you can disagree with someone vicerally and still respect them, love them, treat them with dignity, accept that they have rights, and work to get along with them and work together with them. If you're Obama, you have to because you're between different groups. The implications of this are numerous: (1) we can negotiate with evil leaders on the world stage; (2) we should cut some slack for people like Geraldine Ferraro, who dare open their mouths on race, because we'll never have a productive discussion if we don't include some room for people to say dumb things; (3) it's possible for someone to say "God damn America" and still love America -- in fact, taken in context, Jeremiah Wright was obviously speaking negatively of the government, and not all the people of America, something conservatives regard as the blessed duty of patriots when they themselves do it with somewhat different language; (4) liberals and conservatives can give their all to defeat each other and each other's policies in the political arena, and still observe some boundaries, show personal respect, play by some rules, and seek common ground where possible.

This is all very basic and obvious, but it means throwing out the us-versus-them frame of reference that studies find that most people, but especially conservatives, find to provide a comforting simplicity and clarity to their thoughts, even if it leads their thoughts to be wrong most of the time. If we knew that there was no simple us-versus-them, we might have allowed for Iraqis possessing some independent viewpoints other than pro-US/anti-Saddam versus the opposite.

Illegals in Milwaukee County Jail

2008-03-12T10:33:00.001-07:00

Well, the Shepherd Express is out today and mentions in its "Expresso" section the connections that underlie an article in a UWM online magazine concerning illegal immigrants. The front page of Frontpage Milwaukee has the article .

The idea behind the article, the Shepherd suggests, is to bolster a theme that its faculty advisor, local wingnut Jessica McBride, has been touting that undocumented Mexicans are a real, real big problem. The article itself describes its motivation this way:

In light of the recent local immigration debate, the Frontpage Milwaukee team set out on a three-month investigation to see whether there are illegal immigrant inmates at the Milwaukee County jail or whether rhetoric about so-called “criminal aliens” is exaggerated.

So the entire premise of the piece, apparently, is a false dichotomy: either there are some illegals in jail, or the rhetoric is exaggerated. The implication is that these are mutually exclusive options: either one or the other but not both. If there are aliens in jail, the rhetoric is not exaggerated. This would be true, of course, only if the rhetoric were pretty tame, and relied solely on the implication that in the entire jail population, there is an undocumented immigrant or two.

The result (drumroll, please)... they found some. Shocker!

Michelle Malkin reproduces part of the story and endorses it as fair, all facts, no spin. So, it's been declared fair by someone whose idea of fair is... okay, so maybe that isn't the best evidence of objectivity.

The main point of the article was that there were at 181 persons booked at the jail in the last four years who were illegal aliens who had already been deported and come back. It had some scary-looking Hispanic people's mugshots, and went into great detail about all the crimes attributed to these individuals.

Oh, and it broke down that 181 in 4 years figure for us: that's three or four a week! Jeesh! Wait, which is it, three or four? Let's see. 365 days in a year, so 1461 days in four, counting the leapyear. Or just under 209 weeks, so its... well, about one every 1.3 weeks. Looks like their key finding is a mathematical error. I wonder if Malkin -- yeah, she reported it too. I suspect this will wind up being the old game of conservative telephone. Someone, maybe Limbaugh or whoever, will report it as four a week and not give the underlying numbers. Then the next person will find a way to suggest it's more, and by the time they get done it will be ten a day. It all starts with this one error.

The article is pretty long. I confess I only skimmed most of it. I was looking for a little bit of counterpoint. You know, some viewpoint that doesn't look like it's been included to bolster a conclusion but just because it's a fact, even though all the facts might not line up with the same conclusion. I didn't really see it. I didn't really see what the rhetoric was that the article sought to prove not "exaggerated." All I really saw, frankly, was the type of one-sided shrieking about scary criminals and how they're really really bad. I know this is a little unfair since I didn't have the patience for the whole thing, but at least enough of the article is one-note that it can be fairly critiqued on this point. If there is another side presented, it was certainly not given prominent attention.

My biggest so-what about the article was that 181 doesn't seem like a lot anyway, even if you multiply it a lot. Last time I was arrested and booked at the jail, it was a zoo. As anyone familiar with the situation knows, jail booking is the central destination for arrestees in an area covering a population of roughly a million people. I found page 7 of the Sheriff's 2006 budget and found that booking processes roughly 50,000 people each year, which is like 140 a day. Over 4 years, 181 people constitute less than a tenth of one percent of the total.

This should not have eluded our intrepid student reporters. We might all remember the story from six weeks ago (during the monthslong Frontpage investigation) about how the county was forced to pay out millions of jailees because they violated a consent decree by overcrowding the booking area. More than 13,000 people over a few years were subjected to this overpacking. (The ACLU has some more information not in the other article I linked to.) They sometimes had 300 people in the booking area, which is limited to 110, which is in fact around the planned average population according to the budget above.

Milwaukee has a substantial population of undocumented workers. I don't have the figures, but it strikes me that if they were as criminally inclined as the rest of the population, it would be hard to get a figure as low as 181. This suggests support for the theory that illegal aliens are, apart from the issue of their presence, more law abiding than the rest of the population because they seek to avoid encounters that could lead to deportation, not just encounters with authorities, but encounters with people who might provoke them or lead them into trouble as well.

Judicial Campaign Ads

2008-03-10T22:31:00.000-07:00

I have seen a lot of advertising for the state Supreme Court race, and the only coverage I've actually noticed (other than one good article in the alternative press) has been an article in the main local daily newspaper that said nothing about the candidates' qualifications or positions, but talked about the advertising on their behalf.

I guess I will follow that trend, since it is my wont to critique the debate rather than the substance of things, for the reason that the stupidity and the distortion of the debate is an important issue in itself. Of course, the substance will be addressed here by virtue of the fact that you can seldom assess the quality of the debate without recourse to the facts under discussion, if the debate is focused enough to at least touch on matters of substance. Here it does.
The background is this. There are seven members of the court. They serve ten year terms. There is almost always an incumbent, since a justice can usually choose to retire when a like-minded governor is in office who can appoint a like-minded replacement, and bestow that person with the advantage of incumbency in the next election.

The election is nonpartisan, but there are two main political groupings that usually battle over any court position up for election: a conservative grouping that presses mainly for protecting big corporate litigants who come into court as employers who discriminate, violate union rights, and violate labor standards; as polluters; as producers of unsafe products; as cheats and tortfeasors generally; who want to shut the doors to plaintiffs and generally keep their deep pockets closed. They usually don't advertise their corporate interests, but rather press the idea that they are tough on crime, which is more appealing to the voters. On the other side are the liberals, supported by trial attorneys and unions, who tout competence, ethics and fairness, and, of course, toughness on crime. Not because they are tougher on crime, or even necessarily see this as a legitimate issue, but it works, and if you can make a good case that the other side is not tougher than you, then you undermine what is usually their only issue.

This year's candidates are Louis Butler and Mike Gableman. Butler is a left-of-center former public defender and municipal judge, who was reputedly (and actually) brilliant and taught at the national judicial college. When a right-leaning justice quit to take a position on the federal bench, he was appointed by the Democratic governor. His appointment tipped the court in a more liberal direction. His opinions have been independent and scholarly and have been criticized as activist by the right. He is the first African American to sit on the court. Gableman is a former prosecutor and rural county judge. I know less about him.

There have been several ads running locally for each candidate. (One fact checking site has links to a couple of them. There was also a fact checking report on one of the ads that I did not see because it ran in Madison, not Milwaukee.)

(1) "Meet Mike Gableman" (Greater Wisconsin Committee)

Here's the complete script: "Meet Mike Gableman. He wanted to be a judge. But he had a few problems. Burnett County needed a judge. But Gableman lived 290 miles away. An independent panel recommended two finalists – but he didn’t make the list. He even missed the application deadline. But weeks before the selection, Gableman hosted a fundraiser for Gov. Scott McCallum and gave him $1,250. Guess who McCallum picked? Gableman. Tell Mike Gableman we need higher ethical standards for our judges."

Annenberg Factcheck, the Judicial Campaign Integrity Committee, and the supported candidate all criticize the ad as unfairly impugning Gableman's ethics. Factcheck says that the ad is factually accurate and that the circumstantial evidence presented by the ad raises questions, but notes that it does not prove wrongdoing, and that the last sentence, referring to "ethical standards" seems to imply otherwise.

My view on that, I'd have to say, is pretty mixed. On the one hand, judges come in for a lot of crap that isn't fair. It would sure be good not to have their ethics unfairly impugned, because it affects all judges and ultimately the legitimacy of the judicial system. One would ideally like to know whether deadlines, geographical distance, and contrary recommendations by a selection committee are factors that are usually considered very carefully, or are often ignored. Is there any legal or ethical rule governing this? Was some convincing reason offered for the appoinment?
In fact, though, the other side has not put forward a convincing counter-narrative. Although Gableman's selection "shocked" the head of the selection committee, all McCallum has said about the reasons for the appointment has been that Gableman was the "best" candidate. Doesn't that just beg the question?

I disagree that it's not good enough for an ad to be based on unresolved questions. Is the public not entitled to learn about reasonable questions surrounding the appointment because the evidence is not conclusive? The ad paints a picture. It may not be pretty, but the facts on its palette are apparently true. They raise a good question that has not been answered.

The last line about higher ethical standards is problematic, however. I can defend it somewhat by saying that Gableman, by accepting the appointment under such clouded circumstances, helped create the appearance of impropriety that is raised in the ad. That in itself might reasonably be viewed as somewhat unethical. The ad does not say he is below any absolute level of ethics, it just says, "we need higher ethical standards." Although this clearly implies higher than the standards of his own conduct, it doesn't actually say that.

Another thing that makes the ad quite harsh is the bobblehead effect used to animate a photo or a short clip of Gableman to look like he's rhythmically nodding, but otherwise staring forward with an enamelled gaze fixed on the horizon. He looks stupid. Fat and stupid, actually. And the nodding effect in context makes him look worse than sleepy, it makes him appear to be catatonically reciting, "yes, master" to the governor (although the rhythm and the open eyes contradict a Barbara Eden effect).

My verdict is that it's a harsh ad, full of subtle implications and spin. It's not "fair" but it doesn't do much, in my view, to push down the already low standards of political advertising. You were expecting Solonic objectivity?

(2) "Ralph Armstrong" (Coalition for America's Families)

The script: "Ralph Armstrong was a convicted rapist out on parole when he raped, beat and strangled a 19-year-old co-ed to death. There was eyewitness testimony, fingerprints at the crime scene and blood under Armstrong’s fingernails. But Louis Butler wrote the decision to overturn this rapist’s conviction. On cases taken up by the Supreme Court, Butler sides with criminals nearly 60 percent of the time. Tell Louis Butler victims, not criminals, deserve justice."
I find this ad just bitingly stupid. It's not even grammatical. There was testimony, fingerprints and blood? Was they? I particularly am stunned by the last line that says to let Butler know that criminals don't deserve justice. Say what? If you think that it would be justice for the guilty to pay a price by going to jail, then this is a real mind-bender because meting out a just sentence would give criminals something they don't deserve, which is to get what they deserve. So either the makers of the ad have some other idea of what justice is, or they just aren't being too careful to make sense. I mean, they're literally saying that you shouldn't vote for Butler to be a justice, in a land where we pledge allegience to "justice for all" because he actually punishes criminals justly, and the makers of the ad want you to support unjust punishment.

The ad is, if not confusing, at least extremely imprecise and elliptical in fitting together its facts. Armstrong is a "convicted rapist" and in the end the Supreme Court oveturns "this rapist's conviction." So then he's not actually a convicted rapist anymore, right? Except that while on parole, he supposedly committed another rape, so now we have two rape charges, and we don't know from the ad whether I guess it was the second rape that led to a conviction, and that one was overturned. In which case, he would get back the presumption of innocence and you couldn't fairly say he raped again. Except maybe he was reconvicted after the first conviction for the second rape was overturned.

I heard this ad, and my first response was, too much missing information. You have no idea if the Supreme Court was right or wrong. You got all this evidence (fingerprints! eyewitnesses!), why can't you get the conviction to hold up? What happened? (Wait, those did point to Anderson, right? Alas, more ellipses.) Justices don't overturn convictions because they like criminals. There has to be a legal reason, usually because the Constitution was violated.

So okay, do you want a candidate who will pledge never to let this scenario occur? One who will say, bring in some blood and some fingerprints and we just won't worry about anything else? That's pretty extreme. Arguing by extremes, this would mean, plant the evidence, hide it from the defense, torture the guy in custody, try him in absentia in the wrong county or appoint a trained money to serve as counsel, pick no jury, who cares?

If Butler had been the lone dissenter, that would have been noteworthy. But he was chosen to write the opinion for the majority, which means, whatever else you say about it, his position enjoys the support of at least three other justices.

Likewise, if the conviction had been overturned for insufficiency of evidence, or on some really cockamamie loophole, that would be one thing. But it turns out that Butler's decision, while both sides can be argued, is probably right.

Anderson never denied knowing the victim or having been to the scene, so his print proved little if anything, the flaky "eyewitness" identified Anderson after hypnosis and a mockery of a lineup, then later flip-flopped. The blood was never identifed, but could have been from Anderson's own injury from a fall. So there really isn't a mountain of evidence. On the other hand, one must keep in mind that the accused also has the right to present evidence. In this case, the jury had been told that the semen and hairs on the victim could have been Anderson's. But DNA later ruled them both out. It was the newest DNA evidence that reversed the conviction.

That does not set Anderson free. It only gets him a new trial, because the new evidence is pretty strong exoneration and places the old verdict in doubt. I looked it up and it looks like the state is retrying, but the trial has not occurred, and proceedings were stayed six months ago to allow an interlocutory appeal.

Finally, there's that 60% figure. The ad shows Butler smiling and laughing at a conference of some kind while the words float over him. Factcheck can't figure out where it comes from. Only about 30% of cases before the court are criminal cases, so for him to even find 60% of cases with a criminal to support is an achievement in itself. On just the criminal cases, he says that in only about 3% of cases does he not uphold the appellant's conviction. That's not really the same question, because a lot of cases are up on sentencing issues, or whether a case should remain dismissed on evidentiary rulings, or all sorts of other things where one could "side with" the accused, and he'it would not set a convicted man free. The ad is really information-impoverished and potentially very misleading. The juxtapositon with Butler smiling is a cheap and prejudicial tactic. But campaign ads tend to be cheaply prejudicial and fact-selective.

But I think the substance of this ad makes it unfair even on low standards. Unlike the one reviewed above, this one omits some very substantial facts that any reasonable person would consider essential to evaluating the ad's claims. The fact that there's DNA tending to show Anderson innocent, and that Butler's vote was to let a jury hear that evidence, not simply let him go, is a really big thing that most viewers would feel it was dishonest to leave out. In the case of the other ad, the fact that McCollum denies any illicit motive is not in itself much of an omission without him at least being able to give some more specific reason why he picked a political contributor over the candidates recommended to him.

I do not have complete titles or scripts for the rest of the ads.

(3) Here's a partial script for a Gableman ad from Club for Growth Wisconsin: "Criminals threaten our communities. Oddly enough, so do some judges who return them to the street. But not Judge Michael Gableman. He's a former prosecutor who has gone toe to toe with the arsonists, sexual predators, domestic abusers and white-collar criminals who belong in jail. That's why 70 percent of Wisconsin's sheriffs and countless police chiefs consider Gableman their ally in the war on crime..."

WISC-TV fact-checked this. It found Gableman's crimefighting record was exaggerated. "The arsonists" for example, apparently were the targets of the only arson case Gableman ever prosecuted, which ended with an acquittal, not a conviction. He handled 19 felony child abuse cases: 13 pled to misdemeanors, 2 acquittals, 1 sent to jail after trial (the last three may have been pled to lesser felonies or given probation after trial: the report does not say). In felony sexual assault of children, 31 cases yielded 15 misdemeanor pleas and 11 convictions (not including the pleas, apparently, which would also be convictions). WISC had difficulty identifying any criminals with white collars.

It also had a problem with the overemphasis on crimefighting, which it noted mischaracterizes the mostly-civil caseload of the court.

For me, I have a problem with the whole underlying assumption here: that a good judge is an "ally" in the war on crime, and does not "return criminals to the street." I would say that a good judge applies the law and does not seek a particular result or favor a particular side. That means that criminals will sometimes be returned to the street because a trial judge: (a) allows a jury virdict of not guilty to stand; (b) dismisses a case where the evidence is too thin to present to a jury; (c) sometimes issues a not guilty verdict at a bench trial, when the evidence is insufficient; (d) will on rare occasions overturn a jury verdict that could not have been reached rationally. Appellate judges correct trial judge errors which may result in releases.

The idea that judges, by fulfilling their oath and their ethical obligations to follow the law "threaten communities" is offensive.

(4) "Mark Jensen" (The title is an educated guess and I do not have a script, but it ends identically to the Anderson ad, and the body of the ad says, paraphrasing, that before she was killed, Judy Jensen wrote a letter to police with a road map to her killer, husband Mark Jensen. It quotes a part of the letter in which she says, if anything were to happen to her, Mark would be her first suspect. It then cites the Wisconsin Law Journal as saying that Butler would not have allowed the jury to hear the letter.)

The cited article is available only by subscription, but Butler's partial concurrence in the Jensen decision is public record. It's a pretty fair account of the facts. Of course, it does not give the other side:

The entire court agreed that the letter was hearsay, and was not clearly admissible. Standing against it were recent precedents regarding the clause in the Constitution that allows accused persons to confront the witnesses against him. That clause arose because of a practice where witnesses' statements would be offered to the jury indirectly as a way of avoiding cross examination. Julie's letter could properly lead the police to suspect Mark and build a case against him, but the law would possibly prevent its full contents from being exposed to the jury because it was written for the purpose of incriminating him, and he would not be able to test the truth of the letter by cross examination. The court decided that the issue should be sent back to the lower court to decide whether an exception applied that would allow the letter in.

Butler dissented in part regarding the letter because he thought the rules the lower court would have to apply should be more strictly construed against the admission of the letter, making its admission either impossible or very unlikely. The exception the court was told to consider was whether Mark had caused Judy's inability to testify (essentially, whether evidence of his guilt was convincing enough to take away his right to cross examine the letter). Butler pointed out that under precedent, a judge would normally have to find that the accused not only procured the absense of the witness, but did so with the goal of preventing the witness from testifying.

Ultimately, it's a fairly narrow and technical legal issue. It was argued in Butler's opinion on the basis of existing law and not on any sympathy for criminals.

So this one is reasonably fair as such ads go, although I think someone should educate the voters as to what the court does and what justices are supposed to do, because this whole result-oriented get-the-criminals message undermines the whole system.

(5) Just as Jensen was a sequel to Anderson, the "Meet Gableman" ad has had a three-episode run so far. Regarding the second anti-Gableman spot, again I have no title or script, so I'll paraphrase: Remember Mike Gableman, the guy who gave all that money to the governor and got to be a judge. Well, he has more problems. His court is one of the slowest in the state, which means criminals remain out on the streets longer while waiting for trial. His court ranks near the bottom. And another problem: his decisions are reversed almost a third of the time..."

Like many of the ads here, I have a problem with the metrics this one uses. Like the last in this series, the ad carries an implication that is worth voters considering, not necessarily proven by the facts cited, and hence unfair but not necessarily below the low standard that these kinds of ads typically attain.

My problems with the metrics: (1) Why is the court slow? Is this something that typically would be the judge's fault? Are there other reasons time to trial varies? (2) Is it fair to conclude criminals are out longer to any consequence? This seems like an awful leap in logic. (3) Ranks near the bottom in what? (4) A judge's rate of reversal may be very telling, but it certainly would help to have some context to know how high that is, what it includes, and whether the reversals came from dumb calls from the bench, sloppiness, excessive activism, or just difficult cases and shifting standards.

Those are my reviews for now.

UPDATE:

I originally did not review the third private anti-Gableman ad, so I will now. It essentially states that Gableman poses as a crimefighter, but points out some of the same weak-on-crime stats as WISC pointed out in response to the pro-Gableman tough-on-crime ad. It says that as a prosecutor, he usually pled lots of bad felony cases to misdemeanors, and (do I remember this?) that he gave out lighter sentences than possible as a judge. The facts are good. I do think there is the typical problem of the metric. Is this necessarily bad? Lots and lots of cases get pled down. It's not just Gableman. The practice is not necessarily easy to justify in theory. If you really felt that the outcome on a plea was fair, how could you ethically have charged more? But it's the norm, and it's somewhat unfair to implicitly rely on a contrary assumption.

The candidates themselves have finally put in some ads of their own.

Butler's is a positive ad pointing out some of his decisions that are likely to be popular: going against criminals most of the time, and allowing big corportations to be held to account. It points out the huge number of judges that endorse him, and the huge numbers of rank and file law enforcement that have endorsed him through their unions. I am critical. I do not think it's a good thing to boast of decisions based on who won or lost. This panders to the public's desire to elect judges that will find for the most popular litigants rather than those with the best case, or who end up winning because the legal principles are decided fairly and correctly. But such is the norm, and I cannot fault Butler more than any other candidate. He at least focused on his own record, and at least mentions judicial endorsements and ideals of fairness.

Gableman's first ad was a step worse than the ones promoting him by private parties. Now we know why he did not denounce those ads. It would have been absolutely hypocritical. His is another example of picking a case where Butler sided with a criminal. (Paraphrasing, Butler found a loophole, and the criminal went on to molest again.) Except that it adds these elements: (1) the case is not one where he was a judge, it is one where he was a public defender whose job was to zealously argue for his client; (2) unlike what the ad suggests, the defense was unsuccessful -- the defendant was convicted in spite of an initially successful legal argument, and recidivated only after he had served time and been released; (3) the ad shows side-by-side pictures of Bulter and his black client, after showing a series of photos of mostly-white offenders Gableman opposed in court, apparently emphasizing the race of both Butler and his client. The ad could be described delicately and generously as injudicious.

Gableman's next ad (at least I think it is his) is striking in that it includes, in contrast to the fact that Gableman was a prosecutor, an accusation that Butler worked as a criminal defense attorney, as if this in itself should be a negative. The previous ad had implicitly suggested that there was something ignoble about providing defense for accused criminals, a necessary and praiseworthy aspect of our system of justice. The final ad makes it almost explicit that criminal defense work is something shameful. While not theoretically all that much different from what most of these ads do or imply, this does seem to me to cross a line, and lower an already low standard. Which is quite an achievement, and speaks very poorly for Gableman.

Superdelegates and democracy

2008-03-07T21:59:00.000-08:00

The Primary Contest Rules

I hate to get embroiled in a topic that is so ancillary and overrated, but when has that ever stopped me? I keep hearing about the supposed problem the Democrats have with deciding their nominee, to the point of hearing on the News Hour tonight that there is no principled way the Democrats will be able to select a nominee because both candidates will have strong claims, such as Hillary Clinton's having "won more big states" and Barack Obama's having "won more delegates" (each a presumed outcome that has not yet come to pass because the nominating process is not yet over). Other factors offered are most pledged delegates, most states, most popular votes, and of course, most meritorious candidate. Hmmm. How can one possibly resolve this conundrum?

Well, as an attorney, I might instinctively be drawn to the rules, which say the most delegates wins, and mentions nothing about big states or any of the other factors. As I have also noted, the whole idea of states won is all or mostly just an arbirary media invention. The states are not won or lost except to the extent they send any at-large delegates. I don't actually know of any states that do this, but I don't want to presume out of ignorance that the idea is completely meaningless or fabricated, since it might actually exist as a minuscule factor under the rules.

The argument has been made that following the rules, and thus not abiding strictly to measures like poplar vote, is undemocratic. That's true, at least in some technical sense. But I would not jettison the rules as undemocratic in the middle of a contest unless the undemocratic nature of the rules were really severe. Otherwise, one would trade a small evil for an even greater one: abandoning the order of rules altogether, changing the rules in the middle of the game, and raising the spectre, which would taint the entire process, of whether the criteria ultimately chosen at the end of the day to select the victor were not actually reverse-engineered to produce the desired result.

I think the idea of seating Michigan and Florida delegates on the directive that they vote 50/50 for Obama and Clinton, or vote in the rough proportion of the final outcome among the remaining delegates, is absurd, as is the notion of pressuring superdelegates to vote along similar lines. The short version of this standard would be, you can vote as long as your vote does not count.

I don't think there's any excuse for Michigan and Florida to participate on the basis of the "contests" they've held so far, which did not reflect anything close to the will of Florida or Michigan party members or eligible voters. These were meaningless non-contests, because there was only one major candidate for the nomination contesting them. Have a do-over, or forfeit the seats. Again, the rule may have been dumb, but it would be worse to change the rules after the results are in.

On the power of the superdelegates, I don't think it's by any means antidemocratic that they should get to vote and potentially shift the result from that which would come from a vote conducted exclusively among the pledged delegates. That's what having a vote means: that you can potentially influence the result. One could say against any bloc of voters: how dare you vote against the majority selection of the voters outside your bloc? The answer is, because our votes should count. Superdelegates' votes should count. You can argue about how much, but it is not an undemocratic mechanism to have a set of trusted party figures exercise a role in the outcome. There are two reasons for this:

First, this is not a complete national polity, but a political party, which is like a private club, which has an internal heirarchy and a set of gatekeepers. If you don't like what the party stands for or how it operates, you always have the solution of starting your own party. (In contrast, if you were disenfranchised from a general election, you could not just start your own country, at least not without a war.) The party would rather see some people go than participate, anyway, because they are not sufficiently bound to the party, do not share its interests, and may vote to defeat its interests, which is why some places have closed primaries, and will not let Republicans express a binding preference on whether they'd rather see Clinton or Obama in the general race.

Second, even if the nominating process were not in the domain of a private voluntary association, there is some rationale to letting some delegates cast votes without being bound by the results of primaries and caucuses. This is because those delegates will have some advantages over the primary voters. Not only is their dedication to party presumably more reliable because of their longstanding affiliation and contributions, and their interests in its success correspondingly higher, but they have advantages of expertise, and hindsight over the entire election process, which is to say, a superdelegate from Iowa might have a viewpoint closer to what Iowan voters overall express on nominating day than the voters themselves did way back on the day of the Iowa caucuses, when a third were still voting for Edwards. New Hampshire democrats might now favor Obama who previously used their votes to garner delegates in a different primary for Ron Paul.

The votes of pledged delegates have their own weaknesses from a democratic perspective because viewpoints change, new facts and arguments emerge, problems facing the nation evolve, and political options narrow. Nothing in the mechanism of election was so pristine anyway. They have any number of problems ranging from disparate access to the polls, unreliable voting machines, and disproportionate exposure to the messages of the candidates who had by then raised more money from large contributors.

If the unelected elites of the party had no mechanism of accountability, and accounted for more than 50% of the power over the nominating decision, then one could certainly argue that their disproportionate voice was undemocratic. But where they stand poised to decide the outcome only because the pledged delegates are breaking close to 50/50, meaning that neither Obama nor Clinton is the decisive choice of the party, then certainly recourse to the party leaders at least as legitimate as flipping a coin. And many, albeit not all, have some direct accountability to voters because they continue to hold elected positions or future electoral ambitions, which they would not want to jeopardize by going against their constituencies.

Of all the problems in our democratic processes, the use of superdelegates is one of the least pressing. Certainly, the notion of changing the rules in the middle of the game is much more disturbing, or should be.

The More General Problematology

Electoral systems are of necessity imperfect. On one level, there is simply the mathematical issue of it being impossible to construct a set of rules that will always find the best preference in a multicandidate race. People's potential rankings and weightings of candidates are too complex and may produce conflicted rankings in which no candiate is clearly the optimal pick by any means of calculation.

But in the practical world, it is seldom that the necessary minimum imperfection is even an important consideration, because the real and avoidable problems in voting systems are always so much greater. I once commented that the Communist Party of the USA would be advancing its principles greatly if it undertook a serious study of polyarchy and its defects in the US. (Most people do not know, because the communists are such an insignificant force these days, that they bill themselves as the party of "Bill of Rights socialism" and include a streak of libertarian philosophy that defies the popular expectations still held of a group that continues to honor Lenin and historically had lauded Stalin as well.)

The problems are many and diverse and go well beyond what can be attributed to Diebold.

The first category of problems comes from the representative system of indirect decision making. There are advantages in this system (the specialization of representatives leads to development of greater activity and expertise than could be expected through direct democracy) but it is nevertheless essentially antidemocratic, and its antidemocratic tendencies should be ameliorated as much as possible, but intstead are exacerbated by the existing system. Having a representative rather than a direct system opens the door to poor representation and essentially doubles all other problems by their appearance in two venues: voting on representatives and then on policy. In some cases, the problem is at least tripled because of multiple tiers of representation. For example, the system of setting presidential policy is threefold: voters select electors, electors select a president, and the president sets policy. Unless the president delegates, in which case the connection to the demos is even further attenuated. When representives act on behalf of voters, it intensifies problems of influence because representatives, more than their constituents, may be in fear of lobbies that exercise disproportionate power, or bought off by special interests (a bribe to electors is arguably not even a deficiency, but it certainly is one when an a representative views the harm to his constituents as an externality hence dramatically reducing the cost to the special interest of buying him off). Representatives may grow socially and culturally distant from their constituents and merge to form a nomenklatura class, as is found now in the "beltway."

Another problem inherent in all competative systems, and exacerbated by a rung of representation between voters and issues, is that parties do not equally fight dirty or with requisite intensity. The worst are full of passionate intensity while the ethically immaculate refuse to fight back because it would compromise their standards to do what would be necessary to win. There can be little doubt that the Republican Party, at least on the level of its national representatives (I hesitate to smear the millions of innocents who vote Republican because they fairly have not recognized this pattern), has become the party of graft and knife-fight rules when it comes to their competitive conduct. The unsavory tactics explored by Republicans have included simple kickbacks and virtually open bribery, to physical threats and psychological abuse to enforce party discipline, simply ignoring laws that do not suit them, and lying without remorse. They simply value winning more and past standards of decorum less, and are more willing to resort to threats or actual executions of fillibuster, impeachment, anonymous holds, earmarks, interim appointments, manipulation of rules, and any number of aggressive tactics which Democrats excessively eschew in the vain effort to keep up a nonexistent standard of comity.

Stepping back from policy back to elections, there are various particular other distortions introduced by having layers of elections. The electoral college is a special case, because it artificially overweights small states to no good purpose (there was a reason to mollify Delaware back in 1789, but what possible good in multiplying the voting power of Nevada?), sets an artificial limit on the electors allowed to the District of Colombia, and codifies the disenfranchisment of U.S. dependencies.

Of course, the primary system is another level of decisionmaking between voters and the issues. This one distorts the process by artificially inflating the importance of certain unrepresentative early-voting states. Both the geographic and partisan modes of subdividing the electorate introduce distortions in the process, twisting the course to election through the endorsements of subgroups.

Many of the problems are variations on incumbency power. Those who have the vote already effectively determine who may have and may not be enfranchised. Even though the group of ligible voters for the presidency has expanded to include women, racial minorities, landless white males, and younger adults, excluded groups still include many current and past convicts, minors who would otherwise be deemed competent, the homeless (in practical terms), and resident aliens (who are stakeholders and previously had the franchise in many states). Of course, there are others subject to some form of U.S. jurisdiction or influence but lacking either citizenship or residency. While including such foreigners has obvious considerations weighing against it, from the perspective of democratic theory, it produces a situation where those unfortunate enough to have been born in the wrong place are rendered less powerful over their own affairs through the force of law, and it is not easy to fully justify the extent to which this takes place.

Likewise, those in power set the limitations on even standing as a candidate, most typically by age limits, criminal history restrictions, birthplace, residence, and success in garnering some predetermined level of past or present support. But it is not entirely alien to our system to ban, criminalize, or persecute particular parties or impose religious tests. Even if hurdles set up against third party canidacies are surmountable, the exclusion from debates, free media, and serious consideration by the political class usually operate as an overwhelming counterweight to independent efforts. The winner-take all system, unameliorated by any proportional or cumulative system, amplifies the power of majorities and pushes minorities o the margin, a problem that is vastly amplified by gerrymandering that produces safe seats for incumbent
parties, disenfranchising near-majorites of voters almost everywhere and rendering most local races foregone conclusions after the primary.

Incumbents naturally have the power to reward their supporters by policy decisions, and use their influence in the fields of gerrymandering and manipulation of voter laws. Some formal privileges are awarded by law, such as franking for members of Congress. Incumbents have an automatic advantage in their curricula vitae, and access to media, and, perhaps most important of all, fundraising.

Money is the key factor in elections (even if insufficient to save a Mitt Romney from himself). It's true that no amount of money will sell a horrible candidate to an unwilling public, at least not when there is a slightly less horrible candidate who meets the threshold to participate. But lack of money certainly can, and almost invariably will, effectively doom candidates who would otherwise fly to the top of the pack. Money is used to polish candidates, fund the distribution of the message, and buy top talent in all areas of the science of campaigning. It has an exaggerated effect because the knowledge that it is necessary to success spawns the self-fulfilling prophesy that the unfunded will fail. Because money is selectively available to the rich, the rich have exaggerated influence. Money and volunteer time are the only mechanisms under our current system for persons to express the intensity of their preferences by doing more than voting, but devoting free time to candidates in a society where time is money means that this too is the preferential domain of the wealthy (the modestly affluent may volunteer while the destitute
cannot; the very wealthy, to well remunerated to volunteer themselves, pay others to do it for them).

Most of the remaining distortions in the system arise from the (manipulated) behavior of voters. Part of this is whether they vote or not, since turnout ranges from a bit over half in a successful election, to a meager fraction in a small, off-year contest. Turnouts of less than one percent are not hard to come by in certain races in certain places. The main reason people do not vote is that they have no impression that their vote carries meaningful influence. Polls can be a culprit if they suggest the election will not be close. Some eligible electors are permanent non-voters; others are potentially persuadable, but the preliminary screening process has effectively prevented anyone who might appeal to them from presenting themselves. The election contest may manifest itself as something so overcomplicated or simply repellent that participation does not commend itself as something noble or profitable. Those otherwise interested are selectively dissuaded by legal threats, harassment, intentional misinformation, caging schemes, registration or identification requirements (and historically, poll tests and taxes), faulty election machines, and voter list errors. Inconvenience is a significant factor, and not evenly distributed. Distance to some polling places, the length of time required when there is a long line or shortage of ballots, and the fact that elections are held only on a single day, a weekday, which is a workday and not a holiday, work to deter less motivated voters, those with mobility problems, or those who simply need every work hour they can find. (Voter fraud and inadvertant unqualified voting may create a gross overvote, as can counting defects. But the failure to perform hand recounts or examine and count provisional ballots, generates a much larger undervote in most cases.)

And voters cannot only be deterred from exercising the franchise, they can, with some success, be manipulated into mis-exercising it. Even without the effects of active misleading or charismatic demagoguery, threats of spoilsport opposition recalcitrance or external attack, voters are often simply not apt to vote their interests or values. To operate as an effective mechanism of transmitting the popular will to the motor center of the state, elections must rely on electors whose choices of candiates or policies reflect a sound means toward their desired objectives. They must understand the election as more than a sport, in which they select recipients of their votes as they would choose the brand crafted to project image closest to their personality. They must understand the powers and requirements of the office, focus on the most critical issues and capabilities, access reliable information, detect and reject lies, and understand their own desires and how to achieve them. Even when voting on issues, too often, they are misled to acting entirely on perceived self interest, abandoning their other values, or worse, a acting on competitive impulse to spite others.

So after all this, I guess I've managed to write about something more substantial than the superdelegate thing after all. At least, it's a first approximation of a summary.

The failure of the Cuban exiles is nearly complete

2008-02-19T22:42:00.000-08:00

With news that Castro is stepping down, it's well to note what his adversaries have achieved in 50 years of opposition. They've made themselves obnoxious to two countries. They've wagged the dog as a lobby, distorting and damaging US foreign policy, squandering our goodwill, resources, and opportunities for trade. They've kept Cuban families apart, brought violence and terror into the exile community, placed a wedge between generations, stifled remittances and stimulated deaths at sea from crossings made illegal by the US refusal to grant visas. They've stymied cultural and professional exchanges, and weakened human rights on both sides: therough the travel ban stateside, and by stimulating and helping justify repression in Cuba. More than anything they've impoverished Cuba by the useless blockade. They even had their role in priming the world for a World War III that nearly commenced during the Missle Crisis.

In exchange for all this loss, they've managed to promote a few bigshots, place Miami's other ethnic groups under a corrupt exile regime, and make Miami an international haven for terrorists, generals and dictators from the whole hemisphere.

But Castro, he was never weakened. He is more lionized now in the Americas than ever. The success of his regime in converting masses of poor farmers into skilled but underpaid professionals, while holding off a superpower just offshore, and intervening to decolonialize Africa, hence keeping the island afloat, exporting hope and rocketing national pride, has earned him a permanent place in the pantheon of heroes for the Western and Southern hemispheres. He has survived, perservered, prospered, and lived to see the Continent flourishing with figures like Chavez, Morales, Lula, and Ortega in most of the Americas. Colombia and Paraguay are virtually alone standing against the trend. Castro retires without having been assassinated or captured.

The point is: not what the exiles in Miami intended. So their message today is, we have to keep up our efforts because nothing has changed. Logical if the policies had succeeded so far. Utterly delusional in reality. For 50 years policies intended to oust Castro, end Castroism, and reverse the Cuban Revolution have done nothing of the sort. Maybe 2059, when we mark its centennial, they will reassess.

Just like a real court

2008-02-14T14:23:00.000-08:00

I have not looked lately at the rules created under the Military Commissions Act to conduct trials for the 9.11 accuseds. I do remember, though, that the original executive order appeared to leave open the prospect that George Bush could personally order the executions of anyone tried by military commission regardless of the verdict. Yes, it said that he had the power to issue judgment notwithstanding the verdict of the commission, and did not limit that to clemency for those found guilty. He could kill people cleared by judicial process, initiated in the first place by his own finding. It may have been the single most obscene order ever issued by a U.S. president, amid stiff competition.

At any rate, it is clear that the Pentagon has sent out its talking points memo to all the spokespersons speaking on behalf of the military commissions and there is only one talking point: this is just like a real trial. Look, there's a judge. There are rules. There are burdens of proof and objections and stuff like that. There are tables and chairs just like in a real courtroom.

I sit and listen to these guys and I think: there are rules just like in a real trial (just different rules), and objections (only difference is the judge rules differently on the objections), there's a verdict just like in a real trial (only difference is, this verdict is always guilty). Like the rules themselves make no difference beyond the broad strokes?

I know some of the protections are really important: there's a presumption of innocence (odd, though, that you can hold a person for six years and torture them while presuming them innocent), the state has the burden of proof by a reasonable doubt (but I wonder if that will mean the same thing as in a real court). The real problem is that there's no such thing as your basket of rights being half full. You have to eliminate every possible means for the prosecution to unfairly screw you, or they just pick another way. It's like setting to sea in a boat with a big hole in the starboard bow and saying, look, it's just like a real boat, it's got an intact portside hull and everything. Wink, wink, see you at Davy Jones' locker.

The Press Role in Legitimacy

2008-02-14T14:05:00.000-08:00

Continuing thoughts on the local news and what it's doing to us rather than for us. Updating my post from yesterday, one of the things that annoys me is that the standard for an "investigative" report is to uncover a fact or two, construct an argument around them, and apparently not bother to even ask, much less answer, any of the fairly obvious relevant questions about them. In the legal field, we learn to ask lots of questions. One thing I learned early on is that it is often profitable to ask even apparently irrelevant questions, because they turn up answers concerning what Rumsfeld called unknown unknowns: things that you didn't even consider even though you were trying to exhaustively go through every potentially relevant thing.

The media needs to attack the government for being venal and stupid when it is venal and stupid, but it also needs to shore up the legitimacy of our institutions when they serve the common good and come under attack from venal and stupid arguments. The test should not be pro- or anti- government, but pro-smart, pro-wise, pro-moral. Not that their brand of wisdom or morality should be imposed, but questions can be raised, and they should be raised in a manner that allows for some even-handed discussion and not loading towards a predetermined answer.

Legal reporting tends to be bad. A lot of reporting is simplistic, shallow, and confused. Some policy reporting is the same way. Is it bad law that foreigners held in Guantanamo are ruled to lack the rights of "the People" under the Constitution while corporations are persons? Maybe, but let's hear the rationale for those rulings. There is almost always some good reason for the quirky things the Courts do (but not always). The reasons need to be explicated because most of the time that will shut up critics quickly, and on the other occasions, it will expose the existence of rules that fundamentally lack a reasonable purpose. Why is there a residency requirement for local schoolteachers? I can speculate as to what some of the reasons might be. I have not heard any of them during the recent reporting on the issue. I suspect someone more knowledgeable about the topic could tell me if those reasons were valid or not. They might have some horror stories about past problems involving nonresidents. It's true that housing patterns have changed and that residency requires something that was once more common than it is now, after so many people have fled the city. I can see the city wanting to keep this population. I can see it wanting teachers who are connected to the students and parents through residence in a shared community. I can see it being used as a back door to introduce more minority role models without a racial quota (and this would be a portentially more accurate mechanism because the line would not be purely race but rather shared community). But I'm not an expert. I just know that when I give a second's skeptical thought to the reporting I see, I instantly generate questions about potential explanations that are not even asked.

I guess I should be glad that the local news is reporting on local elected officials and local policy choices. I just wish the focus were not on internet usage in one case and just so complacently uninquisitive about the real issues in boh cases.

McCain, Experience, the Campaign, Iraq

2008-02-13T23:38:00.000-08:00

Briefly, McCain, I don't like him. He's got his plusses at times but I consider him mostly a fraud. I think singing "Bomb, Bomb Iran" virtually by itself shows him unfit for the presidency. I don't understand why he's considered a hero.

However, I think it's intellectually dishonest to attack him for wanting to stay in Iraq 100 years. I think his point was fair. It's not how long you stay, it's how long you stay at alert, with a bullseye painted on you, knocking down doors and getting shot at. If you could stay but successfully pacify the country, the American public would not care. I think it's ridiculous to think Iraq will quickly become a safe place, but he's right that most Americans would not care if it were not for the US casualties produced by the stay.

No one will say it but McCain has more experience because he is a white boy from a notable family. He's been in the Senate 20 years. When he got there, there were two women serving (one the daughter of Alf Landon) and zero African Americans (only one African American had ever been elected to the Senate by that point). So his experience is largely of a sort simply unavailable to women and blacks.

I continue to be amazed at all the talk about candidates allegedly positioning themselves with respect to the all-important issue of their own status as frontrunner or insurgent or whether they have "momentum" which is all malarkey. I remember G.H.W.B.'s "big mo" got him about as far as Joe got on "Joementum." Apparently, the response to, cover the issues and the candidates and not the horserace, is that the horserace is the important issue. However, I seem to note that most polls show Americans are more concerned about the economy and the war than momentum or frontrunneriness.

I have to say, I am really impressed by all the Obama media out there. I've heard that he's got campaign ring-tones going out there, all sorts of merchandising, and viral media. There was the "Obama Girl" video and now the will.i.am "Yes, We Can" video with something around five million hits on youtube, and Slate has that wonderful "Hillary's Inner Tracy Flick" video, and the john.he.is video mocking McCain (although a little unfairly) is just great. He hasn't always impressed me much with his policy positions, but to the extent that running a campaign successfully is any indication of how one would run a country, the man is surely uber-capable. And that's very appealing after 8 years of rank incompetence. And being the opposite of Bush's ideological stridency is, although not for me, apparently a hugely appealing contrast for the rest of the nation. Short summary of the Obama strategy: look for a president with a 25% approval rating and do the opposite.

A positive word for Ron Paul. The Nation put in a good word for Chris Dodd a while back, saying he was good on civil liberties and foreign policy, which is after all where the president's power is least checked by Congress and must be the best for a candidate. By that measure, Ron Paul is not bad. As a libertarian wacko, he will respect civil liberties, and he's got that good old isolationist streak that makes him a stronger anti-war candidate than either of the democrats. Now if only we could get him to appoint some liberal justices. Hmm, maybe a crossover veep? Obama-Paul?

And the disaster that is Iraq. It really is staggering whenever you look at the statistics afresh. A million dead, millions displaced, millions wounded, millions in dire poverty, constant violence, sectarian division, no electricity, an illegitimate and ineffective government, sub-prewar oil production, women subjugated, emerging drug production, no drinkable water, hospitals destroyed, professionals driven off, the people under biometric lockdown, other countries invading at will, the historical, archeological and cultural heritage of the cradle of civiliazation continuing to be blown to bits. Please remember that the surge was intended to create a temporary increase in security to allow the resumption of all the sorts of normal life necessary to come back and make the increased security permanent without the surge. What happened was that there was very little surge: other countries decreased their commitments as the US filtered in troops who were worn out or used up, brain-injured, demoralized and suicidal, scraped the bottom of the barrel to bring in troops that would normally have been rejected as unfit. Petraeus created an illusory surge mostly by systematic surrender, giving up Anbar and leaving Basra abandoned, reallocating forces, and making heavier reliance on air-power which kills indiscrimately and creates generations of new enemies. Along with the burning out of the ethnic cleansing in Baghdad, this led to a salable domestic PR victory, but led to none of the strategic objectives of the surge. The place is still hell. There's nothing you couldn't do before that you can do now. Everyone is still doing what they were doing before: positioning themselves for the inevitable US departure.

Finally, checks and balances. Who says they have to be internal? We here a lot of talk about rebuilding America's image in the world, shoring up its economic strength, repairing its burned out military, and restoring America to international strength and presige. Of course, as your future president, I agree wholeheartedly. But as a current citizen who cares about the rest of the world and about limiting the power of the executive, especially in the face of a supine Congress and accommodating courts, I see the glass as more than half full. So the rest of the world is finally wise to our bullshit? Good for them! If Congress won't stop the President from making unconstitutional foreign policy, maybe the united nations of the world will step in and do their job for them. We don't have the forces free and up to strength to augment covert operations in South America? Well then, they will be better able to impose the check that Congress won't. Hooray for the sovereignty of our South American brothers, truly the successors to Congressman Abe Lincoln!

More Idiocy from Local News

2008-02-13T20:31:00.000-08:00

Two stories draw my attention.

Let's start with tonight's report from Aaron Diamant. This is fresh so the only link I can give is for the teaser. (Update or Correction: try this.) This is a typical example of a news report seeking to generate outrage over a sensationalized big zero. The charge is that taxpayers are forced to pay for county officials using the internet for private matters while at their offices. The facts given in the report:

1) Some county residents feel (rightly, according to the reporter) that being an elected county official is more or less the same as being a barista at a coffee shop and that they should spend their time at work actually working.

2) There is a county policy that allows county workers to use the Internet service provided for their jobs for private matters, so long as it is not excessive.

3) They looked at internet logs and found that officials like various county supervisors and the county executive visited social networking sites, checked on investments, and shopped online from work. The County Clerk spent at least 24 hours over a period of four months, before during and after work, planning a wedding online. (That's about 18 minutes per average workday, including time before and after work and while on break.)

Facts that were not given:

1) Are these employees paid by the hour?

2) Did they do as many hours or as much work as the position expects? (Actually, one person did say they sometimes put in 10 to 15 hour days, so in at least one case, the answer appears to be yes.)

3) Did the time spent on the Internet add any cost to the taxpayer over what they would pay otherwise?

4) Did it cause any decline in service, or did any public business not get done?

5) Were any of these people engaged in private business when they were needed urgently for public business?

6) Might permitting officials the convenience of not having to leave their offices in order to attend to their private lives actually improve their productivity or help attract higher quality candidates?

7) What is the comparable standard in the private sector (for professionals and administrators, not waitstaff)?

8) What limitations are there in the monitoring system that appears to reflect this amount of time spent online? Might the actual time burden on the employees have been less than is apparent from the monitoring? (I had a client who was a public employee discharged for excessive Internet use and we discovered that the reports based on the monitoring dramatically inflated the apparent time spent online, because it assumed that whenever two sites were visited a half hour apart, that the user was sitting glued to the screen for that half hour and not, say, taking a business call while the computer went to screensaver.)

9) Is there evidence that any of these people violated any policy, sought payment for hours not spent working, or commited any legal or ethical offense related to their online time?

I conclude that his was a stupid report. It does not tell us whether these elected representatives are doing their jobs or whether allowing them to use their computers for private matters is good policy. It does recite uninformed opinion that executives should be bound by the same rules as baristas, as if they had no authority to exercise discretion, power to delegate, and as though their jobs are merely a matter of serving time. I would submit that this kind of myopic, pandering report is a particular disservice in the midst of a major national election, where voters should be guided to some practical understanding of what they are voting on. Which is not a barista. (Mike Huckabee would probably be slow on orders because he'd be chatting up the customers, but you's still like him; Obama would always get your order right and serve you with a bright smile; Hillary would be the best able to advise you on the merits of Tanzanian Peaberry over Kenya AAA or the Decaf Haraar; McCain would be a lousy barista.)

On to the next report, from John Mercure again. Do not confuse this similar report. The story here is that a priest ministers to an old woman in ill health, visits her every day as a hospital chaplain, and she decides to leave him all her worldly possessions. Her family, who is cut out and gets nothing, not even the family photos and historical records, finds out later and is upset, and calls the priest a con man and throws around a lot of insults and speculation that he took advantage of the old gal, saying that she had previously expressed her wishes to make specific legacies to various family members.

Now of course, just because I think Mercure's reporting is garbage does not mean that Father Ryan is a saint. He may well be "heinous" scum just as labeled in the broadcast. But the facts are really questionable, and the report leads me to consider how much different it would have been if news reports followed more of the standards applicable to courts.

In Mercure's reporting we have this sequence: (1) The accusation is made; (2) The accusation is supported by lots of insults, hearsay and speculation, but not one document, eyewitness report, or piece of physical evidence of any wrongdoing; (3) Mercure confronts the priest who denies the charges and states that the decedant expressed her desire that the matter remain confidential, and although he looks a little squirrely, he reacts far more calmly and addresses the matter more straightforwardly than anyone else I've seen subjected to one of Mercure's ambushes; (4) More hearsay and speculation, and a statement that the Archdiocese claims that the estate was mostly given to charity but has not produced proof. Then it is said that the priest had sent a letter claiming to have a note from the decedant to show that she did express a desire for confidentiality, and pointed out by the reporter that the priest's letter does not prove anything about the distribution of the estate. The lawyer for the decedant also refuses to divulge any documents.

In court, both sides get an opening statement up front, so that the beginning of the report is not entirely loaded down with one side of the story, and the defense relegated to the end. Actually, that's standard for news reports too, something that is routinely done in the ledes of inverted pyramid style reports, but apparently not something Mercure worries about.

Then the party with the burden of proof must present evidence. Not, oh, I'm so shocked, how could he do this, he must have taken advantage of her. Something like, the priest has done this before, the old lady had dementia, she expressed a contrary intent after the will was changed, the proper probate procedure was not followed. But here we get nothing of the sort. We're told she would do anything a priest said. Okay. Would she do that of sound mind because it's what she really wanted in her heart? Then she's getting her wish. Sorry, family. The old lady is responsible for screwing you. Bad form, but it's her property, and if she wants to give it to the priest with instructions to distribute to charity, that's legally her business. I think it's bad, but that's what a lot of old people want when they're very religious and fear death and want to bribe Saint Peter. I think the old lady was thoughtless toward her family, specially with regard to the photos and documents, but maybe she felt abandoned. How do we know?

Then the other side gets to put in its evidence, but has the right to be silent if it thinks the other side has not given it anything to disprove. In this case, it does not. It cites confidentiality and relies on the adverse case being weak.

Then both sides get a summation. Each can point to the other's lack of evidence, not just the prosecution.

There may have actually been a legal action in this case, but I do not see one recorded in Wisconsin. The old gal had moved to Illinois, and I don't think Lake County of Illinois as a whole has an online database of its circuit court cases like Wisconsin does. When she died, assuming Father Ryan is not her long lost son or brother, her heirs at law would have received notice and the opportunity to challenge the will. That was either not done, or the challenge was unsuccessful. The previous executor was not notified because he was not an heir or beneficiary, being only a great nephew. So this raises the question: if there were a basis to suspect illicit influence on the part of Father Ryan, why not raise it in that forum?

Other things that kind of bug me here. First, since Mercure knows from his previous reporting that some dioceses have considered restrictions on gifts to priests, one wonders if this diocese has any. If so, is that the only reason the estate is going to charity? If not, then shouldn't the church come in for some shame in all this? After all, it was the church and not the priest that pumped all these beliefs into the gal all her life that probably had more to do with her decision than this one priest who tended to her near the end. It was the church that gave him is collar and thus his influence and authority with this deeply religious woman. What charities are being supported? I have identified one: Guest House, a center in Michigan for alcoholic and drug-addicted priests and nuns to dry out for a while before going back to their parishes.

Second, there's an odd schizophrenia about the piece, on the one hand titling it "pay to pray" which sounds like a cavalier profanity, disrespectful of religion, that takes in vain the notion of prayer while going for cheap alliteration and not actually describing the story, and yet treating the whole concept of a bad priest as shocking and unthinkable. Which is crazy, unless you think that the thousands of victims of clerical pedophilia are making it all up.

Third, I think lots of old people near the end upset the settled expectations of their families and make really bad decisions regarding their final bequests. They also just, outside of a will context, despoil the sentimental fortunes of their estates, giving away or allowing to be taken or destroyed those things precious to their families. The intervention of interlopers is often blamed, but frequently the amount of intercession required to get the old folks to give up the goods is frighteningly trivial. Not that interlopers don't exist, but I know various elderly people who have thought about disposing of heirlooms without any conniving voices in their ear, so that clearly is not the only problem. I therefore think that putting all the blame on the priest here, while it might turn out to be correct if all the facts were known, is a pretty cheap and easy out that avoids looking at the state of probate law, the increasing problems that we have with an aging population many of whom make dreadful and thoughtless end-of-life choices all on their own, and, as I've hinted above with reference to the Catholic Church, the broader cultural influences that affect people near the end of life and lead them to screw over their families in favor of strangers and new suitors: religion being one of the worst, but also ideals of "tough love" and independence, general neglect of family, and, especially, materialism. I don't think family members necessarily should have dibs on the money. I'd be happy with a very high estate tax. But I think there's a lot of family stuff that would have historical or sentimental value. When we start thinking only of money, we forget that stuff. Lots of old people seem to assume their kids don't care about that stuff but a lot do.

Can we get some deeper discussion of these issues rather than a hit piece on one priest? The focus on him may or may not help create some justice on the retail level, but there are broader problems implicated here that affect thousands of people and singling out an easy fall guy diverts discussion from the real problems. If old people have a grace period now under federal law for rescission of their contracts, perhaps wills should not be immediately effective without cause or some oversight? Maybe family heirlooms should be placed under a different legal regime from fungibles like money. Maybe groups other than priests should start to erect restrictions on gifts from those they serve.

Update 2: Mike McGee

2008-02-06T06:14:00.000-08:00

Another update I wanted to make concerns the incarcerated alderman from the district next door. I've recently seen this, this, and this. The first is a pretty good article in our alternative weekly. The last two are op-eds in the mainstream daily...

Let's address the second first. It's from Gary Krager, a Wind Lake real estate appraiser and community columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, entitled, "Some brotherly advice for Milwaukee's inner city residents." The first line is, "Let me lay it out there. Here's what black people should do. Reject Milwaukee Ald. Mike McGee Jr." Can you count the problems here?

Krager is white. He does indeed end his piece by addressing the reader as "my brother." This is in itself , let's just say, a bit presumptuous. I don't ususally address blacks as brother or sister until they've addressed me that way. (Usually brother, when it happens.)

It's also obviously condescending to offer unsolicited advice, but that might be forgiven if the advice is thoughtful and draws on some basis other than "white knows best." Krager writes, "since I'll be told I don't know what it's like to be black, I guess I get to be an expert on white people." He doesn't give any credentials there.

And I know Milwaukee is hypersegregated, but the piece appears to be premised on all inner city residents being black and all blacks living in the inner city.

Maybe Krager is an expert on the view from Wind Lake. The only other time I've ever heard of Wind Lake was in reading another community columnist, this one blaming homeowners for being victims of predatory lenders. (In a way, my response to that included the idea that real estate appraisers like Krager were collective experts in having their heads up their asses.) The Journal seems to like white people from Wind Lake. I looked it up on City-Data.com. The median home price is twice that of Milwaukee, but that's reasonable since the median income is also twice that of Milwaukee. The population of 5202 is 97.1% white. Of the remaining 150 or so others, are 86 Hispanics, 32 mixed, 26 native americans and a total of 6 divided between blacks, asians, and rounding error. It's not even in Milwaukee County.

Since I'm a lawyer, let me mention the argument Krager makes regarding the standard of proof:

I don't want to hear "innocent until proven guilty," either. That's the standard for criminal court - and for good reason. It's not the standard anyone uses in his or her own life. Your kid's baseball comes through the window, and he's outside with a bat; I don't think you're going to Mirandize him. He lies about it, and it's going to be worse. Read the criminal complaints against McGee. He's holding a Louisville Slugger.

I think Krager may just be stupid. The presumption of innocence is normal in everyday life. I'm right now in a room full of people. Any one of them could be guilty of any thing. What should I presume: innocent or guilty? When should I shift my presumption? When someone makes an accusation? That does not work. It doesn't work in real life and it doesn't work in the criminal law. I've heard far too much bullshit in court. But Krager does not really believe in the principle of presuming guilt either:

People will say I'm excusing racism. Nonsense. Of that I should be innocent until proved guilty. Racism is stupid. Why does anyone care what someone's skin color is? I want all honest, hard-working people to thrive.

So exactly why is McGee presumed guilty and you are presumed innocent? If anything, the law if the opposite. Since racism is inherently hard to prove, the standards of proof are usually less strict. Since it is embarassing but not a crime, and because the accuser lacks the resources of the state, there is less reason not to presume it. Particularly when you're a white guy from Wind Lake making condescending and presumptuous remarks to blacks whom you've stereotyped.

Let me jump to one of the other articles, where a candidate for McGee's seat says the same thing:

Even Jordan says that the case has dragged on too long, and she believes that McGee should have been kicked out of office after charges were brought so that the district could have a voice on the Common Council. She called it “taxation without representation,” and dismissed the argument that McGee is innocent until proven guilty. “I don’t understand how they sit there and let it go on like this,” Jordan said. “This is a mockery of democracy. This man is in jail. Why did the Common Council not get rid of him?”

I guess that is not surprising. Here's a reduced excerpt of the rest of Krager:

Do not care only about McGee and not his alleged victims. Do not take an "us vs. them" posture... If you want McGee to represent you, of course that's your business. The problem is that it says something to the larger community about your district. If you think that something is that you stand up for a man being persecuted, think again. To many, it says his behavior is acceptable.... That scares a lot of white people.... Many of them avoid the inner city and believe they can live a fine life doing so. The residents of the inner city are the only ones who can make the draws there outweigh the real or perceived dangers...We can pass all the laws against discrimination that we want. We even can enforce them effectively...What we can't do is make people go where they are afraid to go.... Fear will win out. Just try telling someone who's claustrophobic that he or she shouldn't be. If an area excuses and accepts crime, companies won't want to operate there. Rejecting McGee would be a baby step toward setting the bar higher for what's acceptable behavior in his district, which is the only way to attract people to it.

So the argument, in reduced form is:

You need white people to come rescue your area with investment. They want to come and help exploit the area, but they hear you blacks defending McGee and say, "oh, no, those black people have no values. They defend McGee that means they like crime, and if I go there they will come and kill me or rape me." Hence blacks must do whatever they can to sacrifice any black person accused by white people of any crime, so that whites will come to see them as having the same values as we have in Wind Lake, and then we will come and open up restaurants on cheap properties in your area, hire you for slave wages, take all your money, and eventually drive you out, which is what you need and we know best because we're white and you're just dumb n....s and by the way, I'm not racist, because racism is stupid. I just happen to think most of you are lazy and stupid.

Do I need to refute all this? Well, lets look at that last link. It's a response to Krager, and points out that most residents in the area have reasons not to be so flippant about due process, that the area is diverse, that black investment in the area would be at least as good as white investment, and that he is not sincerely seeking to help.

That's where my perspective differs. I'm a white guy and drawing on my expertise, let me tell my black friends that a lot of white people are more stupid than you seem to believe. Of course, Krager could be writing out of hate, but I presume it's just the stupid doing the talking. Because I understand the power of Stupid, I would have concentrated more on the other big defect of Krager's argument: If white people are fearful because they are stupid, the solution is not to appease their stupidity. If they fear something because of a wrong belief, why not just correct that belief? How would you react if your child developed a fear based on a false belief?

I think there's a proper role for racial mediators. Enlightened whites can legitmately lecture receptive blacks, and vice versa, under appropriate circumstances. Krager would find his black audience more receptive if (1) he had anything useful to say, (2) he did not come off as ignorant and racist, (3) he had at least acknowledged that the whites who held these stupid fears were wrong, and (4) he had directed most of his lecture to the white people who are being stupid, rather than black people whose positions he does not even claim to understand.

I hope to more thoroughly address the first link later.

Update 1: Imaginary Primary Races

2008-02-05T11:14:00.000-08:00

First, on the primary race. Last night I was watching the News Hour and one of the guests reminded me of another complaint I have. This person was talking about the expected bounce that would accrue to the symbolic winner of a primary, such as California, irrespective of the number of delegates received, even if less than his or her adversary. What this points out is that the whole talk about the "winner" of this or that race is largely an imaginary construct that the media, rather than informing us to be skeptical of it because it is imaginary, has promoted moreso even than the campaigns themselves.

The way it works is that a state has rules for apportioning delegates. Some go to officeholders or former officeholders and thus in effect were voted upon in advance of the primary date by the general electorate of the state, district, or even the country. Others are apportioned, or go on a winner-take-all basis by subunits of the state, like counties, wards, or congressional districts. So those are district-wide individual races that may be won or lost, but in most cases, being apportioned, the stakes are incredibly small and in a close race at best a candidate may come out with one delegate more than the rival. Other delegates are at large by state, but if the number to be selected at large is not all the state's delegates but just a handful, or if they are apportioned, this makes the actual stakes of a "win" or "loss" insignificant. A few states have caucus systems, such as Iowa's elimination derby. And in some states the delegates are wildly maldistributed.

So the prize of "winning" a state is usually nothing. In most cases, it has a small or nonexistent effect on delegates. And the popular vote for the state, owing to the fact that the rules have little or nothing to do with the popular vote, is really irrelevant.

Now take a step back. I think the media should be telling us how candidates would actually govern if elected, rather than giving us reports of who's ahead and why.

But now add to this that when it comes to giving the horserace coverage, the media do not even focus on the actual delegate contest that will determine the winner. Instead, they focus on the issue of who will "win" this or that state. So Candidate X "carries" state Z, winning 15 delegates to the opponent's 14. (Or maybe 15 to the opponent's 16: It's a mandate!) But X is not going to be governor of Z, or senator from Z. He or she will be the party nominee for a national office where the state of Z may well go to the other party anyway.

So why should the media bother to report who "wins" Z, which is not a real contest with anything officially at stake? How is winning Z any more significant than winning, say, males 18-25, or unitarians, out lesbians that describe themselves as strongly anti-war? The reason, we were politely informed, is because although the mythical race for Z means nothing in itself, the declared "winner" will receive a boost in later races. It's horserace coverage one step removed. While actual race results at least tell you what the voters decided. Just saying who "won" the unofficial contest for most votes tells you only what the candidates will be able to argue to future funders and voters regarding whether they are winning.

Moreover, one must question various things here. Does it make a difference? There's no question that both the major candidates are viable. (How does winning a nonexistent contest prove viability if one lost, tied, or barely won the real contest?) Predictions on this score have repeatedly been wrong. More importantly, one suspects this effect is largely artificial and media driven. Do candidates really have a profound inclination to go out and pitch the fact that they won nonexistent contests? Or do they do it, if at all, mainly because they are aided by being able to say, "if you've been watching the news, you know that we just won Z?"

I think the role of the media is to warn people that the pitch "we just won Z" is misleading because the race for Z is not real, and should not matter much to voters anyway. But in fact, the race for Z is something the media has invented and promoted.

I think there is a word for the media manufacturing ways to look at events in order to report on how the same media-manufactured way of looking at events will affect media-conscious viewers in the future. That word is "masturbation." Thanks for sharing, News Hour.

Primary Coverage Without the Facts

2008-01-23T22:57:00.000-08:00

One thing that does really tire me concerning the coverage of the primaries is that, being so intent to provide color in the manner of a sportscast, to the point sometimes of shouting (but at least not shouting "Booyah" so far), the standards of the factual content have declined.

I've noted before that explaining how the voters feel is akin to reporting on the voters to an audience of candidates rather than vice versa. It is also an ill because it aggravates "third-party effect", plants the notion of voters' election role as passive and predetermined, and promotes preoccupation with the least important concerns. It is human nature to absorb the silliness of the pundits, just as it is human nature to laugh more readily at unfunny farce when a laugh track is provided. I of course am wrapped up in the race myself, being not immune. I fancy myself a lay pundit, with something unique and important to say to anyone who will listen, which puts me in the same cart with two thirds of the voters, who when scratched will do their best imitations of insiders, spouting back the virdicts of the punditocracy. The election coverage we get, which does not tell us how candidates would govern, but communicates the feelings and concerns of pundits and asks us to internalize them, is a continuous track not of chuckles and guffaws, but acquiescence and indigation according to the values of the pundit class.

But as I began, the issue today is on declining factual standards. Before I make my point about them, let me just set one thing up: A lot of things in this world are complicated. One must take care to speak with a certain precision about them, otherwise, one veers easily into untruth. Some things are not just complicated but sensitive. A small misstep might inadvertently send a message that insults or denigrates. And some things are policed so that it is not unheard of that people might speak in code, relating a message below the surface of their literal meaning. There are also those in the audience who find a convoluted or complex position irksome because it seems "overlawyered" and weasely. Something so carefully parsed suggests less than full commitment.

In this kind of public discourse environment, it would be back-asswards public policy to put the entire onus on the speaker to construct every statement perfectly, or to obligate them to elaborate each remark to idiot-proof it against imagined meanings, unlikely but conceivable misinterpretations, or misuse by clever editing. This especially goes for the campaign trail, where candidates are prone to rattling 20-hour days where every word is recorded and the record culled for the most outstandimg highlights.

What can the media do? It can provide context and background, so that voters will not be taken advantage of for their ignorance. I've often thought that John Kerry, although a bad pick, would have done much better if anyone in this country understood how the Senate worked, and that voting no on one version of a bill, then voting yes on a better version was not a flip flop. (Plus that some votes are strategic or symbolic, all are compromises, and voting twenty times on one bill that contains thirty inconsequential and uncontroversial small tax increases is not voting for six hundred tax increases.) Back to what the media can do: it can resist the urge to run soundbites, whose time I have not checked recently, but the last time I saw the research, their average length had gotten down to about eight seconds. It's not easy to get much context or nuance into eight seconds. The media can resist relaying any campaign message that seeks to punish core discourse values like nuance, caution, precision, reliance on evidence, transparency and tact. It can refuse to convey messages that are fact checked and determined to be simply and uncontriversially untrue. It can generally include context. And there's one final thing they can do, which they are not doing, and it's a pretty basic Journalism 101 skill. Can you guess it?
Consider the following examples, not all, from the Clinton-Obama dustup manufactured by the media. :

(1) Bill Clinton calling Obama's candidacy a fairy-tale.
(2) Obama changing positions on the war.
(3) Obama saying conservatives had all the good ideas.
(4) Hillary lying about Obama by saying he praised Reagan.
(5) Hillary suggesting Martin Luther King was not an effective civil rights leader.
(6) Hillary fanning the flames by making snipes at Obama on Meet the Press.
(7) Bill distorting the the facts by saying no one thought Hillary could win New Hampshire.

All of these have been reported in a manner completely at odds with basic journalistic standards, and most if not all of these has been reported in a manner exemplifying the basic staple of journalistic integrity I referred to above, which is: quote accurately. I mean, jeesh! In (1), Bill Clinton was not ambiguous at all. The context was completely clear that he called Obama's account of his consistent opposition to the war a fairy tale. Paraphrasing him partially quoting him as indicated above has not been limited to Obama surrogates outside of the media. In (2), I don't know of Obama being misquoted, but I wouldn't bet against it. Obama was consistent in saying that he was opposed to the war, but could not say how he would have voted on the war were he in the Senate in 2003. That's fair, because in the Senate, no one introduces a bill that says simply, "War?" and asks for your vote. The particular legislation was for authorization of force, and it deserved to be voted down, but lots of Senators stood up and said their vote for the bill was not intended as a vote for war. This goes back to the idea that the media doesn't explain much of the civic basics regarding the responsibilities and processes in government. In (3) we have a Bill Clinton misquote of Obama, which many in the media echoed either in or out of quotes. Obama actually said the Republican Party was for a time the "party of ideas," which was true, in fact. The Republicans had a bold agenda to push America backwards, while the Democrats were mostly about stopping this, which is not in itself much of an idea. In (4) we have Maureen Dowd from today's Times, misreflecting what Hillary said and implicitly misreflecting Obama too by somehow viewing the substance of what she put into Hillary's mpouth as wrong when it was right. Obama did praise Reagan. If Hillary had said simply this, it would not be inaccurate. It is possible to praise someone you disagree with. In (5) we have what is now a famously ridiculous misreading, which was originally attributed to James Clyburn but disavowed by him. I don't remember actually ever seeing Clyburn quoted as saying anything really substantive. I do recall the Times attributing a vague statement to him, which in the context they provided seemed ridiculous, and made me instantly think, "I wonder what the actual context was for this remark." Since then, I've seen the Clyburn elliptical comment referred to repeatedly without ever being quoted for I think the obvious reason that there wasn't ever much there to quote. In (6) we have a reference from someone in the media talking about how Hillary just wouldn't let the issue go. In fact, she was asked directly about the matter, and answered in a way that was fairly deflective, but I guess the fact that he answer was somewhat responsive and not completely evasive meant that she was trying to keep the story alive. Finally, (7) is Dowd again, accusing Bill of misreflecting what the pundits had said. Of course, Bill was accurate. The polls showed Obama way ahead on the eve of the vote, so "everyone" (among the class Bill was referring to) had already pronounced Hillary the loser. Dowd said this was "rewriting history," which in this case was a job Bill was happy to leave to Dowd.

So, in a nutshell: the media get off on handicapping the horserace, and it's infectious and it's bad not only for its own sake, but because the commentators are so preoccupied with how things seem or are read that they don't even do the reality-check of just reporting accurately what someone said, meaning they have effectively regressed to a prejournalistic state, and have lost the one thing that ever made them useful to begin with. They've stopped reporting and stopped anchoring their commenting to the actual news, and are commenting on their own feelings, which is far worse than nothing at all.

Green and Gold, Local News, Sex and Violence

2008-01-20T12:52:00.000-08:00

I actually wrote this on Sunday, and realized today, Thursday, that I never published, probably expecting to do more...

Today is game day. I really can't help wishing the Packers will lose. Sorry, locals. I know some of you have invested thousands of dollars for a few tickets to the game. And it means a lot to you, and it pumps up the economy and all that. But for me, it's just one unending annoyance. If you want to measure the level of distraction, see our local news. With the national news devoted almost entirely to the who's-gonna-win predictions and strategies of the primary contests, it would be nice if the local news could administer at least the small amount of news they usually give, but Packers coverage has crowded out all but a few minutes of every broadcast. They've even be telling me what today's weather would be many times over all week, at the expense of knowing the weather day immediately ahead of those broadcasts.

One of the few stories to peep through on Friday was that of yet another sex offender, although this one has so far been convicted only in the media and is as a legal matter still technically innocent. Among the charges per Channel 4 was "pornography," which, so far as I am aware, is still protected by the Constitution and not a crime. This points I think to two things: first, the reporter was not awake, and the editor did not care, because they had 40 seconds or so to report the story and then get on to their real interest: a local family telling us their superstitious rituals to help Green Bay win, and which shirts are lucky and which shoes are not. Second, right under the surface, there is an understanding that these laws are not just about (or at least the coverage is not about) protecting potential victims, but is really focused on the sex thing. Get some sex into the newscast, while posing as anti-sex.

This struck me particularly because last week's Law and Order SVU just a day or two before this was about a little kid who became a serial rapist and his defense was the internet did it to him with its pervasive porn. What was strange was that no one in the show (so far as I saw, although I missed the beginning) made what I thought would be an obvious point: the really violent rape porn that the boy described is anything but ubiquitous. I think I have a reasonable familiarity with online pornography, but I have never personally encountered what this child described. I haven't had any personal or professional reason to look for it, but I would hazard that the general quantity of porn must be thousands or tens of thousands of times greater, maybe millions of times greater than that of viscerally violent porn. For a show that's usually pretty smart about knowing the difference between sex and rape, this was a bizarre omission.

I think these two events underscore a weakness in our public approach to sex crimes, which is, treating the sexual element as their defining characteristic, and obscuring the significance of violence and real harm (and indeed all details of the offense). I represented a teen whose crime of having sex with his underage future wife carried a far worse sentence than he could have gotten for just beating her (which was also alleged, but why try to prove it when you can just show the teens were hooking up before they were wed?). I have another case where it's clear that the only protection the law provided was not to potential victims, but to the public's irrational fears and the "yuck factor" concerning some things they'd rather not think of. (The law deals with what kinds of busineseses a registered sex offender can own or operate.) In these cases, it looks like sex panic has trumped prevention of actual harm. (Although oddly, as a consequence of the same motivations and lack of legislative precision, it can also happen that a crime will be considered a sex offense by definition even when it has no sexual aspect.)

UPDATE: Packers lost. Our locals appeared to be good sports about it. The news has returned to its normal state, which is poor, but better than it was when it was all Packers all the time.

Lessons from the Filipino Monkey

2008-01-20T12:40:00.000-08:00

Glenn Greenwald’s treatment of the incident in the Strait of Hormuz is missing some of the revelations to come later, but has the right central point: the incident mainly shows the unreliability and incredibility of the Pentagon. With what we now know, it should be fairly evident the irony of Defense Secretary Robert Gates rhetorically asking who one would better believe: Iran or the Pentagon. The answer from the start has been clear and it has not been the Pentagon.

The Administration has been so eager to point fingers at Iran that George Bush has declared himself outside the intelligence consensus (and after reading all those books!) and pressed the nonexistent case for fearing a nuclear attack from Iran. It has a long history of staging Gulf of Tonkin type events (including provocation of the Korean War, and piggybacking on civilian efforts, the Maine incident). And more recently, it has resurrected the Five O’Clock Follies with the fraudulent stories about the Jessica Lynch story and toppling of Hussein’s statue at Fardis Square, not to mention the propaganda about turning points in the occupation, and the Petraeus show.

Iran, on the other hand, has little obvious reason to lie or to stage an episode, albeit this may reflect the US perspective. From Iran, it may seem that it does get some benefit from focusing international and domestic attention on US bellicosity, but this is just speculation, because we really don’t get much of any news here that shines a light on the view from Tehran.

The story was largely concocted. It initially did not appear worth reporting, but a day later it had become dramatic with the report, from which the Pentagon has since distanced itself, that the captain of one of the US warships was on the verge of ordering fire on the Iranian boats when they backed off, and that the boats had dropped mysterious white boxes into the water. A video released by the US was altered by merging footage that did not seem particularly disturbing (no white boxes, no aborted order to fire) with a black screen over which a voice could be heard telling the US (or the Iranians?) “you will explode.” The audio had no trace of a Farsi accent, and did not have the same ambient noise as the actual transmissions from the Iranian boats. It has since been reported by Navy Times and other sources that navigators of the Gulf are familiar with heckling messages of similar character in this region, threatening US warships, and these have been routinely been assumed to be civilian transmissions unassociated with Iran.

Martha Raddatz, appearing to be a credulous idiot (sorry) on Washington Week in Review, said the US captains were really scared. This begs a whole series of questions, mainly, scared of what? The implication is that the tiny Iranian speedboats could have crippled a gazillion-dollar US warship. If so, I have a plan to reduce the navy budget by about 90% replacing our fleet with outboard racers. My first thought was that the Iranians would obviously scratch the hull paint on the pride of Annapolis if they tried anything. My guess in fact is that a speedboat could produce minor but disproportionate damage sufficient to put the captains in concern that they would be forced by standing orders to engage the boats, and thus put themselves in the middle of an international incident. Another question I would hope for somebody to ask is, “what do you mean by behaving provocatively?” What does a small boat do to provoke a big boat? The failure to state anything particular that constituted the provocation was a red flag. George Bush commented that he found the actions (of behaving provocatively) very provocative. He also did not say why.

The final part of the story is the Pentagon’s claim that the US vessels were engaged in transit passage into the Persian Gulf, operating in international waters five miles outside Iranian territorial waters. This is, it turns out, nonsensical in a whole variety of ways. There are no international waters in the Gulf. Outside of Iran’s territorial waters lie Oman’s territorial waters. Ships typically enter the Gulf on the Iranian side. No agreement recognizes transit passage into the Gulf on the Oman side, and the agreement that allows the rest of the world access to the Gulf through Oman’s waters has never been ratified by the US. I find this striking because it would seem to be something easy to check, and yet most outlets got it wrong.

The Free McGee Movement

2008-01-10T04:14:00.001-08:00

I went to an event last week, part of my effort to getting back to being more politically active. I used to go to political events daily, but my attendance has been falling off for some time. The event was a fundraiser for the defense of the imprisoned 6th district Milwaukee alderman, Michael McGee, Jr. (whose real name may or may not be Michael Imani Jackson).

Background.

McGee is interesting. I've met him a couple of times and from our limited interaction he seemed progressive and hardworking. Some of my friends who have dealt with him are not sympathetic. They see him, and I have no reason to doubt this, either, as being more successful in terms of his own notoriety than for his constituents, and ideologically sullied by a homophobic and sexist mindset that is all too well established in the community, which tends to get blamed on rap music but really is propagated just as strongly by traditionalists in the black church. On the common council and in the community, I sense a deep ambivalence toward him as an imperfect model who embarasses them and causes them trouble, but also represents some positive things, deserves respect, and has been unjustly treated. Some of the people I've talked to paint him as loving to project a kind of capo image, natty in a suit, king of the city, dropping asides regarding who might deserve a comuppance. His worldview appeared to be informed by that of the black power movement (his father, after all, revived a version of the Panthers little more than a decade ago) but was perhaps a bit indiscriminate. He seemed to sense conspiracies everywhere when I talked to him, which given the politics of City Hall and the dirty tricks against him is certainly understandable, whether or not it is factually justified.

McGee has been regularly attacked legally and rhetorically on private matters, and the local media has not been kind to him. It is sometimes hard to tell whether the news you see about him represents a struggle to be fair to him despite a lack of sympathy and the persuasiveness of his detractors, or whether the media have only barely gone through the motions of formal objectivity, actively seeking to embarass him. In either case, there has certainly been a very negative portrait that has shown through, and at many places, the coverage has been willingly or unwillingly slanted. Until recently, the news has focused on matters such as accusations regarding a woman whose child he fathered, questions about the name on his driver's license, and his use of intemperate name-calling against a fellow official, the types of news that he would get if he were Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan, not anything related to policy or central to issues of aldermanic service. This alone is a black mark on the media, which waits to be fed these kinds of celebrity news rather than digging into policy issues and reporting on where council members stand.

The current plight of McGee relates to state and federal investigations into his official conduct which have landed him in jail. His state trial is scheduled for March. The first charge announced to the public was an alleged consipracy to commit murder, which is not anywhere among the current charges. A phone tap revealed McGee issuing directives to an associate to apparently intimidate an enemy. This was originally portrayed as the hiring of an assassin and is currently viewed by the prosecution as paying for a beatdown, resulting in two counts of felony conspiracy to commit battery. This is an I Felony, the least serious level, just enough to remove McGee from office and take away his pension. The authorities arrested McGee claiming that they needed to act quickly to stop the assault. The two codefendants on this matter have apparently decided to take deals and testify against McGee. Otherwise, I suspect the case would be difficult, since McGee could simply argue (and probably still will) that the expression he used did not imply violence, but some milder form of rough persuasion.

The state charges now number 12 and include several unclassified misdemeanors for criminal contempt for attempting to pressure witnesses from jail. The remaining charges are all for one or another variation of electioneering, bribery, or lying to election officials, mostly in the course of surviving a recall election initiated by conservative enemies outside the city. I was an election observer and deputy registrar, and observed unlawful election practices by his opponents, despite which McGee easily won the recall. The federal charges are related to corrupt use of aldermanic licensing powers, from what I gather. (More in a little bit about information gaps...) All told the state charges are about half felonies, all of the smallest caliber.

The Movement's Issues.

The event I attended had about 100 or so people. (The estimate of 200, given from the podium, was clearly inflated.) A petition for McGee has 148 signatures, but I'd estimate that about 2o of these were repititious or at least partially anonymous. Not many lawyers seem to be in his corner. His own lawyer on the state charges has twice asked to withdraw. The billing for the event drew me by suggesting that there would be some kind of legal briefing, and defense brainstorming, but what I encountered was essentially a sermon or revival meeting, which addressed the injustice to McGee only in generalities, except for a brief address by his federal defender. The main point to be made was that we could raise money if we all worked together, and that a conspiracy of evil had robbed McGee of his civil and human rights by denying him a trial, denying him bail, and had forced his constituents to endure taxation without representation. The goals of the movement seemed to be several: to actually free McGee by proving him innocent, to redress perceived injustices regarding his mistreatment in prison and denial of rights, and to assure his reelection.

Since this meeting was mainly preaching to the converted, there was not much substance to the cries of injustice. The Free McGee website is a bit better, but still not very robust. It does not link to any documents, like the criminal complaints in the case, and too many basic facts are missing for it to convince even a sympathetic skeptic.His defenders compare McGee's treatment to that of white aldermen and state officials accused of corruption (but not witness tampering or conspiracy to batter) and to that of violent criminals, who at least received bail and trial. As an attorney, I did not find the arguments very compelling, but I nevertheless believe there is some truth to them.

The denial of bail was based on a sound principle, at least superficially, and I actually worked for a while with the AUSA who argued for bail to be denied. McGee could make an argument, perhaps a strong one, that he was screwed over in the bail proceedings and that they were unfair throughout, but this is a detail-intensive argument I cannot personnally make with the information I have. I seem to recall state bail was originally requested and set at a very high amount, but that may have been because of the whiff of murder and an overestimation of McGee's wherewithal. It was subsequently reduced, which is proper; his community ties make him unlikely to flee. The federal bail proceedings all took place after the completion of a sisyphusian ritual of arguing, assembling and posting the state bail, which was all rendered moot by a federal hold. In the federal cases, bail was first granted by the magistrate, but this was reversed by the district judge. The ultimate result of denying bail impedes McGee's representation of his district. McGee's supporters don't really appear to address the state's argument that his release on bail would have facilitated his intimidation of witnesses and the frustration of justice, and that this was a factor not existing in the cases of white officials. Nor do they take into account that the context of the bail originally being set high would have been influenced by the allegations of a murder for hire. State Senator Chuck Chvala might have done some bad things, but no one ever accused him of planning the assassination of his political enemies.

As for his being denied a trial, this is simply not so. He has a trial scheduled. Trial delays usually help the defendant, and in this case, deferring the trial would assure that his pension will vest and that he will have time to prepare a defense.

Nor are his constituents completely without representation, although obviously the quality of that representation is affected gravely by McGee's inability to attend meetings, hearings, and votes. If McGee is guilty, then one might argue that this is what you get when you decide to elect a felon. If McGee wanted to assure his consituents had a representative able to fulfill these functions, he could turn over his seat. On the other hand, releasing McGee for votes and meetings (under appropriate restrictions to prevent any risk that he would undermine the legal process against him) would have been far preferable from the perspective of the legitimacy of local government. If Milwaukee were a province of ancient Rome, the people could cash a get-off-the-cross free card, as those of Palestine did Biblically for Barabbas. There's something to be said for such a policy. As inappropriate as it might be to literally allow the release of a criminal based on local popularity, it would be good to see the law recognize some viable mechanism where a community's support of an accused could be better heard. In this case, the federal authorites and the state and even local prosecutions are not seen as fully legitimate in the eyes of the local community, because Milwaukee is so racially segrgated and all of these guys that I've seen have been very much white. They are part of an establishment that seemed to selectively go after McGee, bug his conversations, push for a recall against him, pressure him with bad press and civil actions, and then characterize his responses to these very pressures as criminal.

I don't know anything specific about alleged mistreatment of McGee, but there is the matter, which I would agree is an outrage, is that while McGee's peer officials appeared in court wearing suits, McGee appeared in a prison jumpsuit and shackles. The image of McGee in shackles was used as recycled stock footage in subsequent newscasts which is an indignity to him and his constituents which evokes images of slavery. Whether this happened because of specific dislike for McGee as an alderman, or because of overt or more subtle racism is something that can only be guessed at, but there it is.

The McGee website does identify some acheivements of the alderman in office, but the descriptions are very slight and give no links.

What is to be done?

Back to the movement, the real question is, what should be done about all this? The obvious persons with the power to help McGee are the judges and juries in his trials, who are supposed to be insulated from influence and follow the law. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to raise money for legal fees and expenses like investigators that might legitimately help move a jury. This all supposes that McGee is innocent or at least has a viable defense that can be supported by these means. Beyond that, the Governor could issue a preemptive pardon, generally a bad practice, and politically unimaginable. The DA and US Attorney have a great deal of power and these really are appropriate parties to address if the goal is freedom for McGee. The problem is that the Milwaukee DA does not need McGee supporters to remain in office, and his federal counterpart is appointed. Winning support for McGee among Milwaukee residents might have some effect on getting the DA to moderate his attack, but not if the evidence is compelling, and the public has not really been exposed to the full scope of this evidence. Pressuring the media for fairness is something that might produce better coverage which is a good in itself and will have a secindary effect of making it easier to win others to the cause. To the extent the goal is McGee's reelection, then the focus should be on the voters, with an awareness of how legal developments will play in the campaign.

There are two big problems I see in all of this, however. The first is contingency. Many of the goals espoused by the McGee movement assume he is innocent. Maybe he is. But if he is not, then all of this will fall apart when the evidence against him proves to be overwhelming.

The other problem is possible misdirection. it sometimes seems like two thirds of all the political activity on behalf of minority and disenfranchised groups is wasted on purely symbolic campaigns. The effort to free McGee is not entirely symbolic, because the community is at risk of more than symbolic losses if it loses either the candidate it elected, or a vote in he common council which that candidate failed to influence because of his incarceration. I also understand there is a principle of standing behind one of your own who comes under attack for sharing your beliefs. In part this is the Niemoeller principle, which was further invigorated by the divide and conquer strategy of the red scare: all must stand together or all will be vulnerable.

However, there is a large portion of the energy in this campaign that appears directed to the offense or indignity in principle that their individual champion should be injured. To that extent, the community is responding to a symbolic injury, much as it would to the airing of a racial slur on talk radio. Campaigns around these kinds of issues, like third party presidential runs, can operate for or against more important concrete issues.

A recent example is the campaign by local Latinos to get Mark Belling fired from a local radio station for an offensive comment about “wetback” voters. Two groups pressed the issue. One called off the attacks when the radio station inaugurated new programming directed at Latinos and contributed money to the local community for beneficial projects. The other group pressed for the firing of Belling and as far as I know, won nothing but a sneering phony apology. The first group arguably sold out for too little, or for benefits that went too much to themselves and not enough to the broader community, but they did well in considering that the remedy they sought was flexible.

One can treat a symbolic issue as either complementary with broader issues, or as a competitive substitute. For example, if the media treatment of McGee is regarded as part of a broader phenomenon, then the media can respond by improving coverage of the inner city and the views of African American community leaders, and drawing attention to the effects of inadequate city services, inadequate state staffing of community corrections and child welfare offices, failure to deal with the housing crisis, predatory lending institutions like rent-to-own and payday loan stores, police brutality, employment discrimination, and on and on. Alternatively, the media could be pressured to devote less resources to all these items, by diverting the fixed share of attention it gives to inner city concerns to more balanced attention to the sixth district alderman.

Likewise, the McGee movement can draw connections to other issues, and use support for the imprisoned alderman as a way to press those issues using the celebrity of the situation, channeling outrage at one case into broader solutions affecting the whole community, or the whole criminal justice system. Or it can compete with other movements, diverting energy, attention, and resources from community benefits to the benefit of one man.

A crucial issue here is McGee’s keeping his seat. If McGee is a leader, his position should be that he (1) will serve as long as that is the will of his constituents, and not abandon them, but (2) counsels his supporters that they should let him resign rather than see the community suffer because of his circumstances, by his being unable to cast crucial votes for their welfare, or otherwise unable to provide them the leadership they need. The question is the same as above: can McGee use his imprisonment to rally support for broader causes, or will those causes end up taking a back seat to McGee?

It bears reiterating that McGee’s cause may well be quite just, and that it is not purely symbolic. But his movement should be strategically aware that the causes McGee represents could be either served or disserved by how this is played.

Acts and Rules

2007-12-30T18:15:00.000-08:00

My way of viewing the world has been greatly influenced by computers. I see computing machines as close analogues of how human minds perform. There is a CPU, various subprocessors, and I/O. The mysterious and fuzzy-bounded consciousness is the ghost in the CPU. Complicated tasks requiring a lot of processing power that need to be performed in real time, such as walking, assembling the input signals into meaningful patterns, using language, or playing an instrument, and basically most habits of thought and behavior, are all offloaded onto dedicated subprocessors, though most reside in the CPU while they are first being learned. Of course, the whole thing is analog, and made out of gelatin rather than printed on silicon chips, and swimming in chemicals that control the relative strength and stability of different algorithmic figures, but in sum the mechanical mind is much like the real thing.

The central question for ethics is always the same for the CPU: what do I do now? If we are good machines, we make good choices. Ethical questions are judgments, but the only one that matters at any given moment is the judgment among alternative actions that one might do. Lots of insights might go into that, but it all comes down to the final choice.

Most of the time the choice is to follow along some default habit, so making the right choice is usually a function of forming the right defaults. Set up the subprocessors so the CPU can run efficiently. Kant called this character. Thomas wrote about it. We can't function without it. There's too much information to sort through, so you have to identify salient patterns, weed out irrelevant distinctions, and generalize like crazy. Deep Blue does it when planning its next move. We need to do it even more.

So from time to time you hear the question put to freshman philosophy students whether you should follow the rules, or decide on an act by act basis what is right. There are tensions here. We generally want people to follow legitimate rules rather than risk their acting according to idiosyncratic criteria that are much less reliable, going so far as to deride carefully customized decisionmaking as "situational ethics." On the other hand, there are bad regimes of rules too. And there are other tensions.

Ultimately, all decisions will be made at some level based on both. An individual's set of internalized general rules will determine whether the ethical choice presents salient features that make it suitable for conscious, individuated decisionmaking. If societal rules are legitimate, it is presumed likely that they will seldom be in tension with the conscience of a good individual, and that when they are, this will trigger attentive choice whether to violate the rule. At least for questions of first impression -- repeated instances will start to follow well-worn mental pathways and fall back into the mechanisms of habit. Of course there are many regimes of rules, but most moral systems likewise have a high degree of overlap.

When a decision must be made where utilitarian, teleological analysis of the particular situation appears to favor a different choice than what "the rules" would prescribe, should the rules be followed? The answer is no, but it is no only provided that the consequences of the rule violation are fully factored into the decision. Violate the rule only if it is worth it. This does not mean only if it can be rationalized, but only if it is really worth it. This would be a non-answer except that there are reasonable criteria on which both sides of the balance can be analyzed.

On one hand, the benefit must be calculated according to principles of good. The following of the rule must cause harm or deny the benefit of the violation, as would be perceived from a neutral perspective without favoritism to the interests of the decider (and compensating for the decider's bias and ignorance of other interests and inability to foresee all effects.)

Likewise, the effect of the violation can be analyzed: what is the likelihood that the violation will become known and be emulated so that the rule is undermined? How is the violation likely to be explained? Is the rule undermined a legitimate one, time tested, and generally sound? A sincere one (as opposed to one honored mostly in the breach)? Is it complicated? Is it important? Is it unassailably secure, or not even viable? Does it approach being universal and absolute or is it widely controverted and full of exceptions? Is the case for the exception generalizable on broad terms, or is it highly anomalous? Is it likely to be seen as an anomaly? Is the violative act prone to being preceived as part of an exception formed on other potential patterns of generalization that run beyond or counter to its actual basis?

The Genesis of the Soul through Reification

2007-12-21T08:39:00.000-08:00

I was just thinking the other day:

The Greeks didn't come up with the soul, but from their thinking, one can easily see where the idea comes from.

The ancient philosophers thought that objects acted the way they did in part because it was essential to their nature; events had a material cause in the subjects of the action performing in accordance with a predisposition. Complex materials were explained by Anaxagoras (or maybe it was Anaximander; I get them confused) as mixtures of elements that provided them with their essential properties. Wet matter contained water; the release of the water rendered the matter dry. Earth provided hardness and weight.

This idea continues to pervade lay impressions of the world even though science has largely rejected it. For example, people think it surprising that sodium and chlorine, neither of them a very savory material (a solid that explodes on contact with water, and a corrosive poision gas) unite to form table salt. The fact is that the properties of a substance depend on much more than the properties of components. Look at diamonds versus graphite. Both contain nothing but carbon. It is the arrangement of the atoms into larger structures that gives them their particular properties, not some missing or differing material component from one to another.

If properties and tendencies really belonged to object in material form, then you could take any positive or negative characteristic and, as they say, "bottle it." Sex appeal, money smarts, strength, slipperiness, heat, cold, invisibility: I'll take a liter of each.

There were different words for soul. Anima was the theoretical construct that distinguished living (animate) from unliving (inanimate) matter. You could have another for sentience, and another for conscience, or motion or repiration, or reproduction. If properties stemmed from material components alone, any of these properties would be things that were in living people (many of them in animals as well) and absent from dead people. If they were material, and ceased to be in a body, then they had to either have been destroyed, or suppressed into a potential but inactive or invisible state, or have gone somewhere else, existing as pure essence without the body.

It sometimes makes sense to think of some properties this way, because they truly are conserved. If one billiard ball hits a larger, heavier billiard ball dead on, it will impart its momentum to the second ball. With some loss for friction, momentum is conserved. Speed will not be conserved, because the larger mass will move slower. You can speak of the momentum being transferred. You can think of the speed being potential, with the possibility of coming out if the heavy ball hits a lighter one.

But other properties are pretty much gone. They change form so totally, it is not really useful to talk about them moving or hiding. When the ball falls off the table and hits the ground, it transfers its momentum to the Earth: it has just hit a super-massive billiard ball. Its speed? I'm sorry, but the speed of the billiard ball is dead. You're not going to re-extract that from the ground. Vaporize a painting of the last supper with an A-bomb and see if you can find that last-supperiness somewhere in the radioactive mist. John McCain's chances of being elected president in 2000: gone.

Mass is conserved pretty easily, although little bits of mass are coming and going all the time, changing back and forth into energy. Patterns and arrangements, shapes, structures, information generally, are much more fragile. Processes, once interrupted, may not easily be restarted. Of course the information isn't really gone. But its recoverability into a recognizable form is likely to be so attenuated as to render it the practical equivalent.

In any event, there is no intact, all-together chunk of concentrated image of Jesus and the apostles in the ionized smoke of the atom blast. The information is scattered, diffused, unrecognizable, and no human means can reassemble it. Likewise the motion of the past billiard ball sitting on the floor, or the shape of the ice sculpture that melted, or the softness and slipperiness of the graphite once it has become a diamond. You can't bottle these things. Nor the animate property of living matter. It's gone.

Jim Kimball Gets the Treatment

2007-12-02T13:09:00.000-08:00

I heard a story today on the radio concerning a guy in Idaho. Here is a link with broadcast details and how to order. Here is a full article from another source on the guy. I wanted to keep a link to this because it is exactly like what we get here all the time.

This guy, Jim Kimball, is on the sex offender registry because he was charged with a sex offense, which was in fact dismissed. Apparently, in Idaho you can be a registered sex offender without having been convicted of a sex offense, and the burden is on you if you want the record expunged. The offense was an isolated incident of consensual sexual contact about 15 years ago, involving a teenage girl that he flirted with in his early 20s and never actually had intercourse with.

A local news station hyped his story. Some high points:

They initially failed to report that he was not convicted, or that the allegation was 15 years old, even though these were matters of public record.
They failed to ever seek his side of the story.
They pushed to air in spite of concerns raised by the reporter that this would ruin someone's life and that the details had not yet emerged to justify the story.
They misleadingly illustrated the story by showing children ten years younger than the alleged victim in his case.
They used special effects like washing out the color from his photograph and zooming in slowly on the eyes, to manufacture a sense of menace.
When other news agencies universally decided not to cover the story, because it was not real news in any way, the station used the fact that it had exercised unsound judgment as a selling-point, repeatedly emphasizing that it had an exclusive.
They managed to get him fired; expose him to his nine-year old daughter whom he and his wife had planned to tell when she was older; traumatized is wife; forced him to miss school events for his children; drove away his friends because people were misled into thinking he was a child sexual predator.

I have some doubts about the use of actuarial tests to lock people up, but I do think they have some scientifically proven predictive value. If you were to apply a test like the STATIC-99 to Kimball, I have no doubt he would fall into the lowest risk category. Guys like this tend to be off-the-scale low risk. There is no evidence I know of that they are at any greater risk of offense than the general population.

I do want to correct one assertion from the KCBI report linked to above. It is stated in the report that an offender's recidivism rate rises over time. This is just bullshit. The cumulative likelihood of course rises, by definition, but the annual rate of recidivism decreases steadily. It decreases even more at older ages, and (for serial offenders) after roughly the first six offenses. The only time risk tends to rise over time, is when there has been recent penalty or treatment whose effects are still fresh and are wearing off, which is a small factor in the long term. That's something that would be meaningless in this case. Otherwise, just think: would we feel that a person just released from prison for a sex offense would be the low risk guy, and the guy who's been good for 25 years is the one you have to watch? It runs completely counter to the principle of induction.

On the Proper Place of Torts Among Mechanisms for Ensuring The Public Good

2007-11-25T12:57:00.000-08:00

The NYT just had a book review of Thomas Geoghegan’s "See You in Court" which inspired me to note briefly a thought I've had for a long time regarding tort reform.

In any given general problem, there will likely be a heirarchy of potential solutions, ranging from most to least desirable. (Of course,for specific problems, the most desirable solutions are often unavailable forcing a fallback. The best remaining solution may be no solution at all.) There's a lot of truth to O, Superman: "When love is gone, there's always justice; when justice is gone, there's always force." The heirarchy is, people play nice. When they don't, we use the law as a resolution mechanism, and the law is backed by force. Even when the law vanishes or lacks legitimacy, force may be wielded extralegally to fix the problem.

Of course, a fundamental problem of politics (which I've also been thinking about because of events in Venezuela) is to maintain the use of the highest levels of resolution of problems as an alternative to perpetual violence. When institutions fail to bend to demands, they break and the resulting vaccuum of working, legitimate institutions results in a series of failures and inefficiencies that make revolutionary change undesirable except where an injustice is severe and reformist efforts remain unlikely to produce success. (Of course, if you believe this happens fairly frequently, you can share this philosophy and still be free to still call yourself a revolutionary.)

The NYT reviewer, Adam Liptak, contrasts Geoghegan with Philip K. Howard, saying Geoghegan sees the movement away from reliance strong contracts rather than increasing regulation as a cause. This strikes me as a very wierd contrast. I've not read Howard -- could he really believe deregulation prevents lawsuits?

My view, like Geoghegan's, and apparently Howards's, sees a shift in arena as the problem: toward tort from other mechanisms. But like Geoghegan, I believe the problem is not that the ugly ineffecient systems of redress lower on the heirarchy have been promoted so that people forget the better tools available; it is that the better tools have been taken away or become ineffective so that resort is made to something less desirable.

I don't think most people think, why should I talk to my neighbor about their vicious dog when I can just call the police, or why should I call the police when I can just shoot the dog (or the neighbor). Most people are smart enough to know that the better mechanisms should be tried because they are cheaper, easier, generate less pain for both sides or for the public at large, and at times can be more effective. Most of the people I see in my civil law practice undertake tort claims only after they have tried mightily to resolve the matter socially and administratively first. (The criminal defendants tend on the whole to be less resourceful in finding legal means to redress their problems.)

The idea that the decline of contract has led to the rise of tort does not resonate that much with me, though I'm sure there's some truth to it. It would mean more to me if we were talking about contract terms that were regulated. Residential leases are a good example. Lots of terms must be in or out of a lease for them to be valid, which has led to leases being very standard. I see regulation as having a high place in the heirarchy. When some activity creates a risk of harm, you regulate it, whether it's by making it unlawful for an individual to recklessly endanger another's safety with a firearm, or by forcing an industry to market only safer products and services using safer means to conduct their activities. Deregulation represents a choice on the part of government to give the subjects of regulated activities more freedom, leaving nonregulatory mechanisms to address the risk that they will do harm .

Generally, the right favors deregulation because it believes market mechanisms will be sufficient. For example, you start a business making cheap soap in your garage: you will have an incentive that the soap not injure or kill too many people too quickly or tracably, because word would get around, the market for your soap would dry up, and you would lose the income stream from tainted soap and probably go out of business. When you start again, you'll know better. If you don't learn, you'll keep going out of business and face a credit crunch. Hence the market disfavors manufacturers being careless or stupid.

Of course, stupid still happens. You can't deter stupid. There are also deterrents to crime and crime still happens. Most crimes are less vicious than stupid anyway. And our experiences with unregulated markets have also seen many victims. With only the market to protect them, victims would be left with nothing but the meager satisfaction that if they tell their stories and are believed, they can hurt the sales of the soap company. Hardly make whole relief for them. Same for crime victims, and even with tort law, the same fate meets prospective plaintiffs who cannot find a big pocket defendant. Every couple of months, the local news has a story about a local business that went under and left clients in a lurch. A great number of businesses are undrcapitalized, fail, and those with at least some customers relying on them cannot even sue, except to wait in line behind a series of creditors.

So regulate as much as reasonable. Then, have torts as a backup. Having torts as a backup acts as a pressure to self-regulate.

Of course, if you shred regulation and shred tort, what are people left with? Vigilanteism. While there are stories that pop up all the time in the news where some violence can be traced to a grievance that was legally unremediated (and the anger often diverted to some easier target), I think a good example is in divorce cases. Some people exit a relationship with such undigested anger that they do stupid and destructive things. The solution of last resort is to go after these people criminally, like all the deadbeat parents constantly being shamed on the local news, but I don't see this as really deterring anyone, and in most cases provides little relief to the victims. We need to look upstream for better solutions toward the love-justice rather than the justice-force end of the spectrum.

Partisanship

2007-11-21T21:41:00.000-08:00

Another very brief entry:

The News Hour tonight had four authors at the table decrying polarization and excessive partisanhsip. I know I will not be alone in my thoughts on this. Basic point: sure. Gotta get along. Can't make everyone the enemy who merely espouses a different viewpoint. Can't follow the model championed by SWMNBN and just kill everyone who disagrees. There have to be some principles of what's fair.

But it disgusts me more than a little bit that:

1) After eight years of Bush and Rove litmus tests, whisper campaigns, personal attacks, using the IRS and leaking classified information to punish opponents, politicizing the whole government, caging voters, stealing elections, calling Democrats traitors, using every tool from gerrymandered redictricting, changing election rules, past-midnight votes where the vote changes after a bribe or a threat is made, changing congressional rules, issuing illegal executive orders and signing statements, ignoring the laws, concealing information from Congress, turning congressional Republicans into a politburo, striving to monopolize K Street donations, and striving to win every vote by 1, with the most extreme possible platform, after all this, suddenly, as the pendulum starts to swing in favor of the erstwhile minority, polarization and partisanship beccomes an issue.

2) No one identifies who is to blame; apparently it is everyone equally, or maybe Joe Lieberman gets some credit for being a closet neocon.

3) No set of principles of fair play is articulated, just vague "try to get along" and "don;t be too partisan" which is so meaningless, it can always be projected to your enemy.

I'm sorry. It's hard for me to concentrate. Karl Rove is on Charlie Rose getting the usual puffball treatment. He just said the Democrats have been unsuccessful this term because they don't show enough respect to their republican peers or compromise enough, and it's sort of making me want to retch.

Horserace

2007-11-19T22:27:00.000-08:00

One way of looking at it: Tim Russert and his guests present news about the voters that the candidates need and care about so they can influence the voters. If they covered the candidate's positions, that would be giving voters news that they need and care about concerning the candidates. It fits in with the fact that Tim and crew are much closer to the world of Hillary and Rudy than they are to the general populace of the country.

Meet John Dau

2007-11-15T06:44:00.000-08:00

A few nights ago, I went to see an installment of UWM's distinguished lecture series. The speaker was John Bul Dau, billed as an authority on the "lost boys of Sudan." (I think "lost boys" is a media/marketing title that the International Rescue Committee came up with; since most of them were sitting in refugee camps for a decade or so, they were displaced, but not exactly misplaced.) I went at an invitation of a political friend, and expected a political event. Sudan is a political topic these days. The local peace movement has made resolving the civil war afflicting Darfur a major campaign. I don't know much about it, except that I suspect things are not as
one-sided as portrayed. (I also think I was encouraged to go because a previous African speaker, a high government figure, had received almost no audience when he had come to speak, and this was a means of demonstrating respect that was missing before, which suggested a general lack of interest or respect for the continent and its people.)

Dau turned out to be a somewhat celebrated survivor, a former lost boy, who put his story in a book and was the subject of a documentary. Thousands died. John became famous, although not famous enough for me to have ever heard of him. Although I expect most DLS speakers to have a strong academic background from which to speak, I think life experience is an appropriate credential. Rigoberta Menchu has something to say worth listening to, so why not John Dau?

So I listened as John described his tale of trial and triumph surviving war, hunger and disease on a thousand-mile, 14-year journey from his escaping as a boy from an attack on his village, trekking afoot cross-country to sojourns in refugee camps in two neighboring countries. (Some of this is filled in from subsequent inquiry because of missing details in John's account.) It was a compelling story.

But there was absolutely no political context. He said nothing about the current conflict except for a passing mention, and maybe some indirect innuendo. I'm not sure he ever said who was shooting at him in Ethiopia: government soldiers or rebels. The conflict that displaced him was not examined. He appeared uninterested in its being solved.

Let me recant one part of that. He did insert a tiny bit of history, saying that Sudan has had frequent wars from the first century. He did not say what they have been about. Some in the audience clearly believed at the end of the night that Muslim forces were fighting early Christians a thousand years ago, impossible by at least six centuries. There was no distinction made between the international conflicts with Chad or Eritrea, with Pharaonic or Roman, or English, or whomever, or current movements in the East, West, or South in conflict with the central government.

At the end of hislong windup came the pitch: a Bill Cosby sermon about personal responsibility, and a request for money for his foundation. John said that priming the audience for this little bit of homespun ideology was the entire purpose of his narrative.

Now, I am reluctant to attack John. He went through hell. His story is a real one. It's hard to attack someone in that position. I tend not to doubt his honesty and motives for the most part. I think there's some fuzzing and sifting that he's doing to spin his message, but probably that's all. He could be a major fraud but nothing really conclusive to suggest so. It's too easy to see him as nine tenths honest. But the point is not the man himself. It is what he is saying, which is toxic. It may be that if he explained himself further, he could trim the most disagreeable points of his philosophy. Indeed, he explicitly contradicted some of the worst conclusions of this meme. But I want to respond to what he actually presented in all its ramifications, which I think was just horrible, horrible.

The ideology is one I've heard a thousand times before, and it's utterly tiresome to me: All that stands between you and success is the will to achieve it. Don't give up. You can have everything you want if you just believe and try. Some of that is fine. Focus on the future, sure. Practice forgiveness. Concentrate on what you can do for your own future. Help others who have helped you. All good. Perservere. Fine. The problem is not that one has no influence over the course of one's life or should not keep going if one is on the right track. Obviously, there's a basic dumb truth in this message. It's a message like "be proud of yourself" that some need. But...

It's dumb because it's unidirectional, un-nuanced, just plain dumb. Like "eat more": good for anorexics, bad for compulsive eaters. I forgot who said that patriotism was a kind of message that was good for small countries with esteem issues, but bad in places where an existing overdose of nationalism lay at the root of imperialism, aggressive war, or internecine destruction; the same is true here. It's a message that I think selectively targets the people who need it least.

Worst, because it's unnuanced, it logically entails all sorts of bad and evil conclusions. It contends, ultimately, the only thing that affects one's personal outcome is their own ambition. So what does that say about those that reach bad outcomes? What of the thousands of John's travelling companions who fell prey to hunger, thirst, corcodiles, gunfire, or disease? It implicitly blames the victims of misfortune, irrationally discounts the huge effect of luck, and lets the villainous and selfish off the hook. It also puts all its marbles on ambition and resolve rather than on morality, smarts, and unified struggle. Sure, step one is not to give up, but step two has to be something more than marching in the same damn circle. John's message is in the beginning and at the end a fascistic ideological cesspool that breeds abandonment of the needy, rationalization of extreme disparities, and the erosion of comity and ethics. It's a message that stills demands for change, protecting and flattering the privileged, and narcotizes and promotes pathological conduct among the disadvantaged.

John actually said that you can take any rich person, and you will find someone who struggled and achieved. They don't have inheritance in Africa? He actually said he had never gotten vaccinated against any disease, yet has never become sick, due to his own personal will not to fall ill. In other words, he's a walking potential carrier that could infect others, and if they die, it will be their own fault for lacking sufficient willpower to resist. (Nevertheless, he wants to build a clinic in the Sudan. Hopefully it will be a clinic that practices modern medicine and not faith healing.)

I hate this meme. Every get rick quick huckster and phony preacher uses it. It combines an immature animistic view of the power of beliefs, with the idea of a God who guarantees that every fate good or bad is always deserved. John dropped a lot of Christian references, as did members of his audience during the questioning. A church brought him to America and he now lives across the street from that church. The black woman next to me was muttering hallelujah at intervals throughout the ending parts of the talk, by which point its status as a sermon rather than an academic exposition had become clear. I was grateful to get out without a baptism or an Amway distributorship.

Although I have said that I give John the benefit of the doubt that he was being mostly honest, and that he has some decent beliefs and holds his belief in this key meme ignorant of its contradiction of everything good he believes, nevertheless, there were some aspects of the talk that gave me doubts. The main thing was that the message was so predigested and unchallenging. No analysis. No hard concepts. No demands for any ongoing involvement. This fit in with his repeated flattery of the audience that Americans are unbelievably generous, which does not seem to square with either the general facts of the world (other industrialized countries spend much larger portions of their GDPs on humanitarian aid) or with the facts of John's story (where he lived off the largesse of the UN, Sudanese rebels, and two poor host countries before ever seeing an American or any American aid). He created a foundation to help American children before creating one to help Sudan. He even flattered the host forum by instructing students to study hard and give back money to the school. He wore a perfectly crisp white shirt, no jacket, and perfect pressed plants, which was the ideally earnest and nonthreating ensemble. He included just a tiny drop of history and geography. He avoided controversial issues, save for a few flashes of popular conservatism: marriage is for one man and one woman (unlike among traditional Dinka); he asserted that moderate Muslims who did not vociferously denounce extremists at every opportunity ought to be considered just as extreme (though he never breathed a word against Christian extremists). He favored his people assimilating to America, but keeping unthreatening aspects of their original culture, like family cohesion. He dropped the names of Hollywood celebs who are now his friends, while affirming by denial that this was a boast.

By the end, I had started to wonder about parts of his story. What was he leaving out? He was very obscure about his family, leaving the impression they were dead until he suddenly mentioned reuniting with his mother at the end of the night. Why? Did he have reason to feel before this that he had abandoned them? What moral compromises did he make? He said he was put in charge of a thousand kids, then later there are 28,000: was he intentionally leaving the misimpression that his responsibilities had exponentially grown? A story he told about enjoying corporal punishment of his students at a refugee camp seemed a little more ominous in retrospect. Any why does he have so many foundations? Did he really make enough at McDonalds to build a four bedroom house, or did he pay himself at these charity groups?

Anyhow, all the last of this is too speculative. I'll let those thoughts dissipate before I sound too much like one of those right wing bloggers that see conspiracies everywhere. Main point: I came for an analysis of a humanitarian crisis, but got no analysis at all, no clarity, just an insistance that we were already generous enough and a pitch to be endlessly optimistic and push on in all matters without assessment. Bleh!

Waterboarding

2007-11-14T13:06:00.000-08:00

There are a bunch of questions. Was Mukasey giving an evasive semantic answer to a substantive question when asked a substantive question whether waterboarding is torture? Is it torture? Does it simulate drowning, or is it drowning?

Mukasey was evasive. He didn't want to say something that would condemn illegal acts on the part of the administration. This was clear from the say-nothing follow up memo. However, the particular response that most people were carping about was correct. Waterboarding, as explaned by Senator Whitehouse, is not per se illegal torture. The description given was not an airtight legal definition. It would include applying what would normally be torture to willing volunteers for training demonstrations, and could possibly include some other applications short of legal torture.

On the other hand, in a vernacular rather than hypertechnical sense, waterboarding, traditionally referred to for hundreds of years as the water torture or the drowning torture, is pretty clearly torture when practiced in the form being discussed. I wish Mukasey had been asked whether the rack, the iron maiden, branding irons, thumbscrews, rape, mock execution, the capucha, flaying, electric shocks, mutilation, or burning were torture. He would have given either legalistic "that depends" answers for those too, which would beg for some elicidation, or not, which would beg the question of why his answer for the drowning torture was different. Either way, you'd put him on the spot.

The definition of waterboarding as a "interrogation technique" is misleading. Traditionally, torture has been practiced not as a means of interrogation specifically, but as a more general form of coersion or punishment. It has been used to force religious recantations or conversions, solicit information, or terrorize a population as a form of collective punishment or deterrence. This was supposedly Dick Cheney's rationale for using torture: not to get information, but to deter people who might not fear death or imprisonment from assisting al Qaeda. Such use of waterboarding is illegal because it fits the definition of terrorism (except in domestic law, wherein actions practiced by the United States against its enemies are excluded from the definition).

NPR said yesterday that to drown was to die of suffocation by water. I could find no source for this. The definitions I found all just said that drowning was suffocation or asphixiation, not necessarily fatal. Waterboarding is drowning.

Is there a law against practices that are not torture but sound like torture? There should be. If one uses dental surgery without anesthetic, or uses a blowtorch, the damage to the image of the U.S. will come from the way that sounds, not whether it meets a technical definition of torture. Keep those things put away. Using them, or waterboarding, in a manner just short of torture, would have may of the negatives of the real thing. And just as little benefit.

Torture is almost always counterproductive and ineffective. It is not without effects, though, and some people want to achieve those effects for their own sake: terror, coersion, and yes, you can get some information. You can pick up tiny clues even from confabulated stories. Is there ever an occasion where torture is the best or only way to get information? I find that highly unlikely. So unlikely, that this is a good place just to draw a hard line and not cross it.

She is Zuul: hear her roar!

2007-11-03T18:43:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, something brought to mind the famous quote from the 1984 blockbuster Ghostbusters:

Gozer the Traveller will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the Vuldronaii the Traveller came as a very large and moving Torb. Then of course in the third reconciliation of the last of the Meketrex supplicants they chose a new form for him, that of a Sloar. Many Shubs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Sloar that day I can tell you.

I couldn't remember it precisely, so I looked it up. Some are more into this than I am. (Try Googling Sloar or Sloarism!)

So this has been rolling around in my brain for a few days, something that you'd suspect would be a complete waste of brain. That may in fact be so. Still, some of the thoughts you get can be interesting.

Some context before I go on, for the non-Sloarists out there. Louis Tully, played by Rick Moranis, is the nebbishy accountant neighbor of Dana Barrett, played by Sigourney Weaver. Louis and Dana have each become possessed by the demonic spirits who pave the way for a malevalent Sumerian deity, Gozer, who is coming to purify humankind with fire. Louis is taken over by Vinz Clortho, the "Keymaster," and Dana by the "Gatekeeper." Their conjugal union will allow Gozer to take material form.

I had never caught it before, but the explanation of the Sloar also reveals something of the language of the spirit world. Possessed by the Gatekeeper, Dana says, "I am Zuul. I am the Gatekeeper." I had thought Zuul was a proper name, like Vinz Clortho, which I still assume is a proper name, or at least a title.

But look at this: "Many Shubs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Sloar..." At first, it made no sense. Zuul again? Is it a name or a noun? Then I got it. Shub=Man, Zuul=Woman. Dana, translated, says, "I am Woman. I am the Gatekeeper."

It's kinda cool. Like triangulating on the meaning of "gulliver" (supposing you are unfamiliar with the Russian "golova") in A Clockwork Orange as recommended in the author's afterword (one is kicked in the gulliver; when a beer is later observed to have a gulliver on it, it becomes clear that gulliver means "head").

Maybe it's still a waste of brain. But it was cool to figure out something, even if it was something useless.

SWMNBN

2007-10-17T21:38:00.000-07:00

There are lots of good reasons to despise A--C------. She is either a fascist or ostentatiously pseudofascist in presentation, a felon, and poisonous to the discourse. But the flap about her longing for a world without Jews does not strike me as especially antisemitic. It strikes me as rather logical and ordinary that for adherants of one religion, adherance to another, incompatible religion is at very least misguided. For Christianity and Islam in their robust versions, nonadherants are destined for Hell. Hoping for the conversion of infidels is compassionate, from that point of view.

btw: Judaism doesn't fall in this category but it does something similar (again, at least in versions) in an unusual way: it has moral rules that apply to Gentiles, and sometimes only to Gentiles. Not only must they follow the Noahide Laws, and without the exceptions that Jews might sometimes be compelled to make to honor other commandments, but at least some Rabbis also assert that Gentiles are commanded not to follow the rules intended exclusively for Jews. Hence: have some BBQ Pork! This strikes me as unique and weird, and has a bit of that Christo-Islamic arrogance telling others what to do, but still tolerant, as is widely recognized: at least there is an admission that you can have your covenant and I can have mine, and there is no need for me to convert you.

Pissing Everyone Off

2007-10-17T21:03:00.000-07:00

Fete the Dalai Lama and piss off China as you need their support on Burma and Korea. Go to Russia to lecture Putin as you need Russian support on Iran. Issue a resolution to piss off Turkey over the Armenian genocide, as they prepare to invade Iraq. Only 15 months left to alienate everyone else. Well, you always have Eastern Europe and Sarkozy.

Foreclosures

2007-10-12T18:38:00.000-07:00

I read this the other day, which I will quote in substantial part below. This gal, Jennifer Fink, whom the local paper engaged as a "community columnist" inspires me to say not-nice things about her, by arguing that in the present foreclosure crisis, "The fault lies with overextended homeowners." That's her title. In explaining her view, it she reveals herself to have been as thoughtless, clueless, and brainless in developing that view, as she appears heartless from her titlular conclusion. I think it's worth comment because I expect this view is not far below the surface of the vast majority of conservatives and others who are not moving to respond to this mess.

I'll skip over her solipsistic little intro in which she explains her own sacrifices to live within her means. What she is setting up very obviously is: I was smart and even noble to suspend my gratification and avoid this fate; hence anyone else who has to suffer it must have fallen into the temptation I avoided because they are simply not be as smart or noble as me, so screw them. I hate this argument. It's a suitable kind of argument for adults to use on children so long as they have all the facts. But to treat another adult with such disrespect based on casual assumptions, that's just lousy.

She lays out the problem starting in the fourth graf:

Metro Milwaukee, like many parts of the country, is experiencing a rash of home
foreclosures. More than 4,000 area homes already have entered foreclosure, and
more are sure to follow. Experts predict that this month will see a tidal wave
of foreclosures...

Okay, so that's the issue: a "rash" and expected "tidal wave" (neither assessment controverted) of people losing their homes, evicted, and sent looking for substitute housing. There are numerous aspects to this she does not mention: some are losing long-term, even multigenerational homes; many will be unable to shift to a new site without substantial loss of personal property stored in their homes; many are innocent children; many are old and infirm; also innocent will be the neighbors, who see their neighborhoods fill with foreclosed board-ups and see their own home values and quality of life crash. So it's not just, I have to relocate to the smaller home I should have had all along. It's more like a hurricane hitting the inner city. Oh yeah, she does not mention that the people she is calling worthless and stupid are largely black.

Continuing:

...as $50 billion worth of adjustable rate mortgages will reset at a new, higher rates.
President Bush waded into the fray in late August with a series of proposals designed to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. Among them is an initiative called FHASecure, which will, according to a government Web site, "help people who have good credit but who have not made all of their payments on time because of rising mortgage payments." Bush also vows to strengthen mortgage lending standards because some borrowers were placed in "sophisticated products they could not afford."
True as that may be, the problem, in my opinion, doesn't lie with predatory lenders.

So we get fact number 2: Predatory lenders peddle sophisticated financial products that involve escalating mortgage payments. The mortgages go up because the interest rates adjust. The new products include things like the "Option ARM" an adjustable mortgage that doesn't just kill its host parasitic and usurious rates that blow up bigger and bigger as they consume their victim. This evolutionary offshoot hooks its victim with the lure of low optional payments that do not even cover the monthly interest, so the amount of the loan increases every cycle. Then, when a pre-set limit is attained, the monthly payment suddenly and violently expands. Of course one of the reasons black folks are so readly preyed upon by this invasive species is that the predatory lenders are now engaged in reverse redlining. Instead of denying financing to low income minority neighborhoods for fear that the loan will be too risky, they fish particularly in these waters, recognizing the potential to reap windfalls from foreclosures.

Then we get:

...The problem rests squarely on the shoulders of homeowners who bought homes
beyond their means. It's your job, not the bank's, to make sure you can afford
the house you buy. To check and recheck the numbers. To have a backup plan, just
in case.

So, it's the buyers who did this to themselves in the buying. Except that's not where most of this comes from at all. Many homes are acquired in probate court or in a divorce proceeding, or are financed reasonably when first sold, but get into problems after a refinancing. The refis are often designed to withdraw some of the equity because of an unforeseen crisis, maybe that aforementioned death or divorce, which led to a diminished household income. This may be abetted by an ex-spouse's failure to pay child support or required maintenance, or by legal or medical bills. The largest number of people who lose their homes have some medical issue at least contributing to the loss. But of course, Ms. Fink's stern analysis is drawn from the same ideological greasetrap as George Bush's statement that sick and dying children can always report to an emergency room, so no one really lacks for health care.

How many people "check and recheck the numbers"? How many people know how? Ms. Fink posits an unrealistic ideal world in which capitalism always works, in part because the consumers are always perfectly informed and the cost of becoming so informed is zero. It is absurd to imagine that the best system would actually be one in which the consumer, who engages in these transactions rarely, would have absolute responsibility for his or her choices and should be required to read and understand what are often dozens or scores of pages of legalese, recognize their consequences, and master the market well enough to know when a better deal will be available, as opposed to being entitled to rely on the representations of the other party, who is a sophisticated, repeat player, without discovering later that he or she was misled. The freedom to make necessary decisions without weeks or months of research is simply more important than the freedom of either winner or loser to make grossly unfair deals.

In fact, the law is not buyer beware, but that contracts may be set aside when the consumer is tricked or pressured. Lawyers who deal in this area frequently encounter the octagenarian widow who was tricked into signing onto an unconscionable refinancing arrangement. Her fault, we are to suppose, that she had no back up plan.

But even average consumers make costly mistakes. They don't sell insurance against the inevitable bouts of fleeting stupidity that most of us suffer. But it would be nice if people were protected against making mistakes that were too stupid. In most areas of life we do this and it's for the better. The friends and relatives of stupid people, and those of smart people who experiment with occasional stupidity, are usually thankful that some rules, social or legal, stand in the way of letting their friends injure themselves too badly. It's the friends and loved ones who have to worry, and who are going to be called on to bail out the unfortunate one whose foolishess leads to a loss.

(And in an ARM, what is it that you are supposed to check? Nothing more than the fact that it is an ARM. You sign up at 7% and the increases begin and soon you are at twice that. Rates that were once illegal. There are no numbers to check in the original deal. It is a provision that is bad.)

Then we get to the part where Fink finally says, I'm better than you; you deserve to lose:

...Economic reality isn't always easy to swallow. By all rights, we should be able to buy a nice home in a new subdivision. ...But while we're content to remain in the home we can afford, many people are not. They see nice homes and think they should have one, too. More often than not, home-buyers stretch to reach some unobtainable version of the American dream.
As a nation, our expectations have changed tremendously over the years. We used to need a roof over our heads; now, we need a roof, a media room, a master suite and a three-or four-car garage. The average new home is now 2,459 square feet, up from 1,695 square feet in 1974. Families, meanwhile, have gotten smaller.
Stretch if you want to for your dream home. Just don't come crying to me when the mortgage
turns out to be more than you can afford...

Now in this last turn, the errors of Ms. Fink are finally exposed as being a full-blowin psychotic break. Apparently, she thinks the inner city where the foreclosure crisis is destroying already fragile neighborhoods is populated by people who each made the mistake of building his or her "dream home" in "a new subdivision." I guess then they just woke up a while later and discovered that their "four-car garages" were suddenly in the zip code of Milwaukee with the highest crime rate, surrounded by run-down $50,000 houses.

This isn't about subdivisions or newly built homes. The only new houses in my area were built by Habit for Humanity and they are not too much more than a roof. None have garages. The fact that people who have the money are building larger homes does not say anything about the people near me. All it means is that the as smaller homes in my area get boarded up or burn down, the housing supply shifts in favor of larger homes. The disparity in wealth is increasing, and it is the rich more than the poor who build homes. This trend presses buyers to find something larger than they need because that is what is available. (The alternative, sharing, is just not palatable to or really feasible for a lot of people.)

They are, true, taught to expect better for themselves. They look at their neighbors. They are told incessantly be optimistic. They do not often hear the truth about how limited their expectations should be. And once in a deal they are stuck there.

But it is not so much that those expectations are unrealistic as that prices are. One may think of a person only able to afford a $50,000 home who foolishly buys an $85,000 home. Another way to view this is a person who can afford a $50,000 home, finds what is really a home worth $50,000, but is told that it now costs $85,000 due to a runaway market. Not to worry though, financing is also easier. By the time the person faces foreclosure, they have already strained and sacrificed to pay excessive interest. They are being milked dry. So they have given enough, and the predatory lenders have gained enough. Why is housing overpriced to begin with? Because of speculation, and the fact that lower income people are economically unsophisticated as a class means that it is not economically advantageous for those who could develop the stock of low income housing to actually do so. They can usually be sold something worse and drained the limit of what they will bear anyway.

Anything else I have not covered?

Am I a suspected insurgent? (Only if I get blowed up good.)

2007-10-12T18:33:00.001-07:00

I'm just noticing that when people get blown up in Iraq, especially by occupying troops and their air support, they always fall into two categories: "civilians", whose numbers are always comprised of "women" and "children", and "suspected insurgents", comprised of... well, I'm guessing any male older than twelve. Since I am a male over 12, then it follows that if I were killed in Iraq by U.S. forces I would thereby be drafted a member of the non-civilian category.

USA Today on Jena 6

2007-10-06T19:14:00.000-07:00

Here. A pretty good summary. Not complete, and falls short of calling for an investigation. But good to see some prominent attention and a much better resume of the facts than Walters was willing to give in the NYT.

And by the way, look at the comments. Yup. People are idiots. Duncan Hunter fersure.

Evidence that as a nation we deserve a Duncan Hunter presidency

2007-10-06T19:06:00.000-07:00

The Chicago Sun Times has Barack Obama on his cover, with an interior article and an editorial on, drumroll, please...

His not wearing a flag pin on his lapel.

Also in today's issue:

Giuliani blasts Clinton for wavering in her support for the Yankees.

If it's true that in a democracy, you get the rulers you deserve (evidence the U.S. failure to adopt the metric system), then these are signs of a coming apocalypse: the incipient presidency of Duncan Hunter (or perhaps Tom Tancredo, certainly among the worstest candidates on offer this cycle.)

Iranian President in NYNY.

2007-09-27T01:12:00.001-07:00

I'm feeling lazy so I won't even look up how to spell the man's name. Let's just call him A.

Some very quick notes:

1) Have you noticed how just about every other part of the world, from the American South to the Levant to Latin America or the Far East prides themselves on their virtue of hospitality? That is a nice virtue. We were embarassingly bad hosts.

2) Some editorials, as with the local daily here, actually thought this was America's finest hour, because Mr. A was actually able to speak. Let's get over ourselves. We don't have a monopoly over free speech. The fact that we grudgingly offer a hostile forum is not so exemplary.

3) Most of the people calling Mr. A and idiot are themselves idiots. Joe Lieberman said he "literally" had blood on his hands. So, let the man use a washroom, and your problem is solved.

4) Remember when Chavez spoke at the UN last year and insulted Bush? The Democrats rushed to condemn him as a bad guest, and all you heard all over was how Bush may be a bad president, but an insult against him by a foreigner was nevertheless a disrespectful gesture to the whole nation (despite questionable elections). So guess how Iranians will see this?

5) Mr. A loves the press. The only thing that gets more press than efforts to censor are ineffective efforts to censor.

6) Mr. A is not the supreme leader and does not set the policies, so most of the attacks on him that presume otherwise are deeply flawed and, when coming from people who should know better, mostly fraudulent.

7) One cartoon I saw had Mr. A dressed as a Nazi but with sharp jutting teeth, as though to say, Hitler was at least a civilized European gentelman who happened to be evil, while you, Mr. A are a mere animal of the feral third world and not worthy of that comparison.

8) Hitler comparisons were also all over the place. Why? Because we blame Hitler too much for anti-Semitism, and not enough for aggressive war and genocide. That is why it is so wrong to compare Bush to Hitler -- he may have killed his first million now in Iraq, but he likes Jews, so it's okay.

9) Mr. A makes lots of sense in some of his arguments. He's also effed up on other stuff, which makes him bad company and an embarassment for those who would otherwise like to support him, or at least his rights and the good things he says. Nevertheless, outside of the US, these points are often uncontroversial, and even within the US outside of its dominant political class, these arguments would carry some resonance if they reached people. Instead, from the papers you'd think Mr. A's entire speech was about the absence of gays in Iran.

10) Since when have visitors to Ground Zero been vetted for their perceived moral character, and why? If we let Karamov go lay a wreath, we should let almost anyone do so. And what about Giuliani's license to appropriate 9/11 as an omnipresent political backdrop? Can we revoke that? I think secular, public memorials should be treated as neutral ground and not politicized -- anyone who is willing to display the proper decorum should be free to go.

11) Iran's place in the Axis of evil has been promoted by most of the Democrats, who show their distaste for the cruelty of war by constantly lamenting that war prevents America from redirecting its resources to more important and humane matters, like some other war. Iran is currently the most popular other war.

That's all for now.

Jena Prosecutor Walters in the NYT

2007-09-26T18:16:00.000-07:00

Reed Walters, the prosecutor of the Jena Six, had an op-ed today in the NYT. Short version: Don't blame me.

Actually, the guy sounds mostly reasonable on the surface, at least if, like most people, you still don't know the facts of the case. He made his job easy by using a layperson speaking out on a legal issue as the representative of all the arguments against him. At least, the easy ones he wanted to respond to. Someone says, why prosecute these kids for assault, and not prosecute the ones who hung the nooses which set off all this racial fighting in the first place? Reed answers, I tried to be fair, but terrorizing and provoking blacks by hanging nooses where they're not wanted is perfectly legal. I had to prosecute the assault because it's my job.

The National Lawyers Guild statement lays out more of the case. Reed leaves out that he has already had to scale back his prosecution because the law would not sustain his original overreaching, charging attempted murder for a series of blows that resulted in no serious injury persisting for more than a few hours. Compounded by the decision he scarcely justifies of charging one of the youths as an adult. He also does not mention his history of similar bias, or his apparent conflict of interest in the matter.

I also disagree with Walters' description of his job (to lay the facts against the statutes and seek justice for victims, he says). The prosecutor's role is to vindicate societal justice by employing the criminal law, not just for victims but for everyone in the jurisdiction.

I find some aspects of his account vague: what was the criminal record of Mr. Bell that he refers to?

I get sick of officials admitting that they made a mistake, but only a PR mistake. The truth is, he did make a PR mistake, and most of the time, a PR mistake is a symptom of a bigger problem.

And he hides behind an African American federal prosecutor to imply that what he did was no different, which is horrendously misleading because most crimes, unless they happen on Indian reservations, cross state lines, or involve the government, are state crimes.

All of this appears dishonest to me. That's five things that look fishy without even starting on his facts. I don;t know the facts, but a good rule of thumb is, when you can catch 'em on what you know, expect them to be twice as dirty with what you don't.

But it's not all his fault. The judge, and lax DOJ Civil Rights apparatus that permitted all this comes in for some blame, as does the community, and the Louisiana Legislature -- can the noose display really not be a crime? Surpringly, that seems very plausible to me, because from what I can see, the criminal code there is a mess. To larger extent than in any of the midwestern states whose criminal laws I've studied, it's a big stack of specific offenses that are semi-random in what they cover.

This just in...

2007-09-22T15:59:00.000-07:00

The Senate has just voted against a bill which would have ordered the Pentagon to assure that all U.S. servicemen and servicewomen performing in Iraq have adequate water to function. The bill would have required the armed forces in theater to maintain stores of water, or make plans to obtain water, sufficient to keep all troops there hydrated except when doing so would interfere with the military mission. The defeat of the bill was seen as the latest victory for those in favor of supporting the troops. "The signal this sends to the troops is one of no confidence in their ability to overcome thirst. The best way to bring the troops home faster is to let them win by letting the generals on the ground follow their own best judgment."

Opponents also said the bill was unconstitiutional. The Bush Administration has said that it does not believe the Congress has authority to pass legislation concerning the military, and that it considers the entire Title 50 of the United States Code, dealing with military matters, to be void.

Definition: A Gathering of Eagles

2007-09-21T16:56:00.000-07:00

Noun. (1) A support group for the endangered species which continues to back the failed occupation of Iraq; (2) A coming together of members of this group, typically numbering in the single digits, but ranging into hundreds for exceptional occations: A Gathering of Eagles counterprotested the anti-war march.

Completely Heterosexual

2007-09-09T23:21:00.000-07:00

It finally makes sense to me; no, wait, I'm still confused.

Larry Craig, like Ted Haggard, is completely heterosexual, although it has not yet inspired a Roy Zimmerman song. For several days, Leno has been pumping a video clip from MSNBC with anthropologist William Leap (identified as a Northwestern) professor, but I find him identified online at American U). Leap states that the Craig bathroom incident does not involve gay sex, just sex between men who are seeking sex with other men, which generates an apparent amount of skeptical laughter from the crowds in Burbank. Dan Savage helps with a CNN appearance, also referred to in his column. Some insight also comes from a seminal 1970 work, recounted, among other places, in this article. (So today, I'm actually giving some links!) Short upshot: guys who seek out sex in mensrooms are nearly all "straight-identified," rejecting the gay label and gay culture, and are disproportionately conservative, Republican men. This goes along with the well established phenomenon that among those who identify as straight, homophobia and homoerotic arousal are strongly correllated. Some experts, apparently including Leap, think Craig is not dishonest in denying he is gay, that the term is not properly applied to the deeply closeted, that it makes more sense in some ways to separate what closeted men do from what we label as gay, and that Craig may be completely sincere, although deluded, in describing himself to others as straight. At some level, he sees himself that way, never having heeded columnists like Savage, who have written a million times that, hey, guess what, if you like sex with other men or other women, that is rest-assured, straight-up, end-of-argument gay.

Should police patrol mensrooms? There're various problems justifying the patrols -- the concerns are overblown and exaggerated by prejudice; policing legitimizes the apprehension, which is counterproductive; the interest in preventing exposure to facts of life that are not inherently harmful is somewhat dubious in an open society, even where those exposed would be children; the actions employed, while not entrapment, tend in that direction; the menace at maximum is small, while most metropolitan police departments have more serious issues to worry about. None of these, save the last, is a knockout.

Is Craig a hypocrite? Not as obviously as most assume, but yes, for the reason Savage notes: he probably would have voted for tough penalties against the very thing he was caught doing. But there is no contradiction between his vile opposition to healthy gay identification and activity, on the one hand, and his inulgence in unhealthy closeted behavior on the other.

Should Craig be investigated if he does not voluntarily resign? Yes. Merely being a pervert or a hypocrite, or using his position for political self-interest are all normal. But: He insists his guilty plea, made under oath, was a perjurious lie. The police account shows an apparent attempt to use his official position to avoid the consequences of the crime. His status as a closeted man active in same-sex hookups raises a concern that he would be exposed to blackmail. Any of these could be a legitimate ground for further examination. Less seriously, he may enjoy a good roasting. Recalling his Meet the Press appearance in 1999, one can almost imagine him saying, "Yes, by all means, investigate me, censure me; I've been a bad boy, a naughty boy. I need to be disciplined."

What is the larger lesson? The conservative majority in the redstate world is not as crazy as it may seem. If you lived in that world you would see the natural appeal of conservative positions. Gay people in blue America go about leading ordinary lives, albeit coping with prejudice. In red America they are more likely to sneak off from the closet to the toilet for anonymous sex. It may seem offensive for Santorum or Scalia to liken gay sex to bestiality, but in red states, there're a lot of farms, and boys do what they will do. It's not just gays, but the risk of animal sex is a lot more present if discipline were to fail. You can see why they may be more preoccupied over there. They also have more crime, more teen pregnancies, more abortions, they draw more of their economy from the public sector, and in general suffer more of the problems that their policies claim to fix. The Republican party and allied institutions are just about the only loci in the nation where unqualified minorities are routinely given positions over better-qualified whites. Look at Clarence Thomas, or a more spectacular laughingstock, Alan Keyes. The redstate right is focused on real problems, they just have not attributed their sorry state to the spectacular failure of these policies, or noticed that these problems are less severe in the civilized world outside their own.

Two Cents on Rove

2007-08-19T22:22:00.000-07:00

The best observations I've made and seen others make:

1) He's treated as history making when in fact he made few innovations, had little real power, and made little impact. All the big historical things that happened would have happened, or come very close to happening, if he had not existed. Pre-existing trends, chance events, and a reliably ineffective opposition did the work, while Rove took the credit.

2) He's treated respectfully and asked his views, even as his interviewers wink to him with the knowledge that about 78% of everything he says is a lie.

3) He's regarded as a genius in all probability because he's mastered the art of getting perceived as a genius without ever having to prove it. He has no academic credentials, but drops names and historical references, constantly makes mistakes which people credit for being clever lies or part of a secret strategy, and he travels among the easily impressed.

4) He's very much a product and exemplar of the corrupt and juvenile College Republican milieu, where dirty tricks are virtually all that matter. It is a culture steeped in petty criminality which its practitioners tend to lose only when they move into some part of the real world where crime is looked down upon, or graduate into adult politics and the potential for actual felonies.

5) He's regarded as an ideologue rather than a functionary, but there is precious little evidence that he had any agenda other than accumulating power for himself and his team.

6) The supposedly big idea at the center of his philosophy ultimately reduces to conceiving politics as total war without any ethical limitations: you get away with whatever you can, and that's a lot. You lie because the lies have no adverse consequences. You deny the opposition access to information. You phony up evidence. You create token programs whose effects you can exaggerate. You smear without mercy or restraint. You are absolutely loyal to those with you and seek to destroy those who are not totally loyal in return. You manipulate voting rules, voting machines, districting, use all the arms of government to promote political over policy interests. In short you rely on short attention spans, public impatience with partisan bickering, and the media's tendency to frame every debate as an even and honest one no matter how lopsided and dishonest. You shovel coporate welfare at the money base and an endless stream of empty platitutdes and symbols at the social base, knowing that 50.002% of the voters will not notice.

7) Even as congratulations and applause greet him, it is widely recognized that he is leaving under a cloud, getting while the getting's good.

UPDATE: Hey, I have a comment! Yes, No. 1 is probably overstated. We may find out later that it is terribly wrong. But I thought this was a great observation since the tendency throughout most of the punditocracy has clearly been excessive in the opposite direction, crediting him for nearly every significant political event in the last seven years.

Executive Privilege

2007-08-16T16:39:00.000-07:00

Aziz Huq has a bylined editorial in the Nation this fortnight on executive privilege, which is very nice, but it does take him to paragraph 8 to make the point I would put first: what good is it?

The standard explanation is that shielding a communication from inspection is required in order to achieve candor. You can see this in attorney-client or priest-penitent privilege: the attorney or confessor function would be completely frustrated if secrecy could not be guaranteed. You can quickly think of most of the functions that might be considered important enough to make a guarantee of a controlled communications environment: gathering information on the transmission of a communicable disease, or for an individual's diagnosis or treatment, anonymous reporting of crimes, support groups and brainstorming sessions, or when spouses confide in one another.

There are lots of laws shielding eliberations of various bodies: when judges caucus, or jurors especially, or even when job interviewers speak openly to decide whom to hire. Hence it is argued that officers of the executive branch, in order to obtain candid advice, must have blanket secrecy over their internal (and some external) discussions.

Huq questions this, and rightly so. My own immediate thought was what kind of exchange might occur if there were no executive privilege, what Bush and Rove might have been like in a room where the contents of their discussions was subject to general release:

President: So, what ought I to do about this here thing?

Adviser: I, I.. I'd rather not say, Mister President.

President: What's wrong, rover-dover?

Adviser: I, I'm ascared, Mr. President. What if I tell you what I think and then someone finds out and doesn't like what I said? They might make me feel bad.

President: Well, you know, it's like I always say, you don't come here to be popular, you got to stand up for stuff. Just tell me what I should do.

Advisor: I can't. I'm still afraid. I, I just wet myself. Waaaah!

As you can see, eliminating executive privilege would have completely crippled Karl Rove's ability to advise the president, which would have been a loss for us all.

As a caviat, I don't doubt that observing a privilege for executive advice is appropriate in proper circumstances. Executives may also be penitents or spouses or clients or patients. There may be times when effective advice depends on disclosing some matter which is rightly secret for other reasons. And there may be genuine occasions where the value of secrecy outweighs its costs. Maybe an advisor is has a special basis for concern but they're indospensible and no one else can give the advice. Likewise, there are also exceptions going the other way, where a privilege fails: the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege, for example: if a client and attorney conspire to break the law, the exchange is not privileged. In any unclear case, a court may have to examine the content of the matter in chambers to decide what is privileged and what is not. That's life.

Applemilk1988 is offline

2007-08-13T18:07:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the most lamentable quality of the popular internet is the forum it provides for, and the representatives it attracts from among, people who are just crude and vicious.

The accusation of expressing ignorant, hateful thoughts online has been abused by rightwing pundits as a means of putting down the progressive blogosphere: some of those thin-skinned, delusional pundits can hardly find a political opinion at variance with their own that does not set off their martyr complexes or promote a surge of unexpected solicitude towards a group they had villified only the previous day.

But it occurs quite a lot, either coming from the right, or in politically neutral settings.

Today I opened up youtube and saw that many of my favorite videos were gone. A few months ago I had gotten the account just so that I could favorite a few clips from a girl in South Florida named Emily. She had reminded me, in some superficial ways, of an old friend of mine, and the videos were entertaining in a modest way. Emily's videos have gotten probably a million views (I stopped adding the figures at half that) and have been the object of a lot of hype, fan mail, and -- to the point of this post -- hate mail. I wont compare her to Orson Welles or Stanley Kubrick, but for a teen (Her login name is Applemilk1988; I can only guess 1988 is her birth year) just doing these quick simple postings from the local mall or Starbucks or from the couch in her family home, they had a lot of humor and personality. Some were definitely better than others. Her best, an "intense" lesson in the Japanese language which spawned four sequels of varying quality, made me understand why she had fans. In contrast, she had regular posts in an entirely different, more natural and subdued persona, that invited a sense of familiarity and empathy.

At least for me. As I noted, Emily has gotten a lot of hate mail. I know because a huge amount of the hate mail is in the completely public form of open video posts on youtube. I continue to be shocked at the vicious character of some of the writing and posting about Emily. Just to give some idea, there is a lot of abusive language and epithets. I would guess that youtube probably deleted others because of use restrictions; either that, or the vloggers have maximized the hostility while evading those restrictions by design.

Anyhow, I noticed that the videos of hers that I'd saved were gone. Despite being a busy guy, I searched first youtube, which had still had others' videos about Emily, and then the broader web, and discovered that Emily's accounts on youtube and various other services had been hacked, apparently by people who specifically targeted her. This all happened just about a week ago, while Emily was (and maybe is still) in Japan. Their celebratory posts reveling in this attack should not have been surprising. Again, I would guess that use restrictions may have weeded out some that were more threatening or sexually graphic than what I see there, but yes, there are gratuitous references to her speculated sexual practices. They also linked to a (former)boyfriend's site, who included some personal gripes against Emily because, he said, they increased traffic to his account due to her fame. He sounds like a real prince.

Emily is such a minor celebrity, known to a fairly small segment of the public for a few short homemade videos. I don't even know her last name, or what city she's in. Nor do I want to know these, and while her more intimate videos invite some empathy with the events of her daily life, I really have no desire to know what she does in private. And yet, there is a following out there for material attacking her, calling her names, exposing her passwords, exposing her alleged doings offline, alleged failings, intimate matters, and who knows what next. This cottage industry of hate against a young woman whose worst crimes, as far as I can tell, are well within the bounds of small interpersonal matters where none of us are perfect.

This seems to me like an interesting case lesson in the proper bounds of discourse, as well as the perils of fame, and it reminds me of the Don Imus ruckus, but of course Emily's haters have not withdrawn their attacks or apologized, but let them persist and metastasize. They have gone to the point of silencing their enemy by force. And I don't see anyone defending her yet, but I'm not sure whether her fans know what's going on.

Wrecking the bus system

2007-08-11T18:31:00.000-07:00

Cutting the bus system is an extremely stupid policy.

I was going through some old newspapers lying about my house when I noticed an article from May when vast cuts to the county bus system were being announced. I saw a detail which I had not noted before, though perhaps this is because I have paid too little attention to the issue. The article stated that the proposed cuts would create a net savings of something over $2 million, but at the cost of 7 million riders per year. I don't know what riders means, but let's assume it means full fare equivalents. Then there would be a gross loss to the system of about $13 million. This is a stunning statistic, and even if my figures are a little off, it would still be stunning, and perhaps moreso.

This is ridiculous from two standpoints. First, from the perspective of the bus system, it means a substantial reduction in service for a comparatively small benefit. The analysts have figured that by dumping unprofitable routes, they can achieve a net gain in strict economic terms. To the extent such a marginal change is a requirement, it may be the best among bad options, but it is still a bad option.

I recall my own experience in business running a small newspaper. The former publisher, deep in debt, had decided to economize by reducing the size, circulation, and use of color in the paper. The result was an immdiate net savings, to be sure, but the paper was locked in a spiral of decline. Ultimately, producing a less attractive, less frequent paper with less in it to read could not have anything good to do for readership, or the value of advertising in the paper. And economies of scale meant that a 50 percent reduction in service only produced, say, a 15 percent reduction in cost. Failure of the paper was palpable when, with a new strategy, the paper was saved.

Finding better ways to cut costs, my staff and I expanded and promoted the paper, with the result that we grew out of our debt. Similarly, a bus system in decline will only continue to decline if the best strategy its leaders can advance is to shrink service. The question that leaps to mind is what other options have been evaluated: Identifying potential efficiencies? Differential pricing of routes? Creative efforts to attract riders? Partnerships with popular
destinations? More effective use of grants and subsidies?

The other standpoint from which the proposal is ridiculous is the public standpoint. Although the bus system, on paper, will be made $2 million more profitable, the loss to citizens would be far greater than the $2 million necessary to maintain the current level of service. The fact that the equation is so lopsided suggests we need much more public investment in the bus system.
The loss of 7 million riders means that some riders will see their access to the city shrink, especially the blind and disabled, and the unlicensed, who are predominantly minorities. They will be forced to forego employment opportunities, opportunities to save on services, and bear the costs of less efficient modes of transportation, such as borrowing rides from friends, or using taxicabs, or simply driving themselves. Inequality and poverty can be safely predicted to increase. Lost employment or consumer transactions will also affect the would-be employers and sellers. Establishments that depend on bus service for customers or employees will be stressed and some may close. Increased auto traffic will increase pollution, traffic congestion, parking congestion (increasing fees for oher drivers), and will increase the number of drivers on
the road who are intoxicated or have suspended or revoked licenses, diminishing public safety. Milwaukee's reputation as a successful modern city with progressive values will be injured, and the loss of a public service will make the city less attractive to tourists, skilled immigrants, students, and businesses that may otherwise wish to locate here.

Did I leave anything out? Probably.

None of these losses will appear on an internal bus system spreadsheet. They will all have a long-term negative effect on the bus system, because the bus system depends on a thriving city and a thriving tax base. But more importantly, these losses will affect the entire public, which should invest in preventing these losses.

Of course, the question is who among the architects of the plan is: (1) actively trying to destroy public services for selfish reasons; (2) merely acting out of ill-considered ideology; (3) duped into following the plan because they have been brainwashed into thinking it is necessary; or (4) actually went through some rational thought process and concluded for a good reason whether it was necessary or not. All four exist. Only (1) and (4) know what they're doing, the former for evil, the latter for good. All that it takes for the (1)s to triumph is for the potential (4)s to become (2)s and (3)s.